Vice President JD Vance’s Munich Security Conference speech in February rocked Europe’s political establishment. Instead of focusing on external threats to the US-led transatlantic alliance, Vance brought attention to what he called the “threat from within,” pointing to Europe’s increasing willingness to restrict political freedoms, especially the speech of Europe’s political right. Though many were critical of Vance, the truth is that European suppression of political freedoms has become so heavy-handed that even The Economist has taken note. The newspaper recently published an article expressing concern with mainstream Europe’s approach to political freedoms, such as the ongoing legal ordeal of Finland’s former interior minister and member of parliament, Paivi Rasanen, enduring legal persecution for using Biblical text to discourage the Finnish Lutheran church from sponsoring a Pride event.
European institutions conceptualize free speech differently from those in the United States. The European Convention on Human Rights protects freedom of expression, but unlike America’s First Amendment, it includes a loophole, noting that freedom of expression is limited by “duties and responsibilities.” As The Economist explains, in Europe, “[y]our right to offend is limited, in some instances, by my right not to be offended.” With the passage of the Digital Services Act in 2022, the EU expanded the loophole and its ability to suppress what EU regulators consider “harmful” speech and “disinformation.”
The EU’s suppression of speech under the guise of hate speech and disinformation coincides with other efforts to weaponize government against the Right. Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Rally party, was convicted of embezzling EU Parliament funds, which comes with a legal ban against running for France’s presidency in 2027, even though she is a leading candidate for the office. This case is troubling because the actions that led to Le Pen’s conviction are common among politicians across the political spectrum. Yet she was the only member of the European Parliament prosecuted for the alleged violations. It is not unreasonable to conclude that authorities targeted Le Pen because of her political viewpoints. And more recently, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the Verfassungsschutz, designated the Alternative for Germany (AfD), an increasingly popular political party, a right-wing extremist organization. This designation allows the intelligence agency to surveil the party, discourages other parties from working with it, and could eventually lead to the AfD being banned from politics.
This all begs the question: how can Europeans decry Vance’s criticisms while simultaneously stripping right-wing politicians and parties of their political freedoms? The answer is an ever-evolving definition of democracy used to stigmatize and punish right-wing parties for competing with mainstream parties. These efforts have gained more traction in Europe than in the United States, leading to a contested understanding of democracy and strained transatlantic relations, particularly when conservatives hold power in Washington.
Defining and Measuring Democracy
Democracy is an increasingly contested concept, yet most will agree that it must entail broad democratic participation, meaningful competition, and the protection of individual rights. While the first two elements of this definition are simple enough, where one citizen’s rights end and another’s begins can be complicated. Take the Finnish example: while Europeans generally value the right of sexual minorities to not be offended over the rights of Christians to express their sincerely held religious beliefs, many Americans reach the opposite conclusion. These questions become even more perplexing when trying to discern precise measurements for a country’s level of democracy.
These conceptual and measurement challenges have not deterred organizations like Freedom House and others from publishing precise, scientific-sounding democracy measurements for virtually every country’s political system. For instance, in a 2019 New York Times opinion piece, Michelle Goldberg discusses results from a Freedom House report showing that the U.S.’s democracy score plummeted to 86 (out of 100) under the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency from a high of 94 during the Obama administration. As relayed in Goldberg’s op-ed, America’s score would have plummeted even further if not for a rise in anti-Trump civic activism over the same period. Goldberg identifies Trump’s “racist demagogy” and “effort to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” an Obama-era executive order, as causes of America’s reduced democracy score. In other words, Trump’s mean Tweets and a ‘bad’ executive order undoing Obama’s ‘good’ executive order are indicative of America’s democratic decline.
Unsurprisingly, recent research from Dr. Andrew T. Little (UC-Berkley) and Anne Meng (UVA) casts doubt on the accuracy of democracy measures. In particular, Freedom House concludes that the world is experiencing global democratic backsliding, and it provides substantial data to support its case. In contrast, Little and Meng argue that coder bias has contaminated democracy measurements, resulting in misleading assessments of democracy. “Freedom House meets with expert analysts to reach a consensus of country-level scores,” and they note that “considerable subjective judgment is required to produce democracy scores.”
Little and Meng test their coder-bias hypothesis by distinguishing between objective measures of democracy requiring little judgement to interpret, those related to participation and competition, versus measurements around what constitutes liberal rights which require much more discernment to interpret. For example, while Little and Meng used data points such as the number of journalists jailed and murdered in a particular country, Freedom House utilized over ninety analysts assessing twenty-three dimensions of press freedom to produce a 0-100 score for each country and territory assessed. According to Freedom House, “[a]nalysts gather information from field research, professional contacts, reports from local and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), reports of governments and multilateral bodies, and domestic and international news media” to arrive at their scores.
The results of Little and Meng’s analysis are striking. Contra Freedom House, Little and Meng argue there is “little evidence” of global democratic backsliding. Instead, “changes in the media environment or changing coder standards may have led to a time-varying bias in expert surveys that could make it appear that the world is becoming less democratic absent any true trend.” In other words, they suggest that social processes are altering assessment standards and leading to the appearance of democratic decline in sophisticated democracy measures when, in reality, no such decline exists.
The Democracy Divide
As should be readily apparent, Vance and the Europeans he scolded in Munich are working from significantly different definitions of democracy. This is how Freedom House can give Finland a perfect democracy score (100/100) despite the Finnish government’s efforts to silence speech and quell religious freedom. On the other hand, Vance’s conception of religious liberty is rooted in the Western tradition and reflects the US Constitution. He sees freedom of expression—especially religious freedom—as a cornerstone of democracy.
Much more could be said about the origins of the emerging transatlantic democracy divide. In a recent State Department Substack, “The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe,” Samuel Samson notes how the transatlantic partnership is founded on shared values. Vice President Vance emphasized this much in his controversial Munich speech. For Samson, “the transatlantic partnership is underpinned by a rich Western tradition of natural law, virtue ethics, and national sovereignty,” highlighting the theistic and Christian origins of the Western tradition. Today’s transatlantic elites undoubtedly have a different conception of Western values and their point of origin. Because of these fundamentally different starting points, the democracy divide—the gap between the transatlantic elite’s and the Right’s conceptualization of democracy—is unlikely to narrow in the future.
The post JD Vance’s Munich Speech and the Transatlantic Democracy Divide first appeared on Providence.