World on Fire
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- This article is about the sociology book. For the song by Sarah McLachlan, see World on Fire (song).
World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability is a 2002 book published by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua as an academic study into ethnic divisions in a society. The book reflects upon a broad history of intercultural exchanges, from 19th century colonialism to modern globalization, and extracts from history a general lexicon of concepts and trends which are universal to all exchange and conflict situations.
World on Fire explores a phenomenon called "market-dominant minority" (dominant minority), using examples such as the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews in Russia, Whites in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and Indians in East Africa and Fiji. Chua claims that minority immigrants often become dominant minorities, because they naturally tend to form more cohesive, relatively isolate, and more self-sustaining communities than the usually indigenous majority. This cohesion typically translates into greater economic prosperity and, eventually, political power. Ethnic minorities, says Chua, are often highly successful when established within a larger ethnic society, and tend to maintain a disproportionately higher socio-economic status relative to the majority. Chua attributes this to several factors, but largely to the synergy between cross-cultural connections and commerce —immigrants typical maintain homeland connections, which serve as a basis for imports and remote financing. In comparison, mono-cultural ethnic majorities tend to be limited in their ability to access outside markets.
Minorities may also have taboos restricting intermarriage, whereby normal social integration and cultural assimilation within a society are minimized in favor of maintaining an ethnic cabal. This, in turn, means that social functions, status, access, and privileges often become prohibited to those not within the dominant minority. Since dominant minority individuals can grow to control a disproportionately larger influence than individuals in the majority, conflicts often arise between the social dominance of a minority and the demographic dominance of the majority. As the minority often must resort to coercive means to enforce typically non-democratic means of control and policy, this dominance often exaggerates and inflames hostilities between ethnic factions.
In her own native country of the Philippines, she explains that the ethnic-Chinese minority maintains a far greater status than the indigenous majority. The fact that the Chinese Filipinos maintain offland business connections, as well as a tight economic community within the Philippines, is a hotbed for envy and bitterness directed at the minority.
In cases where the minority holds onto power through the use of force, the results have historically been shown to be catastrophic. For example, the Vietnam War was largely a war between a dominant minority (in South Vietnam, supported by the United States)) which sought to hold onto its power despite overwhelming popular support for the Viet Minh and its descendant government under Ho Chi Minh. The South and the U.S. governments sought to portray the war as one of anti-Communist opposition to Communism, despite the likely democratic support for Minh, should elections have been held. The war ultimately caused the deaths of 2-4 million civilians (plus another 1 million combatants), largely among rural pro-Minh peoples in the South.
Chua continues with other examples, such as Bolivia's Spanish/Indio divisions, Indonesia's Chinese Buddhist/Native Muslim populations, and others. Each, she argues, maintains a clear line of social and economic demarcations which are further outlined by social and religious taboos.
While the United States doesn't tend to have a national dominant minority per se, Chua says that it nevertheless does have regional ethnic divisions, such as the stereotypical Korean grocers in Los Angeles, or Jewish jewellers in New York. Chua says that there is some truth to these stereotypes in the sense that these are rapidly prospering and established minority communities. The United States, she also claims, constitutes an ethnic minority on its own, with relation to the rest of the world. The U.S. has by far more wealth per capita than the world on average, and holds a large portion of the total wealth in the world, despite comprising only 4% of the world's population. This disparity of wealth, Chua says, is the result of hegemonial intrusions, in the form of "exported democracy," which fuels anti-American attitudes abroad, eventually leading to hostile reactions like the September 11, 2001 attacks.
[edit] Criticism
Chua did not attempt to make a statistical analysis. One such shows that the fall of Communism and the increase in the number of democratic states were accompanied by a sudden and dramatic decline in total warfare, interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, and the number of refugees and displaced persons [1]. This is related to the democratic peace theory which argues that more democracy causes a general decrease in systematic violence.
