France spearheads member state campaign to dilute European AI regulation
In 1853, during the Crimean War between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the United Kingdom and France came to the Sultan’s aid. Twenty years later, in 1877, Tsar Alexander II, protector of the oppressed Serbian and Bulgarian Christians, again went to war against the Ottomans, who this time were forced to accept the creation of the autonomous principalities of Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, by the Treaty of San Stefano. The British were unhappy with this treaty, and together with Austria-Hungary, they convened the Berlin Conference, which annulled the Treaty of San Stefano. The Russian conquests were returned to the Ottoman Empire, as well as much of Armenia and Bulgaria, and the Balkans were fragmented into heterogeneous and conflicting states—a “balkanization” that would lead directly to the First World War.