by Amy Chua
To be sure, Africa also differs in important respects from other developing regions of the world. No other region is poorer or has Africa’s complexity of tribal, linguistic, ethnic, and subethnic divisions. Africa was the last region to be decolonized. Corruption and looting have occurred in Africa on a scale unknown to the rest of the world. Ethnic violence and civil warfare—certainly not all involving market-dominant minorities—occur more frequently and with more intensity, or at any rate with more primitive weapons, than elsewhere.
Nevertheless, taking a global perspective, it becomes clear that Africa is no more exceptional or hopeless than other regions of the non-Western world. On the contrary, like Southeast Asia or Latin America—but probably to a greater extent—Africa is plagued with the problem of market-dominant minorities. As a result, economic liberalization, free markets, and globalization are aggravating Africa’s extreme ethnic concentrations of wealth, provoking the same dangerous combination of frustration, envy, insecurity, and suppressed anger that can also be seen among the impoverished indigenous majorities of Indonesia, Russia, Guatemala, or Sri Lanka. What happens when democratization—or more accurately, immediate elections with universal suffrage—is added to this volatile mixture is the sobering subject of Part Two.
PART TWO
THE POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF GLOBALIZATION
Thus has the spread of global markets produced vast, inflammable ethnic wealth imbalances all over the world. But globalization has also had a crucial political dimension: namely, the American-led worldwide promotion of free elections and democratization.
That markets and democracy swept the world simultaneously is not a coincidence. After the fall of the Berlin Wall a common political and economic consensus emerged, not only in the West but to a considerable extent around the world. Markets and democracy, working hand in hand, would transform the world into a community of modernized, peace-loving nations. In the process, ethnic hatred, extremist fundamentalism, and other “backward” aspects of underdevelopment would be swept away.
The consensus could not have been more mistaken. Since 1989, the world has seen the proliferation of ethnic conflict, the rise of militant Islam, the intensification of group hatred and nationalism, expulsions, massacres, confiscations, calls for renationalization, and two genocides of magnitudes unprecedented since the Nazi Holocaust. The following four chapters will attempt to explain why.
In the last twenty years democratization has been a central, massively funded pillar of American foreign policy. In the 1990s the U.S. government spent approximately $1 billion on democracy initiatives for the post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. At the same time, America aggressively promoted democracy throughout Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Haiti alone received more than $100 million in democracy aid after 1994. With the glaring exception of the Middle Eastern states, there is almost no developing or transitional country in the world where the United States has not actively championed political liberalization, majoritarian elections, and the empowerment of civil society. As of 2000, an estimated 63 percent of the world’s population, in 120 countries, lived under democratic rule, a vast increase from even a decade ago.1
The global spread of democratization reflects the powerful assumption in Western policy and intellectual circles that markets and democracy go hand in hand. But in the numerous countries around the world with a market-dominant minority, just the opposite has proved true. Adding democracy to markets has been a recipe for instability, upheaval, and ethnic conflagration.
In countries with a market-dominant minority and a poor “indigenous” majority, the forces of democratization and marketization directly collide. As markets enrich the market-dominant minority, democratization increases the political voice and power of the frustrated majority. The competition for votes fosters the emergence of demagogues who scapegoat the resented minority, demanding an end to humiliation, and insisting that the nation’s wealth be reclaimed by its “true owners.” Thus as America toasted the spread of global elections through the 1990s, vengeful ethnic slogans proliferated: “Zimbabwe for Zimbabweans,” “Indonesia for Indonesians,” “Uzbekistan for Uzbeks,” “Kenya for Kenyans,” “Ethiopia for Ethiopians,” “Yids out of Russia,” “Hutu Power,” “Serbia for Serbs,” and so on. More moderate candidates, who disavow ethnic politics, are made to look like traitors. As popular hatred of the rich “outsiders” mounts, the result is an ethnically charged political pressure cooker in which some form of backlash is almost unavoidable.
This backlash typically takes one of three forms. The first is a backlash against markets, targeting the market-dominant minority’s wealth. The second is a backlash against democracy by forces favorable to the market-dominant minority. The third and most ferocious kind of backlash is ethnic cleansing and other forms of majority-supported ethnic violence, as occurred most recently in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
In other words, in the numerous countries around the world with a market-dominant minority, the simultaneous pursuit of free markets and democracy has led not to widespread peace and prosperity, but to confiscation, autocracy, and mass slaughter. Outside the industrialized West, these have been the wages of globalization.
CHAPTER 5
Backlash against Markets
Ethnically Targeted Seizures
and Nationalizations
In Zimbabwe, for three years now, furious mobs wielding sticks, axes, crossbows, iron bars, sharpened bicycle spokes, and AK-47 automatic rifles have invaded and ripped apart white-owned commercial farms. Usually by the hundreds, sometimes a thousand at a time, the invaders—with noms de guerre like “Hitler” and “Comrade Jesus”—ransack and destroy, hurling stones and gasoline bombs, singing revolutionary songs, drinking crates of looted beer, fighting over bread and tinned beef, beating, raping, abducting. “They were really like wild dogs,” sobbed a terrified victim. After grabbing food, money, and clothing, they “grabbed four chickens, cut their throats and barbecued them as they watched the house they had set on fire burn down.” Hospitals are flooded with victims of violence: resisters, black or white, faces smashed to a pulp, deep welts zigzagging down their backs, some shot at point-blank range.1
These assaults have not been spontaneous. Rather, they have been sponsored and encouraged by the Zanu-PF government of President Robert Mugabe, which has designated over three thousand farms, covering millions of acres and overwhelmingly white-owned, for confiscation. “We are taking our land,” Mugabe has said. “We cannot be expected to buy back our land that was never bought from us, never bought from our ancestors!” To thousands of cheering supporters in December 2000, he declared, “Our party must continue to strike fear in the heart of the white man—our real enemy. The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans.” When middle-aged Zimbabweans marched for peace, they were bludgeoned by police.2
Many have described the violence directed at Zimbabwe’s white farmers and their black farmhands as “anarchy.” But if this is anarchy, it is an anarchy born of democracy. Moreover, this “anarchy” follows a highly predictable, worldwide pattern. Democratization in Zimbabwe arrived with independence in 1980, in the face of a 1 percent former-colonizer minority owning 70 percent of the nation’s best land.
Mugabe was a hero of Zimbabwe’s revolutionary movement. In 1976 he declared, “in Zimbabwe, none of the white exploiters will be allowed to keep an acre of their land.” That promise helped him sweep to overwhelming victory in the closely monitored 1980 elections, and repeating that promise has helped him win every election since.3 On taking power in 1980, Mugabe was as popular as Nelson Mandela was in newly postapartheid South Africa.
It is easy to demonize Mugabe. But in an ugly sense Mugabe has behaved as a highly rational vote-seeking politician, and the recent violence and seizures are direct products of the democratic process. In 1980, heavily pressured by Britain, Mugabe agreed to a ten-year moratorium
on major land reform: Zimbabwe’s whites would be allowed to keep their vast estates in exchange for their tacit political support. After the deal expired in 1990, Mugabe stepped up his rhetoric about nationalizing white-owned land, particularly whenever elections rolled around. Nevertheless, largely out of fear of losing foreign investment and World Bank and IMF loans, Mugabe redistributed almost no white farmland in the nineties.
Meanwhile, Mugabe’s popularity waned. Complying with IMF free market austerity measures led to sharp price hikes, unemployment, and widespread disenchantment among Zimbabwe’s poorest. These hardships were exacerbated by drought and massive crop failure. Crime rates increased. At the same time, Mugabe was plagued by one corruption scandal after another. In the late 1990s, Zimbabwe’s white farmers and corporations, anxious over Mugabe’s intensifying calls for confiscation of their land and sensing weakness in his constituency, swung their support fully behind the free-market-oriented opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Along with the British government, Zimbabwe’s whites poured funding into the MDC.4 Furious, Mugabe—called a “master manipulator” of the populace even by his detractors—responded as he always had: by playing the race card.
Starting in 1998, in anticipation of the 2000 parliamentary elections, Mugabe called for the immediate seizure of hundreds of commercial farms owned by the “sons of Britain” and “enemies of Zimbabwe.” These calls were delivered at mass rallies and broadcast on national television. As the 2002 presidential elections approached, Mugabe intensified the hatemongering and expropriations. Subordinates were sent into white-owned tobacco fields to mobilize support: “Vote for Zanu PF and you will all be given land, farms, houses. Vote for Zanu PF and there will be peace, jobs, prosperity. Vote for MDC and there will be war. We will get our guns.” Their slogans were: “Down with the whites. Down with colonialism. Down with the MDC. Down with Britain.” The seizures began in earnest in 2000 and have accelerated since.5
The results have been catastrophic. Zimbabwe’s currency, stock market, tourism sector, and foreign investment have all collapsed. Vast fields of tobacco, maize, sunflower, and sugar lay in charred ruins. Tens of millions of dollars in export earnings have literally gone up in flames. Aid agencies estimate that more than half a million people in Zimbabwe face starvation.
It is generally assumed in the Western media that the opposition MDC, which repudiated the violent land seizures, would have won the 2002 elections had they been free and fair. This might well be true: Mugabe set up far more polling stations in rural areas, where his support was strongest, than elsewhere, and there are plenty of reports of intimidation. On the other hand, African governments have uniformly praised the 2002 elections, which in fact were no more irregular than other elections in Africa that the West has deemed “free and fair.”6
More important, the MDC was in fact, and was known to be, sponsored and funded by whites. “The problem with MDC,” as one observer bluntly puts it, is that “[d]espite being led by trade unionist Morgan Tsvangirai, despite taking 57 seats in the election (most, but not all, of its candidates were black), despite appealing hugely to an urban black electorate, this is still a party designed for and by whites.” At the MDC party headquarters in Harare last June, according to news reports, “the only black face visible was the security guard outside the front entrance. Within, it was a sea of pale political strategists, organizers, media spinners and volunteers.”7
Even if MDC had won in 2002, pressures for the massive redistribution of white holdings would not have gone away. The land problem—specifically, the problem of a 1 percent market-dominant white minority controlling the country’s best land in the form of three-thousand-acre commercial farms while most members of the black majority live in land-hungry poverty—would remain, ready for another firebrand politician to exploit, if not next year, then two or five or ten years down the road. Nor should it be forgotten that the harsh, free market, belt-tightening policies urged on Zimbabwe in the early 1990s by the United States, World Bank, and IMF created hardship among the nation’s poorest, contributing to the mass popular frustrations that in turn made Mugabe’s confiscatory campaigns all the more appealing. Zimbabwe’s dilemma is that foreign investors and global capital flee whenever the country proposes to upset the white minority’s landholdings—which is why, from 1980 to the late 1990s almost no land redistribution occurred. But placating the interests of the market-dominant minority and the international business community throws fat on Zimbabwe’s democratic fire. Today’s bloody confiscations and the resulting economic collapse are the direct product of the collision between free markets and democratic politics.
Meanwhile, in neighboring South Africa—which prides itself on its differences from Zimbabwe—five thousand people marched in July 2001 on Kempton Park near Pretoria. At the helm were leaders of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a black opposition party that has campaigned with the slogan “One settler—one bullet!” since its inaugural meeting in 1989. (“Settlers” refers to whites.) The marchers, most of whom were homeless, demanded revolution and the right to occupy land. After years of black majority rule, they protested, they still had nothing to show for it. The PAC leaders egged them on, promising Mugabe-style invasions throughout the country. “This is just a small microcosm of what is potentially a time-bomb,” declared the PAC secretary general. Furious, the Mbeki government evicted the squatters, condemning the PAC leaders as “dangerous demagogues” and “hypocrites and opportunists who will jump at the slightest opportunity to exploit the plight of our people.”8 But since the Kempton Park incident, President Mbeki has accelerated land redistribution efforts.
At the same time, the country’s multibillion-dollar mining industry is facing what London’s The Times recently called “[t]he biggest shake-up in South African ownership rights since the discovery of diamonds and gold in the [nineteenth] century.” If signed into law, the new Minerals Development Bill, acrimoniously fought by the white-dominated mining industry, “will abolish private ownership of mineral rights, transfer title to the State, and grant it the sole power to award licenses for prospecting and mining.” The Mbeki government denies charges that it is conducting “back-door nationalization.” A number of influential whites agree that the scope of the bill is greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless, mining giants like De Beers and Anglo-American are deeply troubled about a clause in the bill that gives the minister for minerals and energy enormous discretionary power to “confiscate any property or any right for black empowerment purposes” without the right of appeal. The current minister, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, has publicly declared that “the twenty-first century is not going to allow a white-dominated mining industry to continue.”9
The land seizures in Zimbabwe are part of a much larger global pattern. Throughout the non-Western world, wherever a small “outsider” market-dominant minority enjoys spectacular wealth in the midst of mass destitution, democratization has invariably produced tremendous popular pressures to “take back the nation’s wealth” for its “true owners.” This is true today from Indonesia to Russia to Venezuela, as I will address momentarily. But the same phenomenon—ethnically targeted confiscation—has been common ever since democratization came to the developing world in the early part of the twentieth century.
Understanding the History of Nationalization in the Developing World without Cold War Blinders
Throughout the twentieth century, bursts of nationalization repeatedly punctuated and damaged the economic growth of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Most American economists and policymakers, steeped in decades of Cold War dynamics, tend to assume that all these nationalizations were motivated by socialist or Communist thinking. In fact, however, nationalization in the Third World has always been far less an expression of Communism than of popular frustration and vengeance directed at a market-dominant minority.
With a few exceptions (China, Cuba, Vietnam), nationalization programs in Third World countries—unlike those in the former Soviet bloc—never sou
ght to eliminate private property or eradicate all economic classes. On the contrary, in the vast majority of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, nationalization programs have targeted explicitly and almost exclusively the assets and industries of hated market-dominant minorities.
Pre-1989 examples of nationalizations targeting a market-dominant minority are so numerous that I’ll give only a few illustrations here. In newly independent Indonesia, President Sukarno’s sweeping nationalizations in the 1950s and 1960s targeted both the market-dominant Dutch and, very explicitly, the market-dominant Chinese. Indeed, through nationalization and other anti-Chinese measures, Sukarno “indigenized” key sectors of the economy—finance, mining, batik, rice, import-export, industry—all formerly dominated by Europeans and Chinese. Although Sukarno’s “Guided Democracy” was in many ways undemocratic, his anti-Chinese nationalizations were overwhelmingly and feverishly supported by the pribumi majority. Indeed, most indigenous Indonesians thought Sukarno was “too soft” on the Chinese.10
In Sri Lanka, which has maintained a troubled parliamentary democracy for nearly half a century, the disproportionate economic power of the Tamil minority had produced bitter resentment among the (largely Buddhist) Sinhalese majority by the 1950s. Solomon Bandaranaike—Oxford-educated and a consummate politician—capitalized on this ethnic resentment. Converting from Roman Catholicism to Buddhism, he swept to electoral victory in 1956 by scapegoating Tamils and championing the cause of “Sinhala Only.” After Bandaranaike’s assassination in 1959, his wife Sirimavo became prime minister, again through democratic elections. Once in office, Mrs. Bandaranaike began radically nationalizing land and industry. These nationalizations had nothing to do with socialism; they did not affect Sinhalese business interests. Rather their express purpose was to elevate the “true” Sri Lankans over Tamils, Christians, and other ethnic minorities.11
