Free speech, censorship and the real meaning of liberty

On March 25, Yascha Mounk published an article titled "For JD Vance, Europe Really Is the Enemy," in which he made the following claim (my italics): "(Europeans were rightly shocked that Vance barely addressed the Ukraine conflict, and the administration’s own crackdown on free expression gave the speech a strong stench of hypocrisy; but Vance did have a point in taking his audience to task for the extent to which many states in the European Union now censor the speech of ordinary citizens.)”

This statement about free speech in Europe is often repeated by right-wing commentators in the United States, particularly in this second Trump era. But what do they actually mean by it? I asked Mounk directly: "Yascha Mounk, could you please explain what you mean by this statement, and give some concrete examples? It is common for Americans to repeat this Trumpspeak but much more rare to see it justified." Unsurprisingly, he did not respond, although it is surprising, perhaps, because he is an active and vocal presence online, especially when it comes to engaging in ideological debate.

Still, his silence is telling. Because what is so often labelled as "censorship" in Europe by American critics is, in fact, something quite different. It is the recognition that speech does not occur in a vacuum; that words have power; that unchecked speech, especially speech that masquerades as a noble exercise of liberty, can be deeply dangerous.

In the United States, the First Amendment has become something of a fetish object. It is frequently wielded to justify all manner of expression, from offensive jokes to outright hate speech. Any attempt to impose limitations or standards is painted as authoritarian overreach. By contrast, in many European countries—particularly those that have witnessed the catastrophic consequences of radicalisation, propaganda and persecution in living memory—there is a more nuanced understanding.

Most obviously, there is the Second World War. Nazi propaganda didn’t just accompany violence, it helped create it. It normalised the dehumanisation of entire groups of people, provided ideological justification for genocide and taught ordinary citizens to turn against their neighbours. More recently, we have the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. Hate-filled rhetoric broadcast on television and radio, especially in Serbia, fuelled brutal ethnic conflicts and mass killings (a pattern also seen in Rwanda in the same period). Speech was weaponised as a precursor to war and atrocity. Yet these were not isolated incidents; they were the predictable result of hate speech left unchecked, of ideas allowed to fester and metastasise into violence.

The United States has its own examples. The January 6 Capitol riot was not a spontaneous eruption of anger but the conclusion of months, if not years, of inflammatory rhetoric, misinformation and conspiracy theory amplified through media and political platforms. The language used was not incidental or accidental; it was strategic, and charged with images of war, betrayal and righteous uprising. The boundary between verbal and physical violence was not just blurred, but deliberately erased.

Countries like France, Germany, Spain and Italy do restrict certain kinds of speech. Hate speech laws exist. Holocaust denial is illegal in several places. Speech that incites racial hatred, or glorifies terrorism or demeans others on the basis of sex, sexuality, religion or ethnicity, is regulated. This is not censorship in the totalitarian sense. It is society recognising the dual nature of speech: as a right, yes, but also as a responsibility.

Let us consider this through a more familiar analogy: physical violence. No society allows it unchecked. We outlaw it not only because it harms the person who suffers it, but because it damages society at large. It creates an environment where people think it is acceptable to inflict harm, which in turn leads to fear, instability and the breakdown of social cohesion. Verbal violence, whether hate speech, incitement or calls for exclusion or persecution, functions in exactly the same way. It wounds individuals, certainly. But it also poisons the social fabric.

We have seen, time and again, how violent speech paves the road to violent action. From genocides to terrorist attacks, from fascist rallies to homophobic assaults, the progression from word to deed is alarmingly short when hateful ideologies are left unchecked. To suggest, as many American commentators do, that efforts to limit hate speech are tantamount to censorship is to misunderstand, or to wilfully ignore, the function of free speech in a healthy, pluralistic society.

What Europe has had to grapple with, particularly after the horrors of the Second World War and the brutal conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, is the essential question of how to allow a multiplicity of voices to coexist. How to permit expression while preventing persecution. And the answer, hard-won and still evolving, has been to accept that speech must have limits if people with different backgrounds, whether by sex, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity and more, are to share a society in any meaningful, peaceful way.

In this light, the American obsession with absolute free speech appears dangerously naive. It is freedom without context; without consequence. But speech, like any liberty, is not an end in itself. It is a means to a more just, more open, more harmonious society. And when it fails to serve that end—when it is turned against the very principles of equality and dignity that underpin democracy—then it must be challenged, and even curtailed.

So, when commentators accuse European nations of censorship, what they are really accusing them of is social maturity; of taking responsibility for the effects of language; of daring to ask: what kind of society do we want to live in? And how do we ensure that freedom is not a weapon turned against the vulnerable, but a space in which all can participate?

That is not the end of free speech. It is its truest beginning.