On the Dark Side of Democracy

By EMILY EAKIN

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/arts/31CHUA.html?ex=1076656998&ei=1&en=0205f1f6a569eb90

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."

With its volatile mix of Sunnis (the elite Muslim minority favored
by Saddam Hussein), Shiites (the generally poorer Muslim majority)
and Kurds, Iraq could soon join the list, Ms. Chua said. "It’s a
big mess," she said. "You have a 60 percent Shiite majority that
has long been oppressed and has just every reason to take back the
country and re-establish its identity."

A Chinese-American whose family is from the Philippines, Ms. Chua
says she has seen firsthand the destructive effects of free
markets and democracy. Both arrived in the Philippines after its
independence from the United States in 1946, benefiting the tiny,
entrepreneurial Chinese community at the expense of the Filipino
majority. Though they make up barely 1 percent of the population,
she writes, "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."

Today ethnic tensions on the island are high. In November 2003,
The New York Times reported that there had been 156 kidnappings so
far that year - apparently a 10-year high. Most of the victims,
some of whom were eventually murdered, were ethnic Chinese. In
1994, Ms. Chua’s aunt was stabbed to death in her home by her
Filipino chauffeur. He was never arrested. And though he stole
money and jewelry from his employer, Ms. Chua writes, the motive
listed in the police record was not robbery but "revenge."

Longtime critics of America’s markets-and-elections approach to
the developing world are finding lately that the chorus of
dissenting voices joining them has swelled. The optimism many
analysts felt after the fall of the Berlin Wall has waned,
dissipated by more than a decade of bloodshed and strife in
Somalia, Rwanda, the Balkans and the Persian Gulf. And the
theoretical model that experts relied on to predict orderly
transitions from dictatorship to democracy is in shambles.

That may be one reason Ms. Chua’s book, which was published a year
ago and released in paperback earlier this month, has received
respectful reviews from magazines on both sides of the political
spectrum, including The Nation, Mother Jones, The Weekly Standard
and Business Week. Some analysts dispute her thesis, saying she
exaggerates the prevalence of ethnic conflict, making, for
example, too much of the fact that many of Russia’s wealthiest
moguls are Jewish. Still, her book has appeared briefly on The New
York Times best-seller list and even garnered Ms. Chua an
invitation to address a group at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Today skeptics of America’s democratization policies include
scholars and commentators, liberals and conservatives, even if few
of them agree with one another. Among the most influential are the
Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, one of the first to
question the wisdom of rapid democratization; the Nobel Prize-
winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz; the journalist Robert D.
Kaplan; and, most recently, Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek
International whose latest book, "The Future of Freedom" (Norton,
2003), argues that one way to curb the negative effects of too
much democracy too fast is to allow countries to first pass
through a period of gradually liberalizing autocracy.

In a much-discussed article published in the Journal of Democracy
in 2002, Thomas Carothers, a democracy specialist at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace in Washington, declared that the
"transition paradigm" favored by pro-democracy advocates for the
last 20 years had outlived its usefulness.

"Of the nearly 100 countries considered as `transitional’ in
recent years, only a relatively small number - probably fewer than
20" have made some democratic progress, Mr. Carothers wrote. He
listed some of the creative terms that analysts have invented to
describe countries in what he called the gray zone: "semi-
democracy, formal democracy, electoral democracy, facade
democracy, pseudo-democracy, weak democracy, partial democracy,
illiberal democracy and virtual democracy." By using such labels,
he wrote, "analysts are in effect trying to apply the transition
paradigm to the very countries whose evolution is calling that
paradigm into question."

In a telephone interview, Mr. Carothers acknowledged that the
field of democracy studies was in flux. "We are coming to the end
of one way of thinking about democratization," he said. "The
questions that people are really agonizing about are: in countries
where market reforms are not functioning very well, what’s the
solution to this? Was our market message wrong? Or was it just
implemented wrong? It’s still a matter of debate how much
inequality has been produced."

Even so, he added, many of the problems that foreign nations face
are the legacy of European colonialism, not United States policy.
"It’s not true that ethnic conflict was created by the wave of
democratization," he said. "Why should democracy get the blame for
failed empire?"

In his view, Ms. Chua’s book "is based on a straw man of U.S.
policy, which says that America is constantly trying to force
democracy down the throats of other countries." In truth, he said:
"Many of the countries want to try democracy. We’re rarely in the
driver’s seat."

Nevertheless, critics complain, America’s approach is both
precipitous and simplistic, encouraging political liberalization
in nations that may not have the social and economic conditions
necessary to sustain it. "We’re not prepared to understand, assess
and respond to the complexities of other societies," said the
economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, who has served as an adviser to
governments in Russia, Poland and Bolivia.

Mr. Stiglitz agreed, saying that democracy experts tend to ignore
social variables like ethnicity and gender. In Malaysia, for
example, he said, the local government created a successful
affirmative action program to benefit the indigenous Malay
majority - and ward off ethnic conflict with the prosperous
Chinese minority - over the objections of Western advisers. And in
Rwanda, he said, the transition from customary to formal law put
land formerly controlled by women under male ownership, an outcome
Western experts failed to anticipate.

Most critics are quick to stress that they are not against
democracy, free markets or globalization per se; they merely
object to the way these ideals have typically been pursued. "I’m
an optimist," Ms. Chua said, summing up her position. "In the last
20 years, we have done things in many ways so badly, so foolishly,
often with the best of intentions - like dropping a stock exchange
in Mozambique or xeroxing copies of the U.S. Constitution. I think
we can do better."

In her book, she argues that one way to reduce inequality and
ethnic tension in democratizing nations is for market-dominant
minorities to share some of their wealth by making "significant,
visible contributions to the local economies in which they are
thriving," by which she means building universities, hospitals or
recreational facilities, supporting local schools and employing
members of the indigenous majority in their companies.

It is an idea, Ms. Chua admits, that her wealthy relatives in the
Philippines may not find appealing. But then, she says, she
decided not to send them her book. "I do not know what my extended
family thinks," she said. "And I’m terrified to find out."