by Walden Bello, in The Nation Newspaper, 22 July, 1998, Bangkok, Thailand
In the final of a three-part series, Walden Bello argues that the best way to defend democracy is to enhance its practice locally and advance it to other countries in the region.
Flaws in democratic practice in Asia are working to the benefit of the authoritarian regimes in their struggle for survival. Taking advantage of the impasse in the region’s democracy movement, they have recently launched a fresh drive to shore up their rule.
First, their apologists have not hesitated to paint the parliamentary mess in Thailand as the future, that corruption and inefficiencies await their own people should they allow democratic movements to come to power. Thailand’s current economic crisis is blamed on democratic decision-making, with the authoritarian apologists claiming that stable economic development demands the strong hand of an authoritarian state. A great worry is that this argument is resonating in Thailand itself, especially among business and technocratic circles.
Authoritarian apologists in the region have voiced strong doubts that the recent economic growth in the Philippines is compatible with a democratic succession that may yield ”a man or woman of the people” as president one who might resurrect the economics of populism and protectionism, with its putative destabilising consequences.
Second, authoritarian governments, particularly Indonesia, have successfully extended the Asean ”principle” of strict non-intervention in the affairs of other member countries to cover free-speech activities conducted in the territory of other Asean countries that are alleged to have destabilising political consequences for them.
Indonesia pressured Philippine President Fidel Ramos to ban the Asia-Pacific Conference on East Timor in Manila in 1994 and prevent the Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta from attending the Manila People’s Forum on Apec last November. Under Indonesian pressure, then Thai prime minister Chuan Leekpai also tried to break up an East Timor conference in Bangkok and expelled Ramos-Horta from the country in 1995.
Asean brotherhood
Third, pro-authoritarian forces have pushed to bring in other non-democratic regimes into Asean to shore up their hegemony at both national and regional level. The recent efforts to bring in Burma, for instance, have been largely dictated by the Suharto regime’s domestic interests. Suharto is increasingly preoccupied with the rising pressures for democratisation in Indonesia, which he sees as being stoked by the different movements for human rights and democracy in the region. Bringing in more non-democratic regimes would strengthen the authoritarian pole in the balance of power within Asean: it would serve to neutralise the formal democratic regimes the Philippines and Thailand and prevent them from following foreign policies that would be more sympathetic to democratic movements on the ground.
Moreover, accepting more authoritarian regimes would create a solid front against external criticism of repressive practices not only in Indonesia but in the majority of Asean states. Not surprisingly, the most enthusiastic backers of such an expansion have been the other authoritarian regimes, notably Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei. In the process, the ”Asean brotherhood” is being redefined as a brotherhood of Asean authoritarian states against liberal democracy, human rights, and other ”Western biases”.
In the face of this reinvigorated authoritarian offensive, what have the formal democratic governments done? They have behaved almost as if they were ashamed of their democratic credentials. They have given in to Indonesian demands to ban East Timor conferences and East Timor personalities. So weak-knee and unprincipled has the Philippines’ Asean policy been that the Filipino government agreed to serve as Slorc’s minong or formal sponsor during the Asean senior ministers’ meeting that finalised Burma’s membership. The day is not far off when a conference on human rights in Burma will not be allowed to take place on Filipino soil or on Thai soil, and Aung San Suu Kyi will be the second Nobel laureate banned from entering these two countries.
But just as alarming as the abandonment of the principles of democracy and human rights as the pillars of foreign policy has been the internal, domestic impact of what amounts to ”authoritarian encirclement,” to borrow an image from the 1930s when Stalin justified repressive measures in the Soviet Union by appealing to the notion of ”capitalist encirclement.”
The authoritarian climate at the state level in the region has encouraged the authoritarian propensities of those sections of the governing elites in Thailand and the Philippines who have never been completely socialised to democratic principles and processes.
In the Philippines, personal support and approval from the other Asean leaders, who consider Ramos a good Asean team player, is undoubtedly one of the factors that is leading him to take an increasingly cavalier attitude to the question of revising the Philippine Constitution in order to allow him to again stand for election. Ramos, it must always be remembered, served his cousin Ferdinand Marcos in a variety of roles, including director-general of the Integrated National Police, chief of the Philippines Constabulary and chief of the Armed Forces. Switching sides in February 1986 was more a product of military and political calculation than democratic conversion.
To an ambitious man like Ramos, it must be galling at times to realise that while democratic rules will shortly rotate him out of the Asean summit, his friends Suharto, Mahathir, Singapore’s Goh Chok Tong, and Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, have been there for a long time and may be there indefinitely.
Fraternal solidarity
Thus, there is some urgency to reinvigorating the democracy movement in Southeast Asia. If the analyse above is correct, revitalising the movement must proceed along the following lines:
First, democracy must be expanded in the region. For democracy is, in a very real sense, indivisible. There can be no ”democracy in one country,” to borrow another famous historical slogan. Unless it expands to become the system of government of your neighbour as well, democracy will constantly be under the threat of being undermined from the outside by regimes that hate the example that democratic processes hold out to their own controlled citizenry.
If we support the struggles for democracy in Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Indonesia, this should not be seen only as an enterprise that stems not only from fraternal solidarity but from self-interest, that is, for the sake of protecting our own democratic practices, cultures, and traditions.
Second, democracy must be deepened in the countries where it now has a foothold. For democracy is an evolving, not a fixed enterprise. A democracy that is limited to the respect and protection of political rights and classical individual rights will wither away. Democracy must be deepened to create the conditions for the meaningful exercise of those political rights. This means that fundamental to the democratic enterprise is the relatively equal distribution of income and assets that can serve as the only basis of genuine political equals.
Third, the practice of democracy must be made more direct. The traditional models of representative democracy have ossified, and a central element of the reinvigoration of the democratic enterprise is innovation and experimentation in direct democracy, eliminating more and more intermediaries between the citizen and the exercise of decision-making. This is not only a case of devolving administration and legislation to the grassroots but having communities themselves participate directly in national decision-making on national, regional, and international matters. It is time to rediscover Rousseau.
Asian enterprise
Fourth, democracy must be cast as an Asian enterprise, one whose wellsprings are found not only in the European enlightenment but also in Asian cultures, most of which have rich traditions that stress participation and equity. We must increasingly extract democratic philosophy, theory, and practice in these genuine Asian traditions, and at the same we must aggressively expose that what is passed off as ”Asian governance” is actually a recycling of western conservative thought, particularly that of Edmund Burke, that great foe of the French and European democratic revolution; the great English philosopher of authoritarianism, Thomas Hobbes; and Hobbes’ contemporary American disciple, Samuel P Huntington of Harvard University, carried out by Western-educated Asian ideological hacks.
Also, we must make sure that our missions of democratic expansion and deepening does not play into Washington’s cynical politics of using the rhetoric of human rights and democracy to advance America’s interests. Democratic activities must expropriate the symbols of nationalism, regionalism, and anti-imperialism from the apologists of authoritarianism, whose rhetoric often masks the fact that the regimes they legitimise are deeply tied to Northern corporate interests, Northern military interests, and Northern dominated multilateral bodies such as the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.
Finally, democratic activists must ensure that democracy will never be feared as a method of rule that can give the majority tyranny over the minority, but serve as a process that can be creatively adapted to an ethnically and culturally diverse region. One of the weaknesses of the authoritarian regimes is that they have been identified as oppressive systems of control by dominant ethnic groups over others. This is the case with the Umno-Malay nexus in Malaysia, the PAP-Chinese connection in Singapore, the Suharto-Javanese link in Indonesia and the Slorc-Burmese connection. Democracy must be identified with cultural and political autonomy, decentralised government, and pluralism in the expression of national identity.
Battle of visions
It must be underlined that while it is certainly true that repression or the threat of repression accounts for most of the staying power of authoritarian regimes, it is not the only source. Daniel Goldhagen’s magnificent book ”Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” reminds us that while the Nazis did exercise coercion, probably an even greater source of their stability was their popularity despite or because of their demagogic crackpot theories with the German people, Now, our neighbouring authoritarian regimes are probably much, less popular with their people than the Nazis were with the Germans, but part of the basis of their control rests on the residual appeal of their ideology among some sectors of the population.
Unless the idea and practice of democratic government is revitalised so as to present a vision that is more compelling and attractive than the formula of political lobotomy in exchange for economic prosperity and security offered by ruling elites from China to Indonesia, it will not fare well in the ongoing climactic struggle with authoritarianism.
If all we have to offer is the paradigm and practice of ”actually existing democracies” in Ramos’ Philippines and Chavalit Yongchaiyudh’s Thailand, our side stands to lose.
Walden Bello is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-director of Focus on the Global South at Chulalongkorn University and a professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines. He is author of ‘Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis’ and ‘Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment, and Global Poverty’.
