We have just witnessed the end of the Western-dominated discourse on development and democracy. Free markets, democracy and globalisation are wonderful ideas. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the self-serving versions dished up by Washington, London and the international institutions they have dominated have ended up calling into question the very ideals on which the best hope of mankind may well depend.
No Western country today practises the kind of laissez-faire capitalism the US has advocated for more than two decades. The financial meltdown that originated from Wall Street only serves to underline the bankrupt versions of these great ideas, but the seeds of their own corruption were sown long ago. Two brilliant thinkers best help us navigate this treacherous post-Western world - after the end of the West's version of the world. Both are from Asian backgrounds but were educated in Britain or the US. As outsiders, they see through the charade and groupthink in Western institutions while mastering the critical tools of Western science and scholarship. Ha-joon Chang, a Korean-born economist and Amy Chua, a law professor at Yale, take a fresh look at globalisation, democracy and free markets from very different starting points. Chang studies the protectionist policies of the US and Britain, even going back several centuries to Henry VII, Elizabeth I and the writings of Alexander Hamilton.
Chua investigates how free markets and democracy have destabilised non-Western societies when there is an ethnic minority, such as the Chinese in Indonesia and the Philippines, that dominates the economy, resulting in violence, ethnic cleansing and/or racial conflagration.
But both arrive at similar conclusions: free markets and democracy do not make natural bedfellows. And if they do in Western countries, that is the outcome of a long historical process. However, this historical experience was forgotten in the euphoria over the end of the cold war and the rise of the US as the world's sole hyperpower. Instead, the West - read Washington - advocates an ahistorical and therefore ideological version of free markets and democracy. History was thrown out the window - that was pretentiously called 'the end of history' - and replaced by an ideology of rapidly imposing market and democracy on any developing countries as the only way to Nirvana. China, India and Brazil ignored that prescription and succeeded spectacularly; most former Soviet-bloc and some Latin American countries that followed it suffered disruption and slower growth.
As a result, there is growing resentment and even repudiation of free markets and democracy around the world, leading to 'the democratic deficit' or 'democratic retreat'. To understand this tragic democratic failure, US history is instructive. Chua observed the long history of disenfranchisement in America in an interview posted on the Web: 'The US had to disenfranchise a lot of people [to become a world power].'
A friend of mine, who has also read Chua's book World on Fire, flashed out what Chua's cryptic statement meant: 'Here is a brief summary of major democratic events that were carefully managed along with its economic advances in the US: the disenfranchisement of the poor and the un-landed didn't end until 1860. With its Jim Crow laws in Dixie, the blacks were effectively disenfranchised until the Johnson presidency in the 1960s, almost two centuries after the birth of the republic. Women were not given the right to vote until the passage of the 1920 amendment. 'At every step of the way, political freedom was parcelled out at a deliberate pace so as not to outstrip its stage of economic development. The tension between market and political forces were alternately stretched and relaxed. The ultra slow progression in the political process clearly illustrates the management of the systems and processes so that political development could be roughly synchronised with the broadening of a middle class.'