Arroyo is one of several Asian leaders who came to power as a reformer, then devolved into a backslider. Days before the scheduled ASEAN gathering on Dec. 11, Arroyo and her backers had attempted to rewrite the Philippine Constitution in a manner that would disband the powerful Senate, establish parliamentary rule and allow her the option of staying in power (as prime minister, not president) after her current term expires in 2010. Yet their attempt to game the country’s still-weak system backfired badly, raising fears that the opposition might turn Manila into a sea of “People Power” rallies against Arroyo’s embattled government. That hasn’t happened, but as Jose T. Almonte, Philippine national-security adviser from 1992 to 1998, says: “For Gloria, [maintaining] her tenure is above everything.”
Thus concluded what could well be called an annus horribilis for democracy in Asia. In 2006, soldiers toppled an elected government in Bangkok and attempted the same (for a second time) against Arroyo in Manila. In South Korea and Taiwan, meanwhile, two relatively youthful rulers failed to meet popular expectations and saw their approval ratings dip into the teens. In Seoul, President Roh Moo Hyun waffled on the region’s gravest security threat: North Korea’s nuclear breakout. In Taipei, President Chen Shuibian battled opposition lawmakers who twice tried to recall him over alleged corruption before their party’s leader became entangled in an accounting scandal of his own.
It’s been 20 years since democracy’s post-cold-war “third wave” hit Asia, and the events of 2006 provoke a fundamental question: why are the region’s converts still so fragile? Asia’s new democracies remain its best training grounds for leaders. In that context, each setback they suffer–when juxtaposed against the seeming orderliness of communist China or authoritarian Singapore–make their messy politics and disruptive election cycles seem more like burdens than blessings. “Leaders aren’t really leading,” says Brad Glosserman, executive director for the Pacific Forum, CSIS, in Honolulu. “They’re rarely in front of public opinion, and rather than trying to solve problems they’re using them for domestic political advantage.” Perhaps that’s why so many Asian democracies seem as if they’re under siege.
Certainly, globalization and the inequities it engenders is one reason that it’s harder to manage free, open societies. For starters, GDP growth is increasingly a poor measure of prosperity in Asia because the bulk of the rewards now go to the richest sectors of society–breaking a paradigm that endured through the mid-1990s in which rising economies lifted all boats. And market liberalizations have rendered leaders less able to placate restive have-nots with pork, jobs and subsidies. “Every leader in the region feels this challenge,” says Chu Yun-han, a professor of political science at National Taiwan University. The forces of economic globalization are not very kind to democracies, especially young democracies. This is our real dilemma today."
The level of discord in Asia is indeed remarkable when viewed against the backdrop of rapid economic expansion. In its latest report on the region’s performance, the Asian Development Bank said growth would hit 4.9 percent in 2006, one of its fastest rates since the 1997-98 financial crisis. Yet the IMF has found Asian countries to be markedly less egalitarian than they were a decade ago. In South Korea, where the rich-poor divide has expanded faster than anywhere else in Asia, the rise of a new moneyed class is an affront to Confucian traditions. “There’s good empirical evidence on the relation between rising levels of inequality and the instability of democracies, the instability of property rights, higher crime and political unrest, and lower-quality public services,” says political economist Robert Wade of the London School of Economics.
Still, the country once lauded as a model for achieving balanced growth in Asia–Thailand–experienced a stunning political setback in 2006. Last Sept. 19, firebrand Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was toppled in a bloodless coup hatched by his own Army chief. Until his ouster he ranked among Asia’s most popular leaders. His party had dominated three previous elections on the strength of his campaign to boost rural investment and enrich Thailand’s poor.
According to the IMF, Thaksin was the sole Asian leader to successfully narrow his country’s rich-poor divide in the past decade, an achievement that made him extremely popular with rural villagers–to the chagrin of the urban elite. City folk, who believed Thaksin abused his power, mounted mass demonstrations in Bangkok that set up the coup. “I’m very pessimistic about what’s happening in Thailand,” says Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University. “There’s been talk among the ruling elite about how Thailand cannot entrust its democracy to the rural masses because they are susceptible to pandering populism.”
Thaksin was hardly blameless. In fact, his downfall illustrates a second key aspect to democracy’s continued weakness in Asia: the supremacy of personalities over institutions. The sale of Thaksin’s family-owned media conglomerate, Shin Corp., in a controversial tax-free deal with Singapore’s state investment arm, typified how the Thai rules were used to his advantage. Further, Thailand’s ostensibly independent courts and election officials showed little backbone; Thaksin appeared to co-opt them to hobble his political opponents. In the end, the Thai middle class in Bangkok concluded that a military takeover was necessary to “save Thai democracy,” as the junta itself later claimed. “One of the things that’s really sad here is that people are so used to their institutions’ letting them down that they don’t even get the chance to function as they’re supposed to,” said a senior Western diplomat in Bangkok days after tanks rolled on the streets.
Indeed, many of Asia’s elected leaders attempt to use government agencies to enrich allies or punish enemies. President Roh in South Korea has gone after the country’s largest chaebol and biggest media groups for tax evasion. In the Philippines, President Arroyo has manipulated her own election commission, shuffled the Supreme Court and attempted to sidestep her senatorial opponents in a quest to establish a parliamentary system that would favor her ruling coalition. “In South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand, the political elite don’t have strong commitment to due process, rule of law or the fundamental rules of democracy,” says Chu.
This year Asia saw the retirement of a rare leader who rose above such petty partisanship: Japan’s maverick prime minister from early 2001 until last September, Junichiro Koizumi. In five years, he remade the ruling Liberal Democratic Party by dismantling a debilitating faction-?centered power-sharing system from within and set the world’s second largest economy on course for its first sustained recovery since the early 1990s. His “no pain, no gain” suggested not the pork-barrel politics of old, but shared sacrifice in the country’s long-term interest.
But Koizumi, too, had his failings. His periodic visits to Yasukuni Shrine undermined his ability to ever engage meaningfully with China’s leaders. Even now the powerful neighbors cling to their divergent views on history as current problems fester. Japan and China are key players in multilateral efforts to mothball North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, but their strained relations have left them with little common ground on which to work.
Until Asia’s leaders start taking a larger view of their roles–pushing harder to strengthen institutions, improving regional relations, and worrying less about partisan score-settling–the region’s democracies will remain weak and vulnerable. Asia has made great progress over the last quarter century, but constant political instability threatens now to undermine some of the gains. That’s a sobering consideration for a region teeming with potential.
