World on Fire World on Fire World on Fire

by Amy Chua

  As a result, although there has been minimal democratization in the Arab Middle East, an intense, majority-based Arab ethnonationalism, along with tremendous hostility against Israeli Jews, nevertheless exists throughout the region. Although it is certainly not clear that fundamentalism is supported by a majority of Arabs—sentiment on the “Arab Street” varies considerably from country to country—there is no question that if popular elections were held throughout the Arab world, Israel would be a common whipping boy among vote-seeking politicians.

  Today very few Arab states even formally recognize Israel’s “right to exist.” Worse, many Arabs in the Middle East seem committed to the policy, officially renounced by the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1993, of destroying Israel and “driving Israelis into the sea.” As David Remnick recently wrote: “Forget Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their culture of martyrdom and absolute victory. Last year, Faisal Husseini, a decided moderate among Yasar Arafat’s leadership ranks, gave an interview not long before he died in which he compared [the Oslo Accords of 1993] to a Trojan horse, an intermediate, tactical step leading to the elimination of Israel. He said, ‘If you are asking me as a Pan-Arab nationalist what are the Palestinian borders according to the higher strategy, I will immediately reply: From the river to the sea’”—that is, with no Israel on the map. Meanwhile in Iran, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaking in a Tehran stadium shortly after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, “called for Israel’s nuclear destruction. A single nuclear bomb would be sufficient to destroy Israel, he said, whereas any Israeli counterstrike could do only limited damage.”19

  Thus, despite its ancient roots and unique status as the crucible of religious strife, the conflict in the Middle East is also a striking manifestation of an intense majority-supported movement aimed at eliminating a despised market-dominant minority. In part, the ferocity of anti-Israeli feeling in the Middle East is sui generis. But it is also in part driven by factors familiar throughout the developing world. The ethnic hatred felt by many Middle Eastern Arabs, compounded by extreme poverty and a profound sense of powerlessness and inferiority, is analogous to the deep resentment experienced by the black majority in Zimbabwe, by Indonesia’s pribumi majority, or by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.

  What Markets and Democracy Would Bring

  in the Middle East

  After September 11, 2001, many prominent voices immediately called for free markets and democratization as the solution for terrorism and ethnic conflict in the Middle East. In a sense, this is no surprise: Poverty and corrupt, repressive regimes have clearly helped turn the Middle East into the cauldron of hatred that it currently is. Thus for Thomas Friedman, the solution to Middle Eastern terrorism and strife is “multi-ethnic, pluralistic, free-market democracy.”20

  Unfortunately, “multi-ethnic, pluralistic, free-market democracy” is not a policy. It is an ideal, and the problem is getting to that ideal. Even if U.S. foreign policy were unconstrained by dependence on Arab oil or other problems peculiar to the region, the basic policy prescription that America promotes elsewhere in the non-Western world—laissez-faire markets and rapid democratization—would be a very high-risk strategy in the Middle East.

  It is critical to distinguish between the short-term realities and the optimistic longer term prospects of market liberalization in the Arab states. In the longer term, if the Arab economies could be genuinely opened and their societies transformed from what Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria calls their present “feudal” conditions, there is good reason to think that markets could produce enormous benefits in the Middle East. Three distinctive features of the Middle Eastern states could make market reforms especially propitious. First, unlike most developing countries, the Arab states have an unusually large number of skilled and educated individuals, often with advanced degrees, who are currently unemployed. Second, the populations of the Arab states include groups famous the world over for their “entrepreneurialism.” As Zakaria notes, “The Palestinians, tragically, have long been the region’s best merchants and would probably respond fastest to new economic opportunities if they could put the intifada behind them.”21 Finally, again unlike most developing countries, the Arab states generally do not face the “problem” of an internal market-dominant minority, and for this reason markets are less likely to be ethnically destabilizing at the national level. Thus, with certain optimistic assumptions, markets can be a key to long-term Middle Eastern reform, both economically and politically.

  In the short run, however, laissez-faire global markets in the Middle East will not transform the entrenched realities of Arab society or have a civilizing effect on ethnic relations. On the contrary, for at least a generation, the effects of marketization in the Middle East would at best produce only marginal benefits for the great mass of Arab poor. However correct in theory, free trade agreements and privatization—in the absence of major structural reforms, which are highly unlikely to occur—cannot in the short term alter the pervasive illiteracy, corruption, and Third World conditions prevailing throughout the Arab states.

  Meanwhile, even if the turn to fundamentalism in the Middle East is a product of closed or repressive political regimes, it sadly does not follow that political liberalization in the region today would lead to moderation—or, for that matter, pro-market regimes. On the contrary, rapid democratization in the Arab states would likely be a recipe for extremist politics, dominated by ethnonationalist (if not fundamentalist) parties unified in their hatred of Israel and the West. As Zakaria candidly observes: “America’s allies in the Middle East are autocratic, corrupt and heavy-handed. But they are still more liberal, tolerant and pluralistic than what would likely replace them [with democratic elections]. If elections had been held last month in Saudi Arabia with King Fahd and Osama bin Laden on the ballot, I would not bet too heavily on His Royal Highness’s fortunes.” A similar dynamic exists throughout the Arab states. In Kuwait, the democratically elected Parliament is packed with Israel-despising Islamic fundamentalists. In Jordan and Morocco, the kings are much more moderate and Western-oriented than the populations over which they rule. Finally, in the Palestinian Authority, the suicide-and-murder-bent Hamas is more popular than the arguably more moderate Palestine Liberation Organization.22

  Many of us tend to think of the Arab-Israeli conflict as being so ancient in its roots that it is impervious to the forces of modernity. In truth, the problem is worse. Given the current realities, the principal forces of modernization—markets and majoritarian politics—are fuel to the fires of ethnic conflict in the Middle East. While free market democracy may well be the optimal end point in the Middle East, the simultaneous pursuit today of laissez-faire markets and immediate majority rule would almost certainly produce even more government-sponsored bloodshed and ethnic warfare.

  CHAPTER 11

  Why They Hate Us

  America as a Global Market-Dominant Minority

  I found myself in the middle of an argument the other evening, one of many I’ve been in since September 11, 2001. An outspoken Chinese friend of mine, Mei Lan—born and raised in China but about to become an American citizen, having just married a native New Yorker—asserted at a Manhattan dinner party that 99 percent of all Chinese in China were happy about the attack on America. This prompted an outcry among the American guests. “Ninety-nine?” someone asked incredulously. “What pollster produced that statistic?” To which Mei Lan replied, “Let’s not get hung up on numbers. Face it, deal with it—Americans are hated.”

  “People like you spreading misinformation, Mei Lan, are exactly the problem,” another guest heatedly interjected. He had visited China the previous summer. The Chinese were nice people, he explained, who didn’t always agree with American policies but who certainly didn’t hate us and in fact wanted to learn from us. Another guest, an international lawyer, agreed, and described all the sympathetic e-mails he had received from Hong Kong and Shanghai after September 11.

  Mei Lan the
n brought up the topic of American hypocrisy about human rights, and the conversation further deteriorated after that.

  In the aftermath of September 11, many Americans have experienced some version of this conversation, debating the extent of anti-Americanism throughout the world. A common problem is the tendency to generalize from an n of 2 or 3. “I got e-mails from my friends in Mexico and Chile. Anti-Americanism in Latin America is wildly exaggerated.” Or: “My Palestinian friend e-mailed me expressing horror about the World Trade Center. The U.S. media presents a totally distorted picture of anti-Americanism over there.”

  Of course not all of the Middle East hates us. Nor does 99 percent of China hate us. The non-Western world is far from monolithic in its attitudes toward America; generalizations on this subject are especially perilous. Nevertheless, it is sadly untrue that Americans are loved and admired around the world. The existence of some anti-American resentment and objections to U.S. foreign policy was apparent to anyone who traveled outside the United States in recent years. But the depth and passion of anti-American hatred that was revealed on September 11 was a profound, nationwide shock.

  “Once there was a time when the most evil people on earth were ashamed to write their crime across the heavens,” writes Neal Ascherson. This was not so of September 11, 2001. “Manhattan that morning was a diagram, a blue bar-chart with columns which were tall or not so tall. A silver cursor passed across the screen and clicked silently on the tallest column, which turned red and black and presently vanished. This is how we delete you. The cursor returned and clicked on the second column. Presently a thing like a solid grey-white cauliflower rose until it was a mountain covering all south Manhattan. This is how we bury you. It was the most open atrocity of all time, a simple demonstration written on the sky which everyone in the world was invited to watch. This is how much we hate you.”1

  Why do they hate us? Amidst grief, anger, patriotism, defiance, and retaliation, stunned Americans have repeatedly returned to this question. This chapter will offer one, certainly not the only, answer.

  America today has become the world’s market-dominant minority. Like the Chinese in the Philippines or the Lebanese in West Africa, Americans have attained heights of wealth and economic power wildly disproportionate to our tiny numbers. Just 4 percent of the world’s population, America dominates every aspect—financial, cultural, technological—of the global free markets we have come to symbolize. From the Islamic world to China, from our NATO allies to the southern hemisphere, America is seen (not incorrectly) as the engine and principal beneficiary of global marketization. For this—for our extraordinary market dominance, our seeming global invincibility—we have earned the envy, fear, and resentment of much of the rest of the world. Of course, not everyone who envies and resents us wants to destroy us. But there are those who do.

  Anti-Americanism around the world is, among other things, an expression at the global level of popular, demagogue-fueled mass resentment against a market-dominant minority. The expression of this resentment varies enormously in intensity, ranging from benign grumbling by French bureaucrats about bad films and bad food to strategic alliances between Russia and China to terrorism. Like the ethnic cleansing of Tutsi in Rwanda, the suicidal mass murder of three thousand innocents on American soil was the ultimate expression of group hatred. The attack on America was an act of revenge directly analogous to the bloody confiscations of white land in Zimbabwe, or the anti-Chinese riots and looting in Indonesia—fueled by the same feelings of envy, grievance, inferiority, powerlessness, and humiliation.

  As with Jewish market dominance in the Middle East or Kikuyu economic success in Kenya, the reasons for America’s global market dominance are the subject of bitter dispute. On one view, American economic success is the result of our superior institutions, entrepreneurial spirit, and generations of hard work. On another view, our wealth and power are the spoils of plunder, exploitation, and exclusion. Even within the United States, tempers flare over which view is correct. The reality is that both carry more than a grain of truth.

  On the other hand, there is astonishing global consensus on one point: that America has become the world’s unrivaled market-dominant minority.

  Market-Dominant America

  Whether you ask an Egyptian imam, a Wall Street banker, or France’s foreign minister, there is striking agreement that the United States, as a country, dominates, drives, perpetuates, and disproportionately prospers from the spread of global capitalism around the world. The facts support this perception.

  To begin with, it is barely exaggerating to say that the United States is responsible for the worldwide spread of free markets. No one has established this more evocatively than Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Today’s universal prescription of Privatization + Deregulation + Economic Liberalization “was made in America and Great Britain,” writes Friedman. The Electronic Herd—Friedman’s term for today’s millions of anonymous traders and investors “moving money around the world with the click of a mouse”—“is led by American Wall Street bulls.”

  At the same time, “[t]he most powerful agent pressuring other countries to open their markets for free trade and free investment is Uncle Sam, and America’s global armed forces keep these markets and sea lanes open for globalization . . .” As a historical matter, it was America, determined after the Second World War to promote capitalism and contain Communism, that drove the creation of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, GATT, and most recently the World Trade Organization as well as a host of other free-market-oriented international institutions. In other words, writes Friedman, “even within the Cold War system America was hard at work building out a global economy for its own economic and strategic reasons.”2

  Today, America sits on top of the global economy. As with the market-dominant Chinese in Southeast Asia, global marketization has intensified America’s breathtakingly disproportionate wealth and economic power. “Not so long ago,” writes Mort Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, “our preoccupation was with how America could prosper in a new era of global competition against a relentless Japan, a uniting Europe, and the Pacific Rim low-wage economies.” But in fact America emerged “triumphant in the new world economy.”3 According to U.S. government statistics for 2000, despite concerns about economic slowdown and recession, the United States, with a GDP of $9 trillion, is “the largest and most technologically powerful economy in the world” as well as “the leading industrial power in the world.” Our exports in 2000 totaled $776 billion; this figure does not include the roughly $2 trillion worth of goods produced, assembled, and sold overseas by foreign affiliates of American companies.4

  Needless to say, these blanket statistics hide enormous inequalities within the United States. In 1999, Bill Gates “owned as much as 40 percent of the American population put together,” writes Thomas Frank. Along with Gates, hundreds of thousands of American entrepreneurs, corporate managers, and just ordinary investors have become multimillionaires, even multibillionaires, practically overnight. Between 1979 and 1997, and adjusting for inflation, reports economist Paul Krugman, the income of families in the middle of the U.S. income distribution rose 9 percent, while the income of families in the top 1 percent rose 140 percent. Meanwhile, an estimated 60 million Americans have had to accept stagnant or even declining earnings in the 1990s and, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 34.5 million Americans (12.7 percent of the population) were officially poor in 1998. Drug addiction and violence continue to be looming problems in our inner cities. “Only the sadly impoverished and chaotic Russian Federation,” notes Edward Luttwak, “has as great a proportion of its citizens in prison as the affluent and well-governed United States . . .”5

  None of these internal blots lessens America’s market dominance at the global level. The American dollar is the world’s dominant currency; even jihadis hold their assets in dollars. English is the world’s dominant language; globalization is making this increasingly
so. American multinationals are the most powerful and visible in the world. It was fashionable for a while to describe multinationals as “citizens of the world,” beholden to no nation. But for most of the world today there is no question that Nike, Gap, Reebok, Starbucks, Ben & Jerry’s, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Disney, Levi Strauss, and Toys “” Us are American. It is precisely the American-ness of these brands that makes them irresistible to so many—and despicable to so many others.

  American fast food is globally dominant. Enough has been written elsewhere about McDonald’s, but it’s also worth noting that Pizza Hut operates in 86 countries around the world, Kentucky Fried Chicken in 82, and Burger King in 58, including Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. American stock exchanges are globally dominant; this is true despite the explosion of new stock exchanges from Shanghai to the Ivory Coast. American media are market dominant: “Where once the BBC let nation speak unto nation,” a British columnist recently lamented, “now we are one world under CNN.”6 Perhaps most important, American firms are utterly dominant in the new information technology. Indeed, for the rest of the world, American economic success is exemplified by the “New Titans” of information technology: the legendary Microsoft and Intel as well as Apple, Novell, Cisco, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, America Online, and so on.