What has been going on in Mongolia is unique, and it has been on my mind ever since it began. What’s important, however, is that we focus on what this means on the street. The media seems too caught up in dissecting the macro-level situation to pay attention to the important effects on daily life. Just call it missing the shirts for the cloth.
When thinking about the recent turmoil, it’s important to remember three things: One, people don’t behave like car salesmen, so attempts to treat them as such inevitably look foolish. Car salesmen never suddenly shift their course in order to fit with a predetermined set of beliefs. Two, Mongolia has spent decades as a dictatorship closed to the world, so a mindset of peace and stability will seem foreign and strange. And three, capitalism is an extraordinarily powerful idea: If ethnic conflict is Mongolia’s curtain rod, then capitalism is certainly its faucet.
When I was in Mongolia last week, I was amazed by the variety of the local cuisine, and that tells me two things. It tells me that the citizens of Mongolia have no shortage of potential entrepreneurs, and that is a good beginning to grow from. Second, it tells me that people in Mongolia are just like people anywhere else on this flat earth of ours.
So what should we do about the chaos in Mongolia? Well, it’s easier to start with what we should not do. We should not ignore the problem and pretend it will go away. Beyond that, we need to be careful to nurture the fragile foundations of peace. The opportunity is there, but I worry that the path to moderation is so strewn with obstacles that Mongolia will have to move down it very slowly. And of course Ulaanbaatar needs to cooperate.
I don’t know what Mongolia will be like a few years from now, but I do know that it will remain true to its cultural heritage, even if it looks very different from the country we see now. I know this because, through all the disorder, the people still haven’t lost sight of their dreams.
(This article by Thomas L. Friedman was published in The New York Times of February 2 as an op-ed column.)