World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [97]
A recent final twist is worth noting. With the rise of China as an economic power in the last several years—not to mention the explosion of market opportunities on the mainland—an increasing number of Thai Chinese are reclaiming their Chinese identity. After decades of suppressing their Chinese heritage, many Thai Chinese are sending their children to newly established Chinese language schools, visiting China in record numbers, investing in China, and reassuming Chinese surnames. Whether this renewed sense of ethnic Chinese pride and identity among Thai Chinese will have a destabilizing effect remains to be seen. Thus far, anti-Chinese resentment among indigenous Thais remains muted, although there are also indications that the acceptance of Thai Chinese by indigenous Thais is by no means complete. Today there are still restrictions on the use of the Chinese language. The Thai government recently forced a local cable television network to cancel its Chinese-language shows, citing long-standing regulations limiting broadcasts to Thai or English with Thai subtitles.
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More fundamentally, it is important to remember the limits of intermarriage and assimilation as an antidote to ethnic hatred. In Latin America and the Caribbean, extensive ethnic intermixing over many centuries has blurred ethnic lines, almost certainly helping to dampen ethnic conflict. But “ethnicity” is a highly artificial and manipulable concept, and “us against them” dynamics have repeatedly been generated even in countries where a market-dominant minority is highly assimilated or intermarrying in significant numbers with other groups. Assimilation did not protect Spanish Jews from repeated bloody attacks in the fifteenth century or German Jews in the Weimar Republic.
More recently, in the former Yugoslavia, intermarriage between Serbs and Croats was common, particularly in cosmopolitan cities like Sarajevo or Mostar. In pregenocide Rwanda, rates of intermarriage between Hutus and Tutsis were also substantial. But in neither country was assimilation or “mixing blood” sufficient to overcome the deadly fantasy of ethnicity as a source of power, a source of hate, and an excuse for mass slaughter.
PART THREE
ETHNONATIONALISM
AND THE WEST
The global spread of free market democracy has thus been a principal, aggravating cause of ethnic instability and violence throughout the non-Western world. In country after country outside the West—from Mandalay to Moscow, from Jakarta to Nairobi—laissez-faire markets have magnified the often astounding wealth and economic prominence of an “outsider” minority, generating great reservoirs of ethnic envy and resentment among the impoverished “indigenous” majority. In absolute terms the majority may actually be marginally better off as a result of markets—this was true, for example, of Indonesia and most of the Southeast Asian countries in the 1980s and 1990s—but these small improvements are overwhelmed by the majority’s continuing poverty and the hated minority’s extraordinary economic success, invariably including their control of the “crown jewels” of the economy.
Democracy, sadly, does not quell this resentment. On the contrary, democratization, by increasing the political voice and power of the “indigenous” majority, has fostered the emergence of demagogues—like Zimbabwe’s Mugabe, Serbia’s Milosevic, Russia’s Zyuganov, Bolivia’s Great Condor, and Rwanda’s Hutu Power leaders—who opportunistically whip up mass hatred against the resented minority, demanding that the country’s wealth be returned to the “true owners of the nation.” As a result, in its raw, for-export form, the pursuit of free market democracy outside the West has repeatedly led not to widespread peace and prosperity, but to ethnic confiscation, authoritarian backlash, and mass killing.
What does all this have to do with the West? Is the non-Western world perhaps just hopeless—too divided, backward, and violent to sustain free market democracy? Perhaps the United States and the other Western nations should simply wash their hands