World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [137]
1 By contrast, the last thing most Americans want is a true world democracy, in which our economic and political fate is determined by a majority of the world’s countries or citizens. The idea, for example, of the U.N. General Assembly controlling U.S. foreign investments would probably not be appealing to most Americans. Like other market-dominant minorities, we don’t trust the relatively poor, frustrated, resentful majorities surrounding us necessarily to act in our best interests.
Democracy or Markets?
Deservedly or not, market-dominant minorities—with their disproportionate capital, skills, business networks, and control over the modern economy—drive global capitalism. Any backlash against market-dominant minorities, whether the Chinese in Indonesia, Ibo in Nigeria, or America at the global level, is thus also a backlash against markets.
In other words, in societies with a market-dominant minority, democracy can pose a grave threat not only to the minority, but to markets themselves. Rather than reinforcing the market’s liberalizing, wealth-producing effects, the sudden political empowerment of a poor, frustrated “indigenous” majority often leads to powerful ethnonationalist, anti-market pressures. And these pressures, as Rwanda, Indonesia, and the former Yugoslavia vividly show, are more likely to lead to confiscation and ethnic killing than to the widespread peace and prosperity that proponents of free market democracy envision. There is always an inherent tension between market capitalism and democracy. But in societies with a market-dominant minority, this tension is inflamed by the dark energies of ethnic hatred. As a result, throughout the non-Western world today, markets and democracy—at least in the raw forms in which they are currently being implemented—are not typically mutually reinforcing. On the contrary, their combined pursuit in the face of a hated market-dominant minority is a recipe for ethnic conflagration.
So where does this leave us? What are the implications of market-dominant minorities for national and international policymaking?
Influential writer Robert D. Kaplan recently offered this general answer: hold off on democracy until free markets produce enough economic and social development to make democracy sustainable. In The Coming Anarchy, Kaplan argues that a middle class and civil institutions—both of which he implicitly assumes would be generated by market capitalism—are preconditions for democracy. Contrasting Lee Kuan Yew’s prosperous authoritarian Singapore with the murderous, “bloodletting” democratic states of Colombia, Rwanda, and South Africa, Kaplan fiercely condemns America’s post–Cold War mission to export democracy abroad, to “places where it can’t succeed.”
2
This position—markets first, democracy later, if at all—has a long and impressive pedigree. In 1959, noted sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset wrote that “the more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.” And in his 1968 Political Order in Changing Societies political scientist Samuel P. Huntington made what continues to be the most powerful and subtle case against rapid democratization in modernizing societies.
3 Not surprisingly, this view also finds support among many leaders of non-Western nations, who argue that democracy is a Western value that should not indiscriminately be imposed on other cultures.
In 1992, for example, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd publicly stated that the “democratic system prevailing in the world does not suit us in the region . . .