Ms. Chua, a professor of law at Yale Law School, has put forth the argument, in A World On Fire that the American policy of exporting both democracy and the free market to the developing world accentuates ethnic hatred in the numerous nations in which wealthy elites, from the ethnic minority, dominate politically and economically over impoverished commoners, from the ethnic majority. While Ms. Chua's presents a persuasive case, she has failed to convince me that she has put her finger on the cause of the instability in the nations in question.
Depressingly, the list of nations plagued by Ms. Chua's form of ethnic inequity are numerous. The most familiar for North Americans is Mexico which, like many other Latin countries, is overseen by white, Spanish Europeans descended from the time of Spain's imperial conquest. And yet these powerful holdovers from a forgotten time are a tiny percentage of the overall population of powerless, darker-skinned Mexicans who are descended from that country's native population. While this is an example of a cultural legacy gone horribly wrong, she also points to countries like Burma whose ruling junta uses trade with resource-hungry, morally-ambivalent China as a means to amass enough wealth to maintain the ruthless suppression of its own people. These are but two examples in a carefully compiled list which seems to run into the dozens, nations made unstable by ethnic and economic inequities so entrenched in the culture that, in all likelihood, only revolution will rectify them. Part of the responsibility for this entrenchment falls to the developed world which has cynically traded with these corrupted nations, content to look the other way so long as trade is productive. This policy, of course, only serves to further enrich Ms. Chua's elites, a reality which only fuels the anger of the impoverished majorities, which only destabilizes already precarious regimes.
This is wonderfully researched and thoroughly exemplified work, but I wonder if Ms. Chua is not reaching too far afield for a cause for her inequity. Rather than blaming free market democracy, why not blame the conceptually flawed nation state which, in all its alluring power, attracts corruption like a corpse does flies? Humanity has repeatedly demonstrated a desire for dominance. We are driven by self-interest and self-interest motivates us to find an advantage over our competitors. And the way we gain advantage is by finding and exploiting weaknesses. This is who we are. It stinks, but that does not make it untrue. And if everyone behaves this way, it becomes absurd to filter our trading practices through the sieve of our morality. There are no clean skins. And if we can only trade with clean skins, then there's no one left to trade with.
Economic prosperity brings about political freedom. This has been demonstrated far too many times for it to be a coincidence. Given that we, the developed world, can't interfere in the affairs of every nation in order to set things right, as we see it, isn't it better to trade with them in hopes that, eventually, enough of the wealth created by trade will filter down to the poor, that the poor will eventually be able to send their kids to school, and that those kids will break through the glass ceilings in their nations and make, for themselves, a better future? It seems the only option other than, perhaps, building schools in all these troubled nations and hoping that educating the people will solve the problem. In any event, I hardly see the point in focusing on the free market, the best tool for spreading political freedom in the world, for not being perfect and mending society's grievous ills. That's down to us being better human beings, not to our economics which, while flawed, is the best that we have.
Well-argued, but an unconvincing conclusion saps it from its strength. (3/5 Stars)
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