Richly Resented.(World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability)(Book Review)

In 1994 Amy Chua received some very bad news: her aunt had been murdered in the Philippines. A wealthy Filipino-Chinese, she'd had her throat slit by one of her many servants, a Filipino chauffeur. At first it appeared to Chua--an American--to be an inexplicable act of violence, but she soon discovered that it was part of a pattern: members of the Chinese minority were regularly the victims of violent crimes, more often than not at the hands of the Filipino majority. The police report, writes Chua, offered a one-word motive for her aunt's murder: "Revenge."

So begins Chua's new book, "World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability" (340 pages. Doubleday). The author, a professor at Yale Law School, argues that the West's push for developing nations to adopt laissez-faire economic policies and democratic reforms since the end of World War II-- ratcheted up after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989--has resulted in a horrible backlash against "market-dominant" and "entrepreneurial" ethnic minorities. (In the Philippines, for instance, Chinese Filipinos make up just 1 percent of the population but control 60 percent of the private economy.) Drawing on examples from Burma to Bolivia, Chua paints a nuanced picture of ethnic and national fault lines. She points to the brutal example of Rwanda, where Western-style democracy gave way to unchecked majority rule ...