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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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what does it mean that europeans consider NGOs to be undemocratic?
if your ancestry is from belgium/north france then you would be belgian/french with dutch nationality. I suppose when we refer to France we mean French before the 19th century immigration.
It differs a bit where I'm from. I have a friend from Malaysia who identifies as "Tamil-Malaysian" (Tamil being the ethnic group and Malaysian being the country). In HK we have a lot of ethnic minorities. Speaking frankly, if you look chinese, you would be considered HKer right off the bat, if you look any other skin colour (white, other asian, etc) you will be considered a foreigner living in HK even if your family has been there for generations. Here is a video i found as an example where some Indians who were born and raised in HK struggle to be seen as HKer
In a democracy power should allways be held by the people. If you have a NGO -even when it does very good things- there allways is a danger that it could go against the peoples ideals or even their interests. You (as in the people as a whole) are also not as soverign when relying on NGOs for basic societal needs like a social saftey net as the voluntary donations founding them could stop any time. Thereby the power is transfered the donors (althought luckily most small-mid sized donors do not really exercize that power) who are mostly the wealthy as they just have more money to spend. A better solution is taxing fairly and using the common found gained throught that in a way the majority decides.
I recently watched an interesting video from Adam Conover on that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cu6EbELZ6I. Altgought I do not agree with everything said (I don't think the Patagonia nonprofit in particular is problematic in my opinion the focus should have been set even more on the issue of something like that beeing possible) I agree with the key message for the reason provided above.
isn't this the same reasoning for govt though? politicians will say one thing for votes and do another thing. If anything it's worse to trust a govt who will more likely go against people's interests. At least an NGO has a stated aim.
not really. In an ideal democracy you could simply vote those people out in the next election . In a well working democracy there is only so much they can do before they are not reelected.
The difference to NGOs is that in a democracy one person (ideally) has exactly one vote while your influence on non profits -especially when you are wealthy enought to afford your own- is mkreso connected to what you (can) donate, so how wealthy you are. In my opinion that makes relying on government more egalitarian whereas a system built on charities is more seceptable to oligarchigal structures.
(I understand that in many places Governments are (very) currupt or not democratic to begin with and there are many NGOs that are democratic (or meybe just plain better for the interests of the people) compared to those governments. And in those cases these NGOs are -for now- obviously better then the government. But imo with a stable democracy the government is a fairer morer stable and more equal solution.