World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability Doubleday Books Dec. 2002 isbn: 0385503024 $26.00

Amy Chua, February 4

Tuesday, 6pm
Harvard Information Center in the Holyoke Center
1350 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge
free and open to public

Apostles of globalization, such as Thomas Friedman, believe that exporting free markets and democracy to other countries will increase peace and prosperity throughout the developing world; Amy Chua is the anti-Thomas Friedman. Her book wil be a dash of cold water in the face of globalists, techno-utopians, and liberal triumphalists as she shows that just the opposite has happened: When global markets open, ethnic conflict worsens and politics turns ugly and violent.

Drawing on examples from around the world--from Africa and Asia to Russia and Latin America--Chua examines how free markets do not spread wealth evenly throughout the whole of these societies. Instead they produce a new class of extremely wealthy plutocrats--individuals as rich as nations. Almost always members of a minority group--Chinese in the Philippines, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America, Indians in East Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia--these "market-dominant minorities" have become targets of violent hatred. Adding democracy to this volatile mix unleashes supressed ethnic hatreds and brings to power ethnonationalist governments that pursue aggressive policies of confiscation and revenge. Chua further shows how individual countries are often viewed as dominant minorities, explaining the phenomena of ethnic resentment in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the rising tide of anti-American sentiment around the world. This more than anything accounts for the visceral hatred of Americans that has been expressed in recent acts of terrorism.

Bold and original, World on Fire is a perceptive examination of the far-reaching effects of exporting capitalism with democracy and its potentially catastrophic results.

Praise for the Author:

"A brilliant, groundbreaking assault on the prevailing wisdom that the American political and economic model is a one-stop solution to the world's woes."
-Will Blythe, Elle Magazine

"Chua frequently fuses expert analysis with personal recollections to assert that globalization has created a volatile concoction of free markets and democracy that has incited economic devastation, ethnic hatred and genocidal violence throughout the developing world.
-Publishers Weekly

"A nuanced contribution to the debate over whether free markets spread democracy or merely advance the McDonaldsization of the globe. Chua defends her case well (and adds a damning footnote to the history of Enron along the way). Globalism is a fact of modern life, she concludes, but one destined to yield much bloodshed in the years to come."
-Kirkus Reviews

"This hard-hitting book should be read by everyone who still imagines that free markets can solve all the world's ills."
-Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America