[This book review article
appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of
The Journal of Social, Political and
Economic Studies,
pp. 371-381.]
BOOK REVIEW ARTICLE
Amy Chua’s World on Fire:
Ethnic Hatreds and Their Implications for the United States
World on Fire: How
Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
Amy Chua
Anchor Books, 2004
Amy Chua is
a Yale Law
School professor whose family has
been among the wealthy Filipino Chinese elite that, even though only 1 percent
of the Philippine population, has for centuries dominated the Islands’
commercial economy. (Almost all rural
land is controlled by a Spanish-blooded gentry
class.) In 1994, Chua’s aunt was
murdered at her home in the Philippines
by her chauffeur with the collusion of other servants—a crime that is not at
all uncommon in light of the ethnic hatred that exists.
The murder
might have caused Chua to take a highly subjective, ethnically partisan view of
such ethnic conflict. Instead, it
stirred her scholarly instincts, leading her to a study of ethnic hatred on a
worldwide basis. The result is a book
that is encyclopedic in its information about one of the most potentially
explosive aspects of the world today.
In much of
the world, she reports, minority ethnic groups have long dominated the
economies and often the politics of nations otherwise inhabited by much larger
impoverished masses. The market
domination is exacerbated today by the globalization of trade, with the
dominant minorities reaping the benefit and the rest of the populations being
raised some, but relatively far less. At
the same time, the worldwide move toward “democracy” provides the fulcrum for
populist appeals to the ethnonationalism felt by the
impoverished peoples. (This reviewer
doesn’t like the word “masses,” which depersonalizes and seems to
belittle. It is a word Chua uses,
however; and in the context of her book it is a useful shorthand term.)
The United
States and the international institutions
such as the World Bank and the I.M.F. that it sponsors have for several years
been militating for what Chua calls a “raw” form of laissez-faire free markets.
These lack the redistributive features that have historically come to be
felt essential in Europe and the United
States.
Those same sources have simultaneously militated for a “raw” form of
democracy consisting of immediate universal suffrage—again in a form of
ideological violation of the historical experience of Europe and the United
States, which saw suffrage granted gradually and in contexts that safeguarded
the rights of individuals and of minorities. The result, Chua says, as she does in the
subtitle to her book, is that “exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic
hatred and global instability.”
A reader
will note that although some of the peoples involved are Islamic, the problem
Chua describes is much more universal.
In an even broader context than the current face-off between a
world-interventionist United States and the vast span of Islamic peoples, we
see that there are, across the globe, ethnic cauldrons into which the United
States should step, if at all, only with fear and trepidation. Again, we are reminded that the messianic
ideology that has for the most part held sway in the United
States since 1898 and that makes the United
States the policeman and social worker of
the world is a dangerous one. We are
reminded, too, that American ignorance of the historical and cultural specifics
of the societies in which it intervenes is profound; and that there is
considerable moral presumption in wading into the countless situations in which
the people who live there insist that they, not the United States, are the ones
who have an inherent right to take care of their own business.
Although
the overarching importance of Chua’s discussion is apparent from such
considerations as these, much additional value comes from the information she
imparts about a wide range of countries.
The book isn’t long (346 pages) and is easily readable, but neither of
those qualities detracts from its scholarship and informative content. Here, in capsule form, is some of what she
tells us:
·
Argentina.
By the mid-1930s, Western investors had become a “market-dominant
minority” who owned about half the country’s industrial capital. This “culminated in a powerful nationalist
reaction under the charismatic populist leader Juan Peron.”
·
Bolivia. A Spanish elite held most of the land until
1952, when the immense Amerindian ethnic “underclass,” “encompassing the great
majority of the Bolivian people, most of whom have no access to heat… clean
water, or medical care,” revolted, introducing universal suffrage and a program
of land-expropriation and redistribution. More recently, there has been a pronounced move
into privatization and free market policies, with cuts in social spending and
“soaring unemployment.”
·
Brazil.
Less than one-tenth of one percent of the population owns most of the
land. Although there is a pervasive
“myth” of Brazilian “racial democracy,” there is in fact a “color hierarchy.” Chua says “a tiny, light-skinned
market-dominant minority has always had a stranglehold on economic and
political power.”
·
Burma (now Myanmar).
A minority from India
once dominated the economy, but “in 1930 and again in 1938 enraged Burmans… proceeded to slaughter Indians in an orgy of
violence.” Hundreds of thousands of
Indians fled additional violence in the 1960s.
Now, however, it is Chinese, especially drug kingpins, who “dominate
Burmese commerce at every level of society,” while the indigenous population
lives in “abysmal” poverty. One of the
things Chua notes about Burma,
as about several societies, is the development of “crony capitalism” consisting
of an alliance of the wealthy ethnic minority with dictatorial local political
leaders.
·
Burundi.
“The Tutsi still control approximately 70 percent of the country’s
wealth.”
·
Cambodia.
“Cambodia’s
capital city Phnom Penh is now
teeming with thousands of prospering Chinese businesses.”
·
Cameroon. Chua says Cameroon
is economically dominated by one tribe, the Bamileke,
who (in an allusion to Nigeria)
are called “the Ibo of Cameroon.”
·
Chile.
Allende’s program was, in addition to being
Communist, in part ethnonationalist, proclaiming “Chile
for the Chileans.” It is noteworthy that
“the Mapuche Indians in southern Chile
have been invading white-owned farms in a style similar to that of Zimbabwe’s
war veterans.”
·
Ecuador. The military coup in 2000 “appears to have
been supported by a majority of Ecuador’s
impoverished population.”
·
Ethiopia.
There has long been ethnic resentment of Eritrean businessmen, who were centered
in Addis Ababa. This led to the 1998-9 expulsion of those of
Eritrean origin.
·
Gambia, The.
“The tiny Lebanese community owns nearly all the stores and restaurants
in the capital of Banjul… and
controls the groundnut industry, the country’s predominant cash crop.”
·
Germany (Weimar). Jews,
composing slightly under 1 percent of the population,
“were widely perceived as an ‘outsider’ ethnic minority wielding outrageously
disproportionate economic power vis-à-vis the indigenous majority.”
·
India.
There is no “market-dominant minority” at the national level, but
several at the state level.
·
Indonesia.
Suharto became president in 1966 and established a “crony capitalism” with Chinese tycoons, enriching
them and his own family while “the vast majority of Indonesians [mostly
Muslims] remained in chronic poverty.”
Anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta
in 1998 forced Suharto’s resignation, after which the
Indonesian government nationalized Chinese properties. In the wake of that, the businesses “have
simply stagnated while the country descends further into frustrated poverty.”
·
Israel.
There is no better example of a prosperous ethnic minority in a sea of
impoverished, and seething, indigenous masses.
The hatreds and violence are well known.
·
Kenya. The dominant ethnic minorities here consist
of three groups: about 5,000 whites who live in opulent enclaves; about 70,000
Indians, who make up less than 2 percent of the population and are
“dramatically more affluent” than the 31 million blacks who “struggle to
survive on less than two dollars a day,” with 45 percent unemployment; and the
Kikuyu tribe [one of 40 in Kenya], who “have for generations been
disproportionately wealthy.” In 1978,
President Daniel Arap Moi
created a “crony capitalist” arrangement between the government and “a handful
of wealthy Indian businessmen.”
·
Laos.
“The 1 percent Chinese minority more or less constitute
the country’s entire business community.”
·
Lithuania.
In the 1920s, the Jewish minority conducted about three-fourths of the
country’s commercial activity.
·
Malaysia.
There were anti-Chinese riots in Kuala Lumpur
in 1960, followed by “extensive affirmative action policies for the indigenous
Malay majority.”
·
Mexico. Chua says old Spanish wealth and more recent
immigrant wealth combine to create a white market
dominance. She quotes Mexico
City’s La Jornada, which says “the booty of privatization has
made multimillionaires of 13 families, while the rest of the population… has
been subjected to … gradual impoverishment.”
·
Namibia.
The business sector is still “almost entirely white” a decade after the
end of Apartheid. We are told “President
Nujoma recently condemned his country’s white
farmers.”
·
Nigeria.
The Ibo tribe, which Chua describes as active in
global fraud and drug trafficking, have “sophisticated social networks
that are almost impenetrable to outsiders.”
In 1966, “tens of thousands of Ibo were slaughtered by furious mobs.”
·
Panama.
“In Panama,
the minuscule Jewish minority—only .25 percent of the
population—disproportionately dominates the country’s wholesale, retail, real
estate, and services sectors.”
·
Philippines.
As we noted earlier, Chua reports that a Chinese Filipino minority of
just 1 percent of the population controls 60 percent of the private economy,
while virtually all land is held by “a Spanish-blooded gentry
class.” While the Chinese see the ethnic
Filipinos as lazy and unintelligent, the latter see the Chinese “as exploiters,
as foreign intruders, their wealth inexplicable, their
superiority intolerable.”
·
Poland. In 1921, Jews, according to Chua, constituted
11 percent of the population, doing 60 percent of the commerce.
·
Romania.
The Hungarian minority has historically been economically dominate. Between the
two world wars, Jews were 4 percent of the population, but controlled many of
the industries.
·
Russia, post-Communist: Jews, who constituted
less than 1 percent of the population, had been quite active in the black
market while the Soviet Union still existed, and hence
were well positioned to step in to the economy once it was opened up after the
fall of Communism. Seven oligarchs, six
of them Jewish, gained great wealth out of the mass privatization. A “crony
capitalist” relationship existed between them and the Yeltsin administration;
and the oligarchs supported Putin in his election
bid. Putin,
however, has since cracked down on them.
There is rising anti-Semitism.
·
Rwanda.
“The 14 percent Tutsi minority dominated the Hutu majority economically
and politically for four centuries.” The
Tutsis were a cattle-raising elite. While Rwanda
was a Belgian colony, the Belgians favored the Tutsis. A revolution in 1959 led
to independence in 1962, with a series of anti-Tutsi massacres culminating in
the killing of 800,000 Tutsi during an 8-month period in 1994.
·
Sierra Leone.
A Lebanese minority dominated the economy, including the diamond
fields. A rebellion amounting to a
“reign of terror” of unspeakable brutality “destroyed Sierra
Leone between 1991 and 1999.”
·
South Africa. Years after the end of Apartheid, whites
remain a market-dominant minority with 80 percent of the land and 90 percent of
the agricultural production. There is
widespread violence and anti-white feeling.
·
Sri Lanka. Historically, the educated, prosperous Ceylon
Tamils have dominated the economy. Colomon Bandaranaike “swept to electoral victory in 1956
by… championing the cause of ‘Sinhala only.’” After he was assassinated in 1959, his wife
continued those efforts. There was a
“wave of anti-Tamil reprisals” during the 1970s. “Ethnic strife continues to this day.”
·
Tanzania.
There was “bitter anti-Indian brutality” after the country abandoned
socialism and adopted a market economy in the 1980s.
·
Thailand.
After the socialism of the 1950s and ‘60s, there is now market dominance
by the Thai Chinese. Although the
Chinese have in the past blended into Thai society through intermarriage, there
is today a move among them to assert “Chinese pride and identity.”
·
Uganda.
The Baganda tribe has historically constituted
a market-dominant minority. There is
strong ethnic resentment against wealthy Indian businessmen.
·
United States of America. World
on Fire points to a fact that is no less important for being well known:
that the United States
constitutes, vis-à-vis the rest of the world, a
“market dominant minority.” “Throughout
the world,” Chua observes, “global markets are bitterly perceived as
reinforcing American wealth and dominance.”
The feeling has long been strong in Europe that
the ubiquitous American products and cultural influences threaten to “swallow
up” the indigenous cultures, which the European peoples greatly value. Significantly, Chua says that even though
such feelings are strong in Europe, “anti-American
hostility is a thousandfold more intense in the
non-Western world.”
·
Venezuela. Chua says President Hugo Chavez has
devastated the economy after he “generated mass support by attacking Venezuela’s
‘rotten’ largely white elites.”
·
Vietnam.
For 1,000 years beginning in 100 B.C., Vietnam
was a province of China. In 1782, Chinese were massacred in Saigon. After the French arrived in the middle of the
18th century, the Chinese flourished under their laissez-faire policies. “Constituting just 1 percent of Vietnam’s
population, the Chinese controlled an estimated 90 percent of non-European
private capital in the mid-1950s.” When
the Communists took over, they labeled the Chinese as “bourgeois” and
“brutalized thousands.” The Communist
government shifted to market liberalization in 1988, and this has brought back
the Chinese.
·
Yugoslavia (former). There was a sharp ethnic division between the
Croats and Slovenes, who have roots in the West, and the Serbs, who have roots
in the Ottoman Empire.
The Croats were a “market-dominant minority,” and, with Nazi support,
killed large numbers of Serbs during World War II. Tito’s dictatorship held things together between 1945-1980, but Chua says Yugoslavia
“was a bomb waiting to explode,” as indeed it did.
·
Zambia.
There were “bloody mass riots” against “greedy” Indians in the
mid-1990s.
·
Zimbabwe.
Whites comprised only 1 percent of the population, but “controlled 70
percent of the country’s best land,” producing “more food than a million black
farmers.” After creation of the
black-controlled government, President Mugabe
restrained his anti-white program for a variety of reasons during the 1980s and
1990s, but has declared “the white man… our real enemy,” designating “over
three thousand [white-owned] farms for confiscation.” The upshot is that Zimbabwe’s
economy is in shambles, so that “more than half a million people face
starvation.”
Several important points are raised by all this:
1. Chua focuses her discussion on the current
features: that globalization of markets is increasing economic polarization,
that the stress on “democracy” is inspiring indigenous populations to assert
themselves against the few who are economically successful, and that ethnicity
plays a central role in both of these.
While these points are no doubt correct, Chua’s examination of the many
countries we have reviewed shows that the minority market-dominance and severe
ethnic tensions existed in many places long before the “globalization” of the
most recent decades. Ethnicity and rich
vs. poor have long been themes.
2. It is apparent that during the 70-year
struggle between Marxism-Leninism and the “free world,” Communism was able to
take advantage of and in part provide an ideological cover for the hatreds that
existed on ethnic and economic grounds.
As the world’s “impoverished masses” continue to become more and more
self-conscious, it is very possible that one or more ideologies will arise to
give voice to the same impulses. The
fight to “contain” Communism ultimately succeeded when Communism’s state-sponsor
collapsed. There will be much reason to
question whether “containing” a future populist ideology will be a viable
option, since the phenomenon it will represent will have no one superpower as a
state sponsor and will have roots that are far too deep and widespread for any
surgical excision.
3. Chua concludes her book with a review of
policy options. She champions neither
the dominant groups nor the indigenous masses, hoping instead (although without
a naïve failure to see the difficulties) for an accommodation through a
generous inclusion of the masses in economic life, mentioning a possible
sharing of ownership of productive enterprise (this is presumably the important
“shared market economy” concept that would, through widely distributed ownership,
distribute the profits of industry even though that industry is
non-labor-intensive).
Here,
certain omissions from her discussion are especially relevant. (This is not especially a criticism of World on Fire. No author can hope to anticipate all that a
book’s many reviewers may think pertinent.)
She never comes to grips with why it is that so many “indigenous masses”
have proved, or seemed to prove, so incapable.
We know that in Europe and America
the “masses” who were long submerged under the slave-regimes of the ancient
world and the aristocracy-dominated regimes of the Middle
Ages eventually were shown to be amenable to success within a market economy
and to be capable of forming a large middle class. It is, perhaps, an open question whether the
same is true of the “masses” of the “undeveloped world.” Chua doesn’t consider such things as the role
of superstition, of cultures that disclaim the profit-motive, and of
disparities in I.Q. among peoples.
Perhaps
that question, which would seem vital under ordinary circumstances, will be
rendered moot, however, by the march of non-labor-intensive technology. If, as Jeremy Rifkin has predicted, the “end
of work” is approaching, there will be massive productive potential but little
income-producing “work” for billions of human beings to do. In that event, some form of ubiquitous
sharing, such as through the distribution of ownership and of the income that
capital creates, as we just mentioned, will be imperative if the global market,
technology, science, and civilization in general are not to be swamped by
revolution.
Yet another
question raised in the “dialectic of possibilities” reflects an additional
factor Chua doesn’t consider: whether science and technology will continue as
major forces—and hence as a source for immense capital productivity--in a world
where Western civilization has been inundated by massive immigration from the Third
World. Right now, the West
is gaining enormous intellectual capital from the influx of brilliant minds
from India, China
and elsewhere who now occupy many of its professorships, research positions, professional
positions, and the like. We must ask
whether that will continue as the West itself comes to experience, partly
through mass immigration, ever-sharpening polarization of wealth, intelligence
and education.
Further,
Chua shows no awareness of the position held by conservatism’s most thoughtful
journal in the United States,
The American Conservative, and by
Patrick Buchanan in his book A Republic,
Not an Empire. This is the view that
the United States will continue to ensnare itself in “tar babies” (which once
hit, won’t let go) until it relearns the principle that guided American policy
during the United States’ first century and a quarter of existence: that the
United States can be a good world citizen, and can lead by example, but should
by no means seek to direct the affairs of other peoples. The only reference Chua makes to this is a passing
one to “belligerent isolationism.” Such
a cliché hardly counts as serious discussion; and, with it, she dismisses the
only possibility the United States
has of not becoming whip-sawed by the world’s innumerable ethnic
conflicts. She may hope for an
accommodation between rich and poor and among ethnicities in the many countries
she has reviewed, but what she doesn’t consider is that any attempt by the
United States to take sides in or even to referee the potential conflict in any
of those countries will almost certainly intensify the hatred of one or often
even both parties. (Why
both? Someone who comes between
two men in a brawl runs the risk of being appreciated by neither of them.)
These
omissions are important, but readers will keep in mind that it is Chua’s scholarship
that calls them to the forefront. She
has performed an invaluable service in gathering in one place the information
about economic and ethnic conflict.
4. It is worth noting that her descriptions of
conflict founded in ethnicity and economic polarization are far removed from a
Marxist analysis, even though she has looked at many of the same things such an
analysis would cover. Hers is a
realistic sociological examination without a superstructure of ideology.
5. It is also worth noting that the “crony
capitalism” Chua describes in so many countries is far removed from the model
of capitalism favored by proponents of the free market. The cronyism involves a great deal of
government favoritism and intervention.
6. Chua, by the very fact she is describing
extremes of wealth, shows empathy for “the impoverished masses.” It is surprising, then, to see her describe,
as she does many times, any leaders who angrily champion the cause of those
masses “hatemongering demagogues.” Such
a description could cause a serious conceptual shortcoming. Much as it has become commonplace to describe
Osama bin Laden as a “fanatic” who “hates us because of who we are,” and thus
to fail to come to grips in any serious way with the grievances he articulates,
a description of future champions of the impoverished in any part of the world
as a “demagogue” will do the same. There
is a smug presumption in assuming that indigenous peoples who have been towered
over by an alien faction have no legitimate grounds to be angry--and very angry,
indeed. They may or they may not have
such grounds, depending upon whether they could plausibly have “made it on
their own.” For an outsider to decide,
and especially to decide by a facile adoption of a certain semantic, is to go
far beyond anyone’s competency.
7. Her discussion of “democracy” is for the most
part a good one, pointing out its dangers and need for restraints. And she sees that democracy, as in Latin
America, can easily be “more formal than actual.” One thing she doesn’t seem to see is that it is
necessarily more formal than actual even in the major “democracies.” As the issues of modern life have become
increasingly complex, there is no way anyone but “experts” can even presume to
have “mastered” them; the average citizen, busy with his own life, takes the
experts’ conclusions on faith. Further,
elites exist within a seemingly “true democracy” (just as an elite does within
the contemporary United States),
and those elites have far more directive power than even the great mass of the
electorate. This very fact constitutes a
major predicament for the United States.
World on Fire is a book every educated
reader would do well to study. It is
informative and provocative in areas of untold importance.
Dwight
D. Murphey