The Politics Of Democratization

Generalizing East Asian Experiences

Edward Friedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367295080
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000304688
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection explores democratic transitions in East Asia, arguing against the standard wisdom that European or Christian value systems and socioeconomic forces are essential for democracy to succeed. Instead the contributors convincingly illustrate that political institutions, which can be built anywhere by skilled coalitions, have the most profound and lasting influence on a stable democratic system. Indeed the East Asian experience reveals truths about Western democratization that are obscured by popular Western mythologies. This partnership of U.S. and Asian scholars has given us the first systematic effort to bring East Asia into the democratization debate in a way that compels one to rethink "the politics of democratization" everywhere. The book therefore is a crucial contribution for all those interested in the broader issues of transition.

Part I
Theoretical Overview

1
Democratization: Generalizing the East Asian Experience

EDWARD FRIEDMAN

Can a study of democratization in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China hold general lessons? Some analysts even doubt that East Asia has yet democratized. They argue that Japan has been run since World War II by one probusiness party and that there has been no peaceful transfer of power to a genuine challenger. In this view that mythologizes the Western experience, democracy means a clash of opposing interests resulting in the voting of the "ins" out of power. Democracy is defined so that Japan is not democratic. Power in Japan is contained within a conservative consensus. In fact, authoritarian elites in South Korea and Taiwan are trying to copy Japan's supposedly nondemocratic system. In addition, in the standard perspective that takes the West as normal and Asia as anomalous, East Asia's miracle economies are credited to East Asia's singular Confucian culture. How can such political, economic, and cultural uniqueness hold general lessons on democratization?

The analytic consensus treats Japan as an exception, not the rule. In 1990 a wise theorist of the politics of democratization dismissed the East Asian instances because, given corporate politics and economic success, the usual divisions that need attention and healing for a democratic transition "are less salient in the newly industrialized countries of Asia."¹ Also, Japan's "transition, coming after defeat in World War Two" by "imposing democracy on a defeated dictatorship" is "irrelevant," both because it "is unlikely to repeat itself' and because the transition was a result of "international" pressure. "Thus, there is little to learn from the historical examples."²

Another able analyst in 1991 found Japan "a de facto one party state run by bureaucrats . . . whose sense of values and culture is not shared by the West" since Japan's racial, mystical, hierarchical zealotry finds the liberal individualism of democracy decadent, "cold, divisive and amoral."³ Japan, understood as a dominant-party system with a nonindividualistic culture is portrayed as the opposite of a democratic West where both parties and individuals are supposedly culturally shaped for continuous clashes. In fact, what is assumed about the West's imperatives for democratization is dangerously misleading Western mythology.

The conventional argument holds that democracy requires an independent, individualistic, rational, and tolerant culture as a soil in which to grow. Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew argued that China's very different culture was the source of China's spring 1989 tragedy, that "students in China had been watching on Chinese television for several years the almost nightly demonstrations of 'people power' in the Philippines and South Korea and forgot that China was a very different country."⁴ In like manner, numerous writers long contended that a culture of dependence, irrationality, and envy forged a Russian (Asian) psyche unsuited to democracy. Yet Russia and even more "Asian" parts of the former Soviet Union have made democratic breakthroughs.

But facts have had little impact on those who insist that Protestant Britain gives meaning to the essence of democracy. Despite democratization in some thirty Catholic countries in southern Europe and South America, Seymour Martin Lipset in 1990 still contended "that the correlation of democracy with Protestantism and a past British connection point up the importance of cultural factors." He still believed that it was determinative that "Catholic nations ... are authoritarians in spiritual matters."⁵ Historical developments should long ago have buried theories about cultural preconditions for democracy.

Actually, democratic cultures are the consequences, not the causes, of democratization. Protestantism in the first era of modern democratization tended to be fundamentalist and intolerant. The Church of England was authoritarian and hierarchical, much as the Roman Catholic Church, something that American democratic colonists often criticized. In fact, the insistence that a free nation required "truly free and rational moral agents, autonomous directors of their own lives, independent of the constraints of ossified custom and established authority"⁶ was an argument used to exclude certain communities, such as Catholics, from citizenship. Catholics were deemed unsuited for freedom.

The established mythology mistakes an anti-democratic pretext for a democratic cause. Germans used the argument to brand Jews as immoral and degraded enemies of the people, a premodern germ that had to be removed so Germany could live. To imagine the West as an individualistic culture is to create an anti-democratic construction invoked to legitimate a war against, or to gain control over, other communities. That is how even John Stuart Mill defended British imperialism. The natives lacked the essentials.

If one takes off narrowly self-serving, anti-democratic, cultural blinders, the actual politics of East Asian democratization comes into clear focus. Political scientist T. J. Pempel noted that "in Italy and Japan one sees fragmentation on the left and relative unity on the right." Japan's advantage was a political organization of "soft hegemony," leaving Japan's conservatives "far more able to respond tactically to its opponents and to changing political opportunities."⁷ Japan's democratization is explicable in ordinary and generalizable political terms. Instead, even the wisest of theorists have dismissed East Asian "accomplishments" as "exceedingly rare."⁸ This misses lessons for democratization in general that concern the centrality of broad consensus to the consolidation of democratic breakthroughs. The chapters in this volume contribute to what is usually missed.

Some observers confuse Japan's quite typical form of democratic consolidation, conservative democracy, with reactionary dictatorship.⁹ In fact, post-World War II Japan democratized. That is, institutions had been entrenched that provided fair rules and space for people to express their purposes and to peacefully challenge, contest, and eventually to compromise on major policy issues without fear of loss of liberty, property, or life. The military and security police did not kidnap, torture, or murder peaceful challengers. In contrast to Japan, for decades after World War II, elsewhere in East Asia, elite intransigents in Taiwan and South Korea in control of politicized security forces relied on coercion to repress or terrorize challengers. Subsequent democratizations in Korea and Taiwan have been as different from each other as each has been from Japan. Contrary to the conventional Western misperception, East Asia's paths to democracy are as diverse as is any other region's. Yet democratic consolidation, in Europe or Asia, is bound by a similar general political logic.

Democratization presupposes a taming and neutralization of the elite's anti-democratic military and security forces.¹⁰ Entering the last decade of the twentieth century, arms of coercion in China were still props of elite intransigents whose values and interests precluded risking an ascension to power by challengers through a popular vote. Conservative elites in South Korea or Taiwan who cannot control their violent intransigents can reverse their democratic breakthrough and prevent democratic consolidation. As the culture of the German Protestant Reformation and a middle-class economy did not guarantee that the Weimar Republic would succeed, so recent gains in wealth in South Korea and Taiwan do not guarantee a democratic consolidation. In the political experience of Japan and the rest of East Asia are general lessons for democratic consolidation that are missed by theories focusing solely on individualistic cultural values and a middle-class economy.

Democracy is a process that institutionalizes fair, general rules that risk a loss of power. If a government, after an initial democratic breakthrough, resorts to force or fraud and does not play by the new democratic rules of the game, then, at the popular level, the power holders will seem illegitimate and a violent anti-democratic opposition can seem legitimate. Democracy then will have a difficult time. If the late-twentieth-century democratizing regime in Korea or Taiwan changes the rules during the game, it will make people cynical and foster chaos, civil strife, and an end to democratization. In the struggle to consolidate democracy, concessions to both intransigent elites and challengers are required in order to build a broad democratic consensus. Consolidating democracy involves avoiding the persistence of significant populations of polarized, violent intransigents. Legitimate clashes of groups, interests, and individuals are a subsequent development.

In Japan, the Cold War seemed to initiate a course away from foil democratization. Efforts to build popular union strength, to weaken elite financial cliques, and to outlaw war criminals ended. Worried about radical unions, not reactionary elites, ruling conservatives made what was proclaimed to be democracy appear to be in continuity with the despotic past in which rulers legitimated repression as expunging communism.

The flaw that could subvert democracy was not electoral victory by the "ins" but an experience of cheating by the "ins." A grand conservative coalition that won elections could not be legitimated by a marred process. Political processes are crucial. If conservative predominance had, in fact, come from continually changing the rules while the game was in progess, Japanese democracy would not have been consolidated. But, over time, it became ever clearer in Japan that the victors played by established rules that involved key concessions to challengers. Eleanor Roosevelt noted on a 1952 visit to Japan that "there is a contradiction in this whole political situation here because the reactionaries are actually in power but they accepted and uphold the very liberal constitution which we forced upon them. They really do not believe in most of the measures . . . but the people do believe in them and they do not dare repudiate them."¹¹

Still, had Japan's conservative Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida conceded to Washington's 1950s pressure for cold war military activities against foreign communists, or if Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda had not, in the 1960s, shared the wealth in an income-expanding equity pact, then the late 1940s reverse course could have discredited Japan's democratization and crippled the fledgling democracy. Instead, a broad political consensus was created and democracy was institutionalized. Processes of political accountability seemed to be working.

In the Cold War era, Japan's socialists had a popular base because of their priority of preventing Japan from returning to fascist militarism.¹² That priority meant limiting the military budget, weakening security ties to the United States, and preventing Japan from military action on the side of U.S. Cold War policies. The socialists won on this agenda because, among conservative elites, the ruling Yoshida faction and bureaucrats of the powerful Ministry of Finance were willing to forego a global politico-military role for Japan. A broad democratic consensus was forged that included most conservatives and most progressives. It forced the resignation of the promilitary Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. Democracy was consolidated because a broad array of political interests could identify with the policy consensus, not because the Japanese were by nature harmonious, as the culturalists wrongly assert.

But with the United States giving anticommunism priority over democracy in Asia, as was the case in Japan's militarist era, East Asia's geopolitical context strengthened Japanese ultraconservative factions that championed the emperor and nationalistic education as part of an antiliberal anti-communism. In that political context, no human rights regime developed in East Asia. Human rights efforts would be embarrassing to anti-Communist dictatorships in Korea and Taiwan that were aligned with conservative rulers in Japan. The anti-democratic danger in this unrepentant reactionary force worried the Japanese people and kept Japan's socialists popular for preserving democracy and opposing full-scale rearmament. The broad political consensus continued as central to democratization. The socialists became the protector "of democracy against fascism and militarism."¹³ Japan's governing elites therefore could rule legitimately only by separating themselves from their most reactionary supporters and making concessions to left-wing challengers. Political compromises helped consolidate democracy.

The old elites crafted electoral rules that strengthened their political prospects. They joined their factions in a conservative party that developed multicandidate districts so that members of different conservative factions could all get elected. The result was conservative dominance over a splintered Left, a challenger whose antimilitarist electoral appeal was still strong enough to force conservative elites to compromise against rearmament and for social equity to maintain power. As occurred in nineteenth-century crises of political mobilization in democratic Europe and in the United States, T. J. Pempel has noted that "important historical blocs allied or divided in ways that gave each a unique confluence of interests and set the country's policies on a consistent trajectory for decades. . . . A party that forges a historical compromise among important socio-economic sectors in the crucible of crisis enjoys a halo effect for some period thereafter."¹⁴ In sum, Japan's consolidation of democracy, rather than being anomalous, is explicable in categories that reveal a general political pattern for the consolidation of democracy as such.

The democratization of East Asia is best understood as part of a global process. A spark for late 1989 democratization in Eastern Europe lay in the televising of China's great spring 1989 democracy movement. "[The 1989 movement in China] awakened the world, especially East Europe. Everywhere in East Europe people were talking about it. Everybody told me: 'without the Chinese [who started the movement], we could not have done anything.'"¹⁵ East Europeans report that watching the Beijing massacre persuaded East German rulers not to follow China's bloody road when confronted with democratic demonstrators.¹⁶ The East Asian experience, in practice as well as in theory, in China as in Japan, is central to the global moment.

Then why in 1989, even Chinese ask, could East Europeans democratize although China could not? Answers, from the perspective of this volume, lie in the realm of ordinary politics. In Beijing, the charismatic revolutionary generation that toppled the old order in 1949 still held on to dictatorial power. Where similar Leninist first-generation patriotic groups held power, that is, in Pyongyang, Hanoi, and Havana, democrats did not win. In fact, in these other capitals, the democratic surge was far, far less than in Beijing. This could suggest that, comparatively speaking, the democratic potential in China may be relatively large.

The 1989 suppression of democratic forces in China may, in addition, have no deeper cause than the particula...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE Theoretical Overview
• PART TWO Japan
• PART THREE Korea
• PART FOUR Hong Kong
• PART FIVE Tawian
• PART SIX China
• About the Book
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index