Resistance and Withdrawal

Abstract

In February 2003, an article in the Nassau Guardian identified the European Union’s latest efforts towards tax harmonization as contrary to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) goal of a global ‘level playing field’ for taxation. The reporter identified three jurisdictions (Panama, Antigua and the Cayman Islands) that had immediately registered their criticism of the EU Directive on the Taxation of Savings with either the EU or the OECD. Their protests concerned the apparent preferential treatment accorded some EU member states concerning information exchange as part of the negotiated resolution that finally put in place the Savings Tax Directive (Delaney, 2003). The OECD also expressed a concern at the potential impact the directive could have on its Harmful Tax Competition Initiative (HTCI).

For the citizen of many smaller, poorer, weaker states, however, the international secretariats look more like enemies, instruments of a new kind of collective colonialism devoted to the preservation of the capitalist system and the hierarchies of power represented in it, even at considerable cost to their material welfare, the dignity and sometimes even the survival of individual men, women and children in a neocolonial society.

— Susan Strange¹