A state with an autoimmune disease

In this piece I use the metaphor of an autoimmune disease to describe our state. It is an image that imposes itself when one takes a sober look at what our defensive structures — legislation, bureaucracy and control mechanisms — have begun doing in recent years to the healthy tissue they are supposed to protect.

What a healthy body does

In a healthy body, T cells accurately recognise what is foreign and what is self, what is dangerous and what should instead be nurtured. When an immune response threatens to get out of control, regulatory cells intervene to restrain it, ensuring that the attack remains limited to what is genuinely harmful. The cells that sustain the body — those that produce, divide and keep it functioning — are thus left in peace.

It is a complex balance, and like any balance, it is vulnerable.

What happens when that balance is lost

In a diseased body, that recognition becomes disrupted. The immune system begins to target the body’s own cells — precisely those cells needed for life and production. The brake that would normally halt an unrestrained immune response is weakened or absent. What began as protection thus becomes a gradual process of destabilisation.

The body does not do this out of malice. It simply no longer recognises itself properly.

Our institutions, seen in this light

The farmer experiences it. The family business experiences it. The inventor, the self-employed worker and the factory that still makes something — they feel how the system, unintentionally, is undermining their position. Not through one law, one measure or one decision, but through an accumulation of regulation that turns out to concentrate primarily on them.

Not an indictment — a diagnosis

This is explicitly not a moral indictment of individual civil servants or politicians. The people who carry this system often do their best and believe they are doing the right thing. The problem lies not with the individuals, but in the signals between them — and in what is missing.

What is missing, in this metaphor, are the system’s regulatory T cells. In other words: responsible leadership that genuinely bears the consequences of its decisions, functioning checks and balances, and personal accountability that still extends ten years later. When those brakes weaken, the attack on healthy cells can continue unnoticed, even when nobody intends it.

What the metaphor opens up

The value of this image lies not in its sharpness, but in the treatment it brings into view. Anyone who sees a state as a body with a deranged immune response knows what is needed to make it healthy again: not to strike the system harder, but to restore its regulatory functions.

That requires three things at once. Reorganising the chain of command, so that whoever makes the decisions also feels the consequences. Making the checks and balances — judicial, journalistic and parliamentary — genuinely workable. And recalibrating the incentives, so that the law protects what sustains society rather than what erodes it.

The two articles that follow apply this image to Brussels: how three measures taking effect at once — CBAM, ETS and Pillar Two — affect Europe’s productive tissue, and how that same dynamic becomes visible across six sectors simultaneously. Read them in that order, with this metaphor in mind, and the figures will fall into place.