The question is: was the EU ever a liberal project as Lapavitsas implies or the attempt of the capitalist class to reinstall fascism disguised at liberal authoritarianism under the leadership of Germany following their failed attempt under Hitler?
Costas Lapavitsas is Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies andconvenor at European Research Network on Social and Economic Policy. He is the lead author together with the EReNSEP Writing Collective of “The State of Capitalism: Economy, Society, and Hegemony” that was published in December. Read our Book Review HERE
n late 2025, the European Union imposed sanctions on Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss colonel and former senior strategic analyst for NATO. The justification was openly ideological. Baud was accused of acting as a “mouthpiece” for pro-Russian propaganda and of disseminating “conspiracy theories” about the war in Ukraine. No criminal offence was alleged, and no judicial process was initiated. An individual was punished by executive designation alone.
The sanctions are not symbolic. They impose an asset freeze across the European Union, and a travel ban throughout the Schengen area. Because Baud lives in Brussels and publishes mainly through a French house, the measures immediately cut off access to bank accounts, interrupt income, and criminalise routine economic relations with EU residents. Although the regulation allows minimal subsistence payments, the effect is to paralyse a person economically and professionally. This is punishment in all but name and a severe restriction of Baud’s freedom.
None of this followed indictment, trial, or adjudication. There was no evidence tested before an independent court and nor was some standard of proof publicly applied. Put plainly, the EU has dispensed with the idea that coercive power requires judicial mediation and operates based on administrative designation alone.
This is not the familiar “democratic deficit” of a distant transnational order that lacks the legitimacy of a genuine demos. It is something more basic and more serious: the exercise of executive coercion without law. Administration has displaced adjudication, and naked authority has displaced justification.
That the Baud case represents a break can be seen by recalling another that once defined the EU’s legal self-understanding. In the early 2000s, Yassin Kadi, a Saudi businessman, was placed on a UN terrorism sanctions list. His assets were frozen, his economic life extinguished, and no evidence was shown to him. When the case reached the EU courts, they ruled that this was unacceptable. Even sanctions adopted by the UN Security Council could not be enforced in Europe unless the targeted individual had access to the evidence and a real opportunity to defend himself before an independent court. Measures amounting to civil death could not rest on assertion alone. That was the EU’s standard, but it has been quietly discarded.
The legal basis for the measures against Baud is Council Implementing Regulation 2025/2568, adopted under the broader framework of Regulation 2024/2643. Since 2022, EU courts have accepted that restrictive measures may be imposed without prior due process on the grounds that advance notice would reduce their effectiveness. While some sanctions have been annulled for lack of a personal link, courts have shown extreme deference on the central issue of evidence.
It is probable that Baud’s designation rests on some confidential file put together by European intelligence services. But that does not affect the substance of the case in the slightest. The real point is that coercive measures of this gravity are now imposed in the EU on the basis of material that is undisclosed, insulated from adversarial testing, and effectively immune from public challenge. EU citizens are asked to accept that the evidence is sound because the executive says so. This is not the rule of law. It is rule by assertion, reinforced by closed procedures and expedited review that shield executive claims from exposure.
The chronology is revealing. This mode of EU operation was already on display during the eurozone crisis, most starkly in Greece. During the Greek crisis, democratic choice was openly subordinated to administrative necessity. Elected governments were overridden in practice, binding policy programmes imposed, and a national referendum neutralised. Decisions of immense social consequence were taken by institutions lacking democratic mandate, justified in the language of financial stability and systemic risk. It became clear that there is an underlying method in EU executive action: when legal or democratic constraints obstruct it, they can be suspended without breaking the institutional shell.
What was first applied to a state is now applied directly to an individual.
The broader context is the EU’s drift into permanent emergency. Crisis is no longer episodic but structural. Within this configuration, executive authority has concentrated at the European level, operating with increasing autonomy under Ursula von der Leyen, while democratic and judicial checks have withered in practice. The European Parliament has long been marginal. The Council of Ministers acquiesces, allowing national governments to hide behind “European obligations” while avoiding responsibility at home.
The Baud case matters because it exposes the logic in its pure form. An individual analyst is sanctioned for his views, irrespective of their quality or political merit. The EU’s coercive apparatus, developed for macroeconomic discipline and foreign-policy alignment, is also turned inward against dissent. The boundary between administrative power and personal liberty has been breached.
For decades, the European Union has presented itself as a liberal project grounded in the rule of law, human rights, and a “rules-based international order”. The Baud sanctions expose the hollowness of that claim. A political order that retains the institutional forms of democracy, such as parliaments, courts, and treaties, while permitting the executive to punish individuals without law no longer meets even minimal liberal standards.
We are no longer confronted with merely the failure of European integration. What has steadily become apparent is the demise of the EU as a credible legal and political project. When an individual can be deprived of livelihood, mobility, and legal standing by executive designation alone, the law no longer protects the citizen. Indeed, the law is not even used as cover when the executive wants to hunt a citizen. The transition from a rule-governed polity to an arbitrary one is complete. That threshold, once crossed, is not easily uncrossed.
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