World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [124]
The “entrepreneurial” market-dominant minorities of Southeast Asia and Africa tend to be politically weak. Often just 1 to 2 percent of the population, they have little or no military strength or influence on governmental policy (other than through cronyism, which in any case benefits only a very few). But this is not true, for example, of the light-skinned elites in Latin America, the Tutsi minority in pregenocide Rwanda, or the white minority in apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia. All these minorities are or were both economically and politically dominant, typically controlling every sector of governmental policy and the military as well. In all such cases, as with America today, there is much more than economics behind the often-violent animosity felt by the frustrated majority. At the same time, the humiliation or oppression felt by the majority because of the minority’s political dominance is inextricably woven together with, and immeasurably magnified by, the minority’s wealth and economic power.
Similarly, while America’s global cultural dominance today is historically unique—and certainly not reducible to mere economics—the world’s reaction against American “cultural imperialism” is again strikingly parallel to standard reactions against market-dominant minorities. A characteristic feature of societies with economically powerful “outsider” minorities is the reported feeling, on the part of the “indigenous” majority, that they are in danger of being “swallowed up,” their culture taken over or eradicated by the minority.
11 Thus in Rwanda, genocide was justified in the name of Hutu “self-protection” and Hutu “self-defense.” A constant theme among Russian hatemongers today is that Jews “are waging a destructive campaign against our fatherland and its morality, language, culture and beliefs.” A pervasive sentiment in Burma, bitterly expressed by a Mandalayan businessman, is that “we are becoming a Chinese colony.” The tiny market-dominant Chinese minority, it is said, “are smothering us”; “they have turned us into second-class citizens in our own towns.” “Burmese identity is being destroyed.” Such sentiments are highly analogous to those expressed today by groups all over the world fearful of the invasion of American products and entertainment.
Finally, and most important, the United States differs from other market-dominant minorities in that the non-American majority is not organized in a single national territory. With the exception of the previous chapter on the Middle East, this book has focused on dynamics internal to nations: specifically, the danger, within individual countries, of rapid democratization in the face of pervasive poverty and a resented “outsider” market-dominant minority. In the case of America as a global market-dominant minority, however, there is no counterpart to democracy at the global level. Notwithstanding various efforts at global integration and the rise of numerous international political organizations, the truth is that there is no democratically elected “world government.”
The closest thing there is to a world democratic government is the United Nations General Assembly, where each member state gets a vote and where, as a result, the Third World commands a substantial majority of the votes. (Of course, the national representatives to the General Assembly are usually not democratically elected.) And indeed, one finds in the General Assembly precisely the anti-U.S. and anti-market reactions that America’s market-dominance would be expected to produce. These reactions range from Resolution No. 3281 in 1974, which purported to expand the authority of member states to “regulate,” “supervise,” and “expropriate” multinational corporations within their jurisdiction (the vote was 120 to 6, with the dissenters being five Western European countries and the United States), to the May 2001 ouster of the United States from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (while Sudan and Sierra Leone, for example, remain members).