Governance in the Asia-Pacific

David Goldblatt, Richard Maidment, Jeremy Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134691357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

]IGovernance in the Asia-Pacific is a student-friendly textbook which examines the governance of nation states in this diverse and rapidly-changing region. It sets out the range of political beliefs and styles that flourish and the similarities and differences between individual states and the ways in which they choose to govern. Wide-ranging in scope and clearly written to help students get to the bottom of important issues, the book addresses many key areas including:
* the Anglo-American powers
* Japan
* independence movements
* the politics of economic development
* social movements
* the politics of the environment
* the pressures for political change in the region.
And these issues are all analysed within the broad context of governance in the Asia-Pacific more generally. The authors also identify factors which explain the political underpinning of the dramatic economic development in the region.

CHAPTER 1
Politics and governance in the Asia-Pacific: Historical and thematic overview

David Goldblatt

1.1
Introduction

This book deals with politics and governance in the Asia-Pacific region since the end of the Second World War, however, despite the apparent narrowness of its coverage, this volume is premised on a broader model of politics and governance than its subject matter might initially imply. Four arguments run throughout the chapters of this book.

• The first is that the study of contemporary politics requires an historical perspective. Unquestionably, an immense gulf separates the politics of the Pacific before and after the Second World War, but this book takes the position that the nature of the region’s political cultures and political values, the territorial reach of its states, and the form and character of its political institutions can only be properly explained by delving into their long and complex pre-war history.

• Second, that the distinctive arena of politics is not captured by the study of the state or governments alone, but by processes of governance: the collective processes of rule-making, monitoring and implementation conducted by many intertwined social actors and institutions. While casual inspection of the contemporary and historical record suggests that in most of the region, most of the time, states have been an indispensable element of the process of governance, they have no monopoly. Collective rule-making has also been undertaken by the stateless indigenous societies of North America and Oceania and the assemblies of the Japanese feudal village, while political power has been wielded by military forces, economic institutions and theocratic bureaucracies.

Two aspects of the notion of governance are developed in this book. First, the notion of governance requires us to focus on active processes rather than passive, static accounts of institutions. While an under standing of the structure of political institutions is indispensable, we have tried to look at the ways in which key actors have used those structures and institutions: what resources, options and strategies do different institutional structures make available to those actors? Second, the notion of governance suggests a process of rule-making in which government and political elites are locked into economic and social networks—these may be formal or informal, vertical hierarchies or more horizontal egalitarian relationships, co-operative or conflictual. While politics and governance constitute a distinct realm of human actions and institutions, they cannot be understood independently from their interaction with military power and international affairs, economic power and institutions, cultural beliefs and social structures.

• Third, the study of politics in the Asia-Pacific is necessarily interdisciplinary and in this book you will find a diversity of social forces at work in almost every chapter. This is reinforced with links to the other books in the Pacific Studies series which focus on other dimensions of life in the Asia-Pacific—international relations, economics and social and cultural life. (Where possible we have referred you to these volumes, which are referenced in bold.)

• Fourth, many of the key questions and issues that political life in the Asia-Pacific has thrown up can usefully be approached thematically. Three themes run through the chapters of this book: difference, dynamism and disjunctures. Difference points to the enormous variations in political life in the Asia-Pacific. Dynamism focuses our attention on the rapid and intense processes of social change that have convulsed the polities and societies of the region. Disjunctures point to the complex interaction of different forms of social change, focusing our attention on the side-effects, contradictions and conflicts that emerge in response or opposition to those changes.

This introductory chapter is intended to serve as a stepping stone to, and. route guide through, the rest of the book. The interdisciplinary approach to politics is not dealt with explicitly but informs the general approach of the chapter. The structure and purposes of this chapter spring from the historical and thematic elements of our approach to studying politics and governance. In Sections 1.2–1. 5 I outline the essential elements of the historical background to politics and governance in the contemporary Asia-Pacific. This does not constitute a comprehensive history. Rather these sections serve to orientate you within the basic co-ordinates of the region’s political history prior to the Second World War. In Section 1.2 I have chosen to begin that history in 1500 to signify an era in East Asia, Oceania and the Americas just before the arrival of Europeans. It is central to the argument of this chapter that this historical experience—the demographic, military, political and cultural conflict between Europe, its North American offshoots and the indigenous states and societies of the region—has been central to the character of politics and the fate of states for most of the subsequent four and a half centuries.

In Section 1.3 a fundamental line is drawn between the Asian and the American-Oceanic experience of European imperial expansion. In the case of the latter, Europeans achieved a total victory and set about the erection of new states on the demographic ruins of indigenous societies. However, in East Asia Europeans encountered a much more complex, dense, and entrenched set of societies whose total defeat was impossible. Indeed, prior to 1800, the impact of Western imperial power was minimal. At best, on the coasts and island chains of South-East Asia, Europeans had managed to construct fragile parasitic colonial polities whose realm consisted of little more than chains of ports, forts and trading stations, tiny garrisons, and pockets of plantation agriculture. In China and Japan, the West reached the limits of its colonial power if not its ambitions. The Chinese still viewed the European presence with a mixture of disdain and indifference, while Japan remained almost entirely cut off from European encounters since its expulsion of Christian missionaries in the seventeenth century.

However, as Section 1.4 seeks to demonstrate, after 1800 the balance of power between European imperialism and the great powers of Asian antiquity shifted massively in favour of Europe and the USA. South-East Asia, apart from Siam, was eventually directly colonized. European colonialism did not leave the political and social life of its fragile Asian colonies untouched, initiating processes of momentous economic, social and cultural change; change that would lay the basis for national independence movements, new state borders and territories, and the institutions of post-Second World War governance. By contrast, Japan and China, falteringly, and in their different ways, were able to muster sufficient political and military power to resist Western occupation and begin their own processes of political and economic modernization. Of all the responses to the threat and presence of the West in the Pacific by far the most successful was the Japanese. Indeed so swift and so impressive was Japan’s reconstruction of itself in the late nineteenth century that the early twentieth-century politics of the region would be shaped by the emergence of a powerful, aggressive and effective Japanese imperial project. It was this that ultimately led to the conflagration of the Pacific War, discussed in Section 1.5, as Japan sought to both replace European imperial powers in the region and destroy the potential imperial power of the USA across the Pacific. Thus my narrative, which begins in 1500, ends in 1945.

Having taken that narrative up to the end of the Second World War, I turn from historical to thematic questions. In Section 1.6 I unpack the meaning of our three themes in terms of governance and political institutions. While there is a distinctive political dimension to all of them, I argue that difference, dynamism and disjunctures come in many forms; political, economic, military and cultural. I then explore the ways in which the individual chapters of this book draw upon historical argument and engage with our themes in pursuit of exploring and explaining governance in the contemporary Asia-Pacific.

1.2
The state in the Asia-Pacific in 1500

The contrasts of political life in the Asia-Pacific five centuries ago with political life in the 1990s are instructive. The gulf is enormous and illustrated by two key differences.

• First, the idea of the Pacific or the Asia-Pacific as a region, in which political life could be viewed as a whole, would have made little sense given the absence of traffic across the ocean, and the effective social and political separation of Asia, Oceania and the Pacific coast of the Americas. In any case, any political observer of the time would not have looked to the Pacific Ocean and the ring of states and societies around it to construct a mental and political geography. In 1500 there was only one centre of political life: the vast and ancient Middle Kingdom, Ming China.

• Second, we view the political life of the Pacific today predominantly in terms of nation-states. States that possess an impersonal legal existence independent of the incumbents of offices and the households and personal retinues of monarchies. States that possess an entrenched and regularized bureaucracy and possess a monopoly of legitimate force evenly across a demarcated and internationally recognized territorial area. No such states existed in the Asia-Pacific in 1500 and no single state form predominated. Political life displayed an unparalleled diversity.

At the centre of that diversity was the great and ancient Chinese empire —self styled as the Middle Kingdom. It considered itself the centre of the known civilized world, the sole site of legal and moral sovereignty to whom all other states owed allegiance and tribute. In 1500 the empire was controlled by the Ming dynasty who had expelled the Mongol invaders and usurpers in the mid fourteenth century. In 1500 the Ming state seemed secure and powerful, despite the immense demographic losses of the fourteenth-century plagues and the subsequent slow down in economic and technological innovation. Yet as with almost every other Chinese dynasty, the Ming fell—not to internal revolt but to conquest by nomadic warriors, in this case the Manchu, from the northern borders beyond the Great Wall of China. The Ming finally fell in 1664 inaugurating the last dynasty of imperial China the Manchu or Qing. As with earlier cycles of imperial history, the nomadic barbarians may have had the military capacity to destroy a Chinese dynasty at a moment of internal weakness, but they lacked any distinctive cultural weight or depth of their own. In a matter of a generation the Manchu elite had become entirely Sinicized, that is, absorbed by the dominant Chinese culture. The culture of elite China and the membership of the Mandarinate—the Confucian imperial bureaucracy—remained unchanged. Qing China retained all the strengths and weaknesses of its Ming forerunners. On the one hand it possessed an organized and regularized administrative and bureaucratic system stretching across an enormous territory with a huge population that could generate the necessary surplus for elite cultural development and military success. On the other hand the Qing state remained dependent on a decentralized landlord class whose interest in seeing power flow to the centre was minimal and whose capacity for developing innovative economic relationships was very low. Qing China’s capacity for economic development and the centralization of political and administrative power— essential when threatened from without—was constrained by the stand off between central state and local landlord.

In the shadows of the great Middle Kingdom stood a wide range of other political forms. In Japan a weak and declining feudal monarchy had been displaced some time before 1500 and the turn of the century saw Japanese society enmeshed in conflict and civil war that was to last for over 100 years. Isolated and protected by its island geography, Japan’s political development could proceed unthreatened until the basic conflicts between the centralizing tendencies of would-be feudal monarchies and powerful local lords and barons was resolved in favour of the former. The Tokugawa Shogunate was established in the early seventeenth century. A small central state was created around the wealth and domestic administration of the Tokugawa family. They set about the destruction of local feudal powers, the imposition of civil order and the neutralization of the ancient imperial house in whose name they ruled, but whose power was rendered nugatory. Increasingly successful, Tokugawa Japan was able to expel the few Christian missionaries who had made it onto the mainland, impose a rigorous peace, and effectively close the country to outside influence. Two and a half centuries of peaceful internal development, some economic growth and considerable cultural achievement followed, but, when the outside world did arrive, it would provide a very sharp political awakening.

In Vietnam the Le dynasty had come to power half a century or so earlier and had by 1500 established a stable and entrenched Confucian monarchy that paralleled Chinese social and political organization as well as being rooted in Chinese philosophy and culture. Yet its core areas of control were small and petered out as soon as one moved inland from the Mekong delta and the long coastline. In Korea, the Yi dynasty had consolidated control over the peninsula even earlier, in the late fourteenth century, and ruled a similar, if more insular, Confucian kingdom. In what is now contemporary Burma/Myanmar a variety of different small Buddhist kingdoms existed, each reflecting variations in the theological tradition and all with a narrow area of actual political control, vying with each other for a wider regional hegemony. This region of inland South-East Asia, over the next two centuries, came to be contested between the Buddhist kingdoms of Ava, centred in Burma, and Ayudhya, centred in contemporary southern Thailand. Between these kingdoms and the expansionary Vietnamese to the east, the remaining independent principalities of Phnom Penh, and the Lao and Shan peoples, were squeezed out of existence. To the south, the Malay peninsula was a complex patchwork of tiny kingdoms, emerging trading city states and Islamic sultanates whose spheres of control did not penetrate much beyond the ports and river estuaries and deltas on which they prospered. A similar patchwork was developing across what has become the Indonesian archipelago, but in 1500 no state of any consequence had emerged in the area outside of the Buddhist kingdoms of Java. The region remained populated by stateless societies of hunter-gatherers and subsistence agrarians. Beyond the ancient and densely populated civilizations of East Asia and its off-shore islands, the stateless societies of Oceania and the Pacific coasts of North America remained untroubled by the states, armies and bureaucracies of either Asia or Europe.

1.3
Early European colonialism

The Americas: democracy and oligarchy

As Section 1.2 made clear, in 1500 the Pacific may have been an ocean but it did not in any sense provide a point of reference for discussing politics. The worlds of East Asia, Oceania and the Pacific coasts of the Americas remained separate. What ultimately brought them together was the creation of a state on the American continent of sufficient power that its reach could be felt across the ocean: the USA. How did such a state emerge and why should it have become the earliest if incomplete liberal democracy? European colonialism in the Americas begins with the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch in the Caribbean and Latin America. From the early sixteenth century onwards successive waves of colonial adventurers and Jesuit missionaries landed on the Latin American mainland encountering and then waging war on the indigenous societies. In the centre of the continent the Spaniards blundered into the Aztecs while in the south all along the continent’s Pacific coastline they encountered Inca civilization. Within a generation these societies had been decimated by the ravages of European diseases and succumbed to a combination of military power, bravado and brutality. Over the next century Spanish control was consolidated along the Pacific coastline and into the interior, where it met Portuguese control spreading out from the Atlantic coastline. Spanish power was extended northwards into what is now Mexico—then called New Spain—as well as into the Florida peninsula, while claims of sovereignty and control were made over much of the western half of North America (see Eccleston et al., 1998, Figures 2 and 3). However, the immensity of Spanish and Portuguese conquests never corresponded to the real reach and power of the colonial administration established in the Americas. The Spanish empire was never able to secure any of its claims to territory north of Mexico and none of the independent states that emerged out of the collapse of the empire in the nineteenth century were able to muster sufficient power to reach across the Pacific. Over the vast territories of the Spanish and Portuguese crown there was perhaps no more than ten million people in 1600. Despite some European immigration, large-scale imports of slaves from Africa, and some local population recovery, the territories remained very thinly populated for three centuries. It is hardly surprising that colonies, and then states, which could barely define their own borders and build more than the most rudimentary social and political infrastructures, should have such a minimal international reach. Nor is it surprising that societies so systematically reliant on the use of repressive labour (slave plantations, metal mining) and so dominated by an ersatz and implanted military-aristocratic class, should be fertile soil for the emergence of elite-dominated oligarchic politics.

Along the Atlantic seaboard in the north of the continent the dominant colonizing powers were Britain and France. Steadily displacing the native American tribes of the east coast by a mixture of disease and war, British colonies were founded from Virginia in the south to the Great Lakes in the nor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Politics and governance in the Asia-Pacific Historical and thematic overview
• Part 1 State Forms and Political Struggles
• Part 2 Policy, Politics and Governance
• Part 3 Riding the Juggernaut Political Change
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Index