Strengthening political dimensions

By Jose T. Almonte

This is the second of two articles originally presented at the Third ASEAN ISIS-IIR Dialog held in Bangkok last month. The dialog was jointly organized by the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS), Thailand and the Institute of International Relations (IIR), Taiwan.

BANGKOK: In East Asia the transition from authoritarianism to democracy is an epic struggle which has now lasted for decades.

Where the transition has been successful, it has been because of the courage of heroic individuals and the quiet determination of masses of ordinary people standing up for their civil rights. Some of these heroes have become household names throughout the region. Others -- like that Chinese youth who stopped the People's Liberation Army tanks in Tiananmen Square -- remain unknown to this day.

But no matter how difficult such transitions have been, overthrowing strongmen and assembling the trappings of democracy have been the relatively easy part. Making democracy work is the harder part of the transition.

Democracy develops best where it develops incrementally -- by piecemeal reforms in the political and civic landscape instigated by economic change. In the West, electorates were enfranchised gradually -- their participation hedged by gender, wealth and literacy qualifications over many years.

It took Britain almost 150 years to develop a middle-class Parliament. By contrast, the advent of democracy in the Third World has been a telescoped revolution -- sometimes taking place with startling suddenness (as in Indonesia) and accompanied by disorienting changes in economic and social relationships.

Making elections, parliaments, free newspapers and independent judiciaries work properly requires a long learning process, for which people often have little patience. Thus, to western eyes, East Asia's new representative systems could easily seem like parodies of their own Westminster-type systems -- in the way votes are bought and sold; oligarchs manipulate their membership in parliaments; and newly enfranchised mass electorates raise entertainers, athletes and other celebrities to public office.

These practices are abetted by party systems made up of perpetually shifting coalitions of locally based factions. Not even having an opposition party will guarantee a reasoned discussion of public policy -- because the opposition can concentrate on obstructionism and on trying to bring down the government.

What are the most difficult problems in making democracy work?

One is that of channeling popular expectations. Newly enfranchised citizens often have extravagant expectations of government. Thus a 1993 survey found 85 percent of Filipino respondents saying it is the government's obligation to provide jobs for all; and 84 percent saying it is the government's task to provide basic income for all. Populist politicians outdoing each other in the lavishness of their electoral promises can easily turn such a representative system into a "pork-barrel state".

Uncontrolled political mobilization in ethnically diverse and multireligious societies still burdened by mass poverty also generates no-holds-barred struggles for power -- which can overwhelm still weak and inexperienced states.

Then there is the even more basic problem of reconciling democracy's egalitarian ideology with cultures where authority still rests on the personal power exercised by dominant personalities -- such as we still have in the Philippines.

Worst of all, there is the liability that ethnic, language and religious sentiments damped down by authoritarian rule will break out once again -- particularly where they may be fomented by the forces of the old order.

Some of these problems are so difficult to contain that it is far from certain democracy will take root in every East Asian country.

As events in Pakistan have recently shown, a nascent democracy can easily be aborted when democratically chosen leaders become reckless and unrestrained in their struggle for political power.

Fortunately, democracy has become part of the spirit of the age. Even authoritarian regimes must claim they are acting on behalf of their captive peoples. And there are global forces to shore up East Asian democracy where it falters. They include the free market and the new communication and information technologies.

Indeed, the whole of the postindustrial era -- whose key resource is intellectual capital -- requires for its evolution in any given country a drastic expansion of individual freedom.

Among us, open markets have not merely brought faster and more sustained growth: they have also been a liberating force. Just as early capitalism subverted feudalism in Western Europe, so has the commercial way of life eroded authoritarian regimes in East Asia.

In the era of globalization, even foreign investments can become a democratizing influence. Note how Beijing is being compelled to establish the rule of law as the basis for foreigners to do business in China, and to assure the security of contracts as part of its efforts to attract outside capital and technology.

The explosion of scientific and technical knowledge has also helped secure democracy's place as the spirit of the age. The writer George Orwell thought in his novel 1984 that new information and communication technologies would make ideal tools for totalitarian regimes. But in real life, they have become a force for leveling political hierarchies and establishing a kind of direct democracy in many of our countries -- not so much by design as by their intrinsic qualities and processes.

The broadcast media easily overleaps the efforts of news gatekeepers through mobile dishes that feed directly from orbiting satellites. In China, the facsimile machine, the laptop computer, the wireless telephone and the Internet have all breached the totalitarian barriers of the state.

The flow of events tells us the world of closed political- economic systems is over. The central question of our time is how to create -- simultaneously -- wealth and social cohesion in free societies.

While history has not quite ended, it is true the ideological challengers to democracy and the market economy have all fallen away. There is no alternative political vision that can invoke people's voluntary allegiance, as communism and fascism once were able to do.

But if we are to keep our societies stable and tranquil, we still must find remedies for the discontents of capitalism. We must find ways of preventing the speculative excesses -- the manias and panics, and the alternating waves of greed and fear -- inherent in its workings. We need to minimize the intensity and frequency of capitalist crises. And we need to find relief for the casualties created by its cycles of "creative destruction".

This is why -- even in the age of globalization -- we need effective states more than ever before, to reconcile the priorities of markets with society's need to care for those whom development leaves behind.

We need effective states to cultivate the synergy between free markets and free politics: to ensure that one nurtures -- and not stifles -- the other. We need effective states particularly to prevent the workings of market-capitalism from impairing the political equality which is democracy's cornerstone.

Public policy must strike the right balance between egalitarian social justice and individual enterprise. It must encourage businesspeople to give voice to their social conscience -- just as it must encourage ordinary people to become efficient creators of wealth.

Where free markets work in those East Asia states in which people are by and large still unfree, then the next wave of reform will be political. And such reform will eventually bring about the best kind of democracy -- democracy that emerges from the workings of the market; democracy that arises from the evolution of civil society.

If the last century saw the victory of freedom over tyranny, of democracy over totalitarianism, then free markets and free politics are the wave of the new century -- as a reflection of sovereign peoples willing their own empowerment; as a reflection of the free will that is inherent in the nature of humankind.

The writer is a former National Security Adviser of the Philippines.