Since the end of the Cold War and the rapid economic rise of East and Southeast Asia, scholars, governments and civil society pressure groups have debated whether the emergence of an educated urban middle class, inexorably educed political pressure to liberalise and democratise. In the 1950s, Barrington Moore coined the phrase ‘no bourgeoisie, no democracy’ and a significant literature associated with the leading scholars of comparative politics — Seymour Martin Lipset, Adam Przeworski, Philippe Schmitter, Guillermo O'Donnell, Lawrence Whitehead and Larry Diamond — have all tried, in various ways, to identify and empirically test the preconditions and processes determining the change from authoritarianism to electoral democracy ‘as the only game in town’. In this literature Southeast Asia has always proved both anomalous and neglected.
Democracy has nowhere established deep roots in the region and its most successful postcolonial state, Singapore, remains an intractably single-party affair. The twenty-first century rise of an authoritarian China also saw a new political literature on democratic failure, populism, the sustainability of an enduring single party, and soft authoritarian rule.
This edited volume attempts to add substance to what Marina Otway termed semi-authoritarianism from the vantage point of post-Cold War and post-financial crisis developments in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia and Thailand. In their introduction the editors assert that, ‘although electoral democracy can be termed a success’ in some states in Southeast Asia, it has so far failed ‘to curtail the dominance of oligarchic elites and patronage politics’. Consequently, political development in post-colonial Southeast Asia remains a ‘paradox’ (p. 1).
Unravelling the paradox, this volume, the product of two European Union-funded workshops held between 2012 and 2013, explores politics ‘from below’. To the extent the edited proceedings of the workshops possess an overarching theme, it is ‘the importance of changing forms of citizenship in Southeast Asia’ (p. 2). Citizenship in electoral but oligarchic postcolonial states, the editors maintain, is a neglected area of research that their volume endeavours to correct ‘in order to understand the particularities of democratization politics in the region’ (p. 2). Like most edited volumes of this ilk its findings are ultimately disappointing, the argument disjointed and its various chapters uneven and sometimes tangential, such as that of Mary Austin discussing the role of foreign domestic workers.
The opening chapter introduces us to a rather well-trodden debate about democracy and democratisation in the postcolonial world. Partha Chatterjee and his epigones get a predictable airing, and much is made by the European and North American contributors of the propensity to apply an ideal type of Western citizenship to the very different historical experiences and political cultures affecting the conditions of democratic emergence in Southeast Asia. In order to hear once again the repressed subaltern voice of the non-Western other, the thirteen authors, only three of whom are actually from Southeast Asia or based at Southeast Asian universities, explore the problem of ‘cultural citizenship’ in order to ‘identify politically marginalized groups whose emancipation should be reinforced’ (p. 19).
The volume falls into three discrete parts that address: the relationship between clientelism and citizenship; postcolonial identity and citizenship; and how the new middle classes in developing Southeast Asia address the state. Given their heterogeneous political cultures, weak state structures and experience of external and internal threats from both communism in the Cold War and religious and ethnic tensions since, we would expect to find the process of democratisation and decentralisation exacerbating traditional practices of clientelism and corruption, especially amongst the rural and urban poor. And this is in fact the case.
Thus Takeshi Ito's study of Javanese villagers, Sheri Lynn Gibbings’ analysis of the practice of sosialisasi in persuading urban market traders to relocate their pitches in downtown Yogyakarta, and Astrid Noren-Nilsson's study of emerging forms of Cambodian citizenship since 2013 show how democratisation has merely reinforced expectations of gift-giving amongst voters (pp. 64, 92, 116). Similarly, Emma Porio finds citizenship participation and government decentralisation in the Philippines reinforcing a predatory form of politics that facilitates corruption, a finding reinforced by Oona Paredes study of how democratic consultation between government and local leaders from the indigenous Higaunon ethne in the Philippine uplands has also strengthened corrupt practices by creating layers of bureaucracy, which in turn reinforces the appeal of local datu (patrons) and fuels political predation. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, Laurens Bakker finds the recourse to local ormas (militias, often composed of preman, thugs) for protection a form of para-state activity that an institutionally weak democracy and decentralisation has encouraged.
Somewhat confusingly, whilst Paredes and Porio rightly consider this behaviour predatory and clientelist, Ito, Bakker, Wolfram Schaffer and Noren-Nilsson regard it instead as a ‘fluid’ adjustment indicative of an evolving postcolonial form of active citizenship. Thus, Noren-Nilsson rejects the concept of ‘clientelism’ as a species of Western ‘othering’ (p. 71), whilst Bakker contends that a lack of trust in central government facilitates a recourse to militia protection, that ‘creates a form of citizenship that emphasizes the position of the individual within the local community’ (p. 150).
Such fashionable concept stretching, however, does little to advance our understanding of Southeast Asian democracy or the relationship between the citizen and the rule of law in an evolving constitutional order. The role of the middle classes in this process also suffers from this failure to link citizenship to any understanding of the role of representative catch-all political parties in democratic political practice. Thus whilst David Kloos and Ward Berenschoft examine the emergence of political Islam informing a distinctive and exclusive understanding of citizenship amongst a fundamentalist and aspirational urban Muslim middle class in Malaysia and Indonesia, Merlyna Lim's discussion of the Malaysian Bersih campaigns for political reform after 2009 focuses instead upon the liberalising impact of digital media campaigns informing and mobilising a multicultural, urban middle class concern with openness, accountability and human rights. Kloos and Berenschoft's conclusion that ‘the call for an Islamic state has served’ a ‘rising Malay middle class as an instrument to defend its privileged access to state resources’ (p. 202), sits uneasily with Lim's contention that Bersih and digital media campaigning has created a ‘new conception of citizenship that is different than what was [sic] sanctioned by the state’ (p. 230).
Incoherent middle-class behaviour also, it seems, characterises recent Thai political development. Wolfram Schaffer finds the largely middle class, NGO-led campaign of Thai small farmers and people living with HIV and Aids (PLHA) for constitutional protection evinced a distinctive ‘pattern of citizenship’ that was not adversarial, but participates ‘in the formal political process … based on patronage, personalized and informal networks’ (p. 243). By contrast, Apichat Satitniramai argues that the conflict between Yellow and Red Shirts, which dominated Thai politics after the constitutional crisis of 2008, demonstrates a profoundly adversarial politics. In by far the most persuasive and relevant essay in the volume, Apichat maintains that rather than a dynamic postcolonial political mutation, the Thai case illustrates the emergence of a new middle-class citizen consciousness which the Bangkok-centred military, monarchical and public sector complex wants to crush. As Apichat argues, ‘The Red Shirts’ are fighting ‘for their right to participate in a meaningful way’ (p. 310).
Apichat refreshingly asserts the crucial role that membership of representative parties plays in the process of political contestation under electoral conditions determined by a constitutional arrangement, subject to the rule of law. By contrast the editors’ fashionable mission to empathise with practices of corruption and predation as somehow attractively non-Western, distorts both the volume and our understanding of citizenship and democratisation. As Hannah Arendt showed, without a coherent two-party structure, the rule of law — and constitutional accountability, democratic citizenship — has little meaning irrespective of its geographical and cultural setting.
