Exporting the Causes of Conflict?
Heather Ba Friday, 11 July 2003
Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2003).
The West won the Cold War, but it may be losing the peace. From ethnic cleansing in Serbia to genocide in Rwanda, from civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo to religious war in Nigeria, the list of nations that have experienced some form of ethnic and/or religious conflict since the collapse of the Soviet Union is long, and getting longer. It wasn't supposed to turn out this way; Western idealists, upon the fall of the Berlin wall, predicted a rapid transition to democracy and free markets around the world, and looked forward with confidence to the establishment of a greater peace. But it is the peace that is conspicuously absent.
Democracy and free markets have spread like wildfire, yet in many developing countries the earth has been left literally scorched by violent ethnic and religious conflict. This has happened not in spite of democracy and free markets, but, in significant ways, because of them. Or so it seems to Amy Chua, professor of law at Yale University, whose recent book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, poses a serious if somewhat overreaching challenge to conventional pieties regarding globalization's effects.[1]
In some respects Chua's thesis comports with the warnings that hard-nosed observers such as Robert Kaplan and Samuel Huntington have issued for years against naïve expectations for the political development of former Soviet and Third World societies. As Huntington has famously argued about clashing civilizations, ethno-religious conflict might already have become the overarching theme of world politics. In his view, "A single dominating ideological conflict has given way to a multiplicity of ethnic conflicts, the stability of a bipolar world to the confusion and instability of a multipolar and multicivilizational world and the potential horror of global nuclear war to the daily horror of ethnic cleansing."[2]
Chua presents a similarly unvarnished perspective on post-Cold War realities. Yet it is not her purpose to simply urge the West to throw up its hands at "inevitable" ethno-religious conflict, gird itself against the chaos, and abandon goals of economic and political liberalization. In fact, Chua believes that democracy and free markets are, in the end, the more sustainable systems for governance and economic growth. Her distinctive contribution is her detailed analysis of the law of unintended consequences at work. She argues that due to the economic situation of many developing nations, poorly designed and hasty transitions to these systems may be accompanied by a surge in ethnic and religious violence.
Central to Chua's thesis is the phenomenon of "market dominant minorities," a term she coined and defines as "ethnic minorities who, for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically the ‘indigenous' majorities around them." Examples of market dominant minorities include the Chinese in many Southeast Asian countries, the Lebanese in western Africa, and whites in South America. She marshals compelling statistics to support her case. Ethnic Chinese, for instance, control approximately 70% of Indonesia's private economy while consisting of only 3% of the population. In the Philippines, they comprise just 1% of the population yet control about 60% of the private economy.
Chua explains that there are many reasons for the existence of market dominant minorities. Some, like the Afrikaners in South Africa, gained their privilege during the colonial era while others, like the Chinese in Burma, benefit from entrepreneurial cultural values. She maintains that the presence of these people-groups makes the introduction of democracy dangerous. Drawing on the old argument that markets and democracy are not compatible, Chua explains that while free markets place wealth in the hands of a minority of people, democracy places power in the hands of the majority. This creates, according to Chua, not a harmonious balance but an opportunity for the poor majority to take its frustrations out on the rich ethnic/religious minorities. "Introducing democracy in these circumstances does not transform voters into open-minded co-citizens in a national community," writes Chua. "Rather, the competition for votes fosters the emergence of demagogues who scapegoat the resented minority and foment active ethno-nationalist movements demanding that the country's wealth and identity be reclaimed by the "true owners of the nation.'"
Chua employs the case of Rwanda to support her theory. While some label the Hutu slaughter of 800,000 minority Tutsi as simply tribal conflict at its worst, Chua argues that economic privilege played a significant role in exasperating the tension between the two tribes while democratic reforms provided an avenue for the oppressed to mobilize for revenge. Hutu resentment of the Tutsi minority was brewing since the colonial era when Belgian colonizers placed the Tutsi minority in a superior economic and political position. But genocide did not occur until Rwanda's dictator, General Habyarimana, acting on political pressure from the U.S., opted to turn Rwanda into a multiparty democracy. Chua concludes from this that democratization was a principal cause, albeit unwittingly, of the horrible events that followed.
The Rwandan case does illustrate some of the dangerous dynamics Chua wishes to draw attention to, yet her account also illustrates her tendency to overstretch her argument. Specifically, her study exaggerates the role of democracy and underestimates the ethnic hatred that was brewing for decades. Democratic reforms may have provided an avenue for the ethnic hatred to erupt, but Chua downplays the importance of the Rwandan Patriotic Party, which was majority Tutsi and invaded the country around the same time General Habyarimana began instituting democratic reforms. The invasion and Habyarimana's demonization of the Tutsi to protect his own position were crucial events that impelled the violence, events insufficiently accounted for by Chua.
Interestingly, Chua highlights the case of Rwanda but ignores a similar situation in its neighboring country of Democratic Republic of Congo. It too is experiencing ethnic conflict rooted in the colonial era. To be sure, this conflict is, perhaps even more so than the Rwandan conflict, exacerbated by certain aspects of the free market. Yet the "Democratic" Republic of Congo has had no recent experience with democracy -- merely a long series of dictators.
Chua's numerous other examples are susceptible to similar criticism. Many of Chua's country cases seem to be dealing with the lingering effects of past colonial and authoritarian regimes. In other cases Chua simply fails to make unambiguously clear connections between free markets, democracy, and ethnic or religious violence. In her case of the Philippines, for instance, it is plausible that economic disparities combined with longstanding ethnic hatred motivated the recent wave of Chinese kidnappings -- but democracy's role is very unclear. While she concedes that not all ethnic conflicts have a dominant economic dimension or occur as a result of democratic reforms, she under-specifies the role of outside factors. Furthermore, her argument isn't entirely fair to democracy or Western advocates of Third World democratization, since the form of "democracy" that often prevails in early stages of transition is not what the West would consider a healthy democracy. Chua's skewed rendering of the facts detracts from her otherwise valid critique of neoliberalism and easy democracy.
Chua's greatest frustration with the West is that it promotes something the U.S. and any other industrialized nation has never experienced—overnight universal suffrage and laissez faire capitalism. All western forms of democracy developed over time, as did moderate governmental regulation of industry. In the United States the poor, the illiterate, women, and African-Americans were all denied the right to vote generations past the Constitutional Convention. Universal suffrage was a process, not an event, for many western nations. While Chua is too quick to implicate democracy in the problems faced by her case study countries, she is right to bring our attention to the fact that, sometimes, rapid democratic transitions have stoked pre-existing conflicts, and could have been implemented with more strategic wisdom and patience.
Chua also rightly emphasizes that free markets are not living up to expectations as the cure to widespread poverty in underdeveloped countries. Chua is not the first to express concern with the disparities which free markets are creating in the developing world. But she is the first to draw attention to the ethnic face that the disparity wears. Chua's suggestion that economic liberalization has fueled ethnic tension by making market dominant minorities wealthier is plausible. Wealth disparity has long been a source of conflict, but the added ethno-religious dimension of market dominant minorities is, as Chua rightly notes, the "Achilles' heel of free market democracy" in the developing world.
Chua gets carried away, however, and overextends her theory to answer the trendy post-9/11 question, "Why do people hate America?" Chua writes:
Like the Chinese in the Philippines or the Lebanese in West Africa, Americans have attained heights of wealth and economic power wildly disproportionate to our tiny numbers. Just 4 percent of the world's population, America dominates every aspect—financial, cultural, technological—of the global free markets we have come to symbolize. From the Islamic world to China, from our NATO allies to the southern hemisphere, America is seen (not incorrectly) as the engine and principle beneficiary of market globalization. For this reason—for our extraordinary market dominance, our seeming global invincibility—we have earned the envy, fear, and resentment of much of the rest of the world.
Chua's conclusion is provocative but her analysis is unimpressive. While she frames her thesis in a unique light, arguing by analogy that America has become the world's "market dominant minority," her deduction is no more useful than others that topped the bestseller list after the terrorist attacks in New York. The analogy only holds true if her thesis is transferable from a national to an international level, but she doesn't demonstrate how her argument can be made to work at both levels of analysis.
Perhaps to her credit Chua admits that solutions to the problem of democracy and free market induced ethnic violence are hard to come by. Still, her lack of specificity leaves the reader a little unsatisfied. After alluding to the fact that overnight universal suffrage is not the answer, she fails to comment on who should be the first to be denied the right to vote. But she does suggest ways to reform the free market system. Tax and carry programs are at the top of Chua's list of prescriptions, while affirmative action programs and generosity toward the poor are also recommended.
World on Fire is a valid critique of unchecked free market economics and "instant" democracy. Nonetheless, one cannot help but sense that Chua's thesis may be an over-generalized and oversimplified analysis which seeks to draw similarities between complicated political situations that have an ethnic or religious dimension, but are otherwise quite unique in their relationship to democracy and free markets.
The causes of the world's ills of underdevelopment, poverty, and war are never diagnosed as easily as Chua makes it seem. But Chua is right in that the remedies are rarely as easy as America makes them seem. The burning question lying beneath all of this is whether the values Americans hold so dear — democracy and freedom to buy and sell goods — are the answer or an answer.
[1] Chua, Amy. World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2003).
[2] Huntington, Samuel. 1996. "Democracy for the Long Haul." Journal of Democracy, 7.2:3-13.