by Walden Bello, The Nation Newspaper, 20 July 1998, Bangkok, Thailand

Democracy is being undermined by ‘Asian values’. In the first of a three-part series, the author explores the state of democracy in Asia.

Democracy in Southeast Asia is in a crisis, and nothing illustrates this more than the recent acceptance of Burma into the ranks of Asean, with not the slightest demurral from the two governments in the regional grouping where formal democracies are in place ­ Thailand and the Philippines.

How did democracy get into this impasse? Can it revitalise itself, and how? Or should we resign ourselves to the ascendancy of authoritarianism at the regional level?

The crisis is rooted in a number of problems, the principal being the gulf between the mission to enhance democracy in the region and the flourishing democratic practice in the countries where it now has a foothold.

Southeast Asia has witnessed a see-saw struggle between democracy and authoritarianism in the last decade, and perhaps, to fully understand the crisis, its roots, and the solution to it, the best place to begin is with the democratic wave that swept the south in the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.

In Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, popular struggles brought down dictatorships and installed formally democratic governments in power. In Asia, the Edsa Revolution of 1986 in the Philippines was followed in 1987 by the ousting of the Chun Doo-hwan regime in Korea and the lifting of martial law in Taiwan. Then in 1992 came the May events in Thailand, which resulted in overthrowing the Suchinda military dictatorship and the start of a process which has since seen two peaceful handovers of power from one parliamentary coalition to another.

Asian governance

It was in this context that the notion of ”Asian governance” or governance according to ”Asian values” made its debut. Not surprisingly, the theory was first popularised at the regional level by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who had for years been toying with the idea of resurrecting conservative Confucianism as a national ideology to legitimise his Peoples’ Action Party’s (PAP) hold on power.

Leaving the prime minister’s office to strut the world stage as the ”Asia voice” in 1990, Lee led the counter-offensive by Asian elites threatened by democratic mass movements to convince their populations that they had their own peculiar forms of governance.

Also that they had their own brand of ”democratic” practice that did not have the Western emphasis on individual rights, electoral competition, free press, free assembly and checks and balances.

Asians, like good Confucians, Lee contended, value order over change, hierarchy over equality, and cooperation and mutual respect over conflict between the elites and the masses. Asians, we are told, fear that too much democracy may undermine the ”East Asian economic miracle”.

However, as an Asian observer noted: ”When I first came across Lee’s list of supposed Asian values, I saw values that were not so much specific to Asian culture but good British upper class Tory values dear to threatened elites everywhere.” It was not without good reason that one British cabinet minister once referred to Lee, when he still was known as Harry Lee, as the ”best bloody Englishman east of Suez”.

Not to be outdone by Lee is Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who combined an attractive Third World critique of Western economic domination with a strident equation of liberal democracy with anarchy and Western imperialism. The classic is Mahathir’s statement in this regard with his speech at the United Nations in 1991, in which he asserted:

”If democracy means to carry guns, to flaunt homosexuality, to disregard the institutions of marriage, to disrupt and damage the well-being of the community in the name of individual rights, to destroy a particular faith, to have privileged institutions [ie the Western press] which are sacrosanct even if they indulge in lies and instigations which undermine society, the economy, and international relations; to permit foreigners to break national laws; if they are the essential details, can’t the news converts opt to reject them? Hegemony by democratic powers is no less oppressive than hegemony by totalitarian states.”

Part of the strategy was to paint liberal democratic systems of South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand as alien Western implants that were out of step with the Asian psyche.

In July 1992, for instance, in a much-publicised speech in Manila, Lee pinpointed the Philippines democracy as the cause of the country’s economic backwardness. Lee’s words then were equally, though implicitly, directed at Thailand, which had just, a few months earlier, removed the Suchinda military dictatorship at a cost of many lives. Lee’s message was that Thailand could lose its status as Asia’s fastest growing economy if it allowed the liberal democratic rot to spread.

Authoritarian counter-offensive

The authoritarian counter-offensive reached its high point during the UN Vienna Human Rights Conference in 1993, when Asean authoritarian regimes and China were able to present what then appeared to be a formidable argument that there was a connection between their high-speed economic growth and their authoritarian political systems.

But the ideological push has lost momentum during the last few years owing to a number of developments.

A succession of much-publicised events, including the conviction of a Singaporean reporter for releasing confidential government economic data to the press, a court case brought by the Singaporean government against the International Herald Tribune for an article critical of Asean judiciaries that did not even mention Singapore by name.

The rush to execute a Filipino domestic Flor Contemplacion, whose guilt was widely in doubt, and most recently, the revelations of Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP elite’s entrenched privileges, including being on the inside track of property deals that netted them hundreds of thousands of dollars, focused the international spotlight on Singapore’s justice and political system in an unprecedented fashion.

And what most of the world came away with was the image of a party dictatorship bent on staying in power through the efficient manipulation of the police, judiciary, the press and social engineering.

Where previously the Singaporeans recitation of their usual mantra of economic progress through political discipline evoked tolerant nods, if not agreement, it now began to elicit smirks and lay expressed for what it essentially was; a thinly veiled justification for a continuing monopoly of power by Lee’s PAP.

In Indonesia, the expectation that with economic growth would see liberalisation was rudely punctured in 1994, when the Suharto government cracked down savagely on the labour movement, closed three of the country’s leading newspapers for expressing increasingly independent views, and launched military-sponsored gang terrorism in East Timor.

Hosting the Apec Summit in November 1994 was Suharto’s supreme effort to whitewash his regime’s repressive past and paint Indonesia as the newest ”Asian Tiger”.

What mostly came across to the world, however, was the image of young East Timorese protesting against the Indonesian occupation of their country within the US Embassy while hundreds of policemen eager to get their hands on them waited impatiently outside. The situation has since deteriorated even more, culminating in the explosion of anti-dictatorship sentiment on July 27, 1996, when thousands of people poured into the streets to protest.

It underlined how little love is lost between the Suharto clique and the people. The discontent continues to deepen, with many analysts interpreting the phenomenon of church burning as really partly a vehicle of protest against the status quo of authoritarianism and growing inequity.

In China, the mix of Confucian values and nationalism has come across as a desperate effort to find a new formula for legitimacy to replace communist egalitarianism. It is also increasingly clear to some observers that it functions as a weak substitute for democratic legitimacy for a jaded generation that has responded to the spiritual vacuum by pouring its energies into money-making.

In Malaysia, one does not need to talk for long to realise the tremendous discontent that lurks beneath the glitzy surface of rising skyscrapers and shiny Mercedes and BMWs as a very large minority, the Chinese, chafe under its politically imposed second-class citizen status in a regime of permanent affirmative action for Malays.

NGOs are tolerated, but those who step out of line are summarily dealt with. Mahathir’s Third World rhetoric was hard put to contain the international damage to his regime’s image that was wreaked by his party’s youth group’s savage busting up of a conference on East Timor last November that resulted in the jailing of most of the participants and expulsion of foreign participants.

In Malaysia and Singapore, no amount of talk about Asian values has been able to hide the truth among both its citizens and an increasing number of outsiders that the ultimate guarantee of stability is the Internal Security Act, which allows the government to pick up and jail people indefinitely without charging themwith any crime.

Younger leaders

In the more sophisticated Asian political context of the last few years, Lee himself is increasingly seen for what he is ­ a relic of East Asia’s past. One might note that some of the region’s younger leaders, like Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, are distancing themselves from the authoritarian position, at least in rhetoric.

His words in a much-noticed speech given in 1994 was virtually indistinguishable from those of the University of the Philippines Law Centre’s Institute of Human Rights, its sub-text being a disavowal of Mahathir’s hard-line ideological position.

“While we accord high priority to social and economic rights, we must at the same time guard ourselves from stretching the argument too far. Development cannot be used as an apology for authoritarianism. The fact of the matter is that more nations have been impoverished by authoritarianism than enriched by it. By not giving vent to the vices of dissent, wrongs cannot be made right and remedies for failures cannot be made available,” said Anwar.

“Thus the notion that freedom must be sacrificed on the altar of development must be rejected. It is our conviction that only through the ability of every individual, however weak or disadvantaged, to freely articulate his fears and grievances can we hope to bring about a just and caring society. Only by guaranteeing the individual’s right to participate fully in society’s decision-making processes can we confer legitimacy to political leadership and governance, for government derives their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Part 2>>

 

Walden Bello is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-director of Focus on the Global South at Chulalongkorn University, and professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines.