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Review of "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability"
By Marian L. Tupy
Introduction
World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
Amy Chua
New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, 2003, 340 pp.
World on Fire is a more nuanced book than the title suggests. Chua's publisher selected the title despite, so she claimed, her better judgment. Indeed, with its equally provocative subtitle, Chua's book must be read carefully as much for the things it says as for the things it does not say. The book is not a diatribe that will warm the hearts of the antiglobalization protesters. In fact, Chua acknowledges that free markets may offer the "best" economic hope in the long run.
Instead, Chua claims that "simultaneous" liberalization of the markets and democratization in the face of a resented market-dominant minority, leads to ethnic tension and violence. That happens, she argues, because economic freedom enables the disproportionate flourishing of minorities, while democratization empowers the resentful majorities. Chua believes that the United States deserves much of the blame for spreading "unrestrained" markets and equally "unrestrained" democracies as supposed panaceas to all the world's ills.
But Chua is wrong to assume that the United States is the primary driving force behind liberalization. Liberalization is mostly a result of the collapse of central planning. The governments that have undertaken some degree of liberalization have done so out of their own self interest and not because the United States wished it.
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