Against the backdrop of a geopolitical shift and the conflict in Ukraine, France and the EU as a whole are moving from liberal confidence towards defensive and increasingly authoritarian self-restraint.
Is France Circling the Wagons?
The recent exchange between French political figure Florian Philippot and Telegram founder Pavel Durov, in which Durov accused President Macron and his allies of steering Europe toward a “digital gulag,” may at first glance appear to be another skirmish in the EU’s long-running disputes over speech moderation and platform regulation. In reality, it exposes something far more structural: a governing class in the European Union instinctively bracing itself as the global order that sustained its authority for decades begins to give way. As for Macron and this “New France” the NYTs speaks of, outreach to farmers and the construction of new aircraft carriers hint that the transition to a new nationalism is underway.
The key issue at hand, the Digital Services Act, “Chat Control,” or the technicalities of online governance, is causing a more profound loss of confidence. Europe’s post–Cold War elite senses, perhaps more intuitively than explicitly, that the liberal, unipolar system that underwrote its prosperity and moral authority is no longer the operating framework of the world. And when systems begin to doubt their future, they do not loosen their grip. They consolidate, narrow the acceptable range of debate, and redefine dissent as instability. The American cliche, “circling the wagons,” applies.
For three decades, Europe has been governed comfortably in the slipstream of American power. Through security guarantees, cheap energy, open markets, and ideological legitimacy were primarily taken for granted. Moral posturing came cheaply when material conditions were assumed to be permanent. The emergence of a genuinely multipolar world has ended that comfort. Today, power is now distributed among competing centers, and Europe increasingly finds itself not as a shaper of outcomes but as a dependent participant, reliant on external energy, foreign capital, and security arrangements it neither commands nor can replace. Another cliche comes to mind when I think of the news from France: “Rats deserting sinking ships” also applies. A paradigm shift is imminent.
Ukraine and the Drain
This shift has been accelerated, not softened, by the conflict in Ukraine, which has functioned as a stress test for Europe’s economic and strategic foundations. Publicly framed as a moral crusade or an existential defense of European values, the conflict has, in practice, exposed structural weaknesses that were long masked by favorable global conditions. Energy prices have surged, industrial margins have collapsed, public finances have been strained, and long-term investment decisions have quietly begun moving elsewhere.
At the same time, the United States has adopted a more openly protectionist stance, reshoring strategic industries and prioritizing domestic resilience over transatlantic balance. Europe, meanwhile, has borne a disproportionate share of the economic costs while retaining only limited influence over the conflict’s trajectory. This asymmetry is rarely acknowledged in Brussels, but it is acutely felt in boardrooms and balance sheets across the continent.
Capital follows energy affordability, regulatory predictability, and strategic clarity, not rhetoric. As Europe loses access to cheap, reliable energy, energy-intensive industries become structurally noncompetitive. Manufacturing does not collapse overnight; it erodes quietly, plant by plant, investment by investment, until the ecosystem that sustained it is gone. Chemicals, heavy industry, advanced manufacturing, and even parts of the green transition supply chain are already hollowing out. What remains is an economic model increasingly dependent on services, tourism, and agriculture. These sectors preserve cultural appeal and social continuity, but they do not generate the strategic leverage or resilience required in a harsher, multipolar world. This is not merely an economic shift; it is a civilizational narrowing of options.
The Closing of the Mind
It is against this backdrop of energy shock, capital flight, and deindustrialization that Europe’s fixation on digital control begins to make sense. When governments can no longer promise rising living standards, industrial renewal, or strategic autonomy, the management of perception becomes politically essential. Public debate ceases to be a democratic asset and becomes a risk factor. Language adapts accordingly. Criticism is reclassified as disinformation. Skepticism becomes extremism. Privacy is reframed as vulnerability. Speech itself is treated as a systems threat. The regulatory push into digital life is not simply about moderation; it is about insulation.
Philippot’s phrase “digital gulag” is intentionally provocative, but it resonates because it captures a trajectory many Europeans sense but hesitate to name. The European project, unable or unwilling to adapt outwardly to a changing world, is hardening inwardly. Liberal forms remain intact, but their substance increasingly rests on compliance, surveillance, and administrative enforcement rather than consent and shared prosperity.
What we may be witnessing is not the defense of liberalism, but its institutional afterlife. The intensity with which European elites police discourse around Ukraine, energy policy, and foreign relations reflects not confidence, but fragility. It suggests a recognition, which is rarely spoken aloud, that the material conditions that once sustained Europe’s moral authority have eroded. In a multipolar world, legitimacy must be earned through performance. Europe’s current path suggests an attempt to freeze a post–Cold War order in place through regulation rather than renewal. That is not a strategy for revival; it is a holding action.
Between agriculture, tourism, and its accumulated cultural treasures, Europe still offers beauty, memory, and depth. What it risks losing is strategic relevance and internal legitimacy. The more profound tragedy may not be that Europe abandons liberalism, but that it tries to preserve it unchanged, long after the world that made it viable has already moved on.
Phil Butler is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, and an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other book
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