Everyone else in the world can drive at high speeds, smoke and drink to their hearts' content.
The main point in it (to me) is that elsewhere people are free, (while in Europe, as the entire article has underscored, they are told what to do like children). Compared to this, the final point about EU companies applying (or profiting by) local laws outside the EU, seems to me, as I said, a side-swipe.
As to your reading re "moral dubiousness", then we'd have to say that it was morally dubious to abolish the death penalty in one country (or state of the US) because it didn't apply to citizens elsewhere. That democracy and the rule of law themselves were morally dubious, because they don't apply to all people, everywhere.
I think you did misread me: I was pointing out that corporations can and do establish subsidiaries or sister companies that are based in the countries they want to do business in, or in tax or corporate havens, and those companies operate under the law of the land they're set up in. To what extent the original corporation can be monitored and held to account for the activities of foreign-based companies it can take care to be legally separate from, seems moot. Not that I'd personally be against it.
I understand better now: just as the EU cannot impose democracy, the rule of law, the abolition of the death penalty on countries outside its borders, it cannot impose business regulations on companies operating outside its borders (even if they are based within Europe).
Still, in order to be eligible for subsidies, the EU must make it a condition for European companies (and their overseas subsidiaries and partners) to follow the same advertising and marketing regulations that they are bound to within Europe. Otherwise, I feel such inconsistency does undermine the "ethical obligation" supposedly behind these regulations to protect consumers (unless we admit that people outside the EU are not worth protecting, too). A language is a dialect with an army and navy.
it cannot impose business regulations on companies operating outside its borders (even if they are based within Europe).
No: when they are not based within Europe.
Do you know of any country (since, in this case, EU legislation must be transposed into each member state's legislation, it's the countries that have sovereignty) that can legislate on business activities in another sovereign state?
Yes, of course the EU can bring pressure to bear in other ways. And should. But, when a major trading area improves regulation within its borders, that looks to me like progress, not an ethically dubious position re the rest of the world.
