THE PRIVATIZATION-NATIONALIZATION CYCLE: THE LINK BETWEEN MARKETS AND ETHNICITY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Amy L. Chua https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/2833/Privatization_Nationalization_Cycle___The_Link_Between_Markets_and_Ethnicity_in_Developing_Countries__The.pdf Lessons
of foreign domination from previous generations are subordinated to the
demand for development and modernization, which are suddenly discov-
ered to be bound up with notions of freedom and justice...
The dangers of foreign domination posed by privatization in the de-
veloping world have not been ignored entirely by those involved in to-
day's privatization programs.351 Taking such dangers into account will
not, however, completely account for either nationalism in the develop-
ing world or its role in driving the privatization-nationalization cycle.. if every nation is to some extent an "imagined political
community,"354 or if nationhood always requires individuals to have "for-gotten many things,"355 still in the postcolonial nation, the imagination
must work harder, and the amnesiac quality of nationhood is far more
pronounced.
nationalism is necessarily problematic, and
a nationalist nationalization movement doubly so. Nationalization, pro-
claiming itself in the name of the interests and destiny of the nation as a
whole, is obliged to suppress the profound cleavages dividing the popu-
lace. At the same time, however, nationalization intensifies these divi-
sions because it invariably takes from one group of nationals for the sake
of another. The economic and political contest to which expropriation
gives rise fractures the nation along all the fault lines that lie below the
thin nationalist veneer....
..As the economic results of nationalization worsen and the intrana-
tional divisions-racial, economic, political, and cultural-grow increas-
ingly intense, there ceases to be a "nation" that can be recognized as the
owner of the nationalized resources. ..
many of the developing countries of
Latin America and Southeast Asia currently privatizinghave, since inde-
pendence, looked to private-enterpriseregimes as a cure for their social
and economic problems, only to lurch back to nationalization in a burst
of nationalist, and often ethnically charged, reaction.