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From The Asian Reporter, V14, #2
(January 6, 2004), page 16.
Nation-building and nations burning
World on Fire: How
Exporting Free Market
Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
By Amy
Chua
Anchor Books, 2004
Paperback, 346 pages, $14.00
By Andrew J. Weber
Mickey Mouse, cars, and wheat notwithstanding,
America’s most vital export must surely be free market democracy.
No other product ships to so many world destinations with such high
expected returns.
However, as Amy Chua effectively argues in World
on Fire, the bitter fruits of this policy are violence and
destruction, arising wherever globalization lays its hand. At the
heart of this failure lies the dangerous linkage between what Chua
calls the “most powerful forces operating in the world today:
markets, democracy, and ethnic hatred.”
This stunning thesis will not be easily
accepted by either political camp. Market proponents who view
globalization as a panacea for the world’s ills will find a bitter
pill to swallow here; their solution instead inflames the very
issues it is supposed to eliminate and causes some of the world’s
greatest atrocities.
At the same time, globalization’s foes,
typically focused on the perceived ills of capitalism, will be at
odds with Chua’s clear belief that globalization does offer many
tangible benefits. The problem is that those benefits do not flow
equally to all. Instead, a market-dominant ethnic minority typically
reaps the lion’s share of the gains, leading to intense envy and
hatred from the local majority.
The sudden expansion of democracy only
exacerbates the problem. Empowering the poor, resentful masses opens
the door for the rise of charismatic demagogues, who promise
“equality” but deliver revenge. With their new political power,
the aggrieved majority specifically targets the market-dominant
minority and their wealth, resulting in seizures and
nationalizations. In the worst cases, the conflict escalates to
expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
Chua’s criticisms may sound radical in a
political climate where globalization is accepted as gospel, but
they actually reflect a tension between democracy and capitalism
identified by Adam Smith as far back as 1776. Smith noted the
potential conflict between the power of numbers (held by the
majority poor) and the power of property (held by the minority
wealthy) and wondered whether the two could peacefully co-exist.
But Smith never addressed the issue of
ethnicity, which, Chua argues, increases the volatility of the
situation exponentially. And, as Chua eloquently and clearly
displays, in countless locales around the world ethnicity could not
be more important.
For the American reader, some of the nations
detailed will be familiar, if only from the unfortunate headlines,
but many others will be largely mysterious. The dominance of whites
in South Africa is likely known; the dominance of Lebanese in Sierra
Leone, Jews in Russia, or ethnic Chinese throughout virtually all of
Southeast Asia probably not, yet the explosive results are the same.
Known or unknown to the average citizen, nonetheless American
foreign policy is actively involved in such “hot-spots,”
exporting free market democracy to them all, often with disastrous
results.
Yet perhaps the undesirable outcomes should not
be surprising, since the political and economic package we sell to
the developing world is one that ironically has never been adopted
in the west. Universal suffrage took centuries to attain, following
long struggles by initially disenfranchised groups, and pure laissez-faire
capitalism is nowhere to be found in any developed nation, as
elaborate tax-and-transfer schemes ameliorate its inherent
disparities.
But if instant free-market democracy is not the
answer, what is? Chua argues that a long process of building stable
economic and political institutions, mirroring the way they arose in
the West, is the path to prosperity for the developing world.
Successful nation-building requires a careful tailoring of solutions
to the specific places where they are delivered, along with targeted
programs to spread the benefits of capitalism beyond market-dominant
minorities and to develop democracy as a form of power-sharing,
rather than simply empowering “the mob.”
These solutions demand a deep understanding of
each nation’s particular situation; what works in one place may
not work in another. The West will have to engage the world on a
case-by-case basis, in a way far different from the “one-size fits
all” model in use today.
If that sounds like a rather obvious solution,
then that is the brilliance of World on Fire: this
“obvious” conclusion is actually a radical departure from
prevailing political philosophy in the West. Yet the West does
recognize the destabilizing power of pure free market democracy;
that is why it was abandoned here long ago. Surely injecting a dose
of this destabilizing force into already unstable developing nations
and expecting a positive outcome is mostly a dangerous fantasy. Chua
shows us the dark side of this fantasy, and the nightmare it can
become.
As America becomes increasingly involved in the
shaping of the world, we would do well to heed her warnings.
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