Tigers vs elephants: New transitions in ASEAN's wake

Tigers vs elephants: New transitions in ASEAN's wake

India and South Africa have both taken a keen interest in the developmental experience and economic opportunities of the ASEAN region. Amyn B. Sajoo looks at two critiques of the changes taking place in these two countries.

SINGAPORE: Delivering the annual Singapore Lecture on a whirlwind tour of the region early this year, South African President Nelson Mandela struck a pilgrim's note. "We have come to learn about how the bonds that you forged among countries of South-east Asia served as a spur to this economic miracle of our times ... about the plodding industry that it took to develop your human resources and advance your technological base."

Indeed, a bevy of senior political visitors from sub-Saharan Africa have found the ASEAN trail de riguer - even as South Asia seeks closer partnering with a group whose dynamism has attracted warm plaudits from sober bureaucrats at the World Bank and the IMF. True, there have been hiccups for ASEAN members in the currency markets, and concern about their role in the Cambodian imbroglio as well as the admission of Myanmar to their ranks.

But at age 30 and with a total population of more than 480 million, the association enjoys enough clout for Washington and the European Union to call - and listen - on a regular basis. That is conspicuously more than the rest of post-colonial Asia, Africa or Latin America can manage at this juncture.

Mandela's stature at home and abroad is remarkable, yet he was suitably wistful in Singapore about the regional integration and cachet of the Southern African Development Community when compared with ASEAN. Meanwhile in South Asia, as India and Pakistan celebrate their respective 50th anniversary of independence, a meaningful regional grouping remains elusive.

The "ASEAN transition formula" of export-led growth, high domestic savings, strong investment in education and effective governance has become a mantra for the World Bank and other multilateral agencies. But as Cal Clark and KC Roy argue in their recent book, Comparing Development Patterns in Asia, neo- classical economic formulas alone will not do the trick. Socio- cultural attitudes and political priorities are integral to the transitional quest.

Two new books on India and South Africa offer timely critiques of the social as well as economic changes underway in societies that share ASEAN's diversity and deep historical legacies - and whose success will impact powerfully on their respective regions.

Gita Mehta's Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India (Doubleday, 306pp) sketches the acute contradictions of tradition and modernity that pervade a land of 17 official languages, a host of religious traditions, and complex caste divisions. India today has the world's 10th largest industrial sector, growing out of the textile mills that fueled Gandhi's anti-colonial struggle.

Yet a country whose predominantly rural population depends so heavily on agriculture relies frequently on farming techniques as ancient as the Ramayana epic. While there is also a cutting-edge cultivation of grains pioneered by Indian researchers, these pockets only attest to the radical unevenness of change.

Again, a burgeoning computer software industry that works with and challenges California's Silicon Valley co-exists with the reality that more than half the population is illiterate. This when India's writers have taken the literary world by storm: Vikram Chandra, Amitav Gosh, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and Gita Mehta herself are household names from New York to Sydney.

ASEAN's huge investment in basic education has no equal in South Asia. Instead, annual defense spending has absorbed shares of gross national product (GNP) that boggle the mind. Mehta recommends a forced mass literacy program, in part as a weapon to promote social justice for the least privileged. But one recalls Indira Gandhi's forced birth-control schemes, which failed in themselves and symptomized a bullying political culture that Indians shrugged off in 1977.

The expectations of an immense and fast-growing middle class linked by travel, television and the Internet to the consumer societies of East and South-east Asia will not easily fit into the prevailing political culture either. Despite changes wrought by Prime Minister Inder Gujral and earlier by the liberalizing finance minister Manmohan Singh, Indian democracy is shot through with old patterns of corruption, cronyism and communalism. There is some reassurance in the media's vigor in exposing those practices.

Recent outbreaks of religious fundamentalism have turned out to be more than a flash in the pan as Hindu-based parties wield power in Bombay (renamed Mumbai) and beyond, against a rich heritage of social tolerance. Rapid economic change is used and opposed by the fundamentalists. They are eager to embrace new means of communications to reach distant audiences, then manipulate caste and creed to advance vested political and economic interests.

Their much publicized campaign against Kentucky Fried Chicken as "unhygienic" is truly absurd in a country where the drinking water can be lethal. Such energies might usefully be directed at land reform and health care for the multitudes in abject poverty.

Snakes and Ladders captures in its title the mix of India's frequent vaulting over "painful stages experienced by other countries, lifted by ladders we had no right to expect" - and the "snakes of past nightmares" that pulled life back to square one. Mehta's short essays on disparate topics are deft and evocative like her 1980 international bestseller, Karma Cola, on the marketing of Indian spirituality in the West.

No less adroit is Patti Waldmeir, the Johannesburg bureau chief of the London Financial Times from 1989 to 1995, in Anatomy of a Miracle (WW Norton, 303 pp). For Waldmeir, South Africa's ability to contain and harness the inheritances of a half century of apartheid into what is by far the most successful transition in sub-Saharan Africa defies all the odds.

Yes, the country has immense diamond and gold deposits, tourist attractions and fertile soils that sprout vineyards and fruit farms to rival the Mediterranean. Apartheid's overseers built an industrial sector of considerable sophistication - partly as a bulwark against trade and investment sanctions - on the backs of cheap black labor. They also created an infrastructure generally in advance of anything on the continent.

But the pundits saw nothing short of civil wars on the eve of Nelson Mandela's release after 27 years in prison in 1990, when ethnic strife had already gripped the post-Cold War world. It simmered in the claims of Afrikaner nationalists descended from Dutch settlers of the 18th century, the Zulus dominant in Natal province (with its sizable Indian population), and "Bantustans" or enclaves created to divide blacks along tribal lines.

By contrast, Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) was reminiscent of Malaysia's Umno or India's Congress Party in seeking to accommodate ethnic and ideological interests. In the fateful years between 1990 and 1994, before elections brought the ANC to power, constitutional wrangles and entrenched white economic power constantly threatened to scuttle the transition altogether. An exodus of skilled Asians and whites had started.

The pragmatism of both the outgoing white National Party under Prime Minister FW de Klerk, and the erstwhile ANC elite that learned hard lessons from the many failures of post-colonial Africa, was critical. It further helped that alternative power centers - like the churches, unions, chiefs and influential corporate leaders who prized stability - often mediated conflict.

However, it is no exaggeration to suggest that Mandela's own combination of Gandhian principles and cool calculation was a key to South Africa's peaceful transformation. For all the personal friction between him and De Klerk, the latter's "courage to leap" into what must have seemed to many of his white compatriots like an abyss likely came from the assurance of Mandela's integrity.

Even the Zulu leader Buthelezi, Mandela's nemesis since 1990, has been largely co-opted. And the new political leaders - Thabo Mbeki (who takes over as President in December), Cyril Ramophosa and Roelf Meyer, among others - have learned well. As Waldmeir sees it, the spirit of ubuntu, or eliciting the humanity in others, infects enough people to keep them fighting the odds rather than each other.

South Africa's economic performance is not quite tigerish, but per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is ahead of China, India, the Philippines and Russia. After a sharp slowdown linked to the fall in gold prices, the growth rate is ascendant again. Blacks are quickly joining the corporate establishment at the topmost levels. Education is a priority in state budgets, and some of the universities offer world class programs.

There is, understandably, room aplenty for discontent. The rule of law is especially shaky in urban centers, with crime rates in Cape Town and Johannesburg well ahead of New York's. Illiteracy among blacks is at 46 percent, compared with one per cent for whites. Land rights are a perennial issue, and squatters rife. Poverty runs deep in politically-conscious black townships.

Nonetheless, South Africa's thriving civil society - like India's - offers much hope. Judging by his pilgrimages, Nelson Mandela is keenly aware of the dangers of complacency and the need to foster robust ties with transitional Asia. At the same time, the country's success would have a ripple effect all the way to Central Africa, ushering in fresh pastures for the tigers and elephants, old and new.

Dr. Amyn B. Sajoo was the author at ISEAS of Pluralism in Old Societies and New States: Emerging ASEAN Contexts (1994). He is currently an independent consultant based in Vancouver.