Democratization, National Identity and Foreign Policy in Asia

Gilbert Rozman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367634339
• eBook ISBN: 9781000360165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How can democratization move forward in an era of populist-nationalist backlash? Many countries in Asia, and elsewhere, face the challenge of navigating between China and the United States in a period of intensifying polarization in their policies tied to democracy. East Asia has shown the way to democratization in Asia—with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan linking national identity to democratization. In other parts of Asia, especially Southeast Asia, nationalist governments have tended to move away from democratization, as happened in Hong Kong at China's insistence. This book investigates how national identity can both help and hinder democratization, illustrated by a series of examples from across Asia. A valuable guide for students and scholars both of democratization and of Asian politics.

Part 1

Toward a conceptual framework on democracy, identity, and foreign policy in East Asia

1

Democratization, national identity, and foreign policy in Southeast Asia

Aurel Croissant

Southeast Asia presents social scientists with a laboratory for the analysis of the relationship between democratization, national identities, and the consequences for foreign policy behavior. Types of nationalism, modes of nation-building, ethnic makeup, colonial heritage, the structure of governing coalitions, the shape and extent of interest, and civil society organizations as well as regime types and their levels of democracy differ widely. Since the 1970s, the common wisdom in democratization studies has been that a consensus about national identity is a prerequisite for democratization.¹ Recently this issue has drawn further discussion. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan see a widely shared sense of national identity as a requirement for successful democratic consolidation, confirming Rustow’s sequentialist view (national identity formation first, democratization later).² For Southeast Asia, James Putzel used national identity to explain why democratization is more difficult in Indonesia and Malaysia than in the Philippines.³ In contrast, democratization scholars have rarely analyzed the consequences of political liberalization and democratic transition for foreign policy behavior, and there are few works on the interface of international relations and comparative politics for Southeast Asia.

Below I suggest that the implementation of democratic procedures and practices in Southeast Asia has helped to manage national identity problems, while the levels and quality of democracy have also been affected by issues of national identity. Thus, the transition from authoritarian rule to electoral democracy (first transition) has often opened up political space for democratizing national identities in Southeast Asia, whereas the lack of progress in the second transition, from democratically elected governments to liberal and fully consolidated democratic regimes, has complicated mutually shared agreement about identity with consequences in conflicts about their content and comprehensiveness as well as their impact on domestic and foreign policies.

Democracy, democratization, and national identity

The age-old political science debate on what democracy is or should mean fills more than one library.⁴ In empirical democratization studies, democracy is typically understood in procedural terms. The minimalist standard definition (“polyarchy”)⁵ is that citizens have regular opportunities to participate in the selection and replacement of political leaders through, primarily, free elections; electoral competition is robust, and basic political rights and civil liberties are protected. Yet there is a productive contemporary debate about whether a minimal and essentially electoral understanding of democracy is sufficient or if democracy should also include the presence of a substantial rule of law and constitutionalism.⁶

This chapter adopts the model of “embedded democracy,” which puts forward a procedural definition that goes beyond a minimalist (or “electoralist”) understanding of democracy.⁷ At its core lies the assumption that democracy is a set of rules and institutions that can be analytically disaggregated into different partial regimes, with each fulfilling specialized tasks for the functioning of a democratic political system based on the rule of law and constitutionalism (that is, liberal democracy). Embedded democracy “consists of five partial regimes: a democratic electoral regime, political rights of participation, civil rights, horizontal accountability, and the guarantee that the effective power to govern lies in the hands of democratically elected representatives.”⁸ If the rules and practices in any of the partial regimes are insufficiently established or cannot fulfill their functions appropriately, the political system deteriorates into some form of “defective democracy”—or even authoritarianism.

While democracy is a particular type of political regime, democratization is a process of continual adjustment over rights and relationships in a political regime.⁹ In transitions from authoritarian rule to a political democracy, there are two transitions:¹⁰ first, from autocratic governance to the installation of a democratic government, and only then, second, from democratic government toward the effective functioning of a democratic regime, i.e., democratic deepening and consolidation. Accomplishing the first transition, as in Myanmar in 2015 and Malaysia in 2018, is no guarantee for a successful second transition. Democratization is neither a linear nor a teleological process. The consolidation of democracy in a particular country does not preclude the possibility that this process can slow down, come to a halt, or be reversed.

There is no consensus on national identity.¹¹ “Modernists” such as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson consider nations’ modern constructs and that states use a broad repertoire to promote “national identity,” such as language policy, symbols, flags, coats of arms, national anthems, public celebrations, and commemorative and national holidays.¹² In contrast, “perennialists” such as Anthony Smith claim a larger role for primordial identities in shaping modern nations.¹³ They posit that ethnic identities predated modern nations and shaped the formation of national communities. Overlapping with this is the debate between primordialists and constructivists, particularly relevant in research on ethnic politics, ethnic identities, and ethnic conflicts.¹⁴ The primordial view argues that the backbone of national identity is composed of a feeling of common blood, biological linkage, or a subjective belief in the citizenry’s common descent, history, and collective destiny. Constructivists stand in opposition by claiming that national identity cannot be taken as merely inherent and permanent: nations are not something natural, but are social constructs (“imagined communities”) closely interwoven with emotions and difficult to objectify.¹⁵ National identities are not fixed solidarities but ongoing constitutive processes.

This contribution is based on a definition of national identity, which from a territorial point of view has the state dimension in mind, but which includes both individual and collective aspects of identity. In this sense, it follows Rozman’s definition of national identity “as beliefs about what makes one’s state unique in the past, present, and future,”¹⁶ and the constructivist (or “modernist”) view that nations and national identity are modern concepts that have been introduced to Southeast Asia as a consequence of Western colonialism and the emergence of anti-colonial forms of political mass mobilization. While state and non-state elites in Southeast Asia regularly tried to “historicize” their conceptions of the nation and national identity, I treat national identities as empirical constructs: they are essentially imagined communities (and beliefs about what characterizes such communities and makes them “unique”).

In contrast to certain strands in IR and foreign policy research, national identity is not a key concept in democratization studies. Despite the global rise of national identity issues in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triple transformation (economic, political, and national) in East Central Europe,¹⁷ democratization research has rarely explored the contents of national identities or how they change. Rustow was, perhaps, the first to provide a systematic theoretical discussion of the relationship between national identity and democratization.¹⁸ He saw national unity as necessary for successful democratization; it can only work if the great majority of citizens accept the boundaries of the political community as legitimate.¹⁹ For Rustow, the agreement about national identity meant that “the vast majority of citizens in a democracy-to-be must have no doubt or mental reservations as to which political community they belong to,”²⁰ while political systems failing to meet the precondition of national identity should not proceed with democratization.²¹ In the 1990s, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan recalled the problem of lack of national unity and identity for the successful establishment and functioning of democracy, arguing that democracy as a form of government presupposes the existence of a political community recognized as legitimate by those affected by power. A democratization process is facilitated if it does not have to be pursued in parallel with a process of nation-building and if only one nation exists within the state borders. When national identity is at issue, democracy cannot resolve contestation over the identity or borders of the polis or demos.²²

Yet, these works are silent about what happens to national identity once democratization has occurred. They can explain why ethnically or nationally divided societies struggle with the institutionalization of a stable and working democracy, and how national identity problems affect democratization, but cannot say much about the impact of democratization on national identities. They focus on nationalism or national identity as the independent variable and democratization the dependent variable but neglect how democratization affects national identities.

Another, even smaller, strand of literature examines the relationship between democratization, national identity problems, and foreign policy. Mansfield and Snyder turn the “democratic peace theorem”—essentially arguing that democracies do not fight each other—on its head and argue that transitions from authoritarian to democratic governments often lead to weak, unconsolidated democratic institutions.²³ The combination of increasing mass political participation and weak political institutions creates the motive and the opportunity for both rising and declining elites to play the nationalist card to rally popular support against domestic and foreign rivals.²⁴ As a result, incomplete democratizers with weak institutions become more belligerent, not less. However, Narang and Nelson find that “the … statistical relationship between incomplete democratization and war is entirely dependent on the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire prior to WWI.”²⁵

Finally, some qualitative works such as Il Hyun Cho’s analysis of national identity, democratic consolidation, and security dynamics in Taiwan and South Korea find that countries in which national identity is contested and politicized under incomplete democratic consolidation are more likely to initiate belligerent foreign policy behavior. The very democratic process, which involves regular electoral cycles and a heated political environment, provides a key channel by which nationalist discourse is framed and amplified. Insufficiently consolidated democracies are particularly vulnerable to this dynamic because effective institutional checks and balances are often replaced with “nationalist outbidding” among domestic political actors, making foreign policy concessions virtually impossible.²⁶ However, Jennifer Lind’s study of democratic transitions and foreign policy behavior contradicts Cho’s argument that xenophobic nationalism in East Asia contributed to bell...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART 1 Toward a conceptual framework on democracy, identity, and foreign policy in East Asia
• PART 2 The evolution of democratic governance in East Asia and national identity
• PART 3 Four test cases in the struggle for democratization in East Asia
• Index