Is Third World Democracy a bad thing?

[chequita guevara]

"World On Fire" by Amy Chua
A new book argues that when Third World countries embrace democracy and free markets too quickly, ethnic hatred and even genocide can result.

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By Michelle Goldberg



Jan. 13, 2003 | The case Amy Chua makes in "World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability" is so clear and persuasive it almost seems as if it had been obvious all along. Yet her argument, that rapid switches to majoritarian rule and free-market democracy in many Third World countries benefit certain ethnic groups over others and lead to vicious sectarian strife, is quite new, if occasionally overstated. Writers such as Robert Kaplan have long argued that the Western obsession with exporting democracy to countries without the institutions to support it is naive and often dangerous, fostering demagogues and communal hatreds. Chua builds on this argument in an essential way, showing how expanding markets exacerbate the problem by enriching already-dominant minority groups even as democracy empowers angry majorities.

"World On Fire" is about a phenomenon Chua calls "market-dominant minorities," groups like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews in Russia, whites in Zimbabwe and Indians in East Africa and Fiji. Market-dominant minorities control hugely disproportionate percentages of their countries' resources. Filipino Chinese comprise just 1 to 2 percent of the Philippines' population, but control all of the country's major supermarkets, fast-food restaurants and large department stores, and all but one of the nation's banks. A similar situation obtains in Indonesia. Jews make up a similarly tiny proportion of Russia's population, but of the seven "oligarchs" who control virtually all of the country's business, six are Jewish. Lebanese dominate the economies in Sierra Leone and Gambia, while Indians dominate the economy in Kenya, along with a smaller, indigenous minority tribe called the Kikuyu. Similar examples abound worldwide.

It's enormously touchy to talk about the economic element of communal violence, especially regarding Jews, since rhetoric about one ethnic group exploiting another is so often a precursor to atrocity. But that's exactly why Chua's book feels so urgent. No matter how politically incorrect it is to talk about, her book makes clear that minority market domination is a reality in much of the world, one that's tied up in many ways with smoldering group hatreds and explosions of mass slaughter, and one that's made worse by Western policies.

Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, is a careful, precise writer, and she makes it very clear that she's not blaming prosperous ethnic groups for violence directed against them, or blaming capitalism alone for fomenting genocide. It's a point she makes over and over again. (Her lawyerly penchant for summing up and reiterating her main arguments far too many times is the book's greatest flaw.)

"The point, rather, is this," she writes. "In the numerous countries around the world that have pervasive poverty and a market-dominant minority, democracy and markets -- at least in the form in which they are currently being promoted -- can proceed only in deep tension with each other. In such conditions, the combined pursuit of free markets and democratization has repeatedly catalyzed ethnic conflict in highly predictable ways. This has been the sobering lesson of globalization in the last twenty years."

Nevertheless, "World On Fire" is not an anti-globalization screed. Chua is a former Wall Street lawyer who worked to help developing countries privatize their resources, and she continues to believe that, in the long term, markets offer the best hope for developing countries. Her scathing assessment of the way the West has foisted liberalization on the rest of the world is driven not by ideology, but by a careful examination of globalization's unintended consequences.

"Back in the early nineties," she writes, "I believed that the proceeds of privatization, as a World Bank official put it, would go to roads, 'potable water, sewerage, hospitals, and education to the poor.' Like many in the 1990s, however, I was viewing emerging market privatization through a rose-colored lens." Later, she adds, "Even assuming that free market democracy is the optimal end point for most non-Western countries, in the short run markets and democracy are themselves part of the problem."

Explaining why market-dominant minorities exist would probably require another volume, and Chua makes only a cursory attempt to do so. In some cases, of course, it's obvious -- the white minority in South Africa and Zimbabwe accumulated capital and expertise at the expense of the grotesquely exploited majority, who cannot now catch up without massive government help. Elsewhere group prosperity is attributable to superior business networks. Cameroon's Bamileke, for example, "operate an informal capital market so efficient it constantly threatens to put government-owned banks out of business," Chua writes. The reasons for Jewish economic success are more mysterious -- especially in Russia, where they've been repeatedly subjected to vicious pogroms -- and "World On Fire" does little to illuminate them. Chua is less interested in how minority groups come to dominate than what happens when they do.

She argues that when economic liberalization and democracy are rapidly introduced to countries with market-dominant minorities, the two forces necessarily come into conflict. "Markets concentrate enormous wealth in the hands of an 'outsider' minority, fomenting ethnic envy and hatred among often chronically poor majorities," she writes. "Introducing democracy in these circumstances does not transform voters into open-minded cocitizens in a national community. Rather, the competition for votes fosters the emergence of demagogues who scapegoat the resented minority and foment active ethnonationalist movements demanding that the country's wealth and identity be reclaimed by the 'true owners of the nation.'"

In Indonesia, for example, free-market policies undertaken under Gen. Suharto, the U.S.-backed dictator, vastly enriched the country's tiny Chinese minority, who in turn supported the strongman. By 1998, Chua writes, Chinese made up 3 percent of the population but controlled 70 percent of the private economy. That was the year democracy protests and riots forced Suharto to resign. His fall was accompanied by orgies of anti-Chinese violence -- Chinese women began wearing "anti-rape corsets," locked steel chastity belts. "[T]he prevailing view among the pribumi majority was that it was 'worthwhile to lose 10 years of growth to get rid of the Chinese problem once and for all,'" she writes. "Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department called resoundingly for free markets and democratic elections."

Many other countries share elements of this dynamic, though Chua sometimes seems to be stretching her thesis in order to fit in as many places as possible. She's overreaching somewhat when she says, early on, "markets and democracy were among the causes of both the Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocides." Clearly democracy was a factor in both, but the economic factors are much trickier. The gap in status between minority Tutsis and majority Hutus is indeed attributable to globalization, but of the old-fashioned, colonial kind -- Belgian colonizers favored minority Tutsis over majority Hutus because of what was seen as their Caucasian-like features. And while Serbian hatred of the Croats was fanned by Croatian economic dominance, the Bosnians they butchered were as poor as they were. Chua makes these caveats herself in the relevant chapters, but they dilute some of the grand claims she lays out in her introduction.

Still, her larger point, that the policies seen as panaceas by the West can actually make things worse, holds true. Electoral democracy is often touted as an antidote to the tyranny and tribalism ravaging much of the globe. "For globalization's enthusiasts, the cure for group hatred and ethnic violence around the world is straightforward: more markets and more democracy," Chua writes. She notes that after Sept. 11, Thomas Friedman wrote of the Middle East, "Hello? Hello? There's a message here. It's democracy, stupid! Multi-ethnic, pluralistic, free-market democracy."

This one-size-fits-all prescription for curing the world's ills is implicated in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. As Chua writes, Hutu dictator Juvénal Habyarimana, who ruled from 1973 until the early 1990s, may have been corrupt and totalitarian, but he did protect the Tutsi population. Once he responded to Western -- particularly French -- calls to adopt multiparty democracy, though, Hutu supremacy became a potent weapon for Habyarimana's political enemies. The genocidal Hutu Power movement was buoyed on a groundswell of popular support. Meanwhile, Chua points out, the "freedom of the press" encouraged by the West stopped the government from shutting down the hugely influential, rabidly anti-Tutsi newspaper Kangura.

"Sudden political liberalization in the 1990s unleashed long-suppressed ethnic resentments, directly spawning Hutu Power as a potent political force," Chua writes.

The idea that democracy, America's most cherished value, has exacerbated the last century's bloodletting is terrible to contemplate. Yet Chua's book ultimately supplies a tiny measure of hope. Unlike Kaplan, Chua doesn't believe that enlightened autocracy is the answer for the developing world. For her, the problem isn't democracy itself but the speed at which it's implemented. Rushing it, especially without protections for individual rights or institutions for upholding the law, can be dangerous.

Kaplan believes that the right kind of despots can sustain a stable environment for capitalism to flourish, creating the middle-class institutions necessary to sustain democracy. One of his models is prosperous, undemocratic Singapore. Chua's analysis, though, shows us that no amount of economic growth will turn countries that have market-dominant minorities, like Indonesia, into countries like Singapore, that don't. Prosperity and stability won't come to those countries until they find a way to narrow the chasm between rich minorities and poor majorities.

To that end, Chua argues for sweeping reforms that would give disenfranchised populations a stake in their nation's resources, as well as massive affirmative-action policies of the kind being undertaken in South Africa and, with notable success, in Malaysia. Such a policy is a huge departure from the free-market evangelism of people like Thomas Friedman, but one more likely to lead to prosperous societies that can, eventually, turn into real democracies.

Of course, it's not terribly likely that her recommendations are going to be implemented in most places anytime soon. In the end, "World On Fire" is valuable less for its prescriptions than for the perspective it offers on the seemingly incomprehensible violence shaking the world. With the fall of communism and the emergence of al-Qaida, it's no longer fashionable to see ethnic conflict in materialist terms -- the new battles are framed as a clash of civilizations rather than a scramble for resources. It's a scarier opposition, because it's so intractably defiant of reason. "World on Fire" suggests these conflicts might not be so primordial and irrational after all. It might be cold comfort to realize how atavistic enmities abroad have been inflamed by our own government's policies, but at least these policies can, ultimately, still be changed.

[chequita guevara]

Uhm, Ming, Rah, can you fix that title to "Third" not "Thrid?"

[Bereta_Eder]

summary please.
no more than 100 words.

[Arrian]

Chua doesn't believe that enlightened autocracy is the answer for the developing world. For her, the problem isn't democracy itself but the speed at which it's implemented. Rushing it, especially without protections for individual rights or institutions for upholding the law, can be dangerous

That's the meat of it, Paiktis... and my response is "duh!"

On the other hand, if you accept that one doesn't just snap one's fingers and switch from despotic rule to a functioning democracy, then you also must cut democracies some slack when they are therefore forced to accept dictators (at least for a while).

-Arrian

[Traianvs]

Hmm in really poor countries there is often not enough organisation for a good an honest democracy... Officials etc are bribed easily by the rich and influential

I think a strong despot with good authority is needed in those countries to get things going, and afterwards they might switch over to demo or commy (or fundy , argh civ2 addiction will never go away!)

Of course the problem is finding an honest dictator, man is easily corrupted by power.. democracy in poor countries is useless anyway, ppl in smaller settlements for example are focused primarily on growing enough food for them to survive anyway, they don't know much about politics, and if they do know some viewpoints of the politicians it is only through rumours or totally fake campaigns that promise a bit of extra food or support to get the poor population on their side... that is pointless

[Flubber]

I don't think there is anything revolutionary here. I recall reading a book "Polyarchy" by Robert Dahl (probably printer 20 years ago) in which it was argued that many nations that try to democratize will fail due to the absence of many factors which favor democracy.

Many of these thingss are as you would expect and would include

-- a free press
-- the existence of political parties (even if it starts as the former dictator and an opposition)
-- a population that has some faith in the legitimacy of democracy

and there were many many more. I seem to recall that major ethnic clashes with violence in the recent past would not be conducive to speedy democratization and that Canada with its French-English division and years of democracy was seen as a bit of an anomally.

------------------------------------------------------------

Democracy is, by its nature, good IMHO. But it may take some time to acomplish it in a given nation.


The legitimacy thing is the biggest. It would be tough ( not impossible but tough) for any dictator to take over a modern western democracy since the army would be made up of people indoctrinated in it. It is likewise tough for a democracy to survive if most of the population has no faith in that system and would pretty much acede to the first coup that occurrs

[orange]

Arguably, some nations need to evolve to accept democracy. They can't just go from iron fist dictatorships or 'communist' regimes to democracy overnight...

[Inverse Icarus]

to build an economic base every country should spend some time with an enlightened despot. slavery should not be shunned. when the base is established, the tree of democracy will be watered by the blood of the revolution.

[Inverse Icarus]

Originally posted by orange
Arguably, some nations need to evolve to accept democracy. They can't just go from iron fist dictatorships or 'communist' regimes to democracy overnight...

enlightened despots

[orange]

yeah, Kim Jong Il - Enlightened Despot

[Inverse Icarus]

[raghar]

Democracy is bad for third world countries.

Democracy is expensive. (election fat gov. ideology and so on)
They will have same rulers anyway. (dictator would be premier and his supporters guess what )
Democracy solves nothing. They would have same problems. They would just lose some time and capable people to "transormation".
You'd need brainwash people several years, and hope there woldn't be crisis, to force them behave like western democracy.

I dislike Democracy because I would rather have FREEDOM.

[Hueij]

It took us a couple of centuries to get where we are. You can't expect 3rd world nations to do that overnight. Especially not because of the way we left them on their own in the 50's and 60's...

I dislike Democracy because I would rather have FREEDOM

And this is utter bullshit

[The Vagabond]

China vs India is a good example against democracy. In 20 years China accomplished more than India in 50. Now GDP per capita in China is twice as large as in India.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

.. In part because India's population is growing twice as fast as China's

[raghar]

Originally posted by Hueij
And this is utter bullshit

You sure about it?
On Jamaica must be realy hot weather. There is something like -15 or so. I had more FREEDOM in totalitarian state than in democracy.
So.
Now you know. (I think you'd dislike this answer somehow.)



To moderators: Nice smilies.

[Berzerker]

Tyranny of the majority is not a moral substitute for tyranny of the minority.

[The Vagabond]

The first line of your signature is nasty, LoA. May I ask you to remove it as a personal favor?

[Lawrence of Arabia]

mmmm ok.

[The Vagabond]

Thanks, LoA

[ranskaldan]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
.. In part because India's population is growing twice as fast as China's

... which also begs the question, why isn't China's population growing so fast?

[OzzyKP]

It is a very interesting point to make, I saw and op-ed in the Washington Post the other day that discussed it (probably by the author). I think the premise is right that we can't force democracy or free-markets on these countries. We should lead by example and hopefully people all over the world will realize the benefit (and yes, free-market democracies are the best way to go) of these institutions.

However I'm not sure how accurate the author's connectons are. Jewish minorities have dominated European economies for centuries in situations much different than the current third world situations the author describes. Even in feudal monarchies this led to ethnic hatred and terrible stuff, so the fact that its happening now in emerging free-market democracies isn't necessarily new.

It is certainly an interesting point to think about.

[OzzyKP]

Originally posted by ranskaldan
... which also begs the question, why isn't China's population growing so fast?

Because they have an oppresive communist dictatorship that suspended all rights to one's reproductive choices t control population.

[Berzerker]

... which also begs the question, why isn't China's population growing so fast?

Forced abortions.

I don't see markets and trade as the problem, in fact, the lack of markets and trade is one of the problems. Democracy is another when democracy includes unrestrained majority rule. If the reason markets and trade is a problem, it's because the have nots are envious of the haves - too bad. My inability to make alot of money is not an excuse to prevent others from making alot of money.

[ranskaldan]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
It is a very interesting point to make, I saw and op-ed in the Washington Post the other day that discussed it (probably by the author). I think the premise is right that we can't force democracy or free-markets on these countries. We should lead by example and hopefully people all over the world will realize the benefit (and yes, free-market democracies are the best way to go) of these institutions.

That is the problem though. Russia "realized" the "benefits" of a free-market democracy, and look what's happening to them.

China took free-market reforms slowly and democratic reforms even more slowly (if at all). "Realization" isn't everything - it is often catastrophic. Methodical implementation is key - and that doesn't involve switching to the "best" system overnight.

And if any of you is willing to tell me why China should discontinue the One Child Policy, I'd be happy to listen.

[OzzyKP]

Originally posted by ranskaldan
And if any of you is willing to tell me why China should discontinue the One Child Policy, I'd be happy to listen.

Because it is the people's right to have whatever kids they want. It is inhuman to point a gun at someone and tell them what they can and cannot do with their lives. Especially something as basic as reproduction.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by OzzyKP
Because it is the people's right to have whatever kids they want. It is inhuman to point a gun at someone and tell them what they can and cannot do with their lives. Especially something as basic as reproduction.

No one has a gun pointed at them. They just have to deal with some rather stringent economic realities if they choose to have more than one child.

I have an alagory for libertarian morality. You have ten people on a boat. Each of them owns a specific portion of the boat. One person decides he wants to drill a hole in his section. According to libertarian morality, not only should he be able to do so, but it would be wrong for the other nine to try and stop him. The world is just a very large boat.

[OzzyKP]

So how exactly is the one child policy implemented and enforced?

btw how is having children like drilling a hole in a boat? Sure too much population may be a problem, but gosh it looks like the west is handling it nicely through voluntary individual decisions.

[el freako]

It seems that most people think that the benefits of democracy, or even more basic a representative government, should flow through quickly into improved wealth and civic society.

It took around a century for the benefits of Britian's representative government to flow through after 1688 and around the same time gap was evident for the US after 1784.


Democracy almost never emerges on it's own (you only have to look at history to see that this is the case), it can emerge from military conquest of a democracy over a despotism (as after WW2) or through the example of other systems (as france and britian in the 19th centuries showed).


To anyone interested in this I can strongly recommend the book "Power and Prosperity - outgrowing communist and capitalist dictatorships" by Mancur Olsen

[ranskaldan]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


No one has a gun pointed at them. They just have to deal with some rather stringent economic realities if they choose to have more than one child.

Originally posted by OzzyKP
So how exactly is the one child policy implemented and enforced?

It depends. National policy simply states, "China's population must be controlled," and some vague estimates of how China's population will be this-or-that by the year X. How these quotas are fulfilled is left to local officials.

In the cities, where control is tighter, the government often has great control. In the past, when most people were employed by the government, this could be serious economic and social consequences if you tried to have more kids. Nowadays with more and more people employed by private and/or foreign firms who couldn't care less, I'd say that it's not so tight. But still, there would probably be serious consequences when it comes to social benefits, etc.

I was pretty surprised to learn recently that in the countryside, the enforcement can be pretty lax! But the countryside is vast and you never have any idea what peasant cadres are doing. That's probably where all the stories of forced abortions are coming from - but I personally know a girl who has 4 siblings sitting at home. Ah well, the countryside is chaos.

Finally, the law isn't enforced on non-ethnic Chinese.

I have an alagory for libertarian morality. You have ten people on a boat. Each of them owns a specific portion of the boat. One person decides he wants to drill a hole in his section. According to libertarian morality, not only should he be able to do so, but it would be wrong for the other nine to try and stop him. The world is just a very large boat.

If you have never been to China, you might not appreciate how BAD the population growth has become. The streets are clogged, CONSTANTLY, and I'm talking about weekends and holidays. The pollution being belched out has colored the sky the shade of grey goo. And it's not just that - of approximately 900 million peasants, at least a third are milling in the cities to work (or trying to find work), and there's probably a few more million (ten million? hundred million?) who've been laid off by stagnant government businesses trying to privatise.

I have more anecdotes if you want, about how I spent about 20 minutes trying to get from the third level to the second level of the pagoda at Hanshan Temple, Suzhou, China. OMG. The stairs were creaking and I was paranoid that the weight would cause the pagoda to fold in upon itself. OMG.

If population growth rate allowed to go on unimpeded, China will implode in ten years. It's that simple.