Mark R. Thompson

Whatever Happened to "Asian Values"?

The discourse contrasting the defects of “Western” individualism and democracy with the virtues of “Asian” communitarianism and good governance, which blossomed during East and Southeast Asia’s economic boom, has withered since the financial bust of 1997–98. Economic crisis seems to be a particularly effective form of ideological critique. “Asian values,” adieu? The most prominent contributions to the discussion of “Asian values” were made by East and Southeast Asian government officials and their critics in journals such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and the Journal of Democracy. This debate received international attention because the assertion that Asian cultural particularity justified the rejection of liberal democracy was matched by impressive economic results. Countries in other regions had earlier employed similar particularistic cultural arguments, but without much success. For example, several sub-Saharan African dictators in the 1970s asserted that their rule accorded with “African traditions,” but obvious economic failings undercut their claims. In East and Southeast Asia, by contrast, three decades as the world’s fastest-growing region made the “Asian challenge” much more interesting than anti-Western positions of the past. “Asian authoritarians,” the Economist wrote in 1992, “argue from a position of economic and social success.” The recent financial crisis in the region, however, has undermined the international prestige of “Asian values.” Having been forced onto the defensive, senior Singaporean government official Tommy Koh no longer attempted to convince an international audience of the merits of Mark R. Thompson is professor of political science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and a visiting scholar at the University of California–Berkeley. He has written on dictatorship and democratization in Asia and Eastern Europe and is author of The Anti-Marcos Struggle: Personalistic Rule and Democratic Transition in the Philippines (1995).

Pacific Asia after 'Asian values': Authoritarianism, democracy, and 'good governance'

The 1997 Asian economic crisis discredited the international discussion about ‘Asian values’ in Pacific Asia, replacing it with a globalised ‘good governance’ discourse. The financial breakdown undermined claims by Asian autocrats that government should be based on authoritarian ‘Asian values’, not ‘Western democracy’. Yet, seven years later, authoritarian regimes in the region are flourishing while the new democracies flounder. Why have dictatorships, not democracies, prospered politically since the Asian financial crisis? Pacific Asia began as an ‘imagined community’ of developmental dictatorships, making authoritarian development the ‘original position’ against which democratic governance is judged. While the demise of ‘Asian values’ contributed to the fall of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, it did less harm to authoritarian regimes in more economically developed Malaysia and Singapore. The US‐led anti‐terror coalition provided several authoritarian rulers in Pacific Asia with welcome support from the West, while allowing them to weaken internal opposition. The new democracies, by contrast, faced international pressures to combat terrorism, often arousing local protest. Finally, middle class‐based reformist movements have risked destabilising the regions new democracies in the name of good governance.

More than Just the Final Straw: Stolen Elections as Revolutionary Triggers

Stolen elections are triggering events that overcome barriers to revolutionary action against electoral authoritarian regimes. They mobilize ordinary citizens, strengthen the opposition, and divide the regime. As neo-institutionalist theories of revolution suggest, the relative openness of electoral authoritarianism inhibits mass protest. But when elections are stolen, regimes undergo “closure,” increasing the probability of protest. The failure of other potential revolutionary precipitants underlines that stolen elections are not merely replaceable final straws. Stolen elections have not only been crucial for the emergence of revolutionary situations, they have shaped outcomes as well. Linking popular mobilization to fraudulent elections has become part of the repertoire of contention of democratic revolutionaries.

Stolen Elections: The Case of the Serbian October

he overthrow of Slobodan Miloseviae in Serbia’s so-called OctoberRevolution four years ago was briefly celebrated by the internationalpress, and it also received extensive attention from scholars. Such ac-counts focused on why and how the opposition won the September 2000presidential ballot as well as on the organizing of the ensuing uprising.But the link between the regime’s disregard for the election results andthe subsequent mass mobilization has not been adequately explained.

China's obsession with Singapore: learning authoritarian modernity

Abstract Chinese government officials and academics have shown disproportionate interest in the small city-state of Singapore. The Southeast Asian country with a majority ethnic Chinese population has drawn their attention because it is the only country in the world that combines advanced industrial development with stable one-party rule. Singapore not only seemingly defies Western predictions that modernization will inevitably lead to democracy, but also appears to show that authoritarian regimes may be better suited to achieving societal stability in an Asian context. In particular, the ruling party of the city-state, the Peoples Action Party, has drawn the attention of conservative Chinese reformists who seek to fill the ideological void that emerged following the decline of Maoist ideology. Reformers in China also derive practical governance lessons from Singapore about fighting corruption, increasing professionalization, and improving responsiveness within the party-state. As such, political learning from the Singapore model must be seen as part of the ongoing process of transformation of the Chinese Communist Party. As a consequence of this learning process, Chinese reformers are using lessons from the Singaporean model as arguments in their efforts to bolster the ideological foundations and strengthen the governance capacity of one-party rule, thus reducing pressures for democratization.

The survival of Asian values as Zivilisationskritik

Recent ¢nancial events in the Asia-Paci¢c area have not only brought havoc to political and economic structures but also changed the conditions for ideological discourse in the region. In this article, I explore the future of one of these discourses ^ ‘‘Asian Values,’’ which emphasize family and consensual governance over personal and political individualism. I ask whether this discourse, which blossomed during East and Southeast Asia’s long economic boom, will wither after a ¢nancial bust. 1 Most of these countries have gone through what can only be termed an economic depression, casting doubt on the claim that authoritarian-communitarianism is the key reason for the region’s rapid growth.We can question whether East and Southeast Asians will continue to accept developmental dictatorships that can no longer deliver development. As Frank Ching of the Far Eastern Economic Review has asked:‘‘Are Asian values ¢nished?’’ 2

China and the "Singapore Model"

Following the death of Singapore’s founding leader Lee Kuan Yew in March 2015, China remains obsessed with Singapore, the only country in the region to achieve advanced economic industrialization without undergoing substantial political liberalization. The key “lesson” that China is trying to learn is how to combine authoritarian rule with “good governance” (“meritocratic” one-party rule). The impact of the “Singapore model” on China shows that learning by nondemocratic states is not necessarily a short-term “modular” phenomenon that is largely reactive in character, but can be long-term and highly institutionalized. It has become increasingly clear, however, that China sees what it wants to see in Singapore, making the “lessons” learned more caricature than reality. And China’s recent crackdown on dissenters, squeezing the already limited political space allowed during the post–Tiananmen Square Massacre period, is actually moving the country further away from rather than toward the Singapore model.

Why and how East Germans rebelled

ConclusionAttempts to explain the East German uprising are particularly significant because it was probably the most important event in the collapse of European communism. The building of the Berlin Wall was the symbol of the Cold War division between Eastern and Western Europe and its fall led to the reunification of Germany and marked the end of this European partition. Elizabeth Pond has written: “When the Berlin Wall fell, the crash obliterated a country, an empire, and an era.”Pond, Beyond the Wall, 1. There are several obstacles to adequate explanation, however. The reasons why East Germans rebelled cannot be separated from the end of communism in Europe. The GDR was “imprisoned” within the socialist bloc (similar to the way the SED “locked up” its own people). Rebellion could only (successfully) occur when Soviet domination had eased. The popular rebellion in East Germany was precipitated by a wave of “exit” unleashed by reform communists in Hungary who had eliminated border controls. The Wall was opened from outside before it was pulled down from within.Even when confined to the protests within the GDR, that is to the second stage of the revolt, the main causes of the uprising have often been misunderstood. The would-be “exiters” were an important part of “voice” and often prompted the activities of the pro-GDR opposition. “Loyal voice” did play a significant role in calling for and speaking at anti-regime rallies. But these oppositionists did not mobilize the population themselves. Mass exodus, and political reform elsewhere in Eastern Europe, had set off the revolt by giving many East Germans a new found sense of political efficacy that led them to act spontaneously.Opp, Voss, and Gern, Die volkseigene Revolution, show that the organized opposition had too few contacts to organize demonstrations but simply announced them, to which ordinary people finally began to respond in large numbers in early fall 1989. To show exactly how this largely spontaneous process took place, the authors concede a social-network analysis of friends and family members encouraging each other to participate would be needed (but proved too expensive!) (chap. 14). Without private advantages and aware of the personal risks, millions of ordinary citizens went onto the streets because they felt a collective sense of obligation to do so.The key to understanding how East Germans rebelled, that is, to explaining the distinctiveness of the revolt, is the ex-GDRs lack of national identity. While the Polish and Hungarian leaderships could initiate democratization and hope to protect some of their interests under postcommunist rule, the SED risked losing “its” state as well. Hirschman underestimates the GDR leaderships dilemma when he argues that “the extinction of the German Democratic Republic can be seen as the ultimate penalty for the long suppression of exit and voice” (p. 200). The GDR could only survive by preventing its citizens from leaving for the bigger, richer, and more democratic state in a divided nation. East Germany was inconceivable as a liberal state. Reform efforts always literally ran into the Wall.Not only does the lack of national identity explain the hardline nature of the regime, it also illuminates the “revisionism” of the opposition. It is only an apparent paradox that in a “state without legitimacy” the loyalty among the GDR intellegentsia was particularly intense.Fricke, “Die Geschichte der DDR: Ein Staat ohne Legitimät,” in Eckhard Jesse and Armin Mitter, editors, Die Gestaltung der deutschen Einheit: Geschichte - Politik - Gesellschaft (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1992), 41–72. The same matter-of-fact nationalism that made many East Germans feel a part of the Federal Republic (of which they were, by nature of the West German Grundgesetz, “virtual” citizens), tied artists, writers, and oppositionists alike to the ideal of the “better German state.” They felt that the evils of German nationalism could best be preempted by socialism, which offered a clear anti-fascist position and justified the continued existence of the GDR.German nationalism and calls for unification were often associated with the “Groβdeutschland” (Greater Germany) of the Nazis. When the Wende made unification possible, warnings were heard of Anschluβ (annexation), the term used to describe the Nazi seizure of Austria. This not only implied a return to the extreme nationalism of the past, it was also an indirect critique of parliamentary institutions: the East German Volkskammer, freely elected in spring 1990, chose to unify with West Germany. East Germans had to rebel against an unrelenting SED and then abandoned the pro-GDR oppositions hope for a rejuvenation of East Germany. Continued emigration and mounting protest doomed efforts to reform the regime and rescue the state. Elections had to be moved up from May to March 1990 to head off pending economic and political disaster. West German parties, which supported GDR “affiliates,” and Western politicians, who were well known and often better liked than their East German counterparts, played a dominant role in the campaign. The vote brought a conservative coalition to power that had promised the fastest and marginalized the two major opponents of immediate unity: the reformed communists (PDS) and the opposition alliance (Bündnis 90). Democratic transition had become part of German unification.

THE POLITICS PHILIPPINE PRESIDENTS MAKE

ABSTRACT In political systems with a powerful chief executive, such as in the Philippines, an essential element in the analysis of politics is a clear understanding of the impact of presidential politics. Two analytical theories have tried to understand this phenomenon: (1) a voluntarist, actor-centered, presidential-style approach, and (2) a structuralist, patronage-based approach. This article shows that neither approach provides a satisfactory account of the countrys presidency. A more useful approach, the author argues, is the relational one developed by U.S. political scientist Stephen Skowronek to analyze the presidency in the United States. Skowronek studies whether presidents attempt to govern in accordance with, or in opposition to, an existing presidential regime—a prevailing set of ideas, interests, and institutional arrangements. This approach allows for the assessment of the choices presidents make within structural constraints while differentiating the performance of presidents from their role as patron-in-chief. In order to apply this theory to the Philippine presidency, however, it must be modified to take into account campaign narratives, strategic groups, and institutional instability. Post- Marcos presidents, the author concludes, can best be evaluated based on how close their association was, or is, with the dominant reformist regime, which employs a narrative of good governance and democratization.

Why Democracy Does Not Always Follow Economic Ripeness

Ninety years ago the German sociologist Werner Sombart posed the famous question: ‘Why is there no socialism in the United States?’1 The query arose from what then appeared to be a sound theoretical premise: that capitalist development, specifically industrialization and the growth of the working class, will lead to the development of a strong socialist movement and pro-labour political parties.