By Walden Bello, in The Nation Newspaper, 21 July, 1998, Bangkok, Thailand
Is Asian democracy in crisis? In this second of a three-part series, Walden Bello believes so and argues that the solution will not come from the West.
While the authoritarian ideology may have failed to make headway in Asia, the democratic revolution has, unfortunately, lost steam in the last few years. In most countries, the novelty of free elections, party competition, and separation of powers has worn off, to reveal several sources of discontent to the model of democracy which insurgent elites patterned their system of government after dislodging authoritarian rule.
Elite democracy
One set of concerns relates to the paradox that rule by established elites can be just as effective, if not more so, through democratic competition as in dictatorial rule, since for the most part only the rich people backed by wealth can afford to run for office, leading to effective control of the political system by economic elites that have the added advantage of legitimacy owing to their democratic election.
Related to this realisation is the increasing questioning on the notion of democracy being narrowly defined as a system of governance among formally equally citizens. Economic inequalities, which continue to be severe in Asia despite economic growth, make a mockery of this formal equality.
Increasingly, the Lockean separation of the realm of the political from the realm of property characteristic of Anglo-American democratic theory becomes less and less persuasive. But this has not given more credibility to the countervailing position associated to Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Indonesia’s Suharto that Asian governance systems must place the priority on delivering social and economic goods, even if this means limiting political liberties.
Increasingly, it is becoming clear to partisans of democracy that the challenge is to expand political rights while at the same time extending democracy to the realm of the social and economic to make economic equality an essential element in the definition and practice of democracy. And the route to this objective is to make political democracy a beachhead from which to legislate and implement a variety of measures for the redistribution of economic power and drastically end its serving as a mechanism to uphold the status quo, as has happened in Thailand and the Philippines over the last few years.
In this connection, the eyes of many people in Southeast Asia’s formal democracies are currently focused on development in the one country in the Asia-Pacific where democracy has not been ”institutionalised” in the clinical sense, where it continues to break the containment structures to which the elites wish to confine it: Korea. The Koreans have sent two former presidents to jail and the current chief of state is now in danger of suffering the same fate. Will they be able to carry the process to the point of breaking up the chaebol or conglomerates whose money continues to grease the Korean political system? Will citizen action lead to breakthrough from monetary democracy to a citizen democracy, from purely political democracy to economic and social democracy?
A second set of concerns has to do with the increasing imitations of representative democracy. Democracy, it is alleged, has become narrowly identified with the holding of free and fair elections. Moreover, parliaments in the region are seen not only to reflect the narrow interests of economic and social elites, but to increasingly represent simply what Rousseau termed the ”corporate will” and interests of the parliamentary and governing class, that is of the representatives themselves, rather than the ”general will” and the interests of the represented. One only has to look at the Thai parliamentary process to appreciate Rousseau’s well-known scepticism about representative democracy.
The rise and popularity of NGOs and people’s organisations throughout Asia testifies to the frustration of a significant section of the citizenry with the representative democracy being modified to accommodate the ”NGO phenomenon,” which represents an effort by citizens to go beyond mere elected participation to more direct popular intervention in the political process. Not surprisingly, professional politicians see NGOs as a threat, while others see them as a step forward from representative to direct democratic rule.
To democratic innovators the challenge is not only that of decentralising political decision-making on local issues to grassroots communities. It is bringing local communities to participate directly in decision-making on national, regional, and international concerns. It is eliminating as many layers of intermediaries as possible between the citizen and the act of decision-making. And here, the innovators are excited by recent advances in telecommunications technology especially teleconferencing, which are on the verge of making real-time national assemblies of millions convened electronically a practical possibility.
Tyranny of the majority
A third set of issues concerning the interests of minorities, be they ethnic, racial, or religious, can be safeguarded under democracy, which by definition is the rule of the majority. It is not at all clear for instance, if democratic rule has been any better than authoritarian rule for the Muslims in southern Thailand, where a Buddhist majority holds sway.
It is very clear, however, that 11 years of democracy has not resulted in significant political and economic gains for the Muslims in the southern Philippines, despite the establishment of the Southern Philippines Council for Peace and Development. Fortunately for the democracy movement, the authoritarian regimes in Southeast Asia have a much worse record in terms of assuring minority rights than the democratic governments.
West is no guide
The problems of Asian democracies are, of course, the same problems that have confronted the older democracies in the West. But one thing is certain: the record of Western democracies provides no guide to newer or re-established democracies of Asia and the Third World. For the translation of formal to substantive democracy, the achievements of both political and economic equality, the transition to more direct forms of democracy, and the protection of the rights of the minority from the majority are the great unresolved issues of the democracies of the West.
There is no longer any doubt that Lockean democracy functions as a facade behind which a power elite to use C Wright Mills’ enduring term makes the fundamental decision about political and economic direction in the United States, a process which is breached only occasionally by populist movements. Nor are there lingering doubts that the system of political contribution, recently raised to an art from by the Clinton administration, is a form of legalised corruption through which corporations, wealthy individuals, and other moneyed interests can exercise undue influence over the direction of the democratic process.
Moreover, in both Europe and the US, there are record low turnouts in elections, and politicians, be they from the right, left, or centre, are registering very low approval ratings and inspiring a great deal of distrust two indicators of citizens’ perceptions that the system of representative democracy is malfunctioning.
Asian democratic activists are very aware that there is currently in the US and Europe a retreat from a positive approach to the challenge of deepening democracy, as economic elites succeed in stripping the liberal democratic state of its already limited redistributive powers and inflame racial and ethnic majorities by increasingly restricting the rights of the minorities.
For instance, France’s denial of automatic citizenship to children of immigrants born in France, Germany’s adoption of very restrictive asylum regulation, California’s Proposition 187 withdrawing educational and other benefits from children of immigrant workers, and the recent US immigration law restricting social security benefits to legal immigrants are essentially draconian measures against the non-white minorities, especially the immigrant minority, but they are popular with all strata of the white American majority and the dominant ethno-cultural groups in Europe.
Increasingly, the US and Europe are turning out to be negative examples for Asia and the rest of the world, as the democratic mechanism becomes the vehicle for reactionary social and economic ends. Which is why when President Bill Clinton and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, pontificate about the need for Asians to respect human rights and promote democracy, they open themselves up to the charge of hypocrisy, of not practising what they preach.
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 the author of a number of books including ‘Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis’ and ‘Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment, and Global Poverty’.
