perhaps waiting in the wings in other societies undergoing this crisis.
In an increasingly integrated world where not only finance moves back and forth so quickly, but ideas and the communications also move quickly, it matters what those outside do and say, It matters particularly what solutions the international community comes up with for dealing with these problems. The most unhelpful solutions will be looking like a schoolmaster dictating terms to a prostate Indonesia, as Camdessus was perceived to be doing. This is a time for the outside world which currently looks strong, to behave with consummate care and tact and imagination about new solutions which can be found quickly, and which do not exacerbate this sense of being bullied and impoverished by the strong. If we return to the analogy with 1930s Europe, its path was very painful toward relatively stable democratic order. The worst dangers, the dangers that appeared in Germany, Austria , Italy and elsewhere in the 1930s had already been there for some time beforehand. If there are dangers like that in Southeast Asia, we should be able to see them already. We should know what they are. Of course people in Europe didn't take them seriously enough, didn't respond early enough, didn't set in place a kind of financial mechanism which would make them unnecessary. But indeed there are already signs in Southeast Asia. On the whole one can say, looking at each of them, that they are not as frightening as they were in Europe and that they can be accommodated will skill and imagination. But we should certainly not underestimate them. I have listed four already.
Firstly economic nationalism. The temptations are already there to prevent the expatriation of funds, to default on loans, to return to more self-sufficient economies, to opt out in some way Or another from this international economy which is causing so much pain. But of course although moves like that were made at the height of the depression of the 1930s in Europe, it is much harder to take those steps today. There will be lots of people calling for such steps, sometimes called radical. But the cost of morality is far greater and far more immediate. That was the case in Europe.
Secondly, the most immediate frightening possibility is the scapegoating of the Chinese. The Chinese minority in Southeast Asia, about 25 million strong and relatively entrepreneurially-oriented, and therefore affluent, has a similar position to that of the Jews in Central Europe in the period of the 1920s and 1930s. I suppose I am influenced here by the experience of preparing the book that Professor Shiraishi and I were involved in making the comparison, and looking at what was similar and what was different in the situation of Jews and Chinese. We wrote this book before the present crisis arose, but it has suddenly become rather more frightening than it was when we wrote it. The chief difference really is not, I think, the fact of China in the background as a great presence for the Chinese. The chief difference is that Southeast Asian Chinese are economically really quite powerful and extremely important whereas Jews were just claimed to be by the fascists, anti-Semitic propaganda. The power of the Southeast Asian Chinese is real. The danger of burning Chinese shop houses in a small town in Java seems negligible to young angry people on the street. It Seems like a cost-free target. But the elite knows it's not a cost-free target. Indonesia suffers enormously from every such outbreak in terms of outflows of capital and the decision of people not to invest. The Chinese are a minority without which Indonesia's economy would be in terrible shape. That is the strongest reason why one cannot easily imagine that the episodic violence against Chinese might turn into the systematic violence which occurred in Central Europe in the 1930s and 40s.
The third point, extremist ideologies are really not there as they were in 1930s. I don't think anybody sees Marxism making a comeback, certainly not in Leninist form. That seems to be the least likely option. Fascism of various sorts is more elusive, and has similarity to the kind of nationalist ideology which many countries, authoritarian leaders are inclined to applaud. It will have attractions, but in the present climate it will not have as much intellectual support as that which German authoritarian fascism had. The most convincing candidate for this sort of extremism, a sort of Messianic hope that somehow a completely different way of doing things in our interests, cutting out those others is what Samuel Huntington called "La reverence de Dieu", the revenge of God, in other words the comeback of a kind of radical religious program suggesting there is in radical Islam a fundamentally different way of ordering the world which would eliminate this kind of financial manipulation, this kind of up and down, this kind of wide inequality of wealth and what is seen as evil manipulation by minorities like Jews or Chines and so forth. This is already there. It is not pretty, but it's perfectly understandable. But again the elite knows the cost of going down this route, they know it very well.
The cost is likely to be far more immediate of any step down this road than was the case in Hitler's final solution against
