Cambodia's Neoliberal Order

Violence, Authoritarianism, and the Contestation of Public Space

Simon Springer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136952036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Neoliberal economics have emerged in the post-Cold War era as the predominant ideological tenet applied to the development of countries in the global south. For much of the global south, however, the promise that markets will bring increased standards of living and emancipation from tyranny has been an empty one. Instead, neoliberalisation has increased the gap between rich and poor and unleashed a firestorm of social ills.

This book deals with the post-conflict geographies of violence and neoliberalisation in Cambodia. Applying a geographical analysis to contemporary Cambodian politics, the author employs notions of neoliberalism, public space, and radical democracy as the most substantive components of its theoretical edifice. He argues that the promotion of unfettered marketisation is the foremost causal factor in the country's inability to consolidate democracy following a United Nations sponsored transition. The book demonstrates Cambodian perspectives on the role of public space in Cambodia's process of democratic development and explains the implications of violence and its relationship with neoliberalism.

Taking into account the transition from war to peace, authoritarianism to democracy, and command economy to a free market, this book offers a critical appraisal of the political economy in Cambodia.

1
Introduction

Setting the stage for neoliberalization

You want others to become petrified from fear of your power, to be apprehensive of and praise your courage; but your status will not be as you assume, what you will have is only self-destruction.

– Cambodian Proverb.

The small Southeast Asian country of Cambodia (formerly known as Kampuchea) has suffered tremendously in recent years. Cambodia’s 30-year civil war during the latter part of the twentieth century has had an enduring effect on the collective memory of the Cambodian people. Indeed, the psychological scarring and unspeakable suffering caused by the infamous Khmer Rouge and their four-year reign of terror in the late 1970s is a national commonality. In a population of seven million at the time, over one and a half million people died as a direct result of Khmer Rouge policy and administration (Banister and Johnson 1993; Chandler 1996; Heuveline 2001; Kiernan 1996). Less well known to most of the world is that this atrocity was preceded by another of comparable magnitude. From 1969 to 1973 the United States (US) reprehensibly and mercilessly bombed the neutral country in an effort to flush out Viet Cong forces thought to be operating from within Cambodia, leaving an estimated 600,000 Cambodians dead (Herman 1997; Kiljunen 1984). Thus, the Cambodian holocaust had two distinct stages in what a Finnish government report refers to as “the decade of the genocide” (Kiljunen 1984). The Cambodian genocide was followed by ten long years of silence at the international level, as it was Vietnamese communist forces that had brought down the Khmer Rouge regime (Chandler 1991; 1996; Kiernan 1996). Throughout the 1980s Cambodia was governed as Hanoi’s client state, and accordingly, with Cold War geopolitics continuing to command the foreign policy agendas of Global North governments, Cambodia and its recent holocaust were largely ignored. As the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, the global political climate shifted. Accordingly, the Cambodian question that had been allowed to fester for a decade could finally be answered. Democracy came to Cambodia in 1991 under a United Nations (UN) sponsored transition that was intended to provide a final solution to the country’s ongoing civil war. However, peace remains a relative term as politically motivated killings are frequent during election times and often go unpunished. Amnesty International (1997: np) calls Cambodia’s pervasive impunity “a cancer at the heart of national life,” while political violence has disgraced every single election the country has held since Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia ended in 1989. Inducing sentiments of intense fear and vehement loathing, state-sponsored violence has fostered a political atmosphere in Cambodia that is non-conducive to public life and individual representation in both civic and national affairs.

The recent unfolding of events in Cambodia took place during a time of monumental change at the global level. The Cold War, a war that Cambodia by way of proxy was all too familiar with, ended following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The breakdown of the Soviet Union was itself precipitated by a massive upheaval of global economics during the 1970s. Between 1973 and 1979 world oil prices rose dramatically, and the impact on the First World was a severe economic recession, the Second World went into an economic tailspin that eventually led to its disappearance, and the Third World fell into a “debt crisis” that would give rise to a condition of aid dependency that continues to this day. This unprecedented and unforeseen disruption of the world economy marked the beginning of an economic paradigm shift, as profound disillusionment with the record of state involvement in social and economic life swept over the Global North, leading to an unsophisticated and naïve belief that the most efficient economic regulator would be to “leave things to the market.” The involvement of the state in the economy was deemed overly bureaucratic and thus an inefficient and unnecessary drain on public coffers. Hence, in spite of variance in doses among regions, states, and cities, the basic neoliberal policy treatment is underpinned by a vision of naturalized market relations that seeks to: eradicate obstacles to the operation of free markets; hold back all forms of collective initiative and public expenditure primarily via the privatization of common assets and the imposition of user fees; advocate individualism, competitiveness, and economic self-sufficiency as fundamental virtues; attenuate or nullify social protections and transfer programs; and actively “recruit” the poor and marginalized into a flexible labor market regime of precarious work and low-wage employment (Peck 2001; Peck and Tickell 2002). This is the essence of neoliberalism, or what has been identified by economist John Williamson (1990) as the “Washington Consensus,” an economic ideology that is fundamentalist in its execution, and seeks to deregulate markets as much as possible to promote “free” trade. It traces its roots back to the neoclassical economics of Adam Smith and David Ricardo – hence neo (new) liberalism (Simon 2002).

Conceptualizing neoliberalism requires an understanding of the complex interplay of local and extralocal forces acting within the global political economy (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Peck 2001). Jim Glassman (1999) alerts us to this notion in his analysis of the Thai state as a concurrently internationalized and internationalizing agent. In focusing exclusively on external forces we risk producing over-generalized accounts of a monolithic and ubiquitous neoliberalism, which insufficiently accounts for local variability and internal constitution. On the other hand, overly concrete or introspective analyses of the local are inadequately attentive to the significant connections and necessary features of neoliberalism as a global project (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Peck and Tickell 2002). Accordingly, Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell (2002, 383) propose “a processual conception of neoliberalization as both an ‘out there’ and ‘in here’ phenomenon whose effects are necessarily variegated and uneven, but the incidence and diffusion of which may present clues to a pervasive ‘metalogic’. Like globalization, neoliberalization should be understood as a process, not an end-state.” In other words, rather than a singular and fully actualized policy regime, ideological form, or regulatory framework, we need to think in terms of “actually existing neoliberalisms” (Brenner and Theodore 2002), where, as protean outcomes of historical specificity, internal contradiction, and contextual embeddedness within national, regional, and local processes of market-driven sociospatial transformation, neoliberalism is continually redefined by the consequences of inherited institutional frameworks, policy regimes, regulatory practices, and ongoing political struggles.

The emerging neoliberal doctrine quickly became the economic orthodoxy in the Global North and was exported to the Global South via measures to address the debt crisis in the form of development aid, primarily though the auspices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). “Market fundamentalism,” as George Soros (1998) calls neoliberal economics, predicts that free-market forces will lead to a prosperous future for the Global South, where all of the world’s peoples will come to live in a unified and harmonious global village. While the globalization of the economy is not a new experience for the Global South, and has deep historical roots in both Southeast Asia and Cambodia, the intensification of this process is new. Economic globalization has heightened over the last 25 years under the programs of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs). These structural adjustment programs (SAPs) have facilitated the spread of a neoliberal, global, economic system dominated by multinational corporations and the governments of the Global North, and enforced by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Yet in spite of such “top-down” measures, the willingness of local elites to adopt and internalize such policies should not be underestimated.

Barry Riddell (2003a: 659) warns that such intensified process of economic globalization in the Global South is “especially disturbing to many citizens and most states because there has been a marked decline in their ability to control, plan, and regulate the commanding heights, or revenue generating sectors, of their economies.” The reality of a constricted ability to control economics has very often also translated into a contemporaneous condition of declining local control over social and political conditions. As the Cambodian state is increasingly both neoliberalized and undergoing internationalization (Glassman 1999) in its developmental agenda, planning agencies, decision-making powers, and economic orientation as each becomes increasingly integrated into transnational circuits of capital and expertise (Sneddon 2007), democratic control wanes further. Indeed, what makes “actually existing” neoliberalism in Cambodia distinctly Cambodian is how local elites co-opted, transformed, and rearticulated neoliberal reforms. This has been done in such a way that it reinforces existing patron–client relations through a framework which “asset stripped” foreign resources brought in to support the building of the liberal peace (Richmond and Franks 2007), thus increasing the exposure of the average citizen to corruption, coercion, and violence.

In the Cambodian context, such lack of democratic accountability has meant that the poor have had to contend with recurrent economic crises. Private firms have plundered Cambodia’s forests along with numerous public assets. This situation of privatization has served to consolidate the wealth and privilege of the elite while simultaneously placing even more pressure on the limited economic means of the poor. The underprivileged are now forced to purchase goods they were previously able to collect from communally held forests, and pay user fees for services that were formerly provided for “free” by the state. There have been extensive cuts to public health care and education, and while many private companies have stepped in to fill this lacuna, the poor cannot afford to pay for such services and are accordingly condemned to a life of sickness and ignorance. Civil service downsizing and salary slashing have resulted in both high levels of unemployment and pervasive rent seeking. Footloose capital has caused numerous factory closures, which has translated into severe job insecurity and union-breaking tactics by the state. The cost of living has risen at an astronomical rate due to IFI economic policies that promote inflation and currency devaluation. Rampant land speculation has forced many of the rural poor off their land and into an urban life of squatterdom, where begging for food often provides the only opportunity to keep fed because the job prospects are so bleak. Finally, as the economic situation for the poor has continued to worsen, many Cambodians have looked to the “informal” economy as the only possible way to make a living, a condition that has promoted a human trafficking epidemic across Southeast Asia as young women are forced into prostitution to supplement the incomes of their families. In short, the world has effectively been turned upside-down for the Cambodian poor.

This marked lack of control stands in stark contrast to the language of empowerment that accompanies the neoliberal doctrine. The agenda of “governance” stands at the forefront of the neoliberal canon, under which democratic empowerment is linked to economic liberalization, and a positive outcome, that is, “good governance,” is only possible if the state adheres to the ideology of the free market. Contradiction runs deep in neoliberal thinking, as a predetermined economic model removes the very element that defines democracy, that is, the freedom to choose. A manifestly democratic economic strategy is one that places people in a position of power, allowing them to participate in decisions that affect their economic lives so that neither the state nor the market is allowed to dominate (MacEwan 1999). Cambodia’s transition to democracy marks an early example of the implementation of the “good governance” agenda at the global level. The furtherance of free-market reforms, which Cambodia had been experimenting with in the late 1980s, was a project simultaneous with the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia’s (UNTAC) peacekeeping efforts, and alongside a democratic constitution, a liberalized economy was a mandated outcome of the UN operation.

Despite the fact that over a decade has now passed since the promulgation of a new constitution which marked the beginning of the country’s new life as a democratic and free-market state, conditions of repression, surveillance, intimidation, vote buying, and other behaviors commonly defined as “undemocratic” continue as the prevalent modes of governance in Cambodia. The realities of Cambodian political life are far from democratic, open, fair, and just. Not only has neoliberalization done little to change this situation, but such political economic reform has actually exacerbated conditions of authoritarianism in Cambodia. Accordingly, neoliberalization is conceived as effectively acting to suffocate an indigenous burgeoning of democratic politics. Such asphyxiation is brought to bear under the neoliberal rhetoric of “order” and “stability,” which can be read through Cambodia’s geography, and specifically through the production of the country’s public space. Public space is the product of two competing ideologies (Mitchell 2003b). On the one hand, the “ordered” view constitutes public space as the site of control, and is typically associated with authoritarian tradition where panopticism is used to maintain order and security. The “ordered” vision of public space is rivaled by the “unmediated” view, which conceptualizes public space as the site where “the voiceless” can materialize their claims and make their demands heard, as a medium for the contestation of power wherein it provides visibility to subaltern groups, and as the space in which identity is constructed, reified, and contested. In short, the unmediated view envisions public space as the crucible of democracy. I support this unmediated vision in arguing that public space is an ideal model for democracy. Democracy as public space puts power back in the hands of the people and allows us to move beyond technocratic, “top-down” models of development.

Furthermore, a geographic analysis of the neoliberal doctrine of “order” reveals the “good governance” agenda as mere pretence. Democracy is widely recognized as the only system of government to offer true legitimacy, and as such, neoliberals the world over pay lip service to democracy in an effort to facilitate the complicity of national populations in allowing the market to reign supreme. Moreover, the neoliberal promotion of an “ordered” vision of public space, most overtly via its corollary found in private space, explains why authoritarian governments, as long as they espouse the free market, are so complacently accepted by the global neoliberal intelligentsia agenda. While “order,” “stability,” and “security” appear as worthwhile goals, we must ask why “order” always seems to benefit the preservation of the status quo, and also in whose interest our nations and cities are being “secured.” As Don Mitchell (2003b: 230, original emphasis) points out, “… the crusade to ‘secure the city’ is not new, and every attempt to reorder the city has served particular interests.” The preoccupation with “order” in Cambodia is viewed in this study as serving the interests of capital at the global level, and political elites at the level of the nation-state. However, these “particular interests” are fiercely contested by Cambodians themselves. This contestation is strongly evidenced in the burgeoning geographies of protest that have emerged in Cambodian public spaces in the post-UNTAC years. The Cambodian experience is of course not unique, and my findings resonate within a larger, global pattern of increased calls for order and stability vis-à-vis democracy as global marketization intensifies. The violent responses to protest movements challenging neoliberal policies in cities as dispersed as Stockholm, Lilongwe, Genoa, Seoul, Quebec, Prague, Asuncion, Seattle, Port Moresby, and Istanbul serve as instructive examples of how the unmediated usage of public space and the very practice of democracy have come into conflict with the neoliberal order.

Thus the major claim I advance is that unfettered and intense marketization is the foremost causal factor in Cambodia’s inability to consolidate democracy, and further explains why authoritarianism remains the principal mode of governance among Cambodia’s ruling elite, an inclination that is often elicited through the execution of state-sponsored violence, or violence from above. By examining Cambodia’s public space, such violence is revealed to be utilized and legitimated in the name of promoting “order” and “stability,” so that the flow of capital and the freedom of the market are not interrupted. It is argued that “order” preserves an economic system that serves to maintain the power and privilege of indigenous elites at the expense of the poor, which in turn entrenches patron–client relations as the elite are positioned to informally control markets and material rewards. Finally, I contend that hypocrisy is inherent to the “good governance” agenda, a condition that is made luminous through Cambodia’s geography by way of the (re)production and contestation of public space, where the neoliberal doctrine is spatially manifested in a way that is irreconcilable with democratic politics in Cambodia.

In seeking answers to why democracy remains unconsolidated in Cambodia following the UN’s massive peacekeeping operation of the early 1990s, the predominant explanation to emerge among Cambodian observers is that Khmer culture is ill-equipped to manage political conflict in a peaceable manner. Scholars such as Steve Heder (1995), Pierre Lizée (1993), Abdulgaffar Peang-Meth (1997), and David Roberts (2001) have all published works that, to varying degrees of lucidity and sophistication, identify a supposed “cultural trait” of absolutism as being the primary and intractable obstacle to greater democracy in Cambodia. However, when placed under close scrutiny, such culturalist interpretations lack reasoned explanatory power, and bear all the same hallmarks as the racial explanations that suffused “development theory” in the bygone era of colonialism. The axiom that opens this introduction suggests that Cambodia’s political culture is not nearly as absolutist as some of the country’s commentators would have us believe. In addition, this maxim further hints that Cambodians have internalized the notion that power never goes uncontested. While the view that Cambodia retains a “culture of violence” – as though violence is some sort of inheritance from time immemorial – is utterly pervasive in Cambodian studies (see Becker 1998; Bit 1991; Curtis 1998; Faulder 2000; Meyer 1971; Moreau 1998; Jenks Clarke 2001; Kurlantzick 2000; Peang-Meth 1991; Prasso 1994; Roberts 2001; Sodhy 2004; Verkoren 2005), some scholars have challenged the conventional view of implicating Khmer culture as the source of Cambodia’s democratic woes, and have provided their own non-culturalist accounts of why Cambodia’s path to democracy has been such a tempestuous ride. For example, Caroline Hughes (2003b) identifies a context in Cambodia whereby political empowerment among average Cambodians has not been forthcoming because democracy came into being as a donor mandate, rather than as an indigenous movement.

Hughes’s (2003b) concern with the wisdom of installing democracy in Cambodia in a “top-down” approach is not misplaced, as democracy is said to be a system of government that represents the will of the collective, and as such should be an endeavor that is driven from the “bottom up.” The major argument concerning Cambodia’s transitional political economy advanced by Hughes (2003b: 220) is that:

Broadly speaking, co-optation and monopolization of local political economies by the partisan state in the 1990s has led to a substitution of internationalization for democratization in Cambodian society. This is problematic in that [it] … has exacerbated elitism in Cambodian society, and has prompted the emergence of new hierarchies in which those most able to operate in an internationalized sphere are increasingly distanced from the grassroots.

I very much agree with Hughes on this point, and the conclusion I draw from this observation over the course of this study is that neoliberalization in Cambodia has narrowed the potential for Cambodians to become involved in democratic processes. In contrast, Hughes (2003b: 2...

Table of contents

• Routledge Pacific Rim geographies
• Contents
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Caught in the headlights of “culture” and neoliberalism
• 3 From genocide to elections to coup d’état
• 4 Cambodia’s battle for public space
• 5 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index