February 12-18, 2004

artpicks

Amy Chua

by Joel Tannenbaum

Books

As the Berlin Wall fell, advocates of free markets and one-size-fits-all democracy assured us that we were witnessing "the end of history." Since then, we have seen ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, East Timor and the former Yugoslavia. We've seen the collapse of the Southeast Asian "tiger" economies and, more recently, the adoption of a Napoleonic foreign policy by the United States. Now, in 2004, these pro-globalization folk are sighing quietly and realizing that maybe history isn't over quite yet.

This realization has spawned an odd new class of intellectuals: anti-globalism globalists -- free-market advocates who still shudder at the horrors of the welfare state, and yet have seen with their own eyes the catastrophe wrought by economic liberalization everywhere from Argentina to the former Soviet Union.

Foremost among them is Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor who spent much of the 1990s helping Mexico to privatize its telecommunications systems. In 1994, Chua's aunt, a member of the Philippines' wealthy and insular Chinese elite, was brutally murdered by her Filipino chauffeur. Police listed the motive as "revenge."

These experiences and others led her to a critique of globalization based on a theory of "market-dominant minorities": economically successful ethnic minorities who become the victims of violent hatred when the societies they live in are destabilized by the imposition of market reforms and democratic elections.

Chua's book, World on Fire (Doubleday), is fascinating and frustrating. Fascinating for the originality of her argument and for her thumbnail sketches of ethnic conflict on six continents. Frustrating for the stubborn tenacity with which she clings to the notion (in spite of every single example she presents) that, as Margaret Thatcher used to say, "there is no alternative."

Amy Chua, Tue., Feb. 17, 5:30 p.m., $15-$25, WHYY Independence Foundation Civic Space, 150 N. Sixth St., 215-561-4700.

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