Europe's Free-Speech Problem

Summary

Updated at 1:54 p.m. ET on August 20, 2025American officials are waging a multifront attack on Europe’s approach to free speech. This month, a congressional delegation traveled to Dublin, Brussels, and London to probe and decry European regulations on digital speech. A State Department human-rights assessment issued last week pointed to objectionable “restrictions on freedom of expression” in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. All of this follows Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech in February at the Munich Security Conference, where he accused European leaders of retreating from the continent’s “most fundamental values,” including free expression.These assessments might seem untrustworthy, given the flagrant transgressions against free-speech principles from the Trump administration and its allies. But the fact is that European leaders are corroding the right to free expression, and show every sign of sliding further down a slippery slope into illiberalism.Europe and the United States have always had different free-speech cultures. In the postwar era, both confronted the question of how tolerant societies should treat intolerant factions. Much of Europe concluded that, although free speech is important, views that threaten democracy itself are different and can be criminalized; see laws in various European states against Nazi propaganda. In contrast, the American system protected expression as vile as neo-Nazis marching through a town of Holocaust survivors because, by First Amendment logic, fascist speech poses less of a danger than enabling the state itself to engage in viewpoint discrimination. Despite these differences, both Europe and America mostly expanded speech protections in the 20th century and pulled back from censorship, seeming to converge on liberal values by the time the Iron Curtain fell and the internet spread.Now Europe and the United States are diverging. Never mind enduring disagreements about how to treat Nazis and other would-be totalit...