Europe as a whole¶
The European cases show a gap between the Union’s capacity to protect and its willingness to. Its instruments against foreign coercion are kept for a seriousness nobody has defined, while its own measure for registering foreign interests moves forward on schedule. Its protection therefore rests on a political judgement it has not been willing to make. Beyond the Union the instruments are thinner and the doors more varied: a foreign list meets national law and often only a bank, for the candidate states accession itself is the hinge, and the states to the east show the sequence completed.
The clerk’s briefs¶
From the clerks, for the Patrician’s eyes
Read these. Judges, collectives and firms inside the Union that a foreign executive lists cannot rely on the Union’s protection, and their banks, hosts and suppliers will act on that uncertainty before anyone in Brussels decides. Organisations that represent foreign interests will soon have something to declare, and the register will pass to whoever holds the majority next. The candidate states watch both, and may be asked to copy the register while being shown the brake left unused. A decision to use the blocking statute would change what every bank and host in the Union calculates.
September 2026: The toolbox¶
On 21 September 2026, after the United States had sanctioned the International Criminal Court’s president and others, the High Representative, Kaja Kallas, said in New York that the Court is “under attacks that is very clear”, and that “we have the tools in our toolbox when it gets really serious how to defend ICC”. She did not say which tools, or what really serious would look like. The tool most people mean is the blocking statute, and the Union’s handling of it, and its silence on the Italian collective Autistici/Inventati designated the same month, are set out in Not in so many words. The clerks note that a brake held in reserve tells everybody watching how far they can go before it engages.
November 2025: A register for foreign interests¶
The European Parliament endorsed its report on the Commission’s proposed directive on transparency of interest representation carried out on behalf of third countries, by 392 votes to 88 with 133 abstentions, and sent it to negotiations with the Council. The Commission had proposed it in December 2023 as part of its defence of democracy package. The clerks note that the Union is drafting a cousin of the instrument the Venice Commission told Georgia to repeal: ties abroad, made something to declare.