World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [138]
4 Similarly, Malaysia’s prime minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad has frequently attacked the “moral degeneration” of Western democracy and the superiority of “Asian values.”
5
Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew recently explained in an interview in Foreign Affairs that “Asian societies are unlike Western ones. The fundamental difference between Western concepts of society and government and East Asian concepts”—referring to China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, as distinct from Southeast Asia—“is that Eastern societies believe that the individual exists in the context of the family. He is not pristine and separate.” On democracy, Lee Kuan Yew responded, “What are we all seeking? A form of government that will be comfortable, because it meets our needs, is not oppressive, and maximizes our opportunities. And whether you have one-man, one-vote or some-men, one vote or other men, two votes, those are forms which should be worked out. I’m not intellectually convinced that one-man, one-vote is best.”
6
Singapore, with its astounding rise to prosperity, modernity, and civil stability, has proved an alluring exemplar for those who question the wisdom of democratizing developing societies. According to Kaplan, the American urge to democratize others is arrogant, provincial, and irresponsible. “To think that democracy as we know it will triumph—or is even here to stay—is itself a form of determinism, driven by our own ethnocentricism,” argues Kaplan.
7
Although Kaplan’s view is refreshingly unromantic, I ultimately differ from him. To begin with, as one writer has quipped, “If authoritarianism were the key to prosperity, then Africa would be the richest continent in the world.” There is no way to ensure that any given dictator will be beneficent, farsighted, and pro-market. Ask (as some do) for an Augusto Pinochet or an Alberto Fujimori, and you may get an Idi Amin or a Papa Doc Duvalier. As many political economists have observed, there is no clear correlation between authoritarianism and economic growth.
8 While democracy is certainly no panacea for corruption, many of history’s most predatory regimes, from the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines to Burma’s repugnant SLORC, have been autocratic.
More fundamentally, Kaplan overlooks the global problem of market-dominant minorities. Kaplan stresses the ethnic biases of elections, but neglects the ethnic biases of capitalism. At the same time he is overly optimistic about the ability of markets alone to lift the great indigenous masses out of poverty. The awkward reality is that markets in developing societies favor not only some people over others, but some ethnic groups over others. Worse, they often benefit a hated ethnic minority, leaving the vast majority of the nation in frustrated poverty. Overlooking this reality, Kaplan blames too much of the world’s violence and anarchy on democracy.
Consider, for example, the brutal takeover of Sierra Leone by diamond-hungry, limb-chopping rebels; the confiscations of white land in Zimbabwe; or the 1998 anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia that triggered $40 billion of capital flight and helped economically destabilize all of Southeast Asia. In all these cases and many more, markets set up the disasters by reinforcing the stark economic dominance of an “outsider” minority and by fomenting intense resentment among the poor, frustrated “indigenous” majority. Once such intense resentment among the majority exists, Kaplan is absolutely right that suddenly holding free and fair elections could well produce catastrophic results. What he fails to see is that unrestrained markets—superimposed on postcolonial societies with massive initial ethnic imbalances in financial and human capital—have helped create intolerable and volatile conditions in these societies, the very conditions that unrestrained democracy detonates.
The remainder of this chapter will be based on three assumptions. First, the best