German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s recent attack on online anonymity exposed a widening disagreement between Europe and the United States over what freedom in the West should mean.
Earlier this month, a young German researcher asked Merz what a pending digital ID law would mean for whistleblowers and investigative journalists. The Chancellor responded: “Please, nobody come to me with free speech.”
He added that the debate over this law had nothing to do with free speech, and described the concept as a libertarian US export.
Understandably, the Chancellor’s rejection of free speech incited a wave of backlash both domestically and abroad. Placing it on the other side of the Atlantic not only pushes the already-tense partners further apart, but suggests a historically revisionist idea that free speech is somehow alien to Germany.
Certainly, the First Amendment creates strong protections around speech. But the intellectual origins of free expression do not begin at Ellis Island.
In Königsberg in 1784, Immanuel Kant wrote Was ist Aufklärung? — What Is Enlightenment? His answer to intellectual dependence was not government supervision of permissible thought but individual reason. “The public use of one’s reason must always be free,” Kant wrote.
The same tradition surfaced politically during the revolutions of 1848. The Frankfurt National Assembly placed freedom of expression and press among the German people’s political liberties. Germany’s subsequent history included two dictatorships that systematically suppressed dissent: Hitler’s Germany followed by the communist regime in East Germany. But the lesson Germany ultimately drew from these periods was not that speech should be limited.
In 1990, after reunification, the Basic Law was extended to all of Germany. While specific legal restrictions to protect children and personal honor were written in, Article 5 guarantees: “Every person has the right to freely express and disseminate their opinion in speech, writing, and images… There shall be no censorship.”
Tell that to the Federal Criminal Police Office, which recorded 10,732 politically motivated offenses involving the instrument “Hassposting” (hate posting) in 2024. In a blitz against illegal hate posts on June 25, 2025, authorities conducted 46 house searches, 66 interrogations, and 26 other measures.
Across Europe, governments increasingly treat liberty as a risk to be managed. The idea that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” has become a justification for intrusive regulation. Platform rules, mandatory age checks, state-approved “fact checkers,” and selective crackdowns on “misinformation” all signal this shift.
The First Amendment tradition begins from a different point. Danger arises when the government acquires too much authority to determine what people may say. The transatlantic alliance wasn’t built on security interests alone. NATO’s founding treaty of 1949 explicitly commits its members to safeguarding a shared political heritage founded on “democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” More than seven decades later, NATO reaffirmed those same principles in its 2022 Strategic Concept.
For decades our common rhetoric was based on the idea that the countries on either side of the Atlantic share a political civilization: representative government, individual liberty, the rule of law, pluralism and limits on state power. But this relationship is further strained when the German chancellor describes free speech as an outlandish philosophy. In contrast, senior American officials increasingly describe European restrictions on expression as evidence that the continent is moving away from the values that supposedly bind the alliance together.
Washington is signaling that this disagreement will no longer remain rhetorical. In May 2025, Secretary Marco Rubio announced a visa-restriction policy for foreign nationals the US government considers responsible for censoring protected American speech. In December, the administration applied it to former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton and the two German leaders of HateAid, and warned that it was prepared to expand the list. The White House also ordered US trade agencies to investigate EU and UK rules that pressure American technology companies to moderate speech.
If European rules remain domestic, Washington may criticize them. If they begin determining what Americans can say or what American platforms must suppress globally, the current administration is right to treat that challenge as a foreign-policy and trade dispute.
If America and Europe no longer agree that citizens should be free to speak, dissent, and communicate without unnecessary state interference, then the transatlantic relationship risks losing part of the principle that gives it meaning.
