World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [92]
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There is plenty of guilt to go around, but by all accounts the more numerous Serbs, who had historically dominated the Yugoslavian military and police forces, were at the forefront of the ethnic cleansing and brutal violence. “Ejecting” or “eliminating” Croats, Slovenes, and other “foreigners” threatening Serbia’s rightful power in Yugoslavia was the guiding, and sadly mass-supported, ethnonationalist principle. In a now famous speech delivered in March 1991—which contains a telling allusion to Croat and Slovene market dominance—Milosevic declared to thunderous applause: “If we must fight, then my God we will fight. And I hope they will not be so crazy as to fight against us. Because if we don’t know how to work well or to do business, at least we know how to fight well!”
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The situation in the former Yugoslavia is enormously complicated, and I am certainly not offering an “explanation” for the tremendous ethnic hatred or atrocities that unfolded there in the 1990s. Indeed, this is probably a good place to reiterate what I am not arguing in this book. I am distinctly not arguing that market-dominant minorities are the source of all ethnic conflict or that market-dominant minorities are the only targets of ethnic persecution. On the contrary, in the former Yugoslavia for example, Serbs were also ethnically cleansed from the Krajina region of Croatia, while huge numbers of Albanians were exterminated en masse; neither group was a market-dominant minority.
Rather, the point is that in virtually every region of the world, against completely different historical backgrounds, the simultaneous pursuit of markets and democracy in the face of a resented market-dominant minority repeatedly produces the same destructive, often deadly dynamic. Sudden, unmediated democratization in Yugoslavia—as in Rwanda—released long suppressed ethnic hatreds and facilitated the rise of megalomaniac ethnic demagogues as well as ferocious ethnonationalist movements rooted in tremendous feelings of anger, envy, and humiliation. As in so many economically distressed countries (post-Communist Yugoslavia was mired in foreign debt) with a market-dominant minority, simultaneous economic and political liberalization directly pitted a poorer but much more populous and militarily powerful group claiming to be the “rightful owners” of the country against a hated, wealthier, “outsider” minority. In the former Yugoslavia, the result of market liberalization and democratic elections was not prosperity and political freedom, but rather economic devastation, hatemongering, populist manipulation, and civilian-conducted mass murder.
CHAPTER 8
Mixing Blood
Assimilation, Globalization, and the Case of Thailand
The destructive ethnic dynamics described in the previous three chapters, while strikingly recurrent across different regions and countries, are not intended to be universal laws of nature. To begin with, there are some developing countries that do not have market-dominant minorities; I will discuss these countries briefly below. In addition, as people often say to me, even in countries with a market-dominant minority, surely there must be exceptions to the rule. Thailand is often pointed to as such an exception—a poor country with a market-dominant minority where the pursuit of free market democracy arguably has not generated ethnic resentment or any of the kinds of backlashes I’ve described. I will examine the ethnic “success story” of Thailand more closely below.
Developing Countries
without Market-Dominant