By most accounts, the past few years have been anni horribiles for human rights and democracy in Southeast Asia. From Thailand to Indonesia to Myanmar, liberal values appear in broad retreat, and at the start of 2018, it is becoming hard to speak of any country in the region as a healthy and functional democracy.
In general, Western media coverage have offered two broad explanations for this trend: the advance of Chinese power in the region, and the retreat of the United States under the “America First” presidency of Donald Trump.
Both explanations are valid, but only up to a point. China’s “march to the tropics” under Xi Jinping has plainly empowered authoritarian governments in the region, but it is hardly the root of the region’s political dysfunction. Similarly, Trump’s indifference to human rights has made life more difficult for Southeast Asian dissidents, but the assumption that the emergence of democratic freedoms in Yangon or Hanoi is simply a matter of sufficient American “leadership” betrays a wildly optimistic view of US power to shape developments (let alone attitudes) abroad.
These partial explanations are consoling, however, because they allow us to preserve the belief that history, for all its recent lurches, is basically still moving in the right direction. In that sense, they are good examples of what the American radical historian Charles Beard once described as the “devil theory” of politics and war. If one assumes that Western-style liberal democracy is the universal aspiration of humanity — something like the conventional wisdom in Europe and the United States — then its puzzling failure can be explained only by reference to malign forces that have arisen, within and without, to thwart the beneficent designs of history.
As Michael Vatikiotis writes in this new book, the reality in this region is a good deal more tangled. In the course of this detailed and engaging tour d’horizon, Vatikiotis seeks to account for what he describes as the “Janus-faced aspect” of modern Southeast Asia: the contrast between its “smiling mask of tropical abundance” and the repressive realities that lie beneath. “For a part of the world that has made so much social and material progress,” he asks, “why do so many countries of the region plumb the bottom of international indices measuring freedom and good government? Why does the region continue to struggle with democratic transition?”
Vatikiotis is in an ideal position to provide an informed answer. A former correspondent for the BBC and editor for the Far Eastern Economic Review, and the author of several books on Southeast Asian politics, he has lived in the region more than three decades and speaks two of its languages fluently. Most recently, he has worked as a mediator of armed conflict for the Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, in which capacity he has been personally involved in trying to broker solutions to regional conflicts including the paralysing “red-yellow” conflict in Thailand and chronic Muslim separatist insurgencies both there and in the Philippines.
Blood and Silk is the product of long contemplation of the puzzling contradiction between the region’s booming economic progress, visible from Singapore to Ho Chi Minh City, and its sticky authoritarian politics. To an extent, it is also a chronicle of disillusionment. Early in the book, Vatikiotis recalls the euphoria that accompanied the “people power” movement that overthrew President Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986. At the time, he writes, “events in Manila were amplified in the media and breathlessly projected as the end of history for Asia”. When similar protests broke out in Myanmar, Indonesia and Malaysia in the late 1980s, followed soon after by the crumbling of the Soviet Union, it felt like democracy was the wave of the future. Only later did it become apparent that this post-Cold War moment, like the fall of Marcos, represented a “false dawn”, the first of many.
Drawing on the work of scholars like O.W. Wolters and Charles Keyes, Vatikiotis argues that today’s authoritarianism has deep roots in Indic-Brahmanic traditions of authority that raised kings and princes high above the worldly realm. This has shaped political cultures shot through with “vestiges of arcane princely power”, which by their nature stand in opposition to more open and transparent forms of governance. These traditions were entrenched during the era of Western colonial rule, when colonial administrations mobilised pre-modern forms of authority to maintain stability and ensure a steady supply of raw materials to Paris, London and Amsterdam. At the same time, colonial powers also “used strict lines of racial division” to control exploited populations, “thus bequeathing the region disintegrated societies at the birth of modern nationhood”.
As independence dawned in the region after Second World War, the nationalist and socialist ideals of early anti-colonial leaders like Indonesia’s Sukarno and Malaysia’s Tunku Abdul Rahman were displaced by a new generation of strongmen and their cliques, some of whom presented themselves as bulwarks against communism during the Cold War, mobilising the symbols of pre-modern tradition to prevent the emergence of effective checks on their power. Since then, Vatikiotis writes, Southeast Asian politics has continued to be dominated by zero-sum struggles in which “power is regarded as an absolute attribute … you either have it, or you don’t. And your life is worth far less if you don’t.” In historical perspective, then, Southeast Asia in 2018 is not the exception but the rule. (The two countries where this pattern may be least applicable are Vietnam, with its Sinitic cultural tradition and “Leninist-Confucian” political system, and Chinese-majority Singapore, whose antiseptic and rigidly ordered political model resembles not so much the Indic-inflected mandala kingdom as the east Asian “developmental state”.)
This is not to say that ordinary people have meekly accepted this Southeast Asian tyranny. Vatikiotis shows that very much the opposite is true, describing “the vibrant and assertive nature of civitas” in many of these countries, and the cycle of popular resistance that has characterised much of the region’s modern history. He pays frequent tribute to the activists and intellectuals he has known who have refused to allow tyranny and impunity to prevail, some of whom have sacrificed their lives in the process. But since underlying problems are rarely addressed, the region has experienced a rolling cycle of conflict, “a tragic mandala of perpetual violence” that forms the dark underside to the “sleek metropolitan glass-and-steel carapaces” of Bangkok, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur.
Even when the mandala does finally turn, entrenched economic interests and socio-cultural attitudes ensure that old patterns repeat. In the Philippines, “people power” gave onto a new round of corruption, impunity and extreme inequality that created the eventual conditions for the election of Rodrigo Duterte on a ruthless “law and order” platform in 2016. As Vatikiotis observes, two-thirds of the Philippine Congress is drawn from some 170 political families, something that seems to remain the same regardless of who occupies the Malacañang Palace. In Indonesia, the reformasi that followed the fall of Suharto in 1998 has produced not a swift transition to democracy but a new era of ambiguous freedom in which new forms of religious exclusivism have enjoyed political blessing, while silence continues to prevail about the New Order’s founding atrocity: the anti-communist killings of 1965-66.
Worryingly, Vatikiotis describes how opposition politicians often cast their struggles in the globalised terms of freedom, justice and human rights, only to jettison these principles upon gaining office. This is evident from apparent democratic breakthroughs — the election of Joko Widodo in Indonesia in 2014 and of Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar in 2015 — that have since petered as both leaders revealed “a troubling insensitivity to human rights concerns and a tendency to accommodate vested interests”.
How to break this repressive cycle? After reading Blood and Silk, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many Western discussions of democracy in the region (and indeed in general) rely on confused and shifting assumptions. It is surely a truism that people everywhere hate tyranny and want accountable and effective government. A desire not to be tortured is not a product of culture; torture, as human rights advocates rightly insist, is a universal evil. But as Vatikiotis shows, desires for freedom and justice can sit alongside a countervailing desire for security, especially in countries, like the Philippines or Cambodia, where legal protections are weak or non-existent.
Present, too, are desires for the enactment of ethnic and national myths, which can impose intense suffering on those, like the Rohingya of Myanmar, deemed to lie “outside” the ethnic or national community. No one wants to suffer, but all too many otherwise decent people are willing to sanction the suffering of others in the name of nation or religion. From my own experience in Southeast Asia, I can attest to the ease with which ethno-nationalist appeals spring from democratic tongues.
When we speak of the value of “democracy”, then, what we are really referring to is not simply elections — so easily inhabited by undemocratic power — but a complex suite of institutions and attitudes that can hold these contradictory human impulses in check. These include the rule of law, professional bureaucracies, economies able both to create wealth and to distribute it equitably, and social norms of civil engagement and respect for individual rights. The problem in Southeast Asia, as Blood and Silk makes clear, is that many of these conditions remain absent. Some nations lack even a basic consensus on the scope and shape of the national community. Malaysia and Myanmar today struggle to reconcile ethnic inequalities imposed for the convenience of British imperialism. In the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, the identity of the nation has been — and continues to be — fiercely contested.
In historical perspective, this is perhaps unsurprising. The rise of mass politics in eighteenth century Europe was in many countries closely associated with the rise of nationalism, sometimes of a fiercely exclusionary kind. Strong states and bureaucracies were often forged, as under Napoleon and Bismarck, by autocratic means, and political systems generally became liberal before they became democratic. The emergence of modern democracy was a halting, contingent process, often involving conflict and considerable violence.
As Pankaj Mishra argues in his Age of Anger, the onset of industrial modernity in the West was accompanied by fierce political backdraughts, as traditional societies were torn from their moorings by the forces of modernisation and urbanisation — the same process that has played out in Southeast Asia in recent decades. The result, for many, was a condition of aggrieved and chronic insecurity, from which flowed a cascade of reactions including anarchism and extreme forms of nationalism. In terms of their relationship to modernity, the pistol-toting nineteenth century anarchist — the Raskolnikov brooding in his garret — has a direct parallel in the educated Javanese Muslim, who, adrift in the urban sea of Jakarta or Surabaya, embraces jihadi doctrine and goes off to join the Caliphate. Indeed, it could well be that the duality Vatikiotis identifies in Southeast Asian societies is inherent in the process of modernisation itself: suns of progress casting shadows of dislocation.
If that is true, more turbulence is surely in store, which democratic elections alone are unlikely to resolve or contain. In 2018, Southeast Asia again finds itself at the forefront of a looming superpower confrontation. A rising China, primed with an aggrieved nationalism and driven by a desire to end its “century of humiliation” at the hands of Western powers, is extending its power assertively into the region, challenging the United States dominance of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. While China remains a “lonely power”, in the words of David Shambaugh, Vatikiotis argues that it enjoys both geographic and cultural proximity to Southeast Asia and that the region’s dysfunctional political realities will make it “much harder for the West to sustain effective influence — and much easier for China to gain sway in the long run”.
This heralds an era of new transitions in Southeast Asia. A particular question mark hangs over the future of the region’s millions of overseas Chinese. Vatikiotis sounds a warning about the possibility that Beijing, extending its strategic belts and roads via Chinese connections in Southeast Asia, and pushed on by rising domestic demands to protect “compatriots” abroad, will reawaken dormant tensions between ethnic Chinese and the region’s majority ethnic groups.
In the last chapter of Blood and Silk, Vatikiotis casts his attention forward in time, offering a sketch of what the region might look like to the year 2050. He predicts the region coming full circle, reverting back to the more decentralised patterns of power that predated the era of Western influence that began with the Portuguese seizure of Malacca in 1511. What is likely to emerge, he writes, will be something “more discernibly Asian”, with more dispersed economies oriented northwards to China, and the fragmentation of centralised power as rising demands for change continue to surge against immovable authoritarian elites. Whether this vision eventuates, or perhaps something more optimistic, it is certain that this complex region will continue to defy romantic Western expectations. Amid the rubble of democratic projects, the mandala of conflicted modernity spins on.
Published in the Mekong Review, February 2018
