‘Senism’ and the Invisible Asia
One of the central pillars of Cold War international relations was the solicitude shown by the world’s most ‘liberal’ capitalism for the utterly illiberal capitalism of the Asian tigers. There is no sufficient economic explanation for this support system. Being primarily a product of power politics, it lasted so long as the Pacific Rim was needed as a vital geopolitical buffer. With the Soviet fall, however, the way was cleared for full-thrust globalization on Washington’s terms.
It was not immediately apparent how onerous those terms would be. At first, foreign investment and financial speculation stoked what looked like a new super-miracle on the Rim. Few took serious notice of how the lending binge of the mid-1990s recklessly expanded foreign debt relative to reserves. When the bubble finally broke in 1997, massive capital exodus sent the region into a ruinous plunge. The IMF took its time responding, and finally applied a ‘rescue’ formula that quite predictably (after many hard lessons, such as the Mexican Tequila Crisis of 1994 and 1995) turned the Asian Crash into the Asian Crisis, effectively converting a recession into a depression. To add insult to injury, the globalist fire sale that followed was broadly self-described as economic therapy rather than the socioeconomic pillage that it was.
This crisis puts the politics of globalization in a different light. It follows from Amartya Sen’s axiom of ‘development as freedom’ that sustainable development requires economic and political priorities to be kept in balance. In Sen’s view, the Crisis spotlighted the high cost of undemocratic governance. Asian exceptionalists hold that liberal democracy is not needed in this high-growth sphere, and indeed would be a hindrance. Sen, by contrast, argues that the freedom factor has instrumental as well as intrinsic value. His outlook, moreover, is deeply rooted in Asian values. In lieu of the statist economism that monopolized the term ‘Asian values’ during the ‘miracle’ years, Sen proposes an ‘Eastern strategy’ that draws on the more humane traditions of Asia.
From this vantage it is obvious that development reaches far beyond the GDPism that dominates the standard discourse of growth. What has passed for development in much of Asia is mere profit-taking, and when the social and ecological costs of that taking are weighed in the balance, the result is often a net loss. Sen’s focus on human capabilities points toward more sustainable development, but also collides with current power structures in the East and West alike. In short, ‘Senism’ is inherently oppositional, despite Sen’s reluctance to face this fact, especially on the Western side. His critique of Singaporean ‘Asian values’ has been incisive, yet he stops short where neoliberalism is concerned. Thus his work has been far better at dealing critically with the ‘Asian miracle’ than with the inroads of neoliberal globalization after the Asian Crash.
In fact, both ‘Asian values’ and neoliberalism lost credibility in the post-miracle years. By the mid-1990s the specter of cultural anarchy haunted much of the developing world, with the conspicuous exception of the Rim. By eliminating that exception, the Crash and subsequent Crisis put the socioeconomic efficacy of the whole capitalist system on trial. Stricken countries reacted to the Crash according to their very different cultural and political contours. One thing they shared, however, was the undertow effect of Washington-directed globalization. At this of all times their autonomous modes of development and social security were gutted. Structural adjustment conditions attached to international loans all but precluded Keynesian recovery procedures, while IMF and World Bank recovery schemes bailed out the financiers who had been most responsible for the Crash. The moral hazard this entailed was not the worst of it. These programs also constituted a bailout of pre-Crash power structures that had lost their economic foundations. In a complete inversion of reality, this reactionary ‘recovery’ operation was hailed by neoliberal pundits, such as the swaggering globalist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, as a factory for democratization.
Many believe the Asian ‘miracle,’ now fully globalized, is back on track, relegating the Asian Crisis to history. But for broad sectors of the working classes the social and cultural meltdown of the Crisis never ended. The elemental security that workers once knew is still melting away, though this hardly registers on the radar screen of our mainstream media. We are assured that the Rim has more than recovered from its little setback of 1997. Even where that is patently not the case — where, for example, thousands of children still dig in garbage pits for their daily bread — the problem is attributed to insufficient neoliberal restructuration. Stellar ‘reform’ cases such as Korea and Thailand are contrasted with relative laggards such as Indonesia and the Philippines.
This dichotomy holds up only insofar as lower class privation in those flagship states has gone unreported. Even in Japan — long famous for its relative egalitarianism — the divisive impact of neoliberal restructuration is only now becoming a hot political issue. The norm throughout Asia, however, is an almost exclusive focus on the profits that are once more rolling in for those who count in increasingly globalized economies. For them post-Crash Asia is better than ever, as the working classes have been put in line, and democracy put on ice.
As more and more Asian leaders join the transnational capitalist class (TCC), the typical Asian state is transformed into a globalist instrumentality. Those citizens who do not enjoy TCC status, and have yet to reap any benefit from the ‘Asian miracle,’ are effectively rendered stateless. For these invisible people the pro forma voting rituals that pass for Asian democracy are almost meaningless. Senism attempts to rectify that, but very timidly. It is, we hold, a necessary but insufficient first step toward the repatriation of the ‘other Asia.’ Democracy is thus given some symbolic teeth, but no real fangs.
Crucially, however, Sen regards democracy as a prerequisite rather than consequence of development. This ‘concurrency model,’ as we term it, integrates economic and political goals at all stages of development. That is a start, but there is still the danger that democratization could end up legitimizing the extant power elite. How can we be sure that the outcome will not be another case of democratic minimalism? The ‘concurrency’ model, we suggest, must be coupled with the kind of active resistance that Sen’s own politics eschews. It is well to march to Sen’s drummer, including his post-Western view of democratization, so long as we register the fact that he has paid scant attention to the TNCs that monopolize today’s global economy. Nor can we fail to note his neglect (until quite recently) of vital issues of environmental and cultural sustainability. In short, the Senian model is very much an unfinished product, and a flawed one at that. At some point we must liberate it from Sen’s own politics.
It is this more radical Senism that should be applied to the question of Asian maldevelopment. In many Rim countries a crossroads was reached with the capitalist ‘setback’ of 1997. For all its social trauma, the Crash did have a silver lining: the enormous emancipatory potential of ‘unguided’ political reformism. Globalization worked against that potential by seizing control of the post-Crash ‘reform’ process. Equating development with pure economism, it snuffed out the grassroots democracy that the Crash had unleashed. The signature feature of such ‘reform’ was what it did not include. While new deals were struck with domestic power elites, the broader issues of political development were jettisoned.
Globalization should be put on trial for two developmental crimes: first, for funding many of the region’s most oppressive regimes during the miracle years, and second, for thwarting the democratic resistance that the Crash unleashed. Walden Bello was right to dub the Crash and its aftermath the ‘Stalingrad’ of prevailing globalization. Never was there a greater need for an international community of conscience rather than capital. Sending in the IMF was like sending the fox to save the chickens.
The carpetbagger mentality that the IMF exhibited in that dark hour sent a strong cautionary message to Asians about Washington-directed globalization. The first rebound action was from Malaysia’s Mahathir, who upbraided the IMF and financial speculators such as George Soros. For the moment, Thailand was the model of cooperation, but eventually it too would recoil from IMF dictates. Under Thaksin it pointedly paid back its rescue loans early, symbolically declaring its economic independence. The last Rim nation to pay off its emergency loans was Indonesia. By deciding to pay back its $7.8 billion outstanding debt four years short of the 2010 due date, Jakarta will save $200 million in interest. But, like Thailand, its primary purpose is to free itself from Washington’s neoliberal grip, not to secure the autonomy that real political reform would require.
Saving Asia’s Worst Regimes
Implicitly, Sen’s Development as Freedom (1999) would mandate both freedom from external imperialism and internal oppression. Sen directly challenges Lee Kuan Yew’s dictum that unyielding political constraints are necessary for Asian economic growth. The region’s power elites have long dismissed democratic values — along with human rights, gender rights, and environmental protection — as luxuries to be deferred until after development reaches a point they deem adequate. That point is of course forever deferred. The Crash put this logic under suspicion even among citizens who felt no intrinsic affection for democracy. What won them over, in accord with Sen’s model, was democracy’s instrumental value. This was the Senian moment, when it became apparent even to economic purists that authoritarianism and its associated cronyism were impediments to development.
Neoliberals quickly appropriated this criticism by building an orientalist fire wall between Western (real) and Eastern (crony) capitalism. That tactic lost its fire power, however, in the wake of the Enron scandal and a multitude of similar revelations concerning Western cronyism. This paved the way for a full anti-globalist critique, equally applicable to the East and West. Although Sen denied his place in anti-globalism, he was in fact one of its key contributors, and it is in this context that we can best assess his model.
He had long neglected, for example, the ecological side of this critique. What is sorely needed is a merger of Sen’s democratism with the environmental mandates of Indian writers such as Vandana Shiva and Arundhati Roy. He of all people should not have missed the deep complementarity of environmentalism and democratization, which African activists such as Ken Saro-Wiwa and Wangari Maathai have dramatically demonstrated (tragically prompting Saro-Wiwa’s Shell-engineered execution). Only after Suharto’s ouster did ordinary Indonesians start to learn the details about the ecological ravages of his administration (if only because his successors wanted to sully the previous dictator’s reputation). Clearly environmental consciousness is difficult to achieve without some degree of democracy.
While opening the door for revisionist Asian values, the Crash also invited the retrieval of an earlier Asian modernism. It is often forgotten that the ‘Asian model’ of the 1960s and early 1970s still gave priority to equity as well as growth. This accords with the thrust of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) meeting of 1972, which endorsed balanced growth as well as the reduction of inequality as prime developmental concerns. That egalitarian factor was summarily aborted by Singapore-school Asianism and neoliberalism alike. For all its trauma, the Crash had the salutary effect of putting equality and other human factors back on the developmental map.
It should not be forgotten that before the Asian takeoff many Latin American and African countries had been on an economic par with future Asian dragons. South Korea and Ghana, for example, were at roughly the same level of development in the early 1960s. The Asian ‘miracle’ hid that common potential behind the smokescreen of Asian exceptionalism. This served at once to discredit ‘dependency’ theory and to camouflage the enormous geopolitical favoritism that the West showered on the Rim. Safe behind that Cold War screen, the ‘miracle’ was able to revive faith in capitalist development worldwide — a faith that had flagged considerably during the stagflated 1970s. So long as the Cold War lasted, Western capitalists were inclined to tolerate and even applaud ‘Asian values.’
The chief local mediators of Eastern and Western capitalism were Western-trained technocrats. In Indonesia they worked closely with the Army to anchor Suharto’s New Order, and hence to repress democracy, though they called the process anti-communism. Here and in most Rim NICs, Singapore’s anti-politics became the model. It is now largely forgotten that in the late 1950s and early 1960s Singapore had been remarkably open and democratic. By smothering this tradition, Lee Kuan Yew’s cohorts went too far even for their own good. The result was such a dearth of interest in politics among Singaporean youth that it became hard to recruit fresh talent for the People’s Action Party (PAP). Precisely this orientation, however, gave Singapore its image as a stable commercial hub, the jewel in the crown of Asian globalization. As Jan Aart Scholte observes, current globalization has sidestepped democracy in favor of the ‘free market’ as ‘the be-all and end-all politics.’
The antithesis of PAP economism is Sen’s equally Asian development-as-freedom model. Unfortunately, as we have seen, some of the most dynamic Asian governments are moving in the very opposite direction. Once GDPism is taken as the highest social value, it is a short step to the acceptance of political repression as a price worth paying for higher economic performance. If China’s renewed hardline is a case of regretful continuity, Thailand’s crackdown on its more ‘Senian’ element has been a case of clear regression. The neoliberal myth of globalization as a prime mover of democratization has it just backwards. Massive infusions of global capital have put some of the worst regimes in Asia out of reach of domestic reform. In fact, globalization turns out to be a rescue package for endangered authoritarians.
Two of the most central claims of neoliberal globalism are hereby eviscerated: the notion that globalization is fundamentally pro-democratic and anti-nationalistic. The ‘black-van’ side of Japanese political culture is kept out of the global view, but most Asian governments have their equivalent of the LDP’s Yakuza (Japanese mafia) connections. If Senism is the sunny side of the ‘other Asia,’ this is its sinister side, and between the two it is the latter that occupies the halls of power. The brazen oppression of the newly globalized regimes is startling. Figures such as Thaksin and Hu Jintao are not simply recycling the old Asian statism. Pre-Crash miraclism went far toward reducing development to economic growth, which in turn was used to justify political stasis. Yet through it all a rule-of-law veneer was usually applied, if only to placate Western allies. Now, under the shadow of Sino-globalization, little matters except the economic bottom line. How did this happen?
Conclusion: the Axman Cometh
The Crash led many to demand more in the way of political reform, but no ASEAN country was willing to forfeit even a fraction of its GDP growth for non-material goals. If Rim governments could not deliver a full and speedy economic recovery, the public would soon give up on the political side of reform. The departure of Suharto and Mahathir left a regional leadership void that any human rights or democratic activist would have to appreciate. But, at this most critical moment, a prolonged economic slump invited a reversion to old voting habits, or worse.
Washington had good reason for keeping its silence concerning the reactionary tilt of globalized regimes such as India’s BJP and Thailand’s TRT. Right populists, after all, were considered more pliable than Left ones. Thaksin became the archetype of this ‘glocal’ (global/local) authoritarianism. The paramount fact from Washington’s perspective was that capitalism was safe on his watch. Propelled by a resurgent economy, in growth terms second only to China, Thailand’s corporate poster boy was instantly recognized by global power brokers as a formidable agent of de-radicalization.
Bush II saw Thaksin and Vajpayee alike as members in good standing on the ‘us’ side of his us/them global divide. Like Bush they voided the pluralist meaning of democracy while milking its populist appeal. Thai democracy was welcomed precisely because it was a sham. Over the last quarter century the bond between Thai politicians and criminal gangs had tightened, while vote-buying became so rampant that many voters saw it as a perfectly legal activity. If this is the best that Asian democracy can offer, authoritarianism will win by default. It at least makes the trains run on time, and keeps the unions in line.
The Crash, in sum, brought development theory to a stark crossroads: either democratization would have to be upgraded to a first priority concern, on a par with economic growth, or downgraded in the manner of Hindutva, Singaporean Asianism, or Thaksinomics. Thai ‘democracy’ had long operated in a gray zone of decentralized patronage, whereby public office was a purchasable commodity and effective leadership was all but impossible. Most Thais did not much care, and there is reason to fear that their embrace of Thaksinocracy (which will survive Thaksin’s personal exit) is indicative of a pan-Asian trend.
This second wave of post-Crash politics was a political counterreformation, comparable in many ways to Japan’s ‘reverse course’ of the late 1940s. However briefly, the Crash had awakened the Rim from its political lethargy, making it harder for globalists to dodge the issue of political reform by way of a presumed democratic teleology. If the liberal democratic road to development was to be taken at all, it would have to be taken more seriously. Obviously more was needed than the minimal device of elections and ballots alone. It is little wonder that Sen’s ‘development as freedom’ thesis gained global credibility at this time, earning him a Nobel Prize, for pro forma ‘democracy’ had patently flunked the test in Asia. Even some classic modernists now wavered in their belief that economic growth is the last word on ‘reform.’ Senism was no longer a fringe model, but would it be just a passing phase?
To be sure, Sen’s democratic axiom cuts both ways: if economic growth is not sustainable without political development, so too democratization is unsustainable without a solid and well distributed economic foundation. Sen, we argue, is a closet egalitarian, but he is still a mainstream economist. If democracy is one engine of his development model, its twin engine is still economic growth. That second engine sputtered out in the Philippines, and faltered in Indonesia after the Crash, leading in both cases to a lack of Senian concurrency (a balance between economic and political development). Likewise, Thailand’s less robust post-Crash reformism died of economic inertia, thereby giving rise to Thaksinocracy. The irony is that the Crash at once activated and deactivated political reform. It released liberatory energies, but the same economic downturn that spawned democracy also killed it.
To its lasting shame, US foreign policy played the role of axman. America’s basic distrust of grassroots democratization was never more fully exposed. What US-led globalization has fostered is the kind of procedural democracy that can be bought and sold, Thai-style. And since the highest ‘democratic’ bidder is likely to be the most globally connected one, it is not hard to see how the word ‘reform’ has come to be associated with globalist neocolonialism.
Clearly Sen has overrated the formal apparatus of democracy as a guarantor of substantive and sustainable development. Dictators have less to fear from universal suffrage than from the social and cultural dimensions of democracy that globalization deconstructs. This takes us into the thick of the new Asian drama, where incommensurable Asianisms are facing off in a developmental value war.
The post-Senian model we adumbrate is fighting on two fronts: with neoliberal globalization on the one hand and Asian authoritarianism on the other, but increasingly the two work in tandem. Despite profound differences, Thaksinomics and Sino-globalism can equally be described as globalized nationalisms, sharing an abiding commitment to development without Senian attributes. Indo-globalism seems to be taking the same route. The difference between it and Sino-globalism will blur over time unless India can reclaim the twin pillars of its distinctly Asian democracy: its Gandhian commitment to the underprivileged masses and its Nehruvian determination to preserve nonaligned independence. Current globalization is anathema to both.
It hardly needs to be said which side of the Asian values debate gets the support of the IMF, the World Bank, and WTO. This conflict will be all too familiar to those who remember the political schism within Western countries during and after the Great Depression, as analyzed by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation (1944). Our sense of déjà vu is no accident, for the Asian Crisis — which in fact has never ended, but rather is expanding beyond the Rim to all of Asia — is the Asian equivalent of the Depression so far as the working classes are concerned. Once again the issue is more political than economic, for the real problem is not so much underdevelopment (where the solution could be economic growth alone) as politically guided maldevelopment (requiring social democratic rather than neoliberal restructuration).
For several decades ‘Asian values’ have been defined by a power elite that would seem never to have heard of social or ecological accounting, much less accountability. The ‘other Asia’ was never a prominent feature on the Cold War map, and globalization is making it all the more obscure. What is sorely needed is a new political cartography. Simply to have ‘democracy’ or not is a mute issue. It is too easy to keep socially significant choices off the ballot. Senism is just too polite and trusting. Our post-Senism, by contrast, takes democracy to the anti-globalist barricades. That may be the only place where a real vote can be cast. Under the throes of current globalization, democracy has two basic choices: to be oppositional or to be cosmetic. The latter serves the interest of present power structures.
But let us close on a point of total agreement with Sen: the urgent necessity of recognizing that simple economic growth is not development, and certainly it is not Asian development. To freeze development in this atavistic mode — which by the way was imported from the West — would spell the end of the hopes that the Crash engendered. This would kill the prospective Asian Renaissance in every non-material sense, and finally in the material sense as well. Perhaps the worst case scenario at this point is the possibility that Asians, for lack of an effective political map, will not even know that they are approaching an epic developmental crossroads. They could pass right through it without knowing that once upon a time they had a choice.
William H. Thornton is professor of globalization and cultural studies at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. His publications include New World Empire: Civil Islam, Terrorism, and the Making of Neoglobalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), Fire on the Rim: The Cultural Dynamics of East/West Power Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), and Cultural Prosaics: The Second Postmodern Turn (Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature – University of Alberta, 1998).
Songok Han Thornton is an assistant professor of International Affairs at Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages. With recent or forthcoming articles in The Journal of Developing Societies, World Affairs, New Political Science, and Development and Society, her major research focus is the politics of Asian globalization. Along with her husband, she is working on a book (from which this essay is drawn) titled The New Asian Drama: Senism, Globalization, and the Politics of Maldevelopment.
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