WORLD ON FIRE

Dick Pountain/Tue 23 March 2004/10:08 am/Political Quarterly

BOOK: 'World On Fire'
AUTHOR: Amy Chua
PUBLISHER: William Heinemann, London 2003
ISBN: 0-434-01220-3

The current state of the world presents us with a number of paradoxes, not least of which is that the deeply conservative administration of George W. Bush appears to be cleaving to a Whig interpretation of history. Bush supporters are apparently convinced that the whole of history so far has been leading us toward the present triumph of free markets, democracy and multiculturalism, which must now be accepted without question as our greatest virtues. Since the collapse of Communism that culminated in the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, it's been almost universally assumed that any continuing advance of history (pace Fukuyama) must be brought about by exporting these virtues to the rest of the world: that is, to those countries we refer to as the 'developing' countries which lack one or all of them. Most of the principal political parties throughout the Western world now subscribe to such an interpretation, included both main parties in the USA and the UK. Bush's stated objective is to impose them through military action in certain pathological cases. 

However virtues are inadequate for understanding today's world, partly because they, by definition, lie beyond criticism, and partly because they obey a seductive but false arithmetic in which applying two virtues together always results in another one. The bigger problem is of course that they don't actually exist. What exist are flesh-and-blood people and their institutions, whose messy variety cannot be contained by such simple abstractions - in the arithmetic of the real world, applying democracy on top of a free market sometimes results in wealth and happiness, but sometimes results in genocide. It takes some courage to point out this fact in the present hysterical climate, because to question multiculturalism can get one branded a racist, while to question whether free markets and democracy are a universal panacea is seen as unreconstructed Communism or Trotskyism. Amy Chua, in her persuasive book 'World On Fire' finds her way out of this Platonic cavern without falling into any of those three deadly sins.
 
Chua is neither a political scientist nor an economist but a professor of international law at Harvard, and perhaps it's the unsentimental detachment proper to that profession that allowed her to notice, where so many seem to have been blind, that the introduction of free markets and democracy in many developing countries has not automatically produced good effects. The reason she deduces is rivalry between ethnic groups, which can be exacerbated enormously when a free market enriches one group at the expense of others - and if the others happen to form the majority, democracy offers them the opportunity to take power and exact bloody revenge against their exploiters. Chua did not need to dig far for her raw materials, merely to harvest them from the newspaper headlines: massacres of Chinese in Indonesia in 1998; land-grabs in Zimbabwe from that same year up till the present; the hellish genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia; and so, sickeningly, on.

That this connection has not been made so clearly before may well be because it's hardly respectable to talk about ethnicity at all in many circles, because someone is bound to accuse you of, at best, essentialism and at worst racism. In this respect Chua has a valuable advantage in her own Philipino-Chinese descent, and perhaps in her female gender too (it's worrying to ponder how differently this book might have been received had it been written by a white Anglo-Saxon male). 'Ethnic' was originally adopted as a euphemism for 'racial' but is incapable of suppressing the dangerous ambivalence that surrounds the whole subject and has split under the tension to become on the one hand a category of consumerism (ethnic jewellery, restaurants, furniture, fashion) and on the other a category of terror (ethnic cleansing). Chua takes a no-nonsense approach to the term, refusing to become bogged down in definitions of ethnicity. For her purposes an ethnic group is one which defines itself so: "I will assume that ethnicity is not a scientifically determinable status". She treats ethnic identity instead as "a sense of belonging to a people, that is experienced 'as a greatly extended form of kinship'", which is not static but constantly shifting, and most importantly, is malleable and manipulable by ideologues. For example the division between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda was a vague and permeable one 200 years ago, with much intermarriage, but the Belgian colonists deliberately entrenched and inflammed it by issuing ethnic identity cards on the the basis of nose-length and and head-size.

Such Deweyian pragmatism pervades the whole book, which is therefore refreshingly free of post-modern jargon. Chua only employs two terms that might be called jargon, both of which are crucial to the exposition of her argument. A 'market-dominating minority' is a social grouping (self-defined, or sometimes defined by its opponents) that concentrates ownership of a nation's wealth out of proportion to its numbers, and 'ethnonationalism' is a type of ideology similar to nationalism but applying only to a sub-group within a nation, such as the Hutu Power movement in Rwanda or India's BJP. Note that 'market-dominating minority' doesn't presume an ethnic definition, so it can equally be applied to classes such as the industrial and media-owning classes of the USA, or even to a political clique like the nomenklatura in the old USSR. Chua's argument is that is precisely in those places where a market-dominating minority is *also* a separate and identifiable ethnic group that the combination becomes explosive. Relatively poor majority populations often tolerate the enrichment of their 'own kind' - in the USA they even welcome it as evidence of the possibility of social mobility for all. However where the wealth is all in the hands of an ethnic 'them', the conditions for a genocide may arise, because class and ethnicity pulling in the same direction exert sufficient force to break a society.

In many of the countries that Chua discusses, a clear historical progression can be seen to lead up to civil disturbance or genocide, the stages of which go something like:
a) During the mid to late 20th century, nationalist or socialist goverments expropriate the assets of a market-dominant minority
b) As a result the national economy all but collapses.
c) In the 1990s or 2000s privatisation is introduced to revive the economy.
d) Under privatisation the old minority prospers even more disproportionately than before.
c) Mass democracy brings the party of the impoverished majority to power.
Such scenarios don't alway lead immediately to genocidal confrontation. Sometimes, as in South Africa, a charismatic leader (Mandela) can engineer a 'soft landing'. More often a form of 'crony capitalism' emerges where the leaders of the party of the majority are bribed by the market-dominating minority to keep the lid on, the Marcos and Suharto regimes being prime examples. In all cases though, the underlying situation remains unstable and combustible.

Chua mostly wields her two abstractions - market-dominating minority and ethnonationalism - in a sensitive and pragmatic way, seldom forcing examples to fit into her template. By doing so she can explain a lot of the violence in the world that might otherwise appear as purely irrational. In the case of Weimar Germany, she is at pains to point out that Jews were not in fact a market-dominating minority in the same way as the Chinese are in Indonesia, the Ibos in Nigeria or the Lebanese in Sierra Leone. However the Nazi party falsely and fatally succeeded in *portraying* them as such, because they were visibly numerous in a few professions like banking, medicine and law, which chimed with historical anti-Semitic prejudices. Chua always resists crude economic determinism and is eager to concede that multiple factors may be at work, going to some lengths to find counter-examples to any overly-simple application of her own schema, such as the complications of Latin America or the oddly-peaceful Thailand. (In the latter case she suggests that a far-from-democratic programme of forced assimilation promoted by King Vajiravudh in the 1930s left its Chinese population less separate, identifiable and vulnerable than in neighbouring states).

Her scheme has its limitations though, of which she is for the most part well aware. Of necessity she must skim over detailed differences in the different social formations she examines. Are the economically-dominated groups factory workers, slash-and-burn subsistence farmers or agricultural labourers? Is land or industrial capital the asset that is being monopolised? Of course the whole point of an abstraction is that it enable us to glimpse the big picture through such details, but it always will leave the argument open to attack in specific cases where a detail doesn't fit. But in a few cases Chua takes big risks by using her abstractions in a metaphorical rather than literal way, which opens her up further to such attack. For example she proposes at various points that immigrant Koreans could be viewed as a market-dominating minority within US inner cities (rather than the whole nation), or that Israel could be seen as a market-dominating minority within the whole Middle East region (rather than within its individual nations) and even, finally, America as the market-dominant minority for the whole world. It's possible to see what Chua is getting at by such metaphors - the hatred that these minorities engender has a similar psychological structure regardless of geographical scale - but such discipline-defying leaps can only attract trouble. The Israeli comparison is particularly touchy and earned Chua a sharp rebuke from Vijay Joshi and Robert Skidelsky in the New York Review of Books (March 25 2004), though elsewhere their review is less than fair to her arguments: pointing out that China's wealth is not concentrated by an ethnic minority can hardly be held against her since she never suggests that it is. 

Perhaps the most cogent objection to 'World On Fire' (also advanced by Joshi and Skidelsky ) is that Chua makes no serious attempt to explain why, in those cases where a minority has seized the wealth, the majority permitted it to happen. I'm inclined to cut Chua a great deal of slack in this matter, because to attempt such an explanation would be both extremely difficult and far, far more inflammatory than the existing book. What Max Weber did for German capitalism in 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism', Chua would have had to do separately for each minority/majority combination as there are few universal principles that can be relied on (save that we must emphatically reject the colonialist and racist explanations that these people are merely 'lazy', 'feckless' or 'childlike'). Instead there are just lots and lots of historical and cultural contigencies - old tribal hierarchies, religious taboos, pastoralist and nomad ethics that despise menial work, hunter/gather sexual divisions of labour, slavery, ritual drug use, and so ad infinitum. I think she was very wise to leave this as someone else's mess.

Some may also object that Chua offers little in the way of concrete policy solutions to ethnic strife that is exacerbated by free markets and democracy, which would be true but harsh since it's by no means clear that such solutions exist: it must be said that she has done an invaluable service merely by pointing out and analysing the problem. The USA is now the world's only superpower and its governments, of either party, are wholly committed to spreading free markets and democracy as the cure-all for the rest of the world's problems, based on a belief that these two institutions form a virtuous circle that will sweep away the cultural obstacles to universal enrichment. While Chua herself is in favour of both free markets and democracy, she thinks that faith in this virtuous circle is misplaced, for the reasons she sets out in this book. Furthermore, she sharply observes that the nations of the West never actually followed their own prescription: capitalism and markets predated the inauguration of universal suffrage by centuries in most of them; not one of them tolerates the crude laissez faire capitalism that they prescribe for developing countries, but all (even the USA) ameliorate it by some degree of redistributive taxation and a welfare state; and in all of them, majority rule is tempered by a vast civil society of long-established and robust institutions that help to safeguard minorities rights but simply do not exist in the developing world.

Such solutions as Chua does present are anodyne and hardly dramatic. The Western nations need to be far more circumspect in their advocacy of free markets - past performances like the IMF's enforcement of deflationary measures that further impoverish the indigenous majorities, or the disastrously skewed privatisations in Russia and Eastern Europe need to be avoided. Democratisation means far more than simply shipping out ballot boxes and observers, and in some cases might be better delayed (as perhaps in China) until markets have done their work of creating a middle class. Market-dominant minorities themselves should become more aware of their vulnerability and reduce it by eliminating corrupt practices and by voluntary charitable works. Their majority governments might introduce affirmative action to help defuse ethnic tension, despite its current deep unfashionability in the USA.

It's unsurprising, if disappointing, that Chua doesn't explicitly suggest that the free market system that we're so keen to export might  benefit from a little more redistribution and regulation at home, and that ideological laissez faire be replaced in the museum of economic history where it belongs: Keynes might never have lived as far as Chua's book is concerned, but she is to be warmly congratulated for having broken free of our *other* greatest taboo.

Dick Pountain