Asia's Diverse Democratic Transitions

Asia's Diverse Democratic Transitions
Walden Bello
Foreword in Transitions to Democracy in East and Southeast Asia
TNI/IPD/Focus and ARENA, Quezon City, 1999

The essays in this volume are efforts to understand the processes of transition to democracy in five countries - Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and South Korea. The common concerns running through the essays include the institutionalization of formal democratic processes such as a competitive party system, the struggle among political, economic, and bureaucratic elites, the intervention or non-intervention of the middle class and popular classes in the political process, and the role of civil society actors.

On the one hand, these essays are important contributions to the 'political science' of democratic transitions. On the other, they are written from a progressive activist perspective, where the stress is not so much on praising what has been achieved so far but to figure out why so much remains to be done in terms of deepening democracy.

The contributions to this volume were written in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis in mid-l997, when a 'second wave of democratization' swept East Asia, following a 'first wave' in the 1986-'92 period that saw the establishment or reestablishment of constitutional democratic processes in the Philipppines, South Korea and Thailand.

The aim of this introduction is to place the experiences analyzed here within the larger context of the continuing challenge of democratization in the region, and to do so from an activist standpoint. It also seeks to highlight the fact that while we in Asia face common challenges in our advocacy for democracy, there are different priorities in different countries.

Phasing Out Authoritarianism

In Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia and Singapore, the key challenge is to end dictatorships, whether by the military or by the party, or to break with authoritarian modes of governance.

In the case of Burma, democratization continues to be at an impasse, with a military apparatus devoid of all legitimacy hanging on to power through its monopoly of the means of violence. Power without legitimacy cannot last indefinitely, but the conjunction of factors that has unhinged illegitimate regimes elsewhere continues to elude the Burmese political scene, where legitimacy largely resides in the repressed opposition. The role of democratic activists in Asia continues - to rally international public opinion to prevent heightened repression in Burma and maintain the international isolation of the military regime.

It may seem difficult to find voices of protest in Singapore at this point, but there can be no mistaking the reality that there is a lot of fear and a lot of discontent in that Orwellian island-state. Let us also have no doubt that, like the activist Dr. Chee Soon Joon, who has challenged the People's Action Party's draconian curbs on free speech, more and more people will find the courage to speak out. And when they do, we must be prepared to take up their cause. Singapore has been the most ambitious effort to perform political lobotomy on a population, but unlike Jack Nicholson in
'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', the Singaporean people will eventually prevail.

In both East Timor and Indonesia, the future hangs in the balance. In East Timor, the role of democratic activists is to keep the pressure on the UN international armed force INTERFET (International Force for East Timor) to crush the militias and neutralize the Indonesian military. The UN itself has to be pushed to support the process of establishing an independent government, and to mount an international effort to gather economic aid for this emerging independent state.

In Indonesia, as the essay by Joel Rocamora and Mastinah Saleh suggests, we are in for a long and complex transition where the support of Asian human rights activists will be essential. It is clear that a freer political system will emerge only on the ruins of the present Indonesian military. The people of Aceh and West Papua have launched struggles that could lead to demands for independent states, while people in East Kalimantan and the Malukus are seeking greater autonomy from Java. A democratic federal state from which the military has been eliminated as a political force seems to be the only viable option, but we must take our cue from the democratic forces in Indonesia at each step of the tortuous path to democracy that is ahead.

The challenge in Malaysia is both clear and complex. On the one hand, we must do all we can to support the movement for reform and to stop the frame-up that is the Anwar Ibrahim trial. But we must be careful not to play into the hands of the United States, which has opportunistically seized on the Anwar issue to try to isolate Mahathir on the economic front. In others words, we must be sophisticated and not let our strong criticism of Mahathir's anti-democratic moves spill over into an uninformed condemnation of his government's economic program to deal with the Asian crisis. The Malaysian government's program of capital controls and fiscal expansion has, contrary to the expectations of Washington, worked to contain the recession and bring the country back to a growth path. Even the IMF and the ratings agencies, including Moody's and Standard and Poor's, which had been eagerly awaiting Malaysia's collapse, now admit that capital controlsworked. This is not to put Mahathir on a pedestal. It is simply, as the old English saying goes, to give the devil his due.

Beyond Elite Democracy

In the Philippines, Thailand, Korea, India, Nepal and Bangladesh, the challenge is different. Here we have liberal democracies, Third World-style, running on more or less free elections. Yet wealth and money so permeate the political system at every level that we have governments run by the rich and powerful for the rich and powerful. Because they have a degree of political legitimacy deriving from elections, elite democracies are better suited for preserving the socioeconomic status quo than authoritarian regimes. It is not surprising that Thailand and the Philippines have two of the most unequal distributions of income in Asia, with the gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, standing at 46.2 in the case of Thailand and 42.9 in the case of the - Philippines - far higher than you will find in most of the authoritarian states in the region.

There are, of course, parts of both Thailand and the Philippines where it will be hard to describe people as enjoying the formal freedoms of elite democracy. In the Muslim areas of the Philippines and the indigenous communities in northern Thailand, for example, the abuse of social rights persists within a framework of authoritarian internal colonialism. Human rights advocacy must reflect this.

But overall, the challenge in elite democracies such as Thailand, Philippines and Korea is to democratize not just the political sphere, but the economic sphere as well, as the essays by Regina Abesamis, G. Luis Igaya, Dorothy Guerrero and Carmel Abao stress. A formal democracy where people are abstractly equal as citizens, with one man or woman possessing one vote, is an illusion of democracy, for it is a democracy that is subverted at every turn by the reality of extreme inequality of wealth and income. As in the liberal democracies of the North, the struggle is for substantive democracy or social democracy, where citizens are genuinely equal because there are no sharp disparities in the access to wealth and income that allow the rich to purchase political decisions at the expense of the poor, whether this is done through illegal bribery in Thailand and the Philippines, or, as in the United States, through legal bribery via massive corporate campaign contributions.

The Question of China

Finally, we have the so-called transition economics, China and Vietnam included, which are not covered in this collection. To many western commentators, things are very simple: these two countries have authoritarian regimes that violate human rights and the task of the hour is the democratization of these countries along liberal democratic lines.

Unfortunately, things are not that simple for us from the South.

Take the People's Republic of China, which recently celebrated its 50th birthday, and here, allow me to combine my two hats as human rights activist and progressive economic analyst. When I, as an Asian economic analyst, contemplate the People's Republic at 50, two things immediately come to mind: China, because of capital controls, managed to escape the Asian financial crisis, and the rest of us in Asia are in some measure in debt to the Chinese government for not devaluing the yuan and turning a crisis into a catastrophe.

American environmentalist Lester Brown may be filled with foreboding at the prospect of hundreds of millions of newly prosperous Chinese straining the world's food supply by moving up the food chain to become meat-eaters. And western pundits may be filled with loathing when they survey China's human-rights record. But one would wager that for most of us in the South, China, warts and all, is still one of the success stories of the century.

China is a dynamic economy, growing between 7% and 10% a year over the past decade. Its ability to push a majority of the population living in abject poverty of the civil-war period into decent living conditions today is no mean achievement. Such economic dynamism cannot be separated from an event that most of us in the South missed out on: a social revolution in the late forties to fifties that eliminated the worst inequalities in the distribution of land and income, and prepared the country for economic take-off when market reforms were introduced in the late 1970s.

China's growth also demonstrates the critical contribution of a liberation movement that decisively wrests control of the national economy from foreign interests. China is a 'strong state', to borrow a term from contemporary political science, one born of revolution and steeled over several decades by hot and cold wars. It is this history of state formation that accounts for the wide difference in attitude toward foreign investors between China and the other developing societies or economies of Thailand, Philippines, Brazil and even South Korea. Because unlike the other countries in the South, Beijing is tough on foreign investors and has the upper hand in its relationship with the international business community. Yet foreign investors are scrambling to get into China, restrictions and all.

Foreign investors will always scream about investment controls chasing away foreign capital. But the case of China, which now accounts for as much as one-third of total foreign direct investment devoted to emerging economies, shows that where there is money to be made, investors will live with the restrictions. In contrast, foreign investors can blackmail other governments to dilute their investment rules. They know that they can ratchet up their demands because weaker governments inevitably will give in, with some, like the Estrada government in the Philippines, going as far as to amend their constitutions to make them 100% investor-friendly.

Respect is what the Chinese government gets from investors. Respect is what the other governments don't have. When it comes to national economic interests, what separates many of the other countries in the South from China is a successful revolutionary nationalist struggle institutionalized into a no-nonsense state.

Western commentators often engage in opportunism when it comes to China. Not a week passes without one or another business rag carrying some denunciation of China's money-losing state enterprises. Not a week also passes without some report on how China's rapid development is creating inequalities diat might destabilize the country eventually. These same publications, in their doctrinaire editorials, have been urging China's rapid phase-out of the state-enterprise sector, yet they hardly ever bring up the connection between government's gradualism and caution in the reform of the state-enterprise sector, with its millions of worried workers, and its smooth management of potential conflict.

US economic authorities and politicians are just as opportunistic as the business press. On the one hand, Charlene Barshefsky, Washington's trade representative, regularly blasts China for distorting 'market forces' through continuing government intervention in the economy. On the other hand, Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers plead with the Chinese not to devalue the yuan for the sake of global stability even when these same market forces are pushing down the currency.

Many of the voices calling on the Chinese government to liberalize the capital account before 1997 and urging a greater role for market forces today were the same voices who, in the early 1990s, wanted Beijing to do away with radualism and apply the Russian-style shock therapy that eventually gave birth to the dominance of mafia capitalism throughout east Europe.

But China does have problems, though too much state intervention in the economy is not at the top of the list.

It must pay urgent attention to environmental degradation and not be put off by the ethnocentric environmentalism of people like Lester Brown. Here, the Chinese must start reexamining, indeed, discarding, the foreign-capital-intensive model of development designed to reproduce western levels of consumption that they have uncritically adopted from the World Bank. Another key concern must be containing the social inequalities generated by such a development model over the last two decades of rapid growth. Large numbers of people have been left behind, particularly in the great Chinese
hinterland. According to the United Nations Development Program, some 29.4% of the population live under the poverty line. And the World Bank estimates the gini coefficient to be 41.5 - much higher than that of India, Indonesia, Egypt, and Pakistan, and ominously close to that of the Philippines and Thailand.

The market has been central to the generation of inequalities, so tougher controls on the market forces, rather than more freedom for these, should be, in my view, among Beijing's priorities.

China must also pay attention to its foreign policy, which is too closely guided by realpolitik. China would not have gotten to where it is without standing up to the superpowers whenever they threatened Chinese sovereignty. But the Philippines and the other Asean countries are not western superpowers, and much goodwill can be regained by a more open and flexible diplomacy toward smaller neighbors that feel threatened by China's very size.Certainly, at the very top of the agenda is the urgent need for greater democratization, and here, many of us in the South should be speaking more loudly of China's need to respect human rights in the same way that we scream for this in Indonesia and Burma. At the same time, democratization, we must remind our friends in the West, will come to China with its own rhythm and timetable, and in forms that might not be exact reproductions of western liberal democratic institutions.Then, there is the question of Tibet, and here the role of democratic activists is clear: they must urge the Chinese authorities to engage genuine representatives of the Tibetan people in a genuine dialogue leading either to genuine autonomy for that country, as some desire, or full-fledged independence - an option that will surely become the Tibetans' only choice should Beijing continue to respond with a mailed fist to their just aspirations.

A Southern Perspective

Our role is, in many respects, more complex than the Western activists. Many Western human rights commentators see only human rights violations when they contemplate the social revolutions that have occurred in the South. Without denying that abuses indeed took place, we, on the other hand, recognize these revolutions as admirable historic efforts to eliminate gross inequities in the access to income and wealth. For us, these revolutions were important nationalist endeavors that resulted in strong states which, as in the case of Vietnam and China, endowed these countries with an unparalleled ability to deal with hostile western states and predatory transnational corporations, and to pursue the national economic interest amidst the powerful forces of capitalist globalization.

Invariably, many Northern human rights activists use the Washington or Westminster models, whether explicitly or not, as their yardstick for Southern political systems. But these models of Lockean democracy are, at best, imperfect vehicles for political participation, promoting only the illusion of political equality. That is, they promote political equality without its substance - economic equality. For us, liberal democracy is not, contrary to Francis Fukuyama, the end of history, the end point of political evolution. There is a higher stage that we aspire for - what some call social democracy, and others call popular democracy.

For many Western activists, greater democracy goes hand in hand with greater freedom for the market. For us, markets have a positive role to play in the economy, but too much market may also subvert the conditions of equality that are necessary for a true democracy to function. A strong state role in the economy does not necessarily lead to totalitarianism, as the free-marketeer Frederick Hayek claimed. It is, in fact, a sine qua non for a vibrant democracy.

Let us be faithful to our reality as Southern human rights activists: that we are people concerned with political liberty, yes, but who also care very much about equality and sovereignty. Without equality and national sovereignty, freedom is an illusion. As long as we remember this dictum, we will find our bearings in these challenging times, where we have to do battle not only with the Suhartos of the world but also with the Bill Clintons and Madeleine Albrights waiting to seduce us to their agendas.