European leaders have lined up to condemn Donald Trump’s “new colonialism” and warn that the continent was facing a crossroads as the US president said there was no going back on his goal of controlling Greenland.
After weeks of aggressive threats by Trump to seize the vast Arctic island, which is a largely autonomous part of Denmark, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, said on Tuesday he preferred “respect to bullies” and the “rule of law to brutality”.
Macron told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that now was “not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism”, criticising the “useless aggressivity” of Trump’s pledge to levy tariffs on countries that opposed a US takeover of Greenland.
The US was seeking to “weaken and subordinate Europe” by demanding “maximum concessions” and imposing tariffs that were “fundamentally unacceptable – even more so when they are used as leverage against territorial sovereignty”, he said, wearing sunglasses because of an eye condition.
If we’re being literal, Elizabeth and then Charles haha.
Jokes aside, the impacts of European colonialism did not end with world war 2 and the resultant imbalance is intentionally perpetuated through neocolonialism.
Edmund Burke famously described societies and the institutions that sustain them as a "partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.”
In other words, institutions link the past, the present and the future, carrying forward both progress (industrial development, individual rights for some) but also the manifestations of exclusionary frameworks (slavery, segregation and colonialism).
If you’re interested in learning more I’d recommend the works of Nobel laureate in economics Daron Acemoglu and the field of post colonial studies.