144 research outputs found
Transparency and authoritarian rule in Southeast Asia : Singapore and Malaysia / Garry Rodan.
No full texteconomic&political bookfair2015Includes bibliographical references (p. 210-249) and index.xvii, 261 p.
The internet and political control in Singapore
No full textGARRY RODAN investigates the political implications of the Internet in Singapore, where authorities have embarked on an ambitious attempt to restrain the liberalizing impact of the new technology. His findings contradict popular expectations of the Internet necessarily aiding the erosion of authoritarian rule
Neoliberalism and Transparency: Political Versus Economic Liberalism
No full textNeoliberalism is principally a political project of embedding market values and structures not just within economic, but also within social and political life. Its objective is a reshaping of power relations. However, within the neoliberal camp there have always been differences over how far this process should extend and by what means it should be achieved. Neoliberalism is a dynamic and at times problematic amalgamation of interests and ideologies. Indeed, the emergence of the Post-Washington Consensus (PWC) with its emphasis on market supportive institutions is as much reflective of these internal frictions as it is of the overall unifying aspects of the neoliberal reform agenda. The advent of the ‘war on terror’ and associated US foreign policy towards unilateralism adds another dimension to internal neoliberal debates about the most appropriate and effective ways to internationally embed market power and values (see Rodan and Hewison 2004)
Conflict and the New Political Participation in Southeast Asia
No full textConsider this paradox: substantial political change including increasing political participation in Southeast Asia in the last decade has often been accompanied by a narrowing of the channels for political contestation. Neither the fact, nor the complexity, of political change in Southeast Asia or elsewhere has totally eluded theorists. Indeed, there is now greater recognition that this political change may be either heading in directions other than liberal democracy, or is manifesting in new variants of liberal democracy. The proliferation of so-called hybrid regime theory and the burgeoning literature on the quality of democracy reflects this. Such work has highlighted how problematic many of the ‘Third Wave’ transitions to democracy have proved to be. In the process, political institutions have been subjected to unprecedented detailed scrutiny and analysis by transition theorists in the attempt to characterise diverse political regimes
The political economy of South East Asia : an introduction/ Edit.: Garry Rodan
No full textxiv, p. 299: ill.; 21 c
Singapore surprise
No full textDespite strong economic growth, election handouts and law suits against opposition candidates, the ruling party lost support last Saturday, writes Garry Rodan
SINGAPORE prime minister Lee Hsien Loong can rightly claim a strong mandate after leading the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) to another emphatic victory in Saturday’s general election. The government secured all but two of the 84 seats in parliament and took 66.6 per cent of the votes cast.
But that still means one-third of Singaporeans rejected the PAP in spite of impressive economic growth, seductive election-eve budget handouts and a host of constraints on opposition parties. The government saw its share of the vote fall by 8.7 percentage points compared with the last elections in 2001. Singapore’s two opposition MPs - Chiam See Tong of the Singapore Democratic Alliance (SDA) and Low Thia Khiang of the Workers’ Party (WP) - were returned with increased majorities, despite concerted attempts to unseat them.
Mixed as the results are for the PAP, one election outcome gives it cause for unqualified satisfaction: the rejection of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) at the polls. This is more than an issue of one opposition party’s demise. It is the nature of opposition that the SDP represents which the PAP seeks to expunge from the Singaporean political system.
The PAP has long been disparaging about political opposition, depicting it as a distraction at best to good government. This was reiterated during the recent election campaign. Reflecting on the existing opposition MPs, Prime Minister Lee observed: “We can deal with them. Suppose you had 10, 15, 20 opposition members in parliament. Instead of spending my time thinking what is the right policy for Singapore, I’m going to spend all my time thinking what’s the right way to fix them, to buy my supporters’ votes, how can I solve this week’s problem and forget about next year’s challenges?”
However, different forms of opposition attract different degrees of hostility from the PAP. Under the leadership of Secretary-General Chee Soon Juan, the SDP has engaged in the most explicit questioning of PAP values and ideologies, and has challenged the PAP on fundamental issues of transparency and accountability. Mr Chee and the SDP have also embarked on extra-electoral strategies of public protests and civil disobedience to highlight the administrative and legal impediments to free speech that undermine genuine political competition in the city-state.
The SDP entered this election with the stated intention of scrutinising the government’s handling of a controversy involving the National Kidney Foundation charity. The NKF had been exposed in the Singaporean media for its extravagance over its chief executive’s S384,000) annual salary and first-class air tickets, and discrepancies over the public disclosure of the size of its reserves. While the NKF is not a state body, the SDP tried to use the NKF fiasco to bolster its argument for more transparency and accountability in government-linked companies and statutory authorities. It sought to challenge the PAP team headed by Minister of Health Khaw Boon Wan in the constituency of Sembawang, which elects six MPs. But the SDP’s campaign had barely got off the ground when its 12 central executive committee members found themselves facing defamation suits from Prime Minister Lee and his father, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew. The Lees allege that an SDP newsletter depicts them and the government as withholding information about the NKF and perpetuating a corrupt political system for the benefit of the political elite.
Thereafter, the NKF issue effectively disappeared from the campaign and the state-controlled media echoed the PAP’s denunciation of the SDP more generally. The SDP secured just 23.3 per cent of the vote in Sembawang. The party’s Ling How Doong, a former MP who contested the seat of Bukit Panjang, suffered the heaviest loss of the election, with just 22.8 per cent of the vote. There is now a serious prospect that pending court cases will kill off the SDP altogether. Cases by PAP leaders against their political opponents have never failed. The SDP has no funds to deal with the scale of damages that could be awarded in the pending cases against Mr Chee and his sister Chee Siok Chin, the only two of the twelve-member committee who have yet to apologise and arrange to settle out of court.
Although the PAP finds the SDP especially objectionable, it still left no stone unturned in battling the other opposition parties. Former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong was assigned a special role in assisting PAP candidates trying to win back the seats of Potong Pasir and Hougang, held by Messrs Chiam and Low respectively. The PAP renewed threats of lower state funding for upgrading housing estates in these two constituencies if it lost, and offered expansive upgrading programs if it won. This included S100 million for Hougang. Despite this, Messrs Chiam and Low saw their share of the vote increase - in Mr. Chiam’s case to 55.8 per cent from 52.4 per cent, and in Mr. Low’s case to 62.7 per cent from 55.0 per cent. That led Prime Minister Lee to declare that “we will review our strategy for approaching these two constituencies over the next five years”. But whether that will lead to a serious acceptance of political pluralism is another matter.
By far and away the most creditable overall performance among opposition parties came from the WP. Apart from Mr. Low’s victory, the WP scored well in the five-member constituency of Aljunied, where it secured 43.9 per cent of the vote. Overall, it obtained an average of 38.4 per cent of the votes in the seats it contested - 6 per cent better than the SDA and 15 per cent better than the SDP. On Sunday morning, Prime Minister Lee positively contrasted the WP with the SDP, noting that the former had improved since its previous leader J.B. Jeyaretnam stepped down in 2001 - after being bankrupted by law suits. He also observed that it had fielded better quality candidates and was rewarded accordingly.
However, the WP came to the polls with a 52-page manifesto containing a range of policy prescriptions relating to Singapore’s mounting material inequalities. Much of the nine-day election campaign was consumed by controversies over defamation cases and attacks by the PAP on the character and integrity of opposition figures. This reduced the scope for debate over the WP’s calls for a minimum wage and an “unconditional needs-based safety net” and other substantive differences over coping with globalisation. The PAP rejects such a direction, but it has yet to deliver an effective alternative to protect the interests of those Singaporeans who feel they have not shared in the fruits of the city-state’s economic growth. This may explain why as many as one-third voted for opposition parties, despite their obvious limitations. •
Garry Rodan is director of the Asia Research Centre and professor of politics and international studies at Murdoch University. This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
Photo: iStockphoto.co
Managing the contradictions
No full textBehind the execution of Nguyen Tuong Van lies a repressive city-state whose problems are becoming clearer, says Garry Rodan
WHATEVER the merits or otherwise of the Singapore government’s refusal to grant clemency to Nguyen Tuong Van, its handling has dealt a blow to Singapore’s image.
The city-state is renowned for bureaucratic efficiency and meticulous attention to detail by its political leaders. This didn’t square with John Howard learning from reporters that, while he was making his plea to Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Van’s mother was already in receipt of the Singapore government’s decision letter.
More than clumsy diplomacy, the clemency episode is the latest illustration of growing challenges facing the ruling People’s Action Party in managing contradictions inherent in the Singapore development model. Singapore’s increasingly sophisticated market economy has also involved the proliferation of government-linked companies that are central to the power base of the PAP. And Singapore’s rise as a regional media and information hub has gone hand in hand with stringent curbs on free expression.
For four decades, its leaders have skilfully reconciled competing political and economic pressures to preserve state economic interests and authoritarian rule. But in the context of globalisation, managing and concealing contradictions is proving more difficult.
It is the internationalisation of government-linked companies, or GLCs, that has driven involvement in Burma and which contradicts the harsh, punitive stance on drug trafficking within Singapore. As Australian media have highlighted, while Singapore’s courts have been sending hundreds of drug mules to the gallows, GLCs have seized on business opportunities in one of the world’s leading drug-source countries. At home, GLCs are insulated from such media scrutiny.
With the internationalisation of Singapore’s cashed-up GLCs, the negotiation of free trade agreements and the more comprehensive integration of Singapore into the global economy, official rhetoric depicting Singapore as a transparent market has also come under unprecedented critical international scrutiny. Temasek Holdings, with a portfolio of 140 billion of taxpayers’ money in overseas investments, have been the principal focus. Many of the companies involved are not publicly listed and are exempt from legal or regulatory requirements for routine external reviews or public declarations.
In separate FTA negotiations with the US and Australia, the lack of transparency of GLCs and the independence of Singapore’s regulatory authorities were contentious issues, viewed by the US in particular as serious obstacles to competition in the domestic market.
The International Monetary Fund has also called for more transparent fiscal and monetary frameworks and raised concerns about the scope for conflicts of interest in Singapore owing to interpenetration of executive power, regulatory authority and leading GLCs. For instance, Lee’s wife, Ho Ching, is the executive director of Temasek.
Contradictions are also playing themselves out in domestic politics. The government’s transparency claims have been an unwitting political opportunity for critics. In August, twelve anti-riot squad police wearing helmets and knee-high protective gear, and armed with shields and batons, formed a phalanx in front of the Central Provident Fund (national superannuation) building in the city centre. This was in reaction not to a security threat but to four silent protesters wearing T-shirts and carrying placards demanding greater transparency and accountability in the use of public funds.
Although the protesters did not appear to violate the Public Entertainment and Meetings Act, which requires a permit for a public meeting of more than five people, they were dispersed and their T-shirts and placards confiscated on the pretext of possible charges of causing a public nuisance.
Tension between the media hub and curbs on free expression also entered a new phase this year with the mushrooming of internet weblogs (or blogs). With no moderators, system administrators or web content managers for Singapore’s authorities to monitor, filter or warn, they have provided new avenues for government critics. The blog of Chen Jiahao, the former beneficiary of a government scholarship to study at the University of Illinois, was at the centre of one controversy when he criticised scholarships as overly restrictive. After threats of defamation proceedings from a leading state bureaucrat, Chen was intimidated into shutting down his blog.
The Films Act contradicts the state-nurtured image of Singapore as a creative arts hub, as does propaganda by the government-controlled media. This act was invoked earlier this year when Martyn See’s Singapore Rebel, a documentary on political dissident Chee Soon Juan, was withdrawn from the Singapore International Short Film Festival. The making, distribution and showing of films containing ‘wholly or partly either partisan or biased references to or comments on any political matter’ is banned under the act, which provides for a two-year jail sentence or an $80,000 fine.
Creative thinking is alive, though, with political activist Yap Keng Ho filing a police complaint against Singapore’s national broadcaster MediaCorp for allegedly violating the Films Act by screening a number of pro-PAP, party-political programs.
Significantly, such contradictions have not hitherto prevented a string of international educational institutions from conducting operations in the city-state. However, concerns about academic freedom weighed heavily when one of Britain’s leading institutions, the University of Warwick, last month declined Singapore’s invitation to set up a campus. This not only put Singapore authorities in damage control, it has raised the bar for all other courted institutions. Can the University of NSW, for instance, maintain its academic reputation without the formal and binding protections of academic freedom sought by Warwick’s faculty? To genuinely realise its ambition of becoming a global schoolhouse, Singapore might have to make significant concessions. This is easier said than done.
The authoritarian PAP regime is not going to collapse any time soon. It has proved remarkably resilient precisely because it has been constantly modified. But new challenges present Singapore’s leadership with a dilemma. Either it embarks on a successful new phase in refining the mechanisms of authoritarian rule or it will increasingly struggle to manage the inherent contradictions of its own success. •
Garry Rodan is director of the Asia Research Centre and professor of politics and international studies at Murdoch University in Perth.
Photo: Andrew Jeffre
Explaining Myanmar's Regime Transition: The Periphery is Central
No full textIn 2010, Myanmar (Burma) held its first elections after 22 years of direct military rule. Few compelling explanations for this regime transition have emerged. This article critiques popular accounts and potential explanations generated by theories of authoritarian ‘regime breakdown’ and ‘regime maintenance’. It returns instead to the classical literature on military intervention and withdrawal. Military regimes, when not terminated by internal factionalism or external unrest, typically liberalise once they feel they have sufficiently addressed the crises that prompted their seizure of power. This was the case in Myanmar. The military intervened for fear that political unrest and ethnic-minority separatist insurgencies would destroy Myanmar’s always-fragile territorial integrity and sovereignty. Far from suddenly liberalising in 2010, the regime sought to create a ‘disciplined democracy’ to safeguard its preferred social and political order twice before, but was thwarted by societal opposition. Its success in 2010 stemmed from a strategy of coercive state-building and economic incorporation via ‘ceasefire capitalism’, which weakened and co-opted much of the opposition. Having altered the balance of forces in its favour, the regime felt sufficiently confident to impose its preferred settlement. However, the transition neither reflected total ‘victory’ for the military nor secured a genuine or lasting peace
The enduring myth of an Okinawan struggle: the history and trajectory of a diverse community of protest
No full textThe islands of Okinawa have a long history of people's protest. Much of this has been a manifestation in one way or another of Okinawa's enforced assimilation into Japan and their differential treatment thereafter. However, it is only in the contemporary period that we find interpretations among academic and popular writers of a collective political movement opposing marginalisation of, and discrimination against, Okinawans. This is most powerfully expressed in the idea of the three 'waves' of a post-war 'Okinawan struggle' against the US military bases. Yet, since Okinawa's annexation to Japan in 1879, differences have constantly existed among protest groups over the reasons for and the means by which to protest, and these have only intensified after the reversion to Japanese administration in 1972.
This dissertation examines the trajectory of Okinawan protest actors, focusing on the development and nature of internal differences, the origin and survival of the idea of a united 'Okinawan struggle', and the implications of these factors for political reform agendas in Okinawa. It explains the internal differences in organisation, strategies and collective identities among the groups in terms of three major priorities in their protest. There are those protesters principally preoccupied with opposing the US-Japan security treaty and for whom the preservation of pacifist clauses of the Constitution and the utilisation of formal legal and political processes are paramount as a modus operandi. There are also those primarily concerned to protect Okinawa's distinctive lifestyle and natural environment, as well as an assortment of feminist groups fundamentally opposed to the presence of US bases due to concerns about patriarchy and exploitation of women, fostered by militarism. In these last two perspectives, protest tends to be conducted much more via informal, network-oriented processes, and includes engagement with international civil society groups.
The increasing range of protest groups derived from the expansion of these last two perspectives, diversifying beyond the traditional workers' unions and political parties, is consistent with the 'new social movement' theory. This theory's emphasis on the importance of socio economic change for the emergence of groups with post-materialist reform agendas and a stronger predisposition towards informal political processes resonates with the Okinawan experiences. However, the impact of this has been, especially after the reversion in 1972, to hinder effective coalition building among the Okinawan protest groups and organisations, weakening their power to bring about political reforms, particularly towards the removal of the US military bases from the island.
Crucially, though, the idea of an 'Okinawan struggle' has endured in the community of protest throughout the post-war period. Ideas about marginalisation of, and discrimination against, Okinawans constitute a powerful myth of an 'Okinawan struggle', which has a long history of being redefined, used and exploited differently by a wide range of protest actors, adjusted to their particular and historically specific struggles. Indeed, in the event that the US military bases were withdrawn from Okinawa, the ability and appeal of the myth of an 'Okinawan struggle' would therefore not necessarily expire, even if it will increasingly be joined by other protest perspectives as a result of the flowering of new social movements
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