World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.

• Author: Turpy, Marian L.
• Position: Book Review

Amy Chua New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, 2003, 340 pp.

World on Fire is a more nuanced book than the title suggests. Chua's publisher selected the title despite, so she claimed, her better judgment. Indeed, with its equally provocative subtitle, Chua's book must be read carefully as much for the things it says as for the things it does not say. The book is not a diatribe that will warm the hearts of the antiglobalization protesters. In fact, Chua acknowledges that free markets may offer the "best" economic hope in the long run.

Instead, Chua claims that "simultaneous" liberalization of the markets and democratization in the face of a resented market-dominant minority, leads to ethnic tension and violence. That happens, she argues, because economic freedom enables the disproportionate flourishing of minorities, while democratization empowers the resentful majorities. Chua believes that the United States deserves much of the blame for spreading "unrestrained" markets and equally "unrestrained" democracies as supposed panaceas to all the world's ills.

But Chua is wrong to assume that the United States is the primary driving force behind liberalization. Liberalization is mostly a result of the collapse of central planning. The governments that have undertaken some degree of liberalization have done so out of their own self interest and not because the United States wished it.

Chua also alleges that the United States promotes "unrestrained" capitalism overseas, while keeping markets regulated at home. If that is true, American foreign policy has been unsuccessful. None of the countries Chua mentions as hotbeds of ethnic hatred enjoys more economic freedom than the United States. In fact, some of those countries come at the very bottom of the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom of the World Report, which ranks countries according to their degree of economic freedom. Out of the 123 countries surveyed in 2002, Burma came in 122nd place and Russia in 116th place. Other countries she mentions, such as Peru and Malaysia, are freer, but still far from "unrestrained". In the same study, those two countries ranked 45th and 51st, respectively.

Chua does not seem to care much for the differences between the actual and the perceived advances of economic and political freedom. She thus falls into the trap of overemphasizing the extent of those reforms. Still, no matter how slowly in some places, the world is undergoing a general process of liberalization and Chua...