Yes, there is no fair use in European legislation. In theory, international copyright law (like UN treaties from WIPO from the mid-1990s) do not allow for fair use exemptions in copyright law - they’re in the US legislation still because the US didn’t sign the Berne Convention until 1986 in either case, and also the US has a strong case of exceptionalism, meaning, they sign international conventions but then do not implement in national/federal law, and it’s not like anyone can seriously challenge US non-compliance with international commitments anyway.
The argument for not having fair use is that it becomes a question of litigation what is permitted and what isn’t. This makes it a costly and uncertain exemption for both copyright holders and copyright users. If there is an exhaustive list of well-defined exemptions, the legal certainty is theoretically higher and the risk of litigation lower, but of course EU-level legislation (like the Infosoc directive from 2001) still introduces a fair bit of uncertainty: most of the exemptions and limitations are optional for the member states to implement, meaning there is huge divergence between different jurisdictions on which exemptions apply where. Also the exemptions and limitations can have multiple, difficult-to-assess requisites that need to be fulfilled (the private copying exemption has five requisites that need be fulfilled in order for the exemption to apply, for instance).
Even knowing that all the questions in this paragraph were rhetorical I’d love to hear your thoughts on this more generic follow-up:
In the EU, it’s fairly common for legislators to directly intervene in free speech, e.g. through legislation. France is for instance very keen on democratically deciding through decrees and laws what constitutes “facts” (so in France you can’t, by law and under threat of criminal penalty, deny the Holocaust, or deny the Armenian genocide, and a bunch of other things). But also Europe in general has strict restrictions on commercial speech (advertisement) e.g. you can’t promote your product by saying someone else’s product is worse, and a whole list of stuff like that (I think the black list has 12-16 requirements or so). Practically speaking it means we have a lot of public debates about stuff like hate speech, facts, etc. because the legislature decides on it.
In the US, I understand it’s more common with private censorship - leaving the decisions exactly to platforms like Facebook, Google, and others to determine through interactions with “civil society actors” (for lack of better words) what needs to be blocked and what doesn’t need to be blocked. So that means that protections against immoral content that might harm the moral fostering of young people are fairly strong in the US - since the web sites are optimizing against being sued by relatively strong and litigious religious groupings. And also that there is a lot of trademark and copyright-related censorship, since the same web platforms would be optimizing against being sued by IPR holders.
If you want an entirely separate reference but in /that/ area (private vs public censorship) I am a mega-fan of James Boyle’s Foucault in Cyberspace from 1997: "Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hardwired Censo" by James Boyle
It’s a short text (16 pages and most of it is footnotes) but I think it’s not given the weight or relevance in contemporary discussions on how to deal with undesirable content at all.