World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
For over a decade now, the reigning consensus has held that the combination of free markets and democracy would transform the third world and sweep away the ethnic hatred and religious zealotry associated with underdevelopment. In this astute, original, and surprising investigation of the true...
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For over a decade now, the reigning consensus has held that the combination of free markets and democracy would transform the third world and sweep away the ethnic hatred and religious zealotry associated with underdevelopment. In this astute, original, and surprising investigation of the true impact of globalization, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua explains why many developing countries are in fact consumed by ethnic violence after adopting free market democracy.Chua shows how in non-Western countries around the globe, free markets have concentrated starkly disproportionate wealth in the hands of a resented ethnic minority. These “market-dominant minorities” – Chinese in Southeast Asia, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America and South Africa, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia – become objects of violent hatred. At the same time, democracy empowers the impoverished majority, unleashing ethnic demagoguery, confiscation, and sometimes genocidal revenge. She also argues that the United States has become the world’s most visible market-dominant minority, a fact that helps explain the rising tide of anti-Americanism around the world. Chua is a friend of globalization, but she urges us to find ways to spread its benefits and curb its most destructive aspects.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780385721868 (0385721862)
Publish date: January 6th 2004
Publisher: Anchor
Pages no: 368
Edition language: English
Category:
Non Fiction,
History,
Academic,
Cultural,
Africa,
Economics,
Politics,
College,
Sociology,
Political Science,
World History,
Race
Chua links unfairness of ‘market dominant minorities’ and the rise in instability in the world through the increasing use of democracy and the ethnonationalism this generates among the less privileged majority. It is a fascinating angle, and in the examples given it seems to fit part of the explanat...
We read this in our college reading club several years ago. It's an excellent book to read along with Niall Ferguson's War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and Descent of the West and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. Chua's basic premise is that ethnic eco...