In this piece, I use the metaphor of an autoimmune disease to describe our state. It is an image that forces itself upon you when you look soberly at what our defense structures — legislation, bureaucracy, control mechanisms — have begun to do in recent years to the healthy tissue they are supposed to protect.

What a healthy body does

In a healthy body, T-cells accurately recognize what is foreign and what is one's own, what is dangerous and what should be cherished. When an immune response threatens to spiral out of control, regulatory cells intervene to slow it down, so that the attack remains limited to what is truly harmful. The cells that carry — that produce, that divide, that sustain the body — are thus left in peace.

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

What happens when that balance is lost

In a diseased body, that recognition becomes disrupted. The immune system begins to target its own cells — precisely those cells needed for life and production. The brake that normally halts a runaway defense is weakened or absent. What began as protection thus becomes a slowly disruptive process.

The body does not do this out of ill will. It simply no longer recognizes itself correctly.

Our institutions, viewed this way

The farmer experiences it. The family business experiences it. The inventor, the self-employed, the factory that still makes something — they feel how the system, unintentionally, undermines their position. Not through a single law, a single measure, a single decision, but through an accumulation of regulation that appears to concentrate primarily on them.

Not an indictment — a diagnosis

This is explicitly not a moral indictment against individual civil servants or politicians. The people who sustain this system often do their best and mean well. The problem does not lie in the individuals, but in the signaling between them — and in what is missing.

What is missing, in this metaphor, are the regulatory T-cells of the system. Read: responsible leadership that truly bears the consequences of its decisions, corrective countervailing power that functions, personal liability that still reaches out ten years later. When those brakes weaken, the attack on healthy cells can continue unnoticed, even if no one wants 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 runaway defense knows what is needed to make it healthy again: not hitting the system harder, but restoring the regulatory functions.

That happens in three ways simultaneously. By redesigning the command structure, so that those who decide also feel the consequences. By making the countervailing power — judicial, journalistic, parliamentary — truly workable. And by recalibrating the incentives, so that the law protects what sustains society and not what hollows it out.

The two articles that follow are the application of this image to Brussels: how three simultaneously impactful measures — CBAM, ETS and Pillar Two — affect the European productive tissue, and how that same dynamic becomes visible in six sectors at once. Read them in that order, with this metaphor in mind, and the figures will find their place.