ProtectEU is the EU’s Latest Trojan Horse Against Freedom

“Never let a good crisis go to waste” is one of those Churchillisms that seems to best capture the spirit of our own cynical age. It has long been a favourite of the ruling Brussels clique: time and again, the Commission has weaponised crises to its advantage, judiciously using every difficulty to justify the further centralisation of powers at the expense of member states. With ProtectEU, its new dystopian, securitarian agenda, the EU is proving such shameless opportunism is still its forte.

ProtectEU is the Union’s new internal security strategy. It isn’t difficult to explain its rationale. We do, indeed, live in an era of ever-multiplying threats: from terrorism to cybercrime and nefarious state-led activities, it is true that the task of shielding nations from external threats has never been more complex than it is today. But, as always with Brussels, the devil is in the details. 

Since the London bombings of 2005 and the subsequent adoption of the EU’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy to the 2021 Security Union framework, the Union has steadily—and self-servingly—expanded its understanding of security. ProtectEU, with its commitment to deeper data sharing, algorithmic detection of “extremist content,” and closer cooperation with online platforms, would further empower agencies like Europol. That would be perfectly fine—if only it was genuinely meant to make us safer.

Unfortunately, it goes well beyond that. In ProtectEU, the Commission is speaking of a “growing range of motivation” in which it includes the conveniently ill-defined category of “anti-system ideologies,” “misogyny,” “anti-LGBTQ+ hatred,” or the rejection of “European democratic values.” These are dangerously elastic concepts. Terrorism, hitherto defined as the use of violence against civilians for political ends, is being bureaucratically redefined as a hazy category designed to include not only murderous fanatics but also mere anti-regime dissidence. They are using anti-terrorism as a mask for political repression—and not for the first time, either.

Dissidents of the liberal-globalist order have all watched this film before. The 2021 Terrorist Content Online Regulation already allows authorities to demand removal of flagged material within an hour. The Digital Services Act obliges platforms to manage “disinformation” and “hate speech,” concepts so delightfully Orwellian as to mean whatever one might want them to mean. While appearing reasonable and necessary when taken individually, these measures collectively build an ecosystem of repression that East Germany’s Stasi could only have dreamt of.

With the establishment increasingly unable to guarantee its self-preservation at the ballot box, it is hardly a surprise that it is trying to reinterpret the vocabulary of counterterrorism to swallow political disagreement. What, indeed, is “anti-system ideology”? What does it encompass? Are the rejection of demographic transformation, the obliteration of national sovereignty, or dangerous, potentially—and literally—suicidal foreign policy adventurism tenets of this “ideology”? 

None of these fears need be regarded as paranoia. Few conservatives have forgotten about how the German establishment has been hard at work trying to ban what is now the country’s largest single political party, Alternative für Deutschland. Its domestic intelligence agencies openly and shamelessly monitor a legally established parliamentary party enjoying the support of tens of millions of Germans for purely ideological reasons. Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, or BfV, has long classified the party as “extremist”, thus opening a legal path for its prohibition. Incredibly, it does so in the name of liberal democracy.

Europe’s institutions increasingly conceive security in sociological terms—they don’t think of it as social tranquillity, but as coercively imposed ideological conformity. Algorithms are supposed to keep the establishment safe from dangerous ideas rather than people safe from international criminals. 

But the problem really does go beyond the visible opportunism with which Europe’s mandarins are trying to use the dark shadow of international terror. Terrorism, jihadism in particular, does remain a bitter threat to hundreds of millions of Europeans. Yet an increasingly large portion of intelligence and policing resources are being directed towards what is, for all intents and purposes, naked political repression. While that is intolerable in its own right, it also represents a dangerous diffusion of focus. Intelligence resources are finite; if everything is extremism, nothing is prioritised. Less will be done to confront real threats that cost actual lives.

Europeans should be wary of the EU’s determination to police the internet. Above all, they should not—and must not—underestimate the Eurocrats’ desire for authoritarian control of what they see, think, and desire for their future. Brussels aims to build a closed, vertically controlled information space where seeing the reality of our sinking continent becomes impossible—and arguing for change is turned into a thought crime. They think this will keep them in their seats, and they think the peoples of Europe won’t notice or care while their most elementary liberties are methodically taken away. They must be proven wrong.