World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [144]
24 Further, even after decades of sustained governmental intervention, the Chinese minority remains starkly economically dominant vis-à-vis the bumiputra majority. To repeat: Market dominance is surprisingly intractable, and resistant to government-sponsored “corrective” ethnic policies. Worse yet, there is always the danger that government affirmative action policies will exacerbate rather than ameliorate ethnic conflict, by entrenching ethnic divisions.
25
For all these reasons, it would be irresponsible to champion affirmative action as the one-size-fits-all solution for developing countries that have a market-dominant minority. This is not to say that the NEP or Quebec’s ethnic preference programs cannot be helpful models. But in the deeply divided societies of the non-Western world, government leaders are themselves ethnic partisans; indeed, they are often the chief instigators of ethnonationalist sentiment. Sadly, there is a slippery slope between narrowly tailored, ethnic preference programs of limited duration on one hand, and vicious, confiscatory, often murderous “group-payback-time” programs on the other. In their own minds, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic, and Rwanda’s Hutu Power leaders were all conducting a form of “affirmative action” on behalf of a long-exploited and humiliated majority.
Democracy: Against Hypocrisy
and Beyond Majority Rule
When I recently visited Bolivia, I noticed enthusiastic political slogans (“MNR!”) spray-painted on the roofs and walls of tiny dirt-floor houses, even in isolated desert villages. When I mentioned these to my Quechuan guide Osvaldo, he dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “The people in those houses can’t even read,” he laughed bitterly. “But if they let the government paint those slogans, they get a sack of potatoes, or maybe some sugar.”
Democracy in the developing world is often more nominal than real. In many countries the great majority of the impoverished electorate do not have a substantial political voice, whether because of lack of access to information or because the wealthy control the political process through lobbying or corruption.
26 This is true even of “success stories” such as the Philippines, where, despite impressive strides toward democracy in the last twenty years, it remains the case that a few landowning, dynastic families along with powerful Chinese business interests continue to dominate the political process.
In other words, Western triumphalism about democracy in the developing world rests in part on a certain hypocrisy. If universal suffrage were a reality rather than a sham, one might wonder whether most of today’s marketizers, foreign investors, and international organizations would be supporting it. Indeed, even today, there are many within the international community who, at the first sign of a possible trade-off between markets and democracy, make clear that their first commitment is to the former. As a beaming U.S. economist said to me just after Venezuela’s democratically elected president Hugo Chavez was deposed in a military coup (and before he was reinstated), “Democracy is not necessarily the most efficient form of government.”
It is better to be an open advocate of the priority of markets than to be a self-congratulatory advocate of sham democracy. The difficulty, however, with a genuine commitment to democracy is that, for all the reasons discussed in this book, majority rule in many countries outside the West could indeed produce anti-market, ethnically violent outcomes.
So what is to be done?
The answer is that democracy has to mean more than majority rule. Just as the United States should not promote unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism (a form of markets that the West itself has repudiated) throughout the non-Western world, so too the United States should not promote unrestrained, overnight majority rule (a form of democracy the West has repudiated). In the West the primary restraints on the excesses of majority rule take the form of constitutional