The Europe/US Free-Speech Skirmishes: Friendly concern, economic rivalry, or political meddling?

At the Academic Freedom Index (AFI), a network of German and other European social scientists including the V-Dem Institute (for conceptualizing and measuring democracy) have built a tool to measure academic freedom by country. Collecting annual data and information from 179 countries and over 2,300 country experts, the AFI establishes the degree of academic freedom in each country and tracks progress or backsliding from year to year. Not surprisingly, the 2025 Report (https://bit.ly/4mHeSSx) includes evidence of an alarmingly rapid erosion of academic freedom in the United States. AFI Co-Director Katrin Kinzelbach (interviewed in Le Monde on March 13) reports that despite a certain a priori pessimism based on a downward trend for the US since 2019 – and personal experience working at the Central European University when it was still located in Hungary – she is shocked at the speed, the number and the variety of types of attacks mounted by the US federal government against universities. For her as for many Europeans this is no time for finger-pointing or a it-can't-happen-here sense of relief, but rather active concern for the pursuit of knowledge worldwide given the preeminent role of the US until now and the number of databases and repositories housed in the States.

Meanwhile slings and arrows fly eastward across the Atlantic – following the initial salvo by J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference – such as attacks launched recently by US tech moguls against the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) as a “threat to free speech”. In response to such claims by the oligarchs, the European Commission Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, Henna Virkkunen, flew westward – to WDC – with a suitcase full of data showing that Meta and friends take down far more content than do the new European directives. As Virrkunen points out in an interview with Euractiv, it is only thanks to the DSA's push for platform transparency that data exists on online content removal. And the data is categorical; 99% of all takedowns in Europe from September 2023 to April 2024 were by platforms such as Meta and X. After meeting with Representative Jim Jordan on the Hill, she felt that “the data was very valuable information for him”.

At about the same time, two members of the US Congress sent a strongly-worded letter across the Atlantic to EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen urging her imperatively to investigate purported campaign violations in the Polish presidential elections (allegedly by the opponent to their MAGA-backed horse). If this initiative seems to border on interference of the sort that would raise cries of alarm in the other direction, overriding any freedom of speech concerns, the impression is strengthened by the MAGA-backed CPAC's recent habit of holding political events in Europe, including a rally in Poland five days before the elections, with American officials delivering stump-like harangues, thereby exercising their freedom of speech in Europe to support a movement whose proven aims include limiting same, along with academic freedom.

One reasonable conclusion would be that the world right now needs Europe to stay strong on human rights (including speech, research and teaching), as when the European Human Rights Commissioner recently rejected a request to revamp the Convention's language on immigrants, made by nine EU members led by Italy. European universities can be good allies to universities elsewhere including by harboring gagged researchers (https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20250505-france-eu-us-scientists) and their endangered work, and supporting what Katrin Kinzelbach sees as “the first signs of resistance by the scientific community” worldwide. A non-interfering form of internationalism.