Western theoretical discussion of South-East Asian politics was in a single mould, in its early days, with the analysis of the politics of ‘developing areas’ or ‘new states’ generally. There was a characteristic assumption, after World War II, of the inevitability not only of economic development but of ‘political development’ as well – meaning development of ‘modern’, i.e. Western-type, State structures and, above all, democracy. These political phenomena were called ‘development’ partly, it seems, because they were seen as a consequence of economic development. Indeed, their presence or extent tended to be tested by the same, quantifying or statistical criteria.
US political scientists were almost all liberals by moral persuasion and sympathetic to the advance of liberal democracy in competition with totalitarian Communism, whether or not they individually took contracts as consultants for foundations and think-tanks funded by the US Government. It is surely ironical, at first sight, that even in the midst of ‘Cold War combat’ on the intellectual front they seem to have embraced one fundamental tenet of the ‘Marxist– Leninist enemy’, that is, the causal connection between economic and political change, and betrayed a quasi-historicist conviction in the inevitability of this progression. However, needless to say there was a crucial difference. The liberal view of the economics–politics nexus did not see the end of the historical process in terms of working-class or peasant revolution, but on the contrary as a political economy in which the ‘bourgeoisie’, as owners of private capital, would not only be a major economic force but would very likely have a dominant (and permanent) political influence as well. Thus the situation that Marxist–Leninist theory assumed to be a mere passing phase was conceived instead as the more natural ‘terminus’ of history, or certainly well worth working for by means of economic aid and strategic alliance with groups which shared the US vision.
But it was not many years before a historical ‘hitch’ occurred, or at least was brought to the attention of liberal analysts by one of the more perceptive, less conformist, members of their fraternity. The typical record of the ‘new states’ was not one of crystallizing democracy but of chronic disorder. Economic change was proving politically destabilizing, and political instability often served as a pretext for military juntas to seize power. But right-wing dictatorship could hardly be stabilizing in the long run either, since the social forces (including
10 Monarchy and democracy
ethnic groupings) which were a source of instability previously were now merely suppressed, and even more alienated in the absence of participant and incorporative citizenship. The worst paradox was that the very leaders who had seemed, or who claimed, to be the friends of ‘Uncle Sam’ looked like being more than helpful to the Marxist–Leninist revolution which their very existence was supposed to negate! The allegedly counterproductive nature of US alliances in the Third World was a common criticism or latent ‘discourse’ on the liberal wing of US journalism during the Cold War years, most of all with reference to Vietnam. However, that is by the by. Our interest, here, is in academic political science, specifically the ‘Huntingtonian revolution’ which summoned the discipline back to its roots as a partly philosophical activity, not a mere branch of sociology in the thrall of behaviourism as it had tended to become, by invoking its traditional concern with political order and the conditions of order. The focus, Huntington argued, should not be on democracy as an assumed product of economic development, but on the preconditions of durable democracy located within the sphere of politics itself. In short, the focus had to be on political institutionalization, meaning both diversity of structures and that capacity for self-renewal or continuity by which an ‘institution’ is essentially defined. Countries with a long-established, powerful judiciary and civil service, such as India, were the most likely to have a viable democracy.1
A little while later, Huntington became a bogeyman of the Left after his name was linked to a purported ‘doctrine’ of accelerated urbanization to counter a revolutionary movement in the countryside. Since the Cold War he has theorized about likely realignments in the international system, based on ancient ties of ‘civilization’ predating but now superseding ‘class ideology’. Love him or hate him, his ideas are among the liveliest in the political science of our time. But his versatility has not lured him into any fundamental diversification. There has been a constant thread of interest in the conditions of durable democratization. In reverse chronological order, he has seen revived ‘civilizational’ identities, especially Islamic identity, as a basis for detachment from Western-promoted liberal democracy for states which may well have been ‘clients’ of the West during the Cold War;2 he produced some more overt analysis of the ‘prospects for democracy’ in the world in his ‘middle period’;3 the notion of removing people beyond the reach of rural terrorism looks like a common-sense contribution to democratization,4 albeit, if correctly attributed, the notion must have been informed also by classical liberal assumptions about pluralist social structure as a normal concomitant of democratization;5 and, ‘first but not least’, there was the call for clarity about the widespread failure of democratization in newly independent states by the mid-1960s and the necessity of the restraints of political institutionalization if democracy was to work.6
It must be an illustration of the hazards of unusual intellectual stature that Samuel Huntington has lately become a bogeyman in international Islamic quarters because his hypothesis about how the post-Cold War world would be realigned was taken as advocacy of how it ought to be realigned. At a time of official US triumphalism about ‘a New World Order’ post-USSR; or boasts
Monarchy and democracy 159 (however untrue!) about ‘saving Kuwait for democracy’ in the Gulf War; or attempts to ‘export’ a US conception of ‘human rights’ to places like China, some sensitivity or even prejudice in face of the writings of an eminent US academic are understandable. Yet it would be a sad loss to international understanding if Third World intelligentsias (not only Muslim intelligentsias) were to overlook the extensive common ground between Huntington and themselves. Upon examination it might turn out that his early interest in institutionalization anticipated in spirit, if not in every detail, the concern with order that has infused the theory and propaganda of ‘Asian values’ in the 1990s. The emphasis on the institution of the family, as an arena of socialization into respect for authority and as a building block of larger-scale structures up to and including the State, is highly compatible with the spirit of Huntington’s earliest writings.
For that matter, Huntington is not alone in US political science. The writings of Lucien Pye (focused more on pluralism than order) are ever open to facets of Asian values and behaviour which may, or do, in some countries prove conducive to pluralism and indirectly to democratization.7 It is true that Western advocacy of an independent middle class as the catalyst for some of the requisite institutionalization suggests an antipathy towards any autocratic or totalitarian tendency in Asian polities. To that extent there must be antipathy between Western democratic theorists and the most assertive advocates of ‘Asian values’, who have coined or elaborated the new idiom as an instrument of consolidation of authoritarianism. But to embrace this agenda would be to abandon any pretence of theorizing about the conditions of ‘democracy’, while to abandon ‘democracy’ as the focal point of enquiry and tacit prescription would simply be self-negating for the scholars concerned. So we have to live with the approach but should acknowledge, in its favour, how much some of the US writing on democratization and the civil society in Asia is sympathetic to Asian conditions as a whole, despite being rooted in Western historical experience.8 Besides, it would be a betrayal of the aspirations of many Asians to take a stand against democracy as a system ‘unsuited to Asian conditions’. The issue and the challenge are to strike the optimum balance between diffusion of power and effective exercise of power by a legitimate centre, in societies which are not only extremely diverse but find themselves in the throes of very rapid change.9
Readers may have begun to grasp the direction and guess the destination of this discussion. The possibility which needs to be explored is that monarchy may offer special assets to a polity in transition towards democracy. Apart from the intangible asset of representing or symbolizing continuity with a nation’s past, as ‘nation–state’ evolves out of ‘galactic polity’ via a ‘bureaucratized colony’, the charisma of monarchy should provide a more potent source of legitimization for the modern State than untried or turbulent democratic competition can do. Moreover, as an institution separate from legislatures – and indeed empowered to settle or restrain unresolved conflict between the interests represented therein – yet at the same time secure in its own system of succession, monarchy meets both the ‘diversified’ and the ‘self-renewing’ criteria of ‘political institutionalization’.
There should be a basis here for Western advocates of democracy and the proponents of ‘Asian values’ to agree with each other.
So much for the rosy ideal. Perhaps the role of monarchy just sketched would serve better as a non-normative, analytical model, from which particular, empirical cases would be anticipated to diverge in some degree. In any case, the present study has set out to offer mainly analysis, not advocacy. And the picture which has emerged from the case studies in Part III suggests that the model is only clearly confirmed in one case, that of Thailand. Even in Thailand’s case, the monarchy has been able to develop its extraordinarily creative function, somewhat above the level of ‘constitutional monarchy’ in European states, through the unique combination of virtues and longevity found in the present King, at least as much as through the historic charisma of the institution. Nor is the promise of continuity into the future – that is, the hereditary succession which is an advantage of monarchy in the light of the institutionalization principle – necessarily a bonus where the heir apparent is in a quite different mould. The first years of the next reign could see some instability, arising either directly from problems within the Palace, or indirectly where a typical crisis of Thai democracy remains unresolved because the new monarch lacks the prestige or the political skill to deal with it.
Malaysia offers an interesting contrast with Thailand in more than one way. Not that there are no similarities: the modern inheritors of authority and power in post-war Malaya (UMNO) saw the Malay monarchy as a vital, supplementary prop to their legitimacy, just as their counterparts in Siam (the military elite) had done in the 1930s. But whereas the Thai military elite tended to become more dependent on the monarchy in this sense (and ultimately have been overshad- owed by it), perhaps because they lacked the legitimization of democratic underpinnings, UMNO leaders never became dependent, despite the strength- ening of the Malay monarchs’ position ‘on paper’ in the context of acute ethnic anxiety in 1971. There could be no greater contrast than between Dr Mahathir’s success in grinding down the residual royal prerogatives since 1983, and the subtle elaboration of the royal prerogative by King Bhumibol since 1973. If Thai monarchy now stands somewhat ‘higher’ on the continuum from weak thrones to powerful ones, Malay monarchy arguably enjoys even less influence today than do the constitutional monarchs of Europe. There is nothing that they seem able or willing to do to uphold modern principles of law, so the question of providing a stabilizing, institutional antidote to the ‘excesses of democracy’ cannot arise. Besides, the ‘excesses’ which some observers might discern are in the area of increasing executive power, not the collapse of authority sometimes associated with multi-party competition. Malaysian democracy is already rather well controlled: by an elected leader who has concentrated a few of the pre- modern attributes and functions of monarchy in his own hands!
It is therefore entirely logical that when Dr Mahathir delivers a homily on ‘Asian values’, arguing for an executive unhampered by a free-for-all party system and a fastidious conception of human rights, he conspicuously does not include
Monarchy and democracy 161 monarchy in his political formula, because in the present Malaysian context monarchy is a conceivable rival to his own power if not constitutional critic.
Another reason for being silent on monarchy – a subtle one, but not insignifi- cant – is that it cannot provide a common denominator in an intellectual discourse which is supposed to be relevant and applicable in a huge diversity of Asian political systems, whose ideologues need to present a common front to their reputed detractors in the West. The discourse of Asian values has had to be compatible with the dynamics of systems as diverse as the Communist People’s Republic of China and Socialist Republic of Vietnam; ‘soft authoritarian’ democracies without a monarchy such as Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and the (recently superseded) ‘New Order’ Indonesia of Suharto; and monarchies of several types, ranging from strictly ‘constitutionalist’ Japan to strictly ‘absolutist’ Brunei. When Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, ex-Premier of Singapore, equates his ‘Asian values’ with Confucianism he may be conjuring up an image of monarchical authority from Chinese history, and this might appear to be compatible with ideas of Malay monarchy. But if the Confucian line is pressed too far it must clash with the doctrines of Asian Muslim states. Thus Lee Kuan Yew is constrained to stress the lowest common denominators of ‘Asian values’, even to the point of meaninglessness, in order to find common ground with Muslim Mahathir, in the same way as Dr Mahathir must play down specifically Malay features, including monarchy, for the sake of consensus with Chinese republicans from Lee Kuan Yew to Jiang Zemin. Meanwhile, Thai discourses about ‘Asian values’ are notably subdued or absent, probably because the monarchy has become a sponsor of democracy against the authoritarianism of the monarchy’s ostensible defenders.
At least Mahathir’s silence on monarchy comes naturally, thanks to domestic imperatives. But these imperatives remind us, in turn, that monarchy may be more attractive to Western theorists of democracy than to Asian leaders who have firm control. Why detract from the stability of a powerful executive by fostering a competitive institution? The effect could be as bad as the worst scenario of Western-type democracy evoked in the ‘Asian values’ debate! Meanwhile, if monarchy holds ‘anomalies’ for certain non-royal leaders, monarchies which are powerful enough to propagate legitimizing images of their own past, as in Thailand and Brunei, seem to have little time for the ‘Asian values’ debate. Apart from the reason just suggested for Thailand (the King’s sponsorship of democracy), this could be because the ‘Asian values’ theme, with its highly diffuse, pan-Asian sources and application, can only detract from the memories or myths of a specific, national monarchy, to the detriment of national identity-building as well as the security of the monarchy itself.10
If we now compare present-day Thailand with present-day Cambodia, there is a question mark over the future of both monarchies, and for comparable reasons. In both the Thai and the Cambodian case the prestige of the present incumbent is a major factor in the viability of the institution. In both cases the King has to maintain a delicate relationship with the power that holds the weapons: respectively, the Thai military elite (despite its current reconciliation
with a democracy that it does not control) and the Cambodian People’s Party (which controls its ‘democracy’ only too well ‘from the barrel of a gun’). The Thai military draws some direct legitimacy from the throne, and appreciates its contribution to national cohesion. About the same can be said of the Cambo- dian People’s Party, or certainly of the Prime Minister, Hun Sen. But the desire for legitimacy does not infer legitimization at any price whatsoever, and one wonders how well the next royal incumbents will satisfy the requirements of these interests. Not that the situation regarding succession is exactly the same. The Thai succession seems fairly certain, while the Cambodian succession is not fixed. However, the consequences of a more or less fixed Thai succession are as fraught with uncertainty as the consequences of fluidity and rivalry in Cambodia. The air of ‘tenure on sufferance’ which characterizes the restored reign of King Sihanouk could be felt in Thailand in due course, besides becoming stronger in Cambodia itself under any of Sihanouk’s kinsmen. And by definition, if the monarch is subject to the whims of a well-organized power elite, he will not be able to restrain either the excesses of their power or the excesses of an open democracy.
In the meanwhile, if one were inclined to rank King Sihanouk on a scale of political effectiveness as of now, he is surely several points below King Bhumibol, though still well ahead of the ‘faceless men’ who sit in turns on the throne of Malaysia. He does play a part in negotiations to solve political crises, but always lends his authority and blessing, in the event, to solutions acceptable to the ruling interest. There can be little question of Sihanouk throwing his weight behind pro-democracy efforts since democracy is far from being a priority for the interest which calls the shots, including the acceptable parameters of kingship itself. Sihanouk is more a client than a patron, though still clever enough to have avoided the status of a mere puppet. Thus the dimension of Thai monarchy that is truly historic, in a ground-breaking sense, is that the present King has not facilitated democracy purely ‘negatively’ by restraining its excesses, but has mobilized his authority more often to block its enemies on the Right, who previously manipulated monarchy in order to block democracy. This amounts to a ‘positive’ strategy for the fostering of democracy in the long term, subject to the requirements of constitutional order. No doubt, the monarchy benefits too, in its historic rivalry with the military, but let this not blind us to the more fundamental process at work.
Last but by no means least, the situation of the three South-East Asian monarchies discussed in the preceding paragraphs is more or less in contrast with the monarchy of Brunei. On the criteria of present power and future ‘life chances’, the Brunei monarchy is far ahead of the rest of the field. In fact, the future prospects are buoyant in no small part because present power invests thought and money in securing its future. It should only be added, as a proviso, that the money is available because of hydrocarbons, which are a ‘gift of God’,