[lit-ideas] A World on Fire
- From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx>
- To: 'DPCA Members' <DPCAMembers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Anthro-L <ANTHRO-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 14:33:01 +0900
This note is to call your attention to a remarkable book I picked up in
Washington during the last DNC meeting.
The book in question is Amy Chua (2002), World on Fire: How Exporting
Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.
The Publisher's Weekly review on Amazon.com reads as follows:
> A professor at Yale Law School, Chua eloquently fuses expert analysis
> with personal recollections to assert that globalization has created a
> volatile concoction of free markets and democracy that has incited
> economic devastation, ethnic hatred and genocidal violence throughout
> the developing world. Chua illustrates the disastrous consequences
> arising when an accumulation of wealth by "market dominant minorities"
> combines with an increase of political power by a disenfranchised
> majority. Chua refutes the "powerful assumption that markets and
> democracy go hand in hand" by citing specific examples of the
> turbulent conditions within countries such as Indonesia, Russia,
> Sierra Leone, Bolivia and in the Middle East. In Indonesia, Chua
> contends, market liberalization policies favoring wealthy Chinese
> elites instigated a vicious wave of anti-Chinese violence from the
> suppressed indigenous majority. Chua describes how "terrified Chinese
> shop owners huddled behind locked doors while screaming Muslim mobs
> smashed windows, looted shops and gang-raped over 150 women, almost
> all of them ethnic Chinese." Chua blames the West for promoting a
> version of capitalism and democracy that Westerners have never adopted
> themselves. Western capitalism wisely implemented redistributive
> mechanisms to offset potential ethnic hostilities, a practice that has
> not accompanied the political and economic transitions in the
> developing world. As a result, Chua explains, we will continue to
> witness violence and bloodshed within the developing nations
> struggling to adopt the free markets and democratic policies exported
> by the West.
My take away was two key arguments:
(1) What advocates of exporting free market democracy are typically
trying to export are highly idealized, purified forms of both free
markets and democracy: forms never in fact implemented in any Western
or other OECD country, where both are tempered by legal systems and
regulations that moderate their effects.
(2) Exported to parts of the world where class divisions parallel
ethnic divisions with the economically dominant minority ethnically
distinct from the economically subordinate majority, the compound free
market + democracy is highly unstable and likely to trigger explosive,
even genocidal, conflict. Why, because the economically dominant
minority profits enormously from free markets, radically increasing the
gap between its wealth and the poverty of the economically subordinate
majority. The economically subordinate majority embrace democracy in
extreme populist forms promoted by charismatic demagogues. Typical
outcomes are either (1) the economically dominant minority's
abandonment of democracy and support of authoritarian regimes that
protect them and their property or (2) violent insurrections in which
the subordinate majority massacres members of the ethnic other who are
portrayed and perceived in diabolical terms.
What is missing when this happens is the rules and institutions that
temper free markets on the one hand (the welfare state/social safety
nets) and one-man, one-vote majority rule on the other (protections for
minorities as embodied, for example, in the US Bill of Rights). That
both represent the outcomes of decades of negotiation (and sometimes
civil wars) is not good news for those who believe that free markets
and democracy are instant and sovereign panaceas for all of the world's
ills. To neglect this historical fact, however, may be to ignite
conflagrations of which our current troubles are only minor precursors.
I do not advocate this conclusion. I do feel challenged by it. Any and
all comments are welcome.
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