Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian Politics

Richard Robison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415494274
• eBook ISBN: 9781136579189
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

Now available in paperback, this Handbook provides a comprehensive analysis of the major themes that have defined the politics of Southeast Asia. It provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge examination of this important subject. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the theoretical and ideological themes that have dominated the study of the region's politics and presents the different ways the complex politics of the region have been understood. The contributions by leading scholars in the field cover a range of broad questions about the dynamics of politics.

The Handbook analyses how the dominant political and social coalitions of the region were forged in the Cold War era, and assesses the complex processes of transition towards various forms of democratic politics. How institutions and systems of governance are being forged in an increasingly global environment is discussed and whether civil society in Southeast Asia has really evolved as an independent sphere of social and political activity. The Handbook examines how national governments are dealing with growing tensions within the region as matters such as labour, human rights and the environment spill beyond national boundaries, and how they are establishing a place in the new global framework.

By engaging the Southeast Asian experience more firmly with larger debates about modern political systems, the Handbook is an essential reference tool for students and scholars of Political Science and Southeast Asian studies.

1

Interpreting the Politics of Southeast Asia

Debates in Parallel Universes

Richard Robison

Among the critical questions that have defined debates about the politics of Southeast Asia, three have been especially enduring. One of these asks why liberal politics has proven so fragile across the region and why various forms of authoritarianism or electoral politics based on one-party rule or money politics have been so pervasive. A second question is concerned with the relationship between market capitalism and political institutions and ideas; in particular why various forms of interventionist state and predatory systems of governance have survived and flourished despite the embrace of market capitalism. A third is concerned with more recent patterns of decentralization of authority, the spread of democratic reforms and the participation of social movements and local actors in the political arena. It is a matter of contention whether these developments signal the long-awaited rise of a progressive and self-reliant civil society or the consolidation of new social and economic oligarchies and mechanisms for control on the part of the state.

This chapter examines how these important questions have been addressed within different schools of thought and how they have themselves been consolidated and transformed over time.

What has Driven the Debate? The Parallel Universes of Political Analysis

The politics of Southeast Asia has been explained and understood within three main ideological and scholarly traditions. These include:

• American political science, in both its pluralist and behavioural aspects and its structural functional dimensions, especially as this is constituted within modernization theory.¹
• Political economy in the British and European tradition, especially as this is influenced by Marxist ideas about the relationship of capitalism, state power and class interest.² This will be referred to in this chapter as critical political economy.
• Public choice/rational choice political economy and New Institutional Economics.³

Several subsidiary approaches have emerged from these traditions.

• A new pluralist political sociology and cultural politics emphasizing the critical importance of civil society, social movements and the politics of culture and identity in the transformation of political systems. It does not always accept modernization assumptions of a necessary grand convergence of markets, democracy and good governance.
• The new pluralism has also merged with ideas that recognize the transformative capacity of institutions and the pathways of possibilities they establish for political and economic reform.⁴ In this approach, institutional reform can be a prelude to broader democratic and liberal consolidation by means of negotiation between conservatives and reformers.⁵
• A departure from more mainstream ideas about class and state emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in the form of dependency theory, emphasizing the primacy of global relations of exploitation and dependence in shaping the dynamics of politics and power in developing economies.

These boundaries are porous in some respects. Behavioural, organic and institutional approaches thread their way across both modernization theory and rational choice political economy. And it is recognized across all schools of thought that institutions matter, although their primacy is contested and there is disagreement about where institutions come from. We also find that many of the same questions are at the heart of debates within all the theoretical camps. Is civil society a progressive or a reactionary force? Are there substantive relationships between democratic political institutions, markets and civil society? Or can markets be incubated in illiberal and authoritarian systems?

Nevertheless, it is true to say that the literature has proceeded in three largely parallel universes, insulated by institutional as well as ideological factors. Rational choice political economists dominate the research factories of the World Bank and associated policy institutions, as well as economics departments in most universities. Behavioural and pluralist approaches are institutionally and ideologically rooted in the US political science academy while critical political economy is found mostly in universities in the UK and Australia. The intellectual cores of the three main schools and their understandings of such key concepts as the ‘state’, ‘civil society’, governance and class, the transformative possibilities of institutions and markets and the possibilities of agency are hardwired in such fundamentally different ways there is little room for compromise. Thus, a central argument here is that theoretical debates about the politics of the region have taken place almost entirely on the basis of collisions and disputes within the main paradigms themselves.

What, then, causes the rise and fall of the different schools and their influence? The unravelling of democratic politics and the expectations of middle-class power in post-colonial societies and the rise of authoritarianism dealt a blow to liberal pluralist approaches. As Western powers placed an increasing primacy on political order and social control in the Cold War, studies that could conflate authoritarian rule with the process of institutional and behavioural modernity flourished. A second fundamental shift in the larger context of economic and political power took place in the 1980s and 1990s. The ending of manufacturing-based social democracy in the West and the rise of neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan meant that the political agenda now moved to transforming society and politics in the image of the market by embedding its principles and values. It was this that incubated the rise of rational choice political economy, methodological individualism and a new political economy of institutions where techno-managerial forms of authority and ‘good governance’ would contain the predatory impulses of society and the destructive potential of representative and competitive politics.

The very same dynamics meant that critical political economy and history now operated in a framework where social democracy was on the retreat and its influence in the policy-making institutions of the state diminishing. At least in Britain and to a lesser degree in Australia, its influence in some media and intellectual institutions has proven resilient for the time being.

Perhaps the important question is whether these paradigms will continue or whether there is a new and fundamental change in the wind. Will a new post-neoliberal phase drive a revitalization of pluralist politics or critical political economy? The possibilities are not simply intellectual. Such changes will also need to overcome the institutional arrangements that cement the orthodoxies within in the academies and their funding bases and journals and in organizations such as the World Bank and the various national development assistance agencies. I will discuss this further in the conclusion.

The 1950s to the 1980s: Explaining the Fragility of the Liberal Experiments and the Rise of Authoritarian Rule

There was an initial mood of optimism among Western observers of Southeast Asia after the Second World War and the unravelling of colonial rule. Seemingly vigorous democracies emerged in several countries and middle classes appeared to play an increasingly influential role in political life. It was also widely felt that countries like the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia and Burma in particular, with their export agricultural industries, were better placed to emerge as modern economies than those of Northeast Asia. Yet in the decades from the 1950s to the 1970s most of the new democracies established across the region were progressively undermined by conflicts within elites over the spoils of power and by the rise of populist movements, some supported by military and by quasi-fascist alliances and others by rural-based insurgencies organized and led by communist parties. It was a period defined by a trend towards authoritarian rule, one-party states, military politics, corporatist and nationalist ideals, often resting on direct state intervention in the economy.

Formal institutions of parliaments and elections often proved useful mechanisms for distributing patronage and power among powerful propertied oligarchies, as was the case in the Philippines. In other cases, they did not embody ideals of representation and the rights of critics and opponents. In Singapore and Malaysia, these were systematically curtailed on the grounds of maintaining social order or providing economic growth. In both countries, internal security acts were introduced to control political activity and in Malaysia a New Economic Policy, introduced following the race riots in 1969, effectively tied the Malay community to what was to become the effective state political party, the United Malay National Organization.

In several cases, democratic regimes were dismantled. In the Philippines, an authoritarian interregnum was introduced by President Marcos, allegedly to sweep away the ongoing corruption of democratic government. And, less than a decade after its establishment, Indonesia’s seemingly vigorous parliamentary system was replaced by a system of ‘Guided Democracy’, argued by President Sukarno to replace the bickering of vested interests and the residues of feudalism and imperialism with a particularly Indonesian form of politics. Representative politics gave way to populist ideas and corporatist institutions and the authority of the state was enhanced by a vast bureaucratic apparatus as well as state-sponsored political organizations and state-owned corporations (see Reeve 1978/9). In Thailand, a right-wing military dictatorship under General Sarit in 1957 ushered in an era of authoritarian politics that would last for almost two decades.

For most modernization theorists, the resurgence of authoritarianism and centralized populism were the logical political expressions of traditional cultural values and patrimonial political and economic behaviour. In the Philippines, Marcos’ authoritarianism was seen as the resurgence of an institutional tradition set down in colonial times (Hutchcroft 1991; Sidel 1999) or the inevitable centralization of patronage politics (Doronila 1985). In Thailand, authoritarianism was argued to be the manifestation of the tradition of bureaucratic polity where the state and its officials maintained a political monopoly and engaged directly with society, generally through systems of patronage and networks of clients (Riggs 1966). Similarly, Sukarno’s ‘Guided Democracy’ was explained as the resurgence of ideas of the state laid down by the Dutch (McVey 1982) or as a victory of the politics of cultural symbolism and neo-patrimonial relationships over the politics of pragmatism and modernity (see Feith 1962: 79–97; Wilner 1973: 517–41).

As the Cold War deepened, it is not surprising that we find in this period a reassessment of authoritarianism among Western political scientists and policy-makers. Thus, for Samuel Huntington (1968), authoritarianism could be understood as a necessary functional response to disintegrative tendencies that emerged in the process of modernization and which required more government, not less. In other words, the political problem was one of establishing order; a task unsuited to many democracies. In particular, it was argued, the military could provide the advance guard of modern values and could play the historical role of the middle classes in the interregnum prior to the establishment of their own political hegemony (Huntington 1968: 222). At the same time, revolutionary challenges could be explained as pathologies of dysfunction rather than real conflicts over the way power and wealth was distributed.

Nevertheless, the portrayal of authoritarian regimes as the advance guard of modernity was highly selective. While some modernization political scientists saw Soeharto’s New Order as a manifestation of neopatrimonial practices and culture (Crouch 1979), others saw its military leadership in particular as a modernizing force (Jackson and Pye 1978). Neo-classical economists recognized it as nothing less than a victory of rationality over politics (Arndt 1967). This was not because it was any less corrupt or repressive in its practices or any less nationalist in its rhetoric or that it relinquished state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy. It did, however, now ally itself to the West in the Cold War and was more receptive to private capital investment and to the advice of Western-trained economic technocrats. It is also significant that governments across the region were themselves quick to seize onto the idea that authoritarian rule could be legitimized in terms of the tasks of political order, national integration and, most important, economic development (Moertopo 1973).

For critical political economists and for many historians, these views of politics as conflicts between traditional and modern cultures or as a choice between order and disorder were seen as masking the real struggles over power (Wertheim 1959). Revolutionary wars and conservative counter-revolutions of this period were seen more in terms of conflicts that emerged from deeper shifts in economic and social power (Mortimer 1969; Race 1972; Scott 1976; Kerkvliet 1979). One of the difficulties for these scholars was to explain why capitalist transformation had failed to produce the social democratic outcomes that had transformed Europe. Why did capitalist transformation, in important instances, appear to sustain authoritarian states, and why were the commercial bourgeoisie or the rural or urban petty bourgeoisie so often reactionary rather than progressive in their attitudes, supporting despotism rather than liberal transformation?

In one way, this intellectual/theoretical problem was resolved by the proposition that politics now operated within a system of global exploitation and dependence that transferred wealth from the peripheries of the global economy to the centres and reduced the bourgeoisie to the role of compradors. Developed with the Latin American experience in mind, dependency theory became an important alternative explanation for the rise of various authoritarian and predatory political regimes across Southeast Asia through the 1970s (Levine 1969; Mortimer 1973; Stauffer 1974; Bello et al. 1982; Hawes 1987).

For others, the problems were to be found in the increasingly powerful position of the bureaucrats as they extended their authority over the apparatus of the state and were able to operate autonomously of social forces and interests. Ben Anderson emphasized the importance of the enduring interests of the corps of officials of the state themselves and how these were able to transcend and adapt to different political and economic circumstances and the idea of a ‘state qua state’ in understanding the powerful position of the state in Indonesia (Anderson 1983). Other scholars saw despotism in Bonapartist terms: flourishing where a weak and disorganized bourgeoisie were, initially at least, unable to organize politically to protect their own interests although, at the same time, structurally forced to guarantee the general interest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Interpreting the politics of Southeast Asia: debates in parallel universes
• Section I: The changing landscape of power
• Section II: States and regimes
• Section III: Markets and governance
• Section IV: Civil society and participation
• Section V: Violence and state authority
• Section VI: The region and the world
• Index