veiled4allah: world on fire

I've recently finished reading World on Fire by Amy Chua. The book is subtitled, "How exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability". The book is fascinating and provocative.

The key to Chua's thesis is the presence of "market-dominant minorities" in many societies. Examples include ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, whites and immigrants in Latin America and Africa, and Jewish oligarchs in Russia, among others. Chua argues that when a market-dominant group already exists in the society, globalization and capitalism greatly enrich this group while the poor majority see only minor improvements in their condition. When the market-dominant group is also an ethnic minority in the society, the stage is set for racial conflict. Chua further argues that when democracy is introduced into such volatile societies, it gives power and legitimacy to the resentment of the majority towards the minority.

This leads to a backlash against free markets such as with ethnically-targeted property seizures and nationalizations. In order to bring stability, many countries end up with a backlash against democracy in the form of crony capitalism and minority rule. In the most extreme cases, there is a backlash against the minorities themselves, leading to expulsions and even genocide. Chua provides example after example of these three types of backlash.

Chua also brings up examples of this process within the West, including Jim Crow and even the Holocaust. She suggests that the same analysis on the regional scale could explain a lot about Israel in the Arab world; and on the global scale, about America and the rest of the world.

One of the key points that Chua makes is that Western countries long ago renounced pure free markets in favor of social welfare systems and the redistribution of wealth, but what developing countries are getting is pure free markets. Also, most Western countries developed slowly towards democracy and only adopted universal suffrage relatively recently, but developing countries are expected to implement universal suffrage immediately from whatever system they previosly had. The "free market democracy" we are exporting is not the same as what we've developed here at home and therefore, there's no reason to expect that the final result will be the same as here at home. When you add in the problem of existing market-dominant minorities, the result may indeed be a world on fire with conflict, hatred, and war.