Еще про демократию в "третьем мире" (интересная статья)

Вот интересная статья, правда, длинная и на английском:


A World on the Edge

Выдержки:

There is a connection among these episodes /in Serbia, Philippines, Indonesia, 9-11 etc.../ apart from their violence. It lies in the relationship—increasingly, the explosive collision—among the three most powerful forces operating in the world today: markets, democracy, and ethnic hatred. There exists today a phenomenon—pervasive outside the West yet rarely acknowledged, indeed often viewed as taboo—that turns free-market democracy into an engine of ethnic conflagration. I’m speaking of the phenomenon of market-dominant minorities: ethnic minorities who, for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the “indigenous” majorities around them.


Market-dominant minorities can be found in every corner of the world. The Chinese are a market-dominant minority not just in the Philippines but throughout Southeast Asia. In 1998 Chinese Indonesians, only three percent of the population, controlled roughly 70 percent of Indonesia’s private economy, including all of the country’s largest conglomerates. In Myanmar (formerly Burma), entrepreneurial Chi­nese recently have taken over the econ­omies of Man­dalay and Yangon. Whites are a market-dominant minority in South Africa—and, in a more complicated sense, in Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, and much of Latin America. Lebanese are a market-dominant minority in West Africa, as are the Ibo in Nigeria. Croats were a market-dominant minority in the former Yugoslavia, as Jews almost certainly are in postcommunist Russia.


***

The prevailing view among globalization’s supporters is that markets and democracy are a kind of universal elixir for the multiple ills of underdevelopment. Market capitalism is the most efficient economic system the world has ever known. Democracy is the fairest political system the world has ever known, and the one most respectful of individual liberty. Together, markets and democracy will gradually transform the world into a community of prosperous, war-shunning nations, and individuals into liberal, civic-minded citizens and consumers. Ethnic hatred, religious zealotry, and other “backward” aspects of underdevelopment will be swept away.


Thomas Friedman of The New York Times has been a brilliant proponent of this dominant view. In his best-selling book The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), he reproduced a Merrill Lynch ad that said “the spread of free markets and democracy around the world is permitting more people everywhere to turn their aspirations into achievements,” erasing “not just geographical borders but also human ones.” Globalization, Friedman elaborated, “tends to turn all friends and enemies into ‘competitors.’” Friedman also proposed his “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” which claims that “no two countries that both have McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.” (Unfortunately, notes Yale University historian John Lewis Gaddis, “the United States and its NATO allies chose just that inauspicious moment to begin bombing Belgrade, where there was an embarrassing number of golden arches.”)


For globalization’s enthusiasts, the cure for group hatred and ethnic violence around the world is straightforward: more markets and more democracy. Thus, after the September 11 attacks, Friedman published an op-ed piece pointing to India and Bangladesh as good “role models” for the Middle East and citing their experience as a solution to the challenges of terrorism and militant Islam: “Hello? Hello? There’s a message here. It’s democracy, stupid!”—“. . . multiethnic, pluralistic, free-market democracy.”



I believe, rather, that the global spread of markets and democracy is a principal aggravating cause of group hatred and ethnic violence throughout the non-Western world. In the numerous societies around the world that have a market-dominant minority, markets and democracy are not mutually reinforcing. Because markets and democracy benefit different ethnic groups in such societies, the pursuit of free-market democracy produces highly unstable and combustible conditions. Markets concentrate enormous wealth in the hands of an “outsider” minority, thereby fomenting ethnic envy and hatred among often chronically poor majorities. In absolute terms, the majority may or may not be better off—a dispute that much of the globalization debate revolves around—but any sense of improvement is overwhelmed by its continuing poverty and the hated minority’s extraordinary economic success. More humiliating still, market-dominant minorities, along with their foreign-investor partners, invariably come to control the crown jewels of the economy, often symbolic of the nation’s patrimony and identity—oil in Russia and Venezuela, diamonds in South Africa, silver and tin in Bolivia, jade, teak, and rubies in Myanmar.


Introducing democracy under such circumstances does not transform voters into open-minded co-citizens in a national community. Rather, the competition for votes fosters the emergence of demagogues who scapegoat the resented minority and foment active ethnonationalist movements demanding that the country’s wealth and identity be reclaimed by the “true owners of the nation.” Even as America celebrated the global spread of democracy in the 1990s, the world’s new political slogans told of more ominous developments: “Georgia for the Georgians,” “Eritreans out of Ethiopia,” “Kenya for Kenyans,” “Venezuela for Pardos,” “Kazakhstan for Kazakhs,” “Serbia for Serbs,” “Hutu Power,” “Jews out of Russia.” Vadim Tudor, a candidate in Romania’s 2001 presidential election, was not quite so pithy. “I’m Vlad the Impaler,” he declared, and referring to the historically dominant Hungarian minority, he promised, “We will hang them directly by their Hungarian tongue!”



***


Where does this leave us? What are the implications of market-dominant minorities for national and international policymaking? Influential commentator Robert D. Kaplan offers one answer: Hold off on democracy until free markets produce enough economic and social development to make democracy sustainable. In The Coming Anarchy (2000), Kaplan argues that a middle class and civil institutions—both of which he implicitly assumes would be generated by market capitalism—are preconditions for democracy. Contrasting Lee Kuan Yew’s prosperous authoritarian Singapore with the murderous, “bloodletting” democratic states of Colombia, Rwanda, and South Africa, Kaplan roundly condemns America’s post-Cold War campaign to export democracy to “places where it can’t succeed.”


и так далее; в общем, вывод такой, что в развивающихся странах демократия только усугубляет проблемы. Правда, автор сводит все к неким доминирующим этническим меньшинствам, а это тема ужасно пожароопасная. Но почитать интересно.

 

Анна, наверное, Вы и этот комментарий на статью видели:
Webpage.

 

Нет, я на нее с
www.aldaily.com пришла, а они там русским не владеют.

На самом деле статья спорная, но и комментарий тоже. Вот, кстати,
еще один.