I Dig Multiethnic Places

I was thinking about Brazil. In a lot of ways, Brazil reminds me of the United States. Both are large countries, in two senses. They are physically big, and encompass a wide range of geographic features and climates, with distinct regional cultures. Both countries have big populations, made up of black, white, Asian, and indigenous peoples and any combination of those you can imagine. And that is a beautiful thing.

I'm reading a really interesting book right now called "World on Fire." It's by Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law school. So she has cred. The book is about the "volatile" combination of market orientated economies and instant democracy in countries with "market dominant minorities." That is the important phrase to remember. Globalization frequently makes the market dominant minorities even richer. They have the capital and the international connections. An already extant wealth disparity between the majority and the MDMs increases. There are so many examples: ethnic Indians in West Africa, Tutsis in Rwanda, white people in Southern Africa and Latin America, Croats in Yugoslavia, ethnic Chinese all over Southeast Asia. An already extant resentment and envy among the majority towards the MDMs also increases. Thus proceeds the introduction of market economics urged on by western governments and institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and others. Simultaneously, free and fair monitored elections start to take place, and now those majorities have free speech, freedom of assembly and meaningful votes. Then they can be taken advantage of by demagogues and opportunistic politicians more than willing to exploit ethnic tension to get votes. (While it's not really fair to include all of these people in the same sentence, this category could include Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez, Slobodan Milosevic, Franjo Tudjman, Gennady Zyuganov, the Ollanta brothers, Evo Morales and Felipe Quispe. Some of these men have much better intentions than others, though.) And sometimes it gets really ugly. Riots, looting, rapes, lynchings. That kind of ugly. Then things get worse. Misguided attempts to redistribute wealth result in nationalizations of companies and the resultant decrease in efficiency and quality, the foreign investors go away, the MDMs move their money (this can be in the billions) to banks in other countries, and the economy goes straight down the toilet. Next on the menu, how about a backlash against democracy, or perhaps an extended period of crony capitalism? The worst kind of crony capitalism, wherein a tiny group of businessmen and corrupt politicians (think Suharto, the Somozas, Ferdinand Marcos, the Yeltsin family, Daniel Arap Moi, the Burmese junta) hoard massive amounts of money whilst most of the country lives in poverty. This not a recipe for peaceful coexistence. Towards the end of the book, she goes for a bit of stretch. She suggests that Israelis are a regional MDM and that Americans (or estadounidenses, si prefieres) are a global MDM. In the context of her argument, these assertions are not as convincing as the rest of the book.

One of the things I like about this book is that it's not just anti-globalization dreck by some pinko like Noam Chomsky. Amy Chua is not arguing that globalization should all of a sudden be ended and perhaps reversed (were such a thing even remotely possible). She doesn't think globalization is a bad thing, necessarily. She does think it's not being implemented the right way. Market economies and democracy are great things. It's fantastic that Peru and Bolivia elected presidents who were indigenous cats. The problem is that developing and post-socialist countries are being asked to integrate total laissez-faire economics, with minimal regulation (much like the parking lot of a Phish show) and hard-core democracy, with universal suffrage, at the same time. None of the western nations that are today so prosperous ever tried to do both of those things at the same time. That's not fair. (Actually, the author points out, there is one example of a Western nation trying to implement universal suffrage and total economic deregulation at the same time. That would be Weimar Germany, and we all know how that turned out.)

And the biggest shame about all this is the ugly ethnic violence. Because multiethnic places are usually really cool places to be. The collision and combination of cultures creates all sorts of neat fusions. The United States, Brazil and Cuba all have great music, due to the combination of European and African musical traditions. Those cultural combinations produce stuff from the delightful to the sublime, including jazz, samba, mambo, pinoy rap, spam musubi, peranakan cuisine, Kill Bill 1 & 2, Chicago hot dogs and California Pizza Kitchen. (I realize that's mostly food and music, but those are two of my favorite things.)

(Here's a link to the wikipedia page for the book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_on_Fire. This covers some of the criticism of the book.)