Political Oppositions in Industrialising Asia

Garry Rodan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134752041
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Industrialization has meant sweeping social transformations across Asia. Some political commentators have predicted that the expansion of civil society and the rapid development of liberal democracy will necessarily follow. The contributors to this volume dissect the extent of political opposition in Asia and analyze the nature of new social movements outside institutional party politics which are contesting the exercise of state power. Nine original case studies explore the variety of political oppositions across Asia, from non-governmental organizations and the formal opponents of the PAP in Singapore to Chinese dissidents based outside the People's Republic of China. All take up the challenge of looking at political opposition in the light of the new social phenomenon of the rising middle class or 'new rich' of Asia. Garry Rodan's hard-hitting analysis of the problems of current political theorizing in relation to Asia sets the case studies firmly in the context of wider debates about democratization. Political Oppositions in Industrialising Asia shatters complacent assumptions about the progress of liberal democracy.

1

Theorising political opposition in East and Southeast Asia

Garry Rodan*

INTRODUCTION

In the 1970s, political opposition in various parts of East and Southeast Asia was primarily characterised by peasant insurgencies and radical student movements questioning the very basis of the capitalist path to development. Their campaigns were often conducted outside constitutional processes. Since the mid-1980s, however, capitalism and industrialisation have firmly taken root in the region, and capitalism's ascendancy is not in question. As a consequence, the nature of political opposition, the forms through which it is conducted, and the actors involved have undergone a transformation. Extra-constitutional challenges are limited, and the predominant agendas of political oppositions in the region have decidedly narrowed to more reformist goals. The new reformers are drawn from new social forces generated by the very processes of rapid capitalist industrialisation, including elements from across a range of classes: bourgeois, middle, and working classes.¹ To differing extents and by varying means, they are shaping the contests over power in the region's dynamic societies.

Also since the mid-1980s, the demise of various dictatorships or military regimes and the establishment or resurrection of elections in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia have prompted a spate of works questioning the long-term viability of authoritarian rule in general. A host of writers began enthusiastically documenting and analysing what was generally characterised as ‘democratisation’. A significant component of this literature involves reconsideration of the relationship between economic development and political change. This has been fuelled to no small degree by recent political transformations in the newly industrialising countries (NICs), notably those of the comparatively mature industrial economies of South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Would these winds of change soon be repeated in authoritarian societies elsewhere undergoing rapid industrialisation?

This question was answered with an enthusiastic affirmative by modernisation theorists whose credibility had taken a battering. Earlier they had depicted market economies and liberal democratic polities as mutually reinforcing, but the development experience of the late industrialising countries of Asia and Latin America had been at odds with this proposition. The sudden political upheavals provided an opportunity for these theorists to salvage something from the debate. To be sure, contemporary modernisation accounts of the causal link between capitalist development and political change are more sophisticated and qualified than previous attempts. They came in the wake of the influential thesis on transitions from authoritarian rule by O'Donnell and Schmitter (1986) and O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead (1986), which rejected any general theory of social or economic determination of political outcomes in favour of voluntarist approaches. These emphasised the importance of agency and processes of negotiation and strategy building. Variables such as culture, institutions, and political leadership, for example, are seen in the revised modernisation literature to complicate the forward march of ‘democracy’ and mediate the political effects of economic development (Pye 1985; Huntington 1991; Lipset 1993, 1990; Marks 1992; Diamond 1989, 1993; Case 1994).² The emphases vary somewhat within this framework, but economic development is nevertheless understood to generate fundamental changes in social structure, including the creation of an extensive and diverse middle class, that exert pressures for political pluralism. At the very least, authoritarian regimes will become increasingly difficult to reproduce, according to these analysts.

Modernisation theorists have not been alone in prophesying problems for authoritarian regimes experiencing the advent of accelerated economic development. Literature on ‘developmental authoritarianism’ argues that late-industrialising countries require a stage of authoritarian rule to kick start industrial growth, but after the initial phase this political regime constrains capitalism. Marxists have also argued that authoritarian regimes are ill-suited to the task of resolving friction between competing fractions of capital in more advanced phases of capital accumulation (Harris 1986). They, too, point to changing centres of economic and social power including a strategically important middle class of professionals and technicians who have economic independence from the state (Robison 1986). The attainment of bourgeois hegemony in the social and economic spheres lessens the need for coercive political structures.

Debates about the continued feasibility of authoritarian rule in late-industrialising countries have been influenced by broader events and intellectual trends. With the dramatic collapse of various East European socialist regimes, presiding over economic decay rather than economic buoyancy, the Cold War was suddenly defunct. For some, the momentous turn of events culminated in the unquestionable triumph of liberalism, a veritable end of history (Fukuyama 1992a). In this context, state-centred analyses came under fire for deflecting attention from important social phenomena which lay behind the unpredicted speed and extent of transformation in Eastern Europe. A related resurgence of analytical interest in the concept of civil society among liberal theorists has been joined by Marxists and other critical theorists looking beyond the state. The decline of state socialism brought with it disclosures about the extent of repression and abuse of office which embarrassed many socialist scholars. In political terms, this has led to a new emphasis on decentralisation and non-state forms of organisation. In analytical terms, it has steered theorists towards usages of the concept of civil society that differ significantly from Marx's own.

Against the above background, two very powerful themes are discernible in this vast body of literature on political change in late industrialising countries of East and Southeast Asia. The first of these is a propensity to equate the challenge to, or demise of, authoritarian rule with the advance of ‘democracy’. This concept is generally employed unproblematically, but implicitly endorses a liberal democratic or formalistic definition of the term. For some writers, the existence of elections appears to be the benchmark of ‘democracy’, for others a more detailed conception of competitive party politics is articulated. But extra-parliamentary activity not servicing formal political institutions is under-theorised. At a time when popular participation and interest in political parties appear to have waned in established liberal democracies while social movements and interest associations disengaged from the formal political process gather momentum (see Schmitter and Karl 1991:80), we should surely remain circumspect about oppositional forms elsewhere. Much of this literature is consistent with a linear conception of history, sitting comfortably with Fuku-yama's notion of liberalism's imminent global triumph.

This does not mean that writers, including Fukuyama himself, have entirely dismissed the possibility that political change in late-industrialising countries of Asia or elsewhere might deviate from the liberal democratic model. But liberal democracy remains the point of reference for these analyses, deviations from it explained in terms of obstacles to this seemingly natural and irrepressible historical force. Of these ‘obstacles’, culture features thematically in the literature, and forms the basis of the prevailing attempts to conceptualise alternatives to liberal democracy. Ironically, such attempts resonate with the message of authoritarian leaders about ‘Asian values’. This emphasises the ‘differentness’ of Asians and is employed to dismiss domestic political challenges as ‘un-Asian’ (Rodan 1995).

A second theme to the literature is a not unrelated romanticisation of civil society which is depicted as the natural domain of personal and group freedoms, implicitly contrasted with the state as a set of naturally coercive power relationships. There is often an unstated assumption attached to this that the rise of civil society is fundamentally a middle-class phenomenon. Civil society is championed not just for its supposed intrinsic merit as the locus of free-minded and mutually co-operative groups and individuals beyond the state's purvey, but more particularly as an essential precondition for political parties to be genuinely competitive and meaningful conduits of the popular will. This tendency in the literature downplays the significance of gross inequalities of power and resources that are to be found within civil society. It is the nature of civil society as much as the fact of it that matters to the prospect and direction of political change. Certainly not all opposition to authoritarian regimes in East and Southeast Asia is imbued with liberal democratic values or aspirations.

Moreover, the analytical and normative insistence on a state-civil society separation diverts attention from the critically important point that civil societies cannot exist as alternatives to states—only in relation to them. Civil society presupposes the state. The state provides the legal framework underwriting the independent political space of civil society. But attempts to reinforce or challenge the inequalities of civil society also involve the state in different ways—whether to enhance, consolidate, or diminish the power of particular social groups. The state-society divide is always a difficult one to make clearly, but different historical conditions have resulted in pervasive states in much of East and Southeast Asia which make these boundaries even more problematic than in Europe and North America. The prevailing assumption is that ‘strong states’, by definition, are associated with ‘weak societies’. This is informed by the notion that civil societies, independent of the state, are the legitimate expression of society. But societal forces are to differing extents incorporated into the state and, especially in the East and Southeast Asian context, cannot be dismissed as political entities. Rather, here cooptation is a real alternative to representation and civil society which may in many cases prove the most significant political accommodation to social diversity.

Neither of these two dominant theoretical themes in the literature encourages a detailed examination of the nature of political change occurring in industrialising East and Southeast Asia. The contest between authoritarianism and liberal democracy is part of the political struggle unfolding in the region, but it is certainly not the entirety of it. Some of these struggles do involve attempts to expand the space of civil society, though not always from ‘democratic’ forces. They can include religious organisations, professional bodies, trade unions, or any of a host of non-government organisations (NGOs). But they can also involve attempts to establish space for political contestation in arenas other than civil society. Organised contests over particular exercises of official power can come from within state-sponsored organisations, even if this form of opposition is not oriented towards a change of government. Co-opting social forces is not unproblematic, even in one-party states, since this often targets groups precisely for fear of their potential as political opponents. Moreover, there is a conceptual limbo in the prevailing literature between civil society and state which conceals a wide variety of organised groups of differing political significance. The danger is that new forms of political organisation and reconstitutions of state-society relations which do not correspond with the liberal democratic model will escape adequate identification and analysis.

The emphasis on extra-parliamentary political activities suggests several types of ‘opposition’. At one extreme, there is political opposition intended to change fundamentally the state and society, such as Communist or Islamic fundamentalist parties or movements. Another type of opposition seeks to change the government but not the state or society in any fundamental sense. Here we would include most oppositions identified by liberal pluralist theorists. Typically, such oppositions attempt to replace one political party in government with another. Finally, there are oppositions which pursue an agenda of reform or reaction within the state and the existing government. This can be conducted by factions within the bureaucracy, the military, or various social and cultural organisations brought under the umbrella of a corporatist state. It can also be conducted by various non-government organisations outside the state but not part of formal political protest. These include non-revolutionary trade unions, social and cultural organisations, for example, which pursue policy agendas without seeking to advance the cause of a particular political party or alternate government. The importance of the various types of opposition is related both to the capacity of the state to foreclose or foster particular avenues for opposition, and the degree to which contending groups accept the state or government as legitimate.

For historical reasons, the state-society relationship in East and Southeast Asia contrasts in certain respects with the European experience, and this has important implications for political opposition. In much of East and Southeast Asia, the state serves as the midwife of industrial capitalism which involves a different relationship between it and the bourgeoisie and civil society from that in situations where an absolutist or feudal state attempts to obstruct capitalism. Since the state in East and Southeast Asia has embraced capitalism, structures emerge that incorporate the new social forces. Hence, political activities involving these social forces are often channelled into state-sanctioned institutions. The environment for potential oppositions is quite different.

With the above in mind, this collection of essays focuses on the extent and nature of political contestation in East and Southeast Asia. The principal question under scrutiny here is not whether ‘demoralisation’ is occurring or likely to occur as economic change and social transformations take place in these societies. Instead, the question is what do these transformations mean for the nature of political opposition. The primary objective is to specify the way in which challenges—real or in prospect—to or within authoritarian rule have resulted from the massive social changes accompanying industrialisation. In particular, we are interested in the direct and indirect roles of emerging social forces— ‘new rich’, comprising the bourgeoisie together with the middle class, and the working class—in the process of political opposition.

There is extensive literature focusing specifically on the question of the middle class and its significance for political development. Much of this has been inspired by the unproductive hypothesis that the middle class is intrinsically hostile to authoritarian rule. However, historically the middle class has adopted a range of political positions, sometimes siding with fascist and authoritarian regimes—as in Italy and Chile. This volume attempts to focus on the ways in which the emergence of new classes have redefined the issues around which power is contested. A new economic system that gives rise to new sources of wealth and class interest also produces new fracture lines in social and political interest and new policy issues. For example, the new middle class has organised around such issues as the quality of public utilities and services, the environment, public accountability and transparency. Their interests translate into new demands and constituencies that necessarily shape oppositional politics....

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• The New Rich in Asia Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Theorising political opposition in East and Southeast Asia
• 2 The ebb and flow of civil society and the decline of the Left in Southeast Asia
• 3 Political oppositions and regime change in Thailand
• 4 State—society relations and political opposition in Singapore
• 5 The syncretic state and the structuring of oppositional politics in Malaysia
• 6 The changing ruling elite and political opposition in China
• 7 Chinese political opposition in exile
• 8 The broadening base of political opposition in Indonesia
• 9 Indonesian middle-class opposition in the 1990s
• 10 New social movements and the changing nature of political opposition in South Korea
• 11 Mobilisational authoritarianism and political opposition in Taiwan
• Index