By James Dorsey.
Political transitions are processes, not momentary events. They can take a quarter of century if not more.
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is as much an expression of a global trend driven by economic, political and geopolitical uncertainty and security and safety fears that produces lack of confidence in the system and existing leadership as are Donal Trump, the 2011 Arab popular revolts; the rise of the far right in Europe; tensions between concepts of freedom, privacy and security; and the wind in the sails of democratically elected, illiberal leaders such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Benyamin Netanyahu in Israel and Narendra Modi in India.
Nonetheless, there are specific reasons why the transition process has moved forward in Southeast Asia despite the military coup in Thailand and the corruption and governance issues that Malaysia is confronting whereas the process in the Middle East is far more torturous, volatile and violent. Three of those reasons stand out:
- Southeast Asia has benefitted from the fact that it does not have the equivalent of Saudi Arabia, an arch-conservative absolute monarchy with regional hegemonic ambitions whose ruling family will not shy away from anything to ensure its survival;
- Southeast Asia further had the advantage that it is not wracked by regional rivalries like those between Saudi Arabia and Iran or Iran and Turkey and is not populated by countries whose ambition is to dominate others. Equally important is that no country in Southeast Asia had the kind of revolutionary ambition that Iran, Egypt, Libya or Algeria had at given times in their more recent history;
- Differences between Southeast Asian nations are not fought on the battlefield and Southeast Asians do not employ militant and violent proxies to influence events in other countries. With other words, there is no equivalent in Southeast Asia to Hezbollah, Hamas or the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units nor is there a pattern of support by any one Southeast Asian nation for restless ethnic or religious in another country in the region such as Saudi support for restless Iranian Arabs in Khuzestan or Baluchis in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province.
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Just published:
Order at: Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa
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Geopolitics aside, there are some fundamental lessons to be learnt from the Southeast Asian experience:
First and foremost, there is no successful transition without the participation of at least a significant faction of the military that sees the preservation of its vested interests in change rather than maintenance of the status quo. In Myanmar, the military took the lead, in Indonesia and the Philippines, a faction of the military reached out to civil society groups. And it was that alliance that pushed the process of toppling an autocrat forward.
No military or faction of a military in the Middle East and North Africa saw or sees the preservation of its interests best served by a transition from autocratic or military rule to a more liberal, more democratic civilian rule. On the contrary, autocrats and militaries in the Middle East and North Africa have worked out a number of models to sustain autocratic rule that gives militaries a vested interest in the status quo.
Protesters in Egypt in 2011 chanted the military and the people are one when the military refused to step in to crush the revolt. The transition in Egypt however was initially one from autocratic rule in which the military and the security forces were the dominant players to outright military rule by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. A brief democratic transition was brutally ended with a military coup that was backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The explanation for the differences in attitude between Southeast Asian militaries and militaries in the Middle East and North Africa lies for a large part in differences in the relationship between autocrats and militaries. It also lies in different approaches to the two regions by international donors, particularly the United States, towards the militaries and civil society.
Western donors worked with Southeast Asian militaries on issues such as civil-military relations and human rights. They also were able to give relatively unfettered support to civil society groups. The result was greater differentiated thinking within Southeast Asian militaries and the existence of a civil society that was able to rise to the occasion. In a study of civil military relations in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)) concluded that there was ample opportunity for serious work on civil military relations in the Philippines. Despite at times rocky relations with former President Suharto in Indonesia, the US also had programs on civil military relations for the Indonesian military.
The study constituted a rare US look at the potential for similar programs in the Middle East and North Africa. Its conclusion for that region was radically different. The study said flat out that the Middle East and North Africa was not ripe for concepts of civil-military relations. The conclusion was in line with US policy that saw autocracy rather than transition as the guarantor of regional stability. As a result, the United States allowed Middle Eastern and North African autocrats like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to decide which civil society groups could receive US support and which ones could not. Hardly, a recipe for development of a robust and independent civil society.
The alliance between the military and civil society in Southeast Asia produced one other key ingredient for relative success: the ability of the street to better evaluate when best to surrender the protest site and move from contentious to more conventional politics and the ability to manage post-revolt expectations.
Civil society was effectively locked out of the transition process once Mubarak resigned on the 11th of February 2011. Its power was significantly diminished with the evacuation of Tahrir Square even if mass protests continued for another nine months with an ever rising number of casualties. The military coup two years later was made possible of course by the missteps of Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brother and Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president.
It was however also made possible by dashed social and economic expectations that the revolt would produce immediate and tangible social and economic benefits strengthened by a manipulative military and security service.
None of these Southeast Asian lessons provide quick fixes for the multiple crises in the Middle East. What it does however demonstrate is that even if popular revolts are often in and of themselves spontaneous events, the run-up to watershed protests are as much a process as is the post-revolt transition. In sum, the Middle East and North Africa has much to learn from the Southeast Asian experience even if Southeast Asia’s path was in some ways easier because it did not have to contend with some of the Middle East and North Africa’s complicating factors.
Thank you.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a recently published book with the same title, and also just published Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored withDr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario
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Remarks by Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario at the Asian Research Institute on 30 August 2016
In November 2015 when we submitted the final manuscript, the overall tone of the book was upbeat for Southeast Asia. Except for Thailand, the countries in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Philippines, seemed poised to complete their democratic transition, rebuild institutions founded on the principles of democratic governance, and enshrine the principles and practices of open participatory systems. The one bright light in the Middle East/North Africa is Tunisia whose Quartet for Democracy had just won a Nobel Peace Prize for its role in the democratic transition.
In the past two months, since the Philippine electorate gave a whopping mandate to Rodrigo Duterte, some 2000 Filipinos have died, mostly on allegations of drug use/abuse, none of them having had the opportunity to seek redress through the judicial system. Rule of law seems to have been usurped by executioners-on-motorcycles. He has gone to war with a female Senator who wants to investigate extrajudicial killings, as well as the female Supreme Court chief justice with whom he is also in a war of words over warrantless arrests. He is threatening to pull out of the UN.
Similarly, In a very recent cabinet reshuffle in Indonesia, former General Wiranto who “is among senior officers indicted by UN prosecutors over gross human rights abuses during the 24-year occupation of East Timor” as quoted in the Straits Times of 27 July 2016, (http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/indonesia-names-controversial-ex-general-as-security-minister), was appointed to the sensitive post of security minister. “Activists have called it a step backwards for human rights,” quoting again from The Straits Times.
This, then, raises the question about Southeast Asia: are we seeing a democratic rollback? In the book’s introduction, we referred to two authors who asked the same questions. Erik Paul’s book Obstacles to Democratization concluded that the ASEAN nation-states are a “passing phenomenon” caught up in superpower contests mainly between the US and China, and citizens are swallowed up and gobbled up by the forces of global capitalism, international financial institutions, and geopolitical players who compete militarily in their struggle for global hegemony.”
Mely Anthony-Caballero, in her edited book Political Change, Democratic Transition, and Security in Southeast Asia, echoed the same disappointment over the failure of democratic consolidation in Southeast Asia after the euphoria of the first wave of democratization in the 1980s that began in the Philippines. Several country case studies in Caballero’s book point towards the entrenchment of patronage politics, the lack of attitudinal requirements among the citizenry to embrace democratic ethos, and the preference for stability and material prosperity rather than the mess and the noise of rambunctious participatory politics.
Thailand remains the foremost example for an authoritarian resurgence in this century, not once, but twice, when military coups in 2006 and 2014 effectively ended the legitimately-elected governments of Thaksin Shinawatra and Yingluck Shinawatra respectively.
Surely, these gripes and grievances are not without merit, but the scenarios are not altogether grim.
Civil society remains a vibrant pro-democracy force in Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines, where civil society and public participation have been enshrined in their respective constitutions. A very active and robust human rights community in Cambodia undertakes a variety of rights-related campaigns, ranging from land grabs to anti-trafficking. In Myanmar, 180 CSOs signed a petition o parliament to reject four proposed bills by a Buddhist organization called the Association for the protection of Race and Religion. Civil society activists view these bills as potentially “inciting hatred, discrimination, conflict and tension.”
Malaysia’s Bersih (literally means clean) continues to be at the forefront of collective mobilization for a variety of social causes despite the Internal Security Act of 1960. As Prime Minister Najib Razak fights for regime survival, the wide entanglement with CSOs in this particular instance is a display of Southeast Asia’s ability for political engagement, regardless of formal restrictions and limitations.
But the most striking feature of Southeast Asia’s transition is the decline of mass atrocities, what Alex Bellamy terms “the other Asian miracle.” It is a region that, in the last four decades, has enjoyed a more “peaceful present,” leaving behind a violent past. Unlike the Iraq or Syria, there are no overt conflicts within and among nation states, nor are there border disputes that would pit nation states against each other. Sovereignty claims are, by and large, respected even after the “invasion” of Sabah in 2013 by the forces of Sultan Jamalul Kiram III, one of the claimants from the Sulu Sultanate in the southern Philippines to Sabah in Malaysia. According to The Economist, the invasion, as amphibious assaults go, was “admittedly tame.”
The Greater Mekong Sub region, a predominantly economic sub-regional program encompassing five Southeast Asian countries, once the backyard of intense conflict and violence now hosts The East–West Corridor, a massive infrastructure program that consists of a road, railway, and energy network has established “connectivity” among the five countries and has stimulated trade among them. The battlefields of the 1960s and 1970s has been transformed into a vibrant competitive marketplace, with formal and informal institutions to mediate and facilitate interregional relationships.
It is a truism today that the so-called “peace dividend” in Southeast Asia has converted past warriors into entrepreneurs and consumers, and where current generations engage in the competition for market share rather than the struggle for military supremacy and territorial conquest.
It is perhaps these features of the other Asian miracle that constitute the starkest contrast between Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
One primary lesson from this comparative study is that civil society is indispensable in building the necessary “political constituency for democracy. New democracies are beleaguered by old regime forces. Civil society participation is even more necessary during such period to prevent the forces of authoritarianism from subverting gains and preserve newly-opened hence fragile spaces of civic life. Newly-installed democratic regimes, on the other hand, should be even more reliant on their partnership with civil society organizations during these precarious transition periods.
And then a second valuable lesson. In the morning-after situation when the protest sites have been emptied, the activists need to heed the call of the “politics of the boardroom” where several hundred decision-makers rather than millions of street protesters undertake the tasks of creating, allocating, and distributing public goods and services. These require joining the executive branch of the government particularly its messy tangle of bureaucratic offices and agencies. Hold-overs from the old regime are bound to interact with the new appointees.
The ability to seek common ground and to prevent bureaucracy from being held hostage by competing forces so that ordinary citizens can rely on continuous and uninterrupted services is a task that requires different leadership skills. In addition, new entrants need to learn very quickly the mechanics of managing large organizations, steering them towards the accomplishment of concrete goals, and marshalling the human and other material resources to fulfil socio-economic objectives.
No matter the political or ideological colour, or one’s confessional affiliation, garbage needs to be collected, revenues raised, water and electricity services provided. Former activists in Indonesia and the Philippines have joined and pursued long-term careers in governments. They run and manage ministries and public commissions on national budgets, education, anti-poverty and human rights; they attend legislative hearings and negotiate with donors; they create committees to decide on projects; and they work with the media and academics to ensure that the message of government services reaches the public. The same is happening in Myanmar today. Joining government is not a straightforward process. The path of transition is littered with uneasy compromises.
Professor Randy David at the University of the Philippines who was one of the original “people power warriors” in 1986, wrote an op-ed in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on 28 August. In Ulaanbaatar he exchanged views among fellow activists and intellectuals on democratic transitions. He wrote of his own pessimism regarding the Philippines before he left for Ulaanbaatar. But while there, in dialogue with fellow people power activists from Fiji, Nepal, Mongolia, and Myanmar, he wrote:
“The Ulaanbaatar forum left me with more questions than answers. But I came away from the discussions feeling renewed and hopeful. For once I understood what the sociologist Niklas Luhmann meant when he referred to democracy as “an evolutionary achievement of society.” A nation must grow into democracy. Unlike us Filipinos, the Mongolians who spent centuries defending their land against their powerful neighbours know only too well how long it will take them still to complete their own democratic transition.”
