Such self-serving interpretations of ‘Asian values’ do not go unchallenged. Anand Panyarachun, a former Thai prime minister who has been active in both business and politics, recently lamented the decline of ethical standards in Asia and what he called the ‘grim’ role models presented to the public: ‘Military figures negotiating business deals, narcotics traffickers serving as parliamentarians, respected business personalities consorting with shady characters, professors offering snake-oil remedies to age-old problems, clerics caught under the covers – laughable, were it all not so deplorable.’ Anand went on to heap scorn on ‘the current wave of support for our so-called Asian values’. He said: ‘As if a long-hidden treasure-trove had suddenly been discovered, Asian values are the fashionable topic of the day. Without specifying what, precisely, is being referred to, political leaders region-wide have grasped this fashionable term as a useful rhetorical device. They have used it to champion special interests, to oppose foreign competition, to curry favour with an all-too-often gullible public.’32 Anand proposed his own set of ‘Asian values’ – good governance, ensured by visionary, vigorous and responsible leadership; moral integrity; and service to others. There was nothing about ‘flexibility’ or curbing the press.
Another problem with ‘Asian values’ is the very different characters of the people who espouse them. In politics, for example, it would be hard to find two people more different than Malaysia’s Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore – the two best-known voices of the ‘Asian Way’. They are rivals, not friends. Mahathir is dynamic but erratic and given to emotional outbursts, boasting of the superior qualities of Asians and particularly Malaysians when things are going well, but bitterly blaming foreigners for conspiring against Asia when they go badly – as he did during the south-east Asian financial crisis of 1997. Lee is much more calculating. In the 1950s, when he was pressing Britain to end its colonial occupation of Singapore, he said: ‘If you believe in democracy, you must believe in it unconditionally. If you believe that men should be free, then, they should have the right of free association, of free speech, of free publication.’33 After taking power, he and his followers carefully modified their views as they slowly built the edifice of the ‘Asian Way’. They emphasized the importance of cultural differences between peoples, stressing the need for Asian governments to be respected rather than suffer the noisy and unproductive harassment typical of debates in the West. Unconditional democracy was out. But Lee, a lawyer by profession, reads more widely and thinks more deeply than the energetic but unreliable Mahathir. He and other Singaporean government ministers do not take simplistic anti-western postures, and are usually ready to give credit where they feel it is due. They openly praise the US for having opened its markets to Asian exporters after the Second World War, an action which was a vital contribution to the Asian economic ‘miracle’. And, without embarrassment, they publicly support a continued US military presence in the region to ensure security.
For all the debate in Malaysia, Singapore and the rest of south-east Asia, there is little chance that a coherent value-system will emerge. The historical and cultural arguments for ‘Asian values’ are weak, and there is little popular support for a philosophy that seems to be the narrow preserve of governments. When the authoritative Far Eastern Economic Review published a series of profiles of its more influential readers to mark its fiftieth anniversary in 1996, it was remarkable how many Asians – business people, academics, bureaucrats – cited ‘Asian values’ as the greatest cliché about Asia before going on to say why they thought it was nonsense.34 And yet ‘Asian values’ still exert a powerful influence in south-east Asia, not just in the politics of individual countries (where these values are used to underpin the authority of particular governments) but also in the region as a whole: it is significant that the members of Asean pursue a coordinated foreign policy based largely on ‘Asian values’.
Asean foreign policy is supposed to operate on the basis of the ‘Asian values’ of consensus, by which it is meant that differences between member states should not be aired in public but resolved by governments behind closed doors; communiqués and public statements thus tend to be exceptionally bland, even by the anodyne standards of international meetings the world over. The search for consensus, however, does not apply to relations between Asean and the outside world. For Asean is eager to confront what its members see as foreign interference in the way they run their countries. The governments object to being told how to run their domestic politics and how to formulate laws on labour rights and environmental protection. In 1993, Asian governments, including Asean, even went so far as to qualify the notion of universal human rights. At a meeting in Bangkok before the UN World Conference on Human Rights, they implied that the UN standards to which most countries, including themselves, had formally subscribed were ‘western’. They argued that more attention should be given to an ‘Asian’ interpretation of human rights, which stressed economic growth and political stability for the benefit of whole communities more than individual freedom. Lee Kuan Yew endorses this view, belittling the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that it was drawn up by the victorious powers after the Second World War and that neither China nor Russia believed in the document they signed.35 The growing confidence of Asean governments in the early 1990s, and their desire to protect each other from challenges to their authority, made work increasingly difficult for local pressure groups on issues such as human rights and the environment. These groups, known as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), had never been popular with the governments they challenged; but now they found their meetings banned or restricted if they attempted to discuss human-rights abuses in another Asean member state. This occurred even in Thailand and the Philippines, the two most democratic Asean members and the two with the greatest respect for freedom of speech, when NGOs tried to discuss the Indonesian occupation of East Timor – a territory abandoned by Portugal, invaded by Indonesia with great brutality in 1975 and forcibly incorporated into Indonesia the following year. Just as China tries to force other Asian countries to refuse entry to the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, Indonesia, the largest Asean member, does not hesitate to put pressure on other member governments to suppress embarrassing meetings. In 1994, angered by a planned conference on East Timor in Manila, Indonesia temporarily withdrew from an economic co-operation programme with the Philippines and suspended its efforts to mediate between the Philippine government and Moslem rebels.36
The attempts by Asean governments to monopolize debate do not go unchallenged. NGOs, liberal politicians and academics in all Asean countries have vigorously re-asserted their belief in minimum universal standards of human rights and continued to protest against everything from poor factory conditions to environmental abuses in the region. In a car park outside a hotel hosting an Asean meeting in Bangkok in 1994, Cecilia Jimenez, a human-rights lawyer from the Philippines, complained about the Thai government’s decision to disrupt a human-rights meeting taking place in the city at the same time and bitterly condemned the Asean governments for ‘cultural relativity’. She said: ‘I think that’s so racist, so insulting to say that we Asians deserve less human rights than you guys from the West … The Philippines and the Thai government are under tremendous pressure from the Indonesian government. That’s why we object to the bully tactics of the Indonesian government.’37
The biggest test of Asean’s unity, however, is not Indonesia but Burma. It is one thing to use the concept of ‘Asian values’ to defend the rights of, say, Singapore and Malaysia to restrict personal freedoms in the interest of economic growth and political stability: such countries have been labelled ‘soft authoritarian’ by political scientists. But Burma is by no means soft. It is ruled by a military junta which has tortured and killed hundreds of its opponents, and which has condemned what should be one of Asia’s wealthiest countries – fertile, rich in minerals, attractive to tourists and home to fifty million people – to poverty and oppression. The junta was so out of touch with its own people that it
