← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · NeoNietzsche
Thread ID: 5692 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-03-21
2003-03-21 14:24 | User Profile
World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability by Amy Chua
From Publishers Weekly
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. (On sale Dec. 24)
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Book Description
Every few years, a book is published about America's role in the world and the changing contest of global affairs that gets everyone thinking in a new way. Amy Chua's WORLD ON FIRE will have exactly that kind of impact on the debate of how the world has changed in light of the events of last September.
Apostles of globalization, such as Thomas Friedman, believe that exporting free markets and democracy to other countries will increase peace and prosperity throughout the developing world; Amy Chua is the anti-Thomas Friedman. Her book wil be a dash of cold water in the face of globalists, techno-utopians, and liberal triumphalists as she shows that just the opposite has happened: When global markets open, ethnic conflict worsens and politics turns ugly and violent.
Drawing on examples from around the world--from Africa and Asia to Russia and Latin America--Chua examines how free markets do not spread wealth evenly throughout the whole of these societies. Instead they produce a new class of extremely wealthy plutocrats--individuals as rich as nations. Almost always members of a minority group--Chinese in the Philippines, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America, Indians in East Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia--these "market-dominant minorities" have become targets of violent hatred. Adding democracy to this volatile mix unleashes supressed ethnic hatreds and brings to power ethnonationalist governments that pursue aggressive policies of confiscation and revenge. Chua further shows how individual countries are often viewed as dominant minorities, explaining the phenomena of ethnic resentment in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the rising tide of anti-American sentiment around the world. This more than anything accounts for the visceral hatred of Americans that has been expressed in recent acts of terrorism.
[url=http://www.amconmag.com/01_13_03/review7.html]http://www.amconmag.com/01_13_03/review7.html[/url]
Globalization's Many Discontents
By Paul Craig Roberts
Yale University law professor Amy Chua writes in World on Fire that "free market democracy" has an Achilles' heel: market-dominant minorities. The disproportionate success attained by market-dominant minorities foments ethnic hatreds. Democracy provides the envious and resentful majority the means to strike at the successful minority, making conflict inherent in "free market democracy."
What is to be done? Chua is too realistic to offer pie-in-the-sky alternatives to markets and democracy. After relating examples of how "free market democracy" works against itself in countries with multi-ethnic populations, she recommends that market-dominant minorities protect themselves with image management and good works. In the last line of her book, Chua reaches the conclusion: "It is difficult to see, in any event, how a little generosity and humility could possibly hurt."
It is difficult to see how such a weak conclusion justifies her publisher's claim that World on Fire is that rare book that "gets everyone thinking in a new way." If Chua or her editor were aware that her ground had been more expertly ploughed by Alexis de Tocqueville, Thomas Sowell, and Peter Bauer, Chua's knowledge of ethnic and tribal conflicts might have been put to better use.
Having nothing to offer but a report on ethnic and tribal conflicts, Chua tries to compensate by connecting globalism to market-dominant minorities. She writes that globalism disproportionately benefits these minorities and thus exacerbates hatreds and political instability. She blames the U.S. government and International Monetary Fund for contributing to ethnic conflict by promoting free market democracy throughout the non-Western world.
In this indirect way Chua takes issue with the neoconservative view, that exporting free markets and democracy to other countries will increase peace and prosperity throughout the developing world. Chua, however, seems no less interventionist-minded than neoconservatives, and as she neither believes that a government-run economy produces better results than the market nor that authoritarianism is preferable to democracy, she fails to challenge the neoconservative view.
Chua is on shaky ground when she blames market-dominant minorities on globalism. Such minorities long predate globalism and exist in lands that can by no stretch of the imagination be labeled free market or democratic. "Free market democracy" is an intellectual construct that nowhere exists.
At times Chua's book reads like an aimless rant against free markets and laissez-faire capitalism. Perhaps she is letting off emotional steam over inequalities that reason tells her are intractable, based as they are in historical, cultural, and genetic differences. The left-wing is frustrated by the realization that society cannot be remade unless history, the gene pool, and human nature itself can be recast.
If truth be known, political correctness prevents Chua from bringing her knowledge of ethnic conflicts to bear on multiculturalism where it belongs. She is honest and bold enough to acknowledge the reality of ethnic hatreds, but her supposition that such hatreds are market driven is merely a repetition of 19th century Marxist economic determinism.
Certainly the U.S. government and the IMF should take care not to export policies that worsen ethnic conflicts, but the more powerful conclusion to be drawn from Chua's material-a conclusion that Chua studiously avoids-is that the U.S., Europe, the U.K., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand should immediately cease and desist from reconstructing themselves as multi-ethnic societies. Accentuating ethnic conflict abroad is stupid, even criminal, but it is insane to import unassimiliable ethnic groups into Western countries, thus replicating in the West the Third World conflicts that Chua so terrifyingly describes.
Chua's report on ethnic conflict supports the undrawn conclusion, revolutionary for the political Left, that successful states are states with homogeneous populations. Even in ethnically or racially homogeneous states, ideologies such as communism can create class conflicts that are as murderous as ethnic conflicts. Life can be dangerous enough without a heterogeneous population seething with grievances. When a political system has to cope simultaneously with race, gender, ethnic, cultural, and class Marxism, social and political instability are guaranteed. Multiculturalism, not "free market democracy," is setting the world on fire.
Paul Craig Roberts is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
Print This Article | Top
[url=http://www.vdare.com/sailer/market_dominant.htm]http://www.vdare.com/sailer/market_dominant.htm[/url]
February 02, 2003
Will U.S. Retain Its "Market-Dominant Majority"?
By Steve Sailer
Francis Fukuyama famously announced at the end of the Cold War that humanity had reached "the end of history." Unfortunately, he forgot to tell history not to bother coming to work.
Easy as it is to make fun of Fukuyama, where exactly did he go wrong?
Fukuyama's conception was formed by his expensive miseducation in the works of Hegel and other 19th Century German philosophers. History consists of the struggle to determine the proper ideology. Now there are no plausible alternatives to capitalist democracy. History, therefore, must be finished.
Lenin held a more realistic theory of what history is about: not ideology, but "Who? Whom?" (You can insert your own transitive verb between the two words.) History continues because the struggle to determine who will be the who rather than the whom will never end.
Fukuyama may be the only major nonwhite American intellectual who does not write primarily about race. This is admirable in many ways, but it's a fatal shortcoming in a thinker of such expansive ambitions. Race remains enormously relevant in this world.
Amy Chua's readable and eye-opening new book "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability" documents just how pervasive ethnic inequality is around the world-and how much that drives the traumas we read about every day. (See also Paul Craig Roberts' review of her book here.)
Chua builds upon Thomas Sowell's concept of the "middle-man minority"-the often-persecuted immigrant ethnic group with a talent for retailing and banking, such as Jews, Armenians, Chinese, Gujarati Indians, Lebanese Christians, etc. She broadens that idea to include other relatively well-off groups, such as un-entrepreneurial hereditary landowners, like the Tutsis of Rwanda and the Iberian-descended whites of much of Latin America. She lumps them all together under the useful term "market-dominant minorities."
Chua begs off explaining why economic inequality exists between hereditary groups. So let me offer a general explanation.
Creating wealth is difficult. People who have wealth pass down their property, their genes, and their techniques for preserving and multiplying wealth to their descendents, rather than to strangers.
In countries without a reliable system of equal justice under the law, clannishness is particularly rational. Businessmen must depend upon their extended families for protection and enforcement of contracts. So they are particularly loath to do serious business with people to whom they have no ties of blood or marriage and who would thus be more likely to stiff them on a deal.
"Globalization," or economic liberalization, tends to make the poor majorities slightly richer and the "market dominant minorities" vastly richer. Sometimes the masses find this an acceptable tradeoff. But sometimes it drives them into a fury.
Often, the minority's post-globalization riches are honestly earned, but not always. American-backed privatization schemes in Russia and Mexico put huge government enterprises into the hands of the most economically nimble and politically well-connected operators at give-away prices. (Chua and her brave editor Adam Bellow, who published The Bell Curve, deserve praise for calling attention to the ethnic makeup of the post-Soviet "oligarchs," something I was completely unaware of.)
Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, is herself the progeny of a market dominant minority: the Chinese of the Philippines. Chinese-speakers make up only 1% or 2% of the Philippines' population. But they own the majority of the country's business assets. They seclude themselves in a luxurious world fenced off from the indigenous majority, whom they hold in contempt and wouldn't dream of marrying.
Not surprisingly, the impoverished natives aren't crazy about the rich newcomers. Chua's beloved aunt in Manila was brutally murdered by her chauffeur. The unmotivated cops made little effort to find him.
It's definitely nicer to belong to the minority than to the majority in these countries. But Chua makes clear that, to Americans used to our norms of congeniality and social equality, it would be an awfully depressing way to live.
After anti-Chinese riots in 1969, the Malaysian majority voted itself affirmative action at the expense of the Chinese. Chua considers this quota system a success. Malaysia has avoided subsequent violence.
Still, long-time Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, the world's pre-eminent Muslim statesman (granted, the competition isn't stiff), has become disillusioned with his plan. As he put it recently: "I feel disappointed because I achieved too little of my principal task of making my race a successful race." The same week that President Bush tacitly endorsed college admissions quotas, the strong-willed Mohamad ended them.
A much grimmer example: Indonesia. The Chinese made up 3% of its vast population, yet owned the great majority of all businesses. The dictator Suharto, whose family had lucrative ties to the Chinese community, fell in 1998. Democratization set off a vicious pogrom against the Chinese, many of whom fled to Chinese-majority Singapore. The government expropriated $58 billion in assets.
Not surprisingly, the native Indonesians proved inept at running the businesses nationalized from the Chinese, and the economy collapsed.
All of which leads to a disquieting conclusion: it can be contradictory for America to demand that other countries simultaneously free their economies and democratize their politics.
We are seeing this in Venezuela right now. The dark-skinned, democratically-elected Hugo Chavez is at war with the fair-skinned rich, who want the national oil company privatized. The Bush Administration ludicrously endorsed the white elite's coup against Chavez last spring as a "victory for democracy," only to be embarrassed when the majority rose up and reinstalled him.
(Chua shows that all across South America since the year 2000, brown and black people are finally developing ethnic self-consciousness and solidarity in the struggle against the whites who have so easily held them down for so long. This historical shift will probably be reflected among Hispanic immigrants in the U.S., most likely to the electoral benefit of the Democrats. Similarly, Beijing's sponsorship of anti-white racialism following Tiananmen Square has translated into a shift to the Left among Asian-Americans.)
That property rights and one man-one vote democracy don't always mix well would not have surprised Aristotle, Edmund Burke, or Alexander Hamilton. Yet many Americans who call themselves conservatives have forgotten this.
One reason: we are one of the fairly small number of lucky countries with "market dominant majorities." We can have our cake (capitalism) and eat it too (democracy) because our majority group is economically quite competent.
America's perpetual trouble has been a less-productive black minority. Black-white economic inequality is not a problem that America is going to be able to solve any time soon. But, due to our market-dominant majority, our country is rich enough to live with it.
In contrast, if our current mass immigration system is allowed to continue, America will become just another country with a market dominant minority. Through government policy, we will have inflicted upon ourselves the kind of ugly society seen in most of the rest of the world.
[Steve Sailer [email him], is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute. His website www.iSteve.com features site-exclusive commentaries.]
2003-03-21 14:27 | User Profile
*Consequently, only with the setting up of the law is there a "just" and "unjust" (and not, as Dühring will have it, from the time of the injurious action). To talk of just and unjust in themselves has no sense whatsoever-it's obvious that in themselves harming, oppressing, exploiting, destroying cannot be "unjust," insofar as life essentially works that way, that is, in its basic functions it harms, oppresses, exploits, and destroys-and cannot be conceived at all without these characteristics. We must acknowledge something even more alarming-the fact that from the highest biological standpoint, conditions of law must always be exceptional conditions, partial restrictions on the basic will to live, which is set on power-they are subordinate to the total purpose of this will as its individual means, that is, as means to create a larger unit of power. A legal system conceived of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle of power complexes, but as a means against all struggles in general, something along the lines of Dühring's communist cliché in which each will must be considered as equal to every will, that would be a principle hostile to life, a destroyer and dissolver of human beings, an assassination attempt on the future of human beings, a sign of exhaustion, a secret path to nothingness.***
*To refrain mutually from injury, from violence, from exploitation, and put one's will on a par with that of others: this may result in a certain rough sense in good conduct among individuals when the necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual similarity of the individuals in amount of force and degree of worth, and their co-relation within one organisation). As soon, however, as one wished to take this principle more generally, and if possible even as the fundamental principle of society, it would immediately disclose what it really is--namely, a Will to the denial of life, a principle of dissolution and decay. Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation;--but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped? Even the organisation within which, as was previously supposed, the individuals treat each other as equal--it takes place in every healthy aristocracy--must itself, if it be a living and not a dying organisation, do all that towards other bodies, which the individuals within it refrain from doing to each other: it will have to be the incarnated Will to Power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendency--not owing to any morality or immorality, but because it lives, and because life is precisely Will to Power. On no point, however, is the ordinary consciousness of Europeans more unwilling to be corrected than on this matter; people now rave everywhere, even under the guise of science, about coming conditions of society in which "the exploiting character" is to be absent:-- that sounds to my ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life which should refrain from all organic functions. "Exploitation" does not belong to a depraved, or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the nature of the living being as a primary organic function; it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life.--Granting that as a theory this is a novelty--as a reality it is the fundamental fact of all history: let us be so far honest towards ourselves!***