World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

By Amy Chua

The reigning consensus holds 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 revelatory 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 6, 2004
• ISBN: 9781400076376

Amy Chua

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Her first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, translated into eight languages, was a New York Times bestseller, an Economist Best Book of the Year and one of the Guardian's Top Political Reads of 2003. Her second book, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall, was a critically acclaimed Foreign Affairs bestseller. Amy Chua has appeared frequently on radio and television and her writing has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and the Wilson Quarterly. She lives with her husband, two daughters and two Samoyeds in New Haven, Connecticut.

Reviews for World on Fire

[ecw0647 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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 economic disparities that often arise in times of economic progress lead to ethnic strife during economic instability. Market dominant ethnic majorities become much richer even as ethnic majority poor get marginally better off.

As an example, Chua cites the Chinese entrepreneurs in the Philippines who represent 1-2% of the population, yet own a vast majority of the businesses and wealth. She argues that for the United States to export free-market capitalism while promoting and exporting democracy is inherently destabilizing because the democratized poor majority will try to retake the wealth from the capitally dominant ethnic minority and this leads to disaster.

[mrtall_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Amy Chua has identified a wedge issue that's been previously under-analysed, if not unnoticed, and has driven in that wedge about as far as it will go. The issue? The fact, that in so many countries, especially developing ones, small ethnic minority groups controls a large proportions of those countries' economies. Her keystone examples are the 'overseas Chinese' in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and other SE Asian countries, but she ranges around the globe in identifying analagous situations.This breadth is the strength of the book. Less satisfying are Chua's attempts -- or lack of them -- to explain why this pattern repeats itself over and over. For an academic, Chua writes clearly, although this book would have benefited from more stringent editing. It's repetitive, and the constant academic-style hedging in Chua's prose is irritating, and could easily have been remedied.Overall, recommended highly.

[dick_pountain_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When the Cold War ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, most Western political thinkers assumed that democracy and free markets had triumped, and that the future could only mean exporting these virtues to those 'developing world' countries that lack one or both of them. However as Amy Chua points out in this valuable book, in the real world virtues are not easily exportable (as Iraq is so bloodily proving) and worse still, combining two virtues doesn't always produce another: many times introducing democracy on top of a free market will result in wealth and happiness, but sometimes can lead instead to genocide. Chua, a professor of international law at Harvard, explains how this happens: a free market may exacerbate rivalries between ethnic groups by enriching one group at the expense of others; if those others happen to be the majority, then democracy may offer them the opportunity to take power and exact bloody revenge against their exploiters. Chua didn't need to dig too far for evidence, merely to harvest it from newspaper headlines: massacres of Chinese in Indonesia in 1998; Mugabe's land-grabs in Zimbabwe; the hellish genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. This is a courageous book that goes firmly against the grain of both current US neo-conservative and leftist dogmas. Chua, perhaps emboldened by her own Philipino-Chinese descent, tackles matters of ethnic conflict with a robust pragmatism that wholly sidesteps all the pieties of political correctness. She concludes that such conflicts must not only be clearly acknowledged, but as far as possible defused before we can even think about trying to export democracy and free markets.

[jcvogan1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very interesting thesis about how economically dominant ethnic minorities are often the target of the majority in emerging democracies.