I think you need more proof than a general hand-wave towards a wikipedia article where some european countries have done some bad things. There’s no coordinated EU wide neocolonialism going on afaik. Feel free to prove me wrong.
CTRL+F “fish” in the article, or you can google “EU fishing West Africa” for more details, but TL;DR: The EU has a number of fishing agreements signed with questionably/non-democratic West African governments, to the detriment of the local population who needs to fish to eat.
I mean, the lack of necessity of trying to change the voting behavior (because you’re dealing with a dictatorship/oligarchy that doesn’t respond to popular opinion) isn’t exactly a point for the EU here; getting caught up in the method is missing the forest for the trees. The point is that the EU isn’t above forcing using its influence to force bad policy on foreign countries for its own gain, so when it loses the propaganda war with America/Russia it’s not due to some moral standard. I absolutely count using its economic clout to force unequal trade deals on weaker countries as “influence operations;” what America and Russia do is just how you do that with democracies. There’s also that one time it forced disastrous austerity on Greece. The fact that the EU doesn’t have its own Murdoch isn’t a testament to its moral integrity.
I mean, the parent commenter never explicitly said “the EU doesn’t do influence operations due to its moral integrity,” but that tends to be the subtext with comparisons like these. Maybe I’m just too paranoid.
I think you need more proof than a general hand-wave towards a wikipedia article where some european countries have done some bad things. There’s no coordinated EU wide neocolonialism going on afaik. Feel free to prove me wrong.
CTRL+F “fish” in the article, or you can google “EU fishing West Africa” for more details, but TL;DR: The EU has a number of fishing agreements signed with questionably/non-democratic West African governments, to the detriment of the local population who needs to fish to eat.
Shure, but thats a different thing. The Argument wasnt about “evil” trade or military or demigration deals.
It was about influence campaigns trying to change the voting behaviour of some population.
I mean, the lack of necessity of trying to change the voting behavior (because you’re dealing with a dictatorship/oligarchy that doesn’t respond to popular opinion) isn’t exactly a point for the EU here; getting caught up in the method is missing the forest for the trees. The point is that the EU isn’t above forcing using its influence to force bad policy on foreign countries for its own gain, so when it loses the propaganda war with America/Russia it’s not due to some moral standard. I absolutely count using its economic clout to force unequal trade deals on weaker countries as “influence operations;” what America and Russia do is just how you do that with democracies. There’s also that one time it forced disastrous austerity on Greece. The fact that the EU doesn’t have its own Murdoch isn’t a testament to its moral integrity.
I think youre fighting a strawman here, nobody said that the eu has moral integrity…
That was never the question, the Mediterranean See ist the most deady border worldwide.
I mean, the parent commenter never explicitly said “the EU doesn’t do influence operations due to its moral integrity,” but that tends to be the subtext with comparisons like these. Maybe I’m just too paranoid.