January 31, 2004
On the Dark Side of Democracy
By EMILY EAKIN
NEW HAVEN — To most Americans, the notion that free markets and democracy are essential to curing the world's ills is an article of faith. If only Iraq and Afghanistan, Cuba and North Korea, Syria and Rwanda would adopt both, their people, not to mention the world, would be safer and richer.
Yet to Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, such accepted wisdom is mostly evidence of a persistent and disturbing national naïveté. All too often, she says, bringing free markets and elections to developing nations leads not to stability or prosperity but to hate-mongering, discrimination and even genocidal violence.
The idea that political and economic liberty could trigger such atrocities is heretical to many Western liberals. That, Ms. Chua says, is because people here are blind to ethnicity.
"I think it's kind of a taboo topic in the West," said Ms. Chua, 41, during an interview at her office on the Yale campus. America, she said, doesn't like to talk about ethnic conflict: despite a long history of racial problems, assimilation is part of the national creed. But in much of the developing world, she argues, nations are starkly divided along ethnic lines. Disproportionately wealthy ethnic minorities — Ms. Chua calls them market-dominant minorities — exist alongside poor and resentful majorities. And in such cases, she insists, adding democracy and free markets can be disastrous.
As she states the case in her recent book, "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability"(Doubleday, 2003): "Markets concentrate wealth, often spectacular wealth, in the hands of the market-dominant minority, while democracy increases the political power of the impoverished majority. In these circumstances the pursuit of free market democracy becomes an engine of potentially catastrophic ethnonationalism." And this, she adds, is precisely what is happening today in Indonesia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Russia and the Middle East." ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/arts/31CHUA.html?ex=1076656998&ei=1&en=0205f1f6a569eb90>
Carl
_________________________________________________________________ Find high-speed ‘net deals — comparison-shop your local providers here. https://broadband.msn.com