Conducted by Jin Gon Park

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She came to Yale in 2001 after teaching at Duke and serving as a visiting professor at Columbia, Stanford, and NYU. Her expertise is in international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law. Her recent books include Day of Empire and World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. Professor Chua has an A.B. and a J.D. from Harvard University.

In your latest book Day of Empire, you argue that the rise of world-dominant powers, or “hyperpowers,” has much to do with the extent of that nation’s “strategic tolerance.” What makes this so?

I say that tolerance is indispensable if you want to be a world-dominant power. The reason for this is simple: if you want to be world-dominant, not just regionally or locally dominant, you have to be at the very cutting edge of the world’s technological and economic frontier. There’s no other way you can have the best nuclear weapons or be at the cutting edge of military power if you are not the most advanced technologically. The reason tolerance is important is that at any given historical moment, the world’s best human capital—whether it be the smartest people, the most creative, the most driven, whether some intelligence or strength or know-how—is never, ever going to be found within any one ethnic group or one religious group. So, in order to pull away from all of its rivals on a global scale, a society has to really be able to access the world’s best and brightest, regardless of ethnicity or religion.

What is the connection between a hyperpower’s decline and its “strategic tolerance”?

On the decline side, my thesis is not that tolerance always causes decline. What I’m saying is that the fall of hyperpowers is often very closely correlated with a return to intolerance and xenophobia, but you can’t always tell whether the hyperpower is already in decline and this persecution and intolerance is a byproduct, or whether it is because they turn to intolerance that they began to decline. Often, both are true.

Now, the connection is that I say that every hyperpower in history has faced the same problem that as they get bigger and bigger, they extend their power to include more and more diverse people. They all face the problem that I call “glue,” which is how to generate good will and cooperation and, ideally, loyalty among those foreign peoples that you conquer or dominate. Take, for instance, Achaemenid Persia; they conquered the Greeks and the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians, but under Persian rule, Greeks still felt Greek, Egyptians still felt like Egyptians. They didn’t identify with the Persian Empire. They didn’t feel Persian. So, very quickly the Empire was torn apart by internal division. So there was nothing to hold it together but military might. Only Rome was able to solve this problem, because Rome was able to extend citizenship to elites in Scotland, Spain, and West Africa. The United States can’t do that, because we’re a democratic hyperpower. As a democracy, the United States doesn’t want to make foreign populations our citizens. Nobody is talking about turning the people of Iraq into U.S. citizens. We don’t want to annex Iraq. We don’t want the people of Fallujah and Baghdad voting in the next United States presidential election. The problem for America externally is how we can generate ties and connections to all the people around the world we’re dominating when we can’t give them citizenship. People in Bolivia and Morocco feel dominated by the United States, because we have military bases everywhere and such enormous economic leverage. So we dominate them, but they don’t feel any loyalty to us.

Though the raising of armies was central to previous hyperpowers, you argue that for the United States to maintain its status as hegemon, it should shy away from militarism. Why?

Today, as a democratic hyperpower, we are very limited in what we can do. So a lot of people say, “Oh, we can’t even control Baghdad.” The truth is that the U.S. has the military power to level Baghdad in one day; we could just nuke it. But as a democracy, we can’t do that. Instead, we have to protect civilians. When Rome conquered Romania, it looted exactly a million pounds of silver. The United States can’t just go and take Iraq’s oil. Right now, being militaristic doesn’t have the same upside that it used to have. Instead, we just get all this anti-Americanism. People had thought that because of markets and democracy, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola spreading, that would turn foreign populations into wanting American leadership. But that’s just a non-sequitur and not true. Wearing a Yankees baseball cap and drinking a Coca-Cola does not turn a Palestinian into an American. They are not U.S. citizens, so it’s counterproductive to be militaristic. We can’t give them any benefits, and we suffer this enormous cost of global resentment.

You have said that a turn against immigration might dry up the vast amount of “immigrant labor and talent [that] has propelled U.S. growth and influence, from westward expansion in the 19th century, to industrial explosion and victory in the 20th century atomic race, to today’s staggering preeminence in the digital age.” Though the United States does turn away a great pool of foreign talent, could its deficiency in some areas be made up for with a strong push toward homegrown education in those areas?

You can definitely do that, and that’s fine. But the only way you can stay a hyperpower is by getting the best advice of the whole world. The best talent and drive is never going to be found in one location. We would lose our competitive edge to a country that could pull in those people. So you have to be able to pull in the best and brightest if you want to be a hyperpower, but it may not be a good thing for the U.S. to be a hyperpower. Maybe some people don’t feel we need to be. That’s what a lot of Europeans say: “Who needs to be a hyperpower?” Scandinavian countries say they don’t want to be an immigrant society, we just want to have good human rights and be wealthy. My book doesn’t say that it’s necessarily great to be a hyperpower. It just says that if you want to be a hyperpower, there is no other way except through immigration. I just mean by having a relatively open immigration policy that is able to pull in the best and the brightest. Right now, there will be one really brilliant mathematician in Nepal, who would want to come here. The smartest still want to come here.

China has become an economic powerhouse while maintaining a relatively homogeneous society. What do you make of its rapid rise to power?

I don’t think China can be a hyperpower because it is a quintessentially ethnically defined country; it’s not an immigrant nation. You still just don’t see large numbers of talented American and European engineers wanting to become Chinese citizens. But you still do see a large number of talented Chinese wanting to become American citizens. I think China could easily continue to grow and grow and be a superpower. If China gets strong enough, even if it’s not a hyperpower, the U.S. could fall from its hyperpower status. You’d be back in a multipolar world. And I think that’s completely likely. I don’t say for sure, because China has a lot of problems that people underestimate. For one, very few people attend high school. If you just go into the rural areas, it’s still really a developing country.

What are the prospects of an American decline? And what would such a fall mean for the United States?

For me, it’s an interesting case. I almost think of the United States as an accidental hyperpower. It became a hyperpower not through militarism and conquest and imperialism—though of course we do have episodes of militarism in our history—but the real secret to our success has been that we’ve always been a magnet for the world’s most driven and enterprising and talented. I hope the U.S. doesn’t fall from it’s hyperpower status, because if the U.S. does become an intolerant, xenophobic society, we will cease to be a country that can pull in the world’s best and brightest. There are some signs of that. It’s harder and harder to get visas for skilled people from foreign countries, and they’re starting to go elsewhere. It’s so unique and rare the formula America has for all the mistakes we’ve made in the past five years. We have an ethnically and religiously neutral political identity. So to be American, you can be Jewish-American, Muslim-American, Catholic-American; you can be Korean-American, Chinese-American, Moroccan-American. And people all feel American. That’s this very unusual internal glue. I think it’s been a great success story. If we take a turn to intolerance, we can lose all that. And that would be absolutely terrible. Of course, the U.S. can decline for lots of reasons. Bad foreign policy, poor leadership, corruption, external attack. There are many different reasons for decline, and we have lots to worry about. I think our post-9/11 policies have been really quite disastrous. We’ve squandered a lot of good will and wasted a lot of money. Anti-Americanism is if anything stronger than it had been before. Interestingly, when a country is in decline, you often see people get fearful and paranoid and insecure. Decline is often accompanied by a turn toward xenophobia. I hope that that’s not what we’re seeing now. There are signs of it, but we’ve always had bursts of xenophobia throughout our history, first against the Italians, against the Jews, against the Polish, and we’ve always been able to overcome it. I think it’s really important that everyone has to be able to speak English and participate in the political system. You can be bilingual, but you’ve got to be able to speak English so that we don’t get the problem they have in Europe of these enclaves that don’t have any connection to each other. I think it’s really important that we share common values—U.S. Constitutional values—and speak a common language.

In your first book, World on Fire, you write of the danger in exporting free market democracy to developing nations, as it may lead to ethnic conflict. What societies are most at risk?

My thesis is specifically about what I call “market-dominant minorities,” like the Chinese in Indonesia, where the rich are not just rich but belong to a different ethnic group. If you democratize very quickly in those places with market-dominant minorities, you’re very likely to get bad outcomes. In Indonesia, the Chinese controlled three percent of the population in the 1990s, and overnight democratization was accompanied by all these calls for confiscation of Chinese assets. Five thousand shops owned by Chinese were burned or looted. It’s kind of like Hamas getting elected in the Palestine Authority. Majority rule doesn’t always bring good things. I’m a very pro-market and pro-democracy person. My thesis is that you really have to understand the countries you’re trying to marketize and democratize. Look at Iraq. If you look at the afterword to the paperback edition of World on Fire, you’ll see that I made all these predictions, and they all came true. You’ve got this deep, sectarian division—60 percent Shi’ites, who have long been oppressed—and if you have rapid democratization, they are going to call for Shi’ites to take back the country. That’s exactly what happened. There are all these demagogues who are very anti-American. So, number one, you need to understand the ethnic and religious structures of these developing countries. And democracy isn’t something that you can just plug in like a lightbulb. You can’t just ship out ballot boxes. The genocidal killer Slobodan Milosevic was elected in free and fair elections in Serbia. Elections are not the answer to everything. And the same goes for the stock exchange. Some people thought we could airlift the stock exchange into Tanzania. That doesn’t do the trick. You need institutions to back up the market.

Are outside actors always in the driver’s seat? That is, can they always affect the outcome when those pushing for democracy in another nation are the people themselves?

I think that lots of times democratization comes from the bottom up. That’s of course true. The U.S. tends to not like democracy when it takes the form of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. That was definitely a democratic
election that the United States didn’t like. Whether it is more U.S.-driven or bottom-up, I don’t know, but you can look at one example. The United States has definitely played a huge role in removing Saddam Hussein from Iraq. For better or for worse, that sort of democratization is something we’ve brought about. I do think that in the 80s and 90s, the U.S. was very influential in trying to promote the ideals of democracies and supporting democratic groups. I don’t know how much was indigenous or how much came from the United States. The rhetoric was definitely completely supporting democratization, not realizing that it doesn’t always bring pro-market, pro-U.S. results. I think Hamas is another great example. That Hamas was just recently democratically elected in the Palestine authority; I think Americans were shocked by that.

You make the case that introducing democracy to a nation before it has shaped institutions to uphold the rule of law is a dangerous move to make. Other political scientists have argued that the history of Western democracies suggests that the two go hand-in-hand—that is, simultaneous rather than sequential development. What do you make of that?

I think that in the history of Western democracies, there is a strong correlation between the two. My point is that people make a big mistake when they assume democracy is a panacea for all countries because in developing countries markets and democracy don’t always go hand-in-hand. I think that democracy can’t just be ballot boxes. You can’t just have everybody vote. You’ve also got to be promoting constitutionalism and free speech and minority protections. Otherwise, you’ll get a situation like in Indonesia, where overnight empowerment of the majority led them to nationalize and confiscate all the Chinese assets. Lots of the Chinese just fled the country, taking with them about $40-100 million. That’s what put that country into a massive depression. That’s a perfect case of democratization not going hand-in-hand with markets. A majority of Indonesians wanted an anti-market backlash, because the Chinese were the ones benefiting from the market. They wanted to go back to a people’s economy. Hugo Chavez is another example of democracy being anti-market. There are so many examples these days that it’s not even controversial.

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