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Independence, or the end of the client state

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On 20 August 2025, Nicolas Guillou, a judge at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, was added to a United States sanctions list for his part in the arrest warrant against Israel’s prime minister. Within days his Visa and Mastercard cards stopped working. His Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and Expedia accounts were closed, and so was his Booking account, a company run from Amsterdam and owned in Connecticut. Parcels were refused when the carrier was UPS. He could no longer book a hotel or a trip online. He described it as travelling thirty years back in time. His Slovenian colleague Beti Hohler, sanctioned for the same warrant, had her Apple ID and iCloud blocked, and a European bank she had been with for decades closed her account the day after.

None of this happened in America. It happened in the Netherlands, to European citizens, judges of a court that 125 states created by treaty, for doing their job. Thirteen of the Court’s judges, prosecutors and staff are now under the same sanctions, including, since August 2026, the Court’s own president. In February 2026, France’s president wrote to Washington asking for them to be lifted, for Judge Guillou and for Thierry Breton, a former European Commissioner targeted over the European Union’s own digital rules. Judge Guillou still cannot use his bank card, and no European institution has the power to give it back to him.

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Europe isn’t broken. Few want it, yet.

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When I was fifteen, I ran a small magazine. It was called Europe Journal, I tried to get an issue out every month, and it was written in two or three languages. I don’t think more than a few dozen people ever read it. I already believed, at that age, something I believe more firmly today: that the countries of this continent have no future on their own. Not a slow decline, but the end of their existence as independent actors, or at best a comfortable vassalage to whichever bigger power is in a good mood that decade.

More than thirty-five years later, I am frustrated, and I am angry, at how little has moved. This series is my attempt to say what should.

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An inheritance for everyone, paid for by inheritance

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I was 25 when I released the first Mandrake Linux, in the summer of 1998. The idea itself cost nothing: a PC, an internet connection, a few months of nights. Everything that came after cost money we did not have, and we spent the following two years finding it. I was lucky. I know people of my generation who had better ideas than mine and never got to try them, for the most banal reason in the world: nobody around them had anything to lend.

This post is a radical answer to that. I am not pretending it could pass tomorrow. I am putting it on the table because the debate it opens is one Europe has avoided for a century, and because the numbers behind it are far bigger than anyone admits.

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