1
Ladies and Gentlemen, good morning.
I would like to express my deepest and sincerest condolences to the good
people of Thailand on the passing of His Majesty the King. Coming from another
monarchical country, I am very much aware of the rhythm of life and expectations
characteristic of the monarchy. I know what it feels like to experience the end of an era,
while anticipating the beginning of another. I hope you achieve this transition peacefully
and that Thailand will begin an era of stability, democracy, and prosperity under the new
reign.
My assignment for this conference is to address the issue of democratization
in Southeast Asia. I believe I was given this assignment in part because I am a Southeast
Asianist by training and because I serve as president of the National Graduate Institute
for Policy Studies or GRIPS, whose mission is to train future political leaders and
policy professionals in democratic governance.
To be honest, however, I wish I had been given this assignment twenty years
ago. Back in the early 1990s, when I was based in the U.S. and living in a small town
in the state of New York called Ithaca, in the middle of nowhere, and teaching at a
2
university, people such as Francis Fukuyama were talking about the “end of history” in
the Hegelian sense, and proclaiming the victory of liberal democracy over other
political ideas and forms of government—Communism, Socialism, Totalitarianism, and
Authoritarianism, all lumped together now as non-democratic and undemocratic.
Those were the heady days when the Cold War had just ended, unexpectedly
as a matter of fact, with the revolutions, largely peaceful, in Eastern Europe and the
collapse of the Soviet Union. But even earlier, already in the second half of the 1980s,
our own region had undergone largely peaceful and democratic transitions, first initiated
in the Philippines in the form of the People’s Power Revolution of 1986, followed
immediately--and to some extent influenced by developments in the Philippines—by
the democratic transition in South Korea and Taiwan. Democratic aspirations were
voiced but later stifled in Myanmar in 1988. In the wake of the Tiananmen massacre in
June 1989, which put into question the legitimacy of the party-state regime in China, it
looked—for a while at least--as if China might follow the paths taken by the East
European socialist states and the Soviet Union, though ultimately this did not come to
pass. And I still remember vividly what happened here in Bangkok in the early 1990s,
3
when royal intervention by the late King led to the restoration of democracy. I will
always remember the euphoria with which my Thai friends and colleagues embraced
their newfound freedom.
These developments in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere were what led Anthony
Lake, National Security Adviser to President William Clinton, to redefine the Clinton
administration’s grand strategy, no longer in terms of containment, but rather, in terms
of democratic enlargement. In the American perspective, widely shared across the
political spectrum, democratic enlargement would go hand-in-hand with so-called
“globalization,” meaning free trade, free movement of capital, and empowerment of
international organizations that supported the integration of the global economy. The
terms “good governance,” “transparency” and “accountability” gained wide currency as
a way to link economic globalization with political democratic enlargement. In other
words, a free market would promote democracy and democratization would lead to
economic growth. The ideology of globalization appeared new in a post-Cold War era
of closer economic integration, large-scale movements and flows of people, goods,
capital and information, and advances in science and innovation, and transportation and
4
communication technologies that brought people, communities, and nations ever closer
to each other. At the same time, globalization revived the ideas that were associated
with so-called modernization theory, which assumed that expanding middle classes
through economic development would in turn provide impetus for democratization. In
some ways, American policy professionals envisioned the end of history in terms of all
societies coming into alignment and refashioning themselves in the American image. In
a nutshell, Americans thought and expected that the rest of the world would become
“like us.”
But times have changed. Social scientists now question the validity of the
modernization theory that Samuel Huntington propounded. They now argue that the role
of middle classes in spearheading democratization is highly contingent. This means that
depending on the larger political, economic, and international contexts, middle classes
may behave differently and call for, and support, different forms of government in times
of crisis. Some social scientists even question the basic assumptions of globalization,
arguing that globalization, democracy, and national autonomy do not necessarily go
together, and might come into conflict with each other. The Harvard professor Dani
5
Rodrik famously argued that this trilemma of incompatible global economic integration,
democracy, and national sovereignty forms an “impossibility theorem” which cannot be
resolved because countries need to choose at most two out of the three principles. So,
if you choose democracy and global economic integration, then you give up on national
determination. And if you choose national sovereignty and global economic integration,
you give up on democracy.
More importantly, it looks as if the tide of world history is shifting and
democracy is in retreat, to quote from the statement of this conference. To put it in a
different way, nationalism of different types is resurgent, in both benign and nasty forms,
while areas in which attempts at building national states have run aground have
provided fertile ground for new types of community-building (for example in the name
of religion and ethnic self-determination) and state formation.
If you think that resurgent nationalism and calls for new types of
community-based state formation are happening in so-called marginal areas of the
world, think again. In a few days, we will know who will be the next president of the
United States of America. The emergence of Donald Trump as the Republican
6
presidential candidate, along with the rise of a very inward-looking, virulently racist and
chauvinist (including male chauvinist) nationalism, is deeply unsettling, given the fact
that as much as 30 to 40 percent of American voters support Trump. We should be
thankful that Trump is a political novice and buffoon, for a more politically adroit,
rightwing populist Trump would have stood a far better chance of taking over the White
House and wrecking American democracy.
But Trump is not alone, for that matter. The United Kingdom has voted to
leave the European Union. Former Prime Minister David Cameron, intent only on
prioritizing his own political survival as well as the survival of his Conservative party,
sought to gain tactical advantage in his country’s general election by calling needlessly
for a national referendum, as if national strategic choice were simply an extension of his
political ego and career. And we know that Marine LePen is positioning herself for the
coming presidential election in France, the Freedom Party is gaining influence in the
Netherlands, and so on.
No doubt there are many reasons for the shift in the tide of globalization and
democratization. But I believe that one factor goes a long way toward explaining the
7
phenomenon that we might call “retreat of democracy,” and the rise of anti-globalism,
anti-liberalism, racism, right-wing and inward-looking nationalism, and fascism. If we
look at the per capita GDP over the last twenty years, we see that the U.S., Canada, and
European countries did very well in the first ten-year period from 1995 to 2005, but
poorly in the ensuing ten-year period from 2005 to 2015. In the first ten-year period
from 1995 to 2005, countries such as the U.S., , Britain, the Netherlands, and Spain saw
their per capita GDP expand from 100 to 125 to 130, while France, Germany, Italy and
others did reasonably well, with their per capita expanding from 100 to 115 to 120.
Japan’s per capita GDP, in the same period, expanded from 100 to 109, the most dismal
performance among all the OECD countries. This is the reason Americans and
Europeans talked about the “Japan Disease”, holding Japan up as an example of
unsound economic management and a cautionary tale of what not to do when running
the macroeconomy.
But in the following ten-year period from 2005 to 2015, the picture changed
radically. Germany was able to maintain its steady performance, with per capita GDP
expanding from 100 to 115, in part because the Euro zone of currency stability allowed
8
the German economy to exploit its competitive advantage vis-à-vis the other European
countries. But Germany was the exception. In such countries as the U.S., Canada,
Britain, the Netherlands and France, the per capita GDPs only expanded on average
from 100 to 103, at most 105, while countries such as Italy and Spain actually saw their
per capita GDPs shrink. For that matter, Japan’s performance remained steady, with
per capita GDP expanding from 100 to 105, on a par with the U.S., Canada, Britain and
the Netherlands. We have thus seen the Japanization of the North American and West
European countries in terms of economic performance, and the Japan Disease is no
longer confined to Japan.
There is one important difference, however. The Japanese economy has
remained stagnant for almost a quarter of a century. Its population is ageing. But its
social safety net is still good enough to support the poor and the aged, and Japanese
business has done its best to keep jobs, even redundant ones at the expense of efficiency,
in the interest of maintaining social stability. This means Japanese no longer have
much expectation for further improvement of their standard of living, but the great
majority of them remain comfortable enough, even if life will not be easy for their
9
grandchildren. Governments came and went in the 1990s, with prime ministers
changing on average every one-and-a-half years. A six-year period of relatively stable
government under Junichiro Koizumi was followed by yet another round of rapid
government turnover, occurring practically every year, with the Liberal Democratic
Party losing power for three years to the Democratic Party of Japan, and then regaining
power under the current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has managed to lead a stable
government in the last three-and-a-half years. The point is that despite this oscillating
cycle of government instability and stability, social peace has been maintained and
extreme right-wing and left-wing nationalisms have remained for the most part under
control.
In contrast, precisely because the U.S. and Western European countries
experienced an economic boom in the immediate post-Cold War years from the 1990s
to the mid-2000s, their peoples had higher expectations for bettering their living
standards. When their expectations were not met, they became unhappy, sometimes
angry, at their governments. Hence the rise of anti-globalism, inward looking
nationalism, racism, fascism, etc.
10
What about Asia? As a matter of fact, the countries in East Asia—the region
encompassing Northeast and Southeast Asia—have done very well over the last
twenty-five years since the end of the Cold War. It is true that we had the East Asian
economic crisis in 1997-1998, when some of the East Asian countries, including
Thailand, were devastated. And yet, if we look at the ten-year period from 1995 to
2005, per capita GDPs expanded from 100 to 120-125 in Thailand, Malaysia and the
Philippines, to 175 in Vietnam, and more than 200 in China. Even Indonesia, the
country hardest hit by the 1997-1998 crisis, saw its per capita GDP expand from 100 to
115.
More important, all these countries did even better in the next ten-year period
from 2005 to 2015. Per capita GDPs expanded from 100 to 130-160 in Thailand,
Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, while China’s per capita GDP more
than doubled again in the same period. To put it in a different way, the standard of
living in all these countries has improved enormously within the space of a generation.
This has understandably given rise to optimism, people taking it for granted—or at least
hoping--that their lives will be better tomorrow and that their children’s lives will be
11
even better than theirs. Of course we don’t know what the future holds for us, but it is
reasonable to expect that the kind of economic performance many countries in the
region have experienced will be very hard to repeat in the coming years. There are signs
that the Chinese economy has been slowing down, while the economic performance of
Southeast Asian economies has been uneven. The point is that the government will be
held responsible if it cannot meet the kind of expectations its people have for improving
their lives.
This is the reason the middle-income trap is now being debated in many
countries in East Asia. Economists offer us advice on how to avoid the middle-income
trap, telling us that human-resource and infrastructural development and inclusive
growth are the way to go. I do not have any problem with these prescriptions, but I
would also like to point out that many societies in East Asia are aging over the coming
fifteen to twenty-five years, if not earlier, and with only a few exceptions, they are aging
without first having achieved high-income status. If we look at the timing in which
each person belonging to the non-working-age population needs to be supported by less
than two persons in the working age population, we see that Thailand is expected to
12
cross this threshold in fifteen years, while China, South Korea and Vietnam will do so in
twenty years. This means that social safety nets need to be put in place in the coming
decade, and a lot more resources need to be invested to secure a minimum level of
social safety for the aging population.
Resources are always limited, however. Government resource allocation--the
issue of how and how much a government can allocate its resources to which sectors--
is not a simple question of economic planning and policy-making. This issue is always
and everywhere intensely political. This leads us to the main point I would like to
make today. Politics, which is sometimes defined as the authoritative allocation of
scarce resources, is by definition messy, and it is impossible, indeed futile, to remove
that messiness, which is the hallmark of politics, from the political process, whether
democratic or authoritarian.
This has long been pointed out by Joseph Schumpeter in his book, Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy. The classical doctrine of democracy often assumes that there
exists a Common Good, which is always simple to define and which provides definite
answers to all questions in public policy. This doctrine holds that democracy is the
13
institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions which realize the Common
Good and that if people do not see it, this must be because of their ignorance, stupidity,
anti-social interests and other reasons, and people therefore need to be made to see the
Common Good, either through persuasion, education, coercion, or a combination
thereof. But Schumpeter rightly argues that there is in fact no such thing as a uniquely
determined Common Good that all people can or will agree on or be made to agree on
by force of education or by force, period.
This leads us to three related questions. First is how to live with this
messiness, the hallmark of politics. Schumpeter gives us an intelligent answer.
Democracy is not the institutional arrangement to arrive at political decisions to realize
the common good. It is, rather, an arrangement to arrive at political decisions in which
individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the
people’s vote. In other words, the role of the people is to produce a government or an
intermediate body which in turn will produce a government. Here I would add in haste
that democracy does not necessarily produce a good government – I can easily come up
with the list of not a few prime ministers who did poorly in Japan’s recent past. But
14
the point is that the calendrical rhythm of electoral politics ensures that those
governments would come and go in due course and the public has no one else but
themselves to blame for any government that they put in power. Democratic electoral
competition ensures that players who lose will have another chance in the coming round
of elections, and political leaders cannot question or undermine the legitimacy of the
very institution of democracy.
History tells us that any political order, whether democratic or authoritarian,
whether national or international, can only be sustained long-term if it is built on
legitimacy. Legitimacy is not the same as constitutionality and legality. Power may
dictate whatever constitutional order it deems suitable for its needs, but it cannot dictate
legitimacy, because legitimacy has to be earned and accepted broadly by the general
population. Legitimacy is embedded in the norms and mores by which people make
their own judgements about what is right, what is not, what is just and what is not, what
to expect of the government and what not to expect, and what should be done and what
should not. This does not mean there is a consensus on such norms and mores. Nor
are norms and mores immutable. Shaped by history and contested by people, they
15
change over time, all the more so at a time when people communicate and move across
boundaries and are aware that their lives, both public and private, can be radically
different. This is the reason that a democratic system has more staying power:
democracy manages, not abolishes, the messiness of politics while respecting the right
of the people to debate freely the issues that most concern them and to elect the
government that they expect to help them achieve their aspirations. Traditional ruling
monarchy aside, no system other than democracy has managed to produce a stable
succession of governments. Governments may change, sometimes rapidly, but the rules
for doing politics remain the same and predictable. At the end of the day, political
leadership must always be tested and its performance assessed critically, for therein lies
the legitimacy of the government, and there can be no escaping the judgment of history
and posterity.
No democratic system is perfect. Nor does democracy necessarily produce
good government. What democracy does is to allow the coming and going of successive
governments in accordance with a set of rules the public accepts as legitimate and in
accordance with a reasonably predictable electoral calendar. If the public is unhappy
16
with their leaders, they can at least count on their fingers how much time they have to
wait to throw the government out. This is the reason the rise of Donald Trump is deeply
troubling. A cardinal rule of democratic politics is that you follow the rules of electoral
competition if you enter the game. Trump’s stated refusal to accept any election
outcome other than his own victory is a sure way to undermine American democracy.
To live with the messiness of democratic politics, it is also important to keep
identity politics under control. Any society is divided along such lines as ethnicity,
class, religion, and ideology. These divisions won’t go away. You may suppress those
divisions for some time, as President Suharto did in Indonesia, banning the public
discussion of ethnicity, religion, and class, but those divisions come back with a
vengeance once the lid is lifted. Here again the challenge is not to suppress or gloss
over the messiness of the political system, but to manage it. The Indonesian experience
is instructive in this respect. Confronted with the threat to national unity by rising ethnic
separatism and religious strife in the wake of the fall of President Suharto, Indonesia
underwent democratization and radical decentralization. This worked even beyond the
expectation of those who designed the new system of decentralized democracy.
17
Despite defects that Indonesians readily admit about their democratic system—above all,
the money politics and dynastic inheritance of political power—Indonesia’s
democratization combined with decentralization has been highly successful in allowing
ethnic minorities and Muslim communities to participate in creating and running local
governments, a move that allowed the management and negotiation of the identity
politics of ethnicity and Islamism at the local level.
Finally, the performance of the government in meeting the expectations of its
people matters a lot. This is the main challenge of democratic governance. As I
mentioned earlier, people now expect their lives to improve in the coming years and
they expect their children’s lives to be far better than theirs. All governments will be
held responsible if these expectations are not met. Public policy requires a lot of
expertise, all the more so now when globalization is a fact of life, and money, goods,
information and people move across national boundaries faster and in increasing
quantities. Some social scientists talk about the trilemma of globalization, democracy
and national sovereignty, arguing that you have to sacrifice democracy if you want to
maintain national autonomy and achieve national prosperity and stability in this age of
18
globalization. I do not agree. Technocracy is often seen as an answer, a way to bring
economic and technical rationality to policy making. Technocrats want to remove
messiness from the political process, arguing that if there were no politics, their policies
would work. But we know by now that experts do not agree among themselves on
many important policy questions – and here it is useful to remind ourselves how much
macro-economists disagree over Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s qualitative
and quantitave easing. It is more useful to allow experts to express and explain their
often conflicting views openly so that the government and the public can be aware
of—and intensively debate—the policy alternatives. The trilemma of globalization,
democracy and national sovereignty is a wrong theorem because it lays out the question
in the wrong way. The question is not either/or, but a question of degrees—namely, how
much liberalization of flows and movements of capital, goods, service, information, and
people, and how much national determination can or cannot be sacrificed, while
maintaining a democratic system, so that the government will be held responsible and
its performance judged critically and regularly by the people.
I readily admit that there is nothing original about what I am saying. But we
19
all need to be reminded that maintaining the trust of the great majority of the people
remains the most important foundation of any legitimate political system. We need to
live with the messiness of politics, while guarding against any attempt to use this
messiness to poison and undercut the system. We must allow the public to form their
own opinions about whether the government is meeting their expectations and to have
the say in the coming and going of government itself.
I say again: No democracy is perfect. Democracy does not necessarily
produce good government. But because democracy provides an opportunity at
reasonably regular intervals for the public to have a say in the coming and going of
governments, this makes the public also accountable to, and responsible for, their
government. Democracy is a learning process, not a goal or objective. We need to learn
from our own and other peoples’ histories and experiences in order to create a better and
more legitimate system for governing ourselves. Only when people feel a sense of
ownership of their own governments can people work together, in the face of deep
disagreements, for the sake of their countries and for the world. Thank you.