Globalization, Democratization and Asian Leadership

Power Sharing, Foreign Policy and Society in the Philippines and Japan

Vincent Kelly Pollard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754615392
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351932950
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The foreign policies of presidents, prime ministers and their foreign secretaries can be influenced by the preferences of domestic and international nongovernmental actors, as well as those of other governments. Representative democracy, media power, citizen activism and the globalization of politics and telecommunications, for example, have accelerated changes in the sharing of power. This book focuses on the Philippines and Japan where, willingly and unwillingly, foreign policy executives share power with individuals and groups inside and outside of government bureaucracies and their societies. The book retells the foreign policy narratives of regional cooperation, military relations and official development assistance (foreign aid), revealing how executive foreign policy makers and civil society organizations share power - and succeed or fail - in a globalizing, democratizing world. A variety of published, unpublished and declassified sources provide journalists, scholars, government practitioners and global citizens with a sophisticated understanding of the domestic politics of foreign policy making, as well as its intergovernmental and transnational side.

1 Globalization, Democratization and Plural Governance

Introduction

Corporate infatuation with globalization may remind future historians of nineteenth-century Social Darwinism. That was an evolution-influenced belief in social progress and survival of the fittest. Tempting as it might be, dismissing globalization as wishful hyperbole—as a fatalistic synonym for the unstoppable world capitalism—would be glib.

More precisely, globalization refers to change, to powerful transformative processes influencing social organizations and individual lives across the planet Earth. Change-inducing globalization processes include flows of trade, investment, political ideologies, terror, genes, literary and artistic tastes, music, cinema, jokes, bacteria and viruses, oceanic and atmospheric pollution, sea-level rise, and other malign and benign artifacts and events. For better and for worse, these processes have reduced distance and time for conflict and cooperation opportunities between countries, governments and smaller social units like families, sports teams, churches and political parties.

Underway for centuries, many globalization processes have accelerated since the 1970s. Telecommunications globalization is a politically-rich example: satellite and cable TV, facsimile transmission, wired and wireless e-mail, and the World Wide Web. Telecommunications globalization colors our lives with mind-numbingly accelerated mass media reporting of political news. Adept use of the Internet by dissenting advocates of globalization-from-below disseminates political words and images with equal rapidity. The attractiveness of representative democracy (not always modeled on the U.S.) and novel forms of citizen participation in politics taken root across the globe in response to local desires and transnational global pressures. In turn, political and telecommunications globalization has created potentially large and receptive transborder audiences for previously disadvantaged political organizations and social movements.

The local impact of globalization processes varies. Regionalization and intensified nationalism are responses to globalization unanticipated by most of its early cheerleaders. As in Europe, Africa and Latin America, liberal (representative) democracy with its openings for citizen participation and contestation for power attracts more support in Asia today than during the early Cold War.

Political diversity still characterizes East Asia (China, Japan, the Koreas, Taiwan and Eastern Russia) and South East Asia (Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia/Kampuchea, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam). And diversity also characterizes Asian democracies like the Philippines and Japan in the age of globalization.

Evaluating Success and Failure in Foreign Policy

Among their more prominent activities, official governments of liberal democracies propose, debate, implement and revise foreign policy. Why then have presidents and prime ministers of some democratically elected governments in Asia better achieved their foreign policy objectives than others?

The question is worth asking. After all, internationally directed actions (trade, military treaties, wars, development assistance) taken by elected government leaders affect the welfare of citizens within their own societies, as well as people outside the country. Such actions include regulation of trade, waging war, controlling immigration, and donating official development assistance.

What has been the experience of government officials and citizens in electoral democracies of East and South East Asia like the presidential Republic of the Philippines and parliamentary Japan? This book answers these questions by explaining how effectively foreign policy makers have shared power in the Philippines and Japan since the 1960s. As the case studies will show, tracing the story of power sharing unlocks the door to foreign policy making processes of diverse Asian democracies.

Intermestic Politics

In this book, intermestic politics are front and center—the domestic, intergovernmental and transnational politics of foreign policy. Therefore, this discussion will benefit scholars, journalists and practitioners—and concerned, attentive, active citizens.

Documentation

Evidence matters. Supporting the facts and inferences in each of the detailed foreign policy making historical case studies in this book is a range of published and unpublished documentary materials. In each case, they include domestic and foreign sources.

Supporting the foreign policy analysis in subsequent chapters are four hundred parenthetical citations to speeches, public documents, newspaper reports and photography, interviews with top policy makers and their critics, declassified diplomatic cablegrams and other once-secret memoranda, videotapes of insightful television talk-show colloquies, memoirs, other descriptive and analytic accounts, translations and quantitative data.

Within each chapter, parenthetical references (author, date, pagination) indicate sources for quotations and summaries. The reader will find a complete citation to each source in an author-alphabetized Reference list.

Availability of data to other scholars enhances the chances of social scientific replicability (King, Keohane and Verba 1994:27). I have undertaken to carry out this responsibility to my colleagues. U.S. Government documents declassified for this book may be purchased from the Department of State, and most are also available in the Asia Collection, Hamilton Graduate Research Library, University Hawai’i at Manoa.

And for those interviewees who have given permission, arrangements will be made to deposit copies of their interview tapes at an appropriate institution.

We now proceed directly to the book’s main theme.

Foreign Policy Defined

Foreign policy refers to explicit or inferred public and private executive preferences for anticipating, shaping, controlling, managing or responding to an anticipated future state of affairs beyond a country’s national borders. Executive foreign policy makers prefer to do one or more of the following: 1) to initiate a future changed state of affairs, 2) to maintain the status quo, or 3) to combine continuity and change. This definition of policy elaborates an earlier values-based one in which “a decision-maker’s policy indicates what choices he would make if confronted with some set of alternatives” (Kent 1969:96). In the current study, foreign policy refers primarily to the preferences of chief executives and secondarily to others whose actions facilitate or impede achievement of the chief executive’s external affairs preferences.

That conceptualization, in turn, has an elective affinity with a narrower one from a study of foreign policy by ten South East Asian governments—“the sum of statements and actions by a state’s policymakers to promote or control the impact of changes in the external environment” (Wurfel and Burton 1990:5). And the definition of policy-as-preference used in this book may remind the reader of all the elements of a related definition of foreign policy as “decisions that set goals, set precedents, or lay down courses of action, and the actions to implement those decisions” (Holsti 1977:21; emphasis supplied). The formulation and implementation of foreign policy in the Philippines and Japan receive sustained attention in this book.

With this understanding of foreign policy, one may infer a chief executive’s external affairs preferences from his or her statements and other actions. Two caveats are in order. Reference to a chief executive’s desires to manage future situations does not imply that he or she has outlined alternative scenarios as is urged by futuristic policy scientists (Dator 1978). At the same time, foreign affairs preferences are not necessarily inferred from outcomes. That would be naïve. And it would imply that executive foreign policy makers are omnipotent. Chance benefits do not imply causality.

Refining Democratic Theory

Scholars have asked how democratic is foreign policy making in Asian governments (Haas, Jiwalai and Kuroda 1996:223–261). This book asks a related question. Expanding on Robert Dahl’s suggestive middle-level notion of “organizational pluralism” (Dahl 1982:55; 1984:233–235), the book explains success and failure by executive foreign policy makers in two representative democracies.

“Organizational pluralism” refers to “a diversity of social organization [sic] with a large measure of autonomy” (Dahl and Lindblom 1953, quoted in Dahl 1984:237). Stretching this notion suggests a Social Process Model of power sharing, foreign policy and society. Like other models, the Social Process Model is a metaphor. It facilitates analysis of success and failure in the intermestic—domestic, bilateral, transnational and multilateral—politics of foreign policy making. Stretched organizational pluralism is not Dahlian “polyarchy.” In teasing out nuances of democratic theory, recall that “organizational pluralism” is necessary but not sufficient for “polyarchy”—which sometimes means the highest degree of political contestation and participation (Dahl 1971:7–8; 1973:1–4; 1982:4–12; 1985:1–18; cf. Dahl 1950:205–279; 1956:63–89; 1967:22–24; 1969/1966:395–401; James G. March, in Shapiro and Reeher 1988:61–62).

Dahl’s Rokkan Memorial Lecture to the Nordic Political Science Association amply refutes the appropriateness of polyarchy for guiding a comparative study of foreign policy making. Overworking polyarchy since the 1950s, researchers have indiscriminately associated it with regime “type,” a “byproduct” of democratization, a “set of institutions’ and a system of social “control by competition” and “a system of rights” (Dahl 1984:227–230, 239–240, nn. 6 and 13). Thus, thirty-one years after introducing polyarchy, Dahl acknowledged that it “does not appear to have a standard meaning,” conceding that he had “doubtless contributed to the confusion” (Ibid.:227). Dahl’s remarkable self-criticism has been ignored by his colleagues and critics. Nor am I convinced that Dahl fully integrated his “Nordic” epiphany into his subsequent scholarship.

The Social Process Model also contrasts with Richard Hoffenbert’s model—“the dominant paradigm for comparative policy research” in the early 1990s. Noteworthy are his tendency to “blackbox” decision making behavior and the “neglect of an intergovernmental dimension” (Sabatier 1991:150–151).

Organizational Pluralism

My use of organizational pluralism resonates with Arthur F. Bentley’s claim that official governments do not monopolize social governance. Applied to foreign policy, his expansive conception of the sources of governance directs attention to power sharing in foreign policy making—willingly and unwillingly, inside and outside the official government, and inside and outside the society: “Government is the process of the adjustment of a set of interest groups in a particular distinguishable…. system without any differentiated activity, or ‘organ,’ to center attention on just what is happening.” Bentley continues:

An immense mass of such adjustments not mediated by the government organs underlies the work of the differentiated government…. because interest groups, identical with those that are adjusting themselves or that have become fully adjusted in the ways just described, work through the differentiated government, and give that government its characteristic forms and movements (Bentley 1908:260; emphasis supplied).

Latent Foreign Policy Interests in the Social Process

Although Bentley elaborated his notion of social and governmental pluralism (Bentley 1908: 261–269, 306, 314–315 and 452), David B. Truman restricted Bentley’s insight in a way congenial to existing governments. In Truman’s interest-group pluralism, the ideal governmental leader tries to link “latent interests” (Truman 1967/1951:116) more closely to established patterns of “access” (Ibid.:5) and does so in order to ‘shift the nature of the risks that beset the legislator and bring them in somewhat closer conformity with those confronting the president” in order to secure “coordinate legislative-executive leadership” (Ibid.:500: cf. Ibid.: 522, 516, 533). “Latent interests,” however, might also be emerging intermestic foreign policy actors discussed in Chapter 3–8. Kolrnhauser noted that “access requires competition among elites” (Ibid.: 55). Thus, electoral and bureaucratic competition among elites deserves attention. Grant McConnell was better attuned than Truman to Bentley’s pluralized notion of governance. McConnell understood not only that official governments could mediate interest group politics but also, on the far end of that mediation spectrum, that pluralized governance includes “private governments” (McConnell 1966:5). More fluidly, pluralized governance consists of competing centers of power with which official governments must interact in order to get their business done. These centers might be a national newspaper, an anti-militarist farmers’ group or a transnational women’s organization.

“Social pluralism” for William Kornhauser, is similar to Dahl’s “organizational pluralism” (Kornhauser 1959:232–237). Amplifying and refining Truman’s concept of “access,” Kornhauser distinguishes between “entrance” into elites and “selection” of elites (Ibid.: 1959:53). Pluralist theory’s embedded elitism reconciles “the ideal of the autonomous individual and the reality of mass-elite dichotomy through the mediation of pluralist democracy—with its negative liberty, multiple group affiliation, intermediary groups and heterogeneity and competition among the elites” (Ono 1967/1965:104). Although systemic (class), structural (institutional, elite) and situational process, pluralist) theories of power in state and society are “intimately” interrelated (Domhoff 1978:129), plural governance does not necessarily imply equality of access or results (Parenti 1988:6, 301–302).

The Social Process Model is an elite model of foreign policy making; however, it brings society into foreign policy analysis. The Social Process Model offsets tendencies to “blackbox” or obscure society’s role in foreign policy making. Unlike exclusively government-centered approaches to foreign policy making, the Social Process Model brings society back into comparative foreign policy analysis by asking the following question: How is power shared—domestically, inside and outside the government, and inside and outside national boundaries?

So, how do executive foreign policy makers achieve their desired goals? Explaining intended and unintended outcomes in the foreign policy making process requires specification of the necessary and sufficient conditions for those outcomes. An emphasis on precedent (national institutions, campaign promises, treaties, policy legacies, gender, standard operating procedures, value diffusion, and global market forces) competes with executive initiative (public and private statements, other agenda setting actions, effective and self-defeating policy legacies) in explanations of foreign policy outcomes.

Showing the interaction of historical and institutional precedent with executive initiative, the Social Process Model brings society back in, paying sustained and detailed attention to how executive foreign policy makers share power. They do so willingly and unwillingly, wittingly and unwittingly, inside and outside govern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Globalization, Democratization and Plural Governance
• 2 Social Inference in Foreign Policy Analysis
• 3 Spreading the Risks: Co-marketing ASEAN in a Contested Election
• 4 Information Asymmetry in Aquino’s Electoral Foreign Policy
• 5 Semi-dictatorship and Democracy in Foreign Policy Making
• 6 ASEAN Free Riders and Senate Resistance
• 7 Guiding Foreign Aid with Contested Standards
• 8 Domesticating and Transnationalizing ODA Policy: NGO Agendas and Limits to Change
• 9 Power Sharing, Plural Governance, and Foreign Policy Success in a Globalizing Asia
• References
• Index