• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

PART TWO

THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF GLOBALIZATION

Thus has the spread of global markets produced vast, inflammable ethnic wealth imbalances all over the world. But globalization has also had a crucial political dimension: namely, the American-led worldwide promotion of free elections and democratization.

That markets and democracy swept the world simultaneously is not a coincidence. After the fall of the Berlin Wall a common political and economic consensus emerged, not only in the West but to a considerable extent around the world. Markets and democracy, working hand in hand, would transform the world into a community of modernized, peace-loving nations. In the process, ethnic hatred, extremist fundamentalism, and other “backward” aspects of underdevelopment would be swept away.

The consensus could not have been more mistaken. Since 1989, the world has seen the proliferation of ethnic conflict, the rise of militant Islam, the intensification of group hatred and nationalism, expulsions, massacres, confiscations, calls for renationalization, and two genocides of magnitudes unprecedented since the Nazi Holocaust. The following four chapters will attempt to explain why.

In the last twenty years democratization has been a central, massively funded pillar of American foreign policy. In the 1990s the U.S. government spent approximately $1 billion on democracy initiatives for the post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. At the same time, America aggressively promoted democracy throughout Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Haiti alone received more than $100 million in democracy aid after 1994. With the glaring exception of the Middle Eastern states, there is almost no developing or transitional country in the world where the United States has not actively championed political liberalization, majoritarian elections, and the empowerment of civil society. As of 2000, an estimated 63 percent of the world’s population, in 120 countries, lived under democratic rule, a vast increase from even a decade ago.

1

The global spread of democratization reflects the powerful assumption in Western policy and intellectual circles that markets and democracy go hand in hand. But in the numerous countries around the world with a market-dominant minority, just the opposite has proved true. Adding democracy to markets has been a recipe for instability, upheaval, and ethnic conflagration.

In countries with a market-dominant minority and a poor “indigenous” majority, the forces of democratization and marketization directly collide. As markets enrich the market-dominant minority, democratization increases the political voice and power of the frustrated majority. The competition for votes fosters the emergence of demagogues who scapegoat the resented minority, demanding an end to humiliation, and insisting that the nation’s wealth be reclaimed by its “true owners.” Thus as America toasted the spread of global elections through the 1990s, vengeful ethnic slogans proliferated: “Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans,” “Indonesia for Indonesians,” “Uzbekistan for Uzbeks,” “Kenya for Kenyans,” “Ethiopia for Ethiopians,” “Yids out of Russia,” “Hutu Power,” “Serbia for Serbs,” and so on. More moderate candidates, who disavow ethnic politics, are made to look like traitors. As popular hatred of the rich “outsiders” mounts, the result is an ethnically charged political pressure cooker in which some form of backlash is almost unavoidable.

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 and most ferocious kind of backlash is ethnic cleansing and other forms of majority-supported ethnic violence, as occurred most recently in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

In other words, in the numerous countries around the world with a market-dominant