World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [8]
Critics of globalization are right to demand that more attention be paid to the enormous wealth disparities created by global markets. But just as it is dangerous to view markets as the panacea for the world’s poverty and strife, so too it is dangerous to see democracy as a panacea. Markets and democracy may well offer the best long-run economic and political hope for developing and post-Communist societies. In the short run, however, they are part of the problem.
“Markets,” “democracy,” and “ethnicity” are notoriously difficult concepts to define. In part this is because there is no single correct interpretation of any of these terms. Indeed, I hope precisely to show in this book that the “market systems” currently being urged on developing and post-Communist countries are very different from the ones now in place in contemporary Western nations; that the process of “democratization” currently being promoted in the non-Western world is not the same as the one that the Western countries themselves went through; and that “ethnicity” is a fluid, artificial, and dangerously manipulable concept.
Nevertheless, some clarification of my usage of these terms is in order. In the West, terms like “market economy” or “market system” refer to a broad spectrum of economic systems based primarily on private property and competition, with government regulation and redistribution ranging from substantial (as in the United States) to extensive (as in the Scandinavian countries). Ironically, however, for the last twenty years the United States has been promoting throughout the non-Western world raw, laissez-faire capitalism—a form of markets that the West abandoned long ago. In this book, unless otherwise indicated, terms like “marketization,” “markets,” and “market reforms” will refer to the kinds of pro-capitalism measures actually being implemented today outside the West. These measures characteristically include privatization, elimination of state subsidies and controls, and free trade and pro-foreign investment initiatives. As a practical matter, they rarely, if ever, include any substantial redistribution measures.
Similarly, while “democracy” can take many forms,
22 I will use the term “democratization” to refer to the political reforms actually being promoted and implemented in the non-Western world today. Thus, “democratization” will refer principally to the concerted efforts, heavily U.S.-driven, to implement immediate elections with universal suffrage. Needless to say, an ideal democratic society would surely include more substantive principles, such as equality under law or minority protections, but to build such principles into the definition of democracy would be to confuse aspiration with reality. It is striking to note that at no point in history did any Western nation ever implement laissez-faire capitalism and overnight universal suffrage at the same time—the precise formula of free market democracy currently being pressed on developing countries around the world.
Ethnicity is another controversial concept that has generated much debate. For purposes of this book, I will assume that “ethnicity” is not a scientifically determinable status. Rather, “ethnicity” will refer to a kind of group identification, a sense of belonging to a people, that is experienced “as a greatly extended form of kinship.”
23 This definition of ethnicity is intended to be very broad, acknowledging the importance of subjective perceptions. It encompasses differences along racial lines (for example, blacks and whites in the United States), lines of geographic origin (for example, Malays, Chinese, and Indians in Malaysia), as well as linguistic, religious, tribal, or other cultural lines (for example, Kikuyu and Kalenjin tribes in Kenya or Jews and Muslims