World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

by Amy Chua

There are a surprising number of places in the world where the lions share of economic power is held by a small, culturally-distinct, ethnic minority group. This is not a conspiracy, though it can sometimes feel like one when talking about it is deemed off-limits. The Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, and Jews in the former Soviet Union are all examples of powerful middleman minorities who managed to obtain a gigantically disproportionate slice of the economic pie in their countries. In the cases of some lucrative or politically sensitive industries, they simply control all of it. As you can imagine, this often engenders the suspicion, and sometimes violence, on the part of the majority populations among whom they live.

World on Fire begins by laying out the reality of minority power as it exists in various places, before progressing to the provocative argument that introducing mass democracy into countries where this is the case would be a bad and even dangerous idea. Universal suffrage often triggers immediate demands to redistribute resources. When there is minority group group that is not just economically, politically, and culturally powerful, but also ethnically distinct, these calls for redistribution very easily slip into something much darker. In a democracy, where appealing to the public is what matters, political entrepreneurs have strong incentives to demonize minorities who seem to inexplicably have more than everyone else, including characterizing them as leeches or bloodsuckers. As you can imagine, this quite frequently leads to pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

The formula of “Free People and Free Markets,” which was basically a religious slogan for post-Cold War neoliberal maniacs, actually turns out to be a uniquely combustible mixture. At least in the short term, opening up markets tends to benefit small groups of well-connected people, often, as it happens, of a shared ethnicity, more than it does societies as a whole. The combination of exploding inequality and ethnic division, to which we then suddenly add mass political participation, is an obvious recipe for violence. Foisting these conditions onto entire societies as a package deal is borderline criminal. That the U.S. has spent so much energy implementing free markets and universal suffrage onto other countries by fiat, a process which the West never went through simultaneously and instead developed one before the other, should give you a sense of how effectively evil U.S. liberal-internationalist foreign policy has been despite its friendly branding.

Losing Your Nerve

So it’s pretty common to find ethnic minorities that dominate societies where they hold themselves relatively aloof from the majority. This all begs the question, though, why do some minorities get so much richer than the people they live among? After having the courage to raise a provocative argument, Chua completely chickens out by declining to engage with that question entirely. This ends up leaving a huge hole in her thesis that will inevitably be filled with speculation that some people are either genetically superior to others or just more conniving and ruthless. If you’re going to spend time writing a book about something you should have the courage of your convictions and at least offer a thesis. For what its worth it seems like cultural factors, as well as the strength of personal networks or political patronage that exist among some minority groups, seem to be important determinants of their success.

Despite this shortcoming, her book gives a whirlwind tour of minority-majority relations around the world that is surprisingly well structured as a narrative. Some of the case studies are indeed interesting, including her analysis of pogroms against white farmers in Zimbabwe and Chinese merchants in the Philippines (Her own Chinese aunt was murdered by a Filipino chauffeur whom she had seemingly mistreated), as well as the tenuous status of Lebanese and Indians in Africa. That said, I found that in some countries that I was familiar she gets basic facts wrong in eyebrow raising ways.

Take this example: Chua characterizes the genocide in the former Yugoslavia as being product of an economic conflict between poor Serbs and rich Croats. This is frankly risible as an analysis, but even worse is that she fails to even mention once that the actual genocide in the country targeted Bosnian Muslims, who had no arms and were specifically singled out by Serbian paramilitaries en masse because they were Muslim. Chua goes so far as to avoid mentioning this once, even suggesting that Slovenes were major victims of the Bosnian genocide (they were barely affected by the war at all) which leads me to conclude that this omission, on par with saying that LGBT people and Roma were the primary victims of the Holocaust, was a deliberate choice. I suspect that because this book was written post-9/1,1 acknowledging at the time that people who were Muslim could ever be victims of anything was considered taboo. This was the insane period that we all had to live through, and to which enlightened elites like Chua gleefully contributed.

That said…

I’m pretty convinced at this point that democracy is a mixed blessing at best in most places, and often is just a pretty word to conceal a far more sordid reality. In developing countries already grappling with grotesque inequality and either internal or external colonialism, simply throwing open the doors to universal suffrage without first trying to address those problems first is a recipe for bloodshed. In the developed world, things are a bit better mainly because majority populations are still well enough off to not want to commit pogroms against minorities even if they don’t like them, and even if they feel like the system overall is not perfectly serving their interests. The state also tends to have strong enough repressive capacity to keep things in check, and these powers are getting more advanced with new forms of Chinese-style technological control that we see today being implemented. With some tweaks, for better or worse, I expect that the U.S. system will continue operating for a long time to come.

I thought this book was fine, although it was not the classic that it could have been if written with a bit more audacity. While bashing democracy, which was bold, Chua is too cowardly to actually come out and state what form of government she thinks might be better in some circumstances. Her argument also feels like a relic of a particular period around the End of History where people were more confident in the combination of laissez-faire economics and universal suffrage. The former is out of fashion almost everywhere today, while the latter is being quietly undermined before our eyes as liberal democracy enters its long senescence.