The Freedom of the Free World

I. In the second sentence

On 15 April 2023, The Pioneer published an extensive survey of twelve German experts on the Taiwan question. The second sentence of the lead reads: China is escalating — and is thereby provoking the free world. Three words with a definite article. They are not defined. They are not questioned. They are inserted into the argument like a coin into the collection box — the matter itself is thereby paid for.

The text is three years old. The formula is not old. It is used today in every editorial, every Foreign Office statement, every Bundestag speech on international affairs, without anyone feeling obliged to ask what is actually meant. One stumbles over it in the NZZ as in the Süddeutsche, in The Pioneer as in the Tagesschau. It has the function of a liturgical phrase: those who hear it know that the defensive line is now being drawn. Those who pronounce it signal belonging. Those who question it are suspect.

We described this phenomenon four months ago in another context — using the term really-existing democracy, in our essay Democracy as Holy Monstrance from January 2026. The free world is the second monstrance of the same liturgy. The vessel is venerated; what is inside is not examined.

II. A vocabulary of worship

Terms that become monstrances have a particular linguistic structure. They are broad. They are non-binding. They are morally charged. And they are introduced in such a way that any analytical question appears as a breach of loyalty. The free world satisfies all four conditions.

It is broad: It comprises the United States, Canada, the Europe of NATO and EU members from Portugal to Estonia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Israel, India — with reservations Brazil, Turkey, Saudi Arabia depending on circumstance. Hungary was governed for sixteen years by Viktor Orbán, who himself defined his politics as illiberal democracy; on 12 April 2026 he was replaced by Péter Magyar with a two-thirds majority. In both phases — the illiberal one and the now-beginning rapprochement with the EU mainstream — Hungary was uncontestedly counted as part of the free world. The vocabulary does not follow the state of democracy; it follows the alliance situation. Latin American democracies such as Costa Rica, Uruguay, or Chile are rarely counted as core members, although by common democracy indices they score higher than India or Turkey — which shows that the term is geopolitically constructed, along NATO, OECD, and alliance lines, not by democratic standards. The country itself, Taiwan, is the object of defence without formally belonging. Whoever counts everyone in cannot count wrong.

It is non-binding: Unlike NATO, OECD, or EU, it has no membership list, no statute, no bodies, no accession criteria. It is a rhetorical construction that can be drawn more widely or more narrowly depending on the needs of the argument. Whoever is needed as an ally is in; whoever is in the way falls out. Saudi Arabia belongs to the free world when it is a matter of oil deliveries, and not when freedom of the press comes up.

It is morally charged: Freedom is the highest value of Western political self-description. Whoever claims it has shifted the burden of argumentative proof. It is not the speaker who must show that his position is liberal; it is the critic who must show that it is not. That is an asymmetric discursive structure.

And it is immunised against examination: Whoever asks what the free world actually concretely denotes is sorted away. Putin-understander, China-understander, anti-Westerner, conspiracy theorist, naive, detached, academic. The sorting replaces the engagement — exactly as in the monstrance diagnosis from January. A living political language would constantly re-examine such core concepts. A frozen language defends them ritualistically.

The term has a whole family. Our values. The rules-based world order. The free democratic basic order. The international community. The West. They all fulfil the same function. They claim substance that is no longer tangible, and they protect the speaker from having to make it tangible.

III. What the experts defend

What the free world actually denotes on closer inspection can be shown exemplarily in the Pioneer article of 2023 — precisely because the voices of the experts carry the term through the entire piece without ever defining it. They defend the free world by talking about Taiwan. But when one reads what they concretely defend, it becomes clear that it is not Taiwan's freedom.

Eberhard Sandschneider, political scientist, formulates the most honest position of the entire tableau. The values-led foreign policy of the German government, he says, is mendacious and doomed to failure, because in the end the values always fall by the wayside. That is not criticism from a distance. It is the self-description of a player. And it is categorical: not sometimes the values fall, but in the end always. That is not an oversight of Western policy. That is definition. The free world as a rhetorical construction is built so that the values are dispensable when business demands it. If it were otherwise, the values would not always fall.

Hans-Werner Sinn follows the line without self-reflection. A conflict with China over the Taiwan question is the last thing the world needs today. Translated: when freedom costs business, freedom is too expensive. Sinn adds the justification at once: The economic dependencies between Europe and China are enormous and can no longer be thought away. This statement is analytically correct — and politically devastating when used as an argument against the defence of freedom. It says: We have manoeuvred ourselves economically into a position in which we can no longer factually redeem the political claims we rhetorically raise. The free world has become the self-description of its own economic extortability.

Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann supplies the figures: Volkswagen 40 percent of its revenue, BMW even 50 percent of its revenue in China. These are the numbers from 2023, the year the Pioneer piece appeared; since then the interweaving has increased, not decreased. She calls this disquieting, without questioning the term free world that produced this dependency. The chair of the Defence Committee sees the problem precisely but cannot pronounce the name that designates it: economic integration with authoritarian systems was not an accident of the free world; it was its business model.

Christoph Heusgen, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, arranges his sentences in a telling order. First: We would be among the great losers of a military confrontation over the island, since our economic dependency is enormous. Only then, almost as an afterthought: Taiwan is also a well-functioning democracy whose preservation should matter to us. The also betrays the hierarchy. Democracy comes after the losses.

Anton Hofreiter, the only Green in the round, argues not politically but economically: China profits considerably from close interconnection with the European economy. In times of declining growth rates and rising youth unemployment, Chinese party leadership must become aware of what domestic political risk it would take with a military escalation. Here too: the threat is not democracy, not values, not freedom. It is market deprivation.

Only one voice in the entire Pioneer article still speaks of freedom as a value, not as a business condition — and that is the voice of a man who is not European. Robert Tsao, Taiwanese semiconductor billionaire, has donated one hundred million US dollars to the Taiwanese Ministry of Defence to preserve freedom, democracy and human rights. Tsao is an entrepreneur. He has earned his money in a system that believes itself to be defended by the free world. He has to watch the defenders hesitate because business with the adversary is too lucrative. No single European politician in the article formulates the defence of Taiwan as a matter of values. Sandschneider has anticipated the finding: the values fall by the wayside.

It is worth naming the vocabulary that accompanies this process ritualistically in politics. Decoupling. For years now there has been talk in Berlin, Brussels, and Washington of the necessity of detaching from economic dependence on China. Friedrich Merz repeated it before and after his election; Ursula von der Leyen coined the milder form de-risking. In fact the interweaving has deepened in the same period, not loosened. German corporations relocate research and development to China because they can no longer exist without that market. Bosch operates 34 plants and 26 technical centres in China, Volkswagen its first research and development base outside Germany in Hefei, BASF builds a complex in Guangdong for ten billion euros while cutting 2,600 positions in Germany. That is not decoupling. That is coupling under reversed signs — substance migrates there, brands stay here. Decoupling is the third monstrance: a word that replaces the deed, a political incantation that ritually claims the opposite of what the actors do.

The German taxpayer finances this process twice over. He finances it downstream through e-car premiums, KfW loans, industrial electricity subsidies, and location grants — all instruments meant to support corporations whose value creation has long since been relocated. And he finances it upstream, in research itself: through federal and EU research programmes, Fraunhofer institutes, ZIM funding, Horizon Europe grants, developments are co-financed whose later industrial scaling takes place in China. A process technology developed at RWTH Aachen with BMBF money is treated in corporate logic as an asset that goes where production runs — and for years that has no longer been Germany. Whoever signs the funding decisions knows this. German research funding has factually become a pre-subsidy system for the global positioning of corporations whose last stage ends in Chinese industrial parks. Whoever says that this is liberal politics must allow himself to be asked: freedom for whom.

IV. When was the description true?

The term free world has not been a monstrance from the start. It has a historical place at which it actually described what it claimed. This place can be dated, and it is instructive to identify it, because then it also becomes visible when it disappeared.

In the fifties and sixties the term designated an empirically distinguishable reality. There were elections with real consequences, press freedom without state direction, a middle class that carried economic power and had political weight, a political class with operational pre-experience outside the parties. The opposing side — the Eastern Bloc — offered a clear differentiation: elections without choice, press as party organ, state economy without independent actors. The term functioned as description because reality approached the description.

The shift is clearly traceable to one process. It began in 1989, not with the triumph of freedom but with the disappearance of its opposite. As long as there was a bloc that represented the opposite, the term liberal needed little internal upkeep — the opposing side defined it. With the disappearance of the opposing side, a double deformation began. Economic integration with the former adversaries became systematic. Between 1990 and 2010, China became an integral part of Western supply chains. At the same time, within the free world, those structures eroded that had once carried the term — the middle class was displaced by concentration, the political class was reduced by the sieve we have described elsewhere to career types, the media landscape concentrated, corporations became larger actors than the states in which they resided.

Both movements ran in parallel and reinforced each other. The free world integrated itself economically with systems that negated its political self-description. And it hollowed out internally the structures that had carried that self-description. Today, in 2026, it is a construction that no longer finds its own substance when it looks for it. Sandschneider says it: the values always fall in the end. That is not a failure that could be remedied in better years. That is the consequence of three decades of structural shift that no one any longer intends to halt — because the actors who could halt it profit from it.

V. The second monstrance

In our January essay on democracy as holy monstrance, we wrote that the apologists were more dangerous than the enemies. They react to every criticism of the system with the accusation that one is attacking democracy itself. The second monstrance functions in the same way. Whoever examines the free world as a term is accused of attacking freedom. Whoever asks what it actually still defends is regarded as its enemy. The sorting replaces the engagement. That does not protect freedom. It protects the word.

The two monstrances protect each other. Whoever questions democracy attacks freedom. Whoever questions freedom attacks democracy. Whoever questions both is an extremist. That is a complete rhetorical architecture which makes any reform impossible without having to pronounce a prohibition. The free world has armoured itself against the possibility of still recognising itself.

An honest language would be concrete. It would say: We defend the property order of the Western market economies, the freedom of movement of capital, access to markets, contract security for global corporations. These are real interests, and to represent them is legitimate. To represent them under the word freedom, while political freedom simultaneously erodes and is sacrificed in case of conflict, is not legitimate. It is the substitution against which Aristotle already polemicised, when the tyrant calls his regime democracy so that the word replaces the deed.

A question remains, which we do not answer here but must put — for its answering is not the business of a diagnosis but of those who want to take it seriously. If the term free world no longer describes what it claims, and if the apologists call it the louder the hollower it becomes — what then would be the language in which one could speak of freedom without thereby damaging it? Perhaps silence about what one defends is more honest than speech that primarily protects the speaker.

The monstrance is still being carried through the streets. The faithful still bow. But ever fewer still believe that something is inside.