World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [9]
Ethnic identity is not static but shifting and highly malleable. In Rwanda, for example, the 14 percent Tutsi minority dominated the Hutu majority economically and politically for four centuries, as a kind of cattle-owning aristocracy. But for most of this period the lines between Hutus and Tutsi were permeable. The two groups spoke the same language, intermarriage occurred, and successful Hutus could “become Tutsi.” This was no longer true after the Belgians arrived and, steeped in specious theories of racial superiority, issued ethnic identity cards on the basis of nose length and cranial circumference. The resulting much sharper ethnic divisions were later exploited by the leaders of Hutu Power.
24 Along similar lines, all over Latin America today—where it is often said that there are no “ethnic divisions” because everyone is “mixed-blooded”—large numbers of impoverished Bolivians, Chileans, and Peruvians are suddenly being told that they are Aymaras, Incas, or just indios, whatever identity best resonates and mobilizes. These indigenization movements are not necessarily good or bad, but they are contagiously potent.
At the same time, ethnic identity is rarely constructed out of thin air. Subjective perceptions of identity often depend on more “objective” traits assigned to individuals based on, for example, perceived morphological characteristics, language differences, or ancestry. Try telling black and white Zimbabweans that they are only imagining their ethnic differences—that “ethnicity is a social construct”—and they’ll at least agree on one thing: that you’re not being helpful. Much more concretely relevant is the reality that there is roughly zero intermarriage between blacks and whites in Zimbabwe, just as there is virtually no intermarriage between Chinese and Malays in Malaysia or between Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East. That ethnicity can be at once an artifact of human imagination and rooted in the darkest recesses of history—fluid and manipulable yet important enough to kill for—is what makes ethnic conflict so terrifyingly difficult to understand and contain.
There are a number of misunderstandings about my thesis that I frequently encounter. I will do my best to dispel some of them here by making clear what I am not arguing. First, this book is not proposing a universal theory applicable to every developing country. There are certainly developing countries without market-dominant minorities: China and Argentina are two major examples. Second, I am not arguing that ethnic conflict arises only in the presence of a market-dominant minority. There are countless instances of ethnic hatred directed at economically oppressed groups. Last, I am emphatically not attempting to pin the blame for any particular case of ethnic violence—whether the mass killings perpetuated by all sides in the former Yugoslavia or the attack on America—on economic resentment, on markets, on democracy, on globalization, or on any other single cause. Numerous overlapping factors and complex dynamics, such as religion, historical enmities, territorial disputes, or a particular nation’s foreign policy, are always in play.
The point, rather, is this. In the numerous countries around the world that have pervasive poverty and a market-dominant minority, democracy and markets—at least in the form in which they are currently being promoted—can proceed only in deep tension with each other. In such conditions, the combined pursuit of free markets and democratization has repeatedly catalyzed ethnic conflict in highly predictable ways, with catastrophic consequences, including genocidal violence and the subversion of markets and democracy themselves. This has been the sobering lesson of globalization over the last twenty years.
Part One of this book discusses the economic impact of globalization. Contrary to what its proponents assume, free markets outside the West do not spread wealth evenly and enrich entire developing societies. Instead, they tend to concentrate glaring wealth in the hands of an “outsider