A Globalized Tinderbox

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability<br> By Amy Chua | Doubleday. 256 pages. $26.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


As Amy Chua makes clear at the outset of her grim and thoughtful assessment of all things globalizing, she has an unusually personal stake in the ethnic fallout from our new world order. In 1994, her aunt, an affluent Chinese woman living in the Philippines, was brutally murdered by her chauffeur. The man stole some jewelry and, still carrying a bloody knife in his hands, informed two maids that their employer was dead. He then wandered off, never to be apprehended. The case was hardly unique: Hundreds of Chinese landowners and business-people are killed in the Philippines each year. When Chua, now a professor at Yale Law School, pressed her aunt’s brother about his seeming resignation to the murder, he replied, “That’s the way things are here. This is the Philippines — not America.” For their part, local police wanly recorded the motive for the murder with a single word: “revenge.”

Each of these terse explanations — “not America” and “revenge” — is a key watchword in Chua’s sobering vision of a bitterly divided world and the often bloody intersections of free markets and fledgling democracy. Her research provides an indispensable rejoinder to the millennial reveries of Tom Friedman, George Gilder, and other globalization touts: In the rush to recast many of the world’s nations as investor-friendly democracies, Western business and political leaders are, to extend Chua’s title metaphor, playing with fire. “At no point in history,” Chua writes, “did any Western nation ever implement laissez-faire capitalism and overnight universal suffrage at the same time.” Yet, she adds, this is “the precise formula of free market democracy currently being pressed in developing countries around the world.” Again and again, Chua observes, this reckless experiment has sparked ethnic hatred and violence.

For all the rhetoric of prosperity we hear from the champions of globalization, the reality on the ground is generally far uglier. The poor and landless haven’t seen their lot improve dramatically; and egged on by opportunistic politicians, they have often visited their resentments on what Chua terms “market-dominant minorities” — elites who come to be seen as either foreign interlopers or ethnic menaces. In many Asian nations — the Philippines, Indonesia — they’re the Chinese. In Rwanda, they’re the Tutsis. In Russia, they’re the Jews who dominate that country’s oligarchy. In the ever-tangled Balkans, the Serbs believe the Croats are the market-dominant out-group; in Kosovo, Albanians fill the same role. And so on.

These ethnic hostilities make the inequalities endemic to globalization more than simply unjust; they are, for minority elites suddenly subjected to majority rule, potentially lethal. Democracies can grant a wide berth to roving demagogues, and in the absence of mass literacy and vital dissenting traditions they can grow deeply deformed. In extreme cases, they can become genocidal.

For Chua, such deadly conflicts are a clear signal that we need to slow down the pace of democratization. This, as Chua realizes, is not a position that sits well with either Friedman-style free traders, whose plans for the rest of the world proceed from the embrace of democratization, or the antiglobalization left, who demands that our brave new global institutions be rendered more accountable and participatory. Chua deserves great credit for even raising this issue, and there’s no gainsaying her claim that the catastrophes in Rwanda and the Balkans were abetted by the hasty introduction of democratic structures in populations who believed they had ugly ethnic scores to settle.

Yet she is none too clear on how these ethnic time bombs are to be defused. Chua denounces full-throated democratization schemes in nations like Zimbabwe as “breathtakingly naive” but waves away alternatives as “idealistic.” She winds up arguing that the best hope to free these social orders from the undertow of ethno-nationalism is to instill in ethnic elites a sense of noblesse oblige. Hailing the effectiveness of ethnic “clan associations” in furthering the interests of the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Chua suggests that such groups should take it upon themselves to promote greater economic fairness in those societies. And in her closing pages, she pleads for “voluntary generosity by market-dominated minorities.”

To which it’s hard to avoid replying, Who’s being naive now? Reformers ever since the Progressive Era have pinned hopes for social justice on the actions of an enlightened economic elite, yet this approach has produced little lasting reform. But if Chua had attended a bit more to the history of Western democracy in the Industrial Age, she might have stumbled upon another civic force that did manage to wed democracy and economic fairness: the labor union.

Through struggles for fair wages and greater worker self-management, unions have often come to multiethnic civic ideals ahead of the remainder of our political culture. Moreover, unions — both here and in places like Poland — have effectively fostered the civic participation on which democracy sustains itself. Indeed, it is easy to forget that many of the traits now commonly associated with developing market societies — irrational economic resentments, illiteracy, and ethnic scapegoating — were also held to be fatal weaknesses of our unskilled immigrant labor in the early 20th century. With little state support, these workers organized themselves into fully functioning, prospering, and — over time, to be sure — tolerant, democratic citizens. Reading Amy Chua’s clearheaded, incisive diagnosis of the many ethnic ills of the globalizing era, one is oddly more convinced than ever that organized labor has a world to win.

Chris Lehmann is the deputy editor of the Washington Post Book World and author of the forthcoming Revolt of the Masscult.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate