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By Root 1824 0

Sukarno’s sweeping nationalizations in the 1950s and 1960s targeted both the market-dominant Dutch and, very explicitly, the market-dominant Chinese. Indeed, through nationalization and other anti-Chinese measures, Sukarno “indigenized” key sectors of the economy—finance, mining, batik, rice, import-export, industry—all formerly dominated by Europeans and Chinese. Although Sukarno’s “Guided Democracy” was in many ways undemocratic, his anti-Chinese nationalizations were overwhelmingly and feverishly supported by the pribumi majority. Indeed, most indigenous Indonesians thought Sukarno was “too soft” on the Chinese.

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In Sri Lanka, which has maintained a troubled parliamentary democracy for nearly half a century, the disproportionate economic power of the Tamil minority had produced bitter resentment among the (largely Buddhist) Sinhalese majority by the 1950s. Solomon Bandaranaike—Oxford-educated and a consummate politician—capitalized on this ethnic resentment. Converting from Roman Catholicism to Buddhism, he swept to electoral victory in 1956 by scapegoating Tamils and championing the cause of “Sinhala Only.” After Bandaranaike’s assassination in 1959, his wife Sirimavo became prime minister, again through democratic elections. Once in office, Mrs. Bandaranaike began radically nationalizing land and industry. These nationalizations had nothing to do with socialism; they did not affect Sinhalese business interests. Rather their express purpose was to elevate the “true” Sri Lankans over Tamils, Christians, and other ethnic minorities.

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In postindependence Burma, U Nu, the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, openly sought to “Burmanize” the economy through nationalization. “The wealth of Burma has been enjoyed firstly by big British capitalists, next the Indian capitalists, and next the Chinese capitalists,” U Nu declared in a famous tract from 1949. “Burmans are at the bottom, in poverty, and have to be content with the left-over and the chewed-over bones and scraps from the table of foreign capitalists.” In the sixties and seventies, Gen. Ne Win’s expropriations of over fifteen thousand commercial enterprises again expressly targeted Westerners and the despised market-dominant Indian and Chinese minorities.

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In Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto won the support of the impoverished masses (as well as members of his own, landowning zamindaar class) through rousing public speeches that accused “Twenty-Two Families”—almost all Mohajir immigrants from India—of stealing the nation’s wealth. It was intolerable, he campaigned, that Pakistan’s indigenous majority (comprising four major ethnic groups: the Punjabi, Sindhi, Baluchi, and Pashtuns) should remain at the mercy of a tiny minority of “outsider” Mohajir industrialists and bureaucrats.

After sweeping to power, Bhutto’s “socialist” Pakistan People’s Party showed itself to be not socialist at all, but deeply ethnonationalist. Bhutto left almost completely intact the massive estates of the wealthy Sindhi zamindaar families, including his own. As late as the 1970s the Bhutto family’s own estate was measured in terms of miles rather than acres, extending across several successive train stops. Nor did Bhutto ever try to nationalize all private business. Instead, Bhutto aggressively targeted firms owned by the market-dominant ethnic Mohajirs. Thus, in January 1972, along with a few Punjabi businesses, Bhutto nationalized thirty-one heavy industrial firms, representing almost all of the hated Twenty-Two Families’ industrial wealth. Bhutto’s 1974 nationalizations of banking and insurance attacked any remaining Mohajir holdings. Through ethnically targeted nationalizations, Bhutto successfully undercut the Mohajir minority’s stark dominance of Pakistan’s industrial and commercial sectors.

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The nationalization movements that swept across Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century present a somewhat more complicated picture. Nationalizing politicians in Latin America undoubtedly mobilized mass support for their movements