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By Root 1747 0

minority, markets and democracy are not mutually reinforcing. Because markets and democracy benefit different ethnic groups in such societies, the pursuit of free market democracy produces highly unstable and combustible conditions. Markets concentrate enormous wealth in the hands of an “outsider” minority, fomenting ethnic envy and hatred among often chronically poor majorities. In absolute terms the majority may or may not be better off—a dispute that much of the globalization debate fixates on—but any sense of improvement is overwhelmed by their continuing poverty and the hated minority’s extraordinary economic success. More humiliating still, market-dominant minorities, along with their foreign-investor partners, invariably come to control the crown jewels of the economy, often symbolic of the nation’s patrimony and identity—oil in Russia and Venezuela, diamonds in South Africa, silver and tin in Bolivia, jade, teak, and rubies in Burma.

Introducing democracy in these circumstances does not transform voters into open-minded cocitizens in a national community. Rather, the competition for votes fosters the emergence of demagogues who scapegoat the resented minority and foment active ethnonationalist movements demanding that the country’s wealth and identity be reclaimed by the “true owners of the nation.” As America celebrated the global spread of democracy in the 1990s, ethnicized political slogans proliferated: “Georgia for the Georgians,” “Eritreans Out of Ethiopia,” “Kenya for Kenyans,” “Whites should leave Bolivia,” “Kazakhstan for Kazakhs,” “Serbia for Serbs,” “Croatia for Croats,” “Hutu Power,” “Assam for Assamese,” “Jews Out of Russia.” Romania’s 2001 presidential candidate Vadim Tudor was not quite so pithy. “I’m Vlad the Impaler,” he campaigned; referring to the historically economically dominant Hungarian minority, he promised: “We will hang them directly by their Hungarian tongue!”

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When free market democracy is pursued in the presence of a market-dominant minority, the almost invariable result is backlash. This backlash typically takes one of three forms. The first is a backlash against markets, targeting the market-dominant minority’s wealth. The second is a backlash against democracy by forces favorable to the market-dominant minority. The third is violence, sometimes genocidal, directed against the market-dominant minority itself.

Zimbabwe today is a vivid illustration of the first kind of backlash—an ethnically targeted anti-market backlash. For several years now President Robert Mugabe has encouraged the violent seizure of 10 million acres of white-owned commercial farmland. As one Zimbabwean explained, “The land belongs to us. The foreigners should not own land here. There is no black Zimbabwean who owns land in England. Why should any European own land here?”

16 Mugabe himself was more explicit: “Strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy!”

17 Most of the country’s white “foreigners” are third-generation Zimbabweans. Just 1 percent of the population, they have for generations controlled 70 percent of the country’s best land, largely in the form of highly productive three-thousand-acre tobacco and sugar farms.

Watching Zimbabwe’s economy take a free fall as a result of the mass landgrab, the United States and United Kingdom together with dozens of human rights groups urged President Mugabe to step down, calling resoundingly for “free and fair elections.” But the idea that democracy is the answer to Zimbabwe’s problems is breathtakingly naive. Perhaps Mugabe would have lost the 2002 elections in the absence of foul play. Even if so, it is important to remember that Mugabe himself is a product of democracy. The hero of Zimbabwe’s black liberation movement and a master manipulator of masses, he swept to victory in the closely monitored elections of 1980, promising to expropriate “stolen” white land. Repeating that promise has helped him win every election since. Moreover, Mugabe’s land-seizure campaign was another product of the democratic process. It was deftly timed