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Not quite a tangent, if you think about it. The language of 'exploitation' is employed by failing nations to externalize their own responsibility for failure onto other countries that are willing to accept said responsibility, whether or not said country actually did anything. Bangladeshi intellectual employs the language of colonialism to blame English self-flagellants for their current woes, even though it is Pakistanis who engaged in * actual * genocide. Pakistanis are both too poor to be bilked for sympathy, and also more likely to declare that the job should be finished than issue even a cursory apology. By contrast local activists in the UK or US are eager to take up the Bangladeshi cause to castigate their proximate opponents.
Similarly, Nigerian or Congolese or Saudi governments engage in direct transactions with foreign entities to let their own economies and resources be exploited. Oil or minerals buried underground have no worth if they are not extracted, and waiting 50 years to MAYBE develop the necessary industry and intellectual capability to exploit said resources is itself a threat when neighboring countries would immediately attack if the land owners are too weak to protect themselves, like Guiana.
Most of third world exploitation by first world powers is not done by the first world, but by the rules or local power brokers who sell out their own people. The khaleeji nobility reap all the profits of their oil resources and spend said profits in Europe. Meanwhile South Korean chaebols who let their people be low wage factory slaves were strongarmed into domestic reinvestment for industrial development. Whenever a country cries against the evils of colonialism, it is useful to ask where the monies received in exchange for selling out their people actually went.
Yes, and the smarter third-world intellectuals explicitly call the first world out for being all too willing to take the money from third-world elites when it is complaining about third-world corruption at the same time.
Honestly, as a third worlder, I find these intellectuals to be disingenuous blowhards. Railing against the first world is easy, because there are sympathizers in the first world eager to take up any cause that undermines proximate enemies. Railing against their own elites is harder because of the obvious risk of bodily harm but also because the intellectuals want to be the elite and thus want to preserve the system for themselves to take over. The first world being heckled isn't even the same first world enabling the third world elites to stay in power; Shell pays off Bruneian royals to have first rights to extract resources, and both the Shell executives and Bruneian royals buy property in High Street with their share of the loot.
The other group that I find to be disingenuous blowhards are the first world anticorruption campaigners. Moralizing from afar is especially tedious for a recipient to hear, and the anticorruption westerners are usually the most clueless and sanctimonious dickheads to ever lecture us. We don't really like corruption here already, but some bespectacled nerdy woman lecturing us makes us reflexively band up to our kin. Better my neighbor reap the rewards than some NGO pretending to be useful.
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I can think of three bad options for Western countries:
Saying "you are corrupt, therefore we embargo you". This might work when the sale of natural resources was essential to prop up the regime, but in general it will at most result in the people being exploited by slightly poorer elites. (This is great if one follows the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, though: profiting from child labor is wrong; who cares what happens to the kids without employment though.)
Invade with the goal of establishing a democracy. This one has a terrible track record.
Just shrug and buy their resources. This makes the West complicit in their exploitation.
Ideally, the West would keep trading, but also exert some pressure to make conditions for the workers less horrible. But telling the elites to industrialize so that their country will not stay poor might not be well received.
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