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Independence, or the end of the client state
Quoting: Independence, or the end of the client state - Gaël Duval (blog, Murena, /e/OS my data is my data, Mandrake Linux...) —
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.
That is what a client state looks like from the inside. It is comfortable, it is prosperous, and one morning a decision taken somewhere else arrives before your own, and there is nothing to do but wait.
Six months later the same thing happened to all of us at once. On 28 February 2026, American and Israeli aircraft struck Iran, and within days almost nothing was moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Brent came within a whisker of 120 dollars in March, after the largest monthly rise on record. The International Energy Agency called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Nobody in Europe had been consulted, nobody in Europe had a vote, and European households got the bill. Four years after the gas shock of 2022, we found out a second time that we do not decide the price of our own heating. What independence means, and what it does not
This post is about independence, which I define narrowly: no longer waiting to find out what Washington, Moscow or Beijing has decided about us this morning. Not autarky, not hostility, not walls. The simple capacity to say no, and to have that no mean something. The word I would use for what it restores is dignity.