World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [7]
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In the contest between an economically powerful ethnic minority and a numerically powerful impoverished majority, the majority does not always prevail. Instead of a backlash against the market, another likely outcome is a backlash against democracy, favoring the market-dominant minority at the expense of majority will. Examples of this dynamic are extremely common. Indeed, this book will show that the world’s most notorious cases of “crony capitalism” all involve a market-dominant ethnic minority—from Ferdinand Marcos’s Chinese-protective dictatorship in the Philippines to President Siaka Stevens’s shadow alliance with five Lebanese diamond dealers in Sierra Leone to President Daniel Arap Moi’s “business arrangements” with a handful of Indian tycoons in Kenya today.
The third and most ferocious kind of backlash is majority-supported violence aimed at eliminating a market-dominant minority. Two recent examples are the ethnic cleansing of Croats in the former Yugoslavia and the mass slaughter of Tutsi in Rwanda. In both cases a resented and disproportionately prosperous ethnic minority was attacked by members of a relatively impoverished majority, incited by an ethnonationalist government. In other words, markets and democracy were among the causes of both the Rwandan and Yugoslavian genocides. This is a large claim, but one that this book will try to defend.
To their credit, critics of globalization have called attention to the grotesque imbalances that free markets produce. In the 1990s, writes Thomas Frank in One Market under God, global markets made “the corporation the most powerful institution on earth,” transformed “CEOs as a class into one of the wealthiest elites of all time,” and, from America to Indonesia, “forgot about the poor with a decisiveness we hadn’t seen since the 1920s.”
19 Joining Frank in his criticism of “the almighty market” is a host of strange bedfellows: American farmers and factory workers opposed to NAFTA, environmentalists, the AFL-CIO, human rights activists, Third World advocates, and sundry other groups that made up the protesters at Seattle, Davos, Genoa, and New York City. Defenders of globalization respond, with some justification, that the world’s poor would be even worse off without global marketization. With some important exceptions, including most of Africa, recent World Bank studies show that globalization’s “trickle down” has produced benefits for the poor as well as the rich in developing countries.
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More fundamentally, however, like their pro-globalization counterparts, Western critics of globalization have overlooked the ethnic dimension of market disparities. They tend to see wealth and poverty in terms of class conflict, not ethnic conflict. This perspective might make sense in the advanced Western societies, but the ethnic realities of the developing world are completely different from those of the West. As a result, the solutions that globalization’s critics propose are often shortsighted and even dangerous when applied to non-Western societies.
Essentially, the anti-globalization movement asks for one thing: more democracy. Thus Noam Chomsky, one of the movement’s high priests, has clarified that there is no struggle against “globalization” in the general sense, only a struggle against the global “neoliberalism” perpetuated by a few “masters of the universe” at the expense of a truly democratic community. Similarly, at the 2002 World Social Forum in Brazil, Lori Wallach of Public Citizen rejected the label “anti-globalization,” explaining that “our movement, really, is globally for democracy, equality, diversity, justice and quality of life.” Wallach has also warned that the WTO must “either bend to the will of the people worldwide or it will break.” Echoing these voices are literally dozens of NGOs who call for “democratically empowering the poor majorities of the world.”
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Given the ethnic dynamics of