The first thing that undergraduate students learn about Asian politics is that there is no such thing as ‘Asian politics’ — there’s just politics, in Asia.
The one consistent feature of the political landscape of our region is its diversity: almost every way of governing a society that has ever been tried can be found in some form in the region today, from capitalist liberal democracies, single-party communist states and absolute monarchies to zones where the writ of modern states matters less than traditional forms of authority.
The latest edition of the East Asia Forum Quarterly (EAFQ), ‘Asia’s politics now’, takes stock of the forces driving the evolution of Asian political systems today, with a
focus on the prospects of democracy in the region amid a global trend towards autocratisation.
Two key interrelated stories stand out in this collection of essays from leading experts of the region’s politics.
First is that because economic development appears to be neither a necessary nor sufficient factor in the success of democracy in Asia, the region will continue to fuel debate about the relevance of the modernisation paradigm for understanding the future of global democracy.
Second, the continuing economic success of authoritarian states like China (as well as the widespread popular approval of backsliding governments in India and Indonesia) should ensure that Asia will remain a reservoir of debate that justifies illiberal or non-democratic governance in utilitarian or culture-based terms.
This is the theme of this week’s lead articles by Mark Thompson and Diego Fossati from EAFQ. Thompson surveys a revival of ‘narratives of Western liberalism as culturally alien to Asia’, in ways that ironically dovetails with the organicist turn within the Western far right.
Fossati looks at the issue from the perspective of public attitudes, explaining how surveys reveal that ‘support for democracy in the region is often conditional, with many citizens prioritising effective leadership and governance over strict adherence to democratic principles’. The challenge for the region is therefore to ‘uphold democratic legitimacy by delivering effective policy outcomes in increasingly diverse and polarised societies’, a predicament that is ‘not unique to East and Southeast Asia but reflects broader struggles faced by democracies worldwide’.
So did history, as per Francis Fukuyama, never end in Asia?
There’s a measure of vindication of Fukuyama’s idea about the post-Cold War hegemony of democratic ideals to be found in the fact that, even as regimes across the region have become more illiberal, or resisted substantive democratisation at all, they still invoke the language of popular sovereignty and electoral legitimation.
There is more still to be found in the resilient liberal civil society movements across the region fighting democratic backsliding, often in the face of considerable risks to their own safety and freedom.
The aspiration for basic political and economic freedom and accountable government, if not its realisation, is still as good as universal. But whether or not the economic and social change in the region generates new popular demands for democracy and liberalism, ultimately it will be elites that determine the supply.
Here is where the question of technology comes to pose new questions whose answers will only become clear years, if not decades, into the future. It is for good reason that the early-2000s euphoria about the emancipatory potential of the internet now feels deeply naive. In the post-Trump world, the potential for social media to mislead, fragment and polarise electorates is as much a feature of Asian democracies as those in the West.
At the same time, the power of digital technologies to enhance states’ ability to monitor their societies, spread propaganda and pre-empt protest will be on show as Asia — China in particular — remains at the leading edge of what some scholars have called the ‘digitalisation’ of autocratic governance.
There are good reasons to think that the Chinese model of tech-enabled mass surveillance and censorship isn’t replicable in other countries.
But at the same time it’s clear there is little doubt that the increased ‘legibility’ of digitally-connected populations to their governments, especially as augmented by artificial intelligence, will have effects on the relationships between states and society in ways we can’t yet foresee.
Asia is thus not just home to a wide range of regime types, with unpredictable trajectories — it is also a key arena of ideological contest, where democracy and autocracy alike are being reinterpreted, reshaped and resisted by economic, social and technological change.
This takes place in a deeply uncertain international environment, as two longform essays in the Asian Review section of EAFQ analyse.
Evelyn Goh surveys the practical implications of a world whose great powers are all ‘revisionist’ — and what this means for long-standing theoretical assumptions about how much international order is shaped by great-power preferences.
In a contribution made all the more timely by Australia’s historic federal election result, Iain Henry addresses the consequences of the entrenchment of ‘America First’ politics for the Australia–US alliance, arguing for policymakers in Canberra to face the facts about the increasing unreliability of the United States as an alliance partner, and to adapt Australia’s defence and international diplomatic strategies accordingly.
The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Law, Policy and Governance, The Australian N
ational University.
Source: East Asia Forum
