EU’s crackdown on X shows desperation not strength

The recent rabid, full-on attack on Elon Musk’s X by the European Commission represents a new chapter in Brussels’ attempts to purge the public square of inconvenient ideas. The Berlaymont has imposed a €120 million fine on X for, essentially, refusing to apply EU-mandated censorship under the Digital Services Act. Brussels’ rising authoritarianism is not a demonstration of strength: Instead, it exhibits with cruel clarity the insecurity, confusion, and fear of a peripheral bureaucracy that has seen itself lose the favour of the imperial centre.

With the Western hegemon, the United States, undergoing a cultural and ideological transformation under President Donald Trump, Brussels now finds itself in the unenviable position of a recalcitrant vassal, divided between its commitment to the memory of the liberal-globalist empire and the temptation of open rebellion against a new overlord who it  sees as politically and ideologically illegitimate. For the Brussels political class, censorship and societal control serve as tools to remain in charge and keep Europe as a fiefdom of a system that was voted out of power a year ago in the US while waiting – hoping – for a liberal counterrevolution in Washington.

The recently unveiled US National Security Strategy puts this in evidence. In the chapter dedicated to the European continent, “Promoting European Greatness”, the United States decries European weakness, questions whether the continent’s decaying states can be useful allies in the future if current trends continue, openly praises “the growing influence of European patriotic parties”, and commits to support “genuine democracy and freedom of expression” in European nations. Washington aims to “help Europe correct its current trajectory” as the US “needs a strong Europe to help it successfully” compete with great power threats to American power, namely – and crucially – China. America believes this is impossible with Europe’s incumbent, hapless, globalist elites – and will, thus, seek to replace them.

This ideological inversion is stunning. For decades, Europeans believed themselves to be the grown-ups in the relationship, gently civilising the unruly American colossus. Today, Washington increasingly sees the EU as a dependent that must either modernise itself or be bypassed altogether. The new strategy is not to cultivate European liberal elites, but to deprive them of the means to protect their hold on power, opening the path for governments that are both better for Europe itself and for American interests. The furious reaction of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the anti-X measures made that much patently clear.

But it can be difficult for imperial centres undergoing processes of political and ideological renewal to bring their dependents on board. When CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet system—by introducing market mechanisms and elements of liberal democracy into it—he assumed that his satellites would follow him into the new era. Instead, they panicked. The Eastern European states had built their entire legitimacy upon communist ideological orthodoxy. For them, reform didn’t just threaten the uncertainty of renewal, but the peril of existential collapse. While pursuing liberalisation at home, Gorbachev faced a bloc of anxious satraps who were more committed to the old dogma than the hegemon itself. The result was a historic inversion: The imperial centre wanted ideological adaptation, deeming it necessary for survival in great power competition, but the periphery demanded stagnation, regarding it as the lifeblood of internal legitimacy.

Something similar is playing out today: As Washington sheds the suicidal litanies of wokery and liberal universalism for conservative nationalism, Brussels responds with frantic dogmatism. It is now the EU, not the US, that polices speech. And Musk’s X—the freest of all social media platforms—doesn’t just represent a technology company. It is, rather, a symbolic challenge to the EU’s entire ideological edifice. What the crackdown shows is that European elites understand that time is against them, and that the political wind is now blowing wholly against the post-national, immigrationist, left-wing consensus they represent. They understand that if they leave public discourse to itself, they will lose the debate. Silencing the dissidents is, therefore, their only available path.

Meanwhile, the United States presses ahead with a strategy that implicitly requires political metamorphosis on the continent. The message from Washington is crystal clear: Europe has to come up with governments which can think about power, borders and national interest, and it will no longer accept the authoritarian suppression, by old-order bureaucrats, of those standing for those ideas.

The EU’s war on X is not really about disinformation. It is about retaining control over a political narrative that is slipping from their grasp. Brussels cannot permit a digital arena in which nationalist ideas circulate without bureaucratic supervision, because it knows that such ideas now possess more energy, coherence, and popular resonance than the exhausted moralistic platitudes of the late liberal era. The Commission acts with aggression precisely because it is a body without authority. It censors because it cannot persuade. It threatens because it cannot inspire. Its crackdown does not project strength; it reveals frailty. 

Today, as Brussels enacts the rites of a dying Weltanschauung, coercion is the last card it has left to play. As in the twilight of Absolutism or in the last years of communism, when Poland’s Jaruzelski had to revert to military rule to delay the collapse of a regime already fatally wounded, the Eurocrats are trying to hang on by having the censors ban the subversive ideas of sovereignty and national pride that are eating away their legitimacy to rule. But history is unforgiving. Orders, after all, don’t collapse when dissent appears. They collapse when rulers no longer trust themselves to survive dissent.