Every second spring, the Epicenter think tank ranks Europe by how harshly it taxes our vices. The 2025 edition crowns Turkey, Lithuania and Finland as the continent’s worst offenders, tallying sin taxes, advertising bans and the long campaign against nicotine. Yet, while the index measures the war on the vape and the sugar tax with admirable rigour, it misses the state’s oldest and most intimate paternalism: over the body, the bedroom and the family.
In a paradoxical result, Italy ranks among Europe’s most liberal states, third only to Luxembourg and Germany. This is in the very year Italy made surrogacy a crime its citizens can commit anywhere on earth and prohibited Pride marches. Lifestyle paternalism and state intrusion into intimate life do not map neatly onto one another. Some countries exhaust their nannying zeal on alcohol, tobacco, and drugs; others reserve their moral anxieties for sex, reproduction, and the family; still others aspire to supervise citizens in every corner of private life. What is clear is that the Bedroom Inspector State deserves an index of its own.
For the state’s government supervision of intimacy predates the sugar tax. Before the secular nanny state fretted over our waistlines, the church and the codified family policed our beds, while marriage law and the criminalisation of sodomy did the disciplinary work that sin taxes do today. The nineteenth century then fused medicine with morals and turned that policing into a science, subjecting women suspected of prostitution to compulsory examination in the name of public health. It is to this period that Foucault traced the moment when sex became, in his phrase, a “police” matter. The lifestyle nanny state is merely the latest secular heir of this older moral state, and the two have never been cleanly separable. Religion supplied the vocabulary of sin; public health supplied the vocabulary of harm. The body, women, and above all the child have always been the master keys that turn private life into public business.
Against this stands a liberal counter-tradition: the line drawn by Mill that the law may coerce an adult only to prevent harm to others, and crystallised in the post-war Wolfenden settlement that there exists a realm of private conduct beyond the reach of the criminal law. Europe’s distinctive achievement was to make that principle binding across the continent. In Dudgeon v United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights struck down the criminalisation of homosexuality and extended the right to a private life to states that resisted it, and as recently as 2026, the Court of Justice found that Hungary’s so-called child-protection law breached the Union’s founding values. Far from being the engine of the Chaperone State, the European rights order has been its most reliable brake, an institution proven a bulwark that requires our defence.
The paternalistic impulse, though, keeps returning in new disguises. Its most ambitious recent form is the regulation critics call Chat Control, which would press messaging services to scan the private communications of Europeans for child-abuse material, creating backdoors into even the most intimate romantic communication that would be vulnerable to all sorts of undesired exposure. On abortion, the continent has split, with Poland left with a near-total ban while France and Luxembourg enshrined the freedom into their constitution and the Parliament solidified its importance in the Charter. On marriage, equality exists in twenty-two countries, with the most recent victory in Greece, the first Orthodox-majority state to legislate it, even as Hungary and Slovakia entrenched inequality in their constitutions. Surrogacy is one of the most unrecognised rights, and it has even liberals genuinely divided over commodification, yet Italy’s choice to prosecute its citizens for lawful conduct abroad and to leave the resulting children in legal limbo is the illiberal extreme that any liberal should be able to condemn.
What binds these cases is the insight of Jyoti Puri that governing intimate life is one of the means by which states make their own authority feel natural and necessary. This is why the impulse recurs in every generation and survives every reform. Stripping away the paternalistic theatrics that disguise coercion may be the first step towards breaking the cycle. A Europe true to its founding values trusts its citizens with their own bodies, their own families and their own desires.
