World on Fire
How Exporting Free Market Democracy
Breeds Ethnic Hatred
and Global Instability
by Amy Chua
Reviewed by R.Z. Halleson
A rather shocking book to anyone not familiar with history, global economics, human behavior, and/or politics, Amy Chua's World on Fire will hopefully change the way governments everywhere see their role on the world stage.
Chua skillfully makes the case that most non-Western countries, whether in Asia, Latin America, or Africa, are ruled more by the industrial elite that own the manufacturing, commerce, businesses, and trade of these countries than by their political leaders.
Further, in an overwhelming number of developing countries, this industrial elite is made up of a small minority of people ethnically different from the vast majority of the populace which is poor.
When free-market democracy is introduced too quickly into these countries, the poor and disenfranchised rise up against the minority group that holds all the wealth and proceeds to kill or exile them, in an attempt to take the country back from what they see as foreigners exploiting the resources of their country. The economy subsequently goes downhill. The poor, of course, do not have the connections or the know-how to keep the economy afloat, so chaos and immense suffering often ensues.
This is the basic premise of the book, but Chua provides much more. She goes into detail about the various countries and the groups that exploit them. She begins with the Chinese in the Philippines:
"Just 1 percent of the population, Chinese Filipinos control as much as 60 percent of the private economy, including the country's four major airlines and almost all of the country's banks, hotels, shopping malls, and major conglomerates."
She says that market-dominant minorities can be found throughout the world: the Chinese in most of Southeast Asia, whites in South Africa and various countries in Latin America, the Lebanese in West Africa, and, surprisingly, Jews in post-Communist Russia.
"The sobering thesis of this book is that the global spread of markets and democracy is a principal, aggravating cause of group hatred and ethnic violence throughout the non-Western world."
That is a strong statement, but Chua backs it up with details where political reforms being implemented in developing countries with free elections lead not to peace and prosperity for all, but instead to bloodshed and economic collapse.
"Like the indigenous populations of Southeast Asia, the uneducated, disease-ridden, desperately poor but numerically vast Indian- or African-blooded majorities of Latin America experience little or no economic benefit from privatization and global markets while finding themselves suddenly filled with contradictory new materialistic and consumerist desires."
In writing about Sierra Leone in Africa, she says:
"By the early 1990s, on the eve of civil war, the Lebanese – not even 1 percent of the population – dominated all the most productive sectors of the economy, including diamonds and gold, finance, retail, construction, and real estate."
The United States is not exempt from her study. She talks mainly about the South where the large numbers of African Americans were a major threat to the white minorities. Disenfranchising blacks to keep them from voting was the major thrust:
"Led, however, by Mississippi, where impoverished blacks constituted 70 percent of the population in 1870, all the Southern states found elaborate ways to prevent blacks from exercising their right to vote."
"The basic technique for establishing white minority rule in the American South was to set up barriers to voting such as property or literacy qualifications, and then to create exemptions that only white males could satisfy."
(On a personal note, I remember how, in the early 1960s when I and my family moved to Shaker Heights, Ohio, we came up against the race issue. After renting for a year, we contacted a realtor to talk about buying a home. The realtor came to my house, saw that I was white, and proceeded to tell me all the tricks that he used to make sure that a buyer was "acceptable" to the community. I guess he couldn't tell by looking that I found him utterly disgusting and was later among the first to welcome new black families to our block. In those days minorities had to use a white front-person to buy a nice house in a south Shaker neighborhood.) But this review isn't about me and my encounters with discrimination. It is about the excellent, one-of-a-kind book written by Amy Chua that takes a global look at patterns of discrimination throughout the entire world. Chua herself has a personal stake in these patterns.
Amy Chua who is of Chinese origin and whose family is part of the Philippines' tiny but entrepreneurial and econmically powerful Chinese minority writes:
"After my aunt was murdered in 1994, my other family members in the Philippines hired personal bodyguards, erected barbed-wire fences and bought some man-eating watchdogs. This is also how many whites in South Africa, Jewish oligarchs in Russia, and other market-dominant minorities live – in fear."
In one of the last chapters she finally asks the question that the reader wants to hear. What is to be done? What can be done about the now-pervasive hatred of America throughout the world? What can be done about the hatred of market-dominent minorities that rule the economies of so many countries, especially considering that their expertise and connections make them indispensible to the economic welfare of those countries? Although the answer to these questions may seem obvious to those who care about the poor, and impossible to those who have their own fear of loss of power with which to contend, Chua proceeds with:
"One long-term strategy – in my mind more likely to be effective and certainly more dignified than erecting barbed-wire fences – is for market-dominant minorities to make significant, visible contributions to the local economies in which they are thriving. Although such efforts to date have been relatively few and by no means always successful in promoting goodwill, some valuable models can be found."
She then outlines the massive contributions to local economies of the Indians in East Africa, and those by the industrialst Manu Chandaria in Kenya who has given millions to local education, health, and environmental conservation. Jewish billionare Roman Abramovich is attempting to turn his image around in Russia by becoming its first philanthropist, and he seems to be succeeding with local citizenry. A few Western multinational corporations are beginning to use philanthropy as a strategy to increase long-term profits in developing countries.
Amy Chua doesn't promote easy answers, and in this thought-provoking book, she sometimes even counters her own arguments for or against issues. She does not claim that more aid to the poor will help anything but short-term alleviation of immediate economic situations. What she does do is point out that democracy promoted in countries with a market-dominent, generally-hated minority is a prescription for trouble no matter where it is done. She backs up her premise with example after example, so many that anyone who fails to see that we have a global sociological pattern of mass human behavior on our hands is . . . well, at least not a big-picture person.