The National Interest
Spring 2001

From Miracle to Malaise

by Peter Hartcher

 

. . . Miracles are not only rare; they can also be fleeting. Today—only five years later—when Southeast Asia is compared to the Balkans, it is not to draw a contrast but a parallel. Most regional economies are in disarray. They have emerged from the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98 not improved but enduringly impaired. The collective Southeast Asian economy is smaller today than it was before the crisis broke. Many dormant ethnic and religious resentments have exploded in violence. Democratic systems are under tremendous stress and a stinking tide of corruption is on the rise. The dominant regional power, Indonesia, has lost the territory of East Timor that it held by force of arms for twenty-four years and is in danger of further splintering in a process commonly invoked as Balkanization. The ASEAN grouping has lost the power of action and degenerated to the brink of meaninglessness. And, depressingly, the region is increasingly inclined to blame the West for its troubles.

The holiday bombs are a clear symptom and a timely signal that the world needs to reconsider this asset that is fast becoming a serious liability. How serious a liability? In a June 2000 speech to the Asian Development Forum, Tan Kong Yam, professor of business studies at the National University of Singapore, suspected that, as the rich United States has the poor, crisis-prone Latin America at its feet, the dynamic economies of North Asia will succeed while the poorer nations of Southeast Asia lapse into a long-term, Latin-style stagnation: "Like Latin America, South-East Asia could gravitate towards being poor and prone to periodic crisis for the next ten years. The effects of weak growth could compound with political difficulties to create the same downward cycle that occurred in Latin America in the 1980s.

The crucial question must now be whether the sharp deterioration is a temporary relapse, or whether it was the quarter century of gains that was the aberration. Were those years, like most apparent "miracles", really just an effervescence? Is Southeast Asia merely returning to form as a Third World trouble spot? If so, it would become a truly worrisome one. For the last quarter century the world has been spared the need to pay much attention to the region because things have been, by and large, going right. But as things go wrong, what is at stake will emerge more starkly. . . .

Democracy's Chances

There is a case for believing that democracy is making itself at home in Southeast Asia. Britain left Singapore and Malaysia with parliamentary systems, and they kept them. They elect their governments to this day. The people of Thailand and the Philippines struggled free of authoritarian regimes. They seemed to be textbook cases of countries where rising living standards created rising political expectations. It happened in fits and starts, but it happened—and almost bloodlessly. Then the Indonesians overthrew Suharto. Here it was not a case of rising living standards but the abrupt interruption of rising living standards that provoked the change. Although it had not held a genuine election since the 1950s, Indonesia managed to conduct a peaceful and fair ballot across its vast archipelago of 3,000 inhabited islands with some 100 million voters. And, despite the profusion of 36 political parties, the result was declared with considerably greater dispatch than the U.S. presidential election of 2000.

It seems, then, that the trend for the region over the last thirty years has been positive, and with the transformation of Indonesia, all five of the original member states of ASEAN are now democratic. Maybe Francis Fukuyama was right about "the end of history." Maybe the critics, arguing that Southeast Asians lack the maturity to choose their own leaders, were horribly wrong. Of course, other regional countries remain in authoritarian hands, but the trend has been positive and overwhelmingly so. Myanmar (Burma) is the only country that seems to have retreated indefinitely from an experiment in democracy.

But deeper analysis shows that there is no room for complacency. The original democracies, Singapore and Malaysia, have the mechanics of elections to choose governments, but not the liberal values and systems that give elections meaning. Singapore's ruling party has successfully repressed political opposition by using a compliant court system to sue opponents into financial bankruptcy and political oblivion. Malaysia has gutted its court system to ensure that the government gets its way. Both countries control and censor their media. They are both systems of illiberal democracy or soft authoritarianism. Thailand and the Philippines are countries where democracy was achieved, lost and then recovered. Both struggle against deeply entrenched corruption and both, in recent times, have elected worryingly corrupt leaders. This has consequences for the durability of democracy in these states. . . .