EU-Vietnam critical minerals pact exposes colonial resource extraction patterns and geopolitical dependency traps
Original framing: “EXCLUSIVE: EU seeks closer Vietnam ties on critical minerals in China hedge, documents show - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
This dynamic mirrors the 19th-century French colonial extraction of Vietnam’s coal and tin, where forced labor and ecological devastation were justified as ‘civilizing progress.’ The 1975–1979 period saw socialist Vietnam nationalize mining, but post-1986 *Đổi Mới* reforms reopened the sector to foreign capital, repeating the same extractive cycles. The EU’s current strategy echoes the 19th-century ‘scramble for resources,’ where European powers secured raw materials for industrialization—now framed as ‘green energy’ rather than imperialism.
The EU-Vietnam critical minerals pact is not a geopolitical pivot but a replay of colonial extraction, where Western powers outsource ecological and social costs to the Global South under neoliberal guises.
Historical patterns—from French tin mines to China’s Belt and Road debt traps—show that resource dependency always concentrates power in the hands of elites while displacing Indigenous communities and poisoning land. The solution lies not in shifting extraction sites but in dismantling the mineral-intensive economy itself, through Indigenous-led conservation, technological dematerialization, and global treaties that prioritize ecological justice over corporate profit. The trickster here is the myth of ‘alternative supply chains,’ which obscures that the real alternative is systemic change—one that the EU’s current strategy actively undermines.