rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">7
The south-east Asia of today is clearly very different, although at first glance it seems as hard to make generalizations about the region’s politics now as it was in the 1960s. What conclusions can be drawn about ten countries that include a military dictatorship in Burma, an Islamic Sultanate in Brunei, a noisy, American-style democracy in the Philippines, a one-party, communist system in Vietnam and Laos and a variety of democratic or quasi-democratic systems among the rest? Yet they do have more in common with each other than mere geography. First, they all acknowledge the importance of foreign investment and global trade and are committed – in word if not in deed – to modern market economics. Second, they are all embroiled in conflicts between old-fashioned authoritarians (who are usually in power), and younger, more liberal politicians (who are mostly confined so far to the opposition, or to the fringes of the ruling parties).
In both the Philippines and Thailand, voters can and do change their governments by means of elections. But truly representative democracy is only just beginning. In each country politicians tend to come from a small elite of landed gentry or business families – or the military. In 1997, the then president of the Philippines (Fidel Ramos) and one of the Thai prime ministers of that year (Chavalit Yongchaiyudh) were both former generals. Politics in Thailand has long been influenced, too, by powerful local businessmen – often gangsters involved in everything from drug-smuggling and illegal logging to gambling and property speculation – who sell their ability to deliver their local votes to a bewildering array of ‘national’ parties. Vote-buying (a vote can be bought for the equivalent of a few dollars) is so rampant in the poorer parts of the countryside that it is taken for granted even by the liberal media. ‘The parties work for the private gain of their sponsors rather than for the good of the society at large or even for the people who elect the party candidates,’ wrote two Thai academics in a survey of corruption in Thailand in 1994. ‘None of the existing political parties have started from grass roots support. Rather, they originated as interest groups of influential people and businessmen.’8 Only now are more idealistic politicians, supported by the more sophisticated voters of the Bangkok metropolis, starting to break into politics and trying to build political parties with some kind of ideological content. Liberals and others who want to modernize the country’s politics are more optimistic than they have ever been, although they acknowledge that it is only in Bangkok that people vote for parties without necessarily knowing the name of their member of parliament, as often happens in the West; in the Thai provinces, the opposite remains true – people know the name and reputation of their MP but are unlikely to know to which party he belongs this year. Ammar Siamwalla, the Thai political scientist and commentator, says that for the last half a century Thais have concentrated on their headlong lunge for economic development and largely ignored the need to modernize their politics while the armed forces and cliques of businessmen fought it out in a series of elections and coups d’état. Now that is changing. Public protests led to the formation of a constitutional panel; the constitution it produced in 1997 (Thailand’s sixteenth since the abolition of the absolute monarchy in 1932) was aimed largely at ending what south-east Asians call ‘money politics’. As Ammar says: ‘To me that’s a great step forward. We are engaged in political debates. We are trying to solve problems. It is very Bangkok-centred, but people are beginning to learn how to govern themselves.’9 The old-style politicians are not giving up easily – both Chavalit and his predecessor as prime minister Banharn Silpa-archa fall into this category – but Thais are no longer tolerating their leaders’ inability to manage a modern economy that faces global competition and needs to be run through solid institutions rather than backroom deals. (It was perhaps significant that the man who formed a new coalition government after the Thai economic crisis erupted was Chuan Leekpai of the Democrat Party. He is a mild-mannered man who likes to do things methodically and legally, although some of the politicians he was obliged to draw into his coalition were members of the old-fashioned and corrupt political class.) Both the rural poor and the urban elite have regularly demonstrated in the streets to air their grievances. ‘In the last few years we have been very good at throwing the rascals out,’ says Ammar. ‘Of course we have been getting the rascals in too. The first step is to throw the rascals out without having the tanks running around the streets. The next step is to stop the rascals coming in.’10
Throughout south-east Asia, names and personalities are often as important as policies. The children of the region’s leaders seem to be drawn inexorably towards power. In Burma, Suu Kyi took the unusual step of prefixing her name with her father’s – Aung San, who brought the country to the brink of independence before he was assassinated – to announce her origins in a country where family names are not normally used. In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew’s son Lee Hsien Loong, known as BG Lee because of his military rank of Brigadier-General, is deputy prime minister. Before he was forced to step down, President Suharto had groomed his children – who had previously been more interested in business – to play a political role in Indonesia, while Megawati Sukarnoputri in opposition drew on the memory of her father Sukarno. In the Philippines, Corazon Aquino became President in 1986 largely because she was the widow of Benigno Aquino, the assassinated opponent of Marcos. And the winner of the Philippine presidential election in 1998 was a swashbuckling B-movie film star named Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada; his vice-president is Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, daughter of a respected former president. ‘We have no idea of power in the abstract,’ says Alex Magno, one of the leading political commentators in the Philippines. ‘The ordinary Filipino does not talk about the presidency. He talks about Cory [Corazon Aquino] or Ramos.’ Magno, who writes in both English and Tagalog, the local lingua franca, says his readers in Tagalog complained that he was inventing words when he thought up a word for ‘presidency’ – ‘pangulohan’, derived from ‘pangulo’ (president). According to Magno, Asian politics is about personalities and pragmatism. He is regularly asked to teach a course on Asian political theory, but says he cannot because there is none.11
But the focus on personalities is not a particular Asian phenomenon. Similar tendencies can be found in Latin America or Africa. The Philippines has a peculiar political system closely modelled on the US, where film stars – Ronald Reagan is the best-known example – are also influential. More importantly for south-east Asia, the attention given to individuals instead of their policies is a characteristic not just of developing Asia but of many pre-modern, pre-industrial political systems. And the situation is changing. South-east Asian countries have become richer and their inhabitants more educated and demanding, a transformation underlined by the criticisms of younger observers such as Magno himself. As President, Ramos came across as a forceful figure who liked to be seen chomping a big cigar, but he and his supporters repeatedly emphasized the success of his policies rather than his personality. His nickname, dull by Filipino standards, was ‘Steady Eddie’. He compared his own achievements in restoring the Philippine economy, reviving its industrial competitiveness and attracting foreign investors to the failures of his predecessors: the nice Cory Aquino, who represented the restoration of democracy but allowed the economy to languish; and Ferdinand Marcos, who espoused a ‘crony capitalism’ in which corruption was rife and local industries were protected from foreign competition.
The democracies of the Philippines and Thailand are gradually moving towards a more modern form of democracy where policies count as much as personalities. At the other end of the political spectrum, the military junta in Burma and the communist regimes in Vietnam and Laos are also under pressure to modernize their political systems. From the inside, there are demands from middle-class citizens and students who want more representation. From the outside (particularly in the case of Vietnam, with its large exile community in the US), there is additional pressure for change as governments seek to encourage foreign investment and open their economies to the outside world.
Inevitably, political progress is slow. The middle class in these three countries remains small and weak; the average per capita income in Vietnam, Laos and Burma is less than
