World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred…

March 18, 2004
I bought this on impulse, from Amazon, after I saw the author's interview with Brian Lamb on a Booknotes rerun.

She was an insightful, generous, thinking human being, who, with vast education and training, has come up with a new and striking theorem about the current state of world politics.

I was so taken with her theory that I bought the book the very next morning, via our very Western computer methodology. Sitting in my living room, in my pajamas on a Sunday morning, I simply looked it up, ordered it, paid by credit card and had it delivered to my porch 3 days later.

Her thesis, market-dominant ethnic minorities and what that means for individiual countries, in particular the US, and her cogent, well-supported documentation seem so eminently sensible to me that I wish every world leader and State Dept. employee could read this book.

She says, in essence, that exporting laissez-faire capitalism and one-person/one-vote-democracy to the Third World, with no thought for long-term consequences, is actually causing the very things the US wishes to halt - namely vicious, murderous ethnic conflict and flourishing international terrorism.

Amy Chua has identified a wedge issue that's been previously under-analysed, if not unnoticed, and has driven in that wedge about as far as it will go. The issue? The fact, that in so many countries, especially developing ones, small ethnic minority groups controls a large proportions of those countries' economies. Her keystone examples are the 'overseas Chinese' in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and other SE Asian countries, but she ranges around the globe in identifying analagous situations.

This breadth is the strength of the book. Less satisfying are Chua's attempts -- or lack of them -- to explain why this pattern repeats itself over and over.

For an academic, Chua writes clearly, although this book would have benefited from more stringent editing. It's repetitive, and the constant academic-style hedging in Chua's prose is irritating, and could easily have been remedied.

Overall, recommended highly. ( )

When the Cold War ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, most Western political thinkers assumed that democracy and free markets had triumped, and that the future could only mean exporting these virtues to those 'developing world' countries that lack one or both of them. However as Amy Chua points out in this valuable book, in the real world virtues are not easily exportable (as Iraq is so bloodily proving) and worse still, combining two virtues doesn't always produce another: many times introducing democracy on top of a free market will result in wealth and happiness, but sometimes can lead instead to genocide.

Chua, a professor of international law at Harvard, explains how this happens: a free market may exacerbate rivalries between ethnic groups by enriching one group at the expense of others; if those others happen to be the majority, then democracy may offer them the opportunity to take power and exact bloody revenge against their exploiters. Chua didn't need to dig too far for evidence, merely to harvest it from newspaper headlines: massacres of Chinese in Indonesia in 1998; Mugabe's land-grabs in Zimbabwe; the hellish genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia.

This is a courageous book that goes firmly against the grain of both current US neo-conservative and leftist dogmas. Chua, perhaps emboldened by her own Philipino-Chinese descent, tackles matters of ethnic conflict with a robust pragmatism that wholly sidesteps all the pieties of political correctness. She concludes that such conflicts must not only be clearly acknowledged, but as far as possible defused before we can even think about trying to export democracy and free markets. ( )

Interesting study of the impact of globalisation on a world which continues to think in ethnic and cultural terms.

A very interesting thesis about how economically dominant ethnic minorities are often the target of the majority in emerging democracies. ( )