Cultural Politics and Asian Values: The Tepid War (Routledge Advances in Asian-Pacificstudies, 6)

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Cultural Politics and Asian Values

In the wake of the Asian financial crisis, the rise of democracy in Pacific Asia, and the recent upsurge of militant Islam, the cultural politics of Pacific Asian societies has never been more pertinent – nor more full of contradictions. Cultural Politics and Asian Values looks at the political, cultural and religious background of East and Southeast Asian societies and those of ‘the West’ with a view to seeing how they are affecting contemporary national and international politics: democratisation, the international human rights discourse, NGOs, globalisation. The book surveys the political history and pre-history of the ‘Asian values’ debate, taking it up to the era of Megawati Sukarnoputri, Chen Shui-bian and Kim Dae-jung. In chapters on Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and liberalism, Barr explores the histories and conceptual essences of the world religions involved in or affected by the debate in an attempt to find a basis for a cross-cultural dialogue on human rights, democracy and civility in governance. He then makes an assessment of the current state of the ‘Asian values’ debate and draws upon Buddhism and some strands of post-modern feminist thought to suggest a way in which the international human rights discourse might proceed. Issues discussed include: • • • •

Are there distinctive values that set ‘Asia’ apart from ‘the West’? How are cultural factors shaping the development of democracy and governance in Asia? Do language, religion and culture affect conceptions of human rights, society and governance? What are the roles of religion and ideology in the international community?

Michael D. Barr is the author of Lee Kuan Yew: The Beliefs Behind the Man, which was based on his dissertation. He wrote Cultural Politics and Asian Values as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Community and CrossCultural Studies, Queensland University of Technology. In mid-2002 he took up an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History Department at the University of Queensland.

Routledge Advances in Asia-Pacific Studies

1

Environment, education and society in the Asia-Pacific local traditions and global discourses David Yencken, John Fien and Helen Sykes

2

Ageing in the Asia-Pacific region David R. Phillips

3

Caring for the elderly in Japan and the US Practices and policies Susan Orpett Long

4

Human rights and gender politics: Asia Pacific perspectives Edited by Anne Marie Hilsdon, Martha Macintyre, Vera Mackie and Maila Stivens

5

Human rights in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan Ian Neary

6

Cultural politics and Asian values The tepid war Michael D. Barr

Cultural Politics and Asian Values The tepid war Michael D. Barr

London and New York

First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2002 Michael D. Barr All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-203-22029-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-27525-X (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–27764–7 (Print Edition)

To my parents, Theresa and Aubrey Barr

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

ix xi xiii

PART I

Cultural politics 1 Death of a debate?

1 3

2 A broad history: from Meiji to ‘East Asian Miracle’

12

3 Narrow histories: Lee Kuan Yew and Dr Mahathir

30

4 Confronting China after the end of history

46

5 Fin de siècle: ‘Democratic Moment’, financial crisis and beyond

64

PART II

Values and religions

77

6 Of liberalism and other religions

79

7 The European legacy: Christianity and liberalism

90

8 Islam: of Shari’a and Adat; Caliphs and Rajas

121

9 Buddhism: the politics of compassion

138

10 Confucianism: humane rites and elite rights

157

viii

Contents

PART III

Cultural politics and Asian values

175

11 ‘Asian values’ revisited

177

12 Human rights revisited

188

Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

194 196 219 236

Preface

Although this book was planned, it seemed more like its structure grew of its own accord from my research interests in Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore. It started with a simple idea: that behind the cynical politics of the ‘Asian values’ arguments put by Lee and others, there must be some kernel of ingenuousness. I followed this idea where it led me, many times revising and reformulating my basic thesis and the details of its application, and this book is the result. Surprisingly, it has turned out to be a highly personal work, in which I bring my personal judgements to bear on politics, major religions and cultures. I have no reason to presume that my judgements are worth more than anyone else’s, but that is the way my mind worked, and so I kept doing it. The alternative was to be silent, and that was too much to ask of an academic. I hope the result is worth the effort. The book has weaknesses, but I have accepted them as the price of putting a cohesive set of arguments within the confines of a single volume and, I hope, making a stimulating contribution of the cross-cultural discourse on human rights, democracy and civility in governance. Since this has turned out to be such a personal work (especially Parts II and III), I owe it to readers to declare my preconceptions. Without going into great detail, let me say that I am an Australian of English– Scottish–Irish ancestry, an orthodox Catholic and an admirer of Pope John Paul II. Catholic social teaching has been the main ideological influence on my political and social views, including those on human rights. I am conservative on social issues but I have a strong bent towards social democracy. I believe that every human being at every stage of life in every society has an unprovable, but very real dignity as a person. The legalistic concept of human rights expresses a narrow but nevertheless essential range of the implications of that dignity. I believe, however, that it has been overused and misused during the latter half of the twentieth century, thus debasing the concept itself and obscuring other aspects of human dignity. Finally, let me say that postmodernism has helped me to understand both the world and myself but I am not a postmodernist.

x

Preface

I guess this means that I am not easily labelled, but then what else would you expect of someone who uses postmodernism but is uncomfortable with the label? MDB December 2001

Acknowledgements

In the two years or so that I have devoted to researching and writing this book, I have acquired numerous debts of gratitude, both institutional and personal. Let me mention the institutional debts first. The book was written while I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Community and Cross-Cultural Studies at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. The Fellowship was originally intended as a vehicle for conducting research on Singapore. I am grateful to QUT and the Centre both for their financial support, and for their forbearance and their faith in me as my research interests wandered. The QUT School of Humanities deserves special thanks for providing me with an office and logistical support. As important as institutions are, however, it is the personal debts of gratitude that sprang more willingly to mind when I began writing these acknowledgments. I am particularly grateful to Prof. Carl Trocki of QUT who, besides giving me the benefit of his insights and general advice, read and commented on all of Part I and some of Parts II and III. A version of Chapter 6 was read to a conference on Social Transformation in the Asia–Pacific Region (held at Wollongong University in December 2000) and benefited from feedback from participants. Mr Laurence Brown of the University of Queensland read an early version of Chapter 6 and late version of Chapter 7 and gave me important feedback on both. Dr Hossein Adibi of QUT read and commented upon Chapter 8. Prof. Martin Stuart-Fox of the University of Queensland gave me incisive general advice very early in my research, and then read and commented upon Chapters 9 and 10. The History Department at the University of Queensland also gave me a couple of opportunities to present papers drawn from Chapters 4, 10 and 12. I am grateful for participants’ feedback and questions, especially that of Dr Robert Cribb, who was discussant in one of these sessions. The whole text, though particularly Chapters 1–3, benefited from advice from Routledge’s two anonymous peer reviewers. I am particularly grateful to the reviewer who disagreed with my entire thesis but still recommended that it be published. I am

xii

Acknowledgements

also grateful to Mr Craig Fowlie of Routledge, who prompted me to leave my comfort zone far behind and write this book. I also wish to thank Prof. Azyumardi Azra, Dr Iraphne Childs, Ms Kylie Pert, Ms Son Je-Eun and Mr Alan Holzl, each of whom advised me on particular details of the book. I have acknowledged their oral contributions in the endnotes, but I wish to thank them more personally. It goes without saying that these expressions of gratitude do not dilute my personal responsibility for the views and any errors in the finished product. Some of this book has already been published in academic journals, and I acknowledge and thank the copyright holders for giving permission to reproduce the material. Specifically, I wish to acknowledge that material from ‘Lee Kuan Yew and the “Asian Values” Debate’, Asian Studies Review, 2000, volume 24, no. 3, pp. 309–34 is reproduced with permission from Blackwell Publishers, and material from ‘After the End of History’, Access: History, 2000, volume 3, no. 1, pp. 103–12 is reproduced with permission from The University of Queensland.

Abbreviations

This list covers only abbreviations that are used in such a way that the immediate text does not always explain the meaning. ASEAN ASEM EU G7 G77 GATT IFI IMF LDP MFN New Order NGO PAP PAS PRC UDHR UMNO UN UNESCO

Association of Southeast Asian Nations Asia–Europe Meeting European Union ‘Group of 7’ leading industrial nations ‘Group of 77’ developing nations General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade International financial institution International Monetary Fund Liberal Democratic Party (Japan) Most Favoured Nation trade status New Order regime of Suharto (Indonesia) Non-Government Organisation People’s Action Party (Singapore) Parti Islam seMalaysia People’s Republic of China Universal Declaration of Human Rights United Malays’ National Organisation (Malaysia) United Nations United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation US United States of America Vienna Conference World Conference on Human Rights, Vienna, 1993

Part I

Cultural politics

1

Death of a debate?

I don’t refer to Asian values. . . . I talked about Confucianist values, not Asian values. There are as many Asian values as there are different types of Asians. There are Hindu values, Muslim values, Buddhist values and Confucianist values. Even among Confucianists, there are differences, though they form one coherent group. Those values are not going to change fundamentally. I’m not trying to defend Asian values. . . . I’m saying that you’re not going to have culture change overnight. These are deepseated habits, embedded in the subconscious of a people. (Lee Kuan Yew, Asiaweek, 21 May 1999)

Lee Kuan Yew is the undisputed architect of the ‘Asian values’ argument. In 1977, when he was prime minister of Singapore, he launched the term at arms-length through an academic seminar on ‘Asian values and modernization’.1 He has been the most forthright – and probably the most intelligent and articulate – of all of the advocates of the arguments usually referred to as the ‘Asian values’ position. In the 1970s, he attributed Singapore’s success to the fact that ‘we were an Asian-Oriental-type society, hardworking, thrifty and disciplined, a people with Asian values, strong family ties and responsibility for the extended family which is a common feature of Asian cultures, whether Chinese, Malay or Indian’.2 In the 1980s, he urged parents to ‘transmit . . . Asian values to their children’, warning them not to forget that Singapore’s success ‘is largely due to the strong spirit of diligence among Asians and to the importance attached to family relationships and parents–children obligations in Asian societies’.3 As recently as 1995, he juxtaposed ‘Asian and Western values’, referring to the influence of ‘core Asian values’ on Singaporeans, and twice in October 1998 – in the midst of the financial crisis – he praised the ‘East Asian values of hard work, sacrifice for the future, respect for education and learning, and an entrepreneurial spirit’.4 It is odd, therefore, that in 1999 Lee would deny ever having used the term ‘Asian values’, and even implicitly conceded to his critics their argument that talk of contrasting Asian and Western values is creating a false and misleading

4

Cultural politics

dichotomy. His statement raises fundamental questions about the ‘Asian values’ debate, not least of which is whether the argument was ever more than a sterile debate among Western academics. Since this book is yet another contribution by a Western academic to the ‘Asian values’ debate, it is difficult to begin without meeting Lee’s challenge and defending the continued use of the term.

THE ARGUMENT Despite Lee’s contention to the contrary, the ‘Asian values’ debate is real and it has important consequences in the real world. It is a generic term for a set of political arguments that rest on cultural or pseudo-cultural premises of varying veracity – which is why this author has described it as an exercise in ‘cultural politics’. The outcome and the very process of the debate affects processes of democratisation, the conception of human rights, the parameters of international trade and diplomacy, and the conduct of international agencies such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and development and humanitarian aid agencies. The argument’s most articulate exponents are Lee himself and Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, although their sentiments have been echoed – and sometimes challenged – in the actions and words of politicians, diplomats and academics throughout Pacific Asia. Although the term ‘Asian values’ carries the suggestion that there is a set of values that is intrinsic and specific to the whole of Asia, this line of argument has been posited only rarely. The prime tactical premise of the ‘Asian values’ argument is rather one of cultural relativism. It claims not only that many of the hegemonic political, social and cultural norms of the late twentieth century (especially liberal democracy and the mainstream human rights agenda) are Western, rather than universal norms, but that they are no more legitimate than alternative norms that could be considered ‘Asian’. A classic but little known example of this phenomenon was the Vietnamese government’s 1993 campaign to legitimise its human rights abuses by referring to ‘Vietnamese values’ and even ‘Buddhist values’.5 Such tactics are designed to taint the claimed hegemonic norms – in this case universalist conceptions of human rights – with the odour of cultural imperialism. Thus in 1991 the Chinese government argued that there are legitimate, national variations of human rights, and that ‘owing to tremendous differences in historical background, social systems, cultural tradition and economic development, countries differ in their understanding and practice of human rights’.6 Two years later Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas attempted to deflect accusations of human rights violations with a similar call for ‘understanding of the traditions and social values of developing nations, many of which were endowed with ancient and sophisticated cultures’.7 The tactical position thus established

Death of a debate?

5

then provides the basis for a positive assertion of the legitimacy, if not the superiority of a favoured political, social or cultural argument or practice, which is identified as being or springing from an ‘Asian value’. Cultural relativism, therefore, acts as a cover for cultural and political assertion, which is the heart of the ‘Asian values’ argument. Once the basic premise of cultural relativism has been set, it can be used to support a choice of varied and sometimes contradictory arguments. Nevertheless, at its core the ‘Asian values’ argument is remarkably consistent. Its proponents advocate a hierarchical view of society that emphasises the interdependence and social nature of human beings. The cultural source of ‘Asian values’ is most commonly Confucianism. It is important to note, however, that the Confucianism referred to here is not the original set of ethics advocated by Confucius, but rather the statecentred form developed from the second century BC onwards. At heart, Confucianism is about people and relationships, and it governs how everyone acts in a traditional Chinese hierarchical society. The relationship between rulers and subjects, for instance, is likened to that between fathers and sons: the subject/son is expected to give his ruler/father obedience and respect, and the ruler/father is urged to be a junzi [virtuous gentleman], and to govern the state/family by his example and by exhortation and education rather than by the arbitrary imposition of his will. The character of Confucianism will be studied in greater detail in Chapter 10, but for the moment we might risk oversimplifying it as an ethical system and humanistic worldview that places great emphasis on forms of conduct within relationships, and on personal virtue, obedience to authority, family loyalty, social harmony and education. Most Southeast Asian cultures also contain significant elements of hierarchy and paternalism, none of which have been challenged by an indigenous equivalent of the European Enlightenment or the French Revolution, with their emphasis on freedom and reason. In Buddhist Thailand, for instance, the king is accorded immense respect because he is presumed to have accumulated good karma in previous lives, and is therefore an intrinsically positive moral force. Muslim Malays, reflecting an afterglow of early Hindu–Buddhist influence, also grow up extremely conscious of their place in a strictly hierarchical society, and even today tend to define themselves by their relationship with their Sultan. Muslim Javanese have also grafted Islam onto a Hindu–Buddhist conception of a highly structured society ruled by a benevolent and all-powerful ruler who brings prosperity through the imposition of peace, order and harmony. Cultural perspectives originating in the region therefore stem from and tend to lead to a web-like relational or communitarian view of society where everyone knows his or her place in a social hierarchy. This worldview is usually juxtaposed to ‘Western’ liberal and atomistic views of society that emphasise the autonomy of persons and lead to decadence. This contrast enables advocates of ‘Asian values’ to present communitarian

6

Cultural politics

and authoritarian arguments that have strong cultural resonance – arguments that emphasise the ‘rights’ of the state, the community (e.g. religious, ethnic or economic community) and the family ahead of the rights of the individual person. The symbiotic linkage between the antiWestern and the anti-decadence themes of Vietnam’s ‘Social Evils Campaign’ in the mid-1990s is symptomatic of the way in which this mindset lends itself to such manipulation. The ‘West’ equals ‘Western values’ equals ‘foreign contamination’ equals ‘decadence’, against which the Vietnamese people and government must show communal and vigilant solidarity.8 A Vietnamese academic spelled out the finer rationale in March 1999: In line with tradition, Vietnamese people always put the interests of the society above those of the family and of themselves. The rights of each individual are respected on condition that they are not opposite to those of the family, village and country. . . . We do not accept those individual interests, which are opposite to

the social interests. We always consider that correct relationships between society and the individual are a good value in the Vietnamese tradition.9 Communitarian arguments have been advanced with profound bluntness on occasion, such as when the Chinese foreign minister declared to the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993 that ‘individuals must put the state’s rights before their own’.10 More often, however, the argument is put more gently – such as when Indonesia’s Ali Alatas called upon the United Nations to redress the West’s excessively ‘individualistic approach’ to human rights, which he maintained lacked ‘balance’.11 In its milder forms this argument is able to muster considerable support in both Asia and the West, since it appeals to conservatives and communitarians in both cultures. Based on such premises, proponents of ‘Asian values’ argue for a paternalistic, illiberal state, which can take any form from the Leninist dictatorships of Vietnam and China to the relatively benign regimes of Singapore and Malaysia. The primacy of the community over the needs of the individual is generally based on a strong affirmation of the state’s duty to the people as a collective – a duty to deliver peace, stability, and economic development.12 This in turn is often linked to an absolutist approach to state sovereignty. Thus, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) argued in July 1991 that human rights ‘should remain within the competence and responsibility of each country, having regard for the complex variety of economic, social and cultural realities’ and emphasised that the ‘international application of human rights [should not] violate the sovereignty of nations’.13 Another important corollary of the ‘strong state’ argument is the deconstruction of ‘liberal democracy’ into its component elements –

Death of a debate?

7

liberalism and democracy – and the advocacy of ‘illiberal democracy’ as a legitimate, if not superior alternative theory of government. Dr Mahathir, for instance, is adamant that democracy is ‘the best form of government, even though we cannot adopt a liberal democracy as practised by the West’,14 but also warns of democracy deteriorating into an ‘excess of freedom’ which in ‘extreme cases’ can become ‘virtual anarchy’. He argues that Asia needs ‘strong, stable governments prepared to make decisions in the best interests of the nation’ because these factors ‘are a prerequisite for economic growth’.15

The family The family is also given a special place in the ‘Asian values’ argument, both because it provides the prime conceptual basis of a relational view of society, and because it is a natural and self-sustaining mechanism for providing nurture, socialisation and social services to the population. The family is a person’s first community, and it is here that a child learns his or her place in the world, the lessons of hierarchy, and the nature of living in a society dominated by relationships. Javanese, for instance, are educated in the sociology of a hierarchical society through growing up in a hierarchical family structure, where the order of birth among siblings is the key to determining social expectations.16 This perception of the naturalness of social hierarchy flows through to the rest of society, so that Javanese social relations between unrelated contemporaries are also modelled on the Javanese intra-family hierarchy.17 Drawing a slightly different lesson from his studies in Japanese psychology, Takeo Doi identifies the Japanese idealisation of the young child’s dependence [amae] upon his or her mother, and the craving for the emotional security associated with maternal love as the key to understanding the relational and highly communalist nature of Japanese society.18 The family also provides the emotional and philosophical model for thinking of society as an organic unity, which provides the strongest rationale for communitarianism. As Dr Mahathir argued in 1989: ‘In the beginning, there was Individual Man, living in splendid isolation, doing “his own thing”, behaving exactly as he pleased, unfettered by a single rule, regulation, or code of behaviour of any sort.’ In fact, from the beginning there never was this Individual Man, born free, living completely unfettered in isolated splendour. From the beginning of time man lived in groups – first the family, then the village, then the district, then the state – because he was instinctively gregarious and because he needed the security and the services that only living in a group could provide.19

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Cultural politics

Lee Kuan Yew made a similar point more concisely in 1994: ‘Eastern societies believe that the individual exists in the context of his family. He is not pristine and separate. The family is part of the extended family, and then friends and the wider society.’20

‘East Asian miracle’ Below the two main premises of strong government and strong families, there is also a raft of non-core arguments that form a less consistent part of the ‘Asian values’ debate. These highlight the economic value of ‘Asian’, and particularly ‘Confucian’ values. Asian and Western observers alike identified peculiarly Asian strengths in thrift, hard work, high standards of education, and communalist, team-based approaches to work. Phenomena such as lifelong employment and house unions, vertical integration of industries, state-led investment and meritocratic selection into a powerful civil service were held up as examples worthy of emulation.

THIS BOOK Although this brief survey seems to leave Lee Kuan Yew’s claim to disown and discredit the term ‘Asian values’ a little threadbare, in a sense he was not being unreasonable. He should not try to deny that he has ever spoken of ‘Asian values’, but it is nevertheless true that he has usually referred to ‘Confucian’ or ‘Chinese values’. He experimented with the term ‘Asian values’, and even found it useful on occasions, but it was so fraught with conceptual difficulties stemming from the diversity of Asian cultures that he tried to avoid using it personally. Nevertheless, it should be recognised that until the Asian financial crisis and the fall of Suharto at the end of the 1990s he seemed to have no objection to journalists and others attributing the term to him. His new position is an attempt to distance himself from the taint of ‘Asian’ corruption and – much worse – ‘Asian’ incompetence while holding solidly onto the core of his arguments. Lee now recognises that the ‘Asian values’ debate has passed a fundamental turning point. Not only have ‘Asian values’ lost the assumption of the moral high ground, but also there is no longer a point of contention over the diversity of values and cultures in Asia. Lee, of course, has always been aware of the diversity in Asian cultures and among Confucianists, but it has only now become necessary to forego the political advantage of the broad term, ‘Asian values’. Yet Lee’s statement leaves open the question of whether the term ‘Asian values’ conveys any useful meaning now that its chief advocate disclaims ownership of the term. Lee obviously intends to undermine the credibility of his critics by claiming that they were only ever fighting a straw man of their own creation. The ‘Asian values’ debate, however, has

Death of a debate?

9

a life larger than Lee Kuan Yew. He began the debate in the 1970s, and has been its foremost advocate, but he does not own it. It would certainly be unreasonable for Lee’s critics to continue belittling the argument by questioning the existence of overarching and unique ‘Asian values’. If, however, ‘Asian values’ is used as a label for the broader basket of arguments described in this chapter, and leaves open the possibility that it might reflect a deeper, more complex cultural reality, then it should be possible to continue using the term without prejudice. Adopting this looser definition, this book will attempt to disentangle the political agenda that the ‘Asian values’ debate has fuelled from those elements that genuinely reflect an ‘Asian’ worldview – however vaguely that may be defined. Part I is an account of the political and historical evolution of the debate, bringing it up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Part II studies the main areas of conflict in the debate through the prism of religion, focussing primarily on issues related to human rights, democracy and the relationship between the individual and society. Building on this research, Part III makes an assessment of the ongoing state of the ‘Asian values’ agenda and then suggests a way to strengthen the conceptual bridges between the human rights discourse and the main cultures and religions of Pacific Asia.

ASIA? Ironically, given Lee Kuan Yew’s retreat from the concept of generic Asian values, this book will argue that there are indeed Asian values – or at least East and Southeast Asian values – that are basically communitarian, consensual and hierarchical. The author hesitates to posit generalisations that could be viewed as Orientalism, but has been forced to resort to the same defence as David Kelly, who, faced with a similar dilemma when editing Asian Freedoms, wrote that to assert, as some seem to, a total absence of cross-cutting relationships [across Asian societies] is contrary to common experience. To use a no doubt overly familiar analogy, members of a family are recognisable as such because they each bear one or more, but not necessarily all, of a set of common traits. No one trait is essential. The societies and cultures of Asia . . . are linked by many such systems of family resemblance. . . .21 It is significant that even with this disclaimer Kelly felt obliged to limit the parameters of his book to East and Southeast Asia. On one level this was merely a prudent attempt to limit the scope of his endeavour, but it also reflected the fact that even his cautious generalisation about the ‘family resemblance’ in Asia barely extends across the whole continent.

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Cultural politics

Even if we ignore North Asia (Siberia etc.) and West Asia (the ‘Middle East’) we are still left with a bipolar entity in the orbit of the two giants, India and China – and even this scenario takes the Malay world for granted. Fortunately, the current thesis does not hinge on any essentialist notion of Asia. Furthermore the ‘Asian values’ debate focuses on East and Southeast Asia (henceforth called Pacific Asia for the sake of elegance) and ignores the sub-continent. With these geographical restrictions in place, it is now possible to speak of a family of Pacific Asian cultures that bear a significant ‘family resemblance’ to each other. The ‘family resemblance’ is often sufficiently vague that it can be easily overlooked, but on other occasions it hits with a force that cannot be ignored. One such occasion was the First International Congress of Ideal Graduates, held in Bangkok in November 2000 under the auspices of the Thai Ministry of University Affairs and several semi-governmental educational associations.22 The first point to be noted is that this conference highlights the streams of continuity within at least two stands of Asian culture. This overtly Thai Buddhist conference had the explicit aim of creating a selfless, ethically sound, community-spirited graduate: a goal that could, with only slight amendment, be an aspiration to the East Asian ideal of the Confucian gentleman–scholar. The second point is how it underlines the almosttangible element of discontinuity between Western and Asian expectations. This conference drew contributors from Argentina, Australia, China, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States, but the bulk of its participants were Thai academics and professionals. Reading the papers and abstracts contained in the conference’s book of proceedings, one cannot help but be struck by the difference in approach between the Western contributors and most of the Asian contributors. The Western participants were, to a person, secular in their approaches, agnostic on ethics, and uninquiring on the nature of the person and society. In contrast, many of the Asian contributors were overtly religious, demanded high standards of personal ‘moral character’ from their ‘ideal graduates’, and pontificated freely on the nature of the human person and the relationship between the human person and society. This generalisation even applied to some speakers who were addressing topics that do not lend themselves easily to such deeper questions: such as those talking about the attributes of the ideal engineering, science, medical or economics graduate. In the West, one might expect to find such dialogues in religious institutes of learning or conceivably a Philosophy Department, but it would be unthinkable for this to happen in a mainstream, international, government-backed conference on graduate outcomes. Yet despite a general sense of good-natured bemusement over some speakers who were thought to have strayed into dogmatic posturing, the Asian participants seemed to regard the religious and ethical dialogue – including the concern about ‘moral character’ – as completely normal.23

Death of a debate?

11

Yet despite such overt indicators, generalisations about the ‘family resemblance’ among Asian cultures should nevertheless be uttered with caution, because Pacific Asia is home to so much diversity that no generalisation is going to be completely true. It should be noted at the outset, therefore, that this book will not try to force rival worldviews into a melting pot – Asian or otherwise. Its argument is more limited: that there are elements in the major religions and most of the cultures of Pacific Asia that drench their people in worldviews at odds with the liberalism, secularism and atomism that currently dominate – though they do not monopolise – Western political discourse. This does not mean that these ‘Asian values’ should be regarded as sacrosanct and be fossilised as some sort of tribute to Asian essentialism. Nor does it mean that democracy, human rights and freedom cannot or should not be fostered within East Asian cultures – even if they are judged to be contrary to traditional ‘Asian values’. It does suggest, however, that as well as addressing the political agenda of ‘Asian values’, critics should reflect upon the extent to which some of the ‘Asian values’ arguments contain elements that deserve respect and credence. Although some impressive work in this direction has been completed already, there has been a general reluctance among Western participants to take this line of inquiry to the point of questioning the premises of mainstream Western political discourse, especially as they affect human rights and personal liberty. This is not to say that there have not already been Western challenges to liberalism and secularism. There are entire subcultures of feminist, multicultural, ethical, legal, communitarian, and Christian scholars challenging and reconceptualising concepts like human rights and autonomy. Some scholars, such as John Gray, even challenge the hegemonic claims of liberalism from within the ideology,24 but there has been very little interaction between these ventures and studies of Asian and international politics. This book will venture onto this interdisciplinary ground, and will attempt to contribute towards building a cross-cultural consensus that might provide a broader conceptual foundation of human rights than that currently on offer.

2

A broad history: from Meiji to ‘East Asian Miracle’

Although ‘Asian values’ is a term of recent vintage, it has a pre-history stretching back to the late nineteenth century. Among its earliest prefigurations were the early Japanese and Chinese efforts to rationalise the manifest technical and military superiority of the West. Even as Meiji Japan was catching up with the West in these fields, Japanese intellectuals such as Okakura Tenshun were developing counter-hegemonic mythologies of a superior pan-Asian culture of peace, beauty and refinement. This neo-‘Asian values’ mythology reached a high watermark when Okakura urged Asian nations to look within their common traditions to produce a cultured and refined alternative to the rude Western culture of war and conflict.1 China’s revolutionary leader Dr Sun Yat-Sen in his turn was utterly convinced of the superiority of pan-Asian values over Western values, which had been laid bare in his mind by the Great War in Europe. By the 1920s, he was lecturing on the superiority of wangdao (the way of the ethical monarch and peaceful ruleship) over badao (the unethical and violent way).2 Considering that Japan has not been a major participant in the modern ‘Asian values’ debate, it is ironic that it played such an important role in its pre-history. Even the conscious, deliberate manipulation of culture to bring about a result akin to that of the ‘Asian values’ agenda has a strong Japanese pedigree. The Meiji government made a conscious decision to elevate the heavily patriarchal, authoritarian family structure of the samurai class to a national ideal and the model for the nation-state. This model, the ie, was consciously chosen over alternatives, including the matriarchal model that was followed by most of the population.3 Decades later the Nationalist Government in China made its early contribution to cultural politics with its Confucian revivalist ‘New Life Movement’ in the 1930s.

POST-WAR DEVELOPMENTS It is important to note the existence of the Meiji and Chinese Nationalist precursors to the ‘Asian values’ phenomenon because they place the

A broad history: from Meiji to ‘East Asian Miracle’

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current debate in a richer historical context. They undermine the suggestion that the modern debate was completely contrived by one or two men, and is devoid of cultural and historical resonance. Nevertheless, it must be conceded that the connections between these early phenomena and the cultural politics of the 1990s is remote and indirect. Of much more direct consequence were post-war political developments, which breathed life into myths of Asian solidarity, generated widespread scepticism about the desirability of democracy as a system of governance, and fostered a deeply felt Pacific Asian reaction against Western ‘decadence’. The Bandung Conference of 1955 provided a fresh post-war starting point for the ‘Asian values’-type mythology. It launched the ideas of the Third World, Afro-Asian Solidarity and the Non-Aligned Movement. Technically, even the term ‘Asian values’ was launched at Bandung (by Nehru), though there is no evidence that the contemporary use derives directly from this instance. The conceptual resonance between Bandung and the modern ‘Asian values’ reaction is demonstrated by the fact that Sukarno opened the conference with words that would not seem out of place in the repertoire of Dr Mahathir: I beg of you, do not think of colonialism only in its classic form . . . Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skilful and determined enemy and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily.4 This sense of pan-Asian defiance of the West has been a regularly recurring theme of East–West relations ever since Commodore Perry confronted Japan, and the fact that the rhetoric has usually been a thin veneer covering an ethnocentric or nationalist agenda does not diminish the importance of the perception. The spirit of Asian solidarity may always have been more myth than reality, but it is nevertheless a deepseated element in the ‘Asian values’ reaction.

DEMOCRACY’S SAD RECORD Of even more direct import to the genesis of ‘Asian values’ was the failure of democracy throughout the Third World, and the subsequent rise of authoritarianism throughout Pacific Asia, creating a near-universal attitude of scepticism about the supposed benefits of democracy. It is much easier to list democracy’s success stories in Pacific Asia than its failures because there are only two countries on the list: Japan and Singapore. It is ironic that one of the two Pacific Asian countries with an unbroken post-colonial history of democratic rule is also the country at the forefront of the ‘Asian values’ debate. To add to the irony, Malaysia follows in the

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democracy honours with only a single, short period (from May 1969 to May 1971) in which democracy was suspended. Even in our three examples of relatively successful Pacific Asian democracies – Japan, Singapore and Malaysia – success was built on decades of rule by a single party that dominated politics completely. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan, the United Malays’ National Organisation (UMNO) in Malaysia and the People’s Action Party (PAP) in Singapore have all delivered relative prosperity and stability to their respective countries, but their electoral longevity has been based substantially on their success in circumventing, if not thwarting liberal democratic processes. •

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Japan has been the most liberal and democratic of the three at all relevant times, but the LDP’s hegemony was maintained by an intimate relationship between the party’s factions, big business and the bureaucracy – and by a system of electoral rorts that rivalled England’s old ‘rotten boroughs’. In 1993, a split in the ruling party forced a change of government, but even then it was only a year before the LDP was back as the dominant party in a new coalition. Despite these limitations, the democratic credentials of post-war Japan are exemplary compared with those of Singapore, where government is based on what David Brown has called an ‘inclusionary corporatist’ state.5 Singapore scrupulously maintains all of the forms of democracy, but civil life is so rigidly controlled by vertically organised interest groups, each with a government-approved – and usually with a government-appointed – leadership, that there is little opportunity for independent thought to emerge beyond the confines of governmentmanaged channels. In this controlled environment, dissident ideas and complaints are either stifled or appropriated into government policy. In such an environment there is little opportunity for an opposition to emerge, and on the occasions when it does, its leaders face strong institutional barriers from government-linked employers, the media, the courts, the taxation office, and even from the housing authorities. About the only point of commonality between Singaporean democracy and liberal democracy is that the actual ballots themselves are ‘clean’. Malaysia’s illiberal democracy is much looser than Singapore’s, but its democratic credentials were still weak, even before the arrest of Anwar Ibrahim. Malaysia relies on a gerrymander favouring ethnic Malays to guarantee UMNO undisputed hegemony over the political system. UMNO then forms coalitions with a variety of non-Malay parties who between them usually command over two-thirds of the seats in the House of Representatives. These are not, however, coalitions in any usual sense of the word. The UMNO-nominated prime minister dominates this coalition and parliament utterly, even down to choosing his coalition parties’ candidates for parliament. UMNO

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has ruled through such coalitions during the whole of its postindependence democratic history. The media is subservient to the government; efforts to express opinions critical of the government are routinely thwarted; and the judiciary is legally beholden to parliament. Ballots are regarded generally as ‘clean’, and opposition candidates can and do get elected – and can even win state governments away from the regime. Yet there is little doubt that Prime Minister Mahathir has the power and the will to destroy any opposition that threatens him seriously. Beyond these three countries the historical record of democracy has been either woeful or non-existent, as a survey of countries sweeping clockwise from Northeast Asia demonstrates. •

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In China, Mao successfully defeated the Nationalist government in combat, and in 1949, it established a communist dictatorship. Even now that communism is dead as an ideology, and many citizens are enjoying new wealth and new freedoms, the Communist Party still rules China as a Leninist party. North Korea has been a communist dictatorship since Stalin installed Kim Il-sung’s regime in 1948. South Korea began life in 1948 with elections supervised by the United Nations. Syngman Rhee was elected South Korea’s first president, but his 13-year rule was far from democratic: he assumed dictatorial powers, purged the National Assembly, outlawed the opposition Progressive Party, and executed its leader. In 1961, Rhee’s government was toppled by student-led demonstrations that were in turn followed by a military coup. For nearly the next three decades, South Korea was ruled by quasi-military regimes that began their lives as effective, if undemocratic governments, only to be replaced during periods of economic downturn and social unrest by ineffective civilian governments that were in turn toppled by a fresh civilianmilitary regime. The established pattern of regime rotation began coming to an end only in 1988 when constitutional reforms and a basic level of democracy were introduced. Yet it is only since 1998, and the election of opposition candidate and democracy activist Kim Dae-jung to the presidency that we can be reasonably confident that the cycle has been broken properly. In 1949 the Chinese Nationalist forces withdrew to the island of Taiwan where they established a government-in-exile – the Republic of China (from now on referred to as Taiwan) – that has since become a de facto separate country. From 1949 until the 1990s the Nationalist Party government that was in power at the time of exile continued to govern Taiwan without recourse to democratic endorsement, and full democracy was introduced only in 1996. In 2000, Chen Shui-bian of

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Cultural politics the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) defeated the Nationalist candidate for the presidency, marking the first democratic change of government in China’s history. The Philippines was handed its independence and its American-style democratic constitution by the United States after the Second World War. Despite problems of corruption and widespread poverty, the Philippines was still a democratic and stable country in 1969 when it re-elected President Ferdinand Marcos for his second term as President. By 1972, however, Marcos’s popularity and his grip on power were waning and he declared martial law. Democracy was not restored until Corazon Aquino’s ‘People’s Power’ revolt of 1986. Indonesia’s experiments with democracy have been very short-lived and uninspiring to date. The Republic of Indonesia started its nominal life with a thoroughly autocratic, interim constitution that did not even pretend to be democratic. In 1945, this did not matter because the ‘republic’ consisted of little more than an elitist, but popular nationalist movement that had unilaterally declared national independence, and was trying to establish its claim. When proper statehood was achieved in 1950 the Republic adopted a pluralist, decentralised and democratic constitution that gave birth to a multitude of political parties and, of course, political infighting. This period came to a decisive end in 1959 when President Sukarno unilaterally declared that the country had returned to the 1945 constitution. He introduced ‘guided democracy’, which he described as ‘the democracy of the family system, without the anarchy of liberalism, without the autocracy of dictatorship’.6 Sukarno’s ‘guided democracy’ was replaced by Suharto’s New Order, which also rejected democracy as a foreign value, suitable only for a ‘conflict-prone’ society,7 and so Indonesia did not see democracy again until 1999. Brunei is a tiny oil rich sultanate tucked between Malaysia’s Eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak. It has no democracy, but also no income tax. The population seems content to forgo civil rights for as long as the sultan continues to finance the country out of his own pocket. Vietnam, like the Koreas, has suffered a Cold War partition, but unlike the Koreas, North Vietnam defeated South Vietnam in battle in 1975 and reunited the country as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In none of the three Vietnams, however, was democracy ever a major force in national thinking or practice. Nationalism was always a prime motivating factor for the Vietnamese, and communism succeeded in linking itself to nationalism much more successfully than did ideas of democracy, or even personal freedom. Since unification there has been little talk of democracy or freedom, and even today the slightest provocation from Buddhist, Catholic or even Party dissidents still provokes the harshest penalties.

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Laos’s experiment with democracy began in 1947 when France gave the Kingdom of Laos an elected National Assembly. Democracy, however, operated as a thin cover for traditional alliances and rivalries of influential families. Reasonably fair elections continued to be held until the fall of Laos to the Vietnamese-sponsored Pathet Lao in 1975, but the elected governments were hostages to military, diplomatic and economic forces that made a mockery of the constitution. After the creation of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, even the veneer of democracy was abandoned. France gave Cambodia a degree of self-government and an electoral act in 1946, which was followed by full independence in 1953. Yet regardless of the constitutional forms, democratic government in Cambodia was dominated utterly by the personality of its sometime king, Norodom Sihanouk, until he was ousted by a military coup in 1970. Since 1970, Cambodia has been ruled by a military dictatorship (1970–5), communist regimes of varying brutality, and is currently a post-communist dictatorship cloaked as a constitutional Buddhist monarchy. Thailand has been a constitutional monarchy and an intermittent democracy since 1932, although it has actually spent much more time under military than under civilian rule. The first serious democratic challenge came as late as 1973. It began as student protest but quickly spread throughout society. The democracy movement was guaranteed a degree of success when the king, whose influence and prestige had remained intact throughout decades of changing military regimes, lent his support. Democratic Thailand failed to deliver the expected prosperity and stability, however, and the country remained prone to military coups. Only since 1992 has Thailand functioned properly as a democracy. The desirability of democracy is now given in Thai politics despite the seemingly endemic problems of corruption that saw a rerun of the 2000 Senate elections. Myanmar (formerly Burma) experimented with parliamentary democracy between 1948 and 1962, but the results were chaotic. Faced with secessionist challenges and an extraordinary level of factionalism in his own governments, U Nu (prime minister 1948–56, 1957–8, and 1960–2) failed to deliver stability, security, clean government or even a functioning economy. The military rule of General Ne Win (military dictator under various titles 1958–60 and 1962–88) delivered stability and security, though his economic policies were peculiar and ineffective by any standards: he combined extreme autarky and xenophobia with numerology and other forms of superstition. The country’s economy has been faring slightly better under his successors, who have adopted more conventional economic policies. This did not, however, lead to a slackening of the military dictatorship. Under extreme pressure from a mass democracy movement the

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Given this dispiriting record it should not be surprising that democracy and civil rights are regarded in some quarters as being of problematical value, if not plainly irrelevant to the region.

SOCIAL CONSERVATISM It may be thought that the politico-historical roots of social conservatism would be more difficult to document than other features of the ‘Asian values’ argument, since it is reputed to be a peculiarity of Dr Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew. This reaction, however, is a misreading of the historical and cultural roots of contemporary social conservatism in Pacific Asia, and its significance in the broad ‘Asian values’ reaction. As the following survey shows, Lee and Mahathir’s reactions to ‘Western decadence’ are, in fact, mundanely typical of the region, and are shared by both advocates and opponents of their ‘Asian values’ agendas. •

Even without leaving Malaysia we find that although Anwar Ibrahim lent his voice to the chorus of Pacific Asians who opposed much of the ‘Asian values’ agenda, he did so from a position of social conservatism: It is understandable that many Asians are frightened by the prospect of being swamped by a deluge of images from cultures that have lost a sense of the sacred, that are marked by a confusion of values, that are undergoing moral decay and suffering from a collapse of the family institution.8

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If we look at Indonesia we find that President Sukarno’s reaction to ‘Western decadence’ in the 1960s was to order the burning and smashing of Western rock-and-roll records and paraphernalia. Nearly a decade before Lee Kuan Yew or Dr Mahathir thought to cut the hair of would-be hippies, Sukarno instructed Indonesian police to cut the hair of any long-haired male youths infected with the ‘mental disease’ of ‘Beatle-ism’.9 The mood in post-Suharto Indonesia did not see any substantial softening of the Indonesian rejection of ‘the sixties’. As Robert Hefner eloquently put it, recalling his own field trips in the 1970s, . . . if the United States was previously seen as the land of cowboys and scientists, both of whom excited a grudging admiration,

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by the late 1970s these icons had been displaced by troubling images of pornography, violence, and drugs. . . . To many Muslims, it seemed that what the West now offered was no longer disciplined excellence but sexual hedonism and do-your-own-thing individualism.10 •

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Turning to the Buddhist world, we find that Thailand’s struggle between traditional rural values and modern urban values bears a striking resemblance to the libertarian/conservative divide. The peculiar feature of Thailand’s contribution is that there, the communitarians are advocating strong families and strong civil society as a means of opposing an authoritarian state. Chai-Anan Samudavanija is one of Thailand’s more prominent advocates of traditional values, and he advocates a return to a culture based on family, kinship and community for precisely this reason.11 Far from rebelling against the more moralising aspects of the ‘Asian values’ argument, Thai critics of authoritarianism like Pracha Hutanuwatr rail against the insidious way that tanha, or ‘craving’, is undermining Buddhist values and focusing one’s attention on oneself.12 In neighbouring Myanmar, the celebrated Aung San Suu Kyi has suffered greatly for her democratic advocacy, but nevertheless disowns ‘the worst ills of Western society’, including ‘unbridled freedom’, ‘selfish individualism’, and ‘gross individualism’.13 Far from being a liberal critic of the junta, she criticises the regime explicitly in terms of Buddhist and Burmese ethics and spirituality.14 Social conservatism also seems to be living off deep roots in East Asia. As recently as 1995 the Vietnamese Government launched a ‘Social Evils Campaign’ that decried ‘cultural poisons’ such as ‘illegal karaoke singing’, prostitution, heroin and pornographic videos.15 Throughout the campaign the Vietnamese press carried endless reports of teenage violence, sexual assaults, drunkenness, drug addiction and homosexuality.16 Former Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui is a strong opponent of the ‘Asian values’ arguments against liberal democracy. Nevertheless, he expresses concern that ‘individualism can go to extremes, even degenerating into egotism and hedonism’.17 He calls on Taiwanese to embrace the ethics of Confucianism to avoid such degeneracy. An earlier generation of Taiwanese leaders mimicked Suharto, Lee and Mahathir by dispensing involuntary haircuts to young males and banning dance parties.18 Kim Dae-jung is now the President of South Korea and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, but in 1994 he was merely a former political prisoner, a human rights activist and an outspoken opponent of Lee Kuan Yew’s version of ‘Asian values’. Yet even as he was championing democracy in East Asia he acknowledged the ‘moral breakdown of

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Cultural politics many advanced democratic societies’ and argued that ‘the proper way to cure the ills of industrial societies is . . . to emphasise ethical education, give high regard to spiritual values, and promote high standards in culture and the arts’.19 Finally, can anyone forget the puritanical character of Chinese communism? Mao’s emancipation of women from the ‘feudal, Confucian family’ contained no elements of sexual licence or even individualism. The party and the school were substituted for the patriarch and the family as the source of authority and comfort, but there was no hint of a parallel with the phenomenon of ‘the sixties’ or sexual revolution of the West. Mao expected his young cadres and women activists to be dedicated, single minded and obsessive about serving the party and the state. It should not come as a complete surprise to learn that in the late 1990s China emerged briefly as a major opponent of the libertarian and feminist agendas in the United Nations, and an international champion of ‘the family as a basic unit of society’.20 It is doubly significant that these agendas are promoted mainly by American and European delegations and Non-Government Organisations, and that the G77 group of developing countries became China’s major diplomatic ally in this debate.21

The West’s cultural revolution An important part of the mythology of Asian social conservatism is the notion that the West suffered a highly destructive cultural shift in the aftermath of ‘the sixties’. This reaction was not confined to Asia: many in the West also feared that the libertarian culture of protest, free love and drugs was a threat to order in their own societies. Indeed, Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee of Singapore later went on record as identifying his own concerns with those of Western intellectuals who had come to be appalled by the counter culture. He singled out for special attention Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism and Paul Johnson’s Enemies of Society – especially Chapter 12 onwards, which deals with the alleged post-1960s debasement of American culture, values and education.22 Contemporary versions of this reaction are still shared today between advocates of ‘Asian values’ and many Western conservatives, who cite family breakdown, drugs, teenage pregnancy, and other social problems as evidence of a collapse of values. Before dismissing these voices as merely a reaction to unwelcome change, we might consider whether there is a more fundamental dynamic at work. First, there is the possibility that a change has taken place in Western culture that altered the dynamic of ‘Western’ relations with the cultures of Pacific Asia. Second, we might consider that this change was of such a dimension that it might have been a force in the development of the ‘Asian values’ reaction. It should be said at the outset that the prima

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facie case for accepting the first proposition is very strong. Throughout the West all forms of authority and most social conventions were challenged in ‘the sixties’, an era defined by Arthur Marwick as beginning around 1958 and ending around 1974.23 The cultural revolutions with which this study concerns itself fall into three overlapping fields: challenges to public authority (especially governments, university authorities and police); to private authority (especially parents and religious hierarchies); and, to almost any established norms. The rebellion against established norms was in part an expression of the first two phenomena, but it went deeper. It manifest itself particularly in the sexual revolution, the drug culture and the hippy culture, but was also present in the newfound enthusiasm for educational and religious innovation that came to the fore in the late 1960s. At its most noble, ‘the sixties’ was an effort to extend the modernist project that had begun with the Enlightenment: a project that presumed that human nature and humanity could and should be continually improved by the application of reason. At its most prosaic, it was a vehicle through which privileged white youths could indulge their passions, fantasies and egos. It is a moot point whether the counter culture and the student protest movements were causes or effects of these phenomena. Cas Wouters has no difficulty in tracing the origins of the sexual revolution back to the 1920s, when, she argues, the ‘sexualization of love’ and the ‘eroticization of sex’ began to drag Western society away from Victorian norms.24 Certainly by the 1950s the influence of Margaret Mead and Alfred Kinsey had already established an elite, and probably the beginnings of a popular perception that sexual permissiveness was a human norm, and that Christian morality was perversely repressing healthy sexuality. Yet even if the origins of the sexual revolution can be traced back to the 1920s, it is nevertheless true that the 1960s marked a turning point, if for no other reason than the easy availability of the female contraceptive pill from the mid1960s. This new technology enabled the separation of sex from procreation to be achieved in such a way that a participant – especially a male participant – could forget that this separation had been achieved by unnatural chemical means. This change could not fail to alter perceptions of sexuality, gender relations and the nature of marriage and the family. The liberation of sex from the burdens of nature also nudges the individual away from society, since society is, in essence, a construct that enables people to relate to and cope with nature and each other. It made it easier to think of oneself as an autonomous, self-governing individual, rather than as a member of a community with relational responsibilities. The contraceptive pill was also a critical component of the latest phase of the Western modernist project because it created the perception that humanity could improve its own nature by defeating biology itself. The extraordinary transformation of the Western worldview in the last four decades of the twentieth century can be demonstrated graphically

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and simply – though admittedly unscientifically – by citing the New York Times editorial of 1 April 1969. The New York Times was then and is now at the forefront of the American liberal agenda. Yet in 1969 it attacked the ‘explicit portrayal’ of sexual intercourse on stage as ‘the final step in the erosion of taste and subtlety in the theatre’ and claimed that such activity ‘reduces actors to mere exhibitionists, turns audiences into voyeurs and debases sexual relationships almost to the level of prostitution’.25 It also advocated arresting actors for depicting ‘sodomy and other sexual aberrations’ on stage. How far we have travelled! It is inconceivable that any national paper in any Western country would express such sentiments today. Surveys of sexual attitudes among American university and college students in the 1960s also drive home the depths of the paradigm shift that has occurred over the last few decades. Beth Bailey refers to one such survey, conducted in 1964. A Kansas University women’s student group surveyed female students and found that over 80 per cent regarded sexual intercourse with one’s fiance as wrong, while 91 per cent regarded more casual sex as unacceptable.26 If one has a propensity to seek out vested interests in all political phenomena, including social movements, it is not difficult to imagine why the sexual revolution was close to the heart of the counter culture. Yet there was more to the counter culture than just sex. In America and Australia, liberated youth were given a second vested interest in challenging authority by the draft [conscription in Australia] for the Vietnam War. Yet the counter culture and the Vietnam Moratorium movement were strong even in places where there was no or little military involvement in Vietnam – places such as Britain, France and Italy. This phenomenon suggests that the association of the counter culture and the moratoriums may have been merely fortuitous, and that a young, idle, liberated and privileged generation of ‘baby boomers’ would have found an outlet for their energies whether or not America was fighting a war in Southeast Asia. Answering such questions is well beyond the scope of this book, but the result was unambiguous: the challenges to public authority throughout the developed world were formidable and almost indiscriminate. Students challenged governments, university authorities and their parents over the draft, the Vietnam War, education, racial discrimination, drugs and sex. Although the hippies have reached middle age and discovered that you can trust people over 30, it is difficult to deny that the challenges they instituted were mostly lasting. Arthur Marwick’s eulogy for ‘the sixties’ has no trouble identifying absurdities, such as the veneration of psychedelic drugs, that died – and in his view deserved to die – with the era.27 Nevertheless, there is no doubt in his mind that the general perception that the West underwent a paradigm shift in the 1960s is correct. In the last words of his book he expressed his conviction, with apologies, by repeating two well-established clichés: ‘there has been nothing quite like it; nothing would ever be quite the same again’.28

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There is a mountain of anecdotal evidence that lends weight to the proposition of a quantum shift in Western values since the 1960s, and in the absence of firmer evidence this book might have to rely upon them. Fortunately there also exists a vast amount of sociological evidence of this phenomenon, much of which has been collected and organised by Francis Fukuyama in his book, The Great Disruption: human nature and the reconstitution of social order.29 Fukuyama argued that the 1960s marked the beginning of a fundamental social breakdown in the West – ‘the great disruption’ – and that Western society began reconstituting itself in the 1990s. Using murder rates and other indicators of social deviance, he argues that a fundamental change in social mores and social cohesion took place in Western society in the 1960s and early 1970s and that this resulted in a wide ethical gulf between Western cultures and those of East Asia. The sociological evidence of Fukuyama’s contention takes the form of a wealth of statistical data that may be viewed both as figures in his book and as raw statistical data on his website at http://www.saisjhu.edu/faculty/fukuyama. Although the statistics for Western countries are startling in themselves, the greatest significance for this study lies in the contrast between the Western countries studied and East Asian countries, especially Japan. This disjunction suggests that the ‘great disruption’ – and by implication the libertarian morality that has emerged from it – was a culturally specific Western phenomenon. Fukuyama’s work also supports the second contention under consideration: that the cultural shift in the West since the 1960s was of such a dimension that it can be considered a force in the development of the ‘Asian values’ reaction. On all comparative measures used except for fertility rates, the contrast between ‘East and West’ was stunning. Between 1950 and 1996 Japan’s theft rates remained constant and her violent crime rates actually dropped markedly while those of Sweden, the United States and England and Wales all increased severalfold. Japan’s divorce rates over the same period showed a very slight increase while those of the other three countries increased dramatically. And between 1960 and 1996 Japan’s rate of births to single mothers remained steady at almost non-existent levels, while those of the other three countries increased about six-fold to rates up to 56 times higher than that of Japan.30 Fukuyama also studied a secondary basket of Western countries and South Korea, but the available figures are relatively incomplete compared to those of the four main countries. Nevertheless, the contrast between ‘East and West’ is still maintained in the comparison between South Korea and the other countries in figures for violent crime, theft, and divorce.31 The contrast is marked all the more because South Korea and Japan are regional leaders in embracing modernity and technology to achieve prosperity, and Japan has embraced many aspects of the sexual revolution, yet they appear to have turned their backs on the social atomism of ‘Western values’. This is not to suggest

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that Japan or any other country is intrinsically immune from family crises just because they have a Confucian culture. All the Confucian societies of East Asia have suffered from increased divorce rates since 1970, but nevertheless their rates of family decay have remained extremely low by Western standards.32 It is doubtful that there is any single, simple explanation for the differences that emerged in the survey. It is premature to attribute the differences to ‘Asian values’, or even ‘Confucian values’, but there can be no doubt that since the 1960s an identifiable, almost measurable gap has emerged between an ‘East Asian’ approach to life and a ‘Western’ one. This conclusion should not be startling, since it conforms so closely to intuitive knowledge of ‘the sixties’. It is nevertheless important to register this feature for the strong element of validity it gives the ‘Asian values’ argument.33 It is too simplistic to say that stress on ‘Asian values’ is merely a reaction to post-1960s libertarianism, but this aspect certainly goes some way towards explaining its appeal. Joseph Chan, in his description of the difference between the ‘communitarian’ approach of ‘Asian values’ and the ‘liberal’ approach that predominates in the West, lists the areas of practical difference as including censorship of pornography, marriage law, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and the invasion of civil liberties in drug detection.34 This is hardly a complete list of the fields of debate on ‘Asian values’. Nevertheless, it is significant that these concerns are among the most sensitive touchstones of the post-1960s ideological divide in the West, and are also the area on which the advocates of ‘Asian values’ are likely to get the strongest support from their respective communities. Conversely when regimes try to overturn conservative social values in the interests of ‘progress’ and ‘economic development’, they often find their levels of popular support to be paper-thin.35 This simple observation can be used to point to the underlying conservatism of the ‘Asian values’ argument, but it also provides a clue to its emotional appeal. Every time Lee Kuan Yew or his successors in the ‘Singapore school’ highlight social dislocation in the United States they touch sensitive nerves in significant sections – if not in the overwhelming majority – of their constituencies. Although other factors also contribute to a high level of popular acquiescence to authoritarianism, the idea of building a firewall against libertarianism must make authoritarianism more palatable, even if not positively desirable. The true degree of support for undemocratic regimes is difficult to measure, but it is widely acknowledged that many of the undemocratic regimes of East and Southeast Asia represent broadly the aspirations of their populations. For instance, Onuma Yasuaki, a strong critic of the ‘Asian values’ argument, nevertheless acknowledges the widespread acceptance of such regimes and actively denies that local ‘human rights activists represent the will of the people as a whole’.36 The distaste for Western permissiveness also affords advocates

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of ‘Asian values’ an ideal opportunity to engage in a syllogistic sleight-ofhand and create an artificially stark dichotomy between the West and Asia, whereby differences are exaggerated into mutually exclusive conceptions of social relations, governance and human rights.

Mere conservatism? At this point we need to consider a serious objection to the author’s reading of social conservatism. Garry Rodan argues that the rejection of the West’s post-1960s cultural revolution is a conservative reaction common to both Pacific Asian and Western countries, and from this premise he dismisses ‘Asian values’ as a mere creature of political conservatism.37 Rodan’s premise is freely conceded, but not his conclusion because it fails to account for the enigma of many dissidents, human rights advocates and democrats in Pacific Asia sharing in this aspect of the ‘Asian values’ reaction. This conundrum is explained, however, if we differentiate between political conservatism (with its inclination against democratic tendencies and the assertion of rights) and social conservatism (concerned with ethics, morality, family, social harmony and perhaps religion). In the West, social conservatives are usually aligned with political conservatives, but the evidence of this chapter suggests that in Pacific Asia this nexus cannot be assumed, and that social conservatism has deep roots in Pacific Asia that allow it to stand independent of political conservatism. This phenomenon itself begs an explanation, but the answer may lie simply in perspectives. The identification of these Asian leaders as ‘social conservatives’ is done through the prism of the West’s post-1960s cultural revolution. Seen within the contexts of their own societies, cultures and religions, however, many of these people are not social conservatives at all: they are often social, as well as political innovators. Not only does this explanation help us to make sense of an otherwise peculiar animal, but if it is considered valid it also makes the prevalence of these ‘social conservatives’ even more significant. When Asian political and social innovators look like social conservatives to the Western eye it strongly suggests that there is an underlying difference between ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’ values in the broadest sense of both terms. It does not mean that the difference is permanent or essential, or that there is not immense variation within each collection of cultures: but it does suggest that the difference is real and should not be ignored. Despite the cynicism with which many observers treat ‘Asian values’ generalisations about the decadent West and family-centred East Asia, this is one of the stronger elements of the argument – at least up to the point where advocates of ‘Asian values’ use familial or social communitarianism to justify overbearing state power. At a fundamental level the ‘Asian values’ discourse represents an attempt to use notions of Asian essentialism as a tactical weapon to confront the individualism of

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liberalism with a perspective that takes greater account of the needs of humans as social animals. Instead of dismissing family-centred communitarianism as merely a disguise for authoritarianism, critics of ‘Asian values’ would be better off acknowledging its legitimacy, and seeking ways to channel this social conservatism in democratic, humanistic directions. Part III of this book is a tentative step in that direction.

ASIAN RENAISSANCE If the 1960s and early 1970s marked a cultural shift in the West, the mid-1970s saw a fundamental shift in international relations in Southeast Asia: the fall of Indochina to communism in 1975. One does not need to resort to the Domino Theory to see that this altered fundamentally the strategic balance in Southeast Asia. The immediate response within the region was a closing of ranks among most of the remaining non-communist countries. Since its foundation in 1967, ASEAN had been a low key grouping that allowed the foreign ministers of Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand to meet in a fairly informal and private setting. There was too much rivalry and mistrust – especially of the giant member, Indonesia, and between Malaysia and the Philippines – for the grouping to engage in serious economic or political cooperation. No longer! Beginning in February 1976, heads of governments and economic ministers, as well as foreign ministers began meeting with a new purpose: to build regional solidarity and strength through economic, political, and diplomatic cooperation. Treaties were signed, a secretariat with staff and office-bearers was established, and a new diplomatic force was launched in the United Nations – one that successfully denied UN recognition to Vietnam’s puppet regime in Cambodia for many years. With the considerable exception of Vietnamese incursions on the Thai border in pursuit of Khmer Rouge fighters, ASEAN leaders were not greatly concerned about the possibility of external threats from Vietnam, or even China. They were much more afraid of internal unrest within their respective countries caused by continuing poverty and injustice, but which could be fanned by Vietnamese or Chinese financial, military and propaganda aid to dissident groups. The key to the newly serious ASEAN was President Suharto. Many valid criticisms can be made of his rule in Indonesia on grounds of corruption and human rights abuses – especially in the later years of his rule. Nevertheless, it should be recognised that only his willingness to give his enthusiastic endorsement to the ASEAN project without dominating it allowed ASEAN to give birth to a minor Southeast Asian renaissance. Economic development and regional self-reliance emerged as driving forces of the new ASEAN, along with and the principle of ‘non-interference’ – that is the habit of showing unconditional deference towards

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the regimes of member states. These principles remain cornerstones of both ASEAN and ‘Asian values’ argument today. In many ways, the success of ASEAN was also critical to the development of the regional consciousness implicit in ‘Asian values’. ASEAN’s successes bred a strong sense of regional pride, at least at elite levels, and gave the region a positive international profile. It also established strong local precedents – following a myriad of Cold War precedents – for turning a blind eye to political situations within countries in order to focus on the ‘bigger picture’ of security and prosperity. ASEAN’s spirit of defiant triumphalism reached a new height in the late 1990s when the organisation admitted Myanmar and later Cambodia to full membership despite their appalling records on human rights and democracy. It did this in the face of European and American pressure, having already expanded its membership to include autocratic Brunei and Leninist Vietnam and Laos with Western endorsement. It is worth noting that ASEAN’s actions at least had the virtue of consistency. It welcomed the entry of dictatorships indiscriminately, whereas the West gave every appearance of choosing between dictatorships and deciding for no obvious reason of principle that some dictatorships (such as Vietnam) are ‘good’, while others (such as Myanmar) are ‘bad’. It is no wonder the West’s human rights and democracy rhetoric is treated with a certain amount of cynicism in Asia.

‘EAST ASIAN MIRACLE’ The rise of ASEAN from the mid-1970s onwards was paralleled by an upsurge of confidence throughout most of Pacific Asia, based almost solely on steadily increasing levels of prosperity. In 1981 Dr Mahathir launched his ‘Look East’ policy, which upheld Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as models of successful economies built upon East Asian work ethics and cultures. He exhorted Malaysians to commit themselves to ‘learning and practising Japanese and Korean work ethics’ and told them to ‘look East where people are hard-working’, and to emulate ‘the diligence in work, efficiency in management and trade relations and other aspects found in the East’.38 He told President Chun Doo-hwan of South Korea that ‘the Korean attitude towards work, their loyalty and discipline’ were part of the key to his country’s economic miracle.39 The ‘Look East’ campaign never became a practical enterprise, except to give Japanese and Korean companies an advantage in tendering for Malaysian business, but it proved a highly consistent rhetorical theme. In November 1987, 6 years after he launched the ‘Look East’ campaign Mahathir was still reassuring Malaysians that his campaign ‘to study work ethics and management skills from Japan, Korea [and] Taiwan’ was alive and well.40

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While Mahathir was running his formal ‘Look East’ campaign, Lee Kuan Yew began an unofficial and more low-key version of the same policy just across the causeway. Early in the 1980s he set Singapore copying Japanese labour management techniques, sponsoring seminars to study the productivity of Japanese industry and even importing Japanese experts to advise his government on how to increase productivity. ‘A keen sense of productivity must become part of the ethos of our people as it is with the Japanese’, he told the launch of the first Productivity Month in 1982.41 At the same time as Dr Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew were ‘looking East’ to Japan and South Korea, those two countries were being lauded in the West on much the same grounds: that they could teach the West about the importance of hard work, education and group purpose. In 1979 Ezra Vogel heralded the triumph of an export-oriented, corporatist, state-led East Asian economic miracle with his best seller, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America.42 This was effectively the celebration of a marriage between Frederich List’s German statist model of economic development and the Japanese collectivist model of social organisation.43 ‘Introducing basic change is never easy’, wrote Vogel, . . . but to expect Americans who are accustomed to thinking of their nation as number one, to acknowledge that in many areas its supremacy has been lost to an Asian nation and then learn from that nation is to ask a good deal. Americans are peculiarly receptive to any explanation of Japan’s economic performance which avoids acknowledging Japan’s superior competitiveness.44 In another place, he reminisced on Japan’s apparent superiority in the social order: Ask the informed Japanese who has travelled abroad if America and European governments have handled problems like economic growth, urban renewal, pollution control, and crime with greater success, and the reply is likely to be a sigh of benevolent sympathy, ending with a rhetorical query as to why those countries have become so decadent.45 Herman Kahn made two major contributions to this discourse in the same year. The first was his collaborative work with Thomas Pepper, The Japanese Challenge: The Success and Failure of Economic Success,46 and the second was his World Economic Development: 1979 and Beyond. Kahn’s thesis was essentially an advocacy of state-directed, export-oriented capitalism in which an idealised Neo-Confucian ethic provided useful social values: an emphasis on education, vertical social cohesion (willing cooperation across class), and collective purpose in the face of adversity and rapid change. Twelve years later, Japan’s economy was stagnating under the weight of new challenges and was not such an obvious source of inspira-

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tion. South Korea and Taiwan, however, were still flourishing and following the List/collectivist model of development championed by Japan decades earlier, and Vogel almost ritually welcomed them – along with Singapore and Hong Kong – into the ‘tigers club’ with The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia.47 He attributed their success to four specific institutional and cultural practices – ‘a meritocratic elite, an entrance exam system [for admission to the institutions of the elite], the importance of the group [especially family and state], and the goal of self-improvement’ – which he described collectively as ‘industrial Neo-Confucianism’.48 It is doubtful whether either Lee Kuan Yew or Dr Mahathir would have had any qualms about accepting either his analysis or his label. By this stage most of Pacific Asia had joined what the World Bank had dubbed ‘the East Asian miracle’ with annual growth rates several times those of the West49 and industrial Neo-Confucianism was being lionised by both Asian and Western academics as the secret of East Asia’s success.50 ‘Asian values’ advocates heralded the Asian renaissance as a forerunner to a ‘Pacific century’. In 1989, Tommy Koh, speaking as Singapore’s Ambassador to the United States, observed that The economies of the Asia Pacific region are the fastest growing and the most dynamic in the world. On the average, they are growing at twice the rate of the OECD countries. Indeed, some of the countries in the region, such as Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore, have regularly registered growth rates of over 10 per cent. This trend is likely to continue into the next decade. I also expect that countries such as Thailand and Malaysia will join the ranks of the newly industrializing economies (NIEs). . . . By the year 2000, experts predict that US trade with the Pacific will be twice as much as its trade with Europe.51 Expressions of self-confidence such as this became commonplace by the early 1990s, but they were only just starting to emerge in the late 1980s. This mood of cautious triumphalism set the stage for a period of heightened East Asian cultural, economic and political assertion although the form it took could not have been foreseen. Yet the essential elements of what became known as ‘Asian values’ were present by the end of the 1980s. Before moving into the 1990s, however, it is appropriate to return to a consideration of the contributions of Lee Kuan Yew and Dr Mahathir. These two men were the pioneers of ‘Asian values’. If the broad themes of reaction and assertion identified in this chapter are valid, they should be conspicuous in the development of their political thoughts.

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Narrow histories: Lee Kuan Yew and Dr Mahathir

Those who regard the ‘Asian values’ argument as a sign of insecurity point to the fact that its earliest manifestations emerged from Singapore – one of the most insecure, multicultural, modern and Western specks of land on the continent. At another level it is significant that the argument for illiberal democracies emerged from what have historically been two of the most democratic countries of Pacific Asia: Singapore and Malaysia. Upon reflection this is not surprising, since a secure dictatorship would have little reason to engage in such a dialogue unless it was for purely external consumption. On the other hand, a regime that answers to an electorate without actually allowing truly democratic competition must continually rationalise its rule to its own people. Without discounting the value of such insights, we are fortunate that we can be much more precise in tracing the origins and development of the ‘Asian values’ reaction, because in each country the ‘Asian values’ agenda was written by a particular person: Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and Mahathir Mohamad in Malaysia. Since each of these men has spent decades in public life – and in fact in the seat of power – their personal histories enable the reconstruction of an unusually intimate picture of the development of a major cultural and political phenomenon. If the ideas espoused in the previous chapter are broadly valid, then such a study should uncover evidence of deep-seated social and political outlooks based on hierarchy, order and communitarian virtues, along with at least a latent sense of disdain for ‘the West’. Even a superficial knowledge of these two men assures us that we will be able to find these characteristics, but it is nevertheless surprising just how deeply the agenda of ‘Asian values’ seems to be embedded in their respective worldviews.

LEE KUAN YEW The immediate cause of Lee Kuan Yew’s initial foray into the politics of ‘Asian values’ seems to have been attacks from the Dutch Labour Party on the PAP government through the Socialist International in 1976.

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At that time the PAP was still a member of the Socialist International, and democratic socialism was still part of the rhetoric, if not the practice of the party. In the mid-1970s the PAP was charged – not without some justification – with being neither democratic nor socialist, and threatened with expulsion from the organisation. The PAP responded by resigning from the Socialist International, and then launching a spirited defence of its actions based on its record of achievement: it claimed to have found a ‘Singapore way’ to achieve socialism and to balance democracy, human rights and the national interest.1 Yet despite the stridency of the PAP’s defence, Lee Kuan Yew must have been dissatisfied that a significant plank of his government’s legitimating mythology had been rendered useless. In place of rhetoric about ‘democratic socialism’, which in any case had been remote from reality ever since the PAP came to office, Lee was left telling the world and the electorate to ignore criticisms simply because the ‘Singapore way’ delivers results. The introduction of the term ‘Asian values’ at an academic conference on ‘Asian Values and Modernization’ in 1977 seems to have been an attempt to fill this ideological and regimelegitimating vacuum.2 From the start, however, ‘Asian values’ was difficult to define. Foreign Minister S. Rajaratnam closed the conference on an exceptionally deflating note: I have very serious doubts as to whether such a thing as ‘Asian values’ really exists. . . . If it has any meaning at all it is merely a convenient way of describing the heterogeneous, conflicting and complex network of beliefs, prejudices and values developed in the countries which for geographical purposes have been grouped as being in Asia.3 The ‘Asian values’ conference highlighted the inappropriateness of using the term ‘Asian values’. Apart from Rajaratnam’s intervention, the only Asian values Ho Wing Men identified were conservative values that held back modernisation,4 while Peter Chen found such diversity among Asian cultures that he announced that he was limiting his discussion to the values of ‘East Asian culture’ and intended to ignore the rest.5 The conference marked a setback for Lee’s hopes of constructing a useful Asian essentialism, but he was intelligent enough to realise that there was only a limited future down that path. Instead he returned to his earlier practice of promoting and praising ‘Chinese’ and ‘Confucian’ values. Yet despite his ‘Confucian’ rhetoric, Lee was interested in promoting only a very narrow reading of Confucianism. The values he wanted to promote are those identified in Chapter 1 as being characteristic of the ‘Asian values’ argument: state and family-centred communitarianism, hard work, thrift and education. Tracing the development of these ideas in Lee’s mind helps us to understand the mixture of ingenuousness and utilitarianism that lies behind the ‘Asian values’ debate.

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Communitarianism Communitarianism, for instance, was already dominant in Lee’s thinking in the mid-1960s and is found in the rhetoric by which he justified the neo-authoritarian subjugation of the trade unions and most of civil society to the will of the government at that time. In August 1965, Singapore separated from Malaysia in an antagonistic atmosphere and faced a precarious future as a city-state. Lee declared that he was setting out to build a ‘rugged’ and ‘tightly-knit’ society capable of ensuring the country’s survival. He launched this rhetoric in October 1965, less than 3 months after Singapore became independent. ‘This is a dangerous part of the world’, he announced, so we must ‘breed a rugged generation to ensure our survival’.6 This marked the beginning of a period of rhetorical flourish in which Lee praised communitarian values and idealised the ‘rugged society’. The government’s already well-established tendency to subsume to itself elements of civil society was accelerated and intensified with the object of turning the whole of society into a unitary whole moving in one direction – a ‘tightly organized society’7 under a centralised, technocratic government. When he spoke of a ‘rugged society’ he meant that the society as an organic whole was to be ‘rugged’ and resilient. Lee envisioned the ‘ruggedness’ of the individual members of society as being akin to members of a ‘herd’ who, due to their cultural ‘instincts,’ are effective ‘digits’ in the collective.8 The message was repeated a few months later, when he praised the ‘spirit’ and the ‘verve’ of ‘the people as a whole’, though on this occasion he did not mention his fanciful and insulting metaphor of the ‘herd’.9 There can be little doubt that Lee was operating from communitarian impulses in the immediate aftermath of separation from Malaysia. The trail of his thinking, however, extends back further. As early as 1962, when Singapore was still a self-governing British colony, Lee revealed his emerging faith in the virtues of ‘social discipline’. At that stage, he was only experimenting with ideas of communitarianism, but the pattern of his thought was becoming plain. Speaking of countries that he had visited recently and on which he had made observations, he said: ‘Where the social discipline is less, the progress is slower. . . . If you don’t get social discipline, everybody does what he likes to do, or will not bustle about what he is told to do. And that becomes the whole momentum.’10 Lee Kuan Yew’s idea of a ‘rugged society’ was communitarian, but from the perspective of this study it is doubly significant that he was trying to build his ‘rugged society’ on the rhetoric and practice of cultural assertion. By 1965 Lee had earned a reputation for belittling the supposed glories of past cultures. Then in August 1966, without obvious warning, he began bemoaning the lack of tradition in a very young country like Singapore, and started emphasising the virtues of social

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traditions. Two months later, in November 1966, the new direction of Lee’s thinking emerged as a dominant theme at a meeting at the University of Singapore. In this address, he spoke at length of the positive roles that the local communal cultures of Singapore could play in the development of a ‘rugged society’. He sought to build a new social consensus based upon the retention of traditional cultures and hoped that the members of each racial community would use their cultural heritage as an anchor, so that each person would be a strong, robust member of society. The cost of losing one’s cultural roots without developing an adequate replacement, he said, was to become ‘a soulless creature’ and ‘a very weak digit’.12 A month later Lee coined the term ‘cultural ballast’, by which he referred to the supposedly innate strength that comes from identification with one’s cultural heritage.13 Lee saw a nexus between culture and language, and hoped that teaching school children their ‘mother tongue’, even as a second language to English would provide them with the ‘cultural ballast’ they needed to be strong ‘digits’ in Singaporean society.14 Lee’s cultural assertion was inspired in part by a reaction to the counter culture and ‘the sixties’ phenomenon in the West. The Western student revolt associated with the Vietnam moratoriums threatened the sense of order and hierarchy that was intrinsic to his view of society, and he saw the cultural assertion of the Chinese in particular, and of Asian societies in general, as a significant line of defence. Lee began expressing his concerns in 1971, when he bemoaned the recentlyemerged Western youth culture of ‘violent demonstrations in support of peace, urban guerrillas, free love and hippieism’. He hoped that ‘the traditional importance of the Asian family unit’ could prevent the excesses that could result from imitating contemporary Western mores.15 Later the same year he repeated this sentiment, telling an English audience that he was confident that Singapore could to some extent ‘inoculate and immunise the people [from Western vices], through their cultural and social values’.16 A year later, Lee began paying frequent and favourable attention to the virtues and the importance of Chinese culture in Singapore. Goh Keng Swee has testified independently to the importance of the contrast between the Chinese-educated Chinese and the counter culture in Lee’s thinking at that time. He told The Straits Times that the Chinese-educated not only proved themselves worthy adversaries when they were aligned with the Communist Party, but ‘when the counter culture of the West developed, [they] held it in contempt’ and ‘retained their strength and cohesion’.17 Although his primary inspiration was Chinese culture, Lee attributed similar qualities of ‘cultural ballast’ to other Asian cultures and came to believe that each person should retain his or her own cultural underpinning, and the strength that he believed was associated with it. Hence Lee gave Indian audiences the same messages of cultural assertion as he gave Singapore’s Chinese communities.18

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Lee believed that Singapore was exceptionally vulnerable to Western decadence because of the widespread use of English and ready access to a relatively open media. Lee Kuan Yew stated the problem, as he saw it, very explicitly in 1971: . . . people in new countries cannot afford to imitate the fads and fetishes of the contemporary West. The strange behaviour of demonstration and violence-prone young men and women in wealthy America, seen on TV and the newspapers, are not relevant to the social and economic circumstances of new underdeveloped countries.19 Lee was convinced of the potential pervasiveness of the American counter culture by the example of Canadian, British and Australian youths who ‘imitated’ the Americans because of ‘the nexus of a common language’, which acted as a ‘lowest common denominator’.20 ‘Permissiveness, social indiscipline leads to disorder and decline’, he warned a few years later in a lecture on the dangers of accepting American values.21 On this occasion, he linked American-style democracy to the development of the permissive society, foreshadowing a symbiosis that was to become a central feature of the ‘Asian values’ argument. And lest it be thought that these were casual interjections by Lee, he confirmed his perception of a dichotomy between Western permissiveness and Asian family values in a public letter to Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee in 1979: ‘We have to reject the passing fads of the West. Particularly important are intra-family relationships. We must reinforce these traditional family ties found in all Asian societies.’22 This letter prefaced the introduction of moral education, religious knowledge and Confucianism courses in schools, which marked the proper beginning of the ‘Asian values’ campaign in Singapore. By the 1980s the counter culture was but a dim memory, but its legacy of permissiveness was still regarded as a potent force by Singaporean leaders. When Culture Minister S. Dhanabalan banned Cosmopolitan, he specified its consistent culture of ‘permissiveness’ as the reason. Echoing the views that Lee Kuan Yew had been espousing for more than a decade, he told members of the government’s censorship boards: We cannot allow every fickle craze from the mass consumer markets with which we do business to take root in our society. . . . In these societies, there is a ferment in ideas, especially those that challenge and undermine every traditional value and institution. . . . Every traditional virtue and value has been insidiously and systematically undermined – be it patriotism or fidelity to marriage partner, or consideration for children and women, or respect for the aged or temperance of any desire.23

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Confucian values No doubt it does not come as a complete surprise that many of the elements of ‘Asian values’ pre-date the contemporary debate, but it is uncanny just how closely Lee’s thinking in the 1960s is linked to the rhetoric of the 1990s. Yet the lessons of the period go even deeper. Beneath Lee’s speeches in the 1960s was an implicitly relational, hierarchical, elitist and communitarian perspective that can be attributed reasonably to ‘Asian values’ in the broadest, non-sectarian sense of the term, although it would be more accurate to follow Lee’s own terminology and describe them as Chinese or ‘Confucian’ values. Lee’s very perception of the political process is breathtakingly elitist and communitarian. Although it is difficult to conceive of a more elitist inspiration for a model of democratic politics than that of the relationship between teacher and student, Lee consciously adopted this imperial Confucian model to rationalise his relationship with the electorate. He explained his position succinctly in 1966: ‘For effective teaching – such as explaining to an ignorant audience the simple A.B.C. of currency or reserves backing, and why our currency could be sound if we do this or that – one really has to give of oneself.’ Elsewhere in this speech Lee expressed his vision of society in even more overtly organic and elitist terms when he introduced the concept of the social ‘pyramid’. The social ‘pyramid’, said Lee, consisted of ‘top leaders’ at the apex, ‘good executives’ in the middle, and a ‘highly civic-conscious broad mass’ at the base. Lee supplemented his imagery of the pyramid with that of a military organisation, and argued that after the leaders comes the ‘middle strata of good executives’, because ‘the best general or the best prime minister in the world will be stymied if he does not have high-quality executives to help him carry out his ideas, thinking and planning’. Finally comes ‘the broad base’ or the ‘privates’. They must be ‘imbued not only with self but also social discipline, so that they can respect the community and do not spit all over the place’.24 An essential concomitant to Lee’s hierarchical, elitist perception of society was the concept of the meritocracy. Lee was adamant that, following the most idealised reading of Chinese Confucian tradition, the elite would hold their superior positions because of merit, talent and education, rather than because of class, inherited wealth, or family connections. Members of the elite should be the most intelligent, the best educated, the best trained, and the ones with the most verve, initiative and energy. Lee was very open in his scepticism about liberalism and human rights. Even when he was Leader of the Opposition in the late 1950s, he proclaimed the subservience of human rights to the need for good government: ‘We would be foolish to try and beguile ourselves with unsophisticated phrases of democracy and liberty and human rights and freedom, while we go down the drain.’25 Then, in one of his first speeches as Prime Minister, he declared his complete lack of interest in

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the theory of the separation of powers,26 and he duly conscripted and cajoled the civil service into becoming a political arm of his government, to be followed eventually by the whole of civil society, including the media, the trade unions, and the community centres. He also espoused a utilitarian theory of law that rationalised the role of the courts as yet another instrument for nation building and ‘the maintenance of good government’.27 Democracy also fared poorly in Lee’s eyes. As early as 1955, he was on record as regarding democracy as an ‘experiment’ to be judged by its results28 – a position that is completely consistent with his later practice of putting ‘good government’ ahead of democracy. It is significant that in the 1990s, he linked his scepticism about democracy and his advocacy of ‘good government’ to his communitarianism and cultural relativism thus: All peoples of all countries need good government. A country must first have economic development, then democracy may follow. With a few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries. . . . As an Asian of Chinese cultural background, my values are for a government which is honest, effective and efficient in protecting its people and allowing opportunities to all to advance themselves in a stable and orderly society where they can live a good life and raise their children to do better than themselves.29 It is worth noting that Lee’s mistrust of democracy was rooted at least partially in his experience of the failed democracies of Asia. In the 1990s, Lee held up the Myanmar of the 1960s as an example of the limitations of democracy, and – oddly considering Ne Win’s appalling economic record – the virtues of a strong authoritarian state: Ne Win once was given a chance to run Burma and he made sense out of it. There is no doubt about it. When he took over in ’57, ’58 he whipped the place temporarily into shape. Piles of rubbish on the road, everybody was building right on the roads. . . . Politicians trying to outdo each other in popularity. . . . The General came in and smashed it all. He was not interested in being popular, he was interested in making sense. He ordered the troops out, cleaned up the streets, knocked the houses down, made new roads where they had been planned. When he came in this second time, there was no resistance. . . .30 This passage is taken from an interview Lee gave in the 1990s, but the lesson was not drawn with the benefit of hindsight. In 1966, Lee made a speech bewailing the collapse of democracy without ‘social discipline’

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and he cited these same experiences in Myanmar to demonstrate the degeneracy that he saw as a more general Asian phenomenon.31 Yet despite his scepticism about democracy, Lee has never been reluctant to justify his mandate by reference to his electoral majorities. He has, in fact, taken electoral victory as a writ to engage in whatever action is required to deliver ‘good government’. In post-separation Singapore we did not witness election results being ignored, rigged or overturned, but the democratic mandate being used to justify the quashing of the liberal order. The ‘tightly knit’ and ‘rugged society’ was ‘illiberal democracy’ in action decades before the term was coined.

The family There is, however, one major area of the modern ‘Asian values’ debate where Lee’s record is less than consistent: the role of the family. Lee has not been a champion of the family in a sense that would be recognised by any Western social conservative. He has been a champion of working mothers, contraceptives, childcare, abortion, sterilisation, and eugenics, and has speculated on the potential benefits of encouraging single motherhood and polygamy for the ‘brightest’ sections of the population.32 Yet despite the impression given by this list, from the late 1960s onwards he has displayed an underlying, though completely ineffectual concern for the consequences of his own policies on family life. He told a meeting of female university students in 1968: There are almost no substitutes for the nurturing and nourishing a child receives from his or her parents, principally the mother. . . . The creche and kindergarten are inadequate substitutes for the home. Perhaps we shall have to learn, like the advanced societies, that the investment a country puts into its women does not give the same kind of returns one expects to get from male citizens.33 In 1971, he expressed some of his worries to the Press Institute at Helsinki: Those who have been brought up in their own traditional life styles and cultural values have greater resistance to Western ills. By all means the pill to keep the birth rate down. But must it lead to promiscuity, venereal diseases, exhibitionism and a breakdown of the family unit? I do not have all the answers. I can only hope the pill plus the traditional importance of the Asian family unit . . . can prevent the excesses from imitating contemporary Western sexual mores.34

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Lee’s government has made great play of supporting the family, and even bases its housing and social security policies on the principles of the encouragement and presumption of intact, extended families. The role of the family creates a dilemma for Lee Kuan Yew because the family is expected to fulfil two contradictory roles. It needs to be the building block of society and to provide the rationale for the paternalistic state, but it is also expected to be completely – and often humiliatingly – subservient to the needs of the state and the needs of the capitalist economy. Singaporeans are expected to function in extended, three-generation families, so that they, rather than the state, can take the main financial burden of caring for the young, the old, the sick and the unemployed. Housing policy currently contains incentives for three-tier families to live near each other, ignoring the fact that their separation was engineered by the government’s housing policies in the first place. Health and social security policies encourage, and sometimes force adult children to assist aged parents with money. Government ministers and even the feature articles in the Sunday newspapers berate parents to teach their children moral values, responsibility and respect for elders.35 Yet all the while, the government is continually undermining the authority and standing of the family by pressuring it into assuming roles of subservience to the state. The government presumed that it could and should turn fertility on and off like a tap through eugenically sensitive economic and institutional incentives and disincentives. Confinement and antenatal charges in hospitals, access to housing, public servants’ access to paid maternity leave, access to good schools, and even direct financial bonuses from the government were determined by the mother’s level of education, the number of children in the family, and whether or not the mother or father had been sterilised. The humiliation extended even further into family life. The government presumed that it could and should determine the languages spoken in family homes. The government presumed that it could and should take responsibility for the moral, social and civic education of children ‘to save Singapore from becoming a nation of thieves’.36 And all the while mothers were being urged to enter the paid workforce and parents were turning increasingly to third parties to raise their children. Despite the government’s sensitivity about raising children to have Asian values, many Singaporeans now leave the rearing of young children to ‘substitute mothers’ – usually grandparents, but often elder siblings, private foster care, child care centres, or foreign housemaids. Insofar as parents have retained a direct role in personally transmitting values to the young, it has been in spite of, rather than because of government policy. For the purposes of this book we can leave aside the question of the stress that these developments have placed on families and parents, though these must be considerable. The matter of immediate concern is that the family has become utterly dependent on the whims of the

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government for its character and function. It has been nearly destroyed as a role model for a hierarchical society and a communitarian, patriarchal state. Its long-term value for the transmission of traditional Asian values (without the inverted commas) must also be in serious doubt. Yet neither Lee, nor any of his successors who wish to remain faithful to his legacy can afford to give the family the support or the freedom that it needs to fulfil its communitarian function. Truly strengthening and respecting the family would recreate alternative foci of domestic authority to rival the government, and such a move runs completely contrary to his narrow, state-focused version of ‘Asian values’. Yet despite the contradictions inherent in his position, this suggests that at least at a superficial level that he is what we might call a ‘familial communitarian’ as well as a state-centred communitarian. It should now be clear that the seeds of the modern ‘Asian values’ debate have been planted deeply in Lee’s political thought for many decades and strains of illiberalism, communitarianism and cultural assertion are rooted deeply in his mind. To a remarkable extent, the ‘Asian values’ argument of the 1990s was merely a sophisticated version of ideas on which Lee had been acting for three to four decades. None of this denies that the immediate forces that prompted their sudden concern for ‘Asian values’ were the demands of political and economic expediency, but it suggests that behind the politics, there were deeper impulses at work.

DR MAHATHIR Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad may seem an unlikely heir of Lee Kuan Yew’s political ideas, but he probably appreciated the delicious irony of appropriating his old enemy’s rhetoric. It is doubtful that, left to himself, Mahathir ever would have conceived of the ‘Asian values’ argument as an holistic, evolving entity as Lee seems to have done, but he should not be regarded as an interloper. There is ample evidence that, like Lee, Mahathir’s advocacy of ‘Asian values’ is based on a mixture of political expediency and longstanding, deep-seated impulses and beliefs. Mahathir’s role in the ‘Asian values’ debate centres around contributions in four areas: liberal democracy, ‘East Asian’ values and work ethic, the corrupting influence of ‘Western values’ (as opposed to Malay and Islamic family values) and the West’s continuing exploitation of the developing world. This latter element was peculiar to Mahathir and sets his views apart from those of Lee, but gives him a point of commonality with some Asian critics of ‘Asian values’, such as Chandra Muzaffar.37 His position on all of these areas of contention was linked, to some extent, to questions of economic development.

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The development of Mahathir’s illiberal approach to democracy has not been completely consistent, and has shifted with the exigencies of political expediency. It began in the aftermath of Malaysia’s race riots of 13 May 1969, when the Malay-led government suspended democracy and imposed rule by a temporary National Operations Council (NOC). ‘Why not call a spade a spade?’, he wrote in August of that year. Why not say bravely that the people of Malaysia are too immature for a workable democracy? Why not say that we need some form of authoritarian rule? . . . The disadvantage of the democratic process is that it satisfies no one. Authoritarian rule can at least produce a stable strong government.38 This passage suggests that Mahathir may have been using the upheaval of 13 May as an excuse to argue against the democratic process, but that would be a misreading. At this stage, Mahathir was a savage critic of the Malay leadership. Having already lost his seat in the House of Representatives in the elections that preceded the May riots, he was then expelled from UMNO and even had his first book, The Malay Dilemma, suppressed. It would be remarkable if an oppositional figure in such a weak position argued strongly against the democratic processes on which his future depended. Indeed, a close reading of the passage confirms that this was primarily a tactical challenge to the Malay political leadership, and his dispute was not with democracy per se. Perhaps, the most accurate observation one can make is that Mahathir regarded democracy as being, at best, just one of several paths to good government. In the 1980s, as an incumbent Prime Minister rather than a hopeful opposition figure, Mahathir expressed concerns more commensurate with his newly acquired power – about the dangers of democracy putting power in the hands of an ignorant electorate: The modern world is against autocracy. It believes in democracy on the assumption that the majority, even if it is illiterate and not well-versed in politics, must always be right. The problem is that opportunists, rogues and foreigners also have access to the minds of the electorate.39 Despite his severe reservations, Mahathir has never moved beyond merely expressing general caution about majority rule. To this day he maintains that he runs a democratic country and defends his mandate by referring to his victories at the ballot box. Like Lee Kuan Yew, Mahathir’s dispute is with the ‘liberal’ part of ‘liberal democracy’. In 1994, he opined that the West’s interpretation of human rights is that every individual can do what he likes, free from any restraint by governments. It does not

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matter if the government is elected democratically by the majority of the people. Governments, according to liberal democrats, cannot in any way act against the personal wishes of the individual in society.40 Hence Mahathir does not regret ‘the choice to adopt a democratic system’.41 Yet in the democracy of which he approves ‘it is important for a leader or government to be free of influence or threat of the possibility of defeat in the course of policy formulation or implementation’ because ‘a government without any threat can sometimes act more fairly’.42 It is also important that ‘when particular groups agitate on issues touching on racial aspects, . . . the Government [must] act quickly and firmly to prevent any possible racial disturbance’. When it comes to dealing with threats of racial disturbances, ‘the Government should not be afraid of being criticized for being intolerant . . .’.43 In 1995, he linked his illiberal approach to democracy with his identification with East Asian culture: As even a cursory glance at East Asia reveals, we believe that strong, stable governments prepared to make decisions which, though often unpopular, are nevertheless in the best interests of the nation, are a prerequisite for economic development. . . . to Asians, democracy does not confer a license for citizens to go wild.44 Commentators generally agree there is little chance of Malaysian democracy prompting citizens to go wild. The prime minister dominates the executive, the federal parliament, most state parliaments and the media, and since Mahathir made the judiciary subservient in law to parliament in 1988, there have been no practical checks and balances in the Malaysian political system.45

Look East! Mahathir’s identification of illiberalism with ‘East Asian’ culture provides a linkage with his approval of ‘East Asian’ values and work ethics. His admiration of Chinese, Japanese and Korean cultures seems peculiar in a Malay nationalist, but it is a major feature of his career. Even while he was a medical student he was already giving thought to the secret of the worldly success of the Chinese in Malaysia, and the concomitant mystery of Malay ‘backwardness’.46 By 1970 he had developed his thinking to the point where he wrote a book about it. Most commentaries on The Malay Dilemma concentrate on the early part of the book, where Mahathir set out his theories of heredity and Malay dysgenics and argued that Malays are culturally and genetically inferior to Chinese.47 This premise then provided his justification for maintaining ‘positive discrimination’ in favour of the Malays to help them catch up with the Chinese: a stance

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that marked a fundamental point of difference with Lee Kuan Yew’s meritocratic version of ‘Asian values’. Less spectacular but just as significant is the later part of the book where Mahathir expounded on the cultural traits that he believed were inhibiting Malays’ worldly success – including politeness, deference and a relaxed attitude to time – and the countervailing cultural virtues that he wanted Malays to develop.48 The context and occasionally his explicit statements make clear that the Chinese shopkeeper is the role model for his ‘rehabilitated’ Malay.49 Although Mahathir’s advocacy of ‘East Asian values’ may lead one to suspect an underlying cultural essentialism in his thinking, his malleable attitude to Malay culture, along with his ongoing willingness to admit that Western values are not all bad50 suggests that his approach is much more sophisticated. In The Malay Dilemma, he judged the worth of a custom strictly according to whether it hindered or facilitated progress. Interestingly, the three most basic elements of ‘Malayness’ as he saw it in 1970 – feudalism, Islam and adat (or traditional customs) – were all classed as features to be merely accepted as realities and perhaps adapted to modern needs.51 This observation highlights the utilitarian nature of Mahathir’s contribution to the ‘Asian values’ debate, but it does not, in itself, undermine his arguments or lead to the conclusion that his approach is insincere. Mahathir has since renounced his theories of Malay inferiority,52 but he has never abandoned his admiration for the Chinese businessman, which he has expanded into an admiration for ‘East Asian’ values and work ethics. Soon after ascending to the prime ministership in 1981, he began putting his cultural arguments into practice with his ‘Look East’ policy, which upheld Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as models of successful cultures. Yet what is not initially obvious from his encounters with East Asia is how he was drawn only to those countries with strong, hegemonic governments – Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, rather than liberal Hong Kong – and how instrumental he regarded the role of strong government in those countries’ successes. When Mahathir praised the Japanese for their successes in 1983, he addressed his remarks to Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone saying that he ‘could not help but admire the fact that you and your predecessors, through sheer hard work and determination, helped to guide the first Asian nation from an islandbased agrarian society . . .’.53 The role of strong, stable government obviously counted more for Mahathir than the fact that it was democratic. Indeed, it is not at all clear that Mahathir was not tracing the line of Nakasone’s predecessors back to the Meiji Restoration.

Western values The ‘Look East’ campaign was also part of Mahathir’s broader campaign against ‘Western values’. In the same breath in which Mahathir was telling

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the 1982 UMNO General Assembly to ‘look East’ to emulate the diligence found there, he was also saying to ‘look East . . . to rid ourselves of the Western values that we have absorbed’.54 Like Lee Kuan Yew, Mahathir’s concern over the creeping, corrupting effects of ‘Western values’ seems to be a reaction to the libertarianism and secularism that swept America and most of the West during and after the 1960s. In 1995, Mahathir attacked ‘Western hedonism’ in terms that leave little doubt about the depth of his emotional revulsion at modern ‘Western values’: Materialism, sensual gratification, and selfishness are rife. The community has given way to the individual and his desires. The inevitable consequence has been the breakdown of established institutions and diminished respect for marriage, family values, elders, and important customs, conventions, and traditions. These have been replaced by a new set of values based largely on the rejection of all that relates to spiritual faith and communal life.55 Nearly 20 years earlier Mahathir expressed similar sentiments in his book, The Challenge, linking them, tellingly, with further stereotypes of workers with poor work ethics.56 Mahathir does not criticise all ‘Western values’ in perpetuity. In fact, he regards ‘the old values and systems of the West’ as worthy of emulation, these being ‘orderliness, discipline and firm social organisation’, as well as Western mastery of technology and useful ‘secular knowledge’.57 He complains of the post-war ‘transformation of values’ and the ‘collapse of values’, particularly since decolonisation, the American defeat in Vietnam and the rise of the student protest movement of the 1960s.58 The fruits of this transformation include homosexuality, drugs, obscenity, pornography, nudity, promiscuity, civil disobedience, cohabitation without marriage, disrespect towards parents and a decline of religious practice.59 More recently he has added incest, hedonism, and ‘total immorality’ to his list of negative ‘Western values’.60 Granted this litany, it should come as no surprise to learn that close to the heart of Mahathir’s hostility to new ‘Western values’ is his concern for the family, which he believes ‘provides stability and security for the individual’: I believe that a lifestyle rooted in family and friends is the key. I have had occasion to discuss the family at length with Westerners. Many say two men living together is a family, two women living together is a family, an unmarried woman and her child are a family. To Asians those are not families. A family exists when a man and a woman are joined in marriage and have children. The Western redefinition of the family is totally unacceptable.61 In the context of our study of Mahathir it is immaterial that many in the West would agree with his critique of these ‘Western values’ and that his

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reactions are not uniquely ‘Asian’. Of greater import is the fact that his objection to libertarianism is based fundamentally on the detrimental effect that he perceives this has on the family and on friendships as vehicles of social stability and security. Significantly, however, Mahathir rejects Islamist conservatism as strongly as he rejects libertarianism. He regards calls for an Islamic state and the imposition of Shari’a as dangerous threats to social stability and his rule. When reading this book’s chapter on Islam it is worth remembering that Mahathir, one of the founders of the contemporary ‘Asian values’ agenda, aligns himself squarely with humanistic, consultative interpretations of Islam (emphasising the fallibility of mere humans in interpreting divine revelation) at the expense of dogmantic literalism.62

Neo-colonialism Interestingly, The Challenge (1976) also foreshadows Mahathir’s conspiracy-like theories about the West’s continuing neo-colonialist exploitation of the developing world. He warned that the West was consciously trying to disrupt and raise the cost of third world industrial production by urging Asian workers to organise and agitate for wage increases,63 a charge that he repeated to an audience in Tokyo in 1995.64 He even regarded the imposition of democratic governments on former colonies as device to make economic rivals vulnerable, unstable and inefficient,65 thus bringing full circle our trek through his thinking. Mahathir’s theories about the neo-colonialist nature of East–West economic relations came to the fore as soon as he became prime minister 6 years after publication of The Challenge. One of his first acts was to preside over a government-sponsored takeover bid of Guthrie Corporation, an old British plantation company in Malaysia. The takeover was conducted by the normal rules of the London Stock Exchange by a legitimate, albeit government-owned investment agency,66 but was clearly an exercise in the economic nationalism for which Mahathir was to become renowned. Britain reacted in kind, denouncing the takeover as ‘nationalisation’ and changing the rules of the Stock Exchange to provide British companies with some protection against future foreign takeover bids. Ian Coates, the Managing Director of Guthrie, described the takeover as ‘absolutely disgraceful’. Mahathir responded with the claim – which seems undeniable two decades later in the era of globalisation – that if a company is ‘up for grabs, then anybody should be able to go for it, whether Malaysian or British’ and accused Britain of maintaining a ‘colonialist mentality’.67 He then escalated the dispute further by implementing a ‘Buy British Last’ campaign, whereby Malaysia introduced official discrimination against the purchase of British products.68 The ‘Buy British Last’ campaign may have been a populist response to an affront, but it represented a deeper anti-colonialist, anti-Western impulse in Mahathir

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that has characterised his prime ministership, and which culminated in his currency controls of 1997. Mahathir denies that he advances anything like a conspiracy theory in his attacks on globalisation and currency speculation. Rather he claims simply that the West, operating from a position of strength, puts in place whatever rules help perpetuate its own wealth and influence. Hence, when the wealthy West requires free trade it insists on free trade; when it requires protection it imposes protection; when Wall Street investors wants to profit from currency speculation, it liberalises the international money market.69 Yet intrinsic to his economic worldview is the perception of a stark divide between the exploited developing world and the wealthy and powerful First World. One of the significant features of Mahathir’s involvement in the currency crisis was his first, instinctive reaction of identifying a Western political conspiracy: he accused George Soros of orchestrating the collapse of Southeast Asian currencies, not just to make a profit, but to ‘apply pressure on Thailand and Malaysia [to] prevent Myanmar from joining ASEAN’.70 A year later Mahathir perpetuated the mythology of the neo-colonial divide by likening his deviation from the economic orthodoxy of globalisation – his imposition of currency controls on the ringgit – to an earlier generation of Muslims facing up to the Inquisition.71 Mahathir’s version of ‘Asian values’, like Lee Kuan Yew’s, is distinctively his, and can be generalised into the broader ‘Asian values’ argument only up to a point. This limitation highlights the restricted sense in which the term can be used: the ‘Asian values’ argument is not a single proposition, but a collection of reactions and related arguments, some of which are contradictory, but all of which are premised on an instinctive mistrust of ‘the West’. Lee and Mahathir each had their own personal histories that led them to face ‘the West’, its values and its mores in an adversarial spirit. Yet despite the differences between them the genesis and the results of their respective ideas are more similar than different and appear to provide an almost tangible link with the broader Pacific Asian reactions identified in Chapter 2. The development of Lee and Mahathir’s political thought are in many ways microcosms of a postcolonial Pacific Asian reaction to the West that goes far beyond the sectarian politics of ‘Asian values’. It is a reaction with three dominant characteristics: general resentment towards the West for past and present sins; rejection of Western individualism and permissiveness; and – until the financial crisis of the late 1990s – unbridled self-confidence on social, economic and political matters, including a conviction borne of experience that privileged developmental achievement over democratic theory. Yet even with these impulses in place, the immediate causation of the ‘Asian values’ debate must still be sought in the events of the early 1990s – taking 1989 as the beginning of a long decade.

4

Confronting China after the end of history

The distant origins of the present volume lie in an article entitled ‘The End of History?’ which I wrote for the journal The National Interest in the summer of 1989. In it, I argued that a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world over the past few years, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism. More than that, I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ and the ‘final form of human government’, and as such constituted the ‘end of history’. (Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 1992)1

Ends and beginnings of historical periods rarely conform to the neatness of the Gregorian calendar. This seldom matters to participants at the time because they are usually blissfully unaware that an ‘historical period’ is ending or beginning, but in 1989 the whole world knew that an era had come to an end. Contrary to all expectations, European communism was dying. Its death was announced all-but officially by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in May of that year, when he told West Germany’s Chancellor Kohl that the Soviet Union would no longer use military force to uphold communism in Eastern Europe. Over the next few years, the world watched European communism’s death throes, but the script was already written. Yet on the other side of the world, a completely different play was being staged. China’s communist leaders had long since abandoned Marxist economic theories, but in 1989 they were nevertheless engaging in drastic and lethal action to protect the Leninist state. The New People’s Army confronted and eventually crushed the democracy movement, leaving perhaps a thousand civilians dead. The rest of the world reacted with a degree of horror and vehemence that astounded paramount leader Deng Xiaoping. He could not understand so much grief over such a small death toll.2 These events were converse, but equally desperate reactions to communism’s crisis of legitimacy, and clearly signalled a sea change in the ideological struggles that had

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dominated world politics in the twentieth century. It was less obvious that these events were ushering in a new quasi-ideological debate that has come to be called ‘Asian values’. It is inconceivable that the ‘Asian values’ debate per se could dominate the next century as communism did the last one – complete with its own Cold War. Yet the ‘Asian values’ discourse did mark the beginning of a more low key engagement in cultural politics that has result in an ongoing ‘Tepid War’ that is being fought at a government level in trade forums, the United Nations and similar venues of diplomatic politics. At a more diffuse, non-government level the ‘Tepid War’ is being fought between and within religious, cultural, civic and political movements throughout Pacific Asia.

THE END OF THE COLD WAR In the popular mind, the ‘Asian values’ debate is often thought to be a creature of the 1990s. There is an element of validity in this perception, but it would be more correct to say that this was the time when the debate first achieved world prominence. The general reasons for the sudden outburst of this debate seem to centre on a unique set of paradigms that beset Pacific Asia, Europe and the United States in the early 1990s. At that time, the West was enjoying an unprecedented level of confidence in the political and economic spheres. It had just won the Cold War; Europe was a union; and markets were multiplying, growing and becoming increasingly more open thanks to the collapse of communism and the pace of globalisation. In this heady atmosphere, the sudden conversion of Eastern Europe to democracy in the early 1990s created the perception that the world was being swept along on an exciting adventure. Some academics pointed to a ‘wave of democratisation’ that seemed to have been sweeping the world since the 1970s, taking in Southern and Iberian Europe, South America and Latin America, and in more recent times, even parts of Africa and East Asia.3 There were serious discussions among European elites about the possibility of China becoming a democracy.4 Francis Fukuyama was both reflecting and feeding this sense of triumphalist optimism when he declared the ‘end of history’. Just as important, however, he was anointing the supposed victory of liberalism with the halo of inevitability – something that is deceptively easy to do when one is looking backwards, but slightly harder when looking forwards. When an outcome is viewed as having been inevitable, it thrusts history into the role of a subordinate narrative. Like a movie trailer, history becomes a mere appetiser for the inevitable main event, which in this case was the futility of resisting political and economic liberalism – but like a movie trailer, this sense of inevitability can only be manufactured with the benefit of hindsight. Yet even as we identify the conceit implicit in the notion of

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inevitability, we have still not grasped the full extent of the sleight of hand in Fukuyama’s argument: even if the defeat of communism had been the inevitable product of history, it is still not a victory for liberalism per se. Religious and non-political dissidents, social democrats, labour leaders, religious leaders, nationalists, conservatives and even some dissident Marxists are all included in the honour roll of the Cold War, but this seems to have been forgotten now that history has come to an end. Fukuyama’s thesis notwithstanding, it would not be difficult to construct an argument that says that post-war social democrats and the Catholic Church each played more decisive roles than liberals or liberalism in winning the victory, and liberals merely arrived during communism’s death throes to pick the spoils. Yet on the dubious premise that ‘the only form of government that has survived intact to the end of the twentieth century has been liberal democracy’,5 Fukuyama claims ultimate victory, not for liberal democratic practice, but for ‘the liberal idea’.6 [Italics are in the original.] Apart from ignoring the contributions of non-liberal leaders and forces, Fukuyama is making the mistake of confusing liberalism and democracy. If Fukuyama had argued that democracy was the only rationale of regime legitimacy to survive the twentieth century, he would have been on fairly safe ground since virtually every regime – even the most barbarous dictatorship – claims to represent the democratic will of the people. But as he acknowledges elsewhere, democracy is not liberalism, and each can and often does exist without the other.7 Nevertheless, having claimed victory in the Cold War, the modern field marshals of economic liberalism – the managers of transnational corporations, hedge funds, and banks – claimed the fruits of victory, and then set about supplanting the last remnants of the international social democratic spirit that inspired the creation of the post-war economic order. The Bretton Woods institutions – the IMF, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) – and their distant cousins, the Marshall and Columbo plans, were the result of a remarkable wartime and post-war consensus to rebuild Europe, assist developing countries, and to construct a civilised, managed, international monetary and trade system. The system had been breaking down since the oil shocks of the 1970s, but in the early 1990s the neoliberal spirit of globalisation completely overwhelmed the last vestiges of the original impulses, an event that was symbolised by the 1993 replacement of GATT with the World Trade Organisation (WTO). GATT, like all the Bretton Woods institutions, was designed specifically to foster economic development and full employment among members. On the other hand, the WTO’s purpose was simply to break down trade barriers and arguably to expose weak economies to the predation of the strong. The dimensions of the liberals’ ideological coup are breathtaking, and are seen not so strongly in the much contested ‘third wave of democracy’, but in the supreme ideological hegemony of deregulation, ‘free trade’

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and globalisation throughout Europe, North America, South America, Pacific Asia and Australasia. Communist, socialist, social democratic and labour parties have capitulated to the new ideology, along with conservative, nationalist and agrarian parties, making mockeries of their various raisons d’être. Thus conservative parties are now willing to sacrifice social stability and gradualist change on the altar of economic liberalism; labour parties abandon workers and public utilities to the international markets; and (at least in Australia) agrarian parties preside over the destruction of rural industries and infrastructure. Ironically for all the participants in the ‘Asian values’ debate, the successful example of undemocratic, and even Leninist East Asian countries in building marketoriented and export-oriented economies contributed substantially to economic liberalism’s ideological victory. The end result of these struggles in the field of economic ideology has been to give liberalism hegemony in the fields of both political and economic ideology, but it is hardly the type of victory that would satisfy Fukuyama. Democracy seems set to remain the hegemonic legitimating force of the twenty-first century, but there is no reason to think that the current hegemony of liberalism in either economics or politics is likely to be permanent. Once one realises the limited sense in which liberalism was ‘victorious’, and the victory is stripped of its sense of inevitability, it is not difficult to see that history has not ended and that political and economic evolution is all too likely to continue for as long as humanity survives.

New world order Yet regardless of the shortcomings of the Fukuyama thesis, there can be no doubt that in the early 1990s, the West was swept with a sense of the inevitability of the imminent victory of liberal and humanitarian ideals. Apart from the contributions by enthusiastic academics, there were plenty of substantial public indicators of this mood and its practical impact on international relations. Take, for instance, the Bush administration’s invasion of Panama. This took place in December 1989, barely a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Two months later, the House of Representatives endorsed the invasion by 389 votes to 26. The significance for this study lies not in the fact of the invasion, nor in the real reasons for the action, but in the fact that it was justified in part by a call to defend democracy from a right-wing dictatorship. Democracy had been used as an anti-communist and anti-Soviet catch-cry many times during the Cold War, but the United States had never used it against a non-communist regime. Regardless of the cynicism that lay behind the use of the democratic justification, Bush’s actions marked a sea change in American diplomacy, one that flowed through to other military interventions and to diplomacy. The full extent of that change became obvious only after another, more serious military intervention, when the United States, this

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time with a broad coalition of allies, defeated Iraq in the Gulf War. Afterwards President George Bush gave a visionary speech entitled ‘The possibility of a new world order: unlocking the promise of freedom’.8 An excerpt from the speech demonstrates how closely the ideas expressed by Fukuyama were being echoed at the peak levels of Western leadership, right down to the sense of historic inevitability and the perception of links between economic liberalism and the political victory over communism: Here at Air University it’s your business to read the lessons of the past with an eye on the far horizon. And that’s why I wanted to speak to you today about the new world taking shape around us, about the prospects for a new world order now within our reach. For more than four decades we’ve lived in a world divided, East from West; a world locked in a conflict of arms and ideas called the Cold War. Two systems, two superpowers, separated by mistrust and unremitting hostility. . . . That war is over. . . . In the coming weeks I’ll be talking in some detail about the possibility of a new world order emerging after the Cold War. And in recent weeks I’ve been focusing not only on the Gulf, but on free trade, on the North American Free Trade Agreement, [and] the Uruguay Round trade negotiations [to create the WTO]. . . .9 A year later Bush tried to live up to his words when he plunged the United States, this time operating under the banner of the United Nations, into an altruistic but disastrous humanitarian intervention in Somalia intended solely to feed hungry refugees. This campaign degenerated quickly and spectacularly into a bloody armed conflict. The US/UN experience in Somalia had a salutary effect on the ‘new world order’. The calamitous outcome ensured that the military option would be used with caution in the future: from then on the business of exporting democracy, good government and human rights would be conducted primarily through diplomacy and other forms of non-military pressure. But the fact of the intervention nevertheless created a major precedent that the Clinton administration followed with enthusiasm. In 1993, President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, went as far as to proclaim that the promotion of democracy abroad was one of the three main pillars of American foreign policy. He declared in language reminiscent of Fukuyama that American foreign policy would encourage the global revolution for democracy that is transforming our world. By helping promote democracy, we do more than honor our deepest values. We are also making a strategic investment in our nation’s security. History has shown that a world of more democracies is a safer

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world. It is a world that will devote more to human development and less to human destruction. And it is a world that will promote what all people have in common rather than what tears them apart.10 The United States, however, did not have a monopoly on naive idealism. Similar rhetoric was common parlance in Europe, as they watched the seemingly miraculous reunification of Germany and the equally astounding ascension of former dissidents, such as Lech Walesa and Václav Havel, to the leadership of post-communist countries. Enthusiasm ran particularly strong in the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and Germany. The United Nations – never very close to the real world, yet for so long a prisoner of Cold War politics – was a natural victim of the illusion of inevitability. The United Nations Under-Secretary General for Human Rights, Jan Martensen, decided in 1989 that a ‘great leap forward’ was imminent in the development of the system of promoting and protecting human rights. Given the historical context, it is not surprising that his idea for a world conference on human rights was swept along on a wave of optimism, or that one of its strongest advocates was the newly re-united Germany, the former home of the Berlin Wall.

CHINA From the point of view of Western opinion, therefore, the Tiananmen Square massacre could not have come at a worse time. China was ‘supposed’ to have been part of the democratic revolution. Its democracy movement returned to prominence in April 1989, and the regime seemed to be regarding its activities with equanimity – until it suddenly declared martial law on 20 May. By that time demonstrations had spread to all major cities and had broadened beyond its initial student base to include workers, entrepreneurs and journalists. Even work units from the New People’s Army, People’s Daily, the Communist Party Central Committee Cadre School, and employees from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences had become involved.11 The final, fatal military crackdown in June and the subsequent spate of show trials in 1991 shocked a naive and overly optimistic West. China had already been under sustained pressure on a range of human rights fronts: for its policy of enforced abortions; for its occupation and repression of Tibet (especially after its declaration of Martial Law in March 1989); and for its use of prison labour in export industries. Yet the Tiananmen Square massacre – as the thousand or so deaths came to be known in the West – added a critical new dimension to ongoing grievances against China in the West: graphic television footage. This footage raised the pressure on Beijing much more than the tens of millions of off-air deaths over the previous

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decades of communist rule, with the result that human rights considerations dominated all dealings between China and the West over the rest of the century. Meanwhile, the West – and particularly the United States – was beset with endemic and highly visible social problems. Crime, drugs, family breakdown, shootings, homelessness and racial tensions were so rife in the United States that even President Bill Clinton and his advisers were questioning whether the American ethos of individualism had gone too far. In 1993, Clinton stood in the same pulpit from which Martin Luthor King delivered his last sermon and repeated his words: I fought for freedom, . . . but not the freedom of people to kill each other with reckless abandonment, not for the freedom of children to have children and the fathers of the children to walk away from them and abandon them, as if they don’t amount to anything.12 Not just conservatives and religious figures, but members of the traditional liberal establishment such as David Broder and E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post joined the chorus of self-criticism. At the same time, Pacific Asia was celebrating both its social cohesion and its economic success. As we have observed in Chapters 2 and 3, by the end of the 1980s, the post1960s social dislocation was peaking in Western societies, and Asian leaders were looking askance at social disorder in America and Europe. They were generally proud that most Pacific Asian countries had been able to achieve phenomenal economic growth without suffering from the ‘excesses of individualism’ that they could see across the Pacific. Nevertheless they were very insecure in their success, and despite the bravado of many of their leaders, they were painfully aware that their continued growth depended upon access to American and European markets to sell their goods. The fear of losing US markets became a major driving force of much East Asian international relations. When Lee Kuan Yew was invited to address both houses of the US Congress in 1985, he used the historic opportunity for one purpose only: to plead against a return to protectionism and for the further opening of US markets. Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) was established in 1989 as an informal dialogue group, but there was never any question that its main purpose was to promote free trade between the United States and the Asian members. This became a particularly acute concern when the United States began working towards the creation of the North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA), which threatened to relegate trade and investment with Asian nations to a second class status. On top of the strictly economic insecurity, resentment at colonial and neo-colonial exploitation by the West continued to simmer, rising to the surface in the rhetoric and actions of Dr Mahathir, and in China’s and Lee Kuan Yew’s brinkmanship with Chris Patten over the return of Hong Kong to China.

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China and ASEAN The combination of Western confidence and insecurity and Pacific Asian confidence and insecurity boiled onto the world stage in the early 1990s when the UN’s series of conferences on human rights coincided with American threats to cancel or put conditions on China’s Most Favoured Nation (MFN) trade status because of its poor human rights record. China found herself acting in a completely new diplomatic environment. It was no longer protected by the Soviet–China–US diplomatic triangle created by Henry Kissinger’s detente, but since it was desperately seeking investment and markets for its newly liberalising economy, Western opinion mattered more than ever. The practical outcome of this paradigm shift was felt almost immediately in the UN. In March 1989, China faced severe criticism in the UN Human Rights Commission for her treatment of Tibet, and then in August she became the first permanent member of the Security Council to be censured by a UN sub-commission for widescale abuse of human rights within its sovereign territory.13 The actual votes must have been disconcerting, but the realisation that China’s ‘natural’ voting bloc in the UN – the developing nations of Asia and Africa – had splintered in the post-Cold War environment must have made China’s psychological isolation complete. As was observed earlier, China’s timing of the Tiananmen Square massacre was appalling. In view of the earlier discussion about seeking remote roots of ‘Asian values’ in the Bandung Conference, it is of interest that the Chinese leadership responded by resurrecting Bandung’s Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, with their strong emphasis on state sovereignty and the principle of non-interference.14 This position – complemented by the truth in Lee Kuan Yew’s statement that ‘no country in Southeast Asia wanted to go out of its way to make China an enemy’15 – provided a starting point for China’s defensive human rights diplomacy. It evolved by early 1990 into a near-obsessive defence of state sovereignty, but it quickly became apparent that new tactics were needed to deflect criticism and rebuild a protective coalition. The task of diplomatic renewal took two distinct, but complementary forms. The first was an intellectual assault on the legitimacy of the international human rights agenda that went beyond the mere assertion of state sovereignty. Following a flurry of government-sponsored academic seminars and studies,16 the short-term result was the Chinese government’s white paper on human rights, published in November 1991.17 Apart from containing propaganda denying that China had engaged in human rights abuses, the paper acknowledged notionally the legitimacy, and even the universality of human rights, but it claimed that China, ‘as a developing country’, had a different perspective on human rights.18 The resultant discourse emerging from this perspective may be stated concisely as the argument that economic and social rights, including the

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right to live in a stable society, are higher priorities than the Western version of human rights. This argument was loaded with a confrontational anti-Western, anti-colonialist flavour that blamed the West for the economic plight of the developing world and claimed a particular cultural and national dignity for developing nations and particularly for China herself. Thus, parallel to the ‘development rights’ argument,19 the government cultivated a revival of Confucianism to enhance its legitimacy as a distinctively Chinese regime. The regime endorsed a series of international academic conferences on Confucianism between 1995 and 1998, and Jiang Zemin (then Deng Xiaoping’s heir apparent) reminisced publicly on how his old-fashioned father taught him the Four Books of Confucianism after school.20 Lee Kuan Yew played a significant role in this Confucian revival by acting as Honorary Chairman of the third and final of these conferences. It is difficult to find a satisfactory name for such a diverse set of arguments, but in the absence of an accepted label we might simply call it the ‘China school of Asian values’. Whatever label one chooses, the post-Tiananmen school has received generous state funding, and it has continued to produce exceptionally high quality literature in defence of China’s claimed rights in the international diplomatic and economic community.21 The second plank of China’s post-Tiananmen strategy built upon the first: the renewed use of aggressive and imaginative diplomacy in building a new defensive coalition in the UN based substantially on the arguments of the China school. It is ironic that China was aided in its coalition building by almost the same phenomenon that had broken down its old support network: the new stridency of the international human rights regime. By 1991, the international community had shifted its attention beyond Tiananmen Square and Tibet, and was challenging the junta in Myanmar, labour laws in Indonesia and Malaysia, and continued Indonesian rule in East Timor. Furthermore, in all of these cases Western powers were unilaterally threatening economic consequences against the regimes in question, either through trade or aid penalties. These actions had the unintended, but predictable consequences of driving ASEAN into a joint defensive position with China and Myanmar. In 1991, Dr Mahathir used an ASEAN forum to reject linkage of trade and investment with human rights issues, and he then drove ASEAN to adopt an official stance that upheld ‘the sovereignty of nations’ against the claims of the international human rights regime.22

China’s ‘special place’ Moreover, ASEAN was particularly vulnerable to being driven into the China camp for economic, historical and strategic reasons. By the early 1990s, China had become a focus of Asian investment and trade interest. China under Deng Xiaoping was regarded as a waking giant, and held

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investors in the region – and in the West – in thrall. Nowhere was the thrall more spellbinding than in Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore had been China’s fourth largest source of foreign investment throughout the 1980s, and Malaysia had been engaging in major bilateral trade agreements since the mid-1980s. During the first half of 1993, in the midst of the UN’s schedule of human rights conferences, China was in the last throes of closing a huge investment deal with Singapore: the ill-fated Suzhou Industrial Park, where Singapore is thought to have lost around US $90 million. At the same time Malaysia was in the opening stages of investment negotiations with China, and Dr Mahathir was being feted in Beijing. It is difficult to believe there was no connection between these ventures and the diplomatic stances adopted by Lee Kuan Yew and Dr Mahathir. Although the actual levels of Asian investment in China were not large in the early 1990s, the Chinese government had successfully created the impression of enormous potential, so that a threat to its own economic life was commonly regarded as a threat to the prosperity of the Pacific Asia region. China was also able to play on the uniqueness of its historical and strategic relationship with Southeast Asia. Since time immemorial China has been the never-forgotten bête noir of mainland Southeast Asia’s international relations and a primary reference point for all strategic thinking. If we treat Malaysia as part of island Southeast Asia, the mainland states have always operated on the assumption that the only way to live peacefully with China is to accept a subordinate status and accommodate its whims. Even when Myanmar and Vietnam notionally defeated invading Chinese armies at different stages of their histories, their rulers (whether kings, emperors or a politburo) cemented ‘victory’ by figuratively or literally kowtowing to China. This may or may not have been a cultural imperative, but it was certainly a logical move because they knew that if they did not do so, then regardless of the cost China would return again and again until it had put them in their place. With China rising again at century’s end, it was almost inevitable that mainland Southeast Asia – like Korea, Japan and even Taiwan – would begin finding new accommodations with the Middle Kingdom, both to profit from her new prosperity and to try to avoid trouble. Island Southeast Asia’s response has been more varied, ranging from Singapore and Malaysia’s unexpected obsequiousness and mercenary enthusiasm, to Indonesia’s predictable suspicion and muted hostility. But in all cases, the constant factor is the overbearing reality of China. The ‘special place of China’ is not an ‘Asian value’ per se – and in fact it sits uncomfortably with the ‘Asian values’ approach to state sovereignty. It nevertheless forms the inescapable backdrop of the discourse.23 In assessing China’s success in post-Tiananmen Square coalition building, it may also be worth noting how strongly the China school of ‘Asian values’ resonates with the pre-existing Singapore and Mahathir schools. We are entitled to wonder to what extent China positioned its post-Tiananmen

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Square arguments as a flattering hook on which to catch Lee Kuan Yew, Dr Mahathir and ASEAN. Considering these factors, the closing of ASEAN ranks behind its beleaguered members and – by default – behind the leadership being given by China should have been foreseen and avoided by Western diplomats – and no doubt would have been in the more pragmatic days of the Cold War. Regardless of the details of China’s technique, she managed very quickly to position herself at the forefront of human rights diplomacy in the UN: at the subsequent UN human rights conferences in Bangkok and Vienna, China secured critical positions on drafting committees and in the hierarchy of chairpersons.24 The new strategy bore fruit in 1992, when the Human Rights Commission, for the moment dominated by developing countries, endorsed the Chinese ambassador’s argument that ‘measures aimed at protecting human rights should be directed by each individual country in the light of its history, tradition and level of economic development’.25 Significantly Chinese Premier Li Peng later thanked third world delegates for their support at the commission.26

Bangkok and Vienna While the victory on the Human Rights Commission was most welcome, it paled against the achievements of 1993, which proved to be a pivotal achievement for the China school of ‘Asian values’. This was the year scheduled for the World Conference on Human Rights, conceived in the liberal glory days of 1989. As early as December 1991 China succeeded, in the face of Western opposition, in having the world conference preceded by a number of optional regional conferences. Then, at the Asian regional meeting held in Bangkok in March and April 1993, a consensus version of the Singapore–Mahathir–China schools of ‘Asian values’ was adopted as the official Asian position on human rights: a position that reportedly gained strong support from Indonesia, Myanmar, Pakistan, India, Syria, Iran and Yemen.27 Of the 30 numbered articles advocated by the Bangkok Conference, seven might be considered to be the core of the new consensus: 3. Stress the urgent need to democratize the United Nations system, . . . and ensure a positive, balanced and non-confrontational approach in addressing and realizing all aspects of human rights; 4. Discourage any attempt to use human rights as a conditionality for extending development assistance; 5. Emphasize the principles of respect for national sovereignty and territorial integrity as well as non-interference in the internal affairs of States, and the non-use of human rights as an instrument of political pressure;

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6. Reiterate that all countries, large and small, have the right to determine their political systems, control and freely utilize their resources, and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development; 8. Recognize that while human rights are universal in nature, they must be considered in the context of a dynamic and evolving process of international norm-setting, bearing in mind the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds; 9. Recognize further that States have the primary responsibility for the promotion and protection of human rights . . . . 17. Reaffirm the right to development, as established in the Declaration on the Right to Development, as a universal and inalienable right and an integral part of fundamental human rights . . . . The Bangkok Declaration was accepted after considerable negotiation by the Asian meeting, despite serious misgivings by Japan, Thailand, Nepal, the Philippines and South Korea, each of which was more comfortable with the conventional ‘Western’ approach to human rights.28 According to diplomats’ reports, ASEAN played a critical role in bridging the gap between the two ‘extremes’.29 It is also worth noting that although the Bangkok Conference was more critical of the ‘Western’ human rights agenda than either of the other conferences, each of the others – covering Africa and the Caribbean/Latin America – was nevertheless at one with Bangkok in their stress on the importance of ‘development rights’.30 This suggests that the notion of ‘development rights’ struck a strong chord with developing countries beyond the Asian region. Having ensured that her own position was now represented as the views of a major bloc at the UN – albeit in a modified form – China was able to exercise a decisive, though non-hegemonic influence on the World Conference itself, which was held in Vienna in June 1993. ‘Asian values’ arguments became the standard repertoire of leaders across Pacific Asia. China’s People’s Daily accused the West of ‘setting up obstacles to communication on human rights and using the issue cynically as a political club to beat less-developed countries’.31 While on a visit to China to promote closer economic ties Dr Mahathir was quoted saying that human rights were ‘a tool Western governments use to subvert Asian countries’.32 Chinese Premier Li Peng agreed that each country should be left to define its own concept of human rights and that ‘different countries have different views on democracy and human rights, and on the priorities which should be accorded to them’.33 Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Ali Alatas warned European aid donors not to link their pledges to human rights issues.34 He called for ‘understanding of the traditions and social values of developing nations, many of which were endowed with ancient and sophisticated cultures’ and warned that ‘an individualistic approach’ to human rights at the

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expense of the interests of society could lead to ‘instability and even anarchy’.35 Even Thai Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai declared that it is ‘natural that approaches to the implementation of fundamental human rights vary because of differences in socioeconomic, historical, cultural backgrounds and conditions’.36 And Lee Kuan Yew, on a visit to China, went to the nub of his immediate concern: he warned the United States of adverse consequences if China’s MFN status was weakened, saying that human rights diplomacy should not be linked to trade.37 A month later, he proved himself to be an effective spokesman and intellectual leader of the nascent ‘Asian values’ consensus with his championing of Confucian values over liberalism and democracy in a major interview in Time magazine.38 The success of the ‘Asian values’ assault at the Vienna Conference was less spectacular than that of the Bangkok Conference, but it was nevertheless of greater import. All countries conceded the universality of human rights, supported democracy, and agreed on the continuing role of the international community in monitoring and curbing abuses, but China and her allies extracted major concessions in return for notional unanimity. The ‘right to development’ was also declared a ‘universal and inalienable right and integral part of fundamental human rights’ (Article 10). The right to development, therefore, had to be treated ‘on the same footing, and with the same emphasis’ as political human rights (Article 5), following the principle of ‘non-selectivity of the consideration of human rights issues’ (Article 32). The conference also declared that ‘the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind’ (Article 5). Each state could now ‘choose the framework [of national institutions to promote human rights] which is best suited to its particular needs at the national level’ (Article 36), which was only logical once it was granted that the ‘primary responsibility for standard setting lies with States’ (Article 38). These provisions had the general effect of creating a space of ambiguity in which national governments are relatively immune from international intervention on human rights issues. On the other hand, Article 2 unambiguously removed the questions of independence, autonomy or self-government for Tibet from the agenda: the ‘right to self-determination . . . shall not be construed as authorizing or encouraging any action which would dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States conducting themselves in compliance with the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples and thus possessed of a Government representing the whole people belonging to the territory without distinction of any kind.39 China made an enormous investment in the Vienna conference, sending a delegation only slightly smaller than that of the United States. It

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reverted to a very ‘hard line’ stance on human rights, and left it to others – including its de facto allies in ASEAN – to broker compromises.40

After Vienna Vienna was a turning point for China’s post-Tiananmen agenda on several counts. First, it now had its intellectual defence in place and at least partly accepted by the international community. Anne Bayefsky points out that the Vienna Conference was the first occasion on which a UN human rights declaration modified the universalist conception of human rights, and this set a precedent that was followed regularly in subsequent years.41 Just as significant, China has used the Vienna process to begin building a loose coalition of support. According to NGOs and Western diplomats, by the end of the Vienna conference China had been actively cooperating with, planning with and often leading an impressive list of countries, including: Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Mexico, Myanmar, North Korea, Pakistan, Singapore, Sudan, Syria, Vietnam, and Yemen.42 Its nascent network of influence in place, China proceeded to strengthen its diplomatic base, or at least reduce its relative diplomatic and economic isolation. By the end of the century, it had achieved complete success on the economic front. Despite continuing pressure on human rights issues, in 2000 China succeeded in normalising its trade relations with the European Union and the United States, and in November 2001 it was admitted to the WTO. Furthermore, China’s diplomatic assault on Southeast Asia reached new heights in 2000, with top-level Chinese delegations to ASEAN countries (or vice versa) eating away at American influence in the region throughout the year. The direct fruits of this diplomacy at the time of writing include an agreement to build a railway linking China with most of Southeast Asia and another agreement to create an ASEAN–China free trade zone. The significance of these achievements should not be underestimated, and is highlighted by the contrast with the West’s treatment of Myanmar. Myanmar is no worse a dictatorship than is China, yet at century’s end it remained a sanction-besieged pariah while China was being welcomed into the world economic community.43 The contrast is underscored by the fact that only five weeks before the EU normalised trade relations with China, she toughened her sanctions against Myanmar.44 The primary difference between the treatment of the two countries is obviously the disparity in market size: Western investors and traders cannot bear to miss out on China’s huge potential as a market and a cheap production base. Yet beyond the greed and ‘Realpolitik’ factors, China’s success rests on the continuation of the strategy that had its origins in China’s post-Tiananmen school of ‘Asian values’. This took the form of an active diplomatic offensive that emphasised China’s distinct national and

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cultural dignity and defended her human rights record while challenging the basis of the Western human rights agenda. Furthermore, it cynically fed the assumption that economic liberalisation inevitably leads to political liberalisation. The trump card in China’s argument was that trade should be separated from politics because economic liberalisation and trade are presumed to lead to the higher good of political liberalisation in any case. It pursued these arguments even as it denounced the liberal agenda as ‘Western’. Chinese academic Zhao Gancheng provides a good example of China’s academic advocacy in a 1997 lecture delivered in the lead-up to the second ASEM (Asia–Europe [trade] Meeting). Zhao observed that China’s economic reform is intrinsically linked to its ‘opening policy’, but that this does not mean that China ‘would have to accept whatsoever the West wishfully [sic] imposes on it’.45 In the interests of ‘political stability’, the Chinese leadership will insist that only ‘gradual social development and gradual political progress including more political transparency’ accompany economic reform. Zhao equated the Western push for immediate political reform to Western imperialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.46 The assertion of China’s ‘dignity’ was paired with the assertion that China was locked irrevocably into development in any case. The implied logic is that since change – presumably for the better – is inevitable anyway, there is no point in pressing issues that will threaten to undermine her dignity and possibly slow progress.47 Hence ‘China strongly opposes unilateral trade sanctions and threatening to use trade as a means to deal with political issues as seen in the Sino–US trade relations’.48 Zhao’s logic is appealingly clever, but ultimately it rests upon a series of dubious assumptions and associations designed to resonate with the wishful thinking of post-1989 liberal triumphalism. A secondary feature of China’s post-Vienna diplomacy is also worthy of note at this stage: the prominence that China gave briefly to championing the family at the UN. Ironically, in this ideological conflict, Beijing has lent its name to the agenda to which it is opposed, since the Beijing Platform for Action was negotiated at the UN Women’s Conference at Beijing in 1995. The five yearly reconsideration of the Beijing platform was then labelled the ‘Beijing Plus 5’ process. The original Beijing conference was almost certainly the first time the Chinese regime was forced to take serious stock of the Western feminist agenda, and its response was unambiguously hostile: every effort was taken by the host nation to insulate the NGOs and the UN conference from the local population and from each other.49 Yet despite this negative reaction there is no indication that the Chinese delegations to this or subsequent UN conferences began to take an active interest in ‘family issues’ until prompted to do so, oddly enough by the activities of a conservative American Mormon-based NGO called NGO Family Voice. The critical exchange took place at the UN Commission on Human Settlements session in Nairobi in 1997, in

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the lead up to a European/American sponsored motion to establish a new commission – the ‘Huairou Commission’. NGO Family Voice feared that this new commission would be dominated by ‘radically left-wing proabortion and pro-homosexual rights advocates’, and was lobbying furiously against it, but seemingly with little effect.50 The UN Secretariat had barred NGO Family Voice from distributing their lobbying leaflets in the usual way – via delegations’ official cubbyholes – and so the NGO resorted to personal lobbying and personally handing leaflets to individual delegates. One who was there best tells the rest of the story: Two hours into the debate on Huairou, China called for a special session of the G77 Nations (Africa, League of Arab States, and most of the Pacific Rim countries). During that special G77 debate, the delegation from China – often reading directly from the NGO Family Voice position paper – urged that recognition of Huairou was a dangerous and illegal precedent. When the debate reconvened, China introduced amendments that essentially gutted formal recognition of Huairou. Every mention of the Huairou Commission was deleted. . . . Although the matter continued to be hotly debated until the last minutes of the session, China’s views ultimately prevailed.51 Later in that conference NGO Family Voice and the Iranian delegation convinced China, G77 and the League of Arab States, to join forces in support of the family in a debate on the Rights of the Child. The immediate result was that China and G77 jointly sponsored an amendment calling upon the international community and other partners at all levels, to maintain and strengthen the family, as the basic unit of society in an effort to provide for the general welfare of the child; to that end urges governments to promote policies conducive to the fulfilment of the right of the child as stipulated in the relevant international agreements and conventions, and avoid any policy that could threaten, weaken, or denigrate the family’s role as the fundamental unit of society.52 There was no hint of this position in the white paper on human rights in China, or in the Bangkok Declaration, and since China returned to silence on these issues after Nairobi, it does not seem to be part of a deliberate strategy or school of thought. Rather, it seems merely to reflect the underlying social conservatism of the Chinese regime, providing a further tenuous link with the Mahathir and Singapore schools of ‘Asian values’.

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RETROSPECTIVE It will be noted that this chapter has taken a different tone to earlier chapters. When we are dealing with the China school of ‘Asian values’ we move from the relatively benign communitarianism of Lee Kuan Yew and Dr Mahathir – designed in part to legitimise illiberal but nevertheless semi-democratic and semi-open regimes – to a set of arguments designed primarily to serve the diplomatic needs of a deadly Leninist regime. Whereas this author believes it is highly profitable to trace the elements of ingenuousness in the Singapore and Mahathir schools, the returns of such an exploration of the China school will be limited indeed. Yet even in the China school, there are grounds for considering that some traces of a distinctively Sinic worldview that may deserve credence. The brief promotion of the family may be an example of one such ingenuous element. More significantly, there is a cultural and historical basis for regarding the Chinese leadership’s aversion to democracy, human rights and freedom as ‘natural’ and ‘understandable’: factors that will be considered in Chapter 10. Yet even if such rationalisations are given generous credence, they cannot take us very far before they begin sliding into self-serving justifications for barbarity and oppression. Even judged by the standards of the Bangkok Declaration and the government’s white paper, the human rights record of the Chinese government is appalling. The Chinese people’s ‘development rights’ and ‘subsistence rights’ – the keystone of China’s defence in Vienna and Bangkok – were violated more profoundly by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward than they ever were by Western exploitation. Without even considering the Tiananmen Square massacre or China’s actions in Tibet we can regard most of the China school of ‘Asian values’ as part of a carefully crafted diplomatic offensive designed to win China a position of respect, profit, and power in the global community. Perhaps this is the most fundamental and genuine and historically-based element of the China school: earning China world standing on her own terms, as she used to have before the West disturbed the power relationships of East Asia, and humiliated the Middle Kingdom. Certainly, there is a long Chinese tradition of popular dissent being grounded in patriotic calls to restore China’s greatness. In the twentieth century, this ethnonationalism was inextricably woven into the May Fourth Movement of 1919, and the democracy movements of the 1980s and 1990s to the point where their calls for democracy and rights should be viewed primarily as patriotic rallying calls.53 Even Wei Jingsheng, the man acknowledged by the West as the hero of Tiananmen Square, demanded democracy and rights primarily as steps in the advancement and modernisation of China.54 Where does this assessment leave this study of the ‘Asian values’ discourse? It leaves the Singapore and Mahathir schools, and the contributions of ASEAN looking a little soiled, since they seem to have been used

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as pawns in a larger game. Furthermore, it is difficult to believe that the Southeast Asian wings of ‘Asian values’ were not aware of the fact that they were being used, and acquiesced consciously for their own reasons. This, however, does not justify a complete dismissal of the ‘Asian values’ discourse. Even the China school cannot be dismissed completely because it is clearly trying to resonate with the worldviews and impulses of other Asian players – and in this task it seems to have succeeded. Just as we cannot dismiss the Singapore and Mahathir schools we must continue to consider the China school, because even the self-serving elements of the agenda tell us something about their constituencies. In contrast, George Bush’s ‘new world order’ is dead and buried. The high principle of the early 1990s has been replaced by sporadic and selective surges of conscience that rarely persevere in the face of Western investment interests. Faith in the end of history has been worn down by Realpolitik, and the liberal missionary urge has been diverted, in the main, into economics. Nothing is as clear as it seemed in 1989. In its own way, the world of the new century is as compromised as was the world of the Cold War. But now it is much messier as leaders, diplomats and academics search for new principles and practices by which the international community can reconcile the demands of state sovereignty, legitimate national self-interest and humanitarian decency – what some have referred to as ‘human security’.55 The collapse of communism may have ended the Cold War, but it has not ended history – not even in the narrow sense in which Fukuyama intended when he used the term. The international community has new challenges now, and will continue to muddle through them as best it can. The ‘Tepid War’ of the ‘Asian values’ debate is just one manifestation of this muddling.

5

Fin de siècle: ‘Democratic Moment’, financial crisis and beyond

The ‘Asian values’ debate might have died in 1993 if the underlying concerns it addressed had disappeared, but it has continued to bubble along with less venom but more sophistication. Since the Vienna conference the debate has changed dramatically. The two most dramatic developments have been the continuation of the spread of democracy throughout Pacific Asia, and the financial crisis of 1997–8.

ENCULTURATED DEMOCRACIES The spread of democracy throughout Pacific Asia since the mid-1980s has fundamentally altered the ‘Asian values’ discourse because it has rendered the notion that democracy is intrinsically foreign to Asians – or even to Confucian Chinese – all-but obsolete. It seems that only in the elite academic circles of China there are still serious debates over the desirability of democratic principles per se,1 though Lee Kuan Yew persists in putting the argument that democracy is much less important than ‘good government’.2 Taiwan and Indonesia have now followed South Korea, the Philippines and Thailand in their democratic revolutions, making democracy a basis of government in a sample of Asian countries dominated by Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Most of these new democracies can even be considered ‘wild’ or ‘free-wheeling’ democracies in the sense that the exuberance of electioneering has been taken to extraordinary lengths. There was certainly nothing restrained about the style of electioneering in Taiwan, Indonesia or South Korea in their national elections of the late 1990s. Some of the Taiwanese candidates engaged in gimmickry and tactics worthy of Italian Greens, complete with bare-breasted models painted in party colours, and graphic depictions of the ruling Nationalists as masked bank robbers. The recent Pacific Asian experience runs contrary to the Singapore school of ‘Asian values’, according to which the conduct of democratic governance in an Asian country should be restrained by a spirit of consensus and deference to rulers. Yet behind the heady excitement of the

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election campaigns themselves, the record of these three new democracies – Taiwan, South Korea and Indonesia – suggests that there remains an element of truth in the ‘Asian values’ critique of ‘Asian democracy’. First, after the election results are in, and governments have been replaced or returned in a clean ballot, politicians feel impelled to make serious gestures towards an ethic of consensus and deference to those in authority. This is followed quickly by a breakdown of the consensus (which is generally paper-thin and overly ambitious to begin with) as presidents try to exert unilateral power while oppositions and supposed allies try to stop him or her. This is accompanied by a stylised ‘dance of the factions’ whereby everyone tries to shift the blame for disputation onto other parties. The reversion to factionalism (an uncelebrated ‘Asian value’) and the breakdown of consensus generally exposes deep set impulses towards centralism and autocracy in even the most ardent champions of democracy. The emergence of this pattern teaches several lessons of no deep cultural import: for instance, about the difficulty of democratic governance with immature institutions; and about the dangers of discordance or ambiguity between executive and legislative power. There are also a variety of lessons with significant cultural implications. The first of these is that the politicians of East and Southeast Asia appear to be responding to different constituency expectations to those of ‘the West’. The ritualised consensus-building and the elaborate attempts to deflect blame for its breakdown are best understood as political responses to constituency expectations driven by popular Korean, Chinese, and Javanese culture. If constituencies in a democracy expect consensus, then of course politicians will be seen to be trying to deliver it – and all three of the countries under consideration are home to cultural expectations that value consensus and deference to rulers. This aspect of enculturation applies superficially to all three of the new democracies, but as the following survey demonstrates, there are as many differences in the details of enculturation between these three countries as there are similarities. Even the emphasis on consensus is subtly different from country to country.

Taiwan Taiwan’s record in the 1990s suggests that it is an example of how democracy can live comfortably in a Confucian society. If anything, Confucian imperatives towards consensus and ethics have helped overcome the problems associated with the inexperience of Taiwan’s political institutions. Take Taiwan’s first change of government. One of the imponderables of Taiwanese politics in the early months of 2000 was the question of how Chen Shui-bian would find sufficient expertise to run the country if he won the presidency away from the Nationalists. Decades of rule had left the Nationalist Party with a hegemonic hold on the

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loyalty of experienced technocrats, and Chen’s DPP had only a small membership and patronage base. The solution lay in the political imperatives of consensus: outgoing Nationalist defence minister, Tang Fei, was named as the new prime minister, and the Nationalists continued to serve in the government without the need for a formal coalition agreement. In the end, Chen appointed a cabinet in which Nationalists outnumbered members of his own party by more than two-to-one. It seemed possible that this might mark the beginning of a grand coalition along the lines of Japan’s amalgamation of the Liberal and Democratic parties in 1955, but the artificiality of the arrangement soon overwhelmed the idealistic ethic of consensus, and the ‘dance of the factions’ began. The immediate postelection compromises gave way to Nationalist threats to impeach President Chen, followed by the complete breakdown of the rapprochement. The ‘dance of the factions’ then began in earnest, whereby each side blamed the other for the disharmony in government. The denouement of the ‘dance’ was played out in December 2001 legislative elections, in which the Nationalists were punished severely. Commentators generally concurred that an important reason for their defeat was the common perception that they had acted as spoilers against Chen’s presidency – an accusation that was a major feature of the DPP’s election campaign. The dominance of the parameters of consensual politics is merely one manifestation of a much broader, even natural enculturation of Taiwanese democracy. L.H.M. Ling and Chih-yu Shih present the evidence and argument for this contention in their 1998 article, ‘Confucianism with a Liberal Face’. They cite two events from 1996 to back their contention that in democratic Taiwan, apparently modern political debates shroud contests to establish ‘Confucian moral credibility’: Politicians may hinge their moral leadership on appearance more than fact, rhetoric more than action. But mass and elite alike demand a ritualized demonstration of selflessness for the common good as the critical standard for public office.3 The details of the examples cited by Ling and Shih are not important to our study, although it is significant that they both involve high levels of contention and discord in politics.4 They are both power struggles within the political elite of a kind that would be completely familiar to anyone from a Western liberal democracy – which should quash any tendency to spin a mythology about Asian democracies being friction-free. Yet even in this context, Ling and Shih detect the operation of cultural imperatives that set distinctive political parameters for the contests. In their study of official statements, newspaper commentaries, and debates in the legislature, the contestants devoted themselves to establishing their personal virtue and selflessness in implicitly – and sometimes in explicitly – Confucian terms:

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‘I feel obliged to the President, my superior and my party who have nurtured my career, and to my constituency in Chiayi. I devote all my time to work and only hope to do things well.’ ‘I sincerely urge Premier Lien not to embroil the office of Premiership in controversy [and] avoid a situation of chaos with the constitutional order.’ ‘The New Party would use the following three criteria to evaluate the new cabinet: the new Premier’s personal ethics, professional integrity and self-presentation.’ ‘We hope that the government will expand its horizons to solicit views from all walks of life and make use of the best and brightest from all sectors. . . .’ ‘As governor, how can I tolerate accusations of “inefficiency” against sincere, hardworking colleagues who have devoted their working lives to the provincial government?’5

Lest these be dismissed as meaningless fanfare, in one of the examples cited by Ling and Shih, James Soong used these tools to manoeuvre President Lee Teng-hui into begging him to remain as Governor of Taiwan, even though he had forsworn Lee’s patronage and emerged as an opposition leader.6 None of this, of course, was of much help to Chen Shui-bian after he fell out with his Nationalist Party ‘allies’. Consensus and ethics may mould the parameters and the rules or Taiwan’s informal politics, but it should come as no surprise that politics can be fought just as ruthlessly within these parameters as they are in any Western democracy.

South Korea The example of Taiwan suggests that within societies where Confucianism is the hegemonic cultural force it provides the dominant template for political discourse, but the experience of South Korea warns against any tendency to essentialism: it reminds us that Confucianism always has to compete with rival aspects of local cultures. The decisive influence of popular Confucian culture on the operation of democracy and governance in South Korea manifests itself in a fashion similar to that of Taiwan, with an emphasis on what Chung Oknim calls ‘moral politics’ ahead of self-interest or even compromise.7 The imperative towards consensus politics is also very clear. After the 2000 elections that thrust Kim Dae-jung into the presidency, but denied him a majority in the legislature, opposition leader Lee Hoi Chang made the following consensus-friendly statement: We’ve become the No. 1 party, and we’re only four seats shy of the majority [in the legislature]. This means people now expect us to not only check and criticize the government but also to actively lead the

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Cultural politics national agenda as the opposition party. So I tried to respect the people’s will in my meeting with President Kim after the elections by promising to carry out a politics of dialogue and cooperation. In fact, in a country like ours where a political culture of cooperation and synergy between the ruling and opposition parties hasn’t fully developed, we could be at a point of new departure.8

Statements such as these are easier to make than to live by, but on the surface this one lends credence to the notion that South Korea’s politicians are responding to a different set of constituency expectations than are those in the West. Yet the ‘consensus’ between government and opposition broke down before it had a chance to become a reality and consensus became nothing more than a political weapon in the arsenal of traditional Korean politics. Beneath this ritualistic deference to the notion of consensus, the politicians never drifted far from the centuries-old Korean traditions that are at most only indirectly part of a Confucian heritage: autocratic centralism, regional based factionalism, and the peculiarly Korean conceptions of personal loyalty and dissent. These local mores have left South Korea more vulnerable than Taiwan to the dangers of poor and vulnerable democratic governance. The tradition of centralist authoritarianism is probably the most decisive and most visible of these traits. It stems directly from the many centuries during which Korea was a vassal state of China and ruled by a highly centralised bureaucracy under an autocratic monarch. It was essentially a society that took all the most centralist and authoritarian aspects of Neo-Confucian ideology, and exaggerated them to an extent that was never achieved in imperial China. The concentration of power was heightened further by the Japanese colonial administration in the middle of the twentieth century.9 Post-war constitutions – including the current democratic constitution – have perpetuated this centralist, authoritarian legacy by vesting vast power and discretion in the president and judging from a series of opinion polls conducted in the 1990s, this state of affairs is a fair reflection of the expectations of most Koreans. In fact, 53 per cent of respondents to one survey regarded strong leadership in a crisis as more important than democracy and only a bare majority rejected outright the prospect of ‘rule by a dictator like Park Chung Hee’ as the solution to challenge of the 1997–8 financial crisis.10 Even today, when the president is a champion of democracy and human rights rather than a military usurper, the legacy of centralised authoritarianism is easily evident. President Kim Dae-jung has used his discretionary powers to cajole and intimidate opposition parliamentarians into joining his government. He has increased the level of presidential intervention in the economy to a point that rivals that of the Singapore government; even setting agendas for bank closures and asset swapping between chaebols. He also routinely bypasses formal procedures for making and

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implementing decisions, preferring to use extra-legal arrangements and personal connections.11 While paying lip service to consensus he has succumbed completely to the Korean vice of regionalism in his appointments: favouring his home province of Cholla to the complete exclusion of Cholla’s traditional rival for government patronage, Kyongsang.12 It is in the nature of Korean politics that such patronage is a major determinant in the economic health of each region, with fortunes swinging as one of ‘their own’ gains or loses power.13 One of the less visible elements of Korean political culture is its absolutist notions of loyalty and dissent. Edwin Reischauer noted the unusual absolutism of the Korean loyalty as long ago as 1960, and attributed it to ‘the fanatical adherence of the Koreans to the borrowed Confucian concepts of loyalty’.14 But this does nothing to account for Koreans’ complementary (and highly un-Confucian) characteristic of absolutism in expressing dissent. This characteristic has been demonstrated in the Korean tradition of student and worker riots, and in the seeming inability of political factions to negotiate compromises15 – a flaw that has been perpetuated by Kim’s regime. Recent scholarship has suggested that this characteristic might be more directly related to Korean Shamanism, which utterly rejects the notion that conflict can be anything other than absolute.16 Shamanism also exaggerates the importance of loyalties based on kinship ties even beyond that of Chinese Confucianism and ancestor worship, thus cementing clan loyalties into immutable allegiances. None of these observations are meant to imply that Korean democracy is in danger of collapse. In fact, it is showing robustness in the face of these difficulties. They do, however, underline the likelihood that Korean democracy faces stresses stemming directly from its cultural heritage, and peculiar to itself.

Indonesia In the case of Indonesia it is not difficult to argue that culture is playing a critical role in that country’s experience of democratic governance, and the result has not, to date, been a happy one. Although Indonesian culture is completely removed from Confucianism, the similarities between them are remarkable. If anything, the impulse for consensus is operating even more strongly here than in either Taiwan or South Korea, at least at the level of national government. When President Megawati Sukarnoputri announced her first broad coalition cabinet in August 2001 she dubbed it a ‘Gotong Royong Cabinet’ or ‘Cabinet of Togetherness/Working Together’, evoking the full symbolism of consensus. Her predecessor, Abdurrahman Wahid did not need to be so obvious in his theatre because everyone knew that had been elected president as the ultimate compromise candidate. He included representatives of the previous Golkar regime, the military, the People’s Democratic Party of Struggle, and various

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Muslim groups in his administration. He tried, unsuccessfully, to operate under the fiction of a consensus-building, face-saving style that epitomises the Javanese aversion to direct confrontation, yet leaves no doubt that the person of the ruler is really in charge. Unfortunately, he failed to demonstrate the complementary Javanese virtue of a ruler bringing an end to chaos and delivering order and prosperity by the sheer force of his personal power.17 On the contrary, his perceived ineptitude stretched his coalition to the limit and exposed him to ridicule and impeachment. Wahid’s rule of Indonesia was marked primarily by policy impotence, ethnic and religious violence, elite intrigues, and disrespect for the authority and the person of President Wahid. In the face of this reality, it may seem foolish to perpetuate lessons about the ‘Asian values’ of consensus and deference to those in authority. The effort nevertheless seems to be warranted, but not because there was ever a reality of Indonesian consensus and deference. Rather the significance lies in the consistent pattern of Indonesian regimes being judged by the expectations of Javanese consensus, deference and power, which are crystallised in the myth of the Ratu Adil [Just Ruler]. The essence of the Javanese conception of power is best described in a rather extensive passage from Benedict Anderson’s Language and Power: Perhaps the most exact image of the ordered Javanese polity is that of a cone of light cast downward by a reflector lamp . . . . The movement of traditional Javanese thought seek[s] ideally a single, pervasive source of Power and authority. The gradual, even diminution of the radiance of the lamp with increasing distance from the bulb is an apt metaphor for the Javanese conception not only of the structure of the state but also of center–periphery relationships and of territorial sovereignty. . . . the undifferentiated quality of the light expresses the idea of the homogeneity of Power. . . . The core of the traditional polity has always been the ruler, who personifies the unity of society. This unity is itself a central symbol of Power. . . .18 Anderson wrote these words in 1972 when Suharto personified this ideal – at least at a superficial level. He was explaining the lines of cultural continuity between the New Order Regime and that of Sukarno, who tried to live the ideal but failed. Yet it is remarkable that the passage also describes the ideals by which Wahid tried to rule nearly three decades later, and by which many Indonesians judged him to have failed. This analysis, if correct, explains a lot about post-Suharto politics. In retrospect it seems incredible to a Westerner that Indonesians placed such high hopes in the elevation of an aged, sick, half-blind religious leader, only to turn against him so quickly. It also stretches credulity to

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think that Wahid thought he could rehabilitate Indonesia by issuing a few fiats, and then devoting most of his attention to his self-imposed role as roving ambassador. Yet if we assume that both he and his constituents expected him to be a source of real, raw Power as described by Anderson, then it helps to explain both of these unrealistic sets of expectations. It seems that both the leader and the led expected Wahid to rule in the mode of a masterful but benevolent father [bapak] looking after his children, a phenomenon that reflects a deep seated Javanese yearning to find childlike security under the protection of father figure.19 It remains to be seen if and how Indonesian democracy can accommodate these cultural impulses and the unrealistic expectations that they occasion, but if the country can be freed from the machinations of violent mischiefmakers in the military and elsewhere, it should not be an impossible task. After all, Japan also raises childish dependency to an adult virtue,20 and used to place great hopes in a father-like leader, and yet it has managed to modify both democracy and its own cultural imperatives to forge a workable accommodation. It remains to be seen how Megawati Sukarnoputri deals with this conception of power, since her weak political base, her quiet personality and the newfound strength of the parliament do not obviously lend themselves to the fulfilment of such expectations.

PERSONAL POLITICS Another basic feature of Asian democracies seems to be their personal characters: the extraordinary emphasis on the personality of the leaders, and the perpetuation of client–patron mentalities in apparently ‘modern’ electorates. This feature is felt with great intensity throughout Pacific Asia, regardless of the system of government in place. The cults of Mao Zedong, Ho Chi-minh, Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen, Norodom Sihanouk and Sukarno represent the zenith of this tendency. The cults of Deng Xiaoping, Suharto, Lee Kuan Yew, Dr Mahathir, Tunku Abdul Rahman (first Prime Minister of Malaya and Malaysia), Ferdinand Marcos, Syngman Rhee, and U Nu are surely not far behind. Even in the absence of overt cults, personal power and personal character tends to overshadow institutional power in most of Pacific Asia. Personalism in Asian politics has already been a subject of some academic inquiry, but it remains to be acknowledged as a continuing feature in the democracies of Pacific Asia. A moment’s reflection, however, is all that is needed to realise that in the three new democracies considered as our prime examples thus far – Taiwan, South Korea and Indonesia – there is ample evidence of the continuation of this personalist impulse. Indonesia is the instance where the perpetuation of personalism is most obvious. In the immediate post-Habibie period the country was held

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together by the people’s personal affection for Abdurrahman Wahid and his Vice-President, Megawati Sukarnoputri. Wahid has been dismissed, though he is still known throughout the country by the affectionate nickname, ‘Gus [older brother] Dur’, much as former-President Sukarno – Megawati’s father – was known as ‘Bung [buddy/mate] Karno’. With Wahid gone, hope and much popular affection has been transferred to Ibu [Mother] Mega for no better reason than the fact that she is Sukarno’s daughter. When considering the Indonesian propensity to place enormous trust in the hands of one person, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Javanese myth of the benevolent and all-powerful Hindu–Buddhist god-king is still a cultural imperative. In South Korea, personalism is just as strong, but has been integrated much more fully into a system of party politics based on the twin loyalties of personal leadership and regional loyalty. Whereas in most Western democracies leaders come and go but parties stay more or less constant, in South Korea each realignment of leaders seems to result in a regeneration of the party into a supposedly new entity. The recent ruling parties are the prime examples. Between 1987 and 1995, the former ruling party had four manifestations – Democratic Justice Party, Democratic Liberal Party, New Korea Party, and Grand National Party to accommodate the political needs of Chun Doo-hwan, Roh Tae Woo, Kim Jong-pil and Kim Young-sam. Kim Dae-jung’s party vehicle had a similarly volatile, though less spectacular history. Then – as if to prove the subordination of party to personality – President Kim actually abandoned formal party alignment in November 2001. Taiwan is another prime example of personalism, not only because its internal party political structures are a faithful reflection of traditional Chinese factionalism,21 but because of the priority regularly given to personality over party since the introduction of democracy in the mid-1980s. The 2000 presidential election provides a contemporary example. Nationalist President Lee Teng-hui was retiring, and so he was not a candidate in the elections himself. James Soong was commonly regarded as his preferred replacement until he split from Lee at the end of 1996 and left the Nationalists. Soong then contested the 2000 presidential elections and came second, significantly without going to the trouble of joining or setting up a new party. The fact that Soong came second without a party speaks volumes for the relative importance of personal qualities in Taiwanese political legitimation. For his part Lee has successfully freed himself of the constraint of party (having manipulated his expulsion from the Nationalist Party in September 2001) and established himself as the self-styled ‘spiritual’ leader of the nation – conferring his endorsement or approbation on any he chooses; weaving alliances between parties and rival leaders; and generally adopting a role vaguely akin to that of Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping after their ‘retirements’.

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It could be argued that Japan is an exception to the generalisation about Asian personalism in politics, since it has developed a system of politics where the personnel at the highest levels of government are little more than functionaries of impersonal factions. This argument falters, however, when one looks at the importance of political dynasties in the country’s leadership. Not only are four of the most recent prime ministers second or third generation parliamentarians, but following the 2000 elections, one-third of Diet members were the descendants of former parliamentarians.22 This is despite the electoral reforms of the 1990s that were intended to end the ‘rotten boroughs’ that were usually blamed for the perpetuation of local oligarchies in politics. Japanese seem content being represented by a coterie of trans-generational political families. Yet it must nevertheless be acknowledged that Japan is an exception to the generalisation about personalism to the extent that it has almost completely excluded adulation of the leader from political discourse. Interestingly, the only other Pacific Asian country that is relatively free of this intense personalism is Thailand, which also has a significant level of personalism at the constituency level, but is relatively blase about its national leaders. Perhaps the secret lies in another characteristic that Japan shares with Thailand: a reigning titular monarch. Neither the Japanese Emperor nor the Thai King has any real power, but each is the subject of deeply felt devotion from his subjects. It would be difficult to establish conclusively, but the points of commonality suggest that the absence of high-level political personalism in these two countries might lie in the diversion of adulation away from politicians and towards their beloved monarchs. That is to say that perhaps the personalism is still present just as strongly, but it has found a non-political home. These observations are not made with an eye to mummifying Asian and Western democracies into permanent or exclusive cultural camps – or even to picture them as two blancmanges of cultural consistency. Even the generalisations made in this chapter do not apply consistently throughout the Pacific Asian region. Personalism seems to be a universal characteristic, but the culture of consensus is much less so. Even within the three new democracies under study we found that the observations about cultures of consensus apply to South Korea only with substantial qualifications. If we go further afield we find that neither Thailand nor the Philippines has cultures of consensus remotely akin to that described in the early part of this chapter. The variety among Asian political cultures is so great that it is misleading to talk about ‘Asian democracy’ at all. Rather, there are Asian democracies, each with its own national political culture – and even rival political cultures within one nation. Some broad generalisations can be made about them as a whole – especially about those countries with Confucian and Sinic heritages – but any generalisation can be no more than a control against which the particular national culture can be compared. Furthermore, both Asian and Western

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democratic cultures can be expected to change as they are exposed to new influences and new challenges. Perhaps the real lesson of this study of Asian democracies is to expect and accept the uniqueness of each nation’s political culture along with the points of commonality between kindred cultures, and to take cultural politics per se into account when assessing the processes and prospects of democratisation and governance.

CURRENCY CRISIS The second event to cause a sea change in the ‘Asian values’ debate has already been referred to in Chapter 1: the Asian financial crisis of 1997–8. The most dramatic result of the crisis for the ‘Asian values’ discourse is the collapse of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, and the novelty of seeing ideological liberalism turned on its head: bad economic management ‘should’ not herald democracy, but it did. The collapse of the New Order altered the balance of influence in ASEAN and Pacific Asia in general, leaving Singapore and Malaysia as the only articulate advocates and practitioners of soft-authoritarian governance. The defection of the world’s fourth largest country to democracy – coming after 10 years of other Pacific Asian countries going democratic – was the final step in delegitimising ‘Asian values’ as a blanket cover for authoritarianism. There will, of course, continue to be discussion on the relationship between culture, governance, democracy and human rights – and Part II of this book is concerned with precisely these questions – but hopefully we can put most of the polemics behind us. The currency crisis should have had a similar effect on the triumphalism of claims about the inherent superiority of a generic ‘Asian way’ of work and business. Yet as we saw in Chapter 1, this has already been superseded – at least in Lee Kuan Yew’s mind – by a Confucian triumphalism, based on the success of South Korea, Japan, China (including Hong Kong), Taiwan, and Singapore in weathering – or at least recovering from – the currency crisis. Even though such a proposition smacks of stereotyping and oversimplification, the empirical evidence is not easily dismissed. Without even hinting at a ‘Confucian values’ thesis, Tom Holland of the Far Eastern Economic Review has already noted that a ‘new fissure’ appears to be developing in Asia ‘along the line of latitude at 20° North’, a boundary that corresponds almost precisely with the edge of the Confucian heartland. Skirting Thailand’s northern border, and passing eastward between the Philippines and Taiwan, it neatly divides East Asia into two rapidly diverging economic zones. To the north [South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China], Asia’s economies are booming. To the south, progress is looking distinctly shaky.23

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Holland bases his assessment strictly on his reading of current political and economic trends rather than cultural explanations, but the ease with which observations such as these could feed a Confucian triumphalism is obvious. It is an ironic twist on the earlier phase of the ‘Asian values’ debate that most of the countries in the basket of Confucian successes are democracies. From the perspective of this study, however, the more significant feature is the destructive effect that the financial crisis has had on ASEAN triumphalism. ASEAN has been transformed almost overnight from a phalanx of upwardly mobile, assertive countries into a defensive, uncertain and internally divided group of supplicants. Chris Patten, speaking as the EU Ambassador to Asia, put it none-too-delicately just before the 2001 meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum: ‘It would be easier for the EU to focus on ASEAN if the grouping had a clearer agenda.’24 Singapore, the only economically advanced member to have survived the crisis without major trauma, is bypassing its neighbours when seeking homes for its serious investment: Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Argentina – almost anywhere but Southeast Asia. Meanwhile ASEAN as a whole is seeking to overcome its weakness through the development of an East Asian economic caucus under the guise of ASEAN-Plus-Three: the three being China, Japan and South Korea. Even the sacrosanct principle of non-intervention has been reinvented as ‘enhanced interaction’ so that member states do not need to pretend that serious intraASEAN problems such as military incursions by Myanmar into Thailand, and environmental (smoke haze) incursions by Indonesia into all its northern neighbours do not exist.25 The future of ASEAN itself is now in serious doubt but it remains to be seen whether the dynamics of weakness results in the dispersal of the ‘Asian values’ reaction per se, or whether triumphalism of the 1990s is simply transformed into a more defensive form of self-assertion and solidarity. The other lessons of the crisis on Asian and global economic politics are still being played out, but a number of things can be stated with relative certainty, none of which conform to the orthodoxy of either ‘Asian values’ or liberal economics. The first is that being ‘rescued’ by an IMF bail-out has been shown to be a likely trigger for the fall of a regime: witness Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea and the Philippines. Second, retaining a strong government hand in monetary and currency matters seems to be a reasonably effective way of protecting an economy and a regime. Malaysia provided the most spectacular example of this, but Taiwan and China also survived the financial crisis relatively unscathed thanks to strict government controls on currency trading. Already this lesson has been noted obliquely by Asia’s most ardent advocate of trade liberalisation and globalisation: Lee Kuan Yew told Asiaweek in June 2000 that Malaysia ‘is up and running. Its closing of the Malaysian ringgit was not orthodox IMF policy but it has worked as well as any IMF policy.

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Therefore [Dr Mahathir] is vindicated’.26 In the same interview, Lee noted that both Myanmar and Vietnam have reversed their policies of economic liberalisation precisely because of the political lessons that they learnt from the fall of Suharto. It would no doubt have heartened Lee to read later that month that a delegation of senior Vietnamese officials was visiting China to learn how they managed to reform their economy without losing party control.27 Considering that all regimes – democratic or not – have a vested interest in survival, these lessons may prove to have a dramatic effect far beyond Asia.

PERSPECTIVES Thus far the active participants under consideration in this book have been mostly members of ruling elites. There are admittedly dangers in this approach, since it implies acceptance of the parameters set down by rulers, at the expense of both their political opponents (and victims), civil society and the ordinary people. It might be reasonable to argue that non-elites should have been given higher priority since they are the ‘real Asia’. And yet the attention that has been paid to the political elites has been a logical and necessary feature in an historical consideration of the ‘Asian values’ debate. By its nature, the ‘Asian values’ discourse is conducted at an elite level. Part II – dealing with the religions involved in or affected by the ‘Asian values’ debate – will consciously bypass the ruling elites by attempting to generate an understanding of at least some of the broader, deeper cultural imperatives in which both rulers and ruled are operating.

Part II

Values and religions

6

Of liberalism and other religions

Values are a deceptively difficult subject about which to write; and broad cultural values are even more problematic. Thus far this study has touched on such questions without really confronting them. Aspects of Sinic and Confucian cultures, and Malay, Indonesian, and Thai cultures have been alluded to along with the values of post-1960s Western culture. Yet the previous section did not stray far into such questions for fear of losing sight of its politico-historical perspective. Part II is different. Here we will attempt to come to grips with one of the major components and driving forces of cultural values: religion. It will consider religions as identifiable sources of values that intersect with local cultures; use them to develop our understanding of the continuities and differences between and within Asian and Western values; and seek within religions the resources to build a fruitful dialogue on human dignity and rights. It should be noted, however, that when this volume uses the word ‘religion’ – and when it later describes liberalism and Confucianism as ‘world religions’ – it is not restricting itself to personal, theistic religions that evoke devotion and spirituality. It is, in fact, disputing the legitimacy of the traditional dichotomy between personal, theistic religions and social, non-theistic worldviews – a distinction that has already come under successful challenge in the American courts on numerous occasions.1 That dichotomy was generated originally by the Enlightenment project, which claimed to be different from the old religions because it rested its authority on supposedly objective reason. It has also been accepted by the pre-modern religions – especially Christianity and Islam – as a line of demarcation between themselves and the new modernist religions. Yet it is not a particularly helpful dichotomy when pursuing questions of cultural politics, especially in Pacific Asia. First, it fails completely to account for Buddhism, since it is an agnostic, but deeply spiritual and personal religion that straddles and defies the old categories. More significantly, the importance of religions in this study is not their beliefs about a god or gods, or the depth of spirituality they evoke in adherents. It is about how beliefs and values affect the concept of the human person and the relationship between the individual and society. In most religions this is

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grounded in, or at least related to a view about the supernatural. Impersonal, social religions like Confucianism and liberalism achieve this end just like a personal, theistic religion, but without reference to the supernatural. Giving greater attention to popular, rather than high culture in the old religions also undermines the traditional dichotomy. Religions generate elite cores of dedicated believers for whom faith is a deeply personal force, but they also produce many more adherents for whom religion is an ordinary, routine part of life, if not an inconvenience. Without casting doubt on the underlying faith of such people it would be fair to say that for many over the millennia, religion has been primarily a social, cultural and political reference point rather than a precious personal faith. Islam, Judaism, the Catholic Church and many strands of Protestant Christianity recognise this reality, and for long periods of their respective histories they have organised themselves accordingly. The author is merely suggesting that we too accept this reality and acknowledge that the personal, theistic religions and the social, non-theistic religions are of the same genus of social entity. By approaching cultural politics through the lens of religion in its broadest sense, it is hoped that we can avoid some of the burdens of stereotyping that bedevil the ‘Asian values’ discourse, without slipping into the alternate error of denying the elements of truth that lie behind such stereotypes. Thus Protestantism and liberalism can each be considered as forces that interact with American culture – and Korean culture for that matter – without labelling either America or South Korea as Protestant or liberal. Confucianism and Buddhism interact with all the Sinic cultures of Northeast Asia in a variety of ways, so that they can be considered as a family of cultures without exaggerating the elements of commonality between them. This approach promises to be a manageable and balanced means of studying cultural values, provided we can satisfactorily identify the religions to be studied, and then take sufficient care to consider how they interact with local cultures.

RELIGIONS This book has taken a working definition of the ‘Asian values’ discourse that regards it as a dialogue within and between Pacific Asia (Northeast and Southeast Asia) and ‘the West’ (primarily the United States of America and Europe, but including Australia and most developed countries). The debate obviously has implications far beyond these neatly constructed cultural and geographical groupings, but these are the most significant loci of the debate as it has emerged historically. It is proposed therefore to restrict the consideration of belief systems to those that are represented in or affected by the dialogue emerging from these regions. Thus Judaism and Hinduism are excluded. Judaism is well represented as

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a minority in the West, and there are pockets of Hindus scattered throughout Pacific Asia – notably in Bali, Malaysia and Singapore – but neither of them enjoys a hegemonic role in any national culture of the region. Furthermore, neither has engaged the ‘Asian values’ discourse in any more than the most cursory way. It is further proposed to restrict our consideration to world religions: that is religions that have passed beyond the geographical, national and cultural cradle of their genesis, and have become significant sources of cultural values on a world scale. Thus Confucianism and liberalism are included in our consideration, but Shinto, Chinese folk religions, Daoism and Korean Shamanism are all excluded from deliberative consideration, although they may be considered as factors interacting with the world religions and the national cultures under study. On the basis of these criteria, there are three theistic and/or personal world religions operant within the discourse of ‘Asian values’: Islam, Buddhism and Christianity. Islam plays major roles in Malaysia and Indonesia and constitutes substantial minorities in Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines and China. Buddhism is dominant in Myanmar and Thailand and is present throughout the rest of mainland Pacific Asia to varying degrees and in a variety of forms. Historically, it has been a significant factor in shaping the ethos of the Sinic societies of Northeast Asia. Christianity played a seminal role in shaping Western civilisation and remains a significant feature of Western life and political discourse today. It has also become a cultural force in several Pacific Asian countries.

CONFUCIANISM With our list of three theistic and/or personal religions established, we can now turn our attention to the two non-theistic social religions that intersect with the ‘Asian values’ discourse: Confucianism and liberalism. It is obvious that Confucianism needs to be considered in a study of ‘Asian values’, but it is less clear that it is a world religion. A brief consideration should, however, be sufficient to establish its credentials. Tu Weiming has observed that there are three kinds of Confucianism: as personal ethics, as a mode of scholarship and as a political ideology.2 We cannot ignore any of these, but the aspect that is most pertinent to this study is Confucianism as personal ethics. It is here that Confucianism is lived in daily life, even by uneducated peasants who have never read a Confucian text, and from which the other aspects derive their meaning. It is also here where we can see clearly the role of Confucianism in providing a socialising worldview. At the level of popular culture, Confucianism has a powerful hold over the social cognition of people raised under its precepts. The only features it lacks to be considered a personal religion are a clergy – which it arguably possessed in dynastic times under the

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guise of teachers and scholars – and a supernatural aspect. Not that Confucianism is hostile to the supernatural: it is simply deemed irrelevant to the task at hand, which revolves around the ethical formation of the elite and the stability and prosperity of society. Although Mencius injected some traces of mysticism into Confucian thought with his concept of the Mandate of Heaven, both elite and non-elite followers of Confucius have been content to satisfy any spiritual needs outside Confucianism. Hence Daoism, Buddhism, folk religions, and especially ancestor worship all came to be strongly associated with Confucian cultures, even though some of them are theoretically incompatible with Confucianism. Most people who have been raised in the Sinic cultures of Northeast Asia have looked to Confucian ethics to provide most of the earthly functions that theists usually associate with religion. This includes providing a normative worldview and ethical discourse for society, and rationalising relations between government and society and the individual. If we can accept that Confucianism is a social religion, it remains only a small step to accept it as a world religion. The only objection to this classification could be that Confucianism has not travelled beyond the geographical, cultural or national borders of its origin. This argument could only be sustained, however, by taking a jaundiced view of Northeast Asia that regards the whole region as one entity. Of course, Confucianism has outgrown its origins! It emigrated from China to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. In fact, it left its culture of origin even before it left China, since it predates and contributed to the idea of China itself.

LIBERALISM Despite the minor element of novelty, the inclusion of Confucianism in our list of world religions is unlikely to provoke many debates. The same can probably not be said of the inclusion of liberalism, so it may be worthwhile devoting more detailed attention to this proposition than has been given to the other belief systems. The first thing to be acknowledged is how much liberalism resembles the old religions, despite its secular character. Its raison d’être is to teach and enforce a conception of the person in his or her relationship with society and the state, which in the context of this book is the most important feature of religions and belief systems. One of liberalism’s founding fathers, John Stuart Mill, even recognised that his own writing merely replaced morality based on theistic religion with morality based on a non-hierarchical religion of ‘Humanity’. Further, he admitted that if the new religion had a ‘corporate hierarchy’, it would have been almost indistinguishable in character from the Catholic Church, ‘though without any secular power’.3 If we trace back the history of liberalism a bit further we find that John Locke deliberately appropriated the language and concepts of Protestant Christianity – drawing on

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the precepts he learnt in his own Puritan upbringing – in his exposition of liberal morality.4 His discussions of Adam, Noah and the Psalms were not just a polemic device to reach a Protestant audience, although they performed this function beautifully.5 They truly reflected the holistic, moralistic, quasi-religious character of his teaching, whereby he raised the supremacy of human reason to a neo-divine status. Locke also raised the concept of private property – and oneself as one’s own property – to the status of a fundamental dogma.6 These teachings touched upon the nature of persons, relations between spouses, and duties of parents towards children,7 but perhaps the place where the quasi-religious nature of Locke and Mill’s liberalism is seen most clearly is in their attitudes to education. It was John Locke, not an apocryphal Jesuit, who wrote . . . I think I may say, that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. ‘Tis that which makes the great difference in mankind: The little, and almost insensible impressions on our tender infancies, have very important and lasting consequences.8 Like the advocates of any religion, both Locke and Mill viewed the education system as a primary conveyer of their worldview and their morality to the next generation9 – a feature that has remained prominent in liberalism to the present time. More recent manifestations of liberalism have dropped most of the quasi-religious language, but they are no less holistic in their claims of conceptualising the nature of the human person, social relations, and the relations between the human person and the state. In fact, in many countries of ‘the West’ – notably the United States and the countries of Western and Nordic Europe – the legislature, the judiciary and the education system have imposed liberal value systems onto families, workplaces, social clubs, the media, and even onto churches. In many respects, the judiciary has developed into John Stuart Mill’s hypothetical ‘corporate hierarchy’ and has appropriated the ‘secular power’ of the state to impose its will as thoroughly as any fundamentalist movement that subordinates a state to its purpose. This observation makes no value judgement about the content of the liberal belief system, either in its early Lockean and Mill phases, or in its more recent manifestations, but it is important to recognise how closely it resembles a personal religion. It would be unreasonable to call it a personal religion per se, because it does not have enough of the recognisable external attributes of a religion. Yet it is clearly a belief system with holistic, moralistic values. Furthermore, it has obviously transcended cultural boundaries and qualifies as a ‘world religion’ in the sense used in this book. If liberalism is a world religion, however, it does not share with the other four world religions their longevity, or their historical record of cultural centrality. It has never enjoyed a sense

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of exclusivity in any civilisation, and despite its holistic worldview, it is doubtful whether it can be regarded as a distinct entity – a self-contained belief system – in the same way as the other belief systems can. Christianity may be an historical successor to Judaism, and Islam may be a successor to both, but all three are distinct. It would be misleading to regard them as manifestations of one overarching entity called monotheism. Even though they all share some characteristics on the basis of their monotheism and common heritage, no one talks about the Judeo–Christian–Islamic ethic. In a real sense, liberalism cannot be isolated from its relatives as thoroughly as Christianity and Islam are from each other. At a glance, it might seem reasonable to regard liberalism as a manifestation of a much broader spirit of ‘modernity’. This characterisation is not completely satisfactory, however, because apart from its vagueness it implies that liberalism and the West ‘owns’ modernity: that the only way to ‘modernise’ is by becoming more ‘Western’ and more ‘liberal’. Some people may indeed believe this to be the case, but it is not the argument that this author wishes to put. In Dædalus’s collection of essays on ‘Multiple Modernities’, S. Eisenstadt began developing a postmodernist concept of modernity that would allow it to be conceptualised more broadly than does the usual practice of identifying it exclusively with the form that developed in Europe, and became dominant through colonisation and industrialisation. Eisenstadt identifies the essence of modernity as a conception of alternate possible futures ‘realizable through autonomous human agency’. He further argues that in this modernity, the premises on which the social, ontological, and political order were based, and the legitimation of that order, were no longer taken for granted. An intensive reflexivity developed around the basic ontological premises of structures of social and political authority – a reflexivity shared even by modernity’s most radical critics, who in principle denied its validity. . . . The degree of reflexivity characteristic of modernity . . . gave rise to an awareness of the possibility of multiple visions that could, in fact, be contested.10 According to this understanding, modernity at the beginning of the twenty-first century is a near-universal mode of thought that can be distinguished from pre-modernity, but not easily from any tenets of contemporary reality. Most of the mainstream Christian churches are part of this modernity, as can be seen by their use of empirical, scientific and social research in their efforts to understand social and moral questions. Indeed it seems reasonable to speculate that modernity’s origins might be found in the thirteenth century writings of St Thomas Aquinas, who was the first Catholic theologian to elevate natural reason to a status not

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11

far below that of revealed truth. Even many Islamic and Christian fundamentalists can be considered part of this modernity because they have been living in the ‘modern world’ with modern technology and modern communications and the inescapable knowledge of alternative systems of thought and social organisation. This conceptualisation of modernity helps explain the enigma of so many Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalists being educated, technologically proficient, urban professionals. They might oppose modernity, but unless they are going to retreat into defensive isolation – as some do – they can oppose modernity only by using the conceptual and technological tools supplied by modernity.12

MODERNISM If this critique is given credence, modernity is too broad a concept to be a home in which to locate liberalism. Liberalism, like communism, seems to be something more than a manifestation of a pre-existing modernity as described by Eisenstadt. Although the claims of liberalism and communism are incontestably products of the critical reflexivity of modernity, each of them have sought merely to replace one set of monopolistic ontological premises with another set that is just as monopolistic and just as constricting in their conception of the future. Thus liberalism, like most ‘isms’, has always been in implicit contestation with the reflexivity of modernity. If modernity is an insufficiently precise term, it may be more useful to characterise liberalism as a manifestation of modernism. Although the two concepts are related and often taken as synonymous, modernism lends itself to being used as a much narrower term. Modernism as a belief system can be understood as the most direct intellectual product of the ‘Enlightenment project’, which was itself a product of modernity. This project, begun in eighteenth century Europe, presumed that human nature and humanity could and should be continually improved by the application of reason. It further assumed that the perfection of humanity was a precise goal, that there was only one path leading to the goal, and that by objective reason we can know where that path lies. This monolithic, goal-oriented conception of humanity was borrowed directly from Christianity, with the Augustinian ‘City of God’ being replaced by what Carl Becker has called ‘The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers’.13 This goal-oriented conception of history lent itself to thinking of history and human society as a unitary whole. More precisely, modernism regards the European intellectual and social movements derived from the Enlightenment as objective manifestations of the advance of the human person and human society towards perfection. One of the problems of modernism, however, is that despite the fact that its adherents agree there is but one path of advancement, and that it is supposed to be revealed with the application of objective reason, there

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is precious little agreement between modernists about either goals or methods. Hence modernism has spawned several belief systems of varying compatibility, most notably liberalism, socialism, Marxism, communism, Social Darwinism, and fascism.14 Of these, liberalism dominates both the political and economic aspects of the ‘Asian values’ discourse, and is arguably the only one that still holds both intellectual credibility and political power in the world. It is therefore the manifestation of modernism most pertinent to the ‘Asian values’ discourse and – at the acknowledged risk of oversimplification – the only that will be considered in this study. All the great liberal thinkers, including Hegel, Locke, Kant and Mill are products and producers of this modernist belief system while Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of ‘the end of history’ is a logical end-point. The End of History is a liberal celebration of the West’s victory in the Cold War. Written from a consciously Hegelian perspective, it is a tightly constructed argument that political liberalism (by which Fukuyama really means liberal democracy) is the highest form of political life a state can achieve, and economic neoliberalism is a practical, though not theoretically a necessary concomitant to political liberalism. He bases his central arguments on his conviction that there exists a ‘Universal History’ – ‘history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process’ – in which humanity is moving progressively towards a destination, and when the destination has been reached, that is the end of ‘History’. Since communism – the last modernist challenger to the supremacy of liberalism – is dead, the continued operation of liberalism in both the political and economic spheres has brought History to that endpoint. This is not to say that things will stop happening, or that liberalism will not be challenged and maybe even suffer setbacks. But he is arguing that there is going to be no further political or economic evolution beyond the modern liberal democratic state.15 The derivation of liberalism from modernism and the ways in which both can be considered a quasi-religious belief system should be apparent at this stage, but it should nevertheless be acknowledged that some strands of liberalism seem more overtly modernist, and therefore more ‘religious’ than others. Fukuyama’s liberalism as expressed in The End of History is highly modernist, though some of his later work is arguably less so. Jack Donnelly’s liberalism is so modernist and narrowly doctrinal – ‘ . . . human rights require a liberal regime’; ‘Other social systems may claim to have competing views of human rights. They do not.’16 – that he might be considered a liberal ‘fundamentalist’. On the other hand, Judith Shklar’s ‘liberalism of fear’ – ‘What liberalism requires is the possibility of making [the avoidance of] the evil of cruelty and fear the basic norm of its political practices and prescriptions.’17 – is consciously non-utopian, and fits less comfortably with modernism. Yet even this offshoot of modernism comes complete with a definitive conception of the nature of the human person and the nature of relations between the person, society and the state; and the liberal church is easily broad enough to accommodate it.

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WORLD RELIGIONS Before we begin looking at the religions individually in Chapter 7, it is important to recognise that all of these religions have emigrated beyond the confines of their original cultures and societies. This is why we can consider them all to be world religions rather than merely folk or national religions. The very fact that they have achieved this status suggests a prima facie argument that all of them possess a universalist conception of humanity on which it may be possible to build a cross-cultural humanistic consensus that upholds respect for human dignity and human rights. Identifying positive indicators of such a humanistic morality is primarily an intuitive, rather than an empirical or an academic process. Announcing them in advance also reveals the operation of circumlocution and preconceptions: my research, my personal moral judgements and my preconceptions have influenced the composition of the list. While it is important to be aware of these inherently human limitations, it would be an error to allow them to forestall moral discourse or the pursuit of a humanistic morality. Despite the difficulties of settling on public standards of value judgements in a postmodern world, the reader should, at the very least, benefit from being given explicit signposts indicating the direction of the author’s thinking and criteria for ‘success’ in this project. Therefore, as a preliminary contribution to the foreshadowed discourse, I suggest that indicators of the subsistence of a humanistic morality in a worldview, religion or belief system are likely to include: • • • • • •

a universalistic conception of humanity (as opposed to one that preferences or excludes some people), with the implication of respect for human life, and compassion for strangers; traces of individualism and respect for each person qua person, with the implication of respect for life, beliefs and customs; protection of the vulnerable members of society, including women, children, the poor, the sick, the aged and the disabled; special respect and concern for the wellbeing and upbringing of children; something akin to concern for the common good; and openness to the application of reason integrated with, alongside, or in preference to dogma.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive or tightly structured. There is a large degree of overlap between some of these indicators and a lot of room for ambiguity and different interpretations inherent in most of the principles. It is intended merely as an immature, embryonic outline of the principles of a humanistic morality. Although many readers are probably concerned about the nuances of interpreting some or all of these principles, only the last one demands immediate explanation.

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‘Openness to the application of reason’ does not seem to reflect a moral principle at all, but it is included because it is a practical necessity for implementing the other principles in the inconstant world of real people. It is also the primary factor at work in the avoidance of dogmatic fundamentalisms, which – largely because of their disdain for human reason – tend to be antipathetic to universalistic conceptions of humanity and respect for persons qua persons. This indicator tends to be linked in practice to the degree of distinction between spiritual and temporal authority: the conflation of church and state tends to indicate the practical, if not the theoretical subjugation of reason to authority. The possibility of finding a concept of human dignity based on such a humanistic consensus is dismissed out of hand by liberal fundamentalists such as Jack Donnelly and Rhoda Howard, who regard human dignity as a near-worthless concept that detracts from the purity of the liberal conception of human rights: All societies possess conceptions of human dignity, but the conception of human dignity underlying international human rights standards requires a particular type of ‘liberal’ regime. . . . [Most] conceptions of human dignity . . . are incompatible with the values of equality and autonomy that underlie human rights. Most regimes – and their underlying social conceptions of human dignity – necessarily deny both the idea and the practice of human rights.18 This dismissal of the concept of human dignity seems exceptionally cavalier, as is their blunt assumption that human rights are synonymous with liberal values of equality and autonomy. Donnelly and Howard are claiming superiority for their own belief system, and its value system, in precisely the same way that conservative Muslims do. They do not seem to have recognised the significance of their acknowledgment that their own conception of human rights rests on a constructed concept of human dignity. Furthermore, in his enthusiasm for liberal purity, Donnelly would have us ignore completely the humanistic potential of important strains of Islamic thought that could lead to some convergence of ideas and values. Donnelly and Howard also seem to be ignoring the possibility that the weaknesses they see in the concept of human dignity may not rest in the concept itself, nor even in the values with which any particular society identifies human dignity. Part of the weakness might be in legal traditions, which are the mechanism by which dignity is, or can be translated into rights – though it must be admitted that legal cultures are themselves products of the broader cultures and their dominant belief systems. The Theravada Buddhist cultures of Southeast Asia, for instance, have a very weak legalist tradition that does not lend itself easily to the sharp delineations inherent in the concept of rights. Although Islam treats people as

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legal entities, it does not regard them as intrinsically rights-bearing entities.19 Insofar as humans have rights it is a merely derivative benefit of a Muslim’s duties to God.20 Chinese and other Confucian cultures disdain the use of law in preference for fostering virtue in the ruling elite. Insofar as they have traditions of legalism, law [ fa] is treated as a system of rewards and punishments designed to govern the uncultured masses, rather than as a basis of rights.21 None of these legalist cultures are compatible with liberal legalism (or more broadly, Western legalism), but they need not present insurmountable obstacles to the cultivation of legal regimes that uphold human dignity and defend human rights. Each of these cultures has already given birth to at least some countries that have made partial or complete transitions to accommodate modernity and to accept more liberal – for want of a better word – forms of jurisprudence. Yet even if some of the gaps between the liberal human rights culture and those of non-Western cultures can be quarantined partially in a discussion of legalism, there is still undoubtedly a lot of truth in Donnelly and Howard’s claims of liberal exceptionalism at the fundamental level of values. In fact, it is worth noting that Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism appear to have much more in common with each other than with liberalism. Liberalism is the only world religion to raise individualism to an absolute virtue. In fact, it is the only religion under consideration that theoretically has no communitarian element at all. It is also the only world religion under consideration that raises secularism to a virtue, although Confucianism is agnostic on the matter. Liberalism is the only one that claims to be agnostic about morality, although in fact it does possess and impose a morality. It should also be noted that liberalism runs contrary to the spirit of a cross-cultural dialogue in another respect: it shares with the more extreme versions of Islam (and Christianity in earlier phases) an absolutist, legalist conception of morality, and the absolute integration of its own morality with the state. The disjunctions between liberalism and the other religions were not very pronounced before the 1960s, when liberalism was still drawing heavily, albeit unconsciously, upon Christian and bourgeois morality. Since the 1960s, however, liberalism has diverged from the points of commonality it had with the other religions, leading to later liberal thinkers such as Peter Berkowitz and Alasdair MacIntyre to bemoan the eviction of personal virtue from liberal discourse.22 The isolation of liberalism from the other religions, along with the short life span of the current phase of Modernism undermines the claim that liberalism is a transcendent, universal good rather than a culturally and temporally specific form of morality. Some readers may wish to take issue with some of the definitions and constructions in this chapter, but at the very least it should facilitate communication by removing many ambiguities. With this basic step behind us, we can now move onto a study of the world religions themselves.

7

The European legacy: Christianity and liberalism

In any ballet, the male lead is at some point or other responsible for lifting or catching the prima ballerina. This is his role responsibility and if he fails to do it well or not at all, he has failed to do what he ought. In such circumstances others, including the choreographer, the other dancers, or the prima ballerina might express disapproval, criticism, even anger for his failure to do his part by saying any of a number of things, such as: ‘You’re supposed to catch her there’, ‘What’s the matter with you?’, ‘You’re not doing your job (or playing your part)’, ‘You’re incompetent (or irresponsible)’. Suppose instead that the choreographer or any of the other dancers came up and rebuked him by saying, ‘You’ve wronged the prima ballerina’, or ‘You’ve violated her rights’. Or imagine that the prima ballerina picks herself up and angrily proclaims, ‘My rights have been violated . . . ’ Now I maintain that doing so would be bizarre to say the least and that in fact no one in that situation would resort to the language of rights. (Craig K. Ihara, ‘Why There Are No Rights in Buddhism’, 1995)1

To say that the formal concept of human rights is European in origin is neither a denial of its universality or its validity. It is simply a statement of fact. The history of the formal concept can be traced back to the English Bill of Rights in 1689, followed a century later by the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the American Bill of Rights, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. The pre-history of the concept is also exclusively Western. Eugene Kamenka describes its remote origins thus: The concept of human rights is a historical product which evolved in Europe, out of foundations in Christianity, Stoicism and Roman Law with its ius gentium, but which gains force and direction only with the contractual and pluralist nature of European feudalism, church struggles and the rise of Protestantism and of cities. It sees society as an association of individuals, as founded – logically or historically – on a contract between them, and it elevates the individual human person and his freedom and happiness to be the goal and end of all human association.2

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Kamenka went on to make the point that in the vast majority of human societies throughout history, such a view of human society would not only have been hotly contested, but ‘most cultures and languages would not have had the words in which to express it plausibly’. This reminder of the youthfulness and culturally specific origins of the concept of human rights is an important corrective for those of us whose cultural and intellectual inheritance derives from Europe, and who therefore tend to take for granted the intrinsic good of human rights. In truth, the human rights culture that has been juxtaposed to ‘Asian values’ has emerged from a multi-millennial European cultural project, and it should not be surprising if some of the inheritors of non-European culture demure from embracing it wholeheartedly. On the other hand, Craig Ihara’s words at the beginning of this chapter should evoke a rather different response, even though he is making a similar point. Ihara uses his tongue-in-cheek argument about ‘rights in ballet’ to remind today’s rights-heavy Western culture that the language of rights is not the most appropriate response to every social imperfection. There are many ways to conceptualise any social injustice or inadequacy, and to resort to rights is at best just one option. Those of us who uphold the universality and overarching importance of human rights as a means of defending human dignity should acknowledge that they do not constitute the complete parameter of human social relations. Nor are they the goals of human society. Their precepts rest on specific moral concepts of the human person, society and ‘good’ that cannot be taken for granted in a postmodern world. This chapter begins an exploration of the five world religions affected by the ‘Asian values’ debate – Christianity and liberalism in this chapter; Islam Buddhism and Confucianism to follow – with the restricted aim of understanding how their moral discourses relate to the humanistic aspects of modernity; and particularly to human rights. There is no attempt to provide a comprehensive survey of the religions’ beliefs. Rather it focuses on their conception of the human person, and how the person is perceived to relate to society and the state. It forms part of a broader argument that contends that despite vast differences in their worldviews, the religions enjoy wide areas of underlying commonality in many of their reactions. It pursues convergence at the very basic level of humanistic morality, and tries to find a basis for a more culturally sensitive concept of human rights. This approach to human rights begins from the unconventional perspective of cultural politics, but it nevertheless resonates very strongly with more traditional academic disciplines. Hyan-Seok Yu, for instance, begins from much more conventional premises within the discipline of International Relations, yet he sees the real ‘Asian values’ debate in terms complementary to those outlined here. In his evaluation of the state of the discourse at century’s end, he wrote,

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Despite the focus on Asian cultures, it seems appropriate to begin this survey in the fount of modernity and modernism: Europe. This peninsula is the incubator of Christianity, liberalism, and – not coincidentally – the culture of rights. The oldest and most genealogically fundamental of these by far is Christianity, and so we will begin our survey there. Beginning with Christianity also places us in an ideal position to study the development of liberalism, since the historical development of liberalism is intimately bound up with, and dependent upon Christianity.

CHRISTIANITY Like all of the world religions under study, modern Christianity is a rather disparate phenomenon, having splintered many times and accommodated itself to a myriad of cultures. Many of the contemporary faces of Christianity in fact present contradictory answers to our questions about the human person. An outsider could be forgiven for failing to recognise that Calvinist puritans and self-professed ‘Liberal Protestants’, let alone Catholics, have grown from the same seed. To find some bearings without provoking sectarian division, we will defer a study of modern Christianity and consider first its historical, pre-modern development. This survey will also enable us to glimpse hints of the historical role of Christianity in contributing to the European culture that built modernity, thus helping to explain why Christianity suffers only a slight tension with modernity. The central mystery of Christianity is that of sin; and from the beginning Christians have understood sin to have both a personal and a communal dimension. This bifurcation has resulted in a tension in Christian thinking that has never been resolved absolutely. Consider the central narrative of the Christian myth.4 A paradise intended for the whole of humanity was spoilt by one man’s personal sin. This personal sin resulted in turn in a communal stain on the whole of humanity. The Jewish nation was chosen as God’s vehicle to bring redemption to the world as a whole and to each individual person; a feat that was accomplished by the life, death and resurrection of God incarnate, Jesus Christ. Throughout most of Christian history there has been a consensus that God made the offer of salvation through a church, although there was rarely universal agreement on which church. Most Protestant churches do not claim

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this role, and have thus weakened this consensus. Yet even in many of these denominations, sectarian enthusiasm seems to be only one step removed from the communalism of the Catholics and the Orthodox. The Christian churches’ struggles to balance the personal and the communal has manifested itself throughout the ages as tension between personal freedom on the one hand, and social and religious duty on the other. How does one meet the seemingly irreconcilable demands of respect for free will, duty to God and duty to society? For centuries, the Catholic Church was the primary source of legitimacy for most temporal power in Europe, and such dilemmas therefore had immediate consequences for entire populations. Even today, when they are no longer close to temporal power, Christian churches are still faced with essentially the same quandaries as they try to find a correct relationship between their worldly, social roles (such as defending human rights and promoting Christian social morality) and their purely spiritual roles (such as evangelisation and administering sacraments). They work under the shadow of the intense emphasis on the individual person developed by St Paul,5 and heightened four centuries later by St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. When St Augustine wrote his Confessions and told the world about his personal journey from Manichaean heresy and sin to the Catholic Church,6 he elevated considerations of the personal to a new level. Writing near the end of the Western Roman Empire he declared, ‘I stood naked before my own eyes, while my conscience upbraided me’.7 Aaron Gurevich emphasises the significance of Augustine’s introspection for the effect that it had on European civilisation; for the intensity it brought to consideration of the person and the personal.8 St Augustine’s Confessions, like his City of God, became a major intellectual force in the medieval church – contributing to his posthumous status as a canonised saint and a Doctor of the Church. His Confessions became a model for confessions and autobiographies for centuries, though Gurevich argues that his sense of intimacy with his creator, and his exploration of his own soul was not replicated throughout the Middle Ages.9 Considering St Augustine’s elevation of the personal, and his own history as a heretic, it might be assumed that he would also be an unambiguous defender of personal conscience over state authority, in a mode strongly reminiscent of the modern concept of human rights. Although this resonance with modernity is certainly present, it would be wishful thinking to see anything as clear cut in Confessions. His focus on the development of his own conscience during his personal journey to God did indeed lay tentative foundations for the humanism of modernity, but he still thought in the communitarian terms inherited from Judaism, and assumed that it was the duty of the state to uphold the good: If God commands a nation to do something contrary to its customs or constitutions, it must be done even if it has never been done in that

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More explicitly, St Augustine approved the use of imperial troops against Donatist schismatics, though this was primarily because the violence associated with the movement threatened lives, property and order.11 St Augustine was dealing with dilemmas over which the church would struggle for the next 1600 years. What is the relationship between the community and the person? Where does the obligation to impose morality end and the need to respect people’s right to err begin? What is the relationship between the church and state? Christ said ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s,’ (Matthew 22: 21), but this leaves a lot of room for different interpretation, as Luther and Calvin were to prove more than a millennium later. Throughout the Middle Ages communitarianism was stronger in Church thinking than individualism, but church and state were never considered to be in coterminous. The pre-Reformation church held temporal power directly in much of Italy, but most of Europe’s temporal leaders were locked in a constant political struggle with the papacy as each party contested the boundaries of its powers. Despite the fact that local Catholic churches exercised powers that today we would regard as obviously temporal, the papacy did not claim direct temporal authority outside the territories it owned. Ever since Pope Clement V established the principle of territorial sovereignty by temporal monarchs in 1313 – thereby laying the foundations of the Western concept of the sharply delineated territorial state – there had been no question that there were two separate powers in any polity. For this reason, the medieval church is sometimes regarded as a harbinger of a rudimentary rights culture – based initially on the rights of the Church vis-à-vis the state. The balance of power between pope and prince was often contested, and the relationship varied from place to place and time to time, but there was never doubt about the operation of rival loci of power. The separation of temporal and spiritual authority in Catholic Europe may have been of variable effectiveness, but even in its least effective, most corrupt manifestations, it still meant that the papacy was always an alternate source of authority over which king or emperor could not exercise direct or complete control. Individualism was never marginalised completely in Catholic thinking but it did retreat into a subordinate role during the Middle Ages. It began resuming a more central place in the Church’s thoughts through the writing of another Doctor of the Church, St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), who adapted the naturalist philosophy of Aristotle, and premised his work on the celebration of natural reason, with all of its

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implications of personalism. St Thomas declared that the intellect is ‘something in the soul’, derived directly from God, and intended to be used to know Him.12 He constructed a new school of moral philosophy that argued from the existence of a God-given ‘natural law’ that could be known substantially though human reason.13 The role of reason in the Christian worldview had never been denied, but St Thomas gave it a new pre-eminence, which has been retained to the present day in the Catholic Church and many Christian churches. Almost immediately following Aquinas’s lifetime another medieval Catholic scholar, William of Ockham (1285–1349), developed the Christian understanding of freedom in a direction that seems distinctly modern. He argued that Christian freedom meant not only freedom from sin, but freedom from all tyranny, and stated that ‘not even the pope [can violate] the rights and liberties conceded to the faithful by God and nature’.14 Of course nothing written above denies that pre-Reformation Christianity contained impulses and engaged in actions that mitigated against the development of humanism, nor that it often failed to live up to its own ideals. Persecutions, corruption, slavery, oppression, wars, antiintellectualism, subjugation of women: they have all been alive and well throughout Christian history, and were often found at the highest echelons of the Church. For the purposes of this argument, however, it is sufficient to establish that there were elements in the character of early Christianity conducive to the development of a universal humanism on which we might be able to build a new consensus on human rights.

European Protestant Christianity St Thomas’ adaptation of Aristotelian thinking was part of a much broader revival of classical Greek philosophy and art, which has become known as the Renaissance. This movement prompted the growth of a highly elitist rationalistic humanism that in turn foreshadowed the Enlightenment and the Reformation centuries later. The Enlightenment will be dealt with later in this chapter, as will post-Reformation developments in the Catholic Church, but for the moment let us consider the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The relationship of Protestantism to modernity is sometimes stereotyped into a simplistic one in which Protestantism was a direct and necessary step towards the growth of freedom, individualism, pluralism, capitalism and human rights in European, British and American culture. This attitude was articulated in Max Weber’s theory that capitalism grew from Protestantism, and is still often accepted as common wisdom.15 Unsurprisingly, the truth is more complicated. The two great European Protestant movements were those begun by Martin Luther in 1517 in Wittenberg, Germany and by John Calvin in 1540 in Geneva, Switzerland. With a few exceptions like the Anabaptists,

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all European Protestant writers and movements could be viewed as historical or spiritual relatives of one or other of these reformers. Of the two, Lutheranism most readily lends itself to humanistic interpretation, though even here the story is far from simple. Luther’s three basic premises derived from the thinking of St Augustine and built upon some strong spiritual and intellectual fashions of his time. From Augustine’s Platonist notions of the ‘City of God’ – transmuted in part through a neoPlatonist school of philosophy known as ‘Nominalism’16 – Luther concluded that the church on earth is not the real church, but merely an imperfect representation of the ideal, mystical church, which is invisible and ultimately unknowable. Augustine’s introspective reminiscences about his own sinfulness and unworthiness built upon a spiritual fashion that also placed extraordinary emphasis on the sinfulness of the world and unworthiness of the human person, resulting in Luther suffering from what is known as ‘Medieval scruples’.17 From these premises he developed an exceptionally anti-humanistic doctrine on the inherently sinful nature of the human person. From Augustine’s occasional outbursts about the frailty of human reason, and from the Nominalist notion of the complete separation of reason and faith,18 he concluded that human reason is inherently ‘carnal’ and ‘absurd’.19 It has no role to play in knowing God, and little to play in matters of ethics and morality, although he did concede that reason is indispensable in governance and society.20 Luther also reacted strongly against a myriad of abuses in the Catholic Church (many of which were condemned by the Church itself decades later) that seemed to reduce Christianity to a legalistic superstition whereby one was saved by purchasing indulgences and ritually performing sacramental and superstitious actions.21 By contrast he concluded that a person is justified by God’s free and unwarranted gift of faith alone, without the intervention of a visible church, and without any capacity by a person to merit salvation. Despite these anti-rational and somewhat anti-humanist premises the revolution Luther began did have humanistic strands in its outcomes. In particular, his vision of a person standing alone before God and his doctrine of justification by faith placed a new emphasis on the individual person and on freedom of conscience. Furthermore, despite his disparagement of reason in matters of faith, he placed great emphasis on secular education and the application of reason to worldly matters. Following this logic, he became the first Western reformer to advocate universal education for both boys and girls, and believed that obstacles of wealth or birth should not be allowed to stop intelligent boys from attending university.22 Calvin presents a more difficult challenge in the search for humanism. He conceived a vision of the sinfulness and unworthiness of humanity that was even bleaker than Luther’s, and concluded that people cannot be saved even by faith: each person has been predestined by God to be either saved or unsaved, and there is nothing more to be done about it.

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The only role for the unsaved is to obey God’s laws, and the only role for the saved (the Elect) is to ensure that God’s laws are obeyed. Calvin’s teaching (and his praxis in Geneva, where he was able to implement his ideas) placed almost exclusive emphasis on the communal aspects of traditional Christianity, the creation of a puritanical church-state – that is, a state subsumed into a church. Yet even here elements of modernity and humanism can be detected, because buried beneath the authoritarianism of classical Calvinism was a republican, democratic, congregationalist impulse that eventually piloted Calvinism far beyond its narrow fundamentalist origins.23 The robust congregationalism of Calvin’s Reformed Church stood in sharp contrast with the meek otherworldliness of Lutheranism. In the Lutheran schema, the church has no temporal authority of its own. Instead it supported existing temporal powers – including autocratic monarchs, princes and barons – as the legitimate expression of God’s authority on earth. It was at least partly due to the self-serving appeal of this doctrine of subservience that many German princes adopted Lutheranism.24 The Lutheran Augsburg Confession promised to be a much less demanding legitimating tool than the papist Holy Roman Empire. The result, however, was a practical identification of the church and the state, and the near-total subservience of the church to the state to the point where each German Lutheran prince could be thought to ‘own’ his own church. The Lutherans conceived a state-church, as opposed to a Calvinist church-state, but the long-term results were surprisingly similar for the development of pluralism and humanism, since both churches faced a common conceptual dilemma. Thomas Franck identified the essence of the problem for the Protestant churches: Mere national churches did not have quite the cachet of the universal Catholic and Orthodox churches, or, for that matter, of universal Islam. A certain unwonted modesty was imposed on the claims of the new churches because they were demonstrably ‘only’ national (or, as with Geneva, civic) institutions, operating, in most instances, plainly under the direction of secular authorities. Moreover, Protestantism’s restricted view of hierarchy and emphasis on personal salvation made the emergence of conscientious individualism almost inevitable, even if it was, at first, a fiercely resisted concomitant.25 A later chapter will take issue with the implications of Franck’s throwaway line about Islam. For the moment, it is sufficient to note the element of intuitive truth in the positive linkage Franck has made between the diminution of the church by its ‘merely national’ character, and the room thus created for ‘conscientious individualism’. Both varieties of localism were fundamentally at odds with the supranational universalism of the Catholic Church, which allowed it to survive as a supranational rival

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to state power, even to the present day – as was demonstrated by the Catholic Church’s pivotal role in the fall of communism in Europe. It can be seen from this survey that those aspects of Christianity that are of concern to this study have remained in tension on both sides of the Reformation. Communalism has vied with individualism, without either winning complete victory. The quest to establish a monopoly for doctrinal truth has been in constant tension with respect for conscience and respect for people qua people. The rivalry between reason and faith has also continued, without an unambiguous result. In short, humanism and anti-humanistic, anti-rational dogmatism have both been present throughout all the manifestations of Christianity considered to date. The one area where there has been little tension until very recent times was on family issues and sexual morality, an area not referred to up to now because the traditional Christian stances on these matters are so clear and so well known. There were areas of disagreement between churches over matters of divorce and remarriage, and some tendencies looked upon sex more dimly than did others. Nevertheless, the essence of the Christian consensus survived both the schisms of the eleventh and the sixteenth century: sex and procreation are to be carried out within a sacred marriage.

LIBERALISM At this stage, it is appropriate to introduce the story of liberalism. This seems sensible, not only because the history of liberalism is nearly inseparable from that of Christianity, but also because it is difficult to discuss humanism in later Christianity without knowledge of liberalism. Liberalism and its parent, modernism, have already been given considerable attention in Chapter 6, but it is now necessary to treat these movements as part of a broader history of ideas. The defining and central concept of liberalism is personal autonomy. Consider John Locke’s social creation myth, the ‘social contract’. It paints a picture of the human person exercising complete autonomy in a ‘natural’, pre-social state, and argues that government and society are merely practical mechanisms for reconciling natural autonomy with the requirements of social intercourse and cooperation. Yet for all the significance of autonomy to liberalism, it rests in turn on a deeper modernist presumption that needs to be appreciated before studying liberalism: that the autonomous person is essentially rational and good, and that human reason is ultimately the supreme social force for good. This presumption is the most basic of liberal and modernist concepts. It achieved its most profound expression when René Descartes (1596–1650) tried to prove his own existence, beginning from the extreme scepticism of doubting the reality of God, the world, his senses and himself. After much agonising he accomplished this task to his own satisfaction, but only by

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arbitrarily excluding human reason from his existential scepticism and conceiving of a world in which human reason can exist free of sensory experience. By his circumlocutious reference to his own rationality – ‘I think, therefore I am’ – he famously raised human reason to existential paramountcy and established ‘reason’ as a new prism through which Renaissance Europe could view metaphysics and morality. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) developed an entire rationale of ethics and conscience based on the Cartesian principle. He extended Descartes’ severe bifurcation of the world and the mind – the senses and reason – and sought ‘pure reason’ and ‘a priori knowledge, . . . [that is] knowledge absolutely independent of all experience’.26 His work advanced the liberal project of constructing a pseudo-Christian system of ethics and morality in which the ‘voice of God’ was replaced by the ‘voice of Reason’. In Kantian morality, the human rational will ‘enacts’ universal, natural laws of morality.27 This concept of notionally universalistic, rational ethics founded on the thoroughly individualistic principle of human reason and personal ‘autonomy’ became the first principle of liberalism as well as a prime linkage between liberalism and Protestant Christianity – particularly central European Lutheranism – that eventually flourished as ‘Liberal Protestantism’ or ‘Liberal Christianity’. Kant refined the concept of the rational, autonomous, sovereign person in the modernist discourse, and increased its acceptability in Christianity, but his ideas were not developed in isolation. Europe was awash with contemporaries and near-contemporaries such as Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who also developed modernist, liberal conceptions of social contract, freedom and – perversely – absolutism. Much of the absolutism of liberalism derived directly from modernism’s heavy conceptual debt to Christianity, which provided the concept of ‘History’ as a unitary, directional, goal-oriented force for absolute and invincible ‘Good’ – against which resistance was both futile and evil. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the rationale for the absolutist tendencies of modernism was already set. Isaac Newton’s Principia of 1668 created a revolution in physics that had convinced eighteenth century Europe that it was possible to know the mind of God by knowing the ‘mind’ of Nature.28 From here it was only a short step for human reason and Nature to supplant the revealed truth of the Christian God as the key to understanding mankind, morality, and social relations, thus providing a foundational cosmology for modernism. Carl L. Becker has argued that John Locke (1632–1704), more than any other person, led the West down this path by making it possible for the eighteenth century to believe ‘what it wanted to believe’: namely, that in the world of human relations as well as in the physical world, . . . it was possible for man, by the use of his mind, to bring his

100 Values and religions thought and conduct, and hence the institutions by which he lived, into a perfect harmony with the Universal Natural Order.29 Becker observed that the eighteenth century did not abandon the old effort to share in the mind of God; it only went about it with greater confidence, and had at last the presumption to think that the infinite mind of God and finite mind of man were one and the same thing.30 In this ‘greater confidence’ and ‘presumption’ lies the seed of the liberal impulse to intolerance and fundamentalism that has clouded much of the current discourses on ‘Asian values’ and human rights. Locke’s influence in Britain and Europe was profound, but it is possible that his greatest social creations were across the Atlantic. In many respects, the American colonies were an unlikely seedbed for a desacralising philosophy like liberalism. The colonies were founded by Calvinist puritans dissatisfied with the English Reformation and determined to build Calvin’s dream in America: either by purifying the Church of England, or by establishing new, unestablished churches. They sought to bring God’s discipline to the New World through law and regulation, and in the absence of a truly national church tended to develop a very strong form of localist communalism, which Barry Shain describes as America’s ‘most enduring political tradition’.31 Yet in the midst of puritanical conformity, other, more humanistic traditions were also flourishing. The democratic congregationalism of Calvinism was an inherent part of American localism, and from fairly early a peculiarly American emphasis on personal conversion and a specific ‘conversion experience’ began to provide an individualistic flavour to an otherwise dour and conformist puritanical landscape.32

American Protestant Christianity The history of American Christianity has many peculiarities, but one of the most extraordinary is the Lockean takeover of Protestantism, which was so complete by the time of the Revolution of 1776 that Michael Zuckert can write of the revolution’s ‘Lockean puritans’.33 And make no mistake; the revolutionaries were both puritan and Lockean, despite the obvious paradox. Their puritanism is evident in their intensely moralistic localism, reminiscent of Calvin’s Geneva. Local towns and villages were safeguarded as moral communities that disciplined or expelled moral pariahs, and looked to the law for (in the words of the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights) ‘the encouragement of virtue, and prevention of vice and immorality’.34 Yet the puritan clergymen, even as they were calling down the wrath of God on sinners, often resorted to the Lockean

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language of natural rights alongside the language of the Bible. They conflated Biblical imagery and the struggle for Lockean liberty by presenting the struggle against tyranny as a ‘struggle against the beast and his image’; by assuring the faithful that God had ‘planted a vine in this American wilderness’ which he would ‘never suffer to be plucked up, or destroyed’; and by envisioning America as ‘God’s American Israel’.35 Accounting for this drift from old Calvinism to Lockean liberalism is not easy, but part of the reason was undoubtedly the localism that was intrinsic to Calvinism and which gave Calvinism its communal dimension. Parochial localism in religion, even more so than the creation of national churches, removes external reference points by which a religious people can retain their identity against the surrounding culture and rival political and social forces. American Protestantism was extremely vulnerable to cultural absorption because it was extraordinarily parochial. Barry Shain tells the following story of early in the nineteenth century: Commenting on the unequalled local control by village and congregation in America, a British minister, after a fourteen-month visit to the United States in 1807, observed that ‘whether Anglican or separatist, we [the English] have a notion of Church and nation. In the American states, even Anglicans speak only of village and congregation.36 Localism left an indelible mark on America, and to this day European Protestantism and European liberalism have both retained much stronger communalist and integrative notions of nation, people and state than have their American counterparts. One can take this contrast even further: European Protestantism has retained a much stronger notion of an institutional church than have American Protestants, whose history has been dominated by a tendency towards localist sectarianism, exemplified by the exponential growth of independent Baptist churches following the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century.37 Localism made American Protestantism extremely vulnerable to the hegemony of Lockean theories of natural rights and social contract; theories that resonated strongly with the ethos of the nascent nation, which was also being expressed in terms of rights, liberty, and freedom from external (British monarchical) rule. In an age when Locke’s philosophy seemed, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, ‘the common sense of the matter’,38 localism removed most Christian defences against liberal intellectual hegemony. Perhaps also the anti-intellectualism of puritanism exacerbated the enervating effects of localism by driving its more thoughtful sons – such as Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton – to seek inspiration elsewhere, thus creating something of a vacuum in Christian political and philosophical leadership. Yet in the face of the apocalyptic and prophetic language of the Lockean puritan preachers these factors can be no more than the beginning of an

102 Values and religions explanation. Much of the remainder seems to lie in the common emotional links between Lockean liberalism and American puritanism: not only hostility towards externally imposed authority, but particularly hostility to the Catholic Church. Locke, whose great fear was the restoration of the Catholic Church in England by the accession of James II to the throne, regarded the Catholic Church, along with Islam and atheism, as an enemy of a free society.39 Anti-Catholicism was also the single most conspicuous and most continuous feature of American puritanism and the hegemonic American culture up to the Revolutionary period and beyond. Of course anti-Catholicism had long been a prominent feature of American anti-French sentiment, but it required real innovation to regard Anglican Britain as a Roman Catholic threat. Under the influence of modernism, however, this seems to have been achieved. The secret of this trick of the mind is what Herbert Butterfield has called the ‘Whig interpretation of history’, a term he coined in 1931 to criticise the dominant school of English historians of his day for their practice of ‘dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress’.40 In this Manichaean division of the world, Catholicism and despotism were inevitably and perpetually allied in mortal combat against Protestantism and liberty: hence liberty is a sacred cause and Catholics can be seen plotting at every turn. This scenario may seem a little far-fetched – and it is – but Nathan O. Hatch gives ample evidence to show that in Revolutionary America the perception that the spiritual tyranny of the papacy aligned with the civil despotism of Spain and France – as well as their minions the Stuarts – explained every jot and tittle of the experience of England, both Old and New. In reflecting on the previous two centuries, Revolutionary New England could account for the rise of liberty, both civil and religious, in a number of remarkable ways: the defeat of the Armada, the overthrow of the Stuarts, the Glorious Revolution (with the ousting of that tyrant and ‘biggoted papist’ Sir Edmund Andros), the Hanoverian succession, the defeats of the Pretender in Britain and the French in Canada. In each of these cases the battle lines were clearly drawn between liberty and Protestantism on the one side and the ‘two sister furies’, popery and arbitrary power, on the other.41 In the light of these assumptions it was then obvious that the split between the ‘new American Israel’ and the Crown meant that the Crown had aligned itself with Rome. This explains the volcanic outcry among both the political and religious elites against Britain’s Quebec Act of 1774: George III was expanding Catholicism on the colonies’ doorstep as a prelude to the imposition of popery! The passing of the Stamp Act was a French-Catholic plot!42 Such were the instinctive reactions of the revolutionary puritans.

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Nineteenth century liberalism If the eighteenth century was the age of John Locke, the nineteenth century was the age of liberal and quasi-liberal diversity. On both sides of the Atlantic liberals divided over the implicit tension between the principles of autonomy and rights on the one hand, and the principles of egalitarianism and democracy on the other. Liberalism both blended with and faced competition from rival expressions of modernism. The blending of liberalism and socialism (and Christianity) became a commonplace mixture when Europeans were considering how to improve white society. When Europeans were considering how to improve the lot of nonwhites in the colonies, however, they tended to mix liberalism with Social Darwinism. By such associations the metropolitans’ racist and authoritarian rule of their overseas possessions was rationalised into an ideology that was genuinely humanitarian, hopelessly patronising, and conveniently self-serving all at the same time. According to this rationale, the social contract did not apply to the non-whites in the colonies because these peoples had not reached the European stage of development. They were still in the pre-contract phase of social evolution where they relied on a benevolent father figure (the white man) to lead and enlighten them.43 John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was a major contributor to this discourse. He is most famous for his exaggeration of Lockean individualism into almost unfettered libertarian, social freedom whereby ‘the only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it’.44 But like Locke before him, his idea of freedom was conditional and elitist. Since he worked for the East India Company, the colonial primitives were never very far from the centre of his vision. Despite the humanism implicit in his support of individualism perhaps his greatest legacy is his justification of colonial authoritarianism. Mill made clear that liberalism defends only bourgeois liberties: it legitimises and defends the liberties of those who already have sufficient social strength (through race, education, property, money, social standing, employment or politics) to have a moderately high degree of autonomy in the first place. According to Mill, the English working class need not apply for liberty until they ‘can be made rational beings’.45 He regarded them as ‘the most disorderly, debauched and unruly, and least respectable and trustworthy of any nation whatsoever’.46 Nor need colonial primitives think that they are worthy of liberty: ‘Despotism is a legitimate form of government when dealing with barbarians.’47 He strenuously opposed self-rule for India because ‘if they are ever to be improved, it must be by foreigners’.48 The main exception to the general rule that liberalism ignores the special needs of the weak is in Mill’s writing on women. Mill opened his 1869 essay on ‘The Subjection of Women’ with the assertion that ‘the

104 Values and religions legal subjection of one sex to the other is wrong in itself, and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other’.49 A few pages later he observed that sexual inequality arose simply from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some man. Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognising the relations they find already existing between individuals.50 Despite the fact that Mill was unconscious of how much the last criticism applied to liberalism itself, there can be no argument that liberalism has continued the Millsian tradition of championing the cause of women, and has played a critical role in reconstructing gender relations in Western societies.

Neo-colonialism? Suggestions that contemporary liberalism contains elements comparable to the racism found in eighteenth and nineteenth century colonialism would be strenuously refuted by today’s liberals, and yet seen from the point of view of developing countries, the parallels between then and now are disquieting. People like Dr Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew have made political capital out of the implicit sense of superiority that Western advocates of human rights, women’s rights, etc. continue to display when urging reforms on Asian regimes. More significant is the fact that Asian advocates of human rights and democracy also find a substantial amount of common ground with the ‘Asian values’ critique on this score. Thus in 1996 (long before the jailing of his friend, Anwar Ibrahim), Malaysia’s Chandra Muzaffar was comfortable sharing a platform with Dr Mahathir and saying: Though formal rule has ended, Western domination and control continues to impact upon the human rights of the vast majority of the people of the non-Western world in ways which are more subtle and sophisticated but no less destructive and devastating. The dominant West, for instance, controls global politics through the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). . . . The dominant West also controls global economics through the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the G7. The self-serving economic policies of powerful states have cost the poor in the non-Western world billions of dollars in terms of revenue – money which translated

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into basic needs could have saved some 15 million lives in the nonWestern world every year.51 The Philippines’s Waldon Bello – a political economist and ardent critic of elite power – used the same platform to criticise the role of the United States in his country. He admitted that the US has generally promoted democracy, but complained that it has created a ‘Lockean liberal democracy’ that has empowered elites who already possessed social and economic power, but has done nothing to empower the marginalised.52 Thus we return to a familiar critique: that liberalism upholds the liberties of those who are already able to exercise a high degree of autonomy, but it fails the very weak. Bello and Chandra’s criticisms are directed in this instance primarily against Western governments, but Abdullahi An-Na’im, himself a Muslim religious refugee from Sudan, directs similar criticism at ‘Northern’ (i.e. ‘Western’) Non-Government Organisations, which he claims have imposed ‘human rights dependency’ on ‘the South’ (the developing world): Given the entire post-colonial experience and neo-colonial economic and political relations, it is problematic to have the major [human rights] organizations based in New York or London, monitoring violations in the South, but reporting in English in London or New York, with little priority for local publicity of their findings. . . . What I call ‘dependency’ is the idea of generating pressures in the North to persuade governments in the South to protect the rights of their people, because that is not how human rights are protected in the North itself. There, human rights are protected by local constituencies organizing around their own priorities enlisting political support within their own communities and pressuring their own governments legally or otherwise. . . . Human rights dependency legitimizes other dependencies and perpetuates dependent relationships.53 An-Na’im believes that the various forms of dependency, including Northern funding of Southern NGOs, has made human rights issues seem abstract and remote to local populations, which has weakened the cause of human rights in those countries. The culpability of liberalism in the politics of human rights NGOs is admittedly diluted by the presence of ideologies other than liberalism. However, if we shift our focus to the role of international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank and the IMF, the role of liberalism is more clear-cut. The hegemony of economic liberalism in the IFIs is often referred to as the ‘Washington consensus’, and is built around a set of policies that include financial sector liberalisation, privatisation of

106 Values and religions state-owned enterprises, fiscal discipline, and deregulation of trade, exchange rates and foreign investment. The theoretical purpose is to facilitate global wealth creation, but the end result seems to open up new markets for American and European investors. The record of the IMF is unambiguous in this regard. It is an instrument by which the large Western banks impose economic liberalism onto vulnerable developing countries. Its record in the Asian financial crisis shows that it is willing to pursue a liberal economic agenda without serious consideration of the human or political costs involved. Its sister organisation, the World Bank, cannot be described so neatly. The World Bank is the ‘caring face’ of the international financial community as it pursues good government and social improvement in developing countries. Yet in this case benevolence looks suspiciously like a disguise for a curious mixture of neocolonial paternalism and Western self-interest. Chantal Thomas, for instance, observes the World Bank’s promotion of ‘good government’: So far the programmatic emphasis is on aspects of governance that are more important to investors, such as ensuring judicial enforcement of property and contract rights, and eliminating corruption in procurement and licensing. Thus many charge that for the World Bank good governance has come to mean liberal governance.54 On the other hand, the World Bank is also pursuing the role of social engineer in many countries. For many years, it has actively promoted and invested in programs inspired by the West’s long-standing Malthusian obsession with population control and abortion. In its official documentation, the World Bank freely admits to having generated a backlash from poor countries and poor people within developing countries by its high-handed approach to family planning.55 The bank also admits – though with less candour – to having met this criticism by integrating these activities into broader health and nutrition programs, making them more difficult to reject or even identify.56 This integration has been taken to the point that even the bank itself has difficulty identifying which of its programs are now concerned with ‘reproductive health activities’, and in what proportions. It nevertheless estimates that 7 per cent of total bank lending – and fully one third of its ‘health, nutrition and population’ (HNP) investment – is now invested in this area.57 There is also a strong perception in developing countries that Western interest in human rights issues – and foreign and humanitarian issues in general – is less dependent on high principle than on the exposure an issue receives on Western television. This study has already alluded to the operation of this factor in the Western response to the Tiananmen Square massacre. David Forsythe cites the same phenomenon in relation to the strength of the American response to the Iraqi persecution of the Kurds in 1991 and the human tragedy in Somalia in 1992, and – just as

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significantly – the failure of the West to help Rwanda in 1994 and Zaire in 1997.58 It would certainly be unfair to blame liberalism per se for all of the foibles of the contemporary West, but the current hegemony of liberalism makes it difficult to separate it from the other Western impulses, most of which are, in any case, modernist relatives of liberalism. It is probably sufficient to note that liberalism today is just as prone to misguided and self-serving misuse as any other religion. People have an uncanny knack of finding justifications for their self-interest and preconceptions in their religions, and liberals are no exception to this rule. Leaving aside the question of liberalism’s missionary charter, we also need to consider contemporary liberalism as it applies within its European and American heartlands, though most of the pertinent points have been considered already. Chapters 2 and 6 have already alluded to recent developments, the main point of which was to highlight the removal of the last vestiges of Christian and bourgeois sexual and social morality from liberalism, and the exaggeration of the libertarian, ultra-individualist strains of thought. The critical developments in this program took place in the American courts where, in a series of judgements concerning contraception, pornography, homosexuality and abortion, the traditional concept of the right to privacy was abandoned. In place of a right to keep certain personal facts from public view, the courts found a right to be treated as an autonomous social entity, and to engage in an ever-broadening range of activities that were previously considered immoral and illegal.59 In subsequent decades, this right has been further broadened to exempt wide ranges of ‘private’ activities, not only from legal condemnation, but also from legal, regulatory and social discrimination. As this process has developed, the stridency with which liberalism has been imposing its morality on Western societies through courts, legislation and social pressure seems to have been directly proportional to the distance liberalism has travelled from Christianity. Religion and religious expressions of morality have been chased out of the public arena – except for liberal morality. In most legal domains marriage has been stripped of its social and legal privileges, and there is no way to get married except under the liberal precept that it is a utilitarian union that can be broken at the convenience of either party. The rights of adults are generally upheld ahead of the needs of children (but ironically, the autonomy of children from their parents’ authority is upheld ahead of the rights of parents qua parents). Employers – including hospitals and schools run by churches – are hostage to watchdog commissioners that ensure that liberal morality is not offended in employment practices. In the interests of supposed ‘neutrality’, non-liberal views on life and death issues such as abortion are excluded from judicial consideration. In short, courts have commonly replaced the monopolistic

108 Values and religions morality of Christianity with the monopolistic morality of liberalism. Historically, this was often achieved in opposition to electoral majorities in the first instance, but the pervasiveness of the liberal legal order is such that the new morality has always been internalised by the populace after the fact. Liberalism has produced a new theoretician to capture and justify the spirit of the age. John Rawls’s early work placed rights on centre stage in liberal thinking, and was originally based on a Kantian notion of the autonomous human person.60 In the 1990s, however, he modified his thinking in an effort to establish a broader consensus. He based his later work on the assumption that notions of fairness and justice are sufficiently beyond dispute to form the basis of a morally neutral, intrinsically good and universally fair political order.61 From the perspective of searching for strains of humanism, there can be no doubt that Rawls’ intentions are positive, but he has fallen into the same conceptual traps as his intellectual forebears. Like Descartes and Kant, he has claimed to begin from premises of scepticism and then applied supposedly objective human reason. And like his forebears, he has arbitrarily exempted core assumptions from this scepticism: he has presumed that his conceptions of justice and fairness are universal and incontestable. From this premise he has privileged liberalism in social discourse at the expense of other religions and worldviews, thus providing the latest rationale for the expulsion of alternate conceptions of morality from civic debate. So although his attempt to find an ‘overlapping consensus’ appears to be pluralistic, in fact it justifies the expulsion of personal religions from public discourse, and it imposes the narrow, atomistic precepts of post-1960s liberal morality under the guise of neutrality.62 The modern manifestations of economic liberalism are also worthy of attention. Despite the use of new technology and terminology that would have made the actual techniques of production and communication unrecognisable to a nineteenth century liberal, such a temporal visitor would have been struck by the familiarity he found in the modern agenda. At the beginning of the twenty-first century liberalism still treats government regulation, wage and salary controls, trade unions, import protection, and social welfare as enemies of progress and economic growth. The only significant addition to the agenda has been financial deregulation, which in any case would have been impractical before the age of instantaneous international communication and electronic fund transfers. With so little significant change it should not be surprising that economic liberalism suffers from the same basic weakness as it has in the previous two centuries: it protects the rights of the moderately strong, but does little for the weak. Hence it insists on the protection of investors through proprietary limited companies, but expects workers to operate under short-term contracts or as casual workers, without job security, trade unions, or wage regulation.

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There is one other aspect of post-1960s liberalism that deserves mention; though many may not regard it as a form of liberalism at all. A new ‘victim liberalism’ has emerged as the direct heir of the 1960s civil rights movements. It is a highly legalistic rights-based approach that tries to compensate for liberalism’s propensity to disregard the special needs of those without social power; and it comes in both an individualistic and a collectivist model. The individualist model restricts its brief to thwarting and correcting particular instances of discrimination (for instance, in the workplace), and to creating institutional and social environments antipathetic to discrimination. The collectivist model goes further and commonly operates on the assumption that unequal outcomes between social groups (usually based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality), are the result of the unjust and discriminatory character of contemporary social institutions (such as schools, family structures, and employment practices). Since such outcomes are assumed to be unjust to the members of identifiable social groups, creating a bias towards the social class of victims is thought to be a suitable way to restore justice and the victim’s rights. A less explicit assumption of victim liberalism is that past injustices to social groups can be compensated by creating a contemporary bias towards those groups. Except for strict libertarians and advocates of laissez faire liberalism, most liberals are generally united in supporting the individualist model of victim liberalism. They tend to be more divided on the collectivist model, and many of its adherents prefer not to recognise their debt to liberalism at all.

LIBERALISM AND HUMANISM At this point, it is appropriate to leave our chronological study of liberalism and Christianity and consider the elements of humanism in each, and the response of each to the contemporary human rights discourse. First, let us consider liberalism, but this time separating the explicitly liberal elements from the contemporary Western landscape, and looking at the strengths as well as the flaws. In Chapter 6, the author set out a tentative list of ‘positive indicators of humanism’ in world religions. These may be further summarised as: a universalistic conception of humanity; traces of individualism; protection of the vulnerable; special concern for children; a concern for the common good; and an openness to the application of reason. Using these indicators as an interim standard, liberalism emerges reasonably well. It is clear that liberalism has been intimately connected with the development of the concept of universal human rights. Despite the foibles and limitations of particular liberals in applying these notions, the universalistic impulse has always been present and grew stronger towards the millennium’s end. The main exceptions to this rule are found at the

110 Values and religions extremities of the human life cycle (before birth and near death) where, following the tendency of liberalism to overlook the special needs of the most vulnerable, the importance of human life is treated dismissively. There is also no basis for doubting the place of individualism in liberalism: the autonomy of the individual has always been central to liberalism in all its manifestations, arguably to the point where mere individualism has been exaggerated into social atomism since the 1960s. On the matter of protecting vulnerable members of society, liberalism’s record has been more ambiguous: although some capitalists and entrepreneurs seem to regard liberalism as nothing more than an ideological shield to disguise greed and sociopathy, liberals have generally seen themselves as humanitarians. Their version of humanitarianism, however, is usually closely linked to middle-class interests. This was true of Locke and Mill, and it is true in today’s world of globalisation and deregulation. On the positive side, it needs to be acknowledged that despite its essentially individualistic ethos, liberalism has always retained a social perspective that gives it an element akin to the common good. Even apart from the collectivist tendencies of victim liberalism and those strands of social democracy that derive from liberalism, most manifestations of liberalism have had subdued, but nevertheless real concern – and often a major concern – for society. What, after all, were Locke and Mill’s manifestos if not idealistic visions of society? It is doubtful that liberalism could have survived for three or four centuries if it had no thought beyond the individual. Nevertheless, few liberals would wish to deny that liberalism focuses its primary attention on the individual person rather than on family, society or state, and insofar as it justifies social institutions, it does so purely for their utility in serving the individual: particularly the adult individual. Ironically, the focus on the adult person is both liberalism’s greatest strength and its major conceptual weakness. It is the basis of its humanism and its advocacy of human rights, but it has produced a philosophy for an adult world: hence the ease with which liberals tend to dismiss the question of protecting children when considering issues like pornography and divorce. Being a philosophy premised on personal autonomy and the rule of human reason, liberalism has difficulty knowing what to do with children. Locke and Mill both grappled with the question of children, almost apologising for their conclusions. Locke’s social theories only work if one assumes that all the actors in society are dispassionate rational creatures. Implicit in his ‘social contract’ mythology is the assumption that society is like an adult club: perhaps a debating society. It is no coincidence that the chronological and conceptual starting point of his discourse was the biblical Adam, who was created a perfect Man, his Body and Mind in full possession of their Strength and Reason, and so was capable from the first Instant of his

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being to provide for his own Support and Preservation, and govern his Actions according to the Dictates of the Law of Reason which God had implanted in him.63 Alas Adam’s children, ‘having another way of entrance into the World . . . that produced them ignorant and without the use of Reason’ could not be subjected to the ‘Law of Reason’, and so cannot be free. Rather, their Parents have a sort of Rule and Jurisdiction over them when they come into the World, and for some time after, but ‘tis a temporary one. . . . Age and Reason as they grow up, loosen them till at length they drop quite off, and leave a Man at his own free disposal.64 Parents, in fact, have a ‘Duty . . . to take care of their Off-spring, during the imperfect state of Childhood.’65 While this may seem to be a reasonable mechanism by which to reconcile Locke’s liberalism with basic, instinctive knowledge about the needs of children and the duties of parents, in fact, it contains the seeds for the dismissal of children as persons of a lesser order. Childhood, apparently, is an ‘imperfect’ state, as opposed to the presumably perfect state of reasoning adulthood. Given Locke’s neo-deification of reason, to say that children are ‘ignorant and without the use of Reason’ is tantamount to dismissing their claim to humanity. Mill faced the same dilemma and dealt with it no better: ‘Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children. . . . ’66 The conclusion seems obvious, but his reasoning betrays the same awkwardness as Locke’s: ‘Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.’67 Therefore, ‘those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury.’68 Once again this logic deals with the ‘child question’ by relegating children to a negative status whereby they are defined by what they are not rather than what they are. It is a tentative claim to humanity. The conceptual difficulties of Mill’s arguments are highlighted by the fact that he consciously used his ‘child arguments’ to undermine the full human status of ‘barbarians’. ‘For the same reason,’ he wrote, ‘we may leave out of consideration [when discussing liberty] those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage.’ It is difficult to say whether, on balance, the liberal handling of the ‘child question’ contributed to widespread disregard for the special needs of children in European societies over the last few centuries. Certainly the liberal linkage of rational autonomy and humanity has been

112 Values and religions used to undermine the perceived humanity of the unborn child in the later twentieth century, enabling a relatively easy rationalisation of abortion. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that liberalism has played many positive, practical roles in improving the treatment of children. Liberals have been a leading force in European and British social reform since the Industrial Revolution, and in this capacity they have introduced a new humanitarian and democratic element to the public protection and education of children. Yet liberalism is vulnerable to another practical criticism in its treatment of children. Just as liberalism has never completely settled the place of children in a society predicated on reasoned and self-governing morality, it has not provided the conceptual tools for passing on liberal values to the next generation. Jay Garfield has articulated this criticism in his contribution to the Journal of Buddhist Ethics 1995 Conference on Buddhism and Human Rights: There is a certain mystery about moral development as seen by the liberal: How do we come to be good persons? Since for the liberal to be a good person is to be a respecter of rights and a discharger of duties, moral education would seem to require and to comprise exactly education regarding duties and rights and training in discharging and respecting them. But if we actually examine what kind of upbringing in fact leads to the development of morally admirable persons, it just doesn’t look like this. Loving families, close relationships, and exposure to kindness seem as a matter of fact to be the necessary conditions for satisfactory moral development. . . . Children learn modes of interaction and attitudes to which they are exposed in childhood. Children brought up compassionately learn to be compassionate. And it is these children who grow to moral maturity by any standards. They are precisely the individuals who respect the rights of others and who discharge their duties.69 In the past liberalism has generally circumvented this quandary by integrating its moral education, whether in schools or in the family, with non-liberal moral education based either explicitly or implicitly on Christian or bourgeois morality. Nowhere was the integration of Christian and liberal education seen more clearly than in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.70 For centuries such arrangements have proved satisfactory, but this informal alliance broke down in the aftermath of the 1960s cultural revolution, especially in the United States where the separation of church and state has been taken to mean the expulsion of non-liberal religion and morality from schools and public institutions. The results have not been encouraging, and in fact the perception of moral and social breakdown among American school

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children has provided fuel for the ‘Asian values’ rejection of ‘Western liberal values’. Assessing the overall strength of strands of humanistic morality in liberalism is not a simple task. Positive and negative features live cheekby-jowl, often in theoretical contradiction but practical harmony. Individualism and the application of reason are both very strong, and despite some historical and contemporary qualifications, liberalism boasts a conception of humanity that is basically universalistic. Liberalism has also played an important role in the cause of equality for women. Liberalism even possesses communalist dimensions that look beyond the individual to the good of society, though its presence has been well hidden since the 1960s. And despite its white middle-class bias, it has been instrumental in introducing many humanitarian reforms in both Western societies and in former colonies. On the other hand, the modernist premises of liberalism have given it a share in the problems of intolerance usually associated with dogmatism – an intolerance that emerges when another religion tries to claim a public space in political or social discourse. It also must be conceded that liberalism has always fallen short of its own ideal of adopting a universalistic conception of humanity. Whether it is the ‘colonial primitives’, the working class or unborn children, liberalism always seems to dismiss some groups as being unworthy of the same protection as the rest of us – and it is usually the weaker groups that one would have thought deserved special protection. This points to the greatest failing of liberalism: the implicit dismissal of children as lesser persons than adults. It is indeed fortunate that this conceptual failing has not always been translated into action, and that liberalism has often been a positive practical force on behalf of the welfare of children.

Protestant Christianity and humanism Turning to Protestant Christianity, we find a similarly uneven record, but even greater extremes. We saw earlier in the chapter that from the very beginning of the Protestant Reformation, humanistic tendencies have operated in tension with fundamentalism and authoritarian, anti-rational tendencies. Even within the thinking and practice of Martin Luther himself, anti-rationalism vied with his reasoned critique of the Catholic Church and his high regard for education; the individualism of his emphasis on one’s personal relationship with God vied with his ultraAugustinian anti-humanism; and his dedication to liberty was qualified by his uncompromising advocacy of submission to the state. Most of the humanistic tendencies seemed to have been extinguished in the Calvinist revolution, but even here the force of democratic congregationalism proved to be a powerful positive force in the long term. Then an accident of political structure intervened with more mixed blessings. Both Lutheran and Calvinist churches were localist in character. In Europe, localism

114 Values and religions manifested itself in the creation of national churches, while in the United States it emerged as an intense parochialism. Both manifestations contained oppressive elements of communalism, but localism also served to open the respective societies to the surrounding cultures and currents of new ideas, including liberalism. In retrospect Protestantism was particularly vulnerable to liberalism, partly because of the vulnerability inherent in localism, but mainly because liberalism grew alongside and within Protestantism, and therefore many early liberal thinkers, notably Kant and Locke, used the language of Protestant Christianity to advance their own ideas. The liberal contribution to Protestantism had some drastic humanistic effects. The place of human reason was restored to a quasi-Thomist level in many churches; the principle of pluralism was introduced, although it took some time for the limits of tolerance to extend beyond Protestant denominations; in many places the dogmatic, authoritarian puritanism of the Calvinist churches was replaced with a benevolent liberal humanism. The political and social results of this new, rational, humanistic Protestantism were often spectacular. The abolition of slavery was substantially a Protestant victory in England, Europe and America; and the fact that the main opponents of the abolitionists were usually Protestants as well does not diminish the standing of this achievement in the slightest. The injection of liberal rationalism also prepared many Protestant churches for the challenges posed by the social problems of urbanisation. Protestants came to be heavily involved in charitable activities and often engaged in social activism on behalf of the urban poor, and eventually on behalf of (and by) non-white minorities. The injection of liberalism and modernism into the Protestant churches came at a cost, however, in that it often resulted in emptying the Protestant faith of many of its basic tenets. This problem was already present in the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, when many Liberal Protestants and advocates of the ‘social gospel’ moved the salvation and sin questions to the margins of their worldview. Unitarians went one step further by ejecting most of the core Christian teachings from their creed, while still claiming – and being granted – a place at the Protestant Christian table. More recently the Protestant dilemma has been thrown into sharp relief by the demands of multiculturalism and postmodernism in the post-colonial world of the late twentieth century. Christians have always believed that Christ redeemed mankind from eternal damnation by his death on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. Both the Lutheran and the Calvinist traditions accept this premise, but then diverge. Luther believed that Christ’s salvation comes only to those who have faith in him, while Calvin taught that salvation comes only to those chosen by God before the beginning of time. Calvin’s teaching is obviously the less universalistic of the two, since it creates a severe divide

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between the saved and the unsaved. Luther’s teaching did not create an obvious dilemma about universalism while it was operating in Lutheran societies where one could go one’s entire life without meeting people who had not accepted the faith. In today’s global village, however, the tension with universalism is glaring. How does one reconcile a universalistic humanism with a belief that non-Christians who have never even heard the Gospel are nevertheless damned? This question has evoked responses that range between two poles. The first, which gained new energy in the 1920s and 1930s, is to retain the salvation creed in toto, and then to express love for humanity by focusing exclusively on saving souls. This is a mainstream evangelical and fundamentalist approach and is an expression of a genuine, but very restrictive humanism. This attitude tends to leave the faithful stricken with a Paulian concern that any day could be the world’s last day, and that life is a race to save as many souls as possible before the end. In this scenario, concepts such as human rights and social justice are peripheral at best, if not a distraction from the real work. At the other pole has been the tendency to dilute Christianity’s faith in Christ as the unique, personal, universal God and saviour. Peter Bailey, a Christian who is a former Deputy Chairman and Chief Executive of Australia’s Human Rights Commission put this argument recently in an Anglican journal: We need to rethink carefully the claim we have made that Christ is the sole channel to the Triune God we know, love and serve. . . . We may need to rethink the view we have for so long had that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life (Jn 14:6). We may have to come to understand those words as portraying our understanding as Christians, as describing the way we believe to be best, but not in any chauvinistic or superior sense. We may need to walk humbly not only with our God, but . . . with Being, the source of all religion, and with our co-religionists of other religions.71 Others, while not travelling as far down this road, have nevertheless moved a long way from Biblical authority. Thorwald Lorenzen, writing on behalf of the ‘liberal’ Baptist World Alliance, has gone as far as to raise United Nations declarations to a level of authority comparable to that of the Bible: Since God is passionately concerned with making human life the way God has created it, we may therefore presume that modern human rights instruments . . . are part of God’s providential working in history. . . . God has exercised and will exercise his Lordship also through secular institutions like the human rights process.72 [Italics are in the original.]

116 Values and religions Most Protestant churches in fact ignore such profound questions in their official declarations on human rights, preferring instead to focus on the positive humanistic messages of Christianity, drawing on a narrative framework, and Christian teachings about duties and love. Since the 1970s Protestant churches have been issuing formal declarations on human rights and related issues, drawing on different aspects of their diverse traditions as anchors for a pluralistic Christian humanism. Lutherans have emphasised justice while Southern Baptists are particularly concerned with issues that liberals would regard as ‘private’ and therefore illegitimate; such as the rights of the unborn child. On the other hand, the Calvinist churches have tended to emphasise communalism and the ‘covenant of God’s faithfulness to his people’.73 Virtually all Protestant Churches diverge from liberal responses by their stronger emphasis on the nurturing of children, the protection of children from moral evils such as pornography, the importance of the family, and freedom of religion.74 The remarkable feature of Protestant Christianity is how, with only a few exceptions at the fringes, and despite many unpromising premises and theoretical difficulties, it has managed to find a broad consensus of humanism at its multifaceted core. Despite doctrinal variation, most Protestant Christians adopt a strongly universalistic conception of humanity, and while they exhibit considerable variety in the character of their individualism and communalism, most Protestants possess both characteristics in some considerable degree. Except for some fundamentalists, they are generally open to the application of human reason in most things: and indeed many strains of Protestantism emphasise the application of reason. Protestant churches have also been involved in the protection of children and other vulnerable and marginalised groups; but the latter trend is a less consistent aspect of Protestant thinking, with its record ranging through blind, conservative reaction; laissez faire; charitable concern; and active reformism. Yet despite the babble of disunity, the humanism of the Christian message has emerged strongly through the Protestant Christian churches. Protestantism has deep roots of Christian humanism that belie its short history of formal engagement with the human rights discourse.

Catholicism and humanism In many ways studying the Catholic Church is an easier task than studying any of the other religions under consideration in this book because it is the only religion with a centralised, structured leadership and bureaucracy recognised worldwide by its adherents. This centralisation disguises a considerable degree of diversity, but it is nevertheless real and important. The Catholic Church is the most deeply established Christian church, and even those who dispute its claim to have been founded on the first Pentecost Sunday acknowledge that it is nearly 1700

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years old. Whereas fundamentalists and evangelicals tend to think in days and years, and mainstream Protestant churches think in generations and maybe centuries, the Catholic Church thinks in centuries and millennia. It did not achieve this longevity by accepting change lightly, nor by burying itself in rigid conservatism. The Church has changed drastically during its long life, but changes have been generally slow, cautious moves that have taken decades and sometimes centuries to play themselves out. In the light of this history of caution, it should not be surprising that the Catholic Church was slow to accept the human rights agenda. On the other hand, it should come as no shock that we are able to trace its official and unofficial thought on broader matters of social justice and rights back to before the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Earlier in this chapter we left the Catholic Church on the eve of the sixteenth century. This was to mark the beginning of a turbulent few centuries for the church as it learnt to come to terms with the Reformation, modernism, liberalism, modernity, the Industrial Revolution, socialism and democracy. The early record was not promising from the point of view of searching for humanism, as the church struggled to reconcile love of truth with respect for people. The Catholic Church and its temporal allies sometimes grudgingly tolerated the practice of Protestant faiths in Catholic territory, but on balance the Catholic Church was not tolerant of confessional dissent, and the persecution of Protestants in places such as England, Netherlands, France, and Spain is a matter of historical record. The initial Catholic response to the concept of human rights was substantially governed by the political setting in which it was annunciated. In England, America, and France, declarations of rights were associated with either secular or Protestant anti-Catholicism. Pope Pius VI’s initial reaction to this emerging rights culture was to issue a condemnation of freedom of opinion and communication! Seven decades later Pope Pius IX issued his Syllabus of Errors, which condemned the separation of church and state, the removal of the Catholic Church as the ‘sole State Religion’, and the encouragement of the free exercise of other religions by immigrants to Catholic states. John Langan has not understated his case when he argued that human rights theory confronted the Catholic Church as alien force, and that it has taken a long time to appropriate it.75 Yet by the end of nineteenth century – less than 30 years after the publication of the Syllabus of Errors – Rome had begun emerging from its conceptual bunker, and had opened a dialogue with modernity. Pope Leo XIII confronted the challenges of urbanisation, the Industrial Revolution and socialism in the first instance. Over the following six decades, Rome developed a theory of social justice that was based on a holistic perception of the human person as a religious, political, social, and economic entity. The critical turning point was reached when Pope John XXIII issued Pacem in Terris in 1963, in which he finally and fully

118 Values and religions accepted the concept of human rights.76 The conceptual fulcrum of this process was the development of a formula that would concede people the freedom to fall into error without diminishing the Church’s claim to be the repository of revealed truth. It is perhaps a sign of the Church’s newfound openness to modernity that a layman supplied this fulcrum: the Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain.77 Under his influence, the Pope declared that ‘every human being is a person, that is, his nature is endowed with intelligence and free will.’ He argued that even without divine revelation we know that persons qua persons have ‘rights and obligations flowing directly and simultaneously from his very nature’, and that these rights are ‘universal and inviolable’.78 There followed a long discursive list of rights that is much more comprehensive than either the classical liberal list of rights or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights developed by the United Nations. There is too much detail to be repeated here, but it is worth noting that the starting point of the list reflected a very different set of priorities to that of liberalism: Beginning our discussion of the rights of man, we see that every man has the right to life, to bodily integrity, and to the means which are suitable for the proper development of life; these are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, and finally the necessary social services. Therefore a human being also has the right to security in cases of sickness, inability to work, widowhood, old age, unemployment, or in any other case in which he is deprived of the means of subsistence through no fault of his own.79 Only then did the pope move on to the more traditional ‘liberal’ conception of rights: By the natural law every human being has the right to respect for his person, to his good reputation; the right to freedom in searching for truth and in expressing and communicating his opinions, and in pursuit of art, within the limits laid down by the moral order and the common good; and he has the right to be fully informed truthfully about public events.80 In contrast to papal declarations from the previous century, Pope John upheld the right ‘to honour God according to the sincere dictates of [one’s] own conscience, and therefore the right to practice [one’s] religion privately and publicly’.81 The concept of the inherent ‘dignity of the human person’82 – independent of truth, faith or Church – provided the key concept in the evolution of the Church’s thinking. Yet unlike its liberal equivalent, it was not a dignity founded in individualism, but one which relied upon an ongoing framework of social institutions, such as family, law, private

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property, states and ethnic communities. John XXIII argued that despite imperfections that might exist in such institutions, their destruction or enfeebling would neither serve the common good, nor, in the long run, the cause of human rights.83 The new recognition of rights did not, therefore, obliterate the more traditional Catholic emphasis on duties and the ‘common good’. Rights are balanced by duties;84 the rights of others limit the rights of the one;85 and the rights of the nation and the state balance the rights of the citizen.86 By century’s end human rights had been moved to a central position in official Catholic thinking by Pope John Paul II. Even the ‘problem’ of reconciling the Christian salvation doctrine with universalistic humanism has been confronted and answered after a fashion. According to the Catholic Church, Christ is indeed the only way to salvation, but somehow, ‘in ways known to Himself ’, God offers this salvation to the whole of humanity, and not just to Catholics and baptised Christians.87 This accords with the Catholic Church’s self-proclaimed unconditional universalism, whereby its Pastoral Constitution (as of 1965) announces the ‘solidarity of the Church with the whole human family’, and its ‘offer of service to humankind’.88 This manifesto appeared somewhat academic until the accession of Pope John Paul II to the See of Rome in 1978, but he has made it one of the hallmarks of his pontificate. This perspective is highlighted by John Paul’s many social encyclicals and speeches, and his two addresses to the United Nations General Assembly: in 1979 and 1995. On neither occasion did he make a plea for any sectional or sectarian cause: rather, he used each occasion as an opportunity to present a humanistic plea for respect of human rights. Like the record of liberalism and Protestant Christianity, humanism and anti-humanism are both found strongly in the Catholic Church’s history. It has a proud record of humanitarian achievement, including the creation of hospitals, schools, and the protection of workers, peasants, women, children and the unborn. But this cannot disguise the fact that it had also participated in slavery, torture, and enforcement of religious conformity, exploitation of the poor, and discrimination against women and non-white ethnic groups, to name but a few offences. On many occasions, it was not the Church herself who was directly responsible, but local regimes or cultures operating under the warrant of legitimacy provided by the Church – which highlights yet again the difficulty religions face when trying to retain some independence from local cultures and regimes. This helps us to understand some of the apparent contradictions in its humanitarian record, but it still does not exonerate the Church from culpability. Nevertheless, it leaves the Catholic Church in a peculiar position in our ongoing search for positive indicators of humanistic morality, since its historical record scores both very well and very poorly on all of the indicators – often at the same time and in the same society. Notions of individualism and freedom; protection of the vulnerable;

120 Values and religions special concern for the protection and nurture of children; openness to the application of reason; the notion of the common good – they are all present at virtually all stages of the Church’s history, often sitting alongside and in sharp contrast with contrary impulses. From the point of view of this study, it is important to note that ‘positive’ impulses have always been present, and have been strengthened drastically in the last century or so. Some practical results of this development can be seen in the number of Catholics, including political leaders such as Kim Dae-jung of Korea and leading churchmen such as Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila, who have placed themselves at the forefront of human rights movements, and been instrumental in bringing about quantum shifts in their respective countries.

CONCLUSION The achievements of this chapter are fairly modest, but nevertheless important. It should come as no surprise that strong traces of humanism are found in both liberalism and Christianity – nor that this humanism is easily compatible with the broad human rights agenda. After all, the human rights discourse was born and bred in the cultural milieu of these two religions and is arguably their direct progeny. It is more discomforting to realise how flawed the humanism is, or has been, in each of the religions. The significance of this cannot be overstated in the light of the role of Christianity and liberalism in giving birth to the concept of human rights. Nor can the significance of the wide variations between and within liberalism and Christianity – in any and all of their manifestations – be ignored. What we have in this chapter is a history of two movements that can each be proud of their contributions to the development of a humanistic morality, but neither of which can automatically claim a position of moral superiority in a cross-cultural discourse on human rights and humanism. It is also sobering to realise how supposedly self-evident values can prove vulnerable to cultural changes and further reflection. Slavery used to be defended by liberals, Protestants and Catholics alike. Liberals used to defend the family. Catholics used to oppose freedom of religion, as did many Protestants. The list could continue without profit. This lesson is particularly important when we realise how short-lived is the current phase of atomistic, post-1960s liberalism. Modernists might regard this social development as the progressive advance of mankind, but for the rest of us the youth of the current phase of liberalism is a warning that it may express merely the values of an age.

8

Islam: of Shari’a and Adat; Caliphs and Rajas

Of the three ‘Asian’ religions being studied in this volume, Islam is most easily comparable to the ‘European’ religions because of its historical and conceptual links to Christianity. It is also the religion that promises to present the greatest challenges as we try to find a basis of dialogue with the modern human rights discourse. On the surface Islam appears to be weak on several criteria by which this book is gauging indicators of a humanistic morality. Despite its avowedly universal message, Islam formally regards non-Muslims and women as second class citizens and, according to some readings, notionally defends slavery. It places extremely high importance on the protection of the vulnerable – the poor, women and children – but some strands are prone to take their notions of protecting women to the point that it becomes a tool in their subjugation. Despite a proud history of involvement in science, mathematics and philosophy, it has a tendency to privilege dogmatism over reason. Islam has an extremely strong concept of community, but it often takes this to an extreme that stifles individualism and freedom. This litany constitutes a formidable case against finding traces of humanism in Islam, especially since there is no shortage of historical and contemporary examples to sustain these generalisations; a situation that feeds Western stereotypes that hark back to the Crusades and the Ottoman assault on Europe. Yet although there are strong traces of truth in all of the charges, none of them can be made without serious qualifications, and without acknowledging contrary tendencies that give us grounds for hope in our search for a humanistic morality. The story of humanism in Christianity and liberalism proved to be multifaceted and multi-layered, and so it is for Islam. Like Christianity, Islam is monotheistic, but in contrast to Christianity, it has no concept of original sin, and sin does not play an especially important role in Islamic thinking. The Qu’ran teaches that the human person is created ‘in the best of moulds’, sullied only because he becomes enmeshed in human customs, superstitions, selfish desires and false teachings.1 According to Mahmoud Ayoub, the central concept of Islam is stewardship: ‘The Qu’ran regards man . . . as God’s steward (khalifah) on earth, possessing an innate disposition or capacity ( fitrah) to know God

122 Values and religions and act righteously’.2 Charles Lindholm, on other hand, sees the essence of Islam as being praxis: Instead of a theology of the nature of God, Sunni Islam . . . offered the faithful a theology of the obligations and prohibitions commanded by Allah, who had given humanity the proper pathway that must be followed over the course of a lifetime in order to reach salvation. Individual devotional practice and acceptance of the Word are what is crucial, not reflection or rationalization. In its emphasis on application, Islam has been appropriately described as a religion not so much of orthodoxy as of orthopraxy, reliant on ritual actions to reveal and inculcate faith. The very word ‘Islam’ signifies an act – the initiatory act of surrender and submission to God.3 Both men emphasise practice over devotion, but the notion of ‘stewardship’ carries within it a slightly stronger potential to be expanded into a doctrine of external compulsion of Islam on all peoples. Although this is not the implication that Ayoub is drawing, the difference between the two readings nevertheless points to a tension that arises continually in our search for humanism in Islam. This tension gives a clue to explaining how Islam can seem benevolent in the hands of someone like Abdurrahman Wahid, Amien Rais or Anwar Ibrahim, yet so vicious in hands of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, or the leaders of Sudan.

THE UMMA/EMPIRE Mohamed, who was born around 570 and died in 632, founded Islam in Mecca. Until the age of around 40 he led a nondescript life as a merchant, but then he began receiving revelations from God: personal revelations in which an angel dictated Allah’s instructions in Arabic and commanded Mohamed to recite them. Unlike the message of Christ, much of which was conveyed by parable and example, Allah’s message was more like a manual of instruction. Mohamed continued living in Mecca for more than a decade, but now he devoted himself to his new role as Allah’s Prophet, accumulating hundreds of followers in a short time. Part of the key to his success is the fact that he did not see or present himself as the founder of a new religion at all, but as a reformer who was, under divine instructions, restoring Arabic traditions and the Abrahmic religions ( Judaism and Christianity) to the ‘straight path’.4 His followers wrote down and memorised Allah’s words, and these were later collated into the Qu’ran, which became the first and the main source of Islam. The second source of Islam is the Sunna, a collection of anecdotal stories of things that the Prophet is purported to have done and said during his mission. It was thought – not unreasonably – that if Allah had chosen Mohamed

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to be his Prophet, then Mohamed’s thinking and his life must be worthy of emulation. Islam won converts in Mecca, but its demands also built resentment. For years Abu Talib, Mohamed’s rich and powerful uncle, had protected the new religion, but after his death Mohamed and the umma (community of believers) were forced to flee Mecca. They settled in Medina, an agricultural town about two hundred miles from Mecca, where the feuding local tribes looked to Mohamed to provide arbitration, leadership and peace. This migration became the pivotal turning point for Islam, which is indicated by its designation as year zero in the Islamic calendar [Hejri]. The Prophet became a temporal leader as well as a spiritual one: and a very successful temporal leader. From his base in Medina he conquered his former tormentors in Mecca, and went on to found an Islamic empire that encompassed the entire Arabian Peninsula by the time of his death 10 years later. Since Mohamed was a temporal ruler in Medina his words and actions – and God’s revelations – began focusing much more on matters of governance than they had in Mecca. Thanks to the Muslim emphasis on praxis this had a direct effect on the character of his nascent religion. Islam became inextricably intertwined with real-world politics, providing its legalistic and narrowly directive character, and supplying the rationale for regarding Islam as a political program to be implemented by an Islamic state. The earlier Mecca version, on the other hand, had been much more open and humanistic, with its strong egalitarian messages to protect the vulnerable (especially girls, women and the poor), and live moral lives. Following the death of the Prophet, the empire/religion he left behind was left in a succession quandary. The Prophet ruled by the direct authority of Allah and under his direct instructions, but neither Allah nor Mohamed gave any instructions about what was to happen after he died. Since no one could credibly proclaim himself as another Prophet, Mohamed’s confidantes came to an ad hoc arrangement whereby one of them would be proclaimed by consent to be Caliph (deputy of the Prophet: very much in the sense of being a steward). The notion of consent in this process was crucial to the perception of the legitimacy of the early caliphs. The successful candidate had first to win the approval of his peers (other associates of the Prophet), and then be accepted by the populace. This emphasis on consensus (ijma) was already a latent feature of Islam, and rested theologically on Mohamed’s observation that ‘my people will never be unanimous in error’.5 From the beginning this gave Islam a strongly egalitarian and democratic tendency, which gradually became stronger in matters of religion and parochial decision making; and so parochial governance by something akin to the American town hall meetings became a common historical feature of Islamic societies.6 Significantly, however, the importance of consensus gradually diminished at the level of state as the caliphate degenerated from a theocratic

124 Values and religions consensus into a series of mere dynastic regimes imposed by military and social force. Although the idealism of the original caliphate could not be sustained in the face of human ambition, it is worth noting that the Islamic ideal rests on a notion of consensus that could be described accurately as a primitive form of democracy. At this point it is also appropriate to note the role of human reason and initiative in the creation of the caliphate. Like other historical forms of Muslim governance, such as sultanates, shahs, democracies, monarchies, military dictatorships and rajas, the caliphate was a product of human reason, not divine command. This point would not be remarkable except that those who regard human reason and Islam as being anathema so often obscure it. Yet from the very beginning human reason and Islam had an intimate relationship, not only in matters of governance, but in jurisprudence (as we will see below), philosophy, science and mathematics. It is too often forgotten in the West that the Aristotelian and Platonic thought of the Renaissance was reintroduced to Medieval Europe via Muslim Spain: Muslim scholars (ulama/the learned) had preserved and studied secular Greek philosophy while Christian Europe had forgotten it.

Shi’ite schism The early caliphs based their moral authority on the twin premises of having been appointed by consensus, and having been associates of the Prophet. Under this arrangement the unity of the Muslim empire and the umma was preserved through several successions, despite various regional uprisings and rebellions. The unity finally broke under the leadership of Ali in the 650s. His cousin, Muawiya, who in retrospect can be regarded as a conventional dynastic usurper of power, challenged and eventually succeeded him. At this point followers of Ali rejected the claims of the usurper and declared their continuing allegiance to Ali’s family, thus establishing the Shi’ite branch of Islam which proved to be the umma’s first permanent schism. Shi’ites are a small minority in Southeast Asia today (and indeed are now common only in Iran and Iraq), but their relevance to the ‘Asian values’ discourse cannot be dismissed because their 1979 revolution in Iran was an inspiration to many Southeast Asian Muslims. If only for the sake of understanding this phenomenon better, it is worth noting some basic features of early Shi’ite history. After the break with Sunni Islam, Ali’s followers did not have temporal power any more, and since they did not recognise the new caliph they had to confront the dilemma of separation of umma and state directly. Their scholars and leaders deliberately held themselves aloof from the machinery of the state, but as if to compensate for the temporal loss, they vested Ali’s lineage with a new superhuman, sacred status. Each generation of Ali’s family was thought to produce an Imam who was not merely an administrative successor to the Prophet, but a living extension

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of Mohamed’s revelations. This suggests that the Shi’ites appear to have adopted a rationale of the separation of religion and state, but this is true only up to a point. The separation was tolerated but not desired, and when Shi’ites and their offshoots had opportunities to establish Shi’ite states (as they did at various times in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Persia/ Iran) they did so. The most distinctive feature of Shi’ite Islam is its doctrine of the ‘hidden’ or ‘living’ Imam. This doctrine was developed in response to the ending of Ali’s bloodline, which most Shi’ites believe occurred in 850. It was decided that a successor really lived, but had gone into occlusion and would return in the Final Days to bring victory to his followers. In the meantime, spiritual and social rule devolved to jurists, scholars, and Ayatollahs, and temporal rule rested with whatever empire happened to control their territory. Ira Lapidus believes that the practical effect of the doctrine of the ‘hidden’ Imam was to return Shi’ite Islam to something resembling its pre-Medina phase, by ‘allowing a new religious community to develop without real concern for the union of religious and political authority’.8 This humanistic outcome, however, has been offset by Shi’ism’s dominant characteristics: conservatism, millenarianism, and a tendency to search for the hidden Imam among charismatic leaders.

Mainstream Sunni Islam Sunni Islam, under the continuing rule of caliphs, did not face such ideological challenges until the tenth century, when the umma was broken into several empires based on geography and dynastic rivalry. Until that time the umma and the empire were practically synonymous, despite tension between them. In the middle of the tenth century, however, temporal power was fractured, and it passed into the hands of sultans, generals, administrators, governors and provincial rulers. Islam continued to legitimise regimes, but the rise of the Buyid, Fatimid, Qarmati and Ghaznavid empires (amongst others) during the tenth century marked the end of unified Islamic theocratic government. Yet it was not so much a separation of church and state as a subjugation of religion to the local state, vaguely comparable to the immediate results of the Lutheran revolution in Christian Europe. Although Sunni Islam had no church structure or ordained clergy, it nevertheless developed a loose structure based on scholarly knowledge and legalism. The original members of this ‘clergy’ were hadith scholars, who were authorities on the tradition that comprised or would come to comprise the Sunna. However faqih/fiqh (legalists/men of law), whose expertise rested in rendering a legalistic interpretation of the behavioural requirements of Islam, eventually supplanted their pre-eminence and set Islam on a path of legalistic rule reminiscent of Judaism. The faqih wrote and interpreted Islamic law (shari’a) derived from the Qu’ran and the nascent Sunna, and were called

126 Values and religions upon not only to advise on what was proper for a Muslim, but also to arbitrate and judge cases. Once again the application of human reason was a critical feature in this development. The Qu’ran and tradition gave specific instructions on living, but they were narrowly focused. Before they could be applied to any but the most straightforward cases, they required the intervention of human reason (ijtihad: intellectual struggle/ independent juristic reasoning); and even in the straightforward cases, penalties often had to be devised and imposed. In the absence of a supranational authority akin to the Catholic papacy, legalist schools began emerging from the regions rather than from the centre, and so despite its universalism, Islam became inherently localist – a tendency that was exaggerated by the Prophet’s high regard for consensus. The Shafi’i school is of the greatest interest in a study of ‘Asian values’, because it has come to dominate Islam in Southeast Asia. This school argues from analogy (qiyas), seeking out the underlying universal principles of Islamic injunctions, and attempting to apply them more generally.9 Most schools, consciously or not, injected local social customs into shari’a: hence the veiling and seclusion of women was incorporated into shari’a from Persia and Byzantium.10 The Shafi’i school went further. Its founder (Shafi’i) took deliberate and conscious account of local mores, and varied his conclusions from region to region so that they accorded with the local setting, which helps to explain how his school was able to enculturate itself so effectively in Southeast Asia.11

Closing the gate of ijtihad Ijtihad did not, however, prove to be an open-ended process. Much to the chagrin of later Islamic reformers, a scholarly consensus developed over the ninth and tenth centuries that the various schools of juristic reasoning had uncovered all the secrets of Islamic law and that further diversity in shari’a would be harmful to the umma. Thus, in the tenth century legalism became fixed, institutionalised and inherently conservative: ‘the gate to ijtihad’ was closed and bida (deviation) came to be regarded as an equivalent of heresy in a Christian context.12 The near-universal acceptance of this judgement by Muslims over the last millennium is strong testimony to the power of consensus in Islam and gives an insight into the depth of its communalism. It also places a huge qualification on the earlier observations of the centrality of human reasoning in the religion. Islam was fuelled on human reason for the first two to three centuries of its life, but then reason turned on itself in the interests of the cohesion of the umma. Muslim academics like Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im and others lament the closing of the gate to ijtihad and are seeking to reopen it,13 but this act must nevertheless be regarded as the biggest single obstacle to Islam’s successful dialogue with modernity and the human rights discourse.

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UMMA AND THE STATE Until the eleventh century the legal schools and the Islamic courts were run autonomously by the communities of scholars themselves, despite the fact that states underwrote them to enhance their own legitimacy. At this stage, the Islamic social vision placed the state in an incidental support role to the umma. The state, however, did not regard the umma as merely incidental. It was a source of legitimacy and power too important to ignore forever, and it was probably just a matter of time before it started encroaching on the instruments of umma decision-making. The Islamic courts’ slide into state dependency began in 1067 when a powerful vizier, Nizam al-Mulk of the Seljuk sultanate, retained complete personal control of a school that he founded and endowed. His example was swiftly followed by others and became the norm, so that by the thirteenth century virtually all Sunni scholars had been trained by a state. This marked the beginning of a long period of social evolution during which temporal regimes encroached gradually on the freedom of the Islamic scholars and the umma, restricting the freedom of schools, academics, lawyers, and judges. Yet for most of its history Islam has maintained an ambiguous and mistrustful relationship with the state. There has been a pronounced tendency among Islamic revivalists and fundamentalists to believe that the identification of Islam and the state – between the umma and the state – should be complete, and that this is the proper Islamic form of social organisation. Yet in Sunni Islam this has only happened (or even been considered desirable) when the umma was a united, universal whole under Mohamed and the first few caliphs. Even then the State generally had a lot of flexibility in matters of governance and law over which Islam was silent or inexplicit – hence the common practice of having secular law courts operating alongside the religious courts. When the umma was fractured – and even when it was internally cohesive but had become primarily a dynastic, territorial entity – the religious leaders and scholars tried and generally managed to keep some distance between themselves and the state. The distinction between the original universalistic umma and subsequent conceptions of the umma as a series of communities delineated variously by race, ethnicity, culture, city, empire or nation-state provides an important conceptual tool for pluralistic Muslims.14 On the other hand, the fundamentalist longing for Islam’s ‘golden age’ of unity is seriously misplaced because it presumes that it is possible to recapture this global religious and political unity of Muslims, which did not survive even four decades after the death of the Prophet. This history helps to legitimise the message of Muslim ‘moderates’, ‘modernists’15 and secular nationalists, who argue that one can be a good Muslim without desiring an ‘Islamic state’. Granted, Muslim majority states have a duty to create an environment conducive to Islam. This idea will still offend liberal fundamentalists and admittedly is open

128 Values and religions to monopolistic tendencies, but it is nevertheless a long way from the Islamic state.

Beliefs This history of the origins of Islamic relations with the state may be only a thumbnail sketch, but it should be sufficient to dispose of a major obstacle to our search for a humanistic morality in Islam: the perception that ‘pure’ Islam demands a monopolistic Islamic state. It also places a severe limitation on the overly simplistic perception that Islam rejects the application of human reason per se. It should now be possible to make a proper survey of Islam’s teachings while beginning to turn our attention to Southeast Asia. If we continue to use the ‘positive indicators of a humanistic morality’ that were outlined in Chapter 6, we are seeking traces of: a universalistic conception of humanity; individualism; protection of the vulnerable, including women; special concern for children; concern for the common good; and an openness to the application of reason. Despite the diversity of Islam, we are fortunate that its level of legalism allows us to be fairly precise in responding to this list. Like liberalism and Christianity, Islam’s message is intended for the whole of humanity. Ideally Islam tolerates no discrimination based on race, ethnicity, aristocratic bloodlines, class or wealth. Slaves and women are called to submit to Allah as fully as are Arabs and men. This egalitarianism was an essential component of Mohamed’s initial successes among the poor of Mecca, and the reason that the feuding tribes of Medina trusted him to adjudicate their disputes and lead them. Of course Islamic societies have not always lived up to the ideals. The divergence between ideal and reality came to the fore immediately following the death of Caliph Ali. His successor, Muawiya, created a dynasty, complete with its own clan-based aristocracy, and his administration openly promoted Arab nationalism over the aspirations of Persians, Turks and other non-Arab Muslims. A similar anomaly can be seen in Southeast Asia, where Islam is heavily identified with Malay ethnonationalism and with aristocratic systems of rajas, sultans and tunkus. Yet despite human flaws – which are no worse than those of historical liberalism and Christianity on questions of race and the poor – Islam has retained the essence of its universalism, and its egalitarianism. Even the Prophet’s fresh institutionalisation of slavery – long since discarded along with slavery itself – was, like St Paul’s apparent acceptance of slavery, designed primarily to give the slaves dignity and improve their treatment.

Non-Muslims The case against Islam on the question of a universalistic conception of humanity rests primarily on its treatment of non-Muslims and women.

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Non-Muslims are not regarded as equal to Muslims in a Muslim society: if they are adherents of the Abrahmic religions then they are welcomed as a protected people (dhimmi) and allowed to live in an Islamic society provided they pay a series of special taxes for the privilege. The Qu’ran explicitly recognises women as legal entities, but nevertheless says that ‘men have a status above women’.16 The treatment of non-Muslims and women is a severe indictment of the universalism of Islam, but even on these two matters, the picture is not completely bleak. Although nonMuslims are usually uncomfortable being designated as dhimmi, it should be recognised that this concept was designed to protect non-Muslims from persecution. It was an antecedent of the rights culture of today, but it conceived of rights as a communal good, rather than an individual good. Granted the strong communalism of Islam (and the pre-Islamic Arab cultures), it is to its credit that it conceived of anything akin to rights at all. Furthermore, as Islam moved into polytheistic India, Hindus and Buddhists also came to be accepted as protected dhimmi.17 In modern Malaysia and Indonesia, as in much of the Muslim world, even the practice of regarding non-Muslim minorities as dhimmi and collecting the special taxes is disregarded – not just as an impractical measure, but as being undesirable. Although the treatment of non-Muslim minorities in parts of the Muslim world is appalling (in Maluku and Sudan for example), these are aberrations, usually more readily explained by ethnopolitical considerations than by anything intrinsic to Islam. In fact, the historical record of Muslim treatment of Jewish and Christian minorities, while far from ideal, has generally been much better than Christian treatment of Muslim minorities, as the contrast between the record of Muslim and Catholic rule in Spain demonstrates. The apparent amendment of Muslim teachings regarding non-Muslims raises a serious matter that has implications far beyond the question of taxing or defining dhimmi. Given the gate of ijtihad was closed a millennium ago, can such developments be regarded as legitimate? This question may be little more than an interesting case study when it is applied to dhimmi, but this is not the only area where Islamic practice and teaching seems to have changed since the tenth century. Was it legitimate for Islam to abandon hudud punishments (amputations, lashings, crucifixions, etc.)?18 Or to stop executing apostates? Or to loosen the gender bias of Muslim family law? These aspects of Islam are frequently cited as being among the biggest obstacles to an Islamic acceptance of human rights, and given the absoluteness with which the Qu’ran, the Sunna and shari’a speak on these matters, such objections cannot be taken lightly. Also at stake in answering this question is the legitimacy of the common practice in the Malay–Indonesian archipelago of intertwining local custom (adat) with shari’a to produce versions of Islam that are generally much softer and more syncretic than those found in the Middle East. The best known and most politically significant instances of syncretism are Islam’s marriages

130 Values and religions with Javanese mysticism (producing an offspring commonly known as Javanism),19 and with Malay kerajaan [social and political anchorage in a king/raja].20 Considering the contemporary sensitivity of gender issues in discussions of Islam, it is also worth noting that throughout much of Indonesia and Malaysia (notably Java, Minangkabau and Negeri Sembilan) Islam has successfully, though not always comfortably accommodated itself to heavily matriarchal indigenous cultures. This has created complex patterns of gender relations that bear little obvious resemblance to Islamist social visions, but which are hopeful signs in our search for humanistic strands in Islam.21 So is the gate to ijtihad closed? As an outsider to the religion this author would not presume to answer the question in any absolute sense. Nevertheless, it seems that the Islamic emphasis on consensus, combined with its localism (including the Shafi’i-approved practice of permitting variation in the application of shari’a between regions) makes the continuing ‘development of doctrine’ easily conceivable, if not inevitable. If this conclusion is correct then it reduces conservative and fundamentalist calls for a return to a ‘pure’ Islam to merely one more interpretation of Islam competing for hegemony, rather than an expression of an absolute Islamic truth.

Women The implications of this issue become obvious as soon as we consider the place of women in Islam. Shari’a has strict and unequal rules regarding gender relations, some of which have been imported from other cultures, but many of which are derived directly from the Qu’ran. According to the Qu’ran, women are vulnerable to polygyny and mildly asymmetric divorce laws; and they receive half a male inheritance.22 The Sunna, shari’a and local traditions have exaggerated these imbalances in varying degrees, obscuring the original intent which was, very clearly, to protect women from the utter vulnerability to which they were exposed in pre-Islamic Arabia. As Donna Bowen put it: The revelations of Islam bettered the conditions of women by abolishing female infanticide, by restricting men’s freedom to unlimited polygyny, by requiring men to definitively divorce a wife following three repudiations, and by recognizing women’s right to own property, to enter in contracts, and to inherit.23 In seventh century Arabian culture, they were liberating principles, designed to protect women from being treated as chattel. As religious and social precepts in the twenty-first century however, these measures unquestionably transgress the principle of universalism we are seeking in this study. Yet many Muslim academics and leaders assert that the modern concept of equality between men and women is compatible with

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the original intent of Islam, and that this is a proper expression of Islamic morality.24 If the operation of localism has indeed created a situation where it is difficult for anyone to claim a ‘purist’ high ground, then such claims can be taken seriously – and therein lies the prospect of Islamic family law gradually developing on egalitarian lines. Yet in another sense, the question of ultimate Islamic legitimacy is beside the point. Regardless of questions of purity, the operation of localism has made the evolution of Islamic law a practical reality, which is why contemporary anthropologists urge that the study of doctrinaire Islam not be isolated from the study of real life Muslims.25 In some places (e.g. Sudan, Afghanistan under the Taliban), the operation of localism has resulted in the complete subjugation of women, and their effective exclusion from society. As we saw earlier, in Java, Minangkabau and Negeri Sembilan localism has had precisely the opposite effect. Despite the efforts of Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) to insist that cinemas show movies with the lights on to protect the modesty of women and their limited success in introducing shari’a dress codes for women, the overwhelming trend in Southeast Asia has been to soften Islamic treatment of women. In Malaysia, for instance, polygyny is restricted by various mechanisms, including an insistence that a husband receive permission from his present wives before entering second or subsequent marriages. By this simple mechanism polygyny was removed to the margins of Malay Muslim culture for a time (though it has returned closer to the mainstream in recent years because economic prosperity created a class of newly rich men who could afford to support multiple wives). Muslim divorce laws in both Malaysia and Indonesia have also been modified to give women greater protection and bring the rights of husbands and wives into closer accord. When one considers that access to education and paid employment is now open to females, it is difficult to see how the current trends in Southeast Asia can be reversed. Perhaps the strongest sign of the permanency of the current development – even in the face of a conservative Islamic revival – is the spectacle of a Malaysian NGO called Sisters in Islam presenting a public and scholarly argument against the PAS moves to make apostasy a capital crime.26 In some Muslim countries this would be inconceivable, but Malaysia has created a socially mobile, educated, articulate, and professional cadre of women leaders, of which Sisters in Islam is just one manifestation. One can never speak with absolute certainty about the future, but it seems highly unlikely that such trends will be reversed by anything short of brute force.

INDIVIDUALISM IN THE UMMA? The extraordinarily strong communalism of Islam, which has led it to privilege consensus over reason, does not bode well for our search for

132 Values and religions individualism. Bassam Tibi’s question on this matter is of central importance: ‘How could cultures in which the individual is conceived as a limb of an organically defined religious–cultural collectivity admit individual rights without undergoing radical changes in their prevailing world view?’27 How indeed? It is true that Islam has generated a duty ( fara’id) culture rather than a rights culture, but Islam’s distinctively strong emphasis on personal duties has itself focused attention on the individual human person, whose personal eternal happiness is at stake. Even the act of raising consensus to a supernatural virtue gives in principle recognition to the operation and interaction of individual minds, although in the next breathe it delegitimises their continued inquiry after consensus has been reached. This characteristic nevertheless indicates the way in which Islamic individualism is most easily recognised: not in the matter of individual rights (where Islam is traditionally weak), but in the matter of individual agency. Despite outward appearances, Islam shares with Christianity and liberalism a great emphasis on individual, personal agency, which is an essential characteristic of individualism. Charles Lindholm put it thus: In the Qu’ranic annunciation, individuals are required to take full responsibility for all their activity in the world; agency and accountability are not limited to obeying or disobeying commandments. For instance, in response to Muslim complaints about persecution by unbelievers, the Qu’ran makes an angry rebuke: ‘Was not the earth of Allah spacious enough for you to move yourselves away (from evil)?’ This remark assumes social mobility, individual initiative and a pragmatic attitude toward life that is characteristic of the Middle East. . . . A similar outlook is found in the often quoted remark of the Prophet to a Bedouin who asked him whether he should tie up his camel or count of God to keep it from wandering. ‘Count on God,’ said the Prophet, ‘and tie up your camel.’28 Lindholm’s observations would be of little value, however, if human agency were not seen to be valued and exercised actively in Islam’s praxis. Seen from the perspective of Southeast Asia – and focusing on Indonesia and Malaysia – there cannot be much doubt that Islam is host to a vibrant civil society, complete with business, political, philosophical and theological initiative, diversity and conflict.29 This is despite Islam’s intrinsic inhibitions about acknowledging the validity of a civil society that mediates between the individual and the umma. A high point of individualism in Islam is undoubtedly found in Sufism: a strand of Islam that is very strong in Java. Sufis are Islamic mystics, and they first appeared towards the end of the eighth century. Dissatisfied with merely submitting to God, they seek a more personal relationship, which can sometimes lead them into conflict with the mufti and fiqh.30 Sufism elevates individual

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experience of divinity to a central place in a mystic’s life, sometimes raising it above the requirements of shari’a and the directions of the Qu’ran. Some Javanese mystics even identify rasa (feeling, intuition, conscience) with divinity, asserting that their inner consciousness is an aspect of the divine.31 Despite the extreme individualism found within Sufism, Islam could never be said to be robustly individualistic. Yet there can be little doubt that at the core of both its doctrine and its praxis, it hosts a sedate strand of personalism that provides a credible basis for pursuing our quest for a humanistic morality.

PROTECTION OF THE VULNERABLE, WOMEN, CHILDREN, THE POOR Muslims are as capable as anyone of failing to live up to their ideals, but there can be little doubt that Islamic principles, stemming right back to the Qu’ran, give a high priority to protecting the vulnerable; especially orphans and women. Mention has already been made of the humanism that lay originally behind many of the injunctions regarding women and wives: a feature that has found resonance in the extraordinarily strong traditional Malay Muslim sense of wajib (obligation) to one’s mother.32 Islamic concern for the poor, which was prominent in the original preMedina revelations to the Prophet, has tended to manifest itself historically as the relief of poverty rather than as deliberate attempts to create a social order where poverty is minimised. The Qu’ranic injunctions regarding polygyny were designed originally as part of this web of social support for the destitute: so that widows and orphans had a breadwinner. The zakat is another arm of the Islamic ‘social security’. This is a tax on Muslims designed specifically to help the poor. In contemporary Malaysia, the zakat remains a functioning, institutionalised reality, and is collected and administered by the state. The Qu’ranic attitude to children is also inspired by this same spirit of humanism. Unlike liberalism, Islam has never had difficulty in conceptualising the place of children in its worldview. Children, including daughters, are gifts from God and are to be welcomed as such.33 An immediate practical effect of this recognition was that the pre-Islamic practice of female infanticide had to stop. Shari’a of all schools extended the explicit ban on infanticide to include a complete ban on abortion after ‘ensoulment’ (variously considered to be between conception and 120 days after conception) unless the mother’s life is endangered by the pregnancy.34 Although the allowance of abortion before ‘ensoulment’ is permitted, even then most schools regard abortion as makruh (reprehensible, detested), which is the legal category next to haram (prohibited) in gravity.35 Islam also gives special attention to the role of the family in meeting the special needs of the young and the elderly, though it stops short of

134 Values and religions vesting marriage with any supernatural or sacramental nature. This teaching rests solidly on a number of Qu’ranic injunctions,36 and has remained a basic element of Muslim social morality, rising above disagreements over matters such as polygyny and divorce. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto made this clear when she addressed the 1994 United Nations Cairo Population Conference: There is little compromise on Islam’s emphasis on the family unit. The traditional family is the basic unit on which any society rests. It is the anchor on which the individual relies as he embarks upon the journey of life. Islam aims at harmonious lives built upon a bedrock of conjugal fidelity and parental responsibility.37 The role of the family, and the related issues of chastity and conjugal fidelity are so central to the Islamic moral vision that there is no significant dissent on these matters from Muslim feminists, even as they oppose other aspects of Islamic morality.38

CONFRONTING MODERNITY In many ways, the ‘Asian values’ discourse is not new to Islam. It is merely the latest manifestation of a long discourse between modernity and traditionalism; between humanism and dogmatism. For well over a century Islamic thinkers and activists have been confronting modernity in all its aspects: the human rights agenda; the place of the nation-state in Islam (and vice versa); social justice and wealth creation; pluralism; governance; the challenge of using technology; and more. Their approaches have been disparate and often polarised between extremes. Modernist movements tried to respond constructively to modernity: to reverse the humiliations of the West’s eclipse of the Muslim world by adopting and adapting ‘Western’ techniques. Others rejected every aspect of modernity and advocated withdrawal and isolation. The challenges of the old colonial order were still being confronted when the post-war world presented new challenges, including that of the UN-driven concept of human rights. Despite the humanistic tendencies we have detected in Islam, it has never been entirely comfortable with the human rights discourse. Several Muslim majority countries, led by Saudi Arabia, have refused to sign the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and many have produced their own ‘Islamic’ declarations of human rights that fail to uphold fundamental elements of universalism: e.g. the freedom to change religion; equality between men and women.39 Many of these rights schemes are even cut-and-pasted from shari’a, with no attempt to distinguish between the particular and trivial (such as the right not to be made fun of or insulted by nicknames – as upheld in the Iranian Constitution)

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and the principled and serious (such as the right to life). The serious presentation of such declarations on the world stage suggests that some strains of Islam lack even the basic conceptual tools to engage in a dialogue with modernity.

‘ASIAN VALUES’ Yet the strange thing is how little Islam contributed to the ‘Asian values’ debate of the 1990s at the level of governments. Despite the fact that two countries in Southeast Asia have Muslim majorities, their positions at the 1993 Vienna Conference on human rights stood without reference to Islam or shari’a.41 In fact, the Indonesian state ideology at that time was an expression of secularism (Pancasila), so it would have been extraordinary if the Indonesian delegate had done otherwise.42 Any tendencies the Malaysian government may have had towards exaggerating their conceptual reliance on Islam was hamstrung by the fact that Muslims form only a bare majority of the population, and the non-Muslim minorities contribute critical components to the governing coalition. So is Islam irrelevant to the ‘Asian values’ debate and has this chapter been a waste of space? Not at all. Even before 11 September 2001 it was obvious that Islam was moving to a more central position in Indonesia and Malaysia, both in mainstream and dissident politics. Its interaction with the broader ‘Asian values’, human rights and democracy discourses has increased with this shift. The rise and fall of Anwar Ibrahim and the rise of PAS has made Islam a central feature of mainstream politics in Malaysia. Not only do two Malaysian states now have avowedly Islamic governments, but the ruling UMNO is being forced to upgrade its Islamic credentials. And although pluralistic Muslim intellectuals like Chandra Muzaffar have been politically and academically marginalised,43 they continue to participate in secular and religious political discourse, ensuring that the softer side of Islam has a voice. Turning to Indonesia we see that even under the final years of Suharto, Islam was becoming increasingly important in Indonesia, but since his fall the Muslim parties have moved into mainstream politics as members and leaders of the governing coalitions and the alternate governments. These parties have deep roots in Indonesian Muslim culture and each brings to national politics its own distinctive Muslim conceptualisation of Indonesian society,44 which has not always been particularly democratic or pluralist. The tension between Indonesian Islam’s democratic and authoritarian tendencies became evident when then-President Wahid was being threatened with impeachment in 2001. Despite having espoused the virtues of pluralism and democracy for decades, when his own power was under threat he toyed with the use of mob rule (though he never seriously unleashed the mob) and tried to use the army to thwart

136 Values and religions constitutional processes. Such strategies could perhaps be construed as a version of primitive democracy – defending a popular leader against constitutional manipulation – but more worrying and pertinent to this study is Wahid’s use of the more extremist language of Islam to justify his actions. Ulamas and Wahid himself used the term jihad [holy struggle/ holy war] in their calls for mass action, and Wahid accused his opponents of engaging in bughat. This Arabic word traditionally meant illicit rebellion against a sultan – the assumption being that the sultan is speaking with the authority of Allah and the rebellion is therefore intrinsically evil. In more recent times bughat has referred to legitimate political dissent against secular leaders, but Wahid resurrected the original authoritarian meaning and used it to condemn a democratic, constitutional opposition.45 This was not the first time Wahid had allowed the teaching of Islam to be distorted for his personal benefit. One of the arguments used to edge Megawati Sukarnoputri out of the running for the presidency in 1999 was an assertion that Islam prohibits women from taking leadership positions over men. The cynicism of this argument was laid bare in 2001 when the supposedly ‘Islamic’ objection to a female president evaporated now that the Muslim parties wanted Megawati to replace Wahid. It is doubly ironic that the person making the original objection, Hamzah Haz, became Megawati’s vice-president. The cumulative lesson of these cases is the ease with which the less humanistic strands of Islam can be used as a cover for short-term political agendas in contemporary Indonesia. It is also important to note that the war in Afghanistan has hardened the fundamentalist wing of Muslim opinion in both Indonesia and Malaysia. Although the appeal of extremists in the broader communities of Southeast Asia is very limited, it has still been sufficiently strong to make both Dr Mahathir and Megawati acutely sensitive and defensive about their alignments with the US against Afghanistan. Islam was only peripheral to the formal ‘Asian values’ debate of the 1990s, but since then it has been thrust onto centre stage of cultural politics. Its more extreme manifestations are threatening to emerge as major challengers to civility in governance in the twenty-first century and the question of the ‘legitimacy’ of softer, pluralistic strains is assuming ever greater importance in national, regional and world politics. Although there can be little doubt that Islam contains strong strains of humanism, and has the potential to be a positive force in a cross-cultural dialogue on human rights and public morality, it is quite possible that the anti-humanistic strands will emerge dominant; even in Southeast Asia. This raises questions of whether outsiders can do anything constructive to avoid this outcome. The potential of outsiders to make an active, positive input into this intra-Islamic discourse is very limited, but there are nevertheless many negative actions that can be avoided. Perhaps, it is appropriate to close this chapter with the words of Walid Saif to a World Council of Churches seminar in 1993:

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If there is really a sincere interest in introducing and promoting democracy and human rights in the Arab and Muslim world, and if efforts in this direction are to be fruitful, those values should not be alienated from the broad Islamic perspective. . . . We do not want to recreate the situation in which the concept of modernity was identified with secularism and westernization. . . .46 Avoiding such a development may require some restraint by liberal fundamentalists, and a rethinking of the standard approach to the human rights agenda. The traditional liberal-inspired focus on personal autonomy and the firm separation of personal and public morality is not likely to find much resonance in Islam, and risks pushing Muslims into the arms of fundamentalists. But Islam is nevertheless host to many humanistic strands that have the potential to engage modernity and the human rights discourse if approached with sensitivity. But more of this in Part III.

9

Buddhism: the politics of compassion

It is my conviction, at any rate, that general solutions and universal rights will solve only generic and universal problems and conflicts of interest. Since such problems and conflicts belong to no one in particular, neither do their solutions help anyone in particular. Unless we take vigorous and ever responsive steps in the direction of conduct that is dramatically harmonious and not just some kind of ideal or factual agreement, . . . human rights discourse will only promote . . . the literal ‘flowing apart’ of humans and their humanity, or persons and the communities through which their meaning flowers. (Peter D. Hershock, ‘Dramatic Intervention: Human Rights From a Buddhist Perspective’)1

Despite being uncomfortable with the ethos of a rights-centred culture, most Buddhist thinkers freely acknowledge the validity of human rights per se; and in fact most Buddhist societies are replete with local human rights activists. The most prominent example of a Buddhist human rights advocate is Tenzin Gyatso, the current and fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet, who told Non-Government Organisations at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights: Human beings, indeed all sentient beings, have the right to pursue happiness and live in peace and in freedom. But if we are prevented from using our creative potential, we are deprived of one of the basic characteristics of a human being. It is very often the most gifted, dedicated and creative members of our society who become victims of human rights abuses. Thus the political, social, cultural and economic developments of a society are obstructed by the violations of human rights.2 Yet despite the substantial levels of consensus that exist between the mainstream and Buddhist contributions to the human rights discourse, there are discernible differences in emphasis and rationale that point to a fundamentally different view of the human person. This can be seen in

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both of the Buddhist statements given above. Each has a distinctive sensitivity towards notions of harmony, spirituality, and society that would be out of place in mainstream liberalism – though it may be significant that there is a clear resonance with Confucian, much Christian (especially Catholic) and some Islamic thinking. Yet even these small points of resonance with the two monotheistic religions cannot be taken very far. Christianity and Islam share with liberalism a species-centric regard for humanity, and a strong sense of the human self-consciousness of being an individual entity. As the Dalai Lama suggests, Buddhism is not species-centric, but places all sentient life in a continuum of respect. Furthermore, any emphasis on personal self-consciousness runs contrary to the Buddhist teaching of no-self [anatta]. This precept argues that ‘one must be aware that one’s own self is indistinguishable from that of all others, and in fact that there is no underlying self behind the momentary consciousnesses which are constantly in flux’.3 Such teachings seem unlikely premises from which to build an ethic of rights. It cannot be denied that at profound levels Buddhism is explicitly anti-humanist – precisely the opposite of the impulses for which we are searching in this study. Yet the ethos of compassion on which Buddhism is based is so strong that even its antihumanistic tendencies have been turned towards humanistic ends. The result is that even though Buddhism is generally weak on systemically thinking about questions of ethics per se, and it has no hierarchy with authority to teach on ethical matters, it has nevertheless begun to develop its own, distinct ethos of human rights.

THE DHAMMA The central mystery of Buddhism is the inevitability of suffering [dukkha], and its sole objective is to promote spiritual development in order to ‘resolve’ or transcend this suffering. It was his witness of suffering that drove Siddhartha Gautama – by legend a prince – to shun a life of privilege and instead to seek enlightenment, thus setting him on the road, almost literally, to becoming the Buddha (the Enlightened One). Gautama set out to understand the nature of suffering, and to overcome the ignorance that is responsible for this universal human phenomenon. After false starts lasting several years, in which he experimented with extremes of austerity, Gautama found Enlightenment through a ‘Middle Way’ between self-deprivation and self-indulgence. The key was detachment from passions: which in Buddhist mythology has been anthropomorphised into Gautama’s defeat of Mara, the Lord of the world of passion. The intrusion of Mara is an appropriate occasion to note that when Buddha founded his religion in the sixth century BC, he did not do so in isolation. Like liberalism, Islam and Christianity, it grew from the seeds of older religions. Buddhism and Hinduism have immediate origins in

140 Values and religions the Indian Brahmanic religion, which contained many of the elements with which they came to be associated: reincarnation, karma, and, in case of Hinduism, caste. A notable part of this heritage is the fact that Buddhism has no concept of the divine, whether as creator, redeemer or even as a source of good – which is why it cannot be regarded as a theistic religion. The absence of divine authority has given Buddhism a reasoning, rather than an authoritative character, and its precepts are accepted by individuals on a purely voluntary basis.4 The direct, personal knowledge of truth and ‘absolute reality’ that comes with Buddha-hood goes a long way towards substituting for divine authority,5 but this never quite reaches even the overarching authority of a system of morality that claims to be universal and ‘right’. Even the basic Precepts [Vinaya] of Buddhism – which seem to the Western eye to reflect a deeper, more systematic approach to a system of morality and ethics – are merely proven means for acquiring good karma. They do not derive from deeper, systemic principles that lend themselves to absolutism or universalism.6 The lack of a central, divinely sanctioned teaching authority and the emphasis, especially in Theravada Buddhism, on practical spiritual development rather than on dogma, philosophy or ideas, has given Buddhism a natural disposition towards pluralism, tolerance and conciliation. This tendency is exaggerated by Buddhism’s belief that we will all reach Enlightenment eventually – in some reincarnation in the distant future. (It is easy to tolerate error in the context of innumerable incarnations and the inevitability of the distant triumph of truth.) In contrast to some of the considerations mentioned near the opening of this chapter, this is a very positive starting point from which to begin our search for humanistic tendencies, though it is also a double-edged sword: ‘softness’ and lack of dogmatism undermines the absolute assertion of human rights. In the absence of dogmatism, Buddhism rests its calls for adherence on what appears on the surface to be a merely pragmatic claim: that it has identified the causes of suffering (stated in the Four Noble Truths) and the ways to alleviate suffering (the Eightfold Path). Buddhism claims to have found the ideal way to achieve contentment and defeat suffering primarily through a series of spiritual exercises. The ideal result of these exercises is to extinguish one’s consciousness of oneself and be capable of breaking the cycle of rebirth. In the Theravada schools of South and Southeast Asia this means becoming an arahat [worthy one ready to break the cycle of rebirth by attaining Nibbana/Nirvana].7 In the Mahayana schools of East Asia, one aspires to become a Bodhisattva [one who is destined to attain Buddha-hood, but defers it to remain in the world as a virtual living saint, helping others find Enlightenment].8 Most people, however, do not attain these ideals, and are reborn in a lesser form that accords with the karma they have acquired by the deeds of their lives. Bad karma moves a person down the hierarchy of sentient beings: a man might be reborn as an ugly man, a woman, an animal, an insect or

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a ghost. Good karma moves a person up the hierarchy: a good man might be reborn as a king, or as a holy monk, a great teacher, an arahat or a Bodhisattva. The core principles of Buddhism are the Four Noble Truths: the omnipresence of suffering [dukkha]; its cause, selfish desire, craving [tanha]; its cure, the elimination of tanha; and the means to the cure by following the Dhamma, the Middle Way of moderation.9 The Dhamma [the way/truth/ duty] is based on the Eightfold Noble Path, which is designed to take one from knowing intellectually to knowing experientially. The eightfold path consists of right views, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right contemplation.10 The ethical base of Buddhism rests in its Five Precepts: to abstain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, falsehoods and intoxicants.11 Such is the bare skeleton of Buddhism, stripped of all the depth and spirituality that makes it attractive to its adherents.

CONSCIENCE Paradoxically for a religion that seeks to purge people of a consciousness of oneself, Buddhism is a highly individualistic faith that effectively makes the personal conscience the real authority in one’s life, providing a point of affinity with liberalism and the more liberal Protestant Christian churches. Scripture, commentaries, the sangha, the example of the Buddha, bodhisattvas, and holy monks – these all provide guidance and ideals, but not judgement. In some ways, the Buddhist elevation of conscience exceeds even that of classical liberalism, since only in Buddhism does ‘right views’ and ‘right thought’ have the potential to develop into direct, personal knowledge of Truth, almost like the Beatific Vision that Christians reserve for the saints in Heaven. In Mahayana Buddhism, which places the stronger emphasis on self-directed moral discipline [sila] ahead of fidelity to the details of established norms, a Bodhisattva or a holy monk may even contravene any of the Five Precepts – providing it is done with upaya [skilful means]!12 Thus a Boddhisattva could have sexual intercourse with an unmarried woman if the end result was to take her closer to Enlightenment.13 It is by a similar rationale that past generations saw warrior monks engaging in Zen meditation before battle.14 The allowance for conscience stretches to the heart of Buddhist praxis, which is essentially gradualist and particularist. Thus lay Buddhists may follow some or all of the basic Five Precepts, but a monk must follow over two hundred. The various schools of Buddhism all follow the same core faith, but variations have emerged that give them very different appearances, even to the outsider. The Theravada school of Southeast Asia is a populist, pragmatic faith that still follows the earliest traditions of Buddhism. It

142 Values and religions sets down the Dhamma for laity and clergy to follow and offers the faithful the hope of gradually improving their temporal lot throughout their subsequent lives, and – in a future almost too distant to imagine – achieving Enlightenment and Nirvana. The Mahayana schools of East Asia (thought to date from the second century BC) accept the teaching of the Theravada school insofar as it goes, but they regard it as the ‘lesser vehicle’, lacking the fullness of compassion. Mahayana Buddhism is more philosophically reflective, less populist, sets higher standards of spirituality and compassion, but, as noted above, is also more flexible in matters of personal morality. It offers the faithful a share in the karmic fruits of many bodhisattvas who have found Enlightenment, but deferred Nirvana in order to share karmic ‘grace’ with the less fortunate. Enlightenment can be achieved almost overnight in Mahayana Buddhism, but once achieved, the reward is selflessly deferred – a formula for making saints who glow hot and bright, but a more difficult faith to ‘sell’ as a popular basis for ordinary daily life.15 Yet regardless of differences between the various schools of Buddhism, they all share the same ‘three treasures’ or ‘three jewels’, being the Buddha, the Dhamma and the sangha. These three, which many Buddhists regard as three manifestations of the one truth, rather than as three separate entities, provide the normative point of reference for Buddhists around the world and down the millennia.

THE SANGHA Praxis is regarded as much more important than beliefs, since both the accumulation of karma [cause leading to moral effect] and attainment of Nibbana/Nirvana [the state of freedom from the false and separative self; a transcendental state where all ills have ceased] are tied very closely to physical and mental actions. The significance of praxis is highlighted by the notion of upaya [skilful means]. These are prescribed karmatically fruitful actions (e.g. alms giving, loving speech), and they are regarded as of more immediate concern than wisdom or insight.16 Consequently, disputes and schisms have most frequently occurred over matters of practice, especially in Theravada Buddhism. Such disputes usually occur within religious orders [sanghas], which are the central institutions of Buddhism. The sangha is as important to the perpetuation of Buddhism as are the Christian clergy and Islamic mullahs to their faiths. It should be noted, however, that a Buddhist monk or nun plays a role only vaguely equivalent to that of a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, or a Muslim mullah. A Catholic religious brother or nun offers the closest analogy. They are effectively laypersons living a religious life, without having received any special sacramental or teaching authority and without any link to the laity analogous with a Christian parish. Yet even this is not a very exact analogy. The purpose of being a Buddhist monk is

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simply to accumulate good karma rather than serve God. They are accorded great respect because it is assumed that they are monks or nuns because they have acquired good karma in previous lives, and because doing good deeds for monks is karmatically fruitful. Furthermore, Catholics enter celibate religious orders for life, and consider it to be their divinely nominated vocation: it is an extraordinary commitment. Although Buddhist monks in most countries may enter a sangha and stay celibate for life, this is far from universal. Thai and Burmese monks commonly take temporary vows that allow them to leave, marry and live in the world. Time spent in the sangha is not only a means of acquiring good karma, but many people consider it a good preparation for life and marriage. In Japan, Vietnam and Korea many orders actually permit monks to marry while remaining within the sangha. Historically, sanghas have accumulated political roles in Buddhist countries and their fate has been bound up with those of regimes. The sangha has been an important legitimating tool for Buddhist regimes, but it is one that has been easily manipulated by rulers who have often settled disputes within and between religious communities according to the needs of the regime, rather than on higher matters of principle.17 This vulnerability to state interference is reminiscent of our study of European Protestantism and Islam. It is so strong that Thanh-Dam Truong argues that all attempts to institutionalise the teaching of Buddhism must result in the subjugation of the sangha to the state.18 Confucianism, communism and Western influence have substantially evaporated the legitimating role of the Buddhism in East Asia and Vietnam; and colonial, communist and post-communist regimes have relegated it to the margins in Laos and Cambodia without completely destroying its legitimating function; but Buddhism and the sangha still play a central legitimating role in Thailand and Myanmar (despite the absence of a Buddhist monarch in Myanmar).19 Thus all sides of politics in both of the latter two countries cultivate the support of sanghas and prominent monks. Conversely, the unexpected intervention of obscure monks into politics can create mayhem for politicians.

ASOKA In the previous two chapters, an historical approach proved particularly useful in picking the threads of humanism in liberalism, Christianity and Islam. The lack of an institutional focus in Buddhism makes this approach less profitable, but there are a number of points that are best made by reference to history. One of the most important historical developments from the perspective of the current study is the reign of the Indian emperor, Asoka Maurya from 270 BC. Asoka inherited a considerable empire from his father, and then proceeded to expand it further through

144 Values and religions conquest, creating a huge empire encompassing most of the sub-continent. After he had achieved his territorial ambitions he became revolted by the horrors of war and converted to Buddhism. He made Buddhism the state religion, and then sent missionaries to spread the religion beyond his own empire: to other parts of India, north Africa, southern Europe, and most significantly for this study, to Sri Lanka, from whence it spread throughout most of Asia. Asoka’s rule set an example that has been described as a vision of the Buddhist welfare state20 and, as Donald Swearer put it, the historical embodiment of the mythic Buddhist world ruler [cakkavattin], one who embodies the Dhamma and rules by it and who personifies the Ten Royal Virtues [Dasarajadhamma]: generosity, moral virtue, self-sacrifice, kindness, self-control, non-anger, non-violence, patience, and adherence to the norm of righteousness.21 There was undoubtedly some deliberate myth making in the portrayal of Asoka, but this does not diminish the importance of his role, which was to create an historical example of a high, humane standard for subsequent regimes – an example that bolstered more ahistorical governance myths found in scripture.22 On the other hand, Asoka’s example also provided critical, practical reinforcement for regime legitimation. It had always been thought that a Buddhist monarch had earned the right to rule by his virtue in previous lives: he is the lay head of Buddhism, its protector and possibly even a bodhisattva. Thanks to Asoka, the Buddhist king also became the focus of intricate, state-centric cosmologies that were woven into royal and religious ceremonies and architecture throughout South and Southeast Asia: most spectacularly in places such as Borobudur and the Bayon at Angkor. Like Islamic and Christian mythology studied in earlier chapters, Buddhist political legitimation seems capable of being turned to the service of almost any type of regime – much to the disgust of modern ‘radical’ Buddhists who seek to oppose and modify state power. Yet the standard of a ruler’s conduct – specifically the extent to which it mirrored the legend of Asoka – has remained an anchor that measures legitimacy. From the perspective of our search for humanistic tendencies, its presence is a powerful positive force, which is especially significant because Southeast Asia lacks indigenous social contract myths. The social contract implicit in Buddhism has faced a formidable task in offsetting Hindu and pre-Hindu ‘primitive power’ myths.23 In Thailand and Myanmar in particular, the forces of good and evil – commonly represented as light and dark or mountains and the sea – are regarded as ancient, tangible entities exercising raw power. One deals with these primitive powers through ritual: by ameliorating and circumscribing evil spirits and encouraging good spirits. In political terms, this translates into encouraging and strengthening autocratic rule, since the ‘good’ power of the king is the

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only practical defence against evil. The personal power of rulers thus becomes a moral good in itself: and the more power a ruler exercises (regardless of whether or not he does so humanely or wisely), the more strongly he is demonstrating his alignment with the good spirits.24 Similar mythology is at work in traditional Javanese culture, where it has given birth to similar conceptions of power, good and evil.25 Given this worldview it would seem absurd to adopt a ‘balance of power’ approach to governance, since this would be tantamount to argue for a balance between good and evil when what is obviously needed is the victory of good. Buddhism has never fully expunged such impulses from any of the countries of Southeast Asia, and in fact Buddhist monarchs have generally accepted the trappings and power assumptions of the Hindu monarchs. Buddhism’s critical contribution has been to provide a countervailing demand that rulers work for the good of their people, and to introduce an alternate, if easily manipulated, locus of legitimation and authority in the sangha.

THAILAND Another set of historical figures of whom we should take account are the nineteenth and twentieth century Siamese monarchs of the Chakri dynasty, especially King Mongkut (Rama IV) and his son, King Chulalongkorn (Rama V). They are not in the same historical league as Asoka, but as the agents of Theravada Buddhism’s most successful accommodation with modernity, they cannot be ignored in this study. These two men introduced the English language, Western science and secular thought to the Thai elite. King Chulalongkorn encouraged young members of the court and the aristocracy to study in Europe, established a British-inspired training college in Bangkok, introduced a public education system to teach the new knowledge, and reformed Siam’s legal and administrative systems along European lines.26 One of the most significant aspects of this process from the perspective of this study is that the modernisation was staffed substantially by Buddhist monks, since the sangha proved to be the only national institution capable of implementing Chulalongkorn’s reforms. The new secular role of the sangha was institutionalised and recognised in law from 1902 onwards.27 Chulalongkorn’s two immediate successors, his sons King Vajirawut (Rama VI) and King Prachathipok (Rama VII), were not systemic modernisers like their father. Nevertheless, they did ready the Thai monarchy for its successful leap into the instability of constitutional and military rule that followed the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932. In time, it was the monarchy that proved to be the only effective long-term stabilising force in the country. In this context, it is appropriate to note the special place of Thailand as the epicentre of political Buddhism in Pacific Asia – and the distinctly

146 Values and religions lesser place of Mahayana Buddhism. Consider these words written by a British official in Myanmar late in the nineteenth century: The Burman cannot conceive of a religion without a Defender of the Faith – a king who appoints and rules the Buddhist hierarchy. The extinction of the monarchy left the nation, according to the people’s notions, without a religion.28 According to Yoneii Ishii, these words adequately describe the ‘essence of Theravada Buddhism’ across Southeast Asia: that is in Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.29 Yet the Burman did have to face the loss of the Defender of the Faith when the British abolished the monarchy in 1878. The Cambodian and the Lao were spared this abrupt dislocation, but witnessed the debasement of their kings as they were transformed in colonial pawns, and then eliminated, permanently or intermittently, at the hands of communist regimes. Only in Thailand did a Buddhist kingdom not suffer the humiliations of colonisation or communist dictatorship, and the consequent stunting of the ‘natural’ Buddhist order. Even without further considerations, this gives Thailand a prima facie claim of exceptionalism, but the differences go much further. The nations of Indochina are also different to Thailand in that they have spent several generations under dictatorships that have crushed civil society, freedom and open debate. This compares unfavourably to Thailand’s relatively benign military dictatorships, which, despite regular efforts to harass and manipulate civil society, nevertheless allowed a relatively free interchange of ideas. Thailand is also the only country in question to operate a capitalist economic system or to have successfully (thus far) democratised. In consequence, Thailand has been left, by default, at the cutting edge of the development of Buddhism as it confronts politics and the public face of modernity. In contrast, Mahayana Buddhism has had centuries of experience as a vibrant private religion but a political irrelevancy. The ideological battles with Confucianism were lost many centuries ago throughout East Asia (and Vietnam). In China, Buddhism – alongside Daoism and folk religions – accepted a subordinate role to Confucianism. Similar accommodations were reached with religious rivals in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. The exception to this rule is Tibet. Although its Vajrayana Buddhism is a form of Mahayana, and Tibet is occupied and administered by China, it has retained its own hierarchical cosmology and Buddhist state-in-exile – personified by the Dalai Lama – in the face of relentless persecution by the Chinese government. Like his confreres in Thailand, the Dalai Lama is also confronting modernity, but being outside the political praxis in his own home, he has little to contribute to the discourse between politics and Buddhism, except for his vital endorsement of human rights and democracy.

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Thailand is therefore the focal point of our study insofar as we are studying the political aspects of our search for humanism in Buddhism. On more esoteric questions, such as ethics, morality, and the nature of the human person, Thailand has no such singular role. On these matters, there is no reason to privilege the Thai experience over that of, for instance, the Japanese or the Koreans.

DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE In many ways, the search for humanistic tendencies in Buddhism is much simpler than that which occupied the earlier chapters. The intellectual looseness and non-dogmatism of the faith – originating with the Buddha himself – lend themselves to a positive result. Hence we see the relative ease with which Buddhist thinkers were able to agree upon a Buddhist declaration of human rights (technically a Declaration of Interdependence) in 1995 and overcome some of the apparent difficulties in reconciling Buddhism and human rights. The Declaration’s preface emphasises the preciousness of human ‘potential for awareness, sensitivity, and freedom’, and the duty not to deprive others of their chance for ‘moral and spiritual flourishing’. It emphasises our ‘mutual dependency’ rather than our independent rights, and sets the reduction of suffering of all sentient beings as humanity’s aim. The theme of mutual dependence reaches its zenith in the final paragraph of the Preface: The Buddhist teaching that we lack an inherently existing Self (anatta) shows that suffering does not really ‘belong’ to anyone. It arises, in the life-stream of various sentient beings. To try and reduce it in ‘my’ stream at the expense of increasing it in another life-stream is folly, both because this will in fact bring more suffering back to me (karma), and because it depends on the deluded notion that ‘I’ am an inviolable entity that is not dependent and can treat others as if only they are limited and conditioned.30 It should not be surprising that despite upholding human rights without obvious compromise, the body of the Declaration is uncannily askew Western and United Nations declarations of human rights: Whereas in its teachings Buddhism recognizes: 1. The interdependency of all forms of life and the reciprocal obligations which arise from it, such as the duty to repay the kindness of those who in previous lives may have been our parents, relatives and friends;

148 Values and religions 2. The need for universal compassion for sentient beings who are all alike in that they dislike pain and wish for happiness; 3. The inalienable dignity which living creatures possess by virtue of their capacity to achieve enlightenment in this life or in the future; The Conference [on ‘Buddhism and Human Rights’] affirms: 1. Every human being should be treated humanely both by other individuals and governments. . . . 2. Every human being must be treated equally and without discrimination on grounds of race, nationality, religion, sex, color, age, mental ability, or political views. 3. Human beings . . . have an obligation to present and future generations to protect the environment they share with other sentient beings, and to avoid causing direct or indirect harm to other forms of sentient life.31

Engaged Buddhism Just as it is not difficult to find evidence of humanism and in principle support for human rights in modern Buddhism, there is also no shortage of evidence that many Buddhists are actively engaged in the quest for human rights, social justice and democracy. This phenomenon even has its own name: ‘Socially Engaged Buddhism’, or just ‘Engaged Buddhism’. It is based largely on the vaguely left wing, anti-capitalist, antiauthoritarian views of outspoken Buddhist monks, especially, but not exclusively from Thailand. The best known of these Thai monks are Sulak Sivaraksa (the founder of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists), and Buddhadasa Bikkhu, but other examples include ChaiAnan Samudavanija, Pracha Hutanuwatr (both mentioned in Chapter 2), and Phra Bodhirak. Thich Nhat Hanh of Vietnam (but exiled in Paris; mentioned earlier in this chapter), Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar and the Dalai Lama of Tibet (but exiled in India) are also considered part of this movement. Onto this has been grafted the contributions of Western Buddhists and some Western academics who are notionally academic students of Buddhism, but who seem to be better described as co-generators of the Engaged Buddhist movement: hence Thomas Yarnall’s quip that ‘Engaged Buddhism’ is ‘made in the USA of Asian materials’.32 The emergence of Engaged Buddhism follows a longstanding tradition of Buddhist social and religious activism, particularly in Thailand, but to a lesser extent throughout the whole of Theravada Buddhist Southeast Asia. The single most notable example was U Nu, the first Prime Minister of Myanmar and the conceptual founder of ‘Buddhist Socialism’. Whether opposing dictatorship or corruption, asserting the rights of women, helping the poor, opposing the excesses of capitalism, or defending the forests, Theravadin monks and laity have been there.

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Humanity It is tempting simply to accept that Buddhism has assimilated itself into modernity so fully that it is completely comfortable with the human rights discourse – which is very close to the truth. Nevertheless, if we maintain the practice of earlier chapters, whereby religions have been ‘tested’ against a consistent, if rather personal standard of humanism, it promises to uncover the nuances peculiar to the humanism of Buddhism. The author’s list of ‘positive indicators of humanism’ in world religions has been summarised thus: a universalistic conception of humanity; traces of individualism; protection of the vulnerable; special concern for children; a concern for the common good; and an openness to the application of reason. Beginning at the top of this list, we can make an opening observation that in the main, Buddhism’s view of humanity is profoundly universalistic. In all its forms, Buddhism’s overriding impulse is compassion for all sentient creatures, but especially for all people. All sentient creatures are part of samsara [the circle of birth, death and rebirth], but human beings are in a special class because they have achieved a precious and rare opportunity for understanding, and for moral and spiritual progress. Of course, some people are reborn in situations more conducive to making such progress than others. Those born in a Buddhist society are obviously advantaged, but this does not diminish the respect due to the less fortunate. Historical Buddhism contains only a few instances where it was tempted to place groups of people – enemies of the state or the sangha – in a class of lesser humans who deserve death, and the impact of these lapses has not been lasting.33 Even the prevalence of abortion in Buddhist countries has not led to a dismissal of the humanity of the foetus: Buddhism unambiguously recognises that the unborn child is a human being and a person, and that killing that person is wrong.34 Obviously the conflict between reality and belief requires further explanation (see ‘Protection of the Vulnerable’ and ‘Abortion’, below), but it does not negate the basic truth of the universality of the Buddhist conception of humanity.

Individualism For a religion that seeks to negate the perception of ‘self ’ with the idealisation of ‘no-self ’, and one that prefers to emphasise duties ahead of rights, Buddhism is surprisingly individualistic. The Buddha himself set this precedent when he rejected the ways of his family and society to leave home and seek enlightenment. Of course individualism in a social or religious movement must give way to a significant level of group conformity, otherwise there can be no movement as such. Buddhism is no exception to this rule. The foundation of religious orders of monks and nuns under rigid rules, the moral authority behind the doctrines and teachings of the

150 Values and religions faith, and eventually the marriage of temporal and religious authority in Theravadin kingdoms has guaranteed that the overall social ethos of Buddhism is predominantly communitarian rather than individualistic. Yet the lack of a tangible teaching authority has left a vacuum at the centre of this communitarianism that is filled by the individual and his or her conscience and personal responsibility. Laypersons are left to make most of the important choices in their lives: not just whether or not to join a religious order, but whether or not to commit themselves to five, three or no precepts. There are few social penalties for engaging in private conduct that is considered immoral. True, the state is seen to have a moral function, but even so, the punishments for ‘private’ offences have traditionally taken the form of compassionate warnings about the dangers of bad karma.35 Furthermore, even though missionaries played a critical role in the spread of Buddhism and there have been sad lapses into religious wars and persecutions (notably on the sub-continent), the religion generally lacks the proselytising fire that has driven members of other faiths to impose their ‘truth’ by force. Indeed many great figures from Buddhism, including Buddha himself and Emperor Asoka, showed respect for other religions as partial or imperfect carriers of the Dhamma.36

Protection of the Vulnerable There is one important point on which Buddhism appears vulnerable to the criticism of failing to respect persons qua persons: its regard for people who have acquired bad karma in previous lives and have suffered in their current reincarnation. In practice this refers to the disabled, the weak, the ugly, the poor and women. Women, for instance, have a lower status than men in principle, and are unable to attain the very greatest heights of the afterlife without an intervening life as a man. Hence we read the cry of a Sukhodaya Queen, ‘By the power of my merit, may I be reborn as a male.’37 Both historically and contemporarily the Buddhist attitude to women has prompted or legitimised some dreadful treatment. Buddhism can be accused of colluding with or legitimising local forms of gender discrimination, such as polygyny; the treatment of women as chattel; the sale of wives; concubinage; and prostitution. And yet it must be said that Buddhist Southeast Asia’s record on women stands up well against the historical record of East Asia and parts of the Middle East. Furthermore, Buddhist misogyny is being worn away as Buddhist cultures are increasingly drenched in modernity. A recent feminist study, for instance, found that Thai women have ‘a relatively high degree of status and autonomy’, whether measured on scales of literacy, workforce participation, legal rights, freedom to choose a spouse, or freedom and power within marriage and family relationships.38 Despite the fact that there is no historical shortage of karmatically based discrimination in Buddhist cultures, in the main Buddhism is saved from

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the worst pitfalls of caste by its inherent compassion, articulated in the first instance by Buddha himself. The anti-humanistic tendencies of the Buddhist conception of karma have always been balanced by the belief that people deserve compassion for their shortcomings, which in any case were probably shared by oneself in a previous life. Hence, the tendency to look down upon the poor has been balanced by an impulse to help the poor, and create a social and economic system that avoids the creation of poverty in the first place.39 Although the influence of such positive impulses has not always been obvious – especially regarding the treatment of women – their presence has made it relatively easy for Engaged Buddhists and other contemporary thinkers to justify humanistic readings of Buddhism. Although the historical and even the contemporary record of Buddhism on protecting the vulnerable contains a similar tension to that found in the other religions, there can be no doubt that the most recent developments are generally positive from the perspective of our search for humanistic tendencies. The situation varies from country to country and from urban to rural settings, but on balance Buddhism’s lack of dogmatism and its underlying humanism is enabling it to develop and accommodate itself, both in principle and in practice, to modernity and modern precepts of egalitarianism and fairness. Yet this same lack of dogmatism and the lack of a central teaching authority is arguably rendering this accommodation less meaningful in the real world. Whatever the strengths inherent in Buddhism’s flexibility and vagueness, they also deny it a strong leadership role among its own adherents. This leadership gap can be seen most clearly when ‘hard’ issues and ‘hard’ decisions are at stake and the humanistic impulses of Buddhism are in conflict with people who are looking for immediate solutions to real problems. The rural Thai family faced with a choice between grinding poverty and placing daughters into prostitution is a case in point. The pregnant woman choosing between the First Precept and an abortion is another. Abortion The prevalence of abortion in Buddhist societies is a paradox and creates an enigma in the search for humanistic impulses in Buddhism. On the surface, there is little reason to doubt Buddhism’s stance on abortion. The Pali Canon and ancient Buddhist scripture and commentaries not only unambiguously condemn abortion and uphold the personhood of the foetus, but they go into great detail as to the ways in which abortion karmatically ‘defeats’ the abortionist, the mother and any accomplices, leading to suffering and bad rebirth.40 Thai Buddhist scripture is extremely graphic. It teaches that abortionists are reborn as smelly, rotting, fly-ridden female hungry ghosts who are forced by hunger to eat their own children.41 Apart from contravening the most important Precept

152 Values and religions of Buddhism, abortion deprives a person (the foetus) of a rare rebirth as a human being, with all of its potential for spiritual development and Enlightenment.42 With this in mind it should not be surprising to find that when David Stott researched Buddhist attitudes to abortion in Tibet and William La Fleur did the same in Japan, each found unanimity on the evil of abortion.43 In 1988, the Dalai Lama summed up Buddhist teaching in a few sentences: Abortion is considered an ill deed of killing a living being. With respect to monks and nuns, there are four types of ill deeds that bring about the defeat of the vow itself; one of them is to kill a human being or something forming a human being.44 Yet Buddhists are among the biggest consumers of abortion among all the world’s religious groups. In Theravada Thailand abortions are relatively common place (despite being illegal in the main), and in Mahayana Japan abortion is legal and is performed at epidemic rates. In Sri Lanka and South Korea, where Buddhists comprise a large proportion of the population, Buddhists have the highest abortion rates per head of population. To complicate matters further, there is little inclination, even by women who have had abortions, to follow the Western liberal practice of using dehumanising euphemisms such as ‘foetal tissue’ when talking about an aborted foetus: the term commonly used in Buddhist countries is more likely to be ‘child’.45 In Japan, it is now part of the common culture for mothers and sometimes fathers to apologise to their aborted children and express grief for their deaths in a service called mizuko kuyo [apology to the water child] that blends Buddhism with Japanese folk religion.46 Though on a much smaller and less public scale, South Korean Buddhists are increasingly expressing similar sentiments of grief towards their aborted children, often through a service modelled on mizuko kuyo.47 Robert Florida also reports personal knowledge of Thai women ‘frequently’ engaging in private Buddhist rituals to lessen the karmic harm done to their aborted babies.48 What are we to make of this mass of contradictions? A handful of authors present this as evidence that Buddhism is ‘soft’ on abortion,49 but the consensus rejecting this approach is nearly unanimous. Pinot Ratanakul seems to go some way towards explaining the dilemma: While Buddhism does not make any exceptions to its precepts, it deals realistically with human wrong. In its awareness of the complexity of the human condition it takes into consideration mitigating factors. . . . Buddhism, therefore, does not want those who violate the precepts to brood over past deeds or to develop a sense of guilt. Regretting a past bad action and resolving not to do it again, however,

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can lessen the bad karmic result of that deed, as it is conductive to spiritual development.50 Yet as neat and tidy as this explanation sounds, it does not really explain the essential difference between the Buddhist and, for instance, the Catholic attitude to abortion. Sentiments parallel to those described by Ratanakul are commonly held by Christians, including Catholics, who counsel women who have had abortions – and they express and believe these sentiments without softening their opposition to abortion in the slightest.51 The deeper explanation seems to be threefold. First, there is Buddhism’s active aversion to dogmatism, and the absence of a central teaching authority mentioned earlier. These factors have proven to be advantageous when the development of humanism requires a flexible approach to old teachings, but a disadvantage when a humane response requires adherence to a difficult standard. Second, there is the practical necessity for ongoing compromise of the precepts, especially the critical first precept against killing. Theoretically, this precept forbids the taking of all sentient life, and some of the more austere monks follow this to the letter: even sweeping the path before them so they do not step on an insect. Most Buddhists, however, need to compromise in order to live: insects are deliberately sprayed and squashed everyday; animals are killed and eaten; soldiers fight for their country. The extent of the compromise is seen in the contradictions involved in being a butcher or a soldier. Both these professions are considered to be ‘wrong livelihoods’ that result from and result in bad karma, yet most Buddhists eat meat and most Buddhists expect their nation-state to maintain an army. Unlike the Christian mentality towards sin, Buddhists do not accept these instances as objective failings for which one repents: they are accepted as legitimate compromises between oneself and morality, rationalised by the latent fatalism residing in the concept of karma. Once such compromises are internalised it is easy to extend them one step further and difficult to insist that they should stop at a particular point, so that the lot of the butcher or the aborted foetus is accepted as karmic destiny. The third part of the explanation bears directly upon another of the author’s ‘positive indicators of humanism’: the question of a special regard for children. On this score there is a critical difference between Christian and Islamic attitudes to children on the one hand, and that of Buddhism on the other. The two monotheistic faiths regard children as a sacred gift from God, and have traditionally urged fecundity on the faithful. Buddhism has no such concept. From Japan to Thailand, the hegemonic Buddhist attitude to sex and fecundity is one of indifference, sometimes spilling over into outright hostility because desire for sex and children interferes with the quest for Enlightenment – which helps to account for the effectiveness of family planning programs in Buddhist countries.52

154 Values and religions Children, once conceived, deserve respect because they are human, but they do not draw their worth from a creator, but merely from the fact that they have entered a rebirth that has special significance. As we have already seen, rebirth as a human is a ‘rare and precious rebirth’ that gives great potential for spiritual development. In a small, but significant way, the Buddhist view of children as mere holders of spiritual potential gives it a second point of identity with liberalism, which also has a tendency to dismiss children as mere holders of rational and autonomous potential.53 Buddhism avoids the trap of dismissing the child as something less than fully human, but nevertheless places only mild active, explicit emphasis on the child’s protection. Yet the differences between the Christian, Buddhist and Muslim approaches to abortion are less striking than the similarities: Christians, Buddhists and Muslims regard abortion as something abhorrent and inhumane. The differences lie largely in the passion with which the religions feel their abhorrence, which is in inverse proportion to their regard for immature human life per se.

THE COMMON GOOD: APPLICATION OF REASON The last two planks in the author’s personal criteria of humanism is a sense of something akin to the common good and openness to the application of reason. On each of these criteria, the historical record and the contemporary stance of Buddhism is clear, though not completely simple. We have already seen that since the time of the Buddha, and particularly since the rule of Asoka, the individualism and the otherworldliness of Buddhism has been balanced by a concern for the welfare of people as members of society with material, spiritual and social needs. This derives not only from the general Buddhist sense of compassion, but also from the Buddhist theory of social contract, whereby kings rule by the consent of their people, for the good of their people.54 The emphasis on community and society is an intrinsic part of the Buddhist critique of the modern human rights discourse, which it criticises for paying insufficient attention to the role of the human person as a social creature. The question of the application of reason is slightly more problematic. We have seen that historically Buddhism has been averse to placing much faith in metaphysical speculation, and treats attempts to conceptualise, categorise and syllogise with suspicion. Yet this is not to say it is irrational or anti-rational. Kenneth Inada characterises the Buddhist mind-set as that of existentialism: subscribing to the notion that existence always precedes essence.55 Buddhists join with Plato (in The Last Days of Socrates) in questioning whether one can conceptualise a chair, a table, or a person per se: as opposed to particular chairs, tables or people. But whereas Plato (and Aristotle) found solutions to this dilemma, existential-

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ism denies that a solution exists. It maintains that the essence is derived only from the particular and cannot exist except in the particular. By contrast Western logic accepts essences as pre-existing and thrives on the conceptualisation that this enables. It has no trouble thinking about a chair or a table or a person in the abstract. Herein lies the heart of the Buddhist dissatisfaction with generic human rights as expressed by Peter Hershock at the opening of this chapter. Virtually all the mainstream Western approaches to human rights presuppose essences and then elevate them to a status comparable to dogma – an un-Buddhist approach on both counts. Existentialism has another implication that is not immediately obvious: it turns the rigid conceptual silos of Aristotelian logic into porous sponges. Aristotelian logic follows disciplined syllogisms: A can equal B or not-B, but it cannot be both. This is the inescapable conclusion of one of the unprovable but supposedly self-evident ‘first principles’ of Aristotelian logic: ‘We assume that every predicate can be either truly affirmed or truly denied of any subject.’56 Buddhist logic denies this rigidity completely and emerges with the tetralemma: A can equal B, or not-B, or B and not-B, or neither B nor not-B.57 To the mind raised on Aristotelian logic, the existentialism of Buddhism defies reason – literally – and to the Buddhist mind the linear precision of Western logic is an obstacle to Enlightenment and a cause of suffering.58 Yet Buddhist existentialism does have an inner logic of its own, and it would be grossly unfair to argue that it is hostile to rationality. Indeed, the emphasis on personal responsibility and the role of the individual person in translating the broad-brush strokes of Buddhist precepts and ethics into a tool for living in the world demands the use of human reason. Since this process takes place at the level of the individual, rather than being delegated to a corporate hierarchy, Buddhism must be judged to place a great emphasis on human reason, even if it is not a style of reasoning with which Westerners will feel comfortable.

HUMANISM This chapter seems to have borne out the author’s working hypothesis that world religions have a tendency to contain humanistic threads: that they are unlikely to have been able to cross the boundaries of culture, geography and time unless they contained universalistic, humanistic elements with pan-human appeal. Yet although the religions under study have humanistic elements in common, there should be no pretence that the respective worldviews are identical, or even similar. With this study of Buddhist approaches to the human person, rights, society and ethics we have entered a realm of thought utterly foreign in its fundamentals to that of the entire ethos of both ‘Western’ and monotheistic thought. Yet even in studying these contrasting religions, the result at a less

156 Values and religions fundamental level has proven to be complementary rather than contradictory. Buddhism will never be completely comfortable with Western patterns of thought, but it is open to the application of human reason, and, like all the other religions studied thus far, it has a strong concept of a common humanity. It also has a finely tuned sense of compassion that should be the envy of the other religions. With these attributes, it is well placed to contribute to the human rights discourse.

10 Confucianism: humane rites and elite rights

It is nearly impossible to separate Confucianism from the various East Asian cultures it inhabits and which it helped to form. Any study of this secular religion is further complicated by the fact that in the middle quarters of the twentieth century Confucianism was gutted in its Chinese heartland. The near-destruction of a religion over several generations should, one would think, be enough to render it irrelevant to a study like this. This assessment does not seem warranted, however, even if we discount the efforts of Jiang Zemin and Lee Kuan Yew to draft Confucius back into political service. At the level of high culture and as a formal system of governance Confucianism is indeed dead, but at the level of popular culture, Confucianism has displayed much greater staying power than its persecutors. It is remarkable how easily the resonance of Confucianism can be identified in the familial and social actions of generations of nationalist, communist and post-communist Chinese, who tend to remain locked in Confucian patterns of thought and habit, often despite their conscious intentions. Even in matters of statecraft, the legacy of Confucianism still flourishes just below the surface throughout East Asia. In Vietnam, not only has the politics of the educated Mandarinate been reproduced under the guise of the Leninist bureaucratic state, but centuries-old Vietnamese classics on the art of Confucian statecraft have been re-published and are enjoying a major resurgence.1 Even in the worst barbarities of Mao Zedong’s rule, Maoist political rituals and education replaced only the dogma of Confucianism: it retained the template in which the dogma lived. The Confucian emphasis on personal virtue [de] was retained, but it was aligned according to ‘redness’ and revolutionary purity, rather than to the virtues of the Confucian gentleman.2 And when the concept of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ class replaced that of lineage, one’s class was still determined by the traditional method: patrilineal descent.3 A strong, almost tangible tribute to Confucianism’s perseverance is the fact that China’s modern student-dissidents of the 1980s and 1990s, who grew up decades after Confucianism’s supposed eradication, constructed their dissent according to classical Confucian precepts, and operated substantially according to Confucian expectations of how scholarly dissidents

158 Values and religions should act. This included presenting deferential petitions to the rulers, and holding their worker and merchant allies in contempt.4 Perhaps, it is just as extraordinary that the Communist Party leadership also seems to follow Confucian patterns of action when dealing with these students: receiving students’ petitions graciously, and showing relative leniency towards the scholar-dissidents, but attacking worker-dissidents savagely. On one occasion Jiang Zemin (then Mayor of Shanghai) apologised for police brutality against a student, explaining that police had mistaken the student for a worker.5 A survey of the rest of East Asia elicits a similar picture, though without the extremes found in China. In Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, the formal study and practice of Confucianism has died during the twentieth century, as it variously faced the challenges of modernity, Christianity, capitalism and communism. Yet in all these cases the popular cultural influence of Confucianism is overt and inescapable at all levels of society and governance – though admittedly it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the influence of Confucianism per se and Confucianism’s various accommodations with local cultures. It might be possible to isolate a ‘pure’ Confucianism for study, free of the influence of national cultures, but this would run contrary to the practice of earlier chapters that have considered world religions as dynamic aspects of the cultures in which they are located. Such a purism would also render the current exercise nearly pointless because such a ‘pure Confucianism’ could not have existed anywhere since early in the twentieth century at the latest. It seems more reasonable to continue the practice of the earlier chapters by studying Confucianism in situ, considering it as a cultural dynamic that is contributing to the formation of East Asian conceptions of the human person, and the relationship between the individual person, society and government.

ORIGINS Confucianism notionally began with the teachings of Confucius in the sixth century BC, but Confucius was himself drawing upon traditions, ideals and cosmologies that were much more ancient. He was in fact calling for a revitalisation of already-ancient values as a response to the chaos that had engulfed China in his own day. The cosmology and many of the salient characteristics of Confucianism were already well established in these earlier traditions. Chung-ying Cheng has provided an account of this pre-existing cosmology, tracing how it has led to the notions of patriarchy, order, hierarchy and virtue that are the historical characteristics of Confucianism. Cheng’s account is too long to reproduce here, but essentially he points to ‘the ancient Chinese people’s belief in the consanguinity of Heaven and man’ as providing the metaphysics of Confucian

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6

humanism and patriarchy. The perception of this consanguinity provided the rationale for regarding earthly patriarchal relationships as not just convenient or rational, but as intrinsically ‘right’: a true and completely natural reflection of Heavenly relationships. Family patriarchy was converted into clan patriarchy and finally into state patriarchy, with virtue [de] being the common element between the personal and the public goods. Virtue in a ruler, however, was not primarily a matter of personal moral rightness, but an expression of his conformity with the natural order of Heaven. This does not mean that the ruler owed duty primarily to Heaven, but simply that conformity with the Heavenly reality – demonstrated in the first instance by his adherence to Confucian rites [li] – was the prerequisite for serving his people well. Cheng writes: From a modern moral point of view, we have in the practice of virtue and rites a morality of devotion to the common good based on the universal practice of virtue as exemplified by the ruler. . . . The world of rites is based on a discovery of human relationship and thus of a capacity for human relationship, reflecting an awareness of feeling-directed sociality on the one hand and abilities-based humanity on the other, both of which culminate in Confucius’s moral humanism of virtue.7 Note that Cheng refers to the ‘discovery’ of relationships. This notion of discovery, rather than creation, invention or revelation permeates the Confucian worldview. Relationships, virtue, morality, humaneness and harmony are all heavenly realities waiting to be discovered. Hence the Confucian conscience is not a free, rational entity, as is the liberal or Kantian conscience. Nor is it quite the same as the Catholic conscience: the application of will and reason to the injunctions of natural and divine law; though this is a closer analogy. The Confucian conscience is an emotional pull that steers people towards dealing humanely with fellowmen. Its direction accords with an a priori perception of reality, which stems from the consanguinity of Heaven and man. The role of reason is merely to cultivate awareness of this relationship, rather than to make an autonomous determination of right and wrong. The result, in political terms, has been described as a ‘virtuocracy’8 whereby communally defined personal virtue is a major factor in societal ascription of roles and status, and even in the self-perception of one’s worth. In political terms, it means that the legitimacy of the ruler rests upon the perception of his personal virtue, which is manifest in the virtue of his advisers and in the state of peace and prosperity in the land. Like liberalism, Confucianism has always been deeply suspicious of official power, but unlike liberalism it has disdained reliance upon mere law to circumscribe it, preferring to foster virtue, wisdom and humaneness

160 Values and religions in rulers and advisers.9 It should be noted, however, that the impulse towards a virtuocracy is and has always been in tension with rival ‘Asian values’ such as meritocracy and feodocracy (where selection for advancement is based on an ascriptive status such as lineage, native region, or gender). A centrally important aspect of the account given above is that the consanguinity of Heaven and man provides the essential basis of both Confucian patriarchy (and by implication Confucian visions of social hierarchy) and Confucian humanism – and the two are so intimately bound that it is difficult to separate them. Daniel Kwok explains the conceptual development of this phenomenon: It was the ancestors who created the human species, and while all humans were ‘born equal’, they were ‘equal’ [only] in the sense of being equally human and different from animals. Moreover, only humans could recognize ancestors. Thus ancestors took precedence over nature.10 This cosmology has provided Confucianism with a rich ore of ‘doctrine’ that is intrinsically humanistic and liberating, yet simultaneously hierarchical and oppressive – presenting a fascinating challenge for the significant body of scholars who are trying to arrange a marriage between the human rights discourse and Confucianism.

Classical Confucianism Confucianism dates its origins from the teachings of Confucius in the sixth century BC, but it was only when it was adopted as China’s state ideology some centuries later that it began to impact upon Chinese history. Until this time it was merely one school among many, some of whom – Daoists and arguably Legalists – have survived into the third millennium. Confucianism even gave the appearance of being one of the less serious contenders for cultural hegemony because it appeared to serve neither rulers nor the ruled. Unlike Daoism, it gave no direct spiritual comfort to the faithful, and in contrast to the Legalists it sought to confine the authoritarianism of rulers by urging upon them personal virtue, selfrestraint and care for their charges. Hence both Confucius and Mencius – the two earliest and greatest figures in Confucianism – were both itinerant scholars and teachers with bands of scholarly followers, ignored by commoners and given little more than passing obsequious attention by rulers. The most bitter and persistent enemies of the Confucianists were the Legalists, who wedded a draconian approach to power with techniques of political manipulation to maximise the practical power of the emperor at the expense of the people. It is ironic, therefore, that it was a Legalist emperor, Han Wudi (second century BC), who made Confucianism the

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state ideology, thus transforming it into a pliable tool of regime legitimation. The Han and successive dynasties retained the oppressive essence of Legalism, but justified their regimes by reference to a tamed State Confucianism that treated a subject’s duties to the ruler as a reflection of a son’s duty to his father. Yet even as it served to support dynastic rule, this new ‘official’ Confucianism retained the essence of its original humanism and succeeded in creating a prescriptive expectation that the Emperor and his ministers would be junzi [virtuous, cultured gentlemen], and would bring the country peace, stability and prosperity. These expectations have served to ameliorate the harshest aspects of Chinese autocracy and led dynastic rule to operate fairly humanely, despite the theoretically boundless power of the Emperor. In the process, Confucianism pre-empted by centuries any political role to which Buddhism might have aspired in China. The gradual synthesis of Confucianism and Legalism from the Han dynasty onwards set the pattern of government and much of life for ordinary Chinese for a millennium. Early Confucianism, drawing directly on the teachings of Confucius and Mencius, focused on the role of virtue, learning and culture in producing good men and good government. The Confucian–Legalist synthesis combined Confucius’s and Mencius’s teachings on filial piety with the prescriptions of governance taught by the third great Confucian thinker, Xunzi, who was more concerned with circumscription through rules than either of his predecessors.11 The end-purpose of the new synthesis was to ensure social order, which required both virtue and rules of conduct to promote the virtuous and curb the unvirtuous. One of its more striking features was the lack of clear delineation between the social and the state or the private and the public. In each case, the latter was a conflation of the former, formalised through elaborate ritual. Thus the bonds between ruler and subject were spiritually parallel to those between father and son. This conceptual dependency became a powerful tool in hands of autocrats, who tried to conflate Mencius’ prescription of absolute filial piety into a formula of absolute loyalty to the ruler. Being a state religion held great advantages for Confucianism, but it also meant that its fortunes waxed and waned with those of the polity to which it was wedded. Hence, as the Han dynasty began its slow degeneration early in the first millennium, Confucianism started facing serious rivalry from alternate religions with more overt expressions of spirituality. Daoism rose from relative obscurity to take a prominent part in Chinese cultural life by the third century. With its message of intense individualism and esoteric spirituality, it swept through the Chinese literati and eventually through the populace as they sought to find a harmony with Heaven to replace the social harmony that Confucianism had failed to deliver. Daoism was the first Chinese religion to adopt the now-familiar accoutrements of an organised faith: churches, priests, parishes, monasteries,

162 Values and religions convents and sectarianism. The rise of Buddhism (injected by South Asian traders and missionaries) followed in the wake of Daoism, sometimes even introducing itself as a Daoist sect in the first instance. Buddhism dominated Chinese (and Vietnamese) spiritual life by the fourth century AD (during the relative disorder of the Six Dynasties period), but it was a heavily qualified hegemony. Buddhism did not seek to supplant either the significant political role that Confucianism had managed to retain or the spiritual niche established by Daoism.

Neo-Confucianism By the seventh century even Buddhism’s qualified dominance among the ‘three religions’ had ended as Confucianism’s fortunes rose with the fortunes of the Tang and then the Sung dynasties. Confucianism rather than Buddhism began attracting the best minds and became the subject of newly invigorated scholarly inquiry. This development made possible the evolution of a distinctly new expression of Confucianism towards the end of the first millennium: what is known in the West as Neo-Confucianism. Confucianism became more xenophobic and more overtly identified with being Chinese (which was ironic considering this period presaged the beginning of a Mongol dynasty). Buddhism, which had already been weakened as a cultural force, was actively and officially persecuted, though it eventually reached an accommodation and survived as one wing of China’s syncretic Confucian–Buddhist–Daoist religious tradition. In the new scholarly Confucianism, ethics took on an unprecedented doctrinal rigidity and the existing regime of Confucian social and ethical relationships took on a new dynamic. The five family-based relationships defined by Mencius were stressed anew: ruler over minister/subject; father over son; husband over wife; elder brother over younger brother; and friend and friend. Friendships are the only apparently non-hierarchical relationship in the Confucian order, but in practice friends have tended to model their behaviour on the older brother/younger brother relationship. The political ideal of benevolent paternalism (modelled on the benevolent paternalism of a husband and father) was given renewed life. Finally and most significantly, the role of the ethically upright scholar as the indispensable adviser and minister to the emperor took centre stage in political theory and practice. The examination system was purified into an instrument of Confucian ideology, and made into the prime form of access to government service and social advancement. Thus was born the Chinese system of governance that was to last into the twentieth century, only to be overturned by the Nationalist Revolution of 1911. The examination system was at the heart of the Neo-Confucian revival – which proved to be the catalyst of Confucianism’s leap into other parts of East Asia – and it is worthwhile to consider it a little more deeply. NeoConfucianism turned the examination system into a funnel through which

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the Confucian literati reproduced themselves. Confucianism sought to cultivate awareness of a pre-existing heavenly order so as to reproduce a mythical golden age of social harmony. Because it focused on ‘discovering’ known truths, it was natural that the examinations should operate under a curriculum that was inherently rigid and conformist and that they served to ensure ideological soundness in the next generation of administrators, scholars and government ministers. Put this way, the examinations seem to be a thoroughly conservative phenomenon. Yet this picture ignores the humanistic idealism that lay behind the Neo-Confucian educational regime and the Confucian impulse towards the democratisation of education. If we return to Confucianism’s roots we find that culture and learning have always been at the heart of its concept of virtue and humaneness. Mencius put it thus: ‘Slight is the difference between man and the brutes. The common man loses this distinguishing feature, while the gentleman retains it.’12 There is only one path to being a gentleman, and that is through moral education in the Way [Dao] of Confucius and the classics. Mencius believed that virtue is inherent in a person, but it needs to be identified and cultivated through education, otherwise it is lost and one is little better than a ‘brute’. The contrary strain of Confucian thought – that of Xunzi – arrived at a virtually identical conclusion from contrary premises: man is inherently bad and can only be lifted above the brutes by moral education. Either way, Confucianism contains a deep imperative to make education available regardless of social class; an ideal that was spelt out in the earliest records of the Han dynasty.13 Neo-Confucian scholars took the imperative to democratise education very seriously, though the gulf between the ideal and the reality was spectacular. Zhu Xi (1130–1200), arguably the leading intellectual authority in the Neo-Confucian movement,14 was singular in his emphasis on universal systemic education that would reach out to the most remote village. Zhu’s calls for universal male education were ignored during his lifetime, only to be taken up half-heartedly by Kubilai Khan in the thirteenth century and again by his successors in the early fourteenth century. The latter attempt proved to have a lasting though seriously flawed legacy. Community schools were created in the villages, but despite the best intentions a clear bifurcation emerged: peasant boys attended poorly resourced and poorly staffed village schools when they were not required on the farm, but the sons of the existing literati and property owners attended elite schools all year round.15 The community schools indoctrinated peasants in the basic virtues of filial piety [xiao], obedience, hard work and humaneness and taught the boys to obey the law [ fa] as a xiao ren [mean/small person] should do. The elite, mostly private schools also taught the basic Confucian virtues, but as well as this they prepared boys for the state examinations and taught them to follow the rites [li] as a junzi should do. Under these circumstances most members of the literati/ administrators were drawn from land owning and literati/bureaucrat

164 Values and religions families, and upward social mobility from poor peasant families could be obtained only by great family or clan sacrifice, or through the beneficence of a wealthy patron. The faults of the system are apparent, but criticism needs to be kept in perspective. It was, after all, only thanks to Confucianism that there was any imperative towards democratising education in the first place – a movement that found no serious parallel in the West until the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, it could easily be argued that universal education throughout the West today merely disguises a bifurcation of education (into elite and mass education) similar to that which characterised Neo-Confucian China. China is the epicentre of historical Confucianism, but it is not the sole repository of the tradition. Vietnam was part of China for much of its history, and it became a Confucian polity in its own right when Confucianism was made the state ideology in the fifteenth century. Korea and Japan adopted Confucianism as their ethic of governance in the wake of the Neo-Confucian revival; though neither of them seriously attempted to free themselves of their respective aristocratic and feudal heritages. They preferred to fit the examination system into their existing class structures, rather than seek to emulate the Chinese ideal of a ‘virtuocracy’ open to all. Thus grew a variety of permutations of Confucianism that can be considered to have ‘corrupted’ it or enculturated it according to one’s inclination.

Confucian values Despite the variations at the level of governance, however, and despite parallel variations at the level of popular culture, there was an underlying commonality in the worldviews of these national manifestations of Confucianism: a societal outlook that was heavily hierarchical, patriarchal and family-oriented. This outlook placed great emphasis on personal virtue and showed great respect for scholarship, but also fostered respect for personages (in the Paulian sense of respecting particular persons because of their social position). Both the relational particularity and the underlying humanism of this ethos is demonstrated in the following edict that was promulgated originally in the eleventh century, and was given new prominence in the seventeenth: The father should be righteous. (He can make his family upright.) The elder brother should have brotherly love. (He should be able to care for his younger brother.) The younger brother should be respectful. (He should be able to respect his elder brother.) The son should be filial. (He should be able to serve his parents.) Husband and wife should have a sense of obligation to each other. (In dire poverty they should look after each other, this is to have a sense of obligation; . . . . ) There must be a distinction between man and

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woman. (A man has a wife and woman a husband. The distinction should not be confounded.) Children should study. (They should be able to understand ritual decorum, rightness, integrity, and shame.)16 This document shares with Buddhism an aversion to conceptualising people qua individuals; preferring to see each person as partaking in a set of bilateral relationships. So a person might be a scholar, son, younger brother, father, husband, and neighbour, and he has obligations and entitlements in these capacities, but there is no easy way to think of him as a person without respect to one or more of these roles. The sexism of the relationships is also obvious, and it is just one part of the hierarchical society being reinforced by community and family rituals that become even more important as one progresses through the higher echelons of society and government. The injunction upon children to study for the sake of culture, refinement and virtue is, if anything understated for Neo-Confucianism, but this might be because the document was written for consumption by peasants, rather than the literati. The web of relationships being invoked in this passage has very obvious oppressive and restrictive qualities, yet it must be acknowledged that the active imperatives are nevertheless humanitarian. They encourage basic humanistic virtues that seem to be the common strand of moral impulse of all the religions under study in this volume. The national variations on these themes are considerable within the broader Confucian traditions, even in the central institution of the family, from which all other Confucian relationships derive their legitimacy. One such variation is found in Vietnam, where the Confucian/Chinese patriarchal system has been modified and severely circumscribed by local traditions, so that women have relatively high status and significant social and economic autonomy.17 The Japanese variety is probably the version that has drifted the furthest from its Chinese origins, as can be seen if the rather pragmatic Japanese concept of the family [ie] is set beside the ‘purity’ of the Chinese Confucian family. The latter is ancestor-based and patrilineal. It relies on genetic bloodlines passed from father to son for continuity, and has a strict hierarchy among siblings, whereby the younger brother will always be subordinate to an older brother. Adoption of sons from outside the family is not unknown, but is uncommon and not regarded as fully legitimate. The Japanese ie, on the other hand, is less dependent of bloodlines, and more conducive towards group, rather than family orientation. It is notionally patriarchal, but in fact gives mothers the dominant role in child rearing and in the domestic domain. The Japanese family system freely sidesteps disappointing progeny by the mechanism of adult adoption. Furthermore, it encourages younger sons to strike out on their own and be sufficiently successful to found their own family-line; thus breaking free of their subordination to their older siblings. Much has been written about the social, political and economic

166 Values and religions implications of these differences, so it would be foolish to downplay them. On the other hand, it would be just as foolish to deny the importance of the underlying points of commonality.

ELITE RIGHTS/EARNED RIGHTS Throughout the long history of Confucianism, a consistent set of themes and commensurate tensions have dominated its life. The faults lines of these tensions rest squarely along the dominant themes of our quest for humanistic tendencies and derive both from the contradictions within Confucian cosmology, and from the close and deliberate identification of Confucianism with incumbent regimes. In a short essay such as this it is impossible to conduct a worthwhile survey of such tensions but perhaps by focusing on one central aspect – the inherent elitism of Confucian humanism – we can go to the core of the Confucian ethos. It must be said, almost parenthetically, that elitism has been an integral part of much of the world’s historical humanism, and so it is far from extraordinary to find it in Confucianism. Europe’s ‘Renaissance Man’ knew that he was better than both the commoners and his own wealthy patrons on all counts: intelligence, talent, education, culture, sensitivity, refinement and calling. Except that the Renaissance Man was often not involved in government and administration, the Neo-Confucian scholars of the same period would have found a strong point of identification – though the Confucian scholar would have had trouble grasping the forwardlooking creativity of the Renaissance Man. Nevertheless, the elitism of Confucian humanism is unexceptional in itself. The humanism of Renaissance Europe has, however, been democratised over the centuries in a way that Confucianism was not: the Chinese elite’s eventual reaction to the challenge of Western modernity was to overthrow, rather than reform the Confucian order. The quest to seek an accommodation between Confucianism and democracy and its kindred movements emerged only in response to the ‘Asian values’ debate of the 1990s. For the purposes of this study, the inherent elitism of Confucianism is demonstrated most strongly in the advocacy that presents Confucianism at its democratic ‘best’; i.e., where it is revealed in its most humanistic and humanitarian guise, and where the concept of rights or something like rights seems to be implicit. The advocacy referred to is that which orbits around Wm. Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming.18 Irene Bloom, for instance, highlights Confucius’ advocacy of a common humanity, demonstrated graphically in Analects 17.2; ‘By nature close together; through practice set apart.’19 This statement is doubly significant to the current discourse because in 1950 UNESCO adopted it as the centrepiece of its ‘Statement on Race’. Bloom described its appeal to the UNESCO panel eloquently:

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Just eight characters in Chinese, eight words in English translation, this apparently simple affirmation from more than two millennia ago was evidently chosen because it seemed aptly to express a modern sense of human equality and relatedness – one that allows for both similarity and difference.20

Yet despite the implication of equality and commonality, Bloom takes great pains to argue that this is an accidental reading of modern values into an ancient text. It is true that the verse recognises a ‘common humanity’ and ‘a similarity in moral potential’, but this implies no commitment to equality of treatment. The modern reader tends to assume (as this author did on a first reading) that Confucius in Analects 17.2 regarded the various practices that set people apart as being merely obstacles to recognising the common humanity. In fact, he regarded them as criteria by which one judges the moral development of a person: whether or not he has risen to being fully human.21 Analects 17.2 does not so much contain an incipient call for human rights as for earned, or graded rights. For Confucius, one becomes a fully human person as a function of socialisation. At birth, as we have already seen from our reading of Mencius, we are little more than brutes.22 Doctrinaire liberals will not be the only ones to be aghast at the implications of the concept of grading humanity thus, but it is well to remember that all the other religions under study have suffered from a similar flaw. Liberalism contains very strong notions of acquiring humanity with increasing autonomy and socialisation, and then losing it as autonomy and socialisation wither (hence the modern push for euthanasia). Buddhism’s concept of a graduated humanity is just as overt. Even Christianity and Islam – the two religions under study that most strongly identify the human person with the mere existence of human life – have sometimes succumbed to the temptation to grade people in a way not dissimilar to that of Confucianism. The other religions have overcome their anti-humanist inclinations to varying degrees, and one of them – liberalism – even claims a privileged place as the founder of the human rights discourse. So how seriously do we take the inherent elitism in Confucianism as a potential obstacle to the human rights discourse? It seems that we must take it very seriously, since it goes to the core of Confucian social philosophy. Nevertheless, while not underestimating the task ahead, we should also not discount the effects of economic development, cultural interaction and modern communications. Doctrinaire ‘high’ Confucianism is almost dead, and the popular, ‘low’ Confucianism that remains has proved itself a malleable beast. Already we can see evidence of this in the widespread education of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese women. Although female education was not unknown in Neo-Confucian China, the modern phenomenon of male and female universal education has

168 Values and religions revolutionised – or at least begun to revolutionise – both gender relations and class relations throughout East Asia and the Chinese diaspora. A similar effect is being seen in the development of more generic aspects of personal power. In every Confucian society enjoying economic growth, the locus of power – economic, political and social – is spreading downwards to a newly wealthy class of entrepreneurs and professionals. There is a natural imperative for members of this newly empowered middle class to conceptualise themselves as having moved further up the hierarchy of socially valued people. In China, they are being encouraged to do so by no less than Jiang Zemin, who has invited the new capitalists to join the Communist Party. Even without such formal invitations, people throughout history in all societies have generally increased the scope of their social claims as they have acquired power, but this phenomenon has been particularly strong among the newly wealthy of East Asia.23 This movement did not need to adopt the language of rights but in fact it has, largely because since early last century, the Mandarin character for ‘power’ ( quan) has provided the root of the word for ‘rights’ in Chinese, Japanese [ gon or ken], Korean [gwan] and Vietnamese [quyên].24 The Japanese were the first to develop this usage,25 but the others followed their example so that in all these languages the concept of power, rights, privilege and concession are so closely linked as to be freely interchangeable. This can be seen clearly in the ‘original’ Japanese. Ken is translated literally as ‘authority, power, rights, concession’. Kenri is ‘rights, privilege, title, authority, powers, goodwill, franchise, agency’. Kenrizu(ki) is ‘rights attached’ to something. Ken-eki is ‘rights, interests’. But kenryonku is ‘power, authority, influence’ and kengen is ‘power, authority, jurisdiction’.26 In Chinese, quanli is power and authority and quanshi is influence and authority, but quanyi is rights and interests.27 These semiotics are a double-edged sword. Confucian cultures, if not high Confucianism itself, have no shortage of resources that prompt and encourage the conceptualisation of rights, but it takes a conscious effort to avoid conceiving of such rights as being earned and dependent upon the capacity to exercise power.28 Rights in Confucian cultures tend to defend the strong, not the weak (which upon reflection is reminiscent of the way liberalism defends the moderately strong, but it fails the very weak). Nevertheless, the fact that Confucian cultures are open to the concept of rights at all gives grounds for hope. The history of the rights discourse in the West began with the conception of elite rights (feudal barons facing King John), which was gradually broadened (for instance to Englishmen in the wake of the English Revolution) and was opened eventually to women, colonial subjects, and so forth. Eventually, the UNsponsored concept of the three generations of human rights emerged; an approach that is still being finessed today. There is no inevitability that similar developments will take place in Confucianism, but it seems

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likely that economic, social and cross-cultural pressures will bring about a similar graduated development. The end result – if there can be such a thing in the context of a continually evolving culture – may not be completely compatible with liberal concepts of human rights. Then again, none of the religions under study conceive of human rights in quite the same way as each other; nor can we even assume that the liberal concept of human rights will remain stable. On the other hand, although the end result may bear little resemblance to classical ‘high’ Confucianism, it is still likely to retain the inarticulate essence that distinguishes Confucian societies from those whose genealogy springs from Christianity, Islam or Buddhism.

Collectivism Elitism is but one of several hurdles that the human rights discourse faces in Confucianism. The other major obstacle is collectivism, whereby the group – whether family, clan, region, nation, ie, keiretsu, or chaebol – is perceived to be the natural unit of rights discourse. Hence, one of the common Chinese terms for human rights, for instance, is intrinsically collectivist: minquan [people’s power/rights].29 China was never home to a ‘social contract’ myth, but eulogises an era of harmony with Heaven through the rule of the good, powerful and wise Sage Kings, and so it has a much higher regard for right thinking and unity of thought than for freedom of choice. It was natural, therefore, that when the May Fourth activists conceived of democracy, they adopted populist organicist models akin to Rousseau’s ‘general will’ and Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, and paid almost no attention to checks and balances to limit the power of democratic government.30 The Chinese version of Confucian collectivism is closely associated with the elitism discussed earlier. The link is found in the relationship between the concept of the masses [min] and that of the cultivated person [ren]. The masses are conceived as an amorphous pool of potential, which Confucius conceived as containing the ‘raw stuff’ [zhi] from which ren can emerge under the example and tutelage of junzi.31 In Confucian thinking, the prime purpose of the masses is to be available to have this potential fostered, so that they can achieve a higher level of refinement and humanity. Most will remain small people [xiao ren] and achieve no more than obeying laws [ fa], but a few in every generation will reach beyond this to become junzi. The collectivist impulse is even stronger in Japanese Confucianism than in the original Chinese version, since the Japanese psyche seems to have combined the collectivism of Chinese Confucianism with a culture of emotional dependency [amae] that is substantially absent in Chinese culture.32 On the other hand, Korean Confucianism tends to follow the more traditional example of Chinese Confucianism: Koreans root their collectivism primarily in hierarchy, personalism and the model

170 Values and religions of village communalism, with dependence playing a lesser, but still significant role.33 It would be a mistake however, to dismiss the collectivist impulses of Confucianism as wholly negative. It is true that they are easily twisted into ideological justifications of authoritarianism and autocracy, but they also enmesh an unselfish, humanistic social consciousness deeply into Confucian cultures. The Western discourse on rights has always played down the social aspect of human nature to some extent, and at century’s beginning self-centred social atomism has almost completely captured the mainstream agenda. Perhaps, it is time for the West to learn something from Confucianism’s stronger consciousness of man’s social nature. How to inject sociality into the human rights discourse without losing the essence of either is a question that will be considered in Chapter 12.

HUMANISM There is plenty of scope for further study of both elitism and collectivism in historical Confucianism, but within the constraints of this book it may be more profitable to impose the discipline of consistency, and run the author’s personal conceptual tests for indicators of a humanistic morality. At the risk of being overly repetitive, Chapter 6 suggested that indicators of the subsistence of a humanistic morality in a worldview, religion or belief system are likely to include: • • • • • •

a universalistic conception of humanity; traces of individualism and respect for each person qua person; protection of the vulnerable members of society; special concern for the well-being and upbringing of children; concern for the common good; and openness to the application of reason.

In this instance, it may be useful to dispose of the last two items directly, since we have already seen that Confucianism has a very strong sense of the importance of the common good and it is, by its secular and social nature, explicitly rational in character. The first four indicators, however, require more detailed consideration. On a superficial reading, it might be expected that Confucianism does not fare well on the first two criteria. After all, a large proportion of this chapter has been devoted to arguing that Confucianism regards full humanity as something to be acquired through refinement and education. Those who are not part of this refined elite are lesser humans. We have also seen that the cultural legacy of Confucianism has left the cultures under its sway poorly equipped even to express individualism, which has been swamped by collectivist tendencies. Yet Confucianism would be exceptional among the world religions

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under study if the truth was not more complicated than this picture suggests; if it was not host to a tension between conflicting impulses that ameliorated the elitism and collectivism. It is also counter-intuitive to believe that the populations of East Asia down the millennia have embraced a religion that contained no universalistic or individualistic impulses at all. In fact, the situation is indeed complex, and the peoples of East Asia are not so radically different to the rest of humanity: the elitism and collectivism in Confucianism is intertwined with a generous, humanistic outlook. Yang Baoyun observes that humanity is the core category of Confucian thought, and that two of the most basic Confucian propositions are the injunction to ‘be benevolent to others’ and the statement that to ‘master oneself and return to propriety is human’.34 The beneficiary of this paternalistic benevolence is the whole of humanity without reference to race, cultural differences or gender.35 The elitism and paternalism is clearly present, and the path to full humanity is prescribed in the rites (through which one achieves propriety), but there can be no doubt that the end result is a generous, benevolent universalism. Yang moves on to cite a passage in Confucius’s Analects: ‘A certain stable was burned down. On returning from court, Confucius asked: Anyone hurt? He did not ask about the horses.’ He could just as easily have cited Mencius’s story of the child about to fall in the well: Now if anyone were suddenly to see a child about to fall into a well, his mind would always be filled with alarm, distress, pity and compassion. That he would react accordingly is not because he would use the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the child’s parents, nor because he would seek commendation from neighbours and friends, nor because he would hate the adverse reputation.36 One is reminded of Raimond Gaita’s argument that universal moral responses based on our common humanity exist and are important, even in a postmodern world. He cited the universal horror at the evil of a baby slasher;37 Mencius cites the universal concern for the innocent child about to fall to death. The fundamental point is the universalistic humanism invoked by each. Mencius raised the high water mark in Confucian humanism by heightening the traditional expectations of humaneness in leaders. None of this means that traditional Confucianism imbues xiao ren with rights, of course, but even xiao ren can expect to be the beneficiaries of others’ – and particularly their rulers’ – benevolence and virtue. It is only a small conceptual step to transform such expectations into claims and demands, even if the word ‘rights’ is not used. If the universalism in Confucianism is easily discerned what of individualism? It would certainly be an exaggeration to say that individualism is strong in Confucianism, but if we follow the precedent set in the chapter

172 Values and religions on Islam, and reduce our expectations to finding personal responsibility rather than active individualism or autonomy, then the search promises to be more fruitful. The junzi represents the ideal of the responsible person, and in his role as the disinterested, honourable imperial adviser, he has traditionally been one of the more potent Confucian antidotes to authoritarianism. The story is told in the Ming History of how the fourteenth century emperor Ming Taizu was angered to discover Mencius’s hostility to unworthy emperors. As if to justify Mencius’s concern he ordered the removal of his spirit tablet from the temple and threatened death to any minister who complained. When the Minister for Justice, Qian Tang, chastised Taizu for his actions, he brought his own coffin into the court, declaring ‘To die for the sake of Mencius would be a glorious death.’38 Qian Tang was prepared to pay the ultimate price for his convictions. He was indeed a worthy junzi. Personal responsibility therefore plays a central role in Confucian thought, though even this observation is qualified by the elitist assumption that the degree of personal responsibility is commensurate with one’s completeness as a person – with one’s education and refinement.

The Vulnerable Considering Confucianism’s inherent bias towards the strong, it should not be surprising that its historical record on protecting the vulnerable – women, children, sick and poor – is rather weak. Classical Confucianism certainly demanded that masses would be cared for as masses [min], but there was little concern for individual vulnerable people per se. The situation is particularly delicate in dealing with gender issues because high Confucianism is intrinsically patriarchal. Women are almost invisible in the Analects, though Mencius went out of his way to uphold their dignity against male overbearance. The plight of women in Confucian societies has historically been that of a second or third class citizen and they have suffered as uneducated concubines, child brides, and foot-bound trophies. Only a couple of generations ago Taiwanese child brides-to-be were passed into the household of their future husbands to work as servants for the rest of their lives; and Japanese women still have trouble being taken seriously outside their domestic environment. Yet despite the conceptual difficulty of reconciling patriarchy and filial piety [xiao] with gender equality, throughout the whole of the twentieth century Confucian cultures were been gradually, and often radically changing their attitudes to women. Hence at the beginning of the new millennium, women are legal equals or near-equals in all East Asian societies, with the exceptions most likely to occur in matters of marriage and divorce. Despite continuing to be enmeshed in patriarchal family and social relationships, they tend to be more educated and less dependent than were their mothers, let alone their grandmothers. In the developed countries of East Asia (and in

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Singapore), most young women have used modern contraceptive methods and easy access to abortion to enjoy sexual freedom before marriage without challenging society’s demand for strong stable, traditional families in a way that has not happened in the West.39 It is conceivable that such trends could be reversed, but it is difficult to see how. All the signs suggest that the ‘liberation’ of women at the grassroots level will continue throughout Confucian societies. A first born son, on the other hand, has traditionally enjoyed immense status, but this did not extend to his sisters or younger brothers who have been left in a rights-vacuum. Although children feature strongly in Confucian discourse as the bestowers of filial piety and the beneficiaries of education, there is little talk of infants or of children as the recipients of their parents’ love, sustenance or protection. This lack of emphasis on the special needs of children is a point of commonality between Confucianism and Buddhism. This mutual reinforcement of children’s ‘invisibility’ may have contributed to the acceptance of infanticide and more recently abortion in China and Japan. Yet it would not be fair to blame either religion per se for such developments. Buddhism can cite many sources to validate its claim to teach natural if not extraordinary respect for children, and Mencius’ parable about the child who nearly fell into the well suggests that Confucianism’s apparent indifference to children disguises a similar natural concern. Yet it cannot be denied that both in theory and in practice, Confucianism fails to show special concern for the wellbeing and upbringing of children qua children, even though it treats first-born sons as ‘little gods’ and it places great emphasis on education.

. . . and ‘Asian values’ It seems that despite many superficial and some deep-set signs to the contrary, Confucianism does not present an insuperable object in our search for universalistic humanistic values in ‘Asian values’. It should be admitted, however, that this has been achieved only by elevating ‘low Confucianism’ to a level of legitimacy that no Confucian scholar would have tolerated. Like each of the other religions under study, Confucianism comes to the conceptual round table of ‘Asian values’ with its own idiosyncratic ethical and metaphysical conceptions. Some of these are likely to cause difficulty in a cross-cultural dialogue on rights and democracy, but none of them is so overwhelming that one can disregard the religion as intrinsically anti-humanistic or evil. It is certainly true that Confucianism has given a disconcerting level of solace and ideological support to autocracy over the millennia, but it has also played a crucial and unreplaceable role in ameliorating and humanising autocracy. At this stage of its life, Confucianism has a choice between adapting itself to the changes being forced from below and outside, or allowing itself to be whittled away as future generations succumb to the influence of rival

174 Values and religions religions and outlooks. Even this assessment assumes that there still exist discrete bodies of Confucian scholars with enough standing and cohesion to reinterpret the teachings, and that their deliberations will actually affect the lives of ordinary people. This is a doubtful proposition, but the possibility should not be dismissed out of hand. The group around Wm. Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming clearly aspires to such a role. If there eventually proves to be no body of scholars capable of such decisive intervention, then ‘low Confucianism’ can be regarded as the last legitimate vestige of the Confucian tradition. Without an institutional or authoritative anchor, it will probably prove to be infinitely flexible, and just bleed away from meaningful ethical and social discourse. Alas, this seems to the most likely scenario.

Part III

Cultural politics and Asian values

11 ‘Asian values’ revisited

I dream that in the twenty-first century, East Asia will develop into a world-class economy, not just in size but in quality, and will achieve parity with the West. . . . My second dream is that in the twenty-first century, East Asia will enjoy a cultural renaissance, and we will become not just a consumer but also a producer, and exporter of cultural products to the world. My third dream is . . . that in the twenty-first century, East Asia will evolve its own authentic models of democracy and good governance. Finally, my fourth dream . . . is that following a historic reconciliation between Japan and China, that the countries of East Asia will get together, closer together, and begin to develop . . . as a community of nations, united by a common vision of our future and a common sense of our past. (Prof. Tommy Koh, Singapore’s Ambassador-at-Large, to an international conference on Asian identities, 21 February 2000)1

At the time of writing, explicit talk of ‘Asian values’ has taken on an ethereal quality. Most of the issues and impulses that come under its broad umbrella are still alive, as Tommy Koh makes clear in the passage cited above, but no one talks about ‘Asian values’ per se. Lee Kuan Yew has walked away from the term. Dr Mahathir puts his arguments without using the term. Suharto is a disgraced failure. Taiwan and South Korea are democracies. Even Myanmar – one of the main authoritarian beneficiaries of the conceptual and diplomatic defence provided by ‘Asian values’ – has started talking to its opposition parties and releasing detainees in an effort to normalise relations with the European Union. The manipulation of ‘Asian values’ as an explicit defence of authoritarianism has substantially ended, but the impulse that underpinned the ‘Asian values’ reaction remains and is waiting to be of service the next time Pacific Asian leaders feel a surge of stridency – whether such stridency originates from confidence or insecurity. For this reason alone, the ‘Tepid War’ over ‘Asian values’ is likely to continue to beset international relations, human security issues and the domestic and social politics of Pacific Asian countries. Even aside from manipulative politics, however, there are aspects of ‘Asian values’ that are likely to demand ongoing

178 Cultural politics and Asian values attention. With or without a Lee Kuan Yew or a Dr Mahathir, Asian countries, cultures and religions will continue to meet modernity, and will engage it in a dialogue that will affect all parties. Economic changes will prompt further reflexion about the role and nature of local cultures. Democracies will thrive, survive or be overwhelmed by the challenges of governance. Buddhist and Muslim-dominated nation-states in particular will search for ways to accommodate conflicting demands of the secular and the sacred. The outcomes of these adventures are unknown, but there can be little doubt that the journeys themselves will take place, and that the issues canvassed in Parts I and II of this book will continue to live through the fact of change and challenge. With this in mind, there may be some profit in appraising the current state of the overt ‘Asian values’ agenda, item by item.

DEMOCRACY By far the most politically significant of the ‘Asian values’ arguments are those that impinge upon questions of human rights, democracy and authoritarianism. In their most blatant forms, these arguments reject human rights and democracy per se as Western cultural impositions foreign to Asian cultures, though this argument is so barren that not even the Chinese government continues to peddle it. Even the softer arguments associated with these issues have taken a back seat for the moment: that there are distinctly and legitimately ‘Asian’ approaches to human rights and democracy that reflect Asians’ cultural preferences for strong leadership, consensus and deference. The so-called ‘third wave of democracy’ that has swept through Pacific Asia in the 1980s and 1990s discredited the application of this argument to democracy. South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand have all shared in the democratic moment. Even China and Vietnam have encouraged a semblance of democracy at village level, and Cambodia at least makes a half-hearted attempt to pretend to be democratic. Democracy has established itself as a legitimate feature of the Asian landscape, but it is far from clear that it is a successful form of governance in Asia. Many of the region’s local cultures operate on assumptions that militate against democracy being an outstandingly successful form of governance in Pacific Asia. This is despite the fact that all of the world religions of the region have humanistic, democratic impulses that could, in the right circumstances, be cultivated into fully consultative forms of governance. The myth of the paramount leader who rules by the force of his personal power is either overtly or latently present throughout the region, as is the communalist reflex. Unitary conceptions of personal power and the almost universal Pacific Asian emphasis on personalist leadership and loyalty detract from the effectiveness of democratic

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governance. Partly because of these features, there has emerged a tendency to ignore, by-pass, or even defy institutional procedures and rules. This can be seen in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. It seems that Thailand, followed by Taiwan, are the new democracies whose culturally based conceptions of power pose the least formidable impediments to the development of good democratic governance (as opposed to the mere survival of democratic forms). Both have a cultural ‘advantage’ that they share with the Japanese: a separation of the traditional source of power (Thai monarch or Chinese emperor) from real power. Like Japan, Thailand has retained a titular, non-governing monarch in whom its people can place harmless, affectionate, blind loyalty without it impeding the processes of governance or democracy. This has left the Thai king free to transcend governance and inject ethical considerations into politics at critical junctures. Political leaders – whether civilian or military; elected or self-imposed – are not held in awe in either country. No one expects them to be an older brother, father, pseudo-divine ruler, or a latter-day Confucian emperor, so popular expectations are lower and politics is reduced to an area of compromise, deals and mundane governance – a perception that suits democracy on the ground. Taiwan has arrived at a similar result by a very different path. The obvious permanency of the PRC and the increasing ambiguity over Taiwan’s national status vis-à-vis China has stripped Taiwan of its imperial illusions. Even its status as a legitimate nation-state has been left in doubt. This has arguably bolstered the propensity of Mao’s successors to see themselves as latter day emperors, but in Taiwan it has mitigated any tendency to see its recent leaders as successors of emperors, thus keeping expectations of government in modest proportions. Perhaps, Indonesia’s greatest hope for effective and reasonably democratic government might be that President Megawati establishes a new pattern of governance that reduces the expectations and power that Indonesians place in their president. Although one can never be certain about an untested leader, at the time of writing it seems unlikely that Megawati will be trying to project an image of herself as a president who is able to rule by personal charisma or by fiat. She may even be reduced to a figurehead or a power broker who exercises little real power. If, one way or the other, her rule results in a reduction in the expectations that Indonesians place in their president, or if effective power shifts to a democratic parliamentary coalition that delivers good government, this could be a crucial advance in Indonesia’s democratic development. Alternative (and more likely) scenarios would see real power being reconcentrated in the presidency, dissipated through debilitating factionalism or usurped by non-democratic forces. On the other hand, in places where executive power and symbolic power are focused in the same person not even the cultural imperative for consensus has produced the politics of compromise that is an essential component of the democratic spirit. Instead, it has given birth to the

180 Cultural politics and Asian values twin villains of Asian politics: a tendency towards factionalism where mandates are split; a tendency towards authoritarianism where mandates are strong. Thus South Korean and Indonesian governance tends to swing between impotent weakness and ruthless strength, both of which are vulnerable to complete democratic failure. Seen in this light, democracy’s third wave really does risk being dashed against the rocks of Asian values. If and when this happens it will leave both Asians and outsiders with a dilemma familiar to students of the ‘Asian values’ debate of the 1990s: is democracy more important than good governance? Given a choice between bad democracy and bad governance, many Asians (and probably many in the West too) are likely to choose bad democracy. Of course some parts of Asia have the worst of both worlds: bad (or no) democracy and bad governance. This study has not focused on these countries, since they intersect only marginally with the active ‘Asian values’ and human rights discourses, but it is well to remember that they exist. A parallel tension exists in the natural tension between democracy and rule of law. As recently as July 2001, this author listened to a conference paper written by an academic from Beijing University, that argued against pressuring China to democratise on the basis that it is both more desirable and more feasible for China to introduce effective rule of law than democracy.2 This argument resumes, almost without missing a beat, the essence of the ‘liberalism versus democracy’ arguments of the 1990s, and which were a direct product of the ‘Asian values’ debate.3 Furthermore, authoritarian states – present or future – are still able to fall back on the diplomatic victories achieved at the height of the ‘Asian values’ push in the first half of the 1990s. Let us not forget that according to the Vienna Declaration on Human Rights, democracy does not necessarily have anything to do with elections or accountability. It is merely an undefined something that is ‘based on the freely expressed will of the people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems and their full participation in all aspects of their lives’ (Article 8).4 In any case, the overnight rehabilitation of Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf – an unrepentant usurper of democracy – in the wake of the 11 September terrorist attacks demonstrated to every undemocratic movement and regime in the world that democracy is a convertible currency in the market for Western goodwill. Strategic concerns can still reduce Western concern for democracy to the margins, just as it did during the Cold War.

HUMAN RIGHTS In a similar vein, the political argument that there are distinctly and legitimately ‘Asian’ approaches to human rights has been marginalised for the moment. Pacific Asia is now home to a plethora of human rights

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commissions, watchdogs, and NGOs – many with links to governments. In the ASEAN countries alone, official human rights commissions now operate in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, while plans for such a body are proceeding in Thailand.5 Further north, there is no shortage of human rights NGOs in the democracies of East Asia. It even emerged in the early 1990s that the Chinese government was sponsoring its own human rights ‘NGO’ and that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences had established a Human Rights Research Unit.6 No one should harbour the illusion that all of these institutionalised human rights bodies can be taken at face value. The Indonesian and Malaysian human rights commissions and the ‘China Society for Human Rights Studies’ were all initiated by regimes that have routinely abused human rights. Yet even if these initiatives are duplicitous, the very fact that these countries have institutionalised human rights in their national agendas legitimises the concept of human rights per se. It was for the sake of this strategic advance that other NGOs decided to accept the credentials of the ‘China Society for Human Rights Studies’ in Vienna in 1993.7 Although China and its allies endorsed the Vienna Declaration on Human Rights and its declaration that ‘all human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated’, the ‘Asian values’ victories in Vienna still stand. These include the assertions that ‘the significance of national and regional particularities and various historical, cultural and religious backgrounds must be borne in mind’ and that protecting human rights is primarily the duty of states, rather than international bodies (Article 5). These arguments and others are ready to be resurrected at any time. They will undoubtedly be used cynically to justify oppression, but if the current study has established anything, it is that they will also find some resonance among the constituencies of Pacific Asia. Islamic, Buddhist and Confucian worldviews each have fundamental difficulties in establishing an interface with the liberal and Christian human rights agendas. As we have seen, Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism all make it difficult even to express the term ‘human rights’ without distorting the English-language meaning of ‘human’ or ‘rights’ or both. This is despite the fact that each religion contains countervailing humanistic impulses that should encourage the protection of human rights in practice, even if the mother religion has difficulty conceptualising them. At the time of writing the appeal of such arguments is at a low-water mark, largely because large sections of Pacific Asia are enjoying a democratic moment, and the West’s missionary enthusiasm for human rights and democracy has waned considerably, thus easing pressure on the oppressive governments of Asia. Beijing’s successful bid for the 2008 Olympic Games and China’s admission to the WTO are the most visible indicators of the latter development. Even before the September 2001 terrorist attacks, both the Bush administration and the European Union were displaying new levels of ‘understanding’ towards authoritarian and

182 Cultural politics and Asian values Leninist regimes that could be labelled either ‘positive engagement’ or ‘profitable engagement’ according to one’s level of cynicism. Since the attacks, the Bush administration has actively courted Beijing for strategic reasons, and human rights concerns have been marginalised further. There is, however, no reason to believe that these factors will be constants. Leadership from a more rights-conscious American administration, or one or two strategic changes of government personnel in Europe could change the scenario radically, as could, for instance, a new televised Tiananmen Square-style outrage – conceivably against Falun Gong – in the lead up to the 2008 Olympic Games. If any of these possibilities eventuate, we can expect to see the ‘Asian values’ human rights dialogue of the 1990s pick-up where it left off.

SOCIAL CONSERVATISM Social conservatism is one of the more deep set of the ‘Asian values’ uncovered in this study. It extends its hold far beyond the political conservatives who championed the overt ‘Asian values’ discourse. Social conservatism reaches deep into the ranks of people who appear to the Western eye to be social and political innovators: sometimes taking the form of ethical conservatism; often as concern for strong, cohesive families. It is well to remember that it is not just Lee Kuan Yew and Dr Mahathir who champion strong families, but also the secular feminists of Singapore, the Muslim feminists of Malaysia and the Buddhist feminists of Thailand. Furthermore, despite decades of Westernisation, modernisation, widespread promiscuity, and the ready availability of contraceptives and abortion, even Japanese society remains steadfast in the value it places on family cohesion and socially ascribed gender roles. But despite the breadth of the appeal of social conservatism, it seems unlikely that Asian societies can do little more than fight a rear-guard action against the ethical challenges and the social atomism that seem to be the inevitable companions of capitalism and modernity. Rates of divorce and births outside marriage are the litmus tests of family cohesion.8 Generalisations on these matters are difficult to sustain across the whole of Pacific Asia, but a few simple observations might be permitted. On the matter of births outside marriage, most Pacific Asian societies are very conservative, but only thanks to the widespread acceptance of contraceptives and abortion. A study of divorce rates also brings little comfort to the long-term prospects of social conservatism. Although low by Western standards, divorce rates are nevertheless creeping up wherever economic development is taking place: in Thailand, Malaysia, China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.9 Secondary manifestations of decadence that according to the mythology of ‘Asian values’ should be associated exclusively with the West are also

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increasing throughout Pacific Asia. This includes drug use, abandoned children10 and prostitution. Perhaps, the most significant difference between Pacific Asia and the West on these matters – apart from the difference in the rates of these phenomenon – is the way power is gendered in each set of societies. In the various Confucian and Islamic cultures, women are almost universally restricted to the more passive roles in gender relations. Where polygamy is an issue, it is always a question of polygyny, not polyandry. When divorce is an issue it is usually a question of whether women are to be treated as well as men, and whether a woman (and children) will be protected. Concubinage is for wealthy men and poor women, not wealthy women and poor men. Marriage laws and customs usually (though not always) preserve traditional male power. In Taiwan, for instance, a husband has unfettered ‘management rights’ over his wife’s property during marriage and until a formal divorce settlement is reached.11 Interestingly this patriarchal gendering of power is much less pronounced in Buddhist Southeast Asia than elsewhere, despite Buddhism’s notional bias against women – possibly because of the countervailing influence of indigenous cultures that have higher overt respect for women.12 Social conservatism, particularly in family and gender matters, is likely to continue to play an active role in political discourse in Pacific Asia – and it could even intensify into populist conservative reaction to ‘decadence’ as has happened in most Western countries. It will, however, be appealing to diminishing constituencies in increasingly polarised societies. The difficulty for social conservatives operating in a changing society is that the growth of the phenomena they fear creates an ever-broadening constituency that can only justify itself by rejecting social conservatism: not just the divorcees etc., but often their children, relatives and friends. Theoretically, a person can differentiate between one’s affection for a person and one’s endorsement of that person’s lifestyle, but in practice this is difficult and uncommon, so that personal relations usually affect beliefs and values. The future of social conservatism may well prove to be the most decisive indicator of the viability of any sort of identifiable ‘Asian values’ discourse – not just on matters related to the family, but also on the whole range of fronts on which Asian societies are confronting modernity. If social atomism continues its slow creep into the sinews of Asian societies, it will make the highly individualistic, almost asocial liberal vision of human rights and human relations seem so much more natural.

DEVELOPMENTALISM AND STRONG STATE SOVEREIGNTY The debates over democracy and human rights tend in practice to be identified with the ancillary issues of developmentalism and strong assertions

184 Cultural politics and Asian values of state sovereignty. Neither of these is peculiar to Asia, but we will consider them briefly because they have been constant features of the ‘Asian values’ discourse. The strong, developmental state emphasising economic development ahead of democracy and human rights has been discredited by the spectacular and drawn out fall of the Suharto regime, but it would be foolish to think it has disappeared. Malaysia, Singapore and China remain essentially developmentalist in their approaches, even though there is a wide variation between their political and economic praxis. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar will undoubtedly resort to developmentalist arguments if and when they ever manage to achieve some serious economic development. Furthermore, the conceptual tenets of developmentalism have been given a strategic niche in the Vienna Declaration on Human Rights, which states that ‘the right to development [is] a universal and inalienable right and an integral part of fundamental human rights’, though the force of this declaration is offset by the proviso that ‘lack of development may not be invoked to justify the abridgement of internationally recognized human rights’. Whereas developmentalism is lying dormant for the moment, but seems likely to make a re-entry to international affairs some time in the future, the exaggerated claims of state sovereignty associated with the ‘Asian values’ debate are not even lying dormant. This was made evident on 16 July 2001 when Russia and China signed a treaty of ‘friendship and cooperation’ that unreservedly rejected all the post-Cold War challenges to national sovereignty that have emanated from the international human rights regime. The pact commits Russia and China to ‘uphold the strict observance of generally recognised principles and norms of international law against any actions aimed at exerting pressure or interfering under any pretext with the internal affairs of sovereign states’.13

STATISM VS. GLOBALISATION The battle between statist economic development and globalisation is also far from resolved. The ongoing stagnation of the Japanese economy and the rude awakening of the 1997–8 financial crisis have shaken faith in both phenomena. Singapore and other East Asian economies are desperately trying to at least give the appearance of freeing up their economies from overbearing government control without undermining the essentials of successful economic structures. On the other hand, the WTO and the IMF are fighting highly public rearguard actions to retain their legitimacy in the face of political pressure in both the developed and the developing world. Waldon Bello believes that domestic political pressure will force a partial victory for the forces of statism. He argues that Asian states will be forced to reassert themselves as

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strong, activist governments with considerable power over markets, production and distribution. Efficiency . . . will be consciously subordinated to the maintenance of social cohesion, or, in the case of more progressive regimes, the achievement of social equity.14 Just as significant is his assessment of the time frame over which he sees these tensions being played out: 10 to 15 years (from the year 2000). Even if Bello is correct only about the timeframe – and he is one of the more astute economists in the ‘North–South’ dialogue – then even these most vulnerable and apparently archaic aspects of the ‘Asian values’ discourse are unlikely to subside from public view in the near future.

EDUCATION AND THRIFT Until the financial crash of 1997–8 the economic benefit of ‘Asian values’ was an article of faith in many circles. ‘Confucian’ East Asia celebrated its profitable emphasis on education and thrift, and most of Southeast Asia tried to copy – as did many in the West. Other Asian ‘ways of doing business’ were also given a discreet wink, if not overt approval: guanxi, cronyism, the politics of patronage, rent seeking. In fact, East Asia’s economic success was the primary basis for its self-confidence in confronting many of the West’s sacred cows, especially its emphasis on human rights and liberal democracy. Alas, how the mighty have fallen. The entire latter group of ‘Asian characteristics’ is now condemned universally and vociferously, while the former pair of ‘Asian values’ – education and thrift – are regarded with suspicion. Apparently, excessive thrift not only depresses consumption but also distorts markets. This criticism is aimed particularly at the state-directed variety of thrift that has provided so much domestic capital for Japan and Singapore during their early years of industrialisation. And education? Well, that is still acknowledged as an ingredient in economic development, but the style of education in East Asia – high pressure, streamed, and with an emphasis on rote learning and maths – is facing a severe credibility test because it is thought to place excessive pressure on children,15 and quash creativity. Edward Chen, Vice-Chancellor of Lingnan College, Hong Kong, put it thus during the currency crisis: Nations in Southeast Asia . . . need to strike a balance between the technical education which has been traditionally given them in the past, and the more Western-style liberal education which has helped form many innovative and creative minds.16 Singapore, for one, is trying to correct this perceived imbalance, but is finding that old habits (one could easily say ‘old values’) are not so easily changed.

186 Cultural politics and Asian values Yet for all of the problems associated with East Asian habits of thrift and education, it will be surprising if these financial and human resource strategies do not persist, even if it is in moderated form. South Korea, for instance, has shown no inclination to move away from traditional teaching methods or curricula, despite public and professional disquiet over its shortcomings.17 And just to make life interesting, the new head of the WTO (Thai Deputy Prime Minister Supachai Panitchpakdi) believes ‘Asian values’ have been ‘a net gain for Asia’ because they underpinned the region’s high-level of thrift and domestic savings. He is convinced that ‘Asian values’ are here to stay and that they will survive the challenges of globalisation.18 It will be surprising if the cycle of economic and educational fashion does not shift again at some stage and rehabilitate East Asian approaches, at least to some extent. East Asia may not have the balance perfect, but no one else does either.

SPECIAL PLACE OF CHINA Regard for the special place of China is not generally considered an ‘Asian value’, and indeed, it was not recognised as a plank of the ‘Asian values’ debate in the opening chapter of this book. Yet it will always remain a distinguishing feature of life, economics and politics in East and Southeast Asia. No matter what developments take place in the United States or Europe, Pacific Asia will always have to live with China as a potentially overbearing neighbour and – at least for as long as it chooses to engage the world economy – as an overwhelming rival and/or partner in trade and investment.19 Japan needs to settle itself into a niche as either China’s younger brother or her older brother. Taiwan will be vulnerable to Chinese jealousy for as long as it is a separate polity. Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Thailand are near-neighbours of China and have always made China’s likely reaction a prime basis for its foreign policy: either accommodating it, or trying to hem it in. Even when we move further afield to the states that are geographically peripheral to the Middle Kingdom, little changes. In the diplomatic struggle over Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations in the 1980s, Malaysia and Indonesia were the critical links for precisely this reason. According to Lee Kuan Yew’s account, they feared that any ASEAN opposition to the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia would allow China to increase its influence in Southeast Asia, and hence were initially reluctant to allow ASEAN to oppose the recognition of Vietnam’s puppet regime.20 Nothing short of the break-up of China will change these realities, and even then the disintegration and its consequences would be the major defining factors for both East and Southeast Asia. The realities of the ‘Asian values’ discourse are not as permanent as the reality of China, but for the medium to long-term they will be nearly

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as difficult to ignore. Their implications extend to urgent questions affecting governance, human security and international relations, but for which there are no simple answers. A single volume such as this can only convey glimpses of most of the issues involved – though it is the author’s hope that they are nevertheless insightful and helpful to those with direct, rather than merely academic interests in these matters. Yet perhaps on one precise, but central question, a single volume can give more than a glimpse, and make a substantial contribution to cross-cultural civility. For this volume that question must be about human rights, which is the subject of the concluding chapter.

12 Human rights revisited

When approaching the question of Asian values and human rights, it is tempting to ask how the humanistic impulses of Asia’s Confucian, Buddhist and Islamic cultures be converted into ‘proper’ human rights. Such an approach is natural to most Westerners and to many Asians, but it would reflect a conceit that Chapters 2, 5 and 6 of this book has striven to expose and discredit: that the conceptions of human rights that happen to be hegemonic at the moment are sacrosanct. These conceptions are fundamentally secular and based on principles of individualism that tend towards social atomism. Not only is the conception problematic, but the most common form of expressing rights in the West (and on the international stage) is also culturally specific: a dogmatic, declaratory approach reminiscent of the Ten Commandments. Ever since the English Bill of Rights was proclaimed in 1689, lists and declarations have punctuated the Western rights discourse. Freedom of expression; the right to life; the right to bear arms; the right to privacy: freedoms have been defined in a series of dogmatic proclamations, which are then trumpeted as if the mere definition is the source of authoritative ‘truth’. This tendency is completely understandable, because even apart from the cultural resonance, human rights abusers are more effectively challenged by ringing and confident declarations than by academic treatises. Such tactics do not, however, do very much to foster intelligent conversation, let alone cross-cultural discourse. Joseph Chan has identified such approaches – which he calls ‘thin’ accounts of human rights – as a cause of the disjunction between Western liberalism and the social conservatism of the ‘Asian values’ discourse. He regards such declaratory accounts of human rights as nothing more than ‘shorthand’ for the results of bundles of sophisticated and contingent arguments.1 The right to freedom of speech, for instance, is shorthand that describes several different rights that each has its own rationale: the rights to commercial speech, political speech, artistic expression, religious expression, etc. Shorthand can be useful for facilitating a discussion and for coining a slogan, but the slogan should never be mistaken for the argument. Hence Chan argues that

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. . . the general right to freedom of expression as such is a generalisation from these independently justified specific rights. Thus to decide whether cigarette advertising should be regulated, it requires substantive reasoning from square one – we need to discuss what sorts of interests and what parties are relevant and how those interests should be balanced.2

The same caveats apply to the application of the ‘freedom of expression’ mantra to pornography, expressions of racial hatred, sexist language etc., not to mention issues to which we barely give a second thought, such as a child’s ‘freedom of expression’ vis-à-vis a parent’s or teacher’s authority. This is why so many supposedly fundamental and universal human rights commonly conflict with other fundamental and universal human rights: because we have mistaken imprecise shorthand generalisations for the real thing. Perhaps a key to a dialogue might be found in an aspect of the Buddhist approach: its reluctance – even inability – to conceptualise generic human rights, or even generic humans, as a meaningful concept because of the existentialism inherent in its mode of thought. Despite being essentialist in its core, Confucian thought has similar difficulties because of the omnipresent role of social ascription in Confucian societies. Islam’s difficulties with conceptualising generic humans are not of the same order as those of Buddhism or even Confucianism, but it also engages in social ascription (on the basis of sex and religion), suggesting that an approach that accommodates this tendency may not be unwelcome from that quarter. A second, closely related key might be found in the nearly universal Pacific Asian trait of taking a web-like relational view of society, and the phenomenon of emphasising duties at least as much as rights. Both of these traits have been used to rationalise Asian exceptionalism on the matter of human rights. If a dialogue on human rights were to resonate with these outlooks without compromising its universalism, it might obviate some reflexive resistance that can inhibit intelligent discussion. Oddly enough, this approach finds resonance with some stands of postmodern feminist discourse, particularly the critique of liberalism offered by Jennifer Nedelsky. She regards liberalism and the mainstream human rights discourse as perpetuating masculine disregard for the ‘inherently social nature of human beings’ and excessive middle-class regard for property.3 Nedelsky challenges the dichotomy between individual autonomy and the collectivity thus: This dichotomy is grounded in the deeply ingrained sense that individual autonomy is to be achieved by erecting a wall (of rights) between the individual and those around him. Property . . . is . . . the central symbol for this vision of autonomy, for it can both literally and figuratively provide the necessary walls. The most perfectly autonomous

190 Cultural politics and Asian values man is thus the most perfectly isolated. The perverse quality of this implicit ideal is, I trust, obvious.4 She goes on to argue that it is not in isolation but in relationships that autonomy, potentialities and happiness can be achieved. Such relational approaches should strike a much stronger chord with Buddhist and Confucian societies than the traditional discourse that treats every person as a fortress, where every wall is rigid, strong and defensive. It is also worth noting that although relationalism does not resonate so strongly with Islam, the communitarian perspective that results from relationalism does. Furthermore, the indigenous cultures of both peninsula Malaya and much of Indonesia (particularly Java) are heavily relational, so relationalism may even strike a stronger chord among Southeast Asian Muslims than it does in doctrinaire Islam itself. Any accommodation between the human rights discourse and relationalism therefore has the potential to procure a serious advance in a crosscultural dialogue. A third key – also related to the first two – might be a fresh approach to the concept of ‘positive rights’: that is economic and social rights that are necessary for the exercise of the more abstract ‘core’ human rights, and which are generally conceived as requiring active intervention by government. The converse are ‘negative rights’ (such as the right not to be killed or tortured) that are generally conceived as those requiring nothing more of government than self-restraint. This approach is not completely foreign to Western, or even liberal human rights discourse, and has been articulated in the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).5 Part of the reason for Western, and particularly American reluctance to take seriously positive rights is the open-ended nature of the commitments implied in such a concept – and the implications this has for the obligations of governments towards their own citizens and those of rich nations towards poor. There has also been concern that the recognition of such claims as ‘human rights’ debases the currency of human rights as a ‘trump card’; the last line of a person’s conceptual defence against active human rights abuse. It is significant, however, that Jack Donnelly, who has been characterised elsewhere in this volume as a ‘liberal fundamentalist’, is one of the more articulate defenders of the notion that there is no fundamental distinction between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ rights. He put his argument thus: All human rights require both positive action and restraint on the part of the state. Furthermore, whether a right is relatively positive or negative usually depends on historically contingent circumstances. For example, the right to food is a fairly negative right in the wheatfields of Kansas, but rather positive in Watts or East Los Angeles. The right

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to protection against torture is largely negative in Stockholm, but somewhat more positive in the South Bronx; in Argentina it was very positive indeed in the late 1970s, but today it is much closer to a negative right.6 Donnelly also points out that ‘negative’ rights are not free of financial cost in any society, since protection from injustice requires an effective and fair police and justice system, the creation and maintenance of which is very expensive.7 Ever since the rise of Asian nationalist movements in the first half of the twentieth century, economic and social rights have been high on their rhetorical agendas, even if nationalist governments have not always been effective in delivering them. Social and economic claims now enter the Asian side of the human rights discourse, not only through government claims about the right to ‘development’ or ‘subsistence’, but through the agendas of Asian civil society activists concerned about those left behind or even victimised by capitalism and globalisation.8 When considering economic and social rights, it is significant that all three of the Asian world religions under study, as well as most local Asian cultures, have benevolent impulses that lend themselves towards such considerations, but they do so without using the language of rights. Most strands of Christianity and some currently unfashionable strands of liberalism share similar impulses. The second critical point that distinguishes the Pacific Asian approaches is that benevolence tends to be heavily contextual and relational. This presents a problem for liberals and often for Christians who have wedded the language of rights to a level of universalism that chokes on contextualisation and relationalism. By the same token, a large part of the reluctance of liberals (especially in the United States) to accept positive rights is undoubtedly because of this universalism. If a person in China or East Los Angeles has a right to eat, then whose duty is it to provide food? Yours? Mine? The state’s? The wealthy West? Does one have a greater obligation to feed some people than others? Is the claim of one’s own offspring or sibling or geographic neighbour greater than that of a stranger in a foreign land? Rigid universalism makes it difficult to reconcile social and economic rights with common sense and human nature. It is counter-intuitive to argue that a stranger has the same claim on me for sustenance as do my own children. Yet this does not mean that the stranger has no claim on me at all, especially if that stranger is sick with hunger in front of me. Perhaps, in this instance the West could indeed ‘learn from Asia’ and accept contextualisation and relationalism as a legitimate and necessary part of the human rights discourse. On the other hand, perhaps, the language of rights is not the most appropriate tool with which to discuss these issues at all. Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity have all taught humanistic benevolence,

192 Cultural politics and Asian values compassion or love for millennia without resorting to the language of rights. Think of Craig Ihara’s parable at the opening of Chapter 7 about the male lead in a ballet who fails to catch the prima ballerina. Ihara speculates on the absurdity of using the language of rights to upbraid the male lead, affirming that using the language of rights in such circumstances would be ‘bizarre to say the least’ and that no one would actually use the language of rights in such a situation. He suggests that it would be much more natural to criticise the male lead using statements related to his relationship with the ballerina in the context of the dance: ‘You’re supposed to catch her’, ‘You’re not doing your job’.9 In Western thinking (including Christianity) rights are a narrowly based set of legalistic immunities. When we have discussed human rights in this book, this was the explicit intent. Yet Part II sought to identify humanistic virtues beyond rights, and which are not related to immunities. Perhaps, the same distinction could also be useful in the broader discourse. Without rejecting the validity of applying the concept of rights to social and economic claims as a matter of principle, it may be fruitful to find a terminology that avoids the traps of universalism while preserving the essence of humanistic virtue. Contextualisation and relationalism, with their implicit concepts of grading claims and duties, may hold the key. In the spirit of Ihara’s critique, the language of rights needs to be complemented by the language of relationships and duties. If someone has a right, then this imposes a duty on others. This is obvious, but when we go one step further and ask who specifically has a duty to uphold a particular right for a particular person in a particular situation, the answer is less obvious and will be relationally specific. It will also be much more meaningful in the real world of real people. Perhaps the best way to begin following this line of reasoning while breaking out of the normal parameters of immunity-based rights is to begin with those who are the holders of duties rather than those who are the holders of rights: an approach that resonates with Buddhism, Confucianism and Islam. In contrast with Jack Donnelly, whose conception of human rights acknowledges the relevance of only one relationship (that between a duty-bearing state and a rights-bearing citizen),10 we need to conceive of hierarchies of duty-holding entities, to cover the range of human experience from the most intimate to the least personal. The two extremes are not difficult to identify. At the most intimate are the personal bonds between parents and young children. At the least personal are entities such as the state. The state is recognised as a legitimate duty holder by every world religion under study (including every form of liberalism) and so its listing – as opposed to the specification of duties – should not be controversial. Between and around these entities are a myriad of other institutional entities of varying degrees of impersonality: such as trade unions, schools, hospitals, employers, banks, and transnational corporations. But it is not just institutions that have grades of

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impersonality. Individual people have duties to other people, not just in such personal kin relationships, but also as friends, enemies, professional associates, ‘nodding acquaintances’ or even as complete strangers; whether they are geographical neighbours, co-religionists, fellow citizens, teachers, co-workers, or refugees. The permutations of institutional and personal duty holders are endless – and are changing continually as social and economic situations change – and neither the list nor the implications of the relationships can be explored here. Nevertheless, just this superficial attempt to identify duty holders shows the way in which contextualisation can give flesh to bald declarations of rights. And put like this, it is difficult to conceive of duties being of equal import. The only way to cope with a world of endless permutations of relationships (i.e. the real world) is to grade duties. Grading duties does not mean grading rights, but it does mean grading claims according to the relationship involved. Put like this, it is not a completely radical idea, even in the West – except perhaps in the United States, which more than anyone else has turned rights into a mantra. Certainly Germany already recognises that there is a general duty to rescue. In utter contrast, the California Supreme Court has held that a fast-food restaurant does not even have a duty to hand over money in its cash register in order to save the life of a customer held at gunpoint by a robber!11 Relationalism and contextualisation have the potential to meet many of the reservations that have been expressed about Western concepts of human rights from Pacific Asian leaders and activists without conceding the principle of universality or the importance of any particular right. And who knows? A dialogue based on these principles might also save the Western perception of rights from degeneration into caricature.

Glossary

This glossary covers only terms that are used in such a way that the immediate text does not always explain the meaning.

Buddhist and related terms arahat bohdisattva dhamma dukkhu karma

Mahayana Nirvana sangha tanha Therevada upaya

worthy one ready to break the cycle of rebirth (in Therevada Buddhism) a living saint who has deferred Buddha-hood to help others (in Mahayana Buddhism) the way/truth/duty suffering the force produced by a person’s actions in one of their lives which influences what happens to them in their future lives the Buddhism of East Asia (Vietnam and further north) ultimate state of bliss in Buddhism monastic order Craving the Buddhism of Southeast Asia (Laos and further west) skilful means

Confucian and related terms amae chaebol de fa guanxi ie junzi keiretsu li min

child-like dependence (Japanese) vertically-integrated business entity (Korean) virtue (Chinese) law (Chinese) networking/personal contacts (Chinese) household/family (Japanese) virtuous/cultured gentleman (Chinese) vertically-integrated business entity (Japanese) rites (Chinese) masses (Chinese)

Glossary 195 ren xiao ren

humane person (Chinese) small/mean person (Chinese)

Islamic and related terms adat caliph faqih/fiqh gotong royong ijma ijtihad mufti/ulama Qu’ran raja shari’a sultan Sunna umma

local customs and law (Malaysia and Indonesia) ruler of an ancient Islamic state called a caliphate; Deputy of the Prophet. legalists/men of law mutual help/working together (Indonesia) consensus intellectual struggle/independent juristic reasoning Muslim scholar Islamic holy book, dictated to Mohamed by Allah; first source of Islam King (Malaysia) Islamic law ruler of an Islamic state called a sultanate (Middle East, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei) collection of anecdotal stories about Mohamed, second source of Islam community of believers

Notes

1 Death of a debate? 1 See Seah Chee Meow (ed.), Asian Values and Modernization, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1977. 2 Lee’s postscript to his address to the Historical Society, Nanyang University, 10 February 1978, in Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister’s Speeches, Press Conferences, Interviews, Statements, Etc., Singapore: Prime Minister’s Office, 1959–90. 3 Lee’s speech at Tanjong Pagar Constituency National Day Dinner, 16 August 1988, cited in Lee Kuan Yew, Lee Kuan Yew on the Chinese Community in Singapore, Singapore: Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations, 1991, p. 97. 4 Lee’s address at Tanjong Pagar and Tiong Bahru Lunar New Year gettogether at Silat Community Centre, 5 February 1995, in Lee, Prime Minister’s Speeches, etc.; Singapore Government Press Release, Lee’s speeches, 8 and 23 October 1998. 5 Vo Van Ai, ‘Human rights and Asian values in Vietnam’, in M. Jacobsen and O. Bruun (eds), Human Rights and Asian Values: contesting national identities and cultural representations in Asia, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000, p. 101. 6 State Council, People’s Republic of China, Human Rights in China, Beijing: International Office of the State Council, 1991, pp. 1–2. 7 The Straits Times, 16 June 1993. 8 Wilcox, W. ‘In their image: the Vietnamese Communist Party, the “West”, and the Social Evils Campaign of 1996’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 2000, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 15–24. 9 Vu Khieu, ‘Vietnam vis-à-vis Asian and European values’, paper presented to a workshop on ‘Asian values and Vietnam’s development in comparative perspective’, Hanoi, March 1999. 10 Tang, J. (ed.), Human Rights and International Relations in the Asia-Pacific Region, London and New York: Pinter, 1995, p. 215. 11 The Straits Times, 16 June 1993. 12 See, for instance, State Council, PRC, Human Rights in China, pp. 14, 1. 13 ASEAN, ‘Joint Communique of the Twenty-Fourth ASEAN Ministerial Meeting’, 1991, Kuala Lumpur. Available HTTP: (accessed 19 June 2000). 14 Report of Dr Mahathir’s talks with Pakistan leader, General Pervez Musharraf, 28 March 2000, in Channel News Asia. Available HTTP: (accessed 30 March 2000). 15 Mahathir Mohamad and Shintaro Ishihara (trans. F. Baldwin), The Voice of Asia: two leaders discuss the coming century, Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, 1995, p. 82.

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16 See Koentjaraningrat, Javanese Culture, Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 109–15, 240–1. 17 Ibid., pp. 234–5. 18 See Doi Takeo (trans. J. Bester), The Anatomy of Dependence, Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, 1981, especially 16–17, 54–5, 58–63. 19 Mahathir Mohamad, ‘The social responsibility of the press’, in A. Mehra (ed.), Press Systems in ASEAN States, Singapore: Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Centre, 1989, p. 107. 20 Lee Kuan Yew’s interview with Fareed Zakaria, ‘Culture is destiny: a conversation with Lee Kuan Yew’, Foreign Affairs, 1994, vol. 73, p. 113. 21 Kelly, D. ‘Freedom – a European mosaic’, in D. Kelly and A. Reid (eds), Asian Freedoms: the idea of freedom in East and Southeast Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 7. Italics are in the original. 22 Kamonpatana Maneewan and Pairoj Witoonpanich (eds), Proceedings of the First International Congress on Ideal Graduates, Integrated to Fourth National Congress on Thai Ideal Graduates (ICIG 2000), Proceedings of ICIG 2000 on Ideal Graduates for World Millenarians: Time of Global Great Happiness and Prosperity for All, Bangkok: Thai Ideal Graduates Association, 2000. 23 Interview with Alan Holzl, 3 April 2001. Holzl was a conference delegate from The University of Queensland. 24 Gray, J. Post-liberalism: studies in political thought, London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

2 A broad history: from Meiji to ‘East Asian Miracle’ 1 Duara, P. ‘Culture and consciousness: civilisation discourse and the nationstate in the 20th century’, in Kwok Kian-Woon, I. Arumugam, K. Chia and Lee Chee Keng (eds), ‘We Asians’: between past and future, Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society and National Archives of Singapore, 2000, pp. 185–6. 2 Ibid., pp. 186–93. 3 Chizuko, U. ‘Modern patriarchy and the formation of the Japanese nation state’, in D. Denoon et al. (eds), Multicultural Japan: palaeolithic to postmodern, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 213–5. 4 Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Africa–Asia Speaks from Bandong, Djakarta: Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1955, pp. 19–29. 5 Brown, D. The State and Ethnic Politics in Southeast Asia, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 89. 6 Zainuddin, A. A Short History of Indonesia, Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1968, p. 259. 7 Habibie, B.J. January 1994 (speaking as Minister of Research and Technology in the Suharto government), in R. Sukma, ‘Values, governance, and Indonesia’s foreign policy’, in Han Sung-Joo (ed.), Changing Values in Asia: their impact on governance and development, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies; Tokyo and New York: Japan Center for International Exchange, 1999, p. 139. 8 Anwar Ibrahim, ‘Globalisaton and the cultural re-empowerment of Asia’, in J. Camilleri and Chandra Muzaffar (eds), Globalisation: the perspectives and experiences of the religious traditions of Asia Pacific, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: International Movement for a Just World, 1998, p. 2. 9 See interview with Sukarno and footage of record burnings and hair cuttings on Levy, C. and C. Olsen, Riding the Tiger Volume 3 [videorecording], Birchgrove, NSW: Australian Film Finance Corporation and Olsen Levy Productions, 1992. 10 Hefner, R. Civil Islam: Muslims and democratization in Indonesia, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 104.

198 Notes 11 Surin, M., ‘Joining the values debate: the peculiar case of Thailand’, Sojourn, 1999, vol. 14, pp. 406–7. 12 Hutanuwatr, P. ‘Globalisation seen from a Buddhist perspective’, in J. Camilleri and Chandra Muzaffar (eds), Globalisation, pp. 91–2. 13 Aung San Suu Kyi, ‘Human rights and Asia’s fear of disorder’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 1995, Winter, p. 52. 14 Noor, F. ‘Beyond Eurocentrism: the need for a multicultural understanding of human rights’, in M. Meijer (ed.), Dealing with Human Rights: Asian and Western views on the value of human rights, Oxford: WorldView; Amsterdam: Greger Publishing; Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2001, pp. 55–6. 15 Wilcox, W. ‘In their image: the Vietnamese Communist Party, the “West”, and the Social Evils Campaign of 1996’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 2000, vol. 32, no. 4, p. 16. 16 Marr, D. and S. Rosen, ‘Chinese and Vietnamese youth in the 1990s’, in A. Chan, B. Kerkvliet and J. Unger (eds), Transforming Asian Socialism: China and Vietnam compared, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999, p. 181. 17 Lee Teng-hui, ‘Confucian democracy: modernization, culture and the state in East Asia’, Harvard International Review, Fall 1999, p. 18. 18 Weller, R. ‘Horizontal ties and civil institutions in Chinese societies’, in R. Hefner (ed.), Democratic Civility: the history and cross-cultural possibility of a modern political ideal, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1998, p. 237. 19 Kim Dae-jung, ‘A response to Lee Kuan Yew: is culture destiny? the myth of Asia’s anti-democratic values’, Foreign Affairs, 1994, vol. 73, no. 6, pp. 190–1. 20 See the first hand reports of several participants in R. Wilkins et al., Executive Summary and Nairobi Conference Report: NGO Family Voice Participation at the Nairobi Conference: United Nations Commission on Human Settlements 16th Session, Nairobi, Kenya, April 21–May 10, 1997, Provo, Utah: J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, 1977. 21 Ibid. 22 Goh Keng Swee in The Straits Times, 30 December 1982. 23 Marwick, A. The Sixties: cultural revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c.1958–c.1974, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, especially pp. 3–20. 24 Wouters, C. ‘Balancing sex and love since the 1960s sexual revolution’, Theory, Culture & Society, 1998, vol. 15, pp. 187–8. 25 Cited in Berns, W. ‘Pornography versus democracy’, Society, 1999, vol. 36, no. 6, p. 17. 26 Bailey, B. ‘Prescribing the pill: politics, culture, and the sexual revolution in America’s heartland’, Journal of Social History, 1997, vol. 4, p. 836. 27 Marwick, A. The Sixties, p. 803. 28 Ibid., p. 806. 29 Fukuyama, F. The Great Disruption: human nature and the reconstitution of social order, London: Profile Books, 1999. 30 Ibid., Figures 2.1 and 2.2, 2.4 and 2.5, pp. 32–3, 42, 44. 31 Ibid., Figures, A.1, A.2, A.4 and A.5, pp. 284–5, 292–3. Fukuyama could not supply South Korean figures for births to single mothers. 32 In 1990, the divorce rates for the Sinic countries of East Asia were as follows (measured in divorces per thousand population): Taiwan 1.36; Japan 1.21; Singapore 1.16; South Korea 0.97; and Hong Kong 0.97; China (1988 figure) 1.2. See Wei-Shiuan Jeng and P. McKendry, ‘A comparative study of divorce in three Chinese societies: Taiwan, Singapore and Hongkong’, International Journal of Sociology of the Family, 1999, vol. 29, no. 2, p. 1.

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33 It is worth noting at this stage that the dichotomy between East Asian familial stability and Western social dislocation does not extend to the Islamic world of Southeast Asia. If anything the entry of ‘old’, pre-1960s Western values seems to have dampened the tolerance of Muslims in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore for polygamy, and easy, socially acceptable divorce. 34 Chan, J. ‘Asian values and human rights: an alternative view’, in L. Diamond and M. Plattner (eds), Democracy in East Asia, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, pp. 32–3. 35 See, for example, Gammeltoft, T. and R. Hernø, ‘Human rights in Vietnam: exploring tensions and ambiguities’, in M. Jacobsen and Ole Bruun (eds), Human Rights and Asian Values, pp. 159–77. These researchers conducted extensive interviews among ordinary people in Vietnam regarding reproductive and economic issues and discovered a marked difference between their public support for official reform programs, and their private attachment to traditional mores. Tyrene White has documented similar reactions to China’s one-child policy, manifesting itself in this case as active and planned resistance to the implementation of the policy. See White, T. ‘Domination, resistance and accommodation in China’s One-child Campaign’, in E. Perry and M. Seldon (eds), Chinese Society: change, conflict and resistance, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, pp. 102–19. 36 Onuma Yasuaki, ‘Toward a more inclusive human rights regime’, in J. Bauer and D. Bell (eds), The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 105–6. 37 See Rodan, G. ‘The internationalization of ideological conflict: Asia’s new significance’, The Pacific Review, 1996, vol. 9, pp. 328–51. 38 Khoo Boo Teik, Paradoxes of Mahathirism: an intellectual biography of Mahathir Mohamad, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 69. 39 Ibid., p. 68. 40 Aziz Zariza Ahmed, Mahathir’s Paradigm Shift: the man behind the vision, Taiping, Malaysia: Firma Malaysia Publishing, 1997, p. 87. 41 Lee Kuan Yew, ‘Productivity: who benefits?’, Productivity Digest, 1982, vol. 1, no. 5, p. 4. 42 Vogel, E. Japan as Number One: lessons for America, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1979. 43 See Austin, I. ‘Pragmatism and Public Policy in East Asia: origins, adaptations and development’, PhD Thesis, Department of Government, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, 2000. 44 Vogel, E. Japan as Number One, p. 225. 45 Ibid., p. 53. 46 Kahn, H. and T. Pepper, The Japanese Challenge: the success and failure of economic success, New York: Crowell, 1979; and Kahn, H. with the Hudson Institute, World Economic Development: 1979 and beyond, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1979. 47 Vogel, E. The Four Little Dragons: the spread of industrialization in East Asia, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991. 48 Ibid., pp. 93–101. 49 World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: economic growth and public policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 50 See, for instance, the collection of essays in Rozman, G. (ed.), The East Asian Region: Confucian heritage and its modern adaptation, Princeton, New Jersey and Chichester, England: Princeton University Press, 1991. 51 Koh, T. The Quest for World Order: perspectives of a pragmatic idealist, Singapore: Times Academic Press for the Institute of Policy Studies, 1998, pp. 280–1.

200 Notes

3 Narrow histories: Lee Kuan Yew and Dr Mahathir 1 See Nair, D. (ed.), Socialism That Works . . . the Singapore way, Singapore: Federal Publications, 1976. 2 Seah Chee Meow (ed.), Asian Values and Modernization, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1977, pp. vii–viii. 3 Ibid., p. 95. 4 Ibid., pp. 1–20. 5 Ibid., p. 29. 6 Lee’s address at the Tanjong Pagar Community Centre, 30 October 1965, in Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister’s Speeches, Press Conferences, Interviews, Statements, etc., Singapore: Prime Minister’s Office, 1959–90. 7 See Lee Kuan Yew in The Mirror, 1966, vol. 2, no. 30, p. 1. 8 See Lee’s address to the Political Study Centre, 15 April 1965, in Lee, Prime Minister’s Speeches etc., and Lee Kuan Yew, New Bearings in Our Education System, Singapore: Ministry of Culture, 1966–67, p. 19. 9 Lee’s speech at Tanjong Katong School, 13 June 1965, in Lee, Prime Minister’s Speeches, etc. 10 Lee’s broadcast version of a talk to civil servants at the Political Study Centre, 14 June 1962, in ibid. 11 Lee’s address at the Annual Review and Display of the Boys’ Brigade, Singapore Battalion, 28 August 1966, in ibid. 12 Lee in ‘Questions and answers after Prime Minister’s address on ‘University autonomy and social responsibility’ at the Historical Society Meeting at the University of Singapore’, 24 November 1966, in ibid. 13 See Lee’s address at the opening of the seminar on ‘Education and nationbuilding’, 27 December 1966, in Lee Kuan Yew, Lee Kuan Yew and the Chinese Community in Singapore, Singapore: Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations, 1991, p. 29. 14 See Lee in Vasil, R. Governing Singapore, Singapore: Eastern Universities, 1984, p. 175. 15 Lee’s address to the General Assembly of the International Press Institute at Helsinki, 9 June 1971, in D. Nair, Socialism That Works, pp. 173–7. 16 Lee’s speech when accepting Honorary Doctor of Laws, University of Liverpool, in The Straits Times, 5 November 1971. 17 Interview with Goh Keng Swee in ibid., 4 February 1982. 18 Lee’s speech at Tamil Festival, 5 February 1967, in Lee, Prime Minister’s Speeches etc. 19 Lee’s address to the General Assembly of the International Press Institute at Helsinki, 9 June 1971, p. 175. 20 Lee Kuan Yew’s address to Singapore Teachers Union’s 26th Anniversary Dinner, 5 November 1972, The Mirror, 1972, vol. 8, no. 47, p. 4. 21 Lee Kuan Yew’s speech to CHOGM Meeting in Kingston, 30 April 1975, in Lee, Prime Minister’s Speeches, etc. 22 Goh Keng Swee and the Education Study Team, Report of the Ministry of Education, 1978, Singapore: Government of Singapore, 1979, p. v. 23 The Straits Times, 19 February 1983. 24 Lee, New Bearings in Our Education System, 7, 12–13. 25 Singapore Legislative Assembly, Debates: official report, 8 October 1958, column 807. 26 Lee’s address to the Civil Service Study Centre, 15 August 1959, in Lee, Prime Minister’s Speeches, etc. 27 Lee’s address to the University of Singapore Law Society Annual Dinner, 18 January 1962, in ibid.

Notes

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28 Singapore, Legislative Assembly, 24 November 1955, column 1239. 29 Lee Kuan Yew, ‘Democracy, human rights, and the realities’, Ministerial Speeches, Singapore, 1992, vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 20–37. 30 Han Fook Kwang, Warren Fernandez and Sumiko Tan, Lee Kuan Yew: the man and his ideas, Singapore: Times Editions and The Straits Times Press, 1998, p. 137. 31 Lee Kuan Yew, New Bearings in Our Education System, p. 13. 32 Lee in The Straits Times, 3 and 8 January 1987. 33 Lee’s address to the 10th Anniversary Celebrations of Eusoff College, 5 October 1968, in Lee, Prime Minister’s Speeches, etc. 34 Lee in Nair, D. Socialism That Works, p. 175. 35 The Straits Times, 5 February 1981 and 6 June 1982. 36 The Sunday Times, 17 January 1982. 37 See, for instance, Chandra Muzaffar, ‘From human rights to human dignity’, in P. Van Ness (ed.), Debating Human Rights: critical essays from the United States and Asia, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 25–31. 38 Cited in Far Eastern Economic Review, 18 September 1969, p. 688. 39 Mahathir in August 1986, cited in Khoo Boo Teik, Paradoxes of Mahathirism: an intellectual biography of Mahathir Mohamad, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 275–6. 40 Mahathir’s keynote speech to a conference on ‘Rethinking human rights’, in Just World Trust, Human Wrongs: reflections on Western global dominance and its impact upon human rights, Penang: Just World Trust, 1996, p. 9. 41 Mahathir, cited in Aziz Zariza Ahmad, Mahathir’s Paradigm Shift: the man behind the vision, Taiping, Malaysia: Firma Malaysia Publishing, 1997, p. 4. 42 Ibid., p. 4. 43 Mahathir Mohamad, ‘Building a Malaysian nation’, Negara, 1989, vol. 13, no. 1, p. 3. 44 Mahathir Mohamad and Shintaro Ishihara (trans. F. Baldwin), The Voice of Asia: two leaders discuss the coming century, Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, 1995, pp. 82–3. 45 A series of uncharacteristically robust decisions by the judiciary in 2001 gives grounds for hoping that the judiciary may be reasserting its independence, but at the time of writing it is too early to be confident that such tendencies will be allowed to develop. 46 Mahathir (writing under the pseudonym C.H.E. Det), ‘New thoughts on nationality’, Sunday Times, Singapore, 9 April 1950. 47 Mahathir Mohamad, The Malay Dilemma, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur: Times Books International, 1970, pp. 1–3, 16–31. 48 Ibid., pp. 103–73. 49 See, for example ibid., p. 110. 50 New Straits Times, 16 March 1995. 51 Mahathir, The Malay Dilemma, pp. 104–5. 52 New Straits Times, 12 May 1997. 53 Khoo Boo Teik, Paradoxes of Mahathirism, p. 68. The italics have been added. 54 Ibid., p. 69. 55 Mahathir and Shintaro, The Voice of Asia, p. 80. 56 Mahathir Mohamad, The Challenge, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: Pelanduk Publications, 1986, pp. 102, 138. Originally published in Malay as Menghadapi Cabaran in 1976. 57 Ibid., pp. 25, 35, 47. 58 Ibid., pp. 46–7, 118. 59 Ibid., pp. 91–8, 103. 60 Just World Trust, Human Wrongs, p. 9.

202 Notes 61 Mahathir and Shintaro, The Voice of Asia, p. 85. 62 Eldridge, P. The Politics of Human Rights in Southeast Asia, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 105. 63 Mahathir, The Challenge, pp. 49–50. 64 New Straits Times, 20 May 1995. 65 Mahathir, The Challenge, pp. 52–4. 66 Khoo Boo Teik, Paradox of Mahathirism, p. 55. 67 Ibid., p. 56. 68 Ibid., pp. 54–7. 69 Asiaweek, 27 March 1997; Khoo Boo Teik, Paradox of Mahathirism, pp. 58–60. 70 Fortune, 29 September 1997. 71 Mahathir Mohamad, ‘Call me a heretic if you like: Malaysia is not going to prostrate itself to the dogmas of global capitalism’, Time, September 21 1998, p. 80.

4 Confronting China after the end of history 1 Fukuyama, F. The End of History and the Last Man, London: Penguin, 1992, p. xi. 2 Margolin, J.-L. ‘China: a long march into the night’, in S. Courtois, N. Werth, J.-L. Panné, A. Paczkowski, K. Bartošek and J.-L. Margolin (trans. J. Murphy and M. Kramer), The Black Book of Communism: crimes, terror, repression, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 464. 3 Huntington, S. Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991, especially pp. 21–6. Also see F. Fukuyama, The End of History, pp. 13–51. 4 See, for instance, Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: the Singapore story 1965–2000: memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore, Singapore Press Holdings and Times Editions, 2000, pp. 548–50. 5 Fukuyama, F. The End of History, p. 45. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., pp. 42–4. 8 Bush, G. ‘The possibility of a new world order: unlocking the promise of freedom’, Vital Speeches of the Day, vol. 57, 15 May 1991, pp. 450–2. 9 Ibid., p. 451. 10 Christopher, W. ‘U.S. foreign relations: international peace’, Vital Speeches of the Day, 15 April 1993, vol. 15, p. 387. Also see Forsythe, D. ‘US foreign policy and human rights: the price of principles after the cold war’, in D. Forsythe (ed.), Human Rights and Comparative Foreign Policy, Tokyo, New York, Paris: United Nations University Press, 2000, p. 24, for Clinton’s personal confirmation of the policy in October 1994. 11 Kent, A. Between Freedom and Subsistence: China and human rights, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 177–8. 12 Frohen, B. The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism, Laurence: University of Kansas Press, 1996, p. 1. 13 Kent, A. China, the United Nations, and Human Rights: the limits of compliance, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 52, 56. Also see Nathan, A. ‘Human rights in Chinese foreign policy’, The China Quarterly, 1994, no. 139, pp. 636–8, for a concise account of China’s diplomatic setbacks during the post-Tiananmen Square period. 14 Kent, A. China, the United Nations and Human Rights, p. 51. It is of passing interest to note that the emphasis on state sovereignty is a distinctly ‘unAsian’ approach to diplomacy, which traditionally had no notion of the equality of states or the strict territorial delineation of states.

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15 Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First, p. 541. 16 Kent, A. China, the United Nations and Human Rights, pp. 149–55. 17 State Council, People’s Republic of China, Human Rights in China, 1991, Beijing: Information Office of the State Council, People’s Republic of China. 18 Ibid., Preface, p. II. 19 China’s advocacy of ‘development rights’ emerged as a fall-back position after the concept of ‘subsistence rights’, which was advocated in Human Rights in China, failed to capture more than token endorsement from other developing nations. 20 de Bary, W. Preface, W. de Bary and Tu Weiming, Confucianism and Human Rights, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, pp. xvi, xviii. 21 See, for instance, Zhu Feng, ‘Human rights problems and current Sino– American relations’, in P. van Ness (ed.), Debating Human Rights: critical essays from the United States and Asia, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 232–54; and Zhao Gancheng, ‘Assessing China’s impact on Asia–EU relations’, in W. Stokhof and P. van der Velde (eds), ASEM: The Asia–Europe Meeting: a window of opportunity, London and New York: Kegan Paul International in association with the International Institute for Asian Studies, 1999, pp. 109–25. 22 ASEAN, ‘Joint Communique of the Twenty-Fourth ASEAN Ministerial Meeting’, 1991, Kuala Lumpur. Available HTTP: (accessed 19 June 2000). 23 The author is grateful to Prof. Martin Stuart-Fox for insights on the special place of China in Southeast Asia and for the opportunity to preview his forthcoming book, China and Southeast Asia. 24 Kent, A. China, the United Nations and Human Rights, pp. 165, 173, 178–9, 188. 25 Ibid., pp. 64–5. 26 Ibid., p. 272, note 65. 27 Ibid., pp. 164, 166. The final statements for the conferences may be viewed on the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights website. Available HTTP: (accessed 16 June 2000). 28 Kent, A. China, the United Nations, and Human Rights, pp. 165–66; and E. Mendes, ‘Asian values and human rights: letting the tigers free’, 1996. Available HTTP: (accessed 13 December 1999). 29 Kent, A. China, the United Nations, and Human Rights, p. 168. 30 Ibid., p. 163. 31 The Straits Times, 16 June 1993. 32 Ibid., 15 June 1993. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 11 June 1993. 35 Ibid., 16 June 1993. 36 Ibid., 30 March 1993. 37 Ibid., 17 May 1993. 38 Ibid., 16, 17 June 1993. 39 All citations of the Vienna Declaration are derived from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights website. Available HTTP: (accessed 19 November 1999). 40 Kent, A. China, the United Nations, and Human Rights, pp. 173, 178–9. 41 Bayefsky, A. ‘The UN and the international protection of human rights’, in B. Galligan and C. Sampford (eds), Rethinking Human Rights, Sydney: The Federation Press, 1997, pp. 75–7. 42 Kent, A. China, the United Nations, and Human Rights, pp. 161, 164, 171, 179.

204 Notes 43 It is worth noting that at the time of writing (2001) Myanmar and the EU seem to be coming to a fresh accommodation, based partly on the Myanmar regime lightening its oppression of opposition parties and politicians. 44 The EU toughened sanctions against Myanmar at a meeting of its foreign ministers in early April 2000, and normalised trade relations with China in mid-May 2000. 45 Zhao Gancheng, ‘Assessing China’s impact on Asia–EU relations’, p. 110. 46 Ibid., p.111. 47 Ibid., pp. 113, 122 48 Ibid., p. 118. 49 Kent, A. China, the United Nations and Human Rights, p. 198. 50 Wilkins, R. et al., Executive Summary and Nairobi Conference Report: NGO Family Voice Participation at the Nairobi Conference: United Nations Commission on Human Settlements 16th Session, Nairobi, Kenya, April 21–May 10, 1997, Provo, Utah: J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, 1977, pp. 3–4. 51 Ibid., p. 6. 52 Ibid., p. 7; and Appendix I, which is a reproduction of the original G77 and China amendment to the Rights of the Child resolution. 53 See He Baogang, The Democratization of China, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 40–45; and Bell, D. ‘Which rights are universal?’, Political Theory, 1999, vol. 27, pp. 850–51. 54 Huang, M. ‘Universal human rights and Chinese liberalism’, in M. Jacobsen and Ole Bruun (eds), Human Rights and Asian Values: contesting national identities and cultural representations in Asia, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000, pp. 236–7. 55 See Tow, W., R. Thakur and In-Taek Hyun (eds), Asian’s Emerging Regional Order: reconciling traditional and human security, Tokyo, New York, Paris: United Nations University Press, 2000.

5 Fin de siècle: ‘Democratic Moment’, financial crisis and beyond 1 Bakken, B. ‘Principled and unprincipled democracy: the Chinese approach to evaluation and election’, in H. Antlöv and Tak-Wing Ngo (eds), The Cultural Construction of Politics in Asia, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000, pp. 107–30. The argument centres around the perceived unprincipled nature of democracy, because it places no emphasis on moral education or the moral evaluation of candidates. 2 Lee Kuan Yew, ‘For third world leaders: hope or despair?’, Collins Family International Fellowship Lecture by Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew at the Forum, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 17 October 2000. 3 Ling, L.H.M. and Chih-yu Shih, ‘Confucianism with a liberal face: the meaning of democratic politics in postcolonial Taiwan’, Review of Politics, 1998, vol. 60, no. 1, p. 69. 4 The incidents were President Lee Teng-hui’s successful attempt to make the premier more directly subservient to the president; and, Governor James Soong’s political rupture with President Lee. 5 Ling and Shih, ‘Confucianism with a Liberal Face’, pp. 71–2, 76. 6 Ibid., pp. 75–7. 7 Chung Oknim, ‘Values, governance, and international relations: the case of South Korea’, in Han Sung-Joo (ed.), Changing Values in Asia: their impact on government and development, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies; Tokyo and New York: Japan Center for International Exchange, 1999, pp. 105–6.

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8 Interview with Lee Hoi Chang, Far Eastern Economic Review, 18 May 2000. 9 Chung Oknim, ‘Values, governance, and international relations: the case of South Korea’, p. 78. 10 Diamond, L. and Byung-Kook Kim, ‘Introduction: Consolidating Democracy in South Korea’, in L. Diamond and Byung-Kook Kim (eds), Consolidating Democracy in South Korea, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 2000, pp. 5–6. 11 See Mo Jongryn, ‘Democracy and the economic crisis’, Korea Journal, 2000, vol. 40, pp. 317–18. 12 John Larkin, ‘Kim Dae Jung comes up short’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 24 May 2001. 13 See Hwang, K. ‘South Korea’s bureaucracy and the informal politics of economic development’, Asian Survey, 1996, vol. 36, p. 318. For accounts of the broader role of regionalism in politics see Byung-Kook Kim, ‘Party Politics in South Korea’s Democracy: The Crisis of Success’, and Byung-Kook Kim, ‘Electoral Politics and Economic Crisis, 1997–1998’, in L. Diamond and Byung-Kook Kim (eds), Consolidating Democracy in South Korea, pp. 53–86 and 173–202 respectively. 14 Reischauer, E. and J. Fairbank, East Asia: the great tradition, London: Allen & Unwin, 1960, p. 444. 15 Mo Jongryn, ‘Democracy and the economic crisis’, p. 310. 16 Hamn Pyongchoon, cited in M. Lee, The Odyssey of Korean Democracy: Korean politics, 1987–1990, New York: Praeger, 1990, p. 11. 17 See Anderson, B. Language and Power: exploring political cultures in Indonesia, Ithaca and London: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1990, pp. 22–3, 36–8. 18 Ibid., p. 36. See Chapter 9 for a discussion of similar conceptions of power in Buddhist Southeast Asia. 19 See Mulder, N. Mysticism and Everyday Life in Contemporary Java: cultural persistence and change, Singapore: Singapore University Press for the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1978, pp. 42, 60–4. For an account of the development of bapakism see Shiraishi, S. Young Heroes: The Indonesian Family in Politics, Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 1997, especially pp. 81–96. 20 Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence, Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, 1981. 21 See several chapters in Dittmer, L. Haruhiro Fukui and P. Lee (eds), Informal Politics in East Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 22 See Channel News Asia, 23 June 2000. Available HTTP: (accessed 23 June 2000). 23 Far Eastern Economic Review, 29 June 2000. The exceptions to these generalisations are North Korea, Vietnam, and Singapore. 24 Ibid., 26 July 2001. 25 Alatas, A. “ASEAN Plus Three” Equals Peace Plus Prosperity, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2001, p. 7. 26 Asiaweek, 9 June 2000. 27 Far Eastern Economic Review, 22 June 2000.

6 Of liberalism and other religions 1 Lerner, N. Religion, Beliefs, and International Human Rights, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2000, p. 4. 2 Tu Weiming, Confucian Ethics Today: the Singapore challenge, Singapore: Curriculum Development Centre of Singapore and Federal Publications, 1984, p. 204.

206 Notes 3 Mill, J. (J. Robson, ed.), Autobiography, London: Penguin Books, [1873], 1989, p. 163. 4 Locke, J. Two Treatises of Government, Student Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1690], 1988, Introduction by Peter Laslett, pp. 16–17. See Kramer, M. John Locke and the Origins of Private Property: philosophical explorations of individualism, community and equality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 38–40 for a brief exposition of Locke’s appropriation of the language of Christianity for his own ideas. 5 See Zuckert, M. The Natural Rights Republic: studies in the foundation of the American political tradition, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996, Chapter Six, ‘Natural rights and protestant politics: Lockean puritans’, pp. 148–201. 6 Locke, J. Two Treatises of Government, pp. 285–7. Also see Nedelsky, J. ‘Reconceiving autonomy: sources, thoughts and possibilities’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 1989, vol. 1, no. 7, pp. 7–36. 7 Locke, J. Two Treatises of Government, for example, pp. 306–9, 318–20. 8 Locke, J. Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Bristol: Thoemmes Press; Taipei: Unifacmanu, 1995, p. 2. 9 Mill, J. (F. Garforth, ed.), John Stuart Mill on Education, New York: Teachers College Press, 1971. 10 Eisenstadt, S. ‘Multiple modernities’, Dædalus, 2000, vol. 129, no. 1, pp. 3–4. 11 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1266–73, First Part, Q. 79: 4. Available HTTP: (accessed 25 August 2000). 12 Eisenstadt, S. ‘Multiple modernities’, p. 2. 13 See St Augustine (transl. M. Dods), The City of God, New York: The Modern Library, 1950; and Becker, C. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1932. 14 Social democracy has not been included in the list of belief systems because all of its varied manifestations appear to be derivative of other ideological and belief systems (e.g. liberalism, socialism, Catholic social teaching), rather than being conceptual entities in their own right. 15 See Fukuyama, F. The End of History and the Last Man, London: Penguin, 1992, ‘By Way of Introduction’, pp. xi–xxiii, especially pp. xii, xiv. 16 Howard, R. and J. Donnelly, ‘Human dignity, human rights, and political regimes’, American Political Science Review, 1986, vol. 80, pp. 802, 816. 17 Shklar J. (S. Hoffman, ed.), Political Thought and Political Thinkers, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998, p. 12. 18 Howard, R. and Donnelly, J. ‘Human dignity, human rights, and political regimes’, pp. 801–2. 19 Peters, R. ‘Islamic law and human rights: a contribution to an ongoing debate’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 1999, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 8–10. 20 Moosa, N. ‘Human rights in Islam’, South African Journal on Human Rights, 1998, vol. 14, p. 519. 21 Wang Gungwu, The Chineseness of China: selected essays, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 173–5. 22 Berkowitz, P. Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999; and MacIntyre, A. After Virtue: a study of moral theory, Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1984.

7 The European legacy: Christianity and liberalism 1 Ihara, C. ‘Why there are no rights in Buddhism – a reply to Damien Keown’, 1995, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Online Conference on Buddhism and Human

Notes

2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

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Rights, 1995, p. 1. Available HTTP: (accessed 15 March 2000). Kamenka, E. ‘The anatomy of an idea’, in E. Kamenka and A. Tay (eds), Human Rights, Melbourne: Edward Arnold (Australia), 1978, p. 6. Hyun-Seok Yu, ‘Asian values and human security cooperation in Asia’, in W. Tow, R. Thakur and In-Taek Hyun (eds), Asia’s Emerging Regional Order: reconciling traditional and human security, Tokyo, New York, Paris: United Nations University Press, 2000, p. 101. The use of the word ‘myth’ here and elsewhere expresses no judgement on the veracity of the story under consideration. See Patterson, O. Freedom Volume I: freedom in the making of Western culture, London: I.B. Taurus, 1991, pp. 325–44, especially pp. 338–44. St Augustine, Confessions (transl. R.S. Pine-Coffin), London: Penguin, [c. 400], 1961. Ibid., VIII, 7. Gurevich, A. The Origins of European Individualism (transl. K. Judelson), Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, pp. 91–2. Ibid., pp. 94–5. St Augustine, Confessions, III, 8. Franck, T. The Empowered Self: law and society in the age of individualism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 104, note 13; and Villa-Vicencio, C. ‘Christianity and human rights’, The Journal of Law and Religion, 1999, vol. 14, p. 585; and Daniel-Rops, M. The Church in the Dark Ages, London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1959, pp. 29–30, 47. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1266–73, First Part, Q. 79: 4. Available HTTP: (accessed 25 August 2000). Ibid., First Part of the Second Part, Q. 94: 2. Villa-Vicencio, C. ‘Christianity and human rights’, p. 587. Weber, M. (transl. T. Parsons), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Allen & Unwin, 1930. Oberman, H. (transl. E. Walliser-Schwarzbart), Luther: man between God and the Devil, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982, pp. 119–20. Ibid., pp. 175–9. Ibid., pp. 120, 159. Skinner, Q. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, volume two: the age of Reformation, London: Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 5. Long, E. Jr, A Survey of Christian Ethics, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 133–4, 189. Oberman, H. Luther, pp. 146–50. Spitz, L. Luther and German Humanism, London: Variorum, 1996, Chapter IX, pp. 385–6. Baron, H. ‘Calvinist republicanism and its historical roots’, Church History, 1939, vol. 8, pp. 34–5. In fact, in both Lutheran and Calvinist churches, the direction to subjects to be unquestioningly slavishness to authority was modified in due course. Franck, T. The Empowered Self, p. 137. Kant, I. (transl. N. Smith), Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, [1781], 1958, p. 43. See Kant, I. (transl. H. Paton), Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, New York: Harper & Row, [1785], 1964, Kant’s pages 69–74. See Becker, C. The Declaration of Independence: a study in the history of political ideas, New York: Vintage Books, 1922, 1942, pp. 39–51. Ibid., p. 57.

208 Notes 30 Ibid., p. 39. 31 Shain, B. The Myth of American Individualism: the Protestant origins of American political thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. xviii. 32 Ahlstrom, S. A Religious History of the American People, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972, p. 132. 33 Zuckert, M. The Natural Rights Republic: studies in the foundation of the American political tradition, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996, pp. 148–201. 34 Shain, B. The Myth of American Individualism, pp. 58–9. 35 Hatch, N. The Sacred Cause of Liberty: republican thought and the millennium in revolutionary New England, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977, pp. 55–72. 36 Shain, B. The Myth of American Individualism, p. 52. 37 Lipsett, W. American Exceptionalism: a double-edged sword, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1996, pp. 19, 60–7; and Ahlstrom, S. A Religious History of the American People, pp. 292–3. 38 Becker, C. The Declaration of Independence, p. 72. 39 Stiltner, B. Religion and the Common Good: Catholic contributions to building community in a liberal society, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999, pp. 24–5. 40 Butterfield, H. The Whig Interpretation of History, London: G. Bell & Sons, 1931, p. 5. 41 Hatch, N. The Sacred Cause of Liberty, p. 73. 42 Ibid., pp. 73–6, 83–4. 43 See Quilty, M. Textual Empires: a reading of early British histories of Southeast Asia, Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, 1998, especially pp. 86–7. 44 Mill, J. (ed. S. Collini), On Liberty with The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 16. 45 Ten, C.L. ‘Democracy, socialism, and the working classes’, in J. Skorupski (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Mill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 394. Despite his contempt for the working class, it should be noted that Mill took a paternalistic interest in their welfare and was commonly regarded as one of their champions. 46 Cranston, M. John Stuart Mill, London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1967, p. 23. 47 Mill, J. On Liberty, p. 13. 48 Parekh, B. ‘Liberalism and colonialism: a critique of Locke and Mill’, in J. Pieterse, and B. Parekh (eds), The Decolonization of Imagination: culture, knowledge and power, London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1995, p. 93. 49 Mill, J. On Liberty, p. 119. 50 Ibid., p. 123. 51 Chandra Muzaffar, ‘Towards Human Dignity’, in Just World Trust, Human Wrongs: reflections of Western global dominance and its impact upon human rights, Penang, Malaysia: Just World Trust, 1996, pp. 269–70. 52 Bello, W. ‘The Function of Liberal Democracy in the US Imperial Enterprise in the Philippines and Asia’, in ibid., p. 88. 53 An-Na’im, A. ‘Problems of dependency: human rights organizations in the Arab world: an interview with Abdullahi An-Na’im’, Middle East Report, 2000, vol. 30, no. 1, p. 22. 54 Thomas, C. ‘Does the “good governance” policy of the international financial institutions privilege markets at the expense of democracy?’, Connecticut Journal of International Law, 1999, vol. 14, p. 561. 55 World Bank, Population and the World Bank: adapting to change (revised edition), Washington D.C.: World Bank, 2000, p. 13.

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56 For a grassroots example of the World Bank’s tactic of presenting unwelcome family planning ‘aid’ as a health and nutrition program, see Aihwa Ong, ‘State versus Islam: Malay families, women’s bodies, and the body politic in Malaysia’, in Aihwa Ong and M. Peletz (eds), Bewitching Women, Pious Men: gender and body politics in Southeast Asia, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 169–70. 57 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 58 Forsythe, D. ‘US foreign policy and human rights: the price of principles after the Cold War’, in D. Forsythe (ed.), Human Rights and Comparative Foreign Policy, Tokyo, New York, Paris: United Nations University Press, 2000, p. 25. 59 See Sandel, M. ‘Moral argument and liberal toleration: abortion and homosexuality’, California Law Review, 1989, vol. 77, no. 3, pp. 521–38. 60 Rawls, J. A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. 61 Rawls, J. Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 62 See Sandel, M. ‘Review of Political Liberalism, by John Rawls’, Harvard Law Review, 1994, vol. 107, pp. 1765–94; and Stiltner, B. Religion and the Common Good, pp. 55–65. 63 Locke, J. (ed. P. Laslett), Two Treatises of Government, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1690], 1988, p. 305. 64 Ibid., p. 304. 65 Ibid., p. 306. 66 Mill, J. On Liberty, p. 13. 67 Ibid., p. 14. 68 Ibid., p. 13. 69 Garfield, J. ‘Human rights and compassion: towards a unified moral framework’, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Online Conference on Buddhism and Human Rights, 1995, p. 11. Available HTTP: (accessed 15 March 2000). 70 Marsden, G. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1991, pp. 9–11. 71 Bailey, P. ‘Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ 50th: should Christians rejoice or lament?’, St Mark’s Review, Summer 1999, no. 176, pp. 8–9. 72 Lorenzen, T. The Rights of the Child, McLean, Virginia: Baptist World Alliance, 1998, p. 17. 73 Hollenbach, D. Claims in Conflict: retrieving and renewing the Catholic human rights tradition, New York: Paulist Press, 1979, p. 111. 74 See Shupack, M. ‘The Churches and Human Rights: Catholic and Protestant human rights views as reflected in church statements’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, vol. 6, 1993, pp. 127–57; and Wood, J. Jr, Baptists and Human Rights, McLean, Virginia: Baptist World Alliance, 1997; Lorenzen, T. The Rights of the Child; and Lorenzen, T. Freedom of Religion as a Human Right, McLean, Virginia: Baptist World Alliance, 1999. 75 Langan, J. ‘Human rights in Roman Catholicism’, in A. Swindler (ed.), Human Rights in Religious Traditions, New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1982, p. 32. 76 Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris: encyclical on establishing universal peace in truth, justice, charity, and liberty, 1963, New Advent Catholic Website. Available HTTP: (accessed March 2000). 77 See Maritain, J. True Humanism, London: Geoffrey Bles: The Centenary Press, 1938; Maritain, J. (transl. J. Fitzgerald), The Person and the Common Good, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1946, 1966; and Maritain, J. Man and the State, Chicago, London, Toronto: The University of Chicago Press, 1951.

210 Notes 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88

Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, 9. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 14. Second Vatican Council, Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, par. 3, cited in Langan, J. ‘Human rights in Roman Catholicism’, p. 29, note 27. Ibid., p. 27. Pacem in Terris: 44. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 80. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration: ‘Dominus Iesus’, on the unicity and salvific universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, Section V, ‘The Church and the other religions in relation to salvation’. Available HTTP: (accessed 18 September 2000). Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes: Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Part 1, Preface, on Catholic Social Teaching. Available HTTP: (accessed 10 October 2000).

8 Islam: of Shari’a and Adat; Caliphs and Rajas 1 Madjid, N. ‘Potential Islamic doctrinal resources for the establishment and appreciation of the modern concept of civil society’, in Nakamura Mitsuo, Sharon Siddique and Omar Farouk Bajunid, Islam and Civil Society in Southeast Asia, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2001, pp. 150–3. 2 Ayoub, M. ‘Asian spirituality and human rights’, in Just World Trust, Human Wrongs: reflection on western global dominance and its impact upon human rights, Penang, Malaysia: Just World Trust, 1996, p. 257. 3 Lindholm, C. The Islamic Middle East: an historical anthropology, Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1996, p. 141. 4 Esposito, J. Islam: the straight path, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 15. 5 An-Na’im, A. Toward and Islamic Reformation: civil liberties, human rights, and international law, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1990, p. 23. 6 Lindholm, C. The Islamic Middle East, pp. 265–7. 7 Lapidus, I. ‘The separation of state and religion in the development of early Islamic society’, International Journal for Middle East Studies, 1975, vol. 6, p. 368. 8 Ibid. 9 Hooker, M. ‘The translation of Islam into South-East Asia’, in M. Hooker (ed.), Islam in South-East Asia, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988, pp. 10–11. 10 Esposito, J. Islam: the straight path, p. 101. 11 Sajoo, A. ‘The Islamic ethos and the spirit of humanism’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 1995, vol. 8, p. 581. 12 Esposito, J. Islam: the straight path, p. 85. 13 See An-Na’im, A. Toward and Islamic Reformation, pp. 27–9. 14 See, for instance, Abdurrahman Wahid, ‘Islam, nonviolence and national transformation’, Social Alternatives, 2000, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 8–10. 15 The label ‘modernist Muslim’ is a commonly used term for Muslims who want to accommodate modernity. It is unrelated to this volume’s use of the term ‘modernism’. For a more precise description of ‘modernism’ in this context see C. Geertz, The Religion of Java, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976, pp. 148–61. 16 Dawood, N. (transl.), The Koran, London: Penguin, 1959, 2: 228.

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17 Mayer, A. Islam and Human Rights: tradition and politics, Second Edition, Boulder and San Francisco: Westview Press; London: Pinter Press, 1991, 1995, p. 148. 18 Most Islamic communities abandoned or severely restricted the application of hudud very early in the life of Islam. 19 Mulder, N. Mysticism and Everyday Life in Contemporary Java: cultural persistence and change, Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1978; and Koentjaraningrat, Javanese Culture, Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 316–445. 20 See Milner, A. Kerajaan: Malay political culture on the eve of colonial rule, Tucson, Arizona: The University of Arizona Press for the Association for Asian Studies, 1982; and Noor, F. ‘Beyond Eurocentrism: the need for a multicultural understanding of human rights’, in Meijer, M. (ed.), Dealing with Human Rights: Asian and Western views on the value of human rights, Oxford: WorldView; Amsterdam: Greger Publishing; Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2001, pp. 56–64. 21 See various essays in Ong, Aihwa and M. Peletz (eds), Bewitching Women, Pious Men: gender and body politics in Southeast Asia, Berkely, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995. Also see Stivens, M. Matriliny and Modernity: sexual politics and social change in rural Malaysia, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996. 22 The Koran, 2: 228, 4: 1, 4: 10. 23 Bowen, D. ‘Abortion, Islam, and the 1994 Cairo Population Conference’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1997, vol. 29, p. 163. 24 See, for example, An-Na’im, A. Toward an Islamic Reformation, pp. 175–6. 25 See various essays in Manger, L. (ed.), Muslim Diversity: local Islam in global contexts, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1999. 26 The Star (Kuala Lumpur), 24 July 1999. 27 Tibi, B. ‘Islamic law/Shari’a, human rights, universal morality and international relations’, Human Rights Quarterly, 1994, vol. 16, p. 296. 28 Lindholm, C. The Islamic Middle East, p. 74. 29 See, for instance, Hefner, R. Civil Islam: Muslims and democratization in Indonesia, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. 30 For a description and discussion of Sufism, especially as it appears in Java, see Woodward, M. Islam in Java: normative piety and mysticism in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta, Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1989, pp. 60–9. 31 Hefner, R. Civil Islam, pp. 248–9, n. 72. Also see Howell, J. ‘Sufism and the Indonesian Islamic revival’, Journal of Asian Studies, 2001, vol. 60, pp. 701–29. 32 See, for instance, Sloane, P. Islam, Modernity and Entrepreneurship Among the Malays, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 26–9. 33 The Koran, 16: 57, 42: 49. 34 Bowen, D. ‘Abortion, Islam and the 1994 Cairo Population Conference’, pp. 163–4. In fact the combination of the timing of ‘ensoulment’ and what constitutes danger to the mother provides the basis of a sophisticated discourse in Islamic jurisprudence that substantially weakens Islam’s reflexively antiabortion position. See Bowen, pp. 167–8. 35 Ibid., p. 165. 36 The Koran., 17: 23, 26, 31–2. 37 Bowen, D. ‘Abortion, Islam and the 1994 Cairo Population Conference’, p. 162. 38 See Moghissi, H. Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: the limits of postmodern analysis, London and New York: Zed Books, 1999; and Schooley, K. ‘Cultural sovereignty, Islam, and human rights – toward a communitarian revision’, Cumberland Law Review, 1995, vol. 25, pp. 698–704. 39 See Waardenburg, J. ‘Human rights, human dignity and Islam’, Temenos, 1991, vol. 27, pp. 151–82; Ali, M. ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights’, Journal of Objective Studies, 1998, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–49; and Mayer, A. Islam and Human Rights, pp. 64–78. 40 Mayer, A. Islam and Human Rights, pp. 56–9.

212 Notes 41 See Chapter 4 for an account of the Vienna Conference. See the Indonesian and Malaysian statements to the conference in Tang, J. (ed.), Human Rights and International Relations in the Asia-Pacific Region, London and New York: Pinter, 1995, pp. 228–38. 42 The problematic character of Indonesia’s ‘Muslim majority’ political status is further augmented by the fact that in the few free elections held in Indonesia, the avowedly Muslim parties have failed to win a majority of Muslim votes. 43 Chandra himself has been dismissed from his university position because of his close association with Anwar. He also narrowly missed out on winning a seat in the 1999 elections standing as a Keadilan (National Justice Party) candidate. He officially withdrew from active politics on 16 October 2001. 44 See Falaakh, Mohammad Fajrul ‘Nahdlatul Ulama and civil society in Indonesia’, and Amin Abdullah, M. ‘Muhammadiyah’s experience in promoting civil society’, in Nakamura Mitsuo, S. Siddique and Omar Farouk Bajunid (eds), Islam and Civil Society in Southeast Asia, pp. 33–42, 43–54. 45 The author is grateful to Prof. Azyumardi Azra of the Institut Agama Islam Negeri, Jakarta, for the information on and understanding of Wahid’s use of the terms jihad and bughat. Prof. Azra made these points during a symposium on Civil Society in Asia at Griffith University, Brisbane, on 10 July 2001. 46 Saif, W. ‘Human rights and Islamic revivalism’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 1994, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 61.

9 Buddhism: the politics of compassion 1 Hershock, P. ‘Dramatic intervention: human rights from a Buddhist perspective’, Philosophy East and West, 2000, vol. 50, p. 32. 2 Gyatso, T. ‘Human rights and universal responsibility’, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 1995, Online Conference on Buddhism and Human Rights. Available HTTP: (accessed 15 March 2000). 3 Hongladarom, S. ‘Buddhism and human rights in the thoughts of Sulak Sivaraksa and Phra Dhammapidok (Prayudh Pyarutto)’, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 1995, Online Conference on Buddhism and Human Rights, p. 3. Available HTTP: (accessed 15 March 2000). 4 de Silva, L. ‘The scope and contemporary significance of the Five Precepts’, in C. Fu and S. Wawrytko (eds), Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society: an international symposium, New York: Greenwood Press, 1991, p. 142. 5 See Saddhatissa, H. Buddhist Ethics, Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1970, 1997, p. 15; and Harvey, P. An Introduction to Buddhism: teachings, history and practices, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 11–12. 6 Prebish, C. ‘From monastic ethics to modern society’, in D. Keown (ed.), Contemporary Buddhist Ethics, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000, pp. 41–2. 7 Harvey, P. An Introduction to Buddhism, pp. 60–8. 8 Humphreys, C. Buddhism: an introduction and guide, London: Penguin, 1990, pp. 49–56. Also see Mitomo, Ryojun ‘The ethics of Mahayana Buddhism in the Bodhicaryavatara’, in C. Fu and S. Wawrytko (eds), Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society, pp. 15–26. 9 Danto, A. Mysticism and Morality: oriental thought and moral philosophy, New York and London: Basic Books, 1972, pp. 67–75. 10 de Silva, L. ‘The scope and contemporary significance of the Five Precepts’, pp. 143–57. 11 Harvey, P. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: foundations, values and issues, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 69–79.

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12 Ibid., pp. 134–40; and Fu, C. ‘From Paramartha-satya to Samvrti-satya: an attempt at constructive modernization of (Mahayana) Buddhist ethics’, in C. Fu and S. Wawrytko (eds), Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society, pp. 316–21. 13 Harvey, P. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, p. 139. 14 Wawrytko, S. ‘Women’s liberation in Taoism and Ch’an/Zen’, in C. Fu and S. Wawrytko (eds), Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society, pp. 266–8. 15 Harvey, P. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, pp. 123–49. The Pure Land schools are the exceptions that highlight the rule: these schools were begun in Japan in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in reaction to the perceived remoteness and difficulty of the existing Mahayana schools. See ibid., pp. 142–3. 16 See Ichishima, M. ‘Realizing skilful means in future Buddhist institutions’, in C. Fu and S. Wawrytko (eds), Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society: an international symposium, New York: Greenwood Press, 1991, pp. 333–45. 17 The relationship between sangha and state is explored in various essays in Smith, B. (ed.), Religion and Legitimation of Power in Thailand, Laos, and Burma, Chambersberg, PA: Anima Books, 1978. Also see Yoneii Ishii (transl. P. Hawkes), Sangha, State and Society: Thai Buddhism in history, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986. 18 Thanh-Dam Truong, ‘“Asian values” and the heart of understanding’, in J. Cauquelin, P. Lim and B. Mayer-König (eds), Asian Values: an encounter with diversity, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000, pp. 52–7. 19 See a country-by-country account in Harris, I. (ed.), Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-century Asia, London and New York: Continuum, 1999. 20 Sarkisyanz, E. ‘Buddhist backgrounds of Burmese socialism’, in B. Smith (ed.), Religion and Legitimation of Power in Thailand, Laos, and Burma, p. 87. 21 Swearer, D. The Buddhist World of Southeast Asia, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995, p. 64. 22 Saddhatissa, H. Buddhist Ethics, pp. 117–25. 23 See Pye, L. Asian Power and Politics: the cultural dimensions of authority, Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985, pp. 34–9. 24 For an account of the traditional Burmese perception of power, see Pye, L. Politics, Personality and Nation Building: Burma’s search for identity, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1962, pp. 66–71, 146–8. 25 See Chapter 5 for citation of Benedict Anderson’s work elaborating on the Javanese conception of power. 26 Reynolds, F. ‘Sacral kingship and national development: the case of Thailand’, in B. Smith (ed.), Religion and Legitimation of Power in Thailand, Laos, and Burma, pp. 101–3. 27 Yoneii Ishii, Sangha, State and Society, pp. 67–99. 28 Cited in ibid., p. 67. 29 Ibid. 30 Online Conference on Buddhism and Human Rights, ‘Declaration of Interdependence’, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Online Conference on Buddhism and Human Rights. Available HTTP: (accessed 12 February 2001). 31 Ibid. 32 Yarnall, T. ‘Engaged Buddhism: new and improved!(?) made in the USA of Asian materials’, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 2000, vol. 7. Available HTTP: (accessed 12 February 2001). 33 Ibid., pp. 257–61 34 See Keown, D. (ed.), Buddhism and Abortion, Hawaii: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999.

214 Notes 35 Harvey, P. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, pp. 347–8. 36 Chappell, D. ‘Buddhist responses to religious pluralism: what are the ethical issues?’, in C. Fu and S. Wawrytko (eds), Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society, pp. 357–61. 37 Satha-Anand, S. ‘Looking to Buddhism to turn back prostitution in Thailand’, in J. Bauer and D. Bell (eds), The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 193, 197–8; and Harvey, P. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, pp. 371–6. 38 Lerdmaleewong, M. and C. Francis, ‘Abortion in Thailand: a feminist perspective’, in Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 1998, vol. 5, p. 28. Available HTTP: (Accessed 21 February 2001). 39 Harvey, P. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, pp. 195–7. 40 Ibid., p. 314. 41 Florida, R. ‘Abortion in Buddhist Thailand’, in D. Keown (ed.), Buddhism and Abortion, pp. 17–18. 42 McDermott, J. ‘Abortion in the Pali Canon and early Buddhist thought’, in D. Keown (ed.), Buddhism and Abortion, pp. 157–82; and Harvey, P. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, p. 314. 43 Harvey, P. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, pp. 328–9; and La Fleur, W. Liquid Life: abortion and Buddhism in Japan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 1. 44 Cited in Keown, D. Buddhism and Bioethics, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995, p. 103. 45 La Fleur, W. Liquid Life, p. 11. 46 See La Fleur, W. Liquid Life; and, Harrison, E. ‘“I can only move my feet towards Mizuko Kuyo”: memorial services for dead children in Japan’, in D. Keown (ed.), Buddhism and Abortion, pp. 93–120. 47 Tedesco, F. ‘Abortion in Korea’, in D. Keown (ed.), Buddhism and Abortion, pp. 134–55. 48 Florida, R. ‘Abortion in Buddhist Thailand’, pp. 25–6. 49 See, for example, La Fleur, W. Liquid Life; and Barnhart, M. ‘Buddhism and the morality of abortion’, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 1998, vol. 5, pp. 276–97. Available HTTP: (accessed 21 February, 2001). 50 Ratanakul, P. ‘Socio-medical aspects of abortion in Thailand’, in D. Keown (ed.), Buddhism and Abortion, p. 62. 51 The author has personal knowledge of this. 52 La Fleur, W. Liquid Life, pp. 18, 113–18. 53 See Chapter 6 for the author’s critique of the place of the child in liberalism. 54 Harvey, P. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, pp. 114–15. 55 Inada, K. ‘Buddhist and Western ethics: problematics and possibilities’, in C. Fu and S. Wawrytko (eds), Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society, pp. 373–4. 56 Aristotle (transl. G. Mure), Posterior Analytics, The Internet Classics Archive. Available HTTP: (Accessed 12 July 2001). 57 The author is grateful to Prof. Martin Stuart-Fox for the insight of the Buddhist tetralemma. 58 Inada, K. ‘Buddhist and Western ethics’, p. 375.

10 Confucianism: humane rites and elite rights 1 Woodside, A. ‘Exalting the latecomer state: intellectuals and the state during the Chinese and Vietnamese reforms’, in A. Chan, B. Kerkvliet and J. Unger

Notes

2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24

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(eds), Transforming Asian Socialism: China and Vietnam compared, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999, pp. 17–21. Shirk, S. Competitive Comrades: career incentives and student strategies in China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, pp. 1–23 and elsewhere. See Stockman, N. Understanding Chinese Society, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, pp. 83, 128–9, 134. Perry, E. and E. Fuller, ‘China’s long march to democracy’, World Policy Journal, 1991, vol. 8, pp. 667–71. Perry, E. ‘Casting a Chinese “democracy” movement: the roles of students, workers, and entrepreneurs’, in J. Wasserstrom and E. Perry (eds), Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China: learning from 1989, Boulder: Westview Press, 1992, p. 155. Cheng, Chung-ying ‘Transforming Confucian virtues into human rights: a study of human agency and potency in Confucian ethics’, in W. de Bary and Tu Weiming (eds), Confucianism and Human Rights, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, pp. 142–3. Ibid., p. 143. Cheng, Ten-jen and B. Womack ‘General reflections on informal politics in East Asia’, Asian Survey, 1996, vol. 36, p. 322. Confucius (S. Leys transl.), The Analects of Confucius, Translator’s Introduction, New York, London: W.W. Norton, 1997, pp. xxiv–xxvii. Kwok, D. ‘On the rites and rights of being human’, in W. de Bary and Tu Weiming (eds), Confucianism and Human Rights, p. 85. Mote, F. Intellectual Foundations of China, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971, pp. 61–5. Mencius (D. Lau transl.), Mencius, London: Penguin, 1970, Book IV, Part B, 19. de Bary, W. Asian Values and Human Rights: A Confucian communitarian perspective, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 41. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., pp. 43–51. Cited in de Bary, W. Asian Values and Human Rights, pp. 74–5. Clammer, J. Values and Development in Southeast Asia, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia: Pelanduk Publications, 1996, pp. 20–1. The author is not suggesting that each contributor to de Bary’s and Tu’s books and symposiums is a co-advocate of their views: simply that they are part of the constellation of expertise that de Bary and Tu have been able to harness for their advocacy. Bloom, I. ‘Fundamental intuitions and consensus statements: Mencian Confucianism and human rights’, in W.T. de Bary and Tu Weiming (eds), Confucianism and Human Rights, p. 96. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 98–9. Peerenboom, P. ‘What’s wrong with Chinese rights? toward a theory of rights with Chinese characteristics’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, 1993, vol. 6, pp. 40–1; and Mencius, Book IV, Part B, 19. See, for instance, Gammeltolf, T. and R. Hernø, ‘Human rights in Vietnam: exploring tensions and ambiguities’, in M. Jacobsen and Ole Bruun (eds), Human Rights and Asian Values: contesting national identities and cultural representations in Asia, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000, pp. 159–77. See Wang Gungwu, The Chineseness of China: selected essays, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 165–86, especially pp. 167, 175–80, for an exploration of the Chinese etymology of ‘rights’. Also see M. Svensson, ‘The Chinese Conception of Human Rights: the debate on human rights in China, 1898–1949’, PhD thesis, Department of East Asian Languages, Lund University,

216 Notes

25 26 27 28

29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Lund, 1996, especially pp. 84–8. I am grateful to Iraphne Childs for advising me on Japanese, to Son Je-Eun for advising me on Korean, and to Kylie Pert for advising me on Vietnamese. Wang Gungwu, The Chineseness of China, p. 167. Nelson, A. The Modern Reader’s Japanese–English Character Dictionary Revised Edition, Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1966, p. 511. Learner’s Chinese English Dictionary, Revised Edition, Singapore: Nanyang Siang Pau and Umum Publisher, 1983, p. 360. Much of the early twentieth century Chinese human rights discourse was centred on the enigmas of conceiving rights in a society moulded by Confucian precepts: questions of natural versus power-based rights, what it is to be fully human, individual versus group rights, and the relationship between rights and duties. See Svensson, M. ‘The Chinese Conception of Human Rights’, pp. 105–55. Ching, J. ‘Human rights: a valid Chinese concept?’; and Judge, J. ‘The concept of popular empowerment (Minquan) in the late Qing: classical and contemporary sources of authority’, in W. de Bary and Tu Weiming (eds), Confucianism and Human Rights, pp. 71 and 197 respectively. Gu, E.X. ‘Who was Mr Democracy? The May Fourth discourse of populist democracy and the radicalization of Chinese intellectuals (1915–1922)’, Modern Asian Studies, 2001, vol. 35, pp. 589–621. See Murthy, V. ‘Confucian thought and democracy’, Asian Culture Quarterly, 1999, vol. 27, pp. 47–58. Confucius’s reference to ‘zhi’ is found in Analects 6.18. Simon Leys translates zhi as ‘nature’, rather than ‘raw stuff’. Doi, Takeo (transl. J. Bester), The Anatomy of Dependence [Revised Paperback Edition], Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, 1981, especially p. 47. See Chang Yun-shik, ‘The urban Korean as individual’, Korea Journal, 1977, vol. 17, pp. 49–57; and Helgesen, G. Democracy and Authority in Korea: the cultural dimension in Korean politics, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon: 1998, pp. 109–18. Yang Baoyun, ‘The relevance of Confucianism today’, in J. Cauquelin, P. Lim and B. Mayer-König (eds), Asian Values: an encounter with diversity, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1998, p. 72. Wang Gungwu, The Chineseness of China, pp. 147–8. Cited in Bloom, I. ‘Mencian Confucianism and human rights’, p. 101. Gaita, R. A Common Humanity: thinking about love and truth and justice, Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1999, pp. 177–80. See Ron Guey Chu, ‘Rites and rights in Ming China’, in W. de Bary and Tu Weiming (eds), Confucianism and Human Rights, pp. 172–3. See Chapter 2.

11 ‘Asian values’ revisited 1 Koh, T. ‘Opening address’, in Kwok Kian-Woon, I. Arumugam, K. Chia and Lee Chee Keng (eds), ‘WeAsians’: between past and future, Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society and the National Archives of Singapore, 2000, pp. 13–14. 2 Pan Wei, ‘Democracy vs. rule of law: China’s political future’, Paper delivered to the Civil Society in Asia Symposium, Griffith University, Brisbane, Tuesday 10 July 2001. A precis of the paper was read to the conference in Prof. Pan’s absence. 3 See Zakaria, F. ‘The rise of illiberal democracy’, Foreign Affairs, 1997, vol. 76, pp. 22–43; Plattner, M. ‘Liberal and democracy: can’t have one without the

Notes

4 5

6 7 8

9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16

217

other’, Foreign Affairs, 1998, vol. 77, pp. 171–80; and Plattner, M. ‘From liberalism to liberal democracy’, Journal of Democracy, 1999, vol. 10, pp. 121–34. References to the Vienna Declaration are taken from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights website. Available HTTP: (accessed 19 November 1999). Jeffries, P. ‘Human rights, foreign policy, and religious belief: an Asia/Pacific perspective’, 2000, Brigham Young University Law Review, vol. 3, p. 892. For news of the Malaysian Human Rights Commission see Channel News Asia. Available HTTP: (Accessed 4 April 2000). Kent, A. China, the United Nations, and Human Rights: the limits of compliance, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, p. 165; and Baker, P. ‘China: human rights and the law’, The Pacific Review, 1993, vol. 6, p. 246. Kent, A. China, the United Nations, and Human Rights, p. 165. The author originally intended to include rates of cohabitation as ‘litmus test’ of social conservatism, but this presented some practical and conceptual difficulties. The practical difficulties are the lack of statistical data on the phenomenon. The conceptual difficulties revolve around the fact that in most of the traditional societies of Pacific Asia the concept of informal cohabitation and that of marriage have never been rigidly exclusive. Both of these factors make cohabitation rates a problematical litmus test about the efficacy of ‘social conservatism’. For what it is worth, intuition and snippets of published information suggest that Sinic, Buddhist and Muslim societies throughout Pacific Asia have all witnessed upsurges in cohabitation under one guise or another. For Thai and Malaysia figures see Wisensale, S. ‘Family policy in a changing Vietnam’, pp. 86, 87. For Japanese and South Korean figures see Fukuyama, F. The Great Disruption: human nature and the reconstitution of social order, London: Profile Books, 1999, pp. 42 (Figure 2.4), 292 (Figure A.4). For Chinese, Taiwanese, Singaporean and Hong Kong figures see Jeng, Wei-Shiuan and P. McKendry, ‘A comparative study of divorce in three Chinese societies: Taiwan, Singapore and Hongkong’, International Journal of Sociology of the Family, 1999, vol. 29, pp. 1–17. For a report on a dramatic increase in the rate of child abandonment in South Korea, see Channel News Asia. Available HTTP: (Accessed 17 July 2001). Pao, M. ‘One China, two wives’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 5 July 2001. It is extremely difficult and dangerous to generalise about disparate local cultures, but one example of such a pro-female culture (at least within the domestic sphere) is found among the Sgaw Karen of northern Thailand. See Hayami, Y. ‘Motherhood redefined: women’s choices on family rituals and reproduction in the peripherals of Thailand’, Sojourn, 1998, vol. 13, pp. 242–62. For an example from Isan in Northeast Thailand, see Mills, M. ‘Attack of the Widow Ghosts: Gender, Death, and Modernity in Northeast Thailand’, in Aihwa Ong and M. Peletz (eds), Bewitching Women, Pious Men: gender and body politics in Southeast Asia, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 244–73. New York Times, 17 July 2001. Bello, W. ‘The rise of capitalism in Asia’, Kwok Kian-Woon, I. Arumugam, K. Chia and Lee Chee Keng (eds), ‘WeAsians’: between past and future, p. 131. See, for instance, Saywell, T. ‘Suffer the children: In Singapore, as in much of Asia, stress starts early’, in Far Eastern Economic Review, 9 August 2001. Cited in Wee Wan-ling, ‘The end of disciplinary modernisation? the Asian economic crisis and the ongoing re-invention of Singapore’, to be published in Third World Quarterly.

218 Notes 17 See Kim Jung Min, ‘Grooming a science elite’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 2 August 2001. 18 Newsweek, 28 January 2001. 19 According to Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, in 2000/ 2001 China was absorbing 70 per cent of East and Southeast Asia’s foreign direct investment. See report in Agence France Press, cited in Singapore Window. Available HTTP: (accessed 6 August 2001). 20 Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: the Singapore story: 1965–2000: memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings and Times Editions, 2000, pp. 673–4.

12 Human rights revisited 1 Chan, J. ‘Thick and thin accounts of human rights: lessons from the Asian values debate’, in M. Jacobsen and O. Bruun (eds), Human Rights and Asian Values: contesting national identities and cultural representations in Asia, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000, p. 64. 2 Ibid., p. 65. 3 Nedelsky, J. ‘Reconceiving autonomy: sources, thoughts and possibilities’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 1989, vol. 1, p. 8 4 Ibid., p. 12. 5 See the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights website. Available HTTP: (Accessed 25 July 2001). 6 Donnelly, J. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 33. 7 Ibid. 8 This refers to people such as Chandra Muzaffar in Malaysia, and many others who have been cited earlier in this book. 9 Ihara, C. ‘Why there are no rights in Buddhism – a reply to Damien Keown’, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Online Conference on Buddhism and Human Rights, 1995, p. 1. 10 Donnelly, J. ‘The social construction of international human rights’, in T. Dunne and N. Wheeler (eds), Human Rights in Global Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 79–88. 11 Sebok, A. ‘How Germany views US tort law: duties, damages, dumb luck, and the differences in the two countries’ systems’, in FindLaw’s Legal Commentary. Available HTTP: (Accessed 6 August 2001).

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Index

abortion 37, 51, 61, 106–7, 112–13, 116, 118, 119, 133, 149, 151–4, 173, 182 Abu Talib 123 Afghanistan 122, 131, 136 Alatas, Ali 4, 6, 57 American Bill of Rights 90 Anderson, Benedict 70–1 An-Na’im, Abdullahi 105, 126 Anwar Ibrahim 14, 18, 104, 122, 135 Aquino, Corazon 16 Argentina 10, 75 Aristotle 94, 154; Aristotelianism 155 ASEAN 6, 26–7, 45, 54, 56, 59, 62, 74–5, 181, 186; ASEAN Regional Forum 75 ‘Asia’ 9–11 ASEM 60 ‘Asian values’ 3–12, 18, 24, 29–45, 47, 55, 64, 91, 124, 135–7, 173, 177–87 APEC 52 Asoka Maurya 143, 150 Aung San Suu Kyi 18–19 Australia 10, 75, 115 Australian Human Rights Commission 115 Ayoub, Mahmoud 121–2 Bailey, Beth 22 Baily, Peter 115 Bali 81 Bandung Conference 13, 53 Bayesfsky, Anne 59 Bayon 144 Becker, Carl L. 85, 99–100 Bello, Waldon 105, 184 Berkowitz, Peter 89 Bhutto, Benazir 134 bin Laden, Osama 122 birth control 21, 37–8, 106–7, 153, 173, 182

Bloom, Irene 166–7 Bodhirak, Phra 148 Borobudur 144 Bowen, Donna 130 Broder, David 52 Brown, David 14 Brunei 16 Buddha 139, 147 Buddhadasa Bikkhu 148 Buddhism 4–5, 10, 19, 79, 81–2, 138–56, 161–2, 167, 173, 183, 189–92; Buddha 139, 147; Buddhist monarch 5, 17, 73, 144–6, 179; Engaged Buddhism 148, 151; existentialism in Buddhism 154–5; Mahayana Buddhism 140–2, 146–7, 152; the sangha 142–3, 146; Thervada Buddhism 88, 140–2, 145–6, 150, 152; Vajrayana Buddhism 146 Burma; see Myanmar Bush, George Senior 49–50, 63 Bush, George W. 181 Butterfield, Herbert 102 Buyid empire 125 Caliph Ali 124, 128 Caliph Muawiya 124, 128 Calvin, John 94–7; see also Protestant Christianity Cambodia 17, 26–7, 143, 146, 178, 183, 186 Catholicism 80, 84–5, 92–8, 102, 116–20, 129, 153, 159; the papacy 94–5 Chan, Joseph 24, 188–9 Chandra Muzaffar 39, 104–5, 135 Chen Shui-bian 15, 65–7 Chen, Edward 185 Chen, Peter 31 Cheng, Chung-ying 158

Index Chiang Kai-shek 71 children 3, 7, 33–4, 36–8, 43, 52, 61, 71, 83, 87, 98, 110–13, 116, 119, 121, 133, 151–4, 165, 171–3, 183, 185, 189, 191–2 China 4, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 26, 46, 51–63, 74–6, 81–2, 106, 146, 157–74, 178–83, 186–7; see also Confucianism, Daoism Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Human Rights Research Unit 181 Christianity 21, 79–85, 92–103, 112, 120, 153, 167, 191–2; Orthodox Christianity 93, 97; see also Catholicism and Protestant Christianity Christopher, Warren 50–1 Chulalongkorn (Rama V) 145 Chun Doo-hwan 27, 72 Chung Oknim 67 Clinton, Bill 50, 52 Coates, Ian 44 Cold War 46–51, 53, 56, 63 Columbia 59 communism 85–6, 143 communist/post-communist regimes 6, 15–17, 20, 46–63 communitarianism 6–7, 32–3, 35, 40–2, 92–3, 97, 101, 118–19, 129, 131–3, 149–50, 169–70 Confucianism 5, 12, 29, 31, 35, 54, 68–9, 73, 79–82, 89, 92, 143, 157–74; Neo-Confucianism 162–6 Confucius 82, 160, 166–7, 171 Croatia 59 Cuba 59 Dalai Lama 138, 146, 148, 152 Daoism 81–2, 146, 160–2 de Bary, Wm. Theodore 166, 174 Declaration of Interdependence (Buddhist) 147–8 democracy 4, 6–7, 13–18, 34–7, 40–1, 46–9, 51, 64–74, 100, 113–14, 123–4, 135–6, 178–80 Democratic Justice Party (Korea) 72 Democratic Liberal Party (Korea) 72 Democratic Progressive Party (Taiwan) 16, 66–7 Deng Xaioping 46, 54, 71–2 Descartes, René 98–9, 108 Dhanabalan, S. 34 Dionee, E.J. 52

237

divorce 23–4, 98, 110, 130–1, 134, 172, 182–3 Doi, Takeo 7 Donnelly, Jack 86, 88–9, 190–2 Dutch Labour Party 30–1 duties 6, 83, 89, 93–4, 111–12, 116, 119, 127, 132, 141, 147–9, 159, 161, 181, 189, 191–3 ‘East Asian Miracle’ 8, 27–9 East Timor 54 education 8, 83, 96, 112–13, 162–5, 185–6 Egypt 125 Eisenstadt, S. 84–5 elitism 29, 35, 82, 89, 95, 103, 105, 162–3, 166–9, 171–2; see also relationalism England 117 English Bill of Rights 90, 188 European Union 59, 75, 177, 181 Falun Gong 182 family 7–8, 23, 25–6, 33–4, 37–9, 43, 60–1, 98, 106–7, 116, 119, 130–1, 133–4, 164–5, 182; see also children, divorce, marriage, polygyny, social conservatism, women and gender Fascism 86 Fatmid empire 125 financial crisis (1997/8) 74–6, 184 First International Congress of Ideal Graduates 10 Florida, Robert 152 folk religions 81–2; Chinese 146; Japanese 152 Forsythe, David 106 France 117 Franck, Thomas 97 French Declaration of the Rights of Man 90 Fukuyama, Francis 23, 46–50, 86 G7 104 G77 20, 61 Gaita, Raymond 171 Garfield, Jay 112 Gautama, Siddhartha; see Buddha GATT; see WTO George III 102 Germany 51, 193 Ghaznavid empire 125 globalisation 44–5 Goh Keng Swee 20, 33–4

238 Index Golkar (Indonesia) 69 Gorbachev, Mikhail 46 Grand National Party (Korea) 72 Gray, John 11 Guided Democracy 16 Gulf War 50 Gurevich, Aaron 93 Guthrie Corporation 44 Gyato, Tenzin; see Dalai Lama Hamilton, Alexander 101 Hamzah Haz 136 Han dynasty 160–1 Han Wudi 160 Hanh, Thich Nhat 148 Hatch, Nathan O. 102 Havel, Václav 51 Hefner, Robert 18–19 Hegel, G.W.F. 86, 99 Hershock, Peter D. 138, 155 Hinduism 80–1, 139–40, 144 Ho Chi-minh 71 Ho Wing Men 31 Holland, Tom 74–5 homosexuality 19, 22, 43, 61, 107 Hong Kong 29, 42, 52, 75, 158, 182 Howard, Rhoda 88–9 human rights; see rights Hutanuwatr, Pracha 19, 148 Ihara, Craig 90–1, 192 IMF 4, 48, 75, 104–6, 184 Inada, Kenneth 154 India 59, 143 individualism and human reason 87, 92–7, 99, 110–13, 118, 124, 126, 128–33, 141–2, 149–50, 154–5, 159, 161, 170, 172 Indonesia 4–7, 16, 18–19, 26, 54, 57, 59, 64, 69–72, 81, 129–31, 135–6, 178–9, 181, 190; see also Islam International Network of Engaged Buddhists 148 Iran/Persia 59, 124–5, 134 Iraq 50, 59, 106, 124 Islam 44, 79, 81, 84–5, 88–9, 121–37, 153, 167, 189–92; caliphates 123; Muslim empires 125; Muslims 5, 18–19, 190; Shafi’i school 126; shari’a 125, 129–30, 133; Shi’ism 124–5; Sufism 132–3; Sunni Islam 122, 125–7 Israel 10 Italy 10

James II 102 Japan 7, 10, 12–14, 23, 27–9, 41–2, 55, 66, 72–3, 75, 82, 143, 146, 152, 158, 164–5, 167–9, 172–3, 182, 184–6; Shinto 81 Java/Javanese culture 7, 70, 130–3, 145, 190 Jefferson, Thomas 101 Jiang Zemin 54, 157–8, 168 Johnson, Paul 20 Judaism 80, 84, 93 Kahn, Herman 28 Kamenka, Eugene 90–1 Kant, Immanuel 86, 99, 108, 114, 159 Kelly, David 9 Khan, Kubilai 163 Khmer Rouge 26 Kim Dae-jung 15, 19–20, 67–9, 72, 120 Kim Il-sung 15, 71 Kim Jong-il 71 Kim Jong-pil 72 Kim Young-sam 72 King, Martin Luther 52 Kinsey, Alfred 21 Kissinger, Henry 53 Koh, Tommy 29, 177 Kohl, Helmut 46 Korea 55, 82, 143, 146, 158, 164, 167–9; North Korea 15, 59; Shamanism 69, 81; South Korea 15, 19, 23, 27, 29, 41–2, 64, 67–9, 72–3, 75, 80, 120, 152, 178–80, 186 La fleur, William 152 Langan, John 117 Laos 17, 143, 146, 183, 186 Lapidus, Ira 125 Lasche, Christopher 20 law courts 8, 14, 36, 79, 107–8, 127, 193 League of Arab States 61 Lee Hoi Chang 67 Lee Kuan Yew 3–4, 8–9, 18, 24, 28–40, 42–3, 45, 52–6, 58, 62–4, 71–2, 74–6, 104, 157, 177–8, 182, 186 Lee Teng-hui 19, 67, 72 Leekpai, Chuan 58 legalism 88–9, 125–6, 129, 160–1 Li Peng 56–7 Liberal Democratic Party (Japan) 14

Index liberalism 5, 11, 46–51, 60, 79–86, 88–9, 92, 98–113, 120, 152, 154, 159, 167, 190–2 Lindholm, Charles 122, 132 Ling, L.H.M. 66–7 localism in religions 97, 100–1, 113–14, 131 Locke, John 82–3, 86, 98–100, 103, 110–11, 114 Lorenzen Thorwald 115 Luther, Martin 94–95, 113; see also Protestant Christianity MacIntyre, Alasdair 89 Madison, James 101 Mahathir Mohamed 4, 7, 13, 15, 18, 27, 29–30, 39–45, 52, 54–6, 62–3, 71, 104, 136, 177–8, 182 Malayan Communist Party 33 Malaysia 4, 7, 10, 13–14, 18, 26–30, 39–45, 54–5, 59, 75–6, 81, 129–31, 135–6, 181–3, 190; Malays 5, 14, 40–2, 128–31 Maluka 129 Mao Zedong 15, 20, 71, 157 Marcos, Ferdinand 16, 71 Maritain, Jacques 118 marriage 23–4, 43, 98, 107, 131, 133–4, 164, 172, 183 Martensen, Jan 51 Marwick, Arthur 21–2 Marx, Karl 169 Marxism 86, 169 May Fourth Movement 62 Mead, Margaret 21 Megawati Sukarnoputri 69, 71–2, 136, 179 Mencius 82, 160–3, 167, 171–2 Mexico 59 Mill, John Stuart 82–3, 86, 103–4, 110–11 Minangkabau 130–1 Ming Taizu 172 modernism 21, 85–6, 89, 98–100; the Enlightenment 79, 85, 95; see also liberalism modernity 84–5 Mohamed 122–3, 127, 132 Mongkut (Rama IV) 145 morality 89, 91, 99, 107, 112, 141–2, 159; the author’s perception of humanistic morality 87

239

Musharraf, General Pervez 180 Myanmar 18–19, 27, 36–7, 45, 54–5, 59, 76, 143–4, 146, 148, 183, 186 NAFTA 50, 52 Nakasone, Yasuhiro 42 National League for Democracy (Myanmar) 18 National Operations Council (Malaysia) 40 Nationalist Party (Republic of China/Taiwan) 12, 15–16, 65–7, 72 Ne Win 17, 36 Nedelsky, Jennifer 189–90 Negeri Sembilan 130–1 Nehru, J. 13 neo-colonialism 13, 44–5, 104–9 Netherlands 117 New Korea Party 72 New Life Movement (Nationalist China) 12 New Order (Indonesia) 16 New Zealand 75 Newton, Isaac 99 NGO Family Voice 60–1 Nizam al-Mulk 127 North Korea; see Korea North Vietnam; see Vietnam Onuma Yasuaki 24 Pakistan 59, 134, 180 Panama 49 Pancasila (Indonesia) 135 Panitchpakdi, Supachai 186 Park Chung Hee 68 Parti Islam seMalaysia 131, 135 Pathet Lao 17 Patten, Chris 52, 75 Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights 100 People’s Action Party (Singapore) 14, 31 People’s Republic of China; see China Pepper, Thomas 28 Philippines 16, 26, 64, 73, 81, 105, 120, 178, 181 Plato 154 polygyny 130–1, 133–4, 150, 183; see also marriage pornography 22, 43, 110, 116, 189 Pope Clement V 94 Pope John Paul II 119 Pope John XXIII 117–19 Pope Leo XIII 117

240 Index Pope Pius IX 117 Pope Pius VI 117 Prachathipok (Rama VII) 145 Progressive Party (South Korea) 15 Protestant Christianity 80, 82–3, 92–3, 95–102, 113–16; Anabaptists 95; Baptists 101, 115–16; Calvinism 94–7, 100–1, 113–15, 143, 146; Liberal Christianity/Liberal Protestants 92, 99, 114; Lutheranism 94–6, 113–15; the Reformation 95; Unitarians 114 Qarmati empire 125 Qian Tang 172 race and ethnicity 6, 13–14, 40–2, 62, 70, 103, 109, 111, 118–19, 127–9, 148, 162, 166–7, 171 Rahman, Tunku Abdul 71 Rais, Amien 122 Rajaratnam, S. 31 Ratanakul, Pinot 152–3 Rawls, John 108 Reischauer, Edwin 69 relationalism 3, 5, 7–8, 35, 118, 162, 164–7, 189–93; see also elitism religions (as a subject of study) 79–89 Republic of China; see China for pre-1949; see Taiwan for post-1949 Rhee, Syngman 15, 71 rights (pertaining to human rights) 4, 6, 35, 40–1, 53, 55–63, 87–90, 94, 105–6, 112, 115–20, 129, 134, 138, 147–8, 168–9, 180–2, 188–93 Rodan, Garry 25 Roh Tae Woo 72 Rousseau 169 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 99 Russia 183 Rwanda 107 Saif, Walid 136–7 St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo 85, 93, 96 St Paul 93, 128 St Thomas Aquinas 84, 94–5 Samudavanija, Chai-Anan 19, 148 Saudi Arabia 134 Schklar, Judith 86 Shafi’i 126, 130 Shain, Barry 100 Shih, Chih-yu 66–7

Sihanouk, Norodom 17, 71 Sin, Cardinal Jaime 120 Singapore 3, 6, 13–14, 20, 24, 26, 28–39, 55, 59, 74, 81, 157–8, 173, 177, 182–3, 185 Sisters in Islam (Malaysia) 131 Sivaraksa, Sulak 148 ‘the Sixties’ 18–25, 33–4, 37, 42–3, 52, 89, 108–9, 112; see also ‘the West’ slavery 95, 114, 119–21, 128 social conservatism 18–20 Social Darwinism 86, 103 Social Evils Campaign (Vietnam) 6, 19 socialism 86, 103; see also communism, Marxism Socialist International 31 Somalia 50, 106 Soong, James 67, 72 Soros, George 45 South Korea; see Korea South Vietnam; see Vietnam Soviet Union 46 Spain 117, 129 Sri Lanka 144, 152 State Peace and Development Council (Myanmar) 18 the state 5–7, 31–2, 36–9, 41–2, 54–5, 58, 73, 83, 93–4, 97–8, 123–9, 134, 136, 143–6, 157–8, 160–2, 172, 179, 183–5; state sovereignty 6, 53, 55–8, 94, 184 Stott, David 152 Sudan 59, 122, 129, 131 Suharto 16, 26, 70, 76, 135, 177 Sukarno 13, 16, 18, 70–2 Sun Yat-sen 12, 71 Suu Kyi, Aung San 148 Suzhou Industrial Park (China) 55 Swearer, Donald 144 Syria 59 Taiwan 15–16, 19, 27, 29, 42, 55, 64–7, 72, 74–5, 158, 172, 178–9, 183, 186 Taliban (Afghanistan) 122, 131 Tang Fei 66 Thailand 5, 10, 17, 19, 26, 45, 58, 64, 73, 81, 143–8, 151–2, 178–9, 181–2, 186; Chakri dynasty 145–6; Thai king 5, 73, 179 Thomas, Chantal 106 Tiananmen Square massacre (China) 51, 53–4, 62, 106, 157–8 Tibet 51, 54, 58, 146, 148, 152 Tibi, Bassam 132

Index Truong, Thanh-Dam 143 Tu Weiming 81, 166, 174 Tunisia 125 U Nu 17, 71, 148 United Malays’ National Organisation (Malaysia) 14, 40, 135 UN 4, 6, 15, 20, 26, 47, 50–1, 53–7, 104, 115, 118–19, 134, 190; Bangkok Conference on Human Rights 55–8, 61–2; UN Commission on Human Settlements 60–1; UNESCO 166–7; UN Human Rights Commission 53, 56; UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 190; UN Women’s Conference, Beijing 60; Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 118, 134; World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna) 6, 55–8, 62, 64, 135, 138, 180–1, 183 United Kingdom 10 United States 10, 49–51, 59, 80, 83, 100, 107, 112, 148, 193 Vajirawut (Rama VI) 145 Vietnam 4, 6, 16, 19, 26–7, 55, 59, 76, 82, 143, 146, 148, 157, 161, 164–5, 167–8, 178, 183, 186 Virginia Declaration of Rights 90, 117 Vogel, Ezra 28–9

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Wahid, Abdurrahman 69–72, 122, 135–6 Walesa, Lech 51 Weber, Max 95 Wei Jingsheng 62 ‘the West’ 6, 10–13, 18–25, 33–4, 37, 39–40, 42–5, 51–2, 81, 90–2, 107, 143, 170, 193; see also ‘the Sixties’ William of Ockham 95 Women and gender 95, 103–4, 109, 113, 118–19, 121, 123, 126, 128–31, 133, 136, 148, 150–1, 153, 164–5, 167–8, 171–3, 183; see also divorce, marriage, polygyny World Bank 29, 104–6 World Baptist Alliance 115 World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna); see UN World Council of Churches 136–7 WTO 48, 50, 59, 104, 181, 184, 186 Wouters, Cas 21 Xunzi 161, 163 Yarnall, Thomas 148 Yemen 59, 125 Yoneii Ishii 146 Yu, Hyan-Seok 91 Zaire 107 Zhou Gancheng 60 Zhu Xi 163 Zuckert, Michael 100