Asian Democratic Contributions?
Southeast Asian Nationalists on Guided
Democracy 1
ALAN CHONG
Ph.D. LSE
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
National University of Singapore
AS1#04-05
11 Arts Link
Singapore 117570
SINGAPORE
email: polccs@nus.edu.sg
Abstract: Democracy as political doctrine has its fair share of controversies over the adjudication of
rights and the prioritization of the individual over the community. These debates have largely derived
from its western genesis. The current stage of global development has however supplied many nonwestern perspectives on democracy which suggest that any consensus over an identifiable body of
democratic thought is likely to witness more sub-diversity than ever before. This article argues that
contemporary Asian thinkers on the philosophy of government have a valuable contribution to make to
democratic discourse notwithstanding the clichés of the Asian Values debate of the 1990s. By
performing a sampled reading of José Rizal, Sukarno and Lee Kuan Yew on their diverse interpretations
of guided democracy in a nationalistic context, it will be shown that these three modern Southeast Asian
political thinkers would offer some tentative Asian insights on the democracy of dignity and of
responsibility.
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Democracy is conventionally associated with the discursive contestation over the
demarcation of spheres of rights. As a corollary, it prioritizes the individual’s claims over those
of the community. It is also representative of a system of government whereby the ordinary
citizens collectively enjoy the ultimate level of legitimate political power. These characteristics
of mainstream democratic doctrine are in fact better described as debates. As points of debate,
they have contributed to political theorizing by revealing the dynamism of democratic thought
in responding to change. By embracing debate, democracy’s proponents have also revealed that
it is a supple guardian of rights against encroachment by power. Nevertheless, a detailed review
of the key democratic debates – over relativity of rights and between the prioritization of the
individual and the community – reveal that there are additional debates that have yet to be fully
comprehended.
This article argues that modern Southeast Asian nationalists have fresh intellectual
contributions to make to the existing debates along the lines of arguments of dignity, and of
responsibility within democracy. In particular, modern Southeast Asian nationalists enjoy the
advantage of having experienced historical and ideological hybridism in the laboratory
conditions of transiting decolonization in the twentieth century. These are lessons which are
valuable even in the twenty-first century given the unhappy aftermath of a spate of
humanitarian and military interventions since the end of the Cold War. State-building in Haiti,
Rwanda, Timor Leste, Afghanistan and Iraq have for instance illustrated a glaring
‘responsibility deficit’ in democratic thinking in relation to institution building. Local
nationalism – clinically referred to in the popular media as sectarianism – is often an obstacle to
the understanding and practice of democracy. Frequently, democratic ideals and stability
operate at severe disjuncture.
I am also aware that in choosing the three afore-mentioned thinkers I am risking
argumentative complications with the widespread association of two of them with ‘soft
authoritarianism’ and the highly politicized Asian Values Debate of the 1990s. (Bauer and Bell
1999) As will become evident later, this risk is unavoidable and worth taking since democracy
planted only recent roots in Asia through some degree of indigenization in one way or another.
This indigenization of democracy was enabled by nationalistic personalities, hence the peculiar
conflation of both nationalism and democracy in the political thought of José Rizal, Sukarno
and Lee Kuan Yew. (Africa, 1961; Dahm 1969; Lysa 2002) In Southeast Asia, nineteenth and
twentieth century modern advocates of liberty invariably sought legitimacy in the syntheses of
ideas of community that could free their fellow oppressed while finding cosmopolitan peace
with the world of pre-existing nations and their diversities. Few, if any, political theory readings
have been undertaken from the angle of these thinkers with some notable exceptions. (Fisher
1956; Rafael 1990; Dahm 1969; Barr 2000) Existing scholarship on these thinkers have been
predominantly framed by scholars of comparative politics and history, and measured against the
test of practical government in Asia. (Steinberg 1972; Pauker 1962; Van der Kroef 1968;
Hering 1992; Milne and Mauzy 1990) Nonetheless, the pragmatic concerns of the politics of
Asian modernization should not obscure what is potentially a rich pool of modern Asian
political thought. In the way that philosophical scholars of Machiavelli and Marsilius of Padua
do not associate their intellectual quest with the foibles of contemporary Italian politics, nor
interpreters of Locke, de Tocqueville and Hamilton against the record of Bill Clinton and
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George Bush, one should not dismiss the thought of Rizal, Sukarno and Lee as irrelevant to a
global dialogue on democracy. This article intends to proceed by first identifying some lacunae
in two key debates in mainstream democracy – the conflict of rights and the liberalcommunitarian debate. Thereafter, the three Southeast Asian thinkers will be introduced in
terms of their political inspirations. Finally, we shall organize the thought of the three thinkers
into the two broad thematic contributions of democracy of dignity, and democracy of
responsibility.
Rights Debates in Democracy
The starting point of any introduction to democratic theory is the topic of rights. John
Locke’s statement of men’s natural rights of being individually ‘free, equal and independent’
has served as the basis for arguing the case for democratic government. Within this state of
nature, every man’s rights are governed by the laws of nature allowing each the exercise of
individual rights to the full. Where injustice has been committed against anyone, the victim
enjoys the moral right of proportionate retribution against the perpetrator. Problems arise
however when the retribution exacted is disproportionate due to unrestrained passions,
misguided infliction of injuries, or simply inequalities of physical strength between one another.
Locke even created the category of ‘unjust aggressors’ being converted into legitimate slaves of
the victors on the grounds of due punishment for transgression.
More complex problems arise in the operation of the laws of nature when men’s rights
involve a medium of exchange – money. Money substitutes for other forms of wealth, energies
and services. This enables individuals to avoid immediate barter of perishable goods. Needs can
be contracted to be satisfied across time through currency of exchange. Services too could be
guaranteed by money and substitute for saleable physical goods if one needed to compensate
another. When possession of money enables their accumulators to amass property and exclusive
control in excess of their entitlement under the laws of nature, inequalities result. This then
transforms the state of nature into a state of war.
The possibilities of disproportionate or unjust force in retribution, together with the
potential for conflict arising from property possession through money, transform the condition
of men into a ‘state of war’. This is an intolerable situation inviting the solution of a social
contract among men. The goal behind such a contract is to establish by common consent of all
like-minded individuals a common authority to preserve their rights under collective
procedures. Legislation is passed by a sovereign body with the intention primarily of preserving
life, liberty and property; and secondarily of adjudicating disputes of rights arising from
conflicts over the exercise of power. Natural law now becomes codified by earthly consent; and
every individual within the contract becoming its author and uniformly subject to it. This is
clearly democracy of abstract principle. One can easily extrapolate the institutional design of
civil courts, electoral procedures, political representation and so on from here.
The operational democracy of rights however throws up many normative controversies.
The question of justice of equality is one that has arisen in every practicing democracy. Gender
inequalities; inequalities of intellect; cultural differences; and immigrants as participants in an
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existing social contract are all instances of contestation of the substantive meaning of
democracy. Furthermore, the abstract assumption of maintaining mankind qua individuals as
‘free, equal and independent’ presupposes the possession of adequate material means by each
human person in Locke’s account. One might argue that the dignity of a person’s natural
existence has been compelled by the triumph of capitalism ever since Locke’s lifetime into a
measure of wealth possession. This reduction of the worth of an individual offends
contemporary liberal consciences. But their solutions have yet to be comprehensive beyond
mere UN declarations. John Stuart Mill has captured the problem quite nicely in his
commentary on the representation of minorities:
In a really equal democracy, every or any section would be represented, not
disproportionately, but proportionately. A majority of the electors would always have a
majority of representatives; but a minority of the electors would always have a minority
of the representatives. Man for man, they would be as fully represented as the majority.
Unless they are, there is not equal government, but a government of inequality and
privilege: one part of the people rule over the rest: there is a part whose fair and equal
share of influence in the representation is withheld from them; contrary to all just
government, but above all, contrary to the principle of democracy, which professes
equality as its very root and foundation. (Mill 1905, 127)
The difference between ‘proportionate’ and ‘equitable’ goals is obvious. Thomas Christiano has
clarified this inherent tension in equality alluded to by Mill in terms of an equality of well-being
in competition with an equality of method or procedure. (2002, 34) This alludes of course to the
perennial debate between procedural and substantive rights. In some constitutional
democracies, the judicial system, being the fount of the exercise of equal procedural rights, is
involved by private citizens and government representatives in pursuing substantive rights in
various cases of contestation. The method of non-violent and legal contestation may be fair, but
its results may not be by some other rights-based standard as civil rights campaigns in the US
have shown. The point to be made in this section is essentially that existing democratic debate
has not fully answered the question of according either personal or collective dignity when
called upon to do so in situations of conflicting prioritization of rights.
Individual-Communitarian Debates in Democracy
Since rights begin with the description of the dignity of the individual, it is logical that
the other great debate of democracy involves the relative positions of the rights of the individual
vis-à-vis the community he is willingly part of. As the social contract theorists have elaborated
it, this goes to the heart of the bargain in setting up the sovereign power. The individual
contracts to his fellow individuals the mutual consent for setting up a common power to be
arbiter of disputes among them. Justice has been ‘collectivized’ under the authority of a wider
community. Additionally, this implies a second voluntary compromise on individual rights –
that each contracting individual considers himself or herself bound by the law and decisions
arising thereof. As suggested in the preceding section, this appears to be a matter of the
adjudication of rights when they enter into conflict. But in substantive and operational terms it
involves larger principles of modus operandi that may not be satisfactorily codified
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constitutionally. This is the tussle between the individual’s enjoyment of his or her rights, and
his or her obligations to the contractual community.
Thomas Nagel has suggested that the nature of political justification for any sort of
institutional governance is dual faceted: ‘first as occupants of the impersonal standpoint and
second as occupants of particular roles within an impersonally acceptable system.’ (1991, 30)
This captures the liberal-communitarian debate in democratic thought nicely. Following the
Kantian categorical imperative, the democratic individual wishes his personal and particular
interests to be universally accepted by his fellow humanity. On the scale of the nation-state, this
is theoretically feasible when one subscribes to the social contract theories. Controversies arise
however when one investigates separately the filters for defining the personal and particular
standpoint, and then the impersonal? At the risk of sounding circular, I am suggesting that
social contract theory is ironically being challenged by potentially independent interest
formulations which threaten a reversion to the conflict existing in the Lockean state of war, or
the Hobbesian state of nature. The citizens of a state may will into existence a common pool of
sovereign power out of enlightened self-interest, but the total complexity of their motivations
do not necessarily enter into calculations at that point of conceiving statehood.
Instead, as Iris Marion Young (1989), Anne Phillips (1995) and the postmodern
theorists put it, the complexity of the notion of interest conjoined to identity shifts according to
time and place. Identity within a majority may be transmuted into minority status. Strangers
residing in a long-settled polity find themselves engaging in the politics of difference within a
liberal democracy. The list goes on where majority and minority, liberal and communitarian
deliberate, and frequently clash, over conceding spaces of political prioritization. The notion of
the people becomes subjected to severe strain where centrifugal democratic processes are
allowed to run their course. This can be expressed as the second democratic controversy this
article intends to address via the writings of three Southeast Asian nationalists: how does one
attain the balance of responsibilities between the individual and the community?
Rizal, Sukarno and Lee on Democracy – Implicit Rumination amidst Anticolonialism?
In introducing the three thinkers one has to situate them in the context of colonized
socialization into western education, as well as their consciousness of their independent
reflections on their received socialization. In other words, in this attempt to read an ‘Asian
democratic contribution’, it would be useful to bear in mind Edward Said’s observation that
though imperialism implacably advanced during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
resistance to it also advanced…This by no means exempts the aggrieved colonized
peoples from criticism; as any survey of post-colonial states will reveal, the fortunes and
misfortunes of nationalism, of what can be called separatism and nativism, do not
always make up a flattering story. It too must be told, if only to show that there have
always been alternatives to Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein. Western imperialism and
Third World nationalism feed off each other, but even at their worst they are neither
monolithic nor deterministic. Besides, culture is not monolithic either, and is not the
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exclusive property of East or West, nor of small groups of men or women. (Said 1993,
xxvi-xxvii)
I have chosen to sample Southeast Asian political thought for these parallel reasons. The
Filipino, Indonesian and Singaporean peoples embraced modernization under the tutelage of the
very colonial powers they despised. They imbibed democracy from their imperial masters and
synthesized them according to their nationalist filters. Furthermore, the geopolitical notion of
‘Southeast Asia’ is also symptomatic of so much of postcolonial Asia in terms of its hybridism
of political experience. In pre-modern times, the kingdoms of this region shaped their social and
governing systems under the cultural gravities of both India and China. By the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, trading contact with Arabia introduced Islamic influences. The coming of the
Portuguese in the early sixteenth century ushered in Western thought for another three
centuries. None of the earlier influences were completely eradicated with each successive wave
of thought. Today, postcolonial Southeast Asia is a political chameleon still trying to define its
essentialist identity while also operationalizing a ‘modern Asian’ mode of governance at ease
with the international community of states.
The life of José Rizal Mercado (1861-1896) exemplified the intellectual tension between
the higher ideals of the European Enlightenment manifested in his educational experiences in
Europe and the crude dictatorial conditions of Spanish colonial administration in the
Philippines. Born into a well-to-do Filipino family with rural landholdings and small-scale
industry, Rizal enjoyed the privilege of a Jesuit education at one of the best colleges in Manila
in the 1870s. The syllabi combined rigid discipline, religious exposure and instruction in Latin,
Greek, Spanish, mathematics, philosophy, history, and the physical and biological sciences.
Rizal revealed a distinct appetite for imbibing ideas and exercising his powers of personal
expression. However, his progress into higher education in the Philippines brought encounters
with the racism and religiously-disguised bigotry perpetuated by the Spanish colonial system.
He turned instead towards the metropolitan centre, Spain itself, for a window into the developed
world beyond the Philippines. Thus began a journey of simultaneous discovery of the lofty
ideals of the Enlightenment, and revulsion towards Spanish power politics. His acquaintances
with the intellectual circles in Europe further inspired his reflections on the condition of
mankind and the future of his Filipino brethren. These were also spaces for anti-colonial
ferment. Rizal published his two celebrated novels – Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo –
on the continent indicting Spanish injustice through colorful literary characters. They were
promptly banned in his homeland and their author persecuted for sedition. Yet this was also the
man who addressed the spirit of free expression at a banquet attended by Filipino expatriates
and Spanish literati in Madrid in 1884 on the occasion of two prestigious art prizes being
awarded to Filipino artists:
In reflecting on their palette the splendiferous rays of unfolding glory with which they
surround their Native Land, both express the spirit of our social, moral, and political
life; mankind subjected to harsh tests; unredeemed mankind; reason and aspiration in an
open struggle with preoccupations, fanaticism, and injustices, because sentiments and
opinions cut passage through the thickest walls, because to them all bodies have pores,
all are transparent, and if they lack pen, if the press does not help them, the palette and
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brushes will not only delight the eye but will also be eloquent tributes. (Quoted in Zaide
and Zaide 1999, 72)
Sukarno (1901-1970) traced a similar trajectory but with an intensely more indigenous
slant. The population whose national awakening he intended to arouse was dispersed over some
13000 islands stretching over 3000 miles along the equator. Furthermore, this Indonesian
population comprised multiple peoples with diverse traditions of government and entrenched
social ritual which could only be collectively labeled ‘patron-client’ social relationships. The
successive waves of cultural influence that transited Southeast Asia, left very deep imprints on
the Indonesian psyche. For the Javanese, who are the largest ethnic group among the
Indonesians, pre-modern politics emanated from the notion of a supernatural and phallocentric
kingship. Viable political authority was exercised by a royal figure that, through word of
command, charisma, divine rhetoric or other magical effort, produced the largest amount of
political outcome through minimal ruling effort. The Javanese prided themselves on their
refined, or halus, ways. Not surprisingly, much of the pre-modern narratives of Indonesia
described kingdoms which established their seats and cultures within or in proximity to the
island of Java. Sukarno was born a Javanese, and by extension, maneuvered his personality cult
and other political symbols around the pre-existing centrality of Javanese culture. (Dahm 1969)
Even though Sukarno was born the son of a minor Javanese aristocrat and his Balinese
commoner wife, he was exposed to the modern ideas of the West through the limited education
system erected by the Dutch in the Netherlands East Indies. 2 This was the prestigious Dutch
secondary school, the Hogere Burger, in Surabaya. While schooling, he boarded with the
family of one of the early Indonesian nationalists, Omar Said Tjokroaminoto, who had cofounded Sarekat Islam. Political renaissance, humanistic matters and religious revival became
topics of discussion in the household. Young Sukarno became a regular attendee of
Tjokroaminoto’s nationalist circles. According to Sukarno’s own account, it was at the
Surabaya branch of the Theosophical Society that he first started reading the works of JeanJacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Sidney and Beatrice Webb,
Garibaldi, Karl Marx and other political greats. (Sukarno 1966a, 39) The lid on learning was off
from then on. During his years in Bandung studying for his civil engineering degree, he
enthusiastically participated in nationalist groups of all ideological stripes and continued to
consume tomes of political philosophy and biography. It was in Bandung that Sukarno led a
General Study Club and reflected deeply about how far he could embrace Marxism in his vision
for Indonesia. In those heady days, Marxist egalitarianism was one with democracy. ‘We need
equality. We’ve had inequality all our lives’, he hollered at the nationalist crowd in 1926, ‘[l]et
us dispense with titles. Although I was born into the ruling class, I never call myself raden and I
beg you never address me so from this moment forward.’ (Sukarno 1966a, 72) The intellectual
curiosity about philosophy, and political praxis in particular, continued even during his two
terms of imprisonment by the Dutch between 1929 and 1942. During the trial that preceded the
first prison term, Sukarno himself led his own defense by mounting a detailed political
argument which was subsequently published in both Dutch and Bahasa Indonesia titled
Indonesia Accuses. There is no doubt that Sukarno was a propagandist and a significant thinker
with a knack for synthesis. His letters and speeches before and after Indonesian independence in
1945 reflected the mind of a natural orator and an inspirer of unity.(Sukarno 1966b) This was
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the man who invented a version of populist Indonesian socialism called Marhaenism and
claimed to be able to synthesize modern scientism and ancient culture. (Sukarno 1966a, 76)
Lee Kuan Yew (1923-present), the relatively more youthful of our trio of Asian
nationalists, also grew up in a colonial context yet enjoyed access to modern education. Born
into a fairly well-to-do family, Lee did not develop anti-colonial sentiments nor significant
political leanings till the advent of the Japanese Occupation during World War Two. In fact,
despite difficulties in adjusting to primary school, he attended one of Singapore’s premier
secondary schools, Raffles Institution. His parents impressed upon him the importance of
making a career out of the professions their friends exhibited – lawyers and doctors. Such was
the occupational mobility allowed by British colonialism. Lee resolved to read law in London
following his sterling performance at Raffles. However, the outbreak of war in Europe by 1939
temporarily postponed all possibility of an overseas education. Lee instead won a scholarship to
continue his studies at Raffles College, a tertiary institution founded by the colonial
government. It was here that Lee first encountered hints of the political defensiveness of the
Malays during student politics, and observed that received traditions of student culture, such as
ragging, made little sense. The Japanese Occupation which interrupted his time at Raffles
College, proved an even harder lesson for Lee. The much-vaunted civilized standards of British
tutelage took a severe beating at Japanese hands. Lee’s memoirs record extended observations
of both the panic evacuation of British civilians and the crumbling morale of British and
Australian soldiers. The two chapters of his memoirs dealing with the Fall of Singapore up till
the surrender of the Japanese to the returning British are framed in a tone comparable to a
Machiavellian narration of socio-political conditions attending to a transition between two
sovereign powers. Alternatively, one could also sense that it was Lee’s version of learning
through the University of Life the Hobbesian lessons of anarchy within the ‘state of nature’, and
its absolute cure.
They gave me vivid insights into the behavior of human beings and human societies,
their motivations and impulses. My appreciation of governments, my understanding of
power as the vehicle for revolutionary change, would not have been gained without this
experience. I saw a whole social system crumble suddenly before an occupying army
that was absolutely merciless. The Japanese demanded total obedience and got it from
nearly all. They were hated by almost everyone but everyone knew their power to do
harm and so everyone adjusted. Those who were slow or reluctant to change and to
accept the new masters suffered. (Lee 1998, 74)
Following the British return, Lee was able to realize his plan for reading law in Britain. Here he
built upon his observations of politics and human nature by scrutinizing the already diminished
British prestige at its source. Apart from his impressive First class honors, Lee observed at close
range the distinctions of class and race at work in the settings of London and Cambridge.
British society was transiting in its dominant attitudes from the order, pride and efficiency that
built empire, to a set more at home with a nondescript western power. (Lee 1998, 113-128) Lee
however admired the workings of the parliamentary system in generating a peaceful rotation of
governments between the Conservative and Labour Parties. An important supplement to that
was the implementation of a cradle-to-grave welfare system which Lee initially admired, but
was to subsequently debunk when he held the reins of government in Singapore.
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What struck me most was the fairness of the system. The government was creating a
society that would get everybody – rich or poor, high or low or middle class – on to one
broad band of decent living standards…I was too young, too idealistic to realize that the
cost to the government would be heavy; worse that under such an egalitarian system
each individual would be more interested in what he could get out of the common pool
than in striving to do better for himself, which had been the driving force for progress
throughout human evolution. (Lee 1998, 129)
By the 1960s, when his PAP (People’s Action Party) government confronted the problems of a
developing Singapore, he had to confront the challenge of bonding and inspiring the people to
generate wealth first, before he could redistribute it.
Within these political lives, one does surmise the existence of threads of democratic
thought amidst the passion for political liberation of their subject peoples. Indeed as Said has
suggested, imperialism awakens the mind of the subject even while it oppresses through the
preservation of as near a monopoly of truth as possible. Rizal, Sukarno and Lee have variously
been philosophically enriched by access to western and modern education. Its incidental
byways extending into, and from, their western host societies offered invaluable insights into
human nature and the dangers of untested ascriptive identities. Philosophical anger clearly
emanates from their thoughts and lives. These were angry nationalists first and foremost. Yet to
be equal, and to surpass the repressive authorities, each of them was compelled to think through
and pronounce on the rights of the underdog. Democracy thus emerges as a dimension of the
good fight – the arguments for the weak and downtrodden; and a psychological smite at the
arrogance of deceitful government. On the other hand, in today’s context, one might just as well
turn the mirror of scrutiny the other way and measure postcolonial Asia by the standards of its
modern philosophers. This indeed is why it is useful to understand the uneven trajectory of
Asian democracy vis-à-vis the hopes of universalist liberals.
Democracy of Dignity
So much of the nationalist credentials of our trio of modern Asian thinkers revolve
around the dignity of the individual writ large as ‘the people’ from whose milieu they emerged.
By ‘dignity’, it is meant a positive measure of self-worth, merit and of stature. The colonial
powers of Spain, the Netherlands and Britain were all varying degrees of liberal democratic
states by the late nineteenth century. Yet their franchise of rights did not extend to the
populations they governed in their overseas colonies. In fact, their very operationalization of the
concept of colonialism under the rubric of imperial rule left much to be desired against the
ideals of Locke, Mill, Voltaire and so on. European Leviathans abroad did not pay attention to
the niceties of respecting a consensual social contract.
Take for example, Rizal’s trademark umbrage at Spain’s twin neglect of the
modernization of education for the Filipinos, as well as the abuses of wealth-owning Spanish
friars in the Archipelago. These serve as the vehicles for his discourses on the wider malaise in
Madrid’s practice of government in her overseas territories. As he spelt it out in article after
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article, anti-colonialism did not necessarily mean the eradication of Spanish authority; the issue
was representation of the righteous instead of the corrupt:
[T]o say that “the only properly called social ties that unite the Philippines with the
[Iberian] Peninsula are the Catholic Religion and the traditional respects” is to offend
the stainless patriotism and the loyalty of the Filipinos who since Legazpi have been
joined to Spain, not for reasons of religion nor of traditionalism but, at the beginning,
for reasons of high political convenience, and later, for love, for affection for the Mother
Country.
To involve the integrity of the mother country in those Islands in the mediation of the
religious orders, as the friar organ seeks, is to involve it in the influence of
obscurantism, of fanaticism, of oppression, and of tyranny; and certainly Spain did not
plant in those Islands the invincible standard of Castile so that they might be the
exclusive patrimony and feudal dominion of the reactionary friars but rather to
assimilate and equalize them with herself, moaning if she moans, unfortunate if she is
unfortunate, enjoying progress, liberty, rights, social as well as political, when she
enjoys these precious gifts, this inestimable legacy of the French Revolution,
systematically anathematized by the friars to their misfortune. (Rizal 1889a, 79)
Rizal has cloaked his defense of his fellow Filipinos’ prestige behind the cause of a righteous
government that ought to distinguish genuine loyalty from mercenary deceit by certain religious
pretenders to political power. Spanish legitimacy had to be based on incontrovertible intentions
to govern for the good of the people of the land. Rizal’s democratic rhetoric unsurprisingly took
on the philosophical cudgels against the local version of the orientalist myth that the non-white
natives (‘Indios’) were biologically indolent and incapable of intellectual labor. (Africa 1961)
In this line of critique, he attacked the worthlessness of religiously indoctrinated syllabi that
featured rote-learning of Latin and other church-related subjects. In doing so, Rizal was
consciously drawing upon his encounters with racism in his schooling in the Philippines as well
as his university sojourn in Madrid in the late 1880s. One can glean a strong plea for universal
democratic equality through education for equal dignity of opportunities and abilities:
Teach, educate, and enlighten the Indio; rather, teach us, educate us, and enlighten us,
and indifference, apathy and indolence will disappear. The blind man who has seen light
cannot help but love it. He who has heard once the harmonies of Meyerbear or the
melodies of Rossini cannot help but love music. He who has seen the advantages of a
better life will fight to get out of the moral ergastula 3 in which he lives and will always
tend towards and look for that object that men desire and dream of, which is the relief of
their wretchedness if not happiness, a deity exiled from the earth by men.(Rizal 1992,
12-13)
Equality of procedure and access does not automatically translate into equality of rights
if the thickness of structural inequalities in the status of dignity between two persons is
undiminished. Where Rizal had made equality of dignity an issue of reciprocal loyalty to the
colonial Leviathan and educational standards, Sukarno’s speeches attacked colonialism for
being a social contract that lacked the rigorous application of consent:
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Wherever the Europeans have occupied some Asian country to “give leadership”, there
then appears “order”, but this “order” is, in fact, neither more nor less than pseudoorder. For order that is truly order consists of the orderly conditions obtainable only if
there is mutual agreement between the party governing and the party governed, to be
exact: when between these two parties there is the deepest harmony.
And those are not the conditions in the Asian countries which have been occupied by the
European nations to “give them leadership”. Every one of the peoples’ wishes which
deviates from and does not accord with the wishes of the Europeans who have colonized
them, every effort by the people to develop freely apart from that “leadership”, is
answered with harsh regulations. It is these harsh regulations which then bring “order”;
it is these harsh regulations which bring the “orderly conditions” and “peacefulness”.
But, for whoever is prepared to understand, it is quite obvious that such “order” in
reality is pseudo-order. For whoever wants to understand, it is evident that such “order”
in reality is inverted order.
A row of gallows is also “order”, but its orderliness is “orderliness of the
gallows”…(Sukarno 1928, 45)
Sukarno has invoked Lockean rationales for liberal government against the colonials. It goes
even deeper to suggest that it is even more sinister that the ‘gift’ of civilized government
towards a people who have not freely given their consent to it is as good as the Trojan horse of
dictatorship. Freedom to consent to government by another involves both the governor and tobe-governed respecting one another’s dignity. Along with the reference to ‘pseudo-order’, the
closing imagery of the “orderliness of the gallows” is particularly pointed as an indication of the
desire for choice without any coercive ambience.
Colored by his colonial context, Sukarno has also pondered the inequality of humanity.
The great philosophers whose books he read and communicated with in his mind must have
imbued him with many sparks of curiosity considering the inequalities of humanity. Sukarno
himself admitted to admiration of classical Greek democracy. He recalls how a school lecture
set him off on the possibilities of mounting tribunals and shouting his case before the
assembled: ‘I visualized angry thinkers making speeches and spouting slogans like “Down with
oppression” and “Up with freedom.” My emotions became inflamed.’ (Sukarno 1966a, 40) The
colonial market scene, so vividly rendered by John Furnivall’s thesis of the ‘plural society’,
offered Sukarno a different muse:
I took endless walks by myself and tried to sort out the thoughts whirling around in my
brain. By the hour, I stood motionless on the little bridge which spanned the small river
and watched the ceaseless parade of humanity. I saw the Indonesian peasant in bare feet
shuffling wearily towards his dilapidated hut and I saw the Dutch colonialist riding
snappily by in his open landau drawn by two sleek grays. I saw the white families
looking so clean while their brown brothers were so dirty, their bodies so smelly, their
belongings so ragged, their children so smutchy. I wondered how people could be
expected to stay clean when they had no other clothes to change into. I drank in the
Page 11 of 23
stench of the rotting garbage and choked sewers and I fixed the stink of my people’s
poverty firm in my nostrils so that when I’m 10,000 miles away I can still smell it. I
looked into the despair of every man and woman I saw. I just drained in the people. My
pauper people.
From the bridge I blinked out at the teeming masses and I understood clearly this was
our strength and I had a great awareness of their suffering. Even a child cannot remain
untouched once he sees signs on swimming pools that scream, “No dogs and inlanders
[natives] allowed.” (Sukarno 1966a, 41)
Sukarno believed that sincere equality between man and man required the leveling of dignity
even where material circumstances were dire. When he became president, he used to respond to
western threats of economic sanctions with the diatribe ‘go to hell with your aid’. As the
president of independent Indonesia, he took pains to cut an immaculately dressed figure with
both domestic and foreign audiences. He saw himself and his erstwhile Partai Nasional
Indonesia as an army of rebels, but as in an army, there had to be uniforms and leaders who
looked ‘crisp and efficient’. He also wished his people to take the cue of aspiring to be modern
from him and his comrades. The traditional sarong symbolized feudalism. ‘The minute an
Indonesian dons trousers, he walks erect like any white man. Immediately, [when] he wraps that
feudal symbol around his middle, he stoops over in a perpetual bow. His shoulders sag. He
doesn’t stride manfully, he shuffles apologetically. He instantaneously becomes hesitant and
servile and subservient.’ (Sukarno 1966a, 80-81) For Sukarno, dignity of the mind, and in the
perception of selves and others has as substantive a value as appearances:
I prefer uniforms for every public appearance because I know downtrodden people
delight to see their President crisply tailored. If the Chief Executive appeared in a
rumpled, wilted suit like a tourist with his hat brim damp, there would be a groan of
disappointment. Our Marhaens [Indonesian peasant comrades 4 ] can see that every day
in every kampong. An Indonesian leader must be a commanding figure. He must exude
power. For a once-subjugated race, this is imperative. (Sukarno 1966a, 81)
Sukarno has been dismissed by the popular western media for his vainglory and outlandish
political speeches during his presidency. Nonetheless, he has something important to say about
the condition of man being subjected by his fellow man under the simplistic notion of
government for all.
Lee Kuan Yew’s ruminations are less fiery, but they are no less inspired by the desire
that democracy for the Asian context needed to accommodate the dignity of Asians as human
beings equal to the rest of humanity. Up till the Japanese Invasion in 1942, Lee lived in a world
where the British were at the top of a social and political pecking order. The British had let it be
known that they were indispensable in both Singapore and neighboring Malaya for keeping the
peace between the Asian races domiciled there and the general economic livelihood of all. It
was also widely assumed that, depending upon the sufferance of British officialdom, a select
number of English-educated Asians were allowed to associate with white colonial power by
participating in the governor’s Executive or Legislative Council. These were advisory bodies
with no binding authority. Lee observed that some were knighted for long service or for their
Page 12 of 23
loyalty, but they ‘were patronized by the white officials, but accepted their inferior status with
aplomb, for they considered themselves superior to their fellow Asiatics.’ (Lee 1998, 51-52)
The British, on their part, cultivated this myth of natural superiority for ‘any British, European
or American who misbehaved or looked like a tramp was immediately packed off because he
would demean the whole white race, whose superiority must never be thrown into doubt.’ (Lee
1998, 52) Lee’s political awakening to the pretence of white supremacy was shattered by the
dramatic retreat staged by the British military and administrative apparatus. Lee observed:
The whites in charge had gone. Stories of their scramble to save their skins led the
Asiatics to see them as selfish and cowardly. Many of them were undoubtedly
exaggerated in the retelling and unfair, but there was enough substance in them to make
the point. The whites had proved as frightened and at a loss as to what to do as the
Asiatics, if not more so. The Asiatics had looked to them for leadership, and they had
failed them. (Lee 1998, 52-53)
The Japanese, even though Asian, were no idealistic brethren either. Lee’s substantive political
views on the matter of an independent future for Singapore took shape most concretely in
postwar Britain, where he studied law in Cambridge, and commuted to London for some
lectures and examinations. In between, he encountered slices of British social disdain for
waiting upon their colonial subjects. He attributed it to the ‘color prejudice of the British
working classes’, bus conductors, salesgirls and waitresses in the shops and restaurants, as well
as ‘the landladies in Hampstead’.(Lee 1998, 113-114) Lee concluded:
I had now seen the British in their own country and I questioned their ability to govern
these territories for the good of the locals. Those on the spot were not interested in the
advancement of their colonies, but only in the top jobs and the high pay these could give
them; at the national level they were primarily concerned with acquiring the foreign
exchange that the exports of Malayan rubber and tin could earn in US dollars, to support
an ailing pound sterling. (Lee 1998, 113)
In fairness, Lee paid tribute to the virtues of the Parliamentary System as he witnessed it as a
visitor to the House of Commons and through friendships he forged with Labour Members of
Parliament. He was also impressed with the gentlemanly attitudes of the educated elites who
were his teachers – their sense of fair play and courtesy. But he was also influenced by Harold
Laski’s lectures on socialism, and his encounters with Marxist campaigners in London. Their
ideals, not their methods, spoke to his yearning for Asian self-determination and self-respect.
Indeed Lee’s association with the so-called ‘Asian Values debate’ stemmed from his widely
articulated view that the good of one’s holistic community was prior to the equality of rights in
a liberal framework. Lee has consistently been conscious of the variegated needs of dealing
with the inequalities attending to postcolonial development in Asian contexts. ‘[O]ne cannot
ignore the history, culture and background of a society. Societies have developed separately for
thousands of years at different speeds and in different ways. Their ideals and their norms are
different. American or European standards of the late 20th century cannot be universal.’ (Lee
1992, 382) In an interview published in 1998, Lee curiously described himself as a ‘liberal
democrat’: ‘As someone who believes in equal opportunities so that everybody gets an equal
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chance to do his best, and with a certain compassion to ensure that the failures do not fall
through the floor.’ (Lee quoted in Han et al. 1998, 130)
Between Rizal, Sukarno and Lee, one can glean the shape of a democracy of dignity
derived from and applied to an ‘Asian other’ of a western liberal democracy. The following
three features abstracted from the above-mentioned ideas should perhaps not be thought of as
exclusively Asian characteristics that build a case for ending dialogue with western liberal
democracy. These are points of departure for new sub-debates that enliven the discourse of
democracy.
Firstly, dignity may subsume individual and collective human rights, but the latter do
not necessarily substitute completely for the former. The former, while being frequently
intangible, contains meaning for its possessor. As Rizal, Sukarno and Lee suggest, equality
must be felt in both heart and mind, aside from being inscribed as a list of rights onto a national
constitution. Among the three, Sukarno goes so far as to contribute the suggestion that dignity
lies as much in appearances and their generated perceptions. Dressing well, in tune with the
spirit of being modern, is as reflective of one’s mental capacity as the physical discipline of
striding proudly as everyman’s equal into the future. Mainstream liberalism already preaches
respect for rights through a nighwatchman state, should it not consider how dignity might be an
operational manifestation of rights in practice? Or should dignity be distinct but interdependent
on the guarantee of rights?
Secondly, there is a high premium placed upon equal access to the highest educational
standards available as a leveler of inequality among men. Once again, one might ponder what
values inhere in rights possession when their holder is ignorant of their potential? Education
liberates the mind and the possibilities of its contemplation of equality. Where education for
liberalism is concerned, this debate should welcome inputs from the sub-fields of Comparative
Politics and International Relations. The possibilities for peaceful coexistence among men
aware of their governance under a regime of rights cannot be attained until the mind is formed.
Thirdly, the discourse of dignity enables liberal democracy’s supporters to uncover the
hidden unequal power relations that obscure their ideology’s appeal. This is as pertinent in the
postcolonial transition of much of the Third World, as well as the reestablishment of failed
states in the post-911 context. The debate over whether Islam and liberal democracy are
unalterably opposed to one another may be clarified through the filter of substantiating the
appropriate level of dignity between one culture and another. Anti-colonialism in the context of
the 1890s-1940s offers more than lessons of historical vintage for political theory because it
illuminates the potential for oppression to operate even under the most well-intentioned ethics
of caring. Incidentally, the very concept of colonialism implemented as imperial rule emanating
from a liberal democratic society should be regarded as an abomination.
Democracy as Responsibility
Closely associated with dignity in the discourse of the three thinkers under study is the
notion of responsibility. In the present usage, responsibility should be understood as the sphere
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of action that proceeds directly from a person’s formal and informal duties as an office-holder,
or as a moral and political agent. (Adapted from Scruton 1983, 404) There already exists a vast
literature treating the concept of moral and political responsibility in classical Asian
philosophy.(Senghaas 2002) I do not wish to engage these for reasons of space and focus. What
is significant in the writings of the ‘modern’ Rizal, Sukarno and Lee is the idea that
nationalism, as the conscientious expression of the democratic will of the people, requires
espousing an ethic of care for present and future generations. Rizal’s voice, articulated through
the memory of Crisostomo Ibarra, the main protagonist of his novel Noli Me Tangere, captures
this ethic of responsibility for social improvement accurately:
“Do not forget that if knowledge is the patrimony of humanity, it is inherited only by
those who have the heart,” the old man reminded him. “I have tried to transmit to you
what I have received from my teachers; the riches I have endeavored to augment as
much as I could, and I am passing it on to the following generation. You will do the
same with those who come after you, and you can triple it, for you are going to very rich
countries.” He added, smiling: “They come in search of gold; go to their country to look
for that other gold which we lack. Remember, however, that all that glitters is not gold.”
(Rizal 1996, 52)
This passage is almost autobiographical of Rizal’s immersion in Spain and Western Europe in
the late 1880s. The sense of obligation to uplift the downtrodden with a correction in politics
operates in tandem with the creation, or recovery, of dignity.
Rizal spent his adult life speaking up for his causes not as an individualist, but as one
concerned for his fellow Filipinos within the wider fabric of cosmopolitan humanity. He was
very clear in distinguishing his attack on the imperious and corrupt Spanish clergy from the
other absolute of arrogating the powers of God upon the altar of individualism. Dictatorship and
debasement of public office is derived from self-centered priorities – ‘more arrogant is he who
wishes to subject another’s will and dominate all men. More arrogant is he who poses as God,
who pretends to understand every manifestation of God’s will.’ (Rizal 1889b, 58) He was
writing a letter of support to the twenty young women of the town of Malolos whose petition
for the opening of a ‘night school’ for learning Spanish had been rejected initially by the
Spanish Governor-General upon the advice of the Spanish parish priest of that town. Implicitly
invoking Christian ethics for embedding the individual’s interests within the succor of the
community, Rizal invited his audience to consider situating their struggle in terms of
responsibility to their fellow humanity in seven theses:
What I ask is for all to think, to reflect and meditate, investigate and [sift] in the name of
reason the following that I am going to state:
First and foremost. Some become treacherous because of the cowardice and negligence
of others.
Second. Lack of self-respect and excessive timidity invite scorn.
Page 15 of 23
Third. Ignorance is bondage, because like mind, like man. A man without a will of his
own is a man without personality. The blind who follows [an]other’s opinion is like a
beast led by a halter.
Fourth. One who wants to help himself should help others, because if he neglects others,
he too will be neglected by them. One mid-rib is easy to break, but not a bundle of many
mid-ribs, tied together.
Fifth. If the Filipino woman will not change, she should not be entrusted with the
education of her children. She should only bear them. She should be deprived of her
authority in the home; otherwise she may unwittingly betray her husband, children,
country, and all.
Sixth. Men are born equal, naked and without chains. They were not created by God to
be enslaved, neither were they endowed with intelligence in order to be misled, nor
adorned with reason to be fooled by others. It is not pride to refuse to worship a fellow
man, to enlighten the mind, and to reason out everything. The arrogant one is he who
wants to be worshipped, who misleads others, and wants his will to prevail over reason
and justice.
Seventh. Analyze carefully the kind of religion taught you. Find out if that is the
command of God or the teaching of Christ for alleviating the suffering of the poor, for
comforting those in pain. Consider everything taught you, the aim of every sermon, the
underlying reason for every Mass, novena, rosary, scapular, image, miracle, candle belt,
and other things that are forced upon you, dinned daily into your ears and dangled
before your eyes, and discover their beginning and their end, and then compare that
religion with the pure religion of Christ, and see if your Christianity is not like the
milking animals or like the pig that is fattened, not for its own sake, but in order to sell it
at a high price and make more money out of it. (Rizal 1889b, 65-66)
There can be no clearer echoes of the biblical injunction of doing unto one’s neighbor what one
wishes for oneself. Rizal describes the philosophical tension between the responsibility of
reason towards oneself and the responsibility unto others who are leaders or followers. The
echoes of Lockean, and even Rawlsian, individual rationality are self evident but the individual
is restrained by one’s need to consider every decision’s ripple effects upon society. Preferably,
individual rationality should exist in relation to communitarian good in happy reciprocity. This
was important in the Philippine context where poverty characterized the masses and well-to-do
natives of Rizal’s social background were a minority. In one passage in the Noli, the democratic
aspirations of the poor and downtrodden were described in a poignant snippet of wishful
thinking that reconciles Rizal’s seven theses in a network of complex social reciprocity:
Listen, Mother, to what I have thought of. Today the son of the late Don Rafael [a
distinguished Filipino among his townsfolk] arrived from Spain. He must be as good as
his father was. Well then, tomorrow you get Crispin out, you collect my salary and you
tell them I will no longer be a sacristan [altar server]. As soon as I get well, I will go
and see Don Crisostomo and I will plead with him to admit me as tender of his cattle…I
Page 16 of 23
am old enough. Crispin can study at the home of the old man Tasio, who’s not given to
beating and is good, even if the priest does not believe it. What do we have to fear from
the priest, anyway? Can he make us poorer than we already are? Believe it Mother, the
old man is good. I saw him several times in church when there was no one else; he
kneels and prays, believe it.
So, Mother, I will no longer be a sacristan. I earn little, and what I earn is turned into
fines. All complain of the same things. I will be a cowhand and I will take good care of
what is entrusted to me. I will make myself loved by the owner! Perhaps he will allow
us to milk a cow so we can drink milk. Crispin likes milk very much. Who knows? He
may gift us with a calf, a young female cow, if he sees I am behaving well. We will take
good care of it and fatten it like our hen. (Rizal 1996, 95)
That the democracy of responsibility is intrinsic to the democracy derived from poverty
is equally prominent in Sukarno’s thoughts and speeches. He indicts Dutch colonialism for its
anti-liberal capitalism. Large foreign conglomerates compelled the largely self-sufficient
Indonesian peasant and worker into a relationship of dependency through the wage system,
taxation and harsh quota exactions of their produce. Unlike British capitalism, there was no
attempt to allow an indigenous bourgeoisie to thrive under colonial patronage. Sukarno’s
prognosis was therefore to be derived from Indonesia’s concrete context. This is where he
simplifies the place of the individual to that of the plight of Marhaen. According to Sukarno’s
own autobiography, this concept was inspired by his search for an explanation of the original
political economy of subsistence among the majority of Indonesians who constituted the
agricultural poor. Sukarno once encountered a peasant in the province of Sunda and ventured to
inquire of his economic circumstances. It turned out that the peasant owned his own plot which
had been handed down across the generations. The peasant also revealed that he owned his own
tools. Sukarno asked if he was farming for someone else. To this the peasant replied in the
negative and added that his produce was ‘just barely enough’ to keep a wife and four children
alive. Sukarno inquired further regarding his house; the peasant said he owned it as well. “It is
only a small one, but it is mine”, he told Sukarno. (Sukarno 1966a, 62) For the latter, this
phrase summed up the spirit of self-subsistence which the Dutch cruelly interrupted with the
enforcement of extraction quotas, taxes and so on under the logic of industrial capitalism. That
peasant’s name was Marhaen, from which Sukarno distilled Marhaenism across all Indonesian
occupations where the native owned his own labor, earnings and property:
A Marhaenist is a person with small means; a little man with little ownership, little
tools, sufficient to himself. Our tens of millions of impoverished souls work for no
person and no person works for them. There is no exploitation of one man by another.
Marhaenism is Indonesian Socialism in operation. (Sukarno 1966a, 63)
Scholars of Soviet Marxism and Russian nationalism may recognize this as Sukarno’s own
idealization of the self-sufficient village economy. But for Sukarno, this was the democratic and
moral weapon against the imperial capitalism of the Dutch. The moral strength of the
Marhaenist lies in his redemption of the meaning of humane society and in this regard, any
ideology or religion that can be complementary in attaining this communitarian end should be
embraced. Marhaenist democracy ought to be ‘economic democracy’ and ‘democracy-of-
Page 17 of 23
society’ in the sense that it banishes the motive of employing labor for pure profit. In Sukarno’s
words, ‘the object of socio-nationalism is to correct conditions in society, so that conditions
which are now lop-sided will become perfect conditions, wherein no people are oppressed,
wherein no people are afflicted, wherein no people are impoverished and miserable.’ (Sukarno
1932, 162) There is thus no contradiction in the ethical aims of nationalism, socialism,
Marxism, and Islamism contra capitalism. This unity of diversity against exploitation allowed
Sukarno to describe a democratic nationalist who could simultaneously be a comrade of his
local community, and at one with cosmopolitan democracy:
The genuine Nationalist, whose Nationalism is not merely a copy of Western
nationalism but whose Nationalism arises out of a love for human beings and mankind,
the Nationalist who accepts his sense of nationalism as an inspiration and who puts that
feeling into practice as an act of service, is invulnerable to all petty and narrow ideas.
(Sukarno 1926, 5)
Lee Kuan Yew’s take on democracy as responsibility is also notable for its indirectness.
Lee has been strident about arguing for good government rather than democratic government
per se. Nevertheless, depending on how it is contextually defined, democracy can be a subset of
good government. In a forum at the Royal Society of International Affairs in London in 1962,
Lee had the following to say concerning the prescription of democracy for Singapore and other
developing states:
There are vagaries about the system of one-man-one-vote which make it an extremely
hazardous system to run anywhere in the underdeveloped and the under-educated
world…
We [in Singapore] are not exceptional, we are neither more intelligent nor bettereducated than many of our neighbors. We have been more fortunately endowed and
enjoy a better standard of living, but I do not think the basic factors are materially
different. Where the majority of your population is semi-literate, it responds more to the
carrot than to the stick, and politicians at election time cannot use the stick. So this leads
to a situation where he who bids the highest wins.
At a time when you want harder work with less return and more capital investment, oneman-one-vote produces just the opposite. The offer of more return with less work ends
up in bankruptcy. I would say that but for the enormous prestige of Mr Nehru and the
quality of the leadership at the very top around him, I do not think it would have worked
in India either. It is not for me to say what is likely to happen in India in the next decade
– Mr Nehru cannot go on forever….
It is not a tradition with the Malays nor with the Chinese to count heads; it has always
been [the tradition] to listen to the dicta of the elder. Mind you, I think it will endure in
Malaya for some time, but for how long, I don’t know. I should imagine that with every
passing year there will be mutations made to the system in order to make it still work.
We all know that barely five months ago the Tunku [Abdul Rahman, Prime Minister of
Malaya] brought in several basic amendments to the constitution, a constitution drafted
Page 18 of 23
by five eminent jurists from the five Commonwealth countries. They settled in Rome
and drafted what was jurisprudentially a sensible and an elegant constitution – but it was
not going to work. Very wisely, the Tunku decided that he would change bits and
pieces….
Government, to be effective, must at least give the impression of enduring, and a
government which is open to the vagaries of the ballot box – when the people who put
their crosses in the ballot boxes are not illiterate but semi-literate, which is worse – is a
government which is already weakened before it starts to govern. (Lee 1962, 365-367)
I have taken liberties with the length of my argument by employing this long quote to suggest
that modern Asian leaders like Lee are seldom politically correct in relation to the intricacies of
Lockean liberalism. Democracy for the people might also mean paternal leadership that
oversees the long-term interests of the less-knowledgeable. It is also principled when it is
altruistically applied to developmental contexts where the normative good is to prioritize
delivery of prosperity unto the greater number of the population. In this way, between any two
individuals in the same community, their relative status is unequal and they should be content
about it, since no one is worse off when the better of the two leads with both their interests at
heart. Lee has therefore gone on to propound a version of the ‘good men for good government
theory’ as an antidote to the perspective that a democracy of institutional checks-and-balances
is the best way to proceed. In some ways, Lee’s empirically-honed views shadow the
controversial debates in the interwar years about the conscientious quality of allowing public
opinion to steer public policy. (Lippmann 1960) That Singapore became ranked with Japan and
South Korea as the only Asian countries that have made it to the list of the Developed has given
Lee some credibility for his controversial views.
Clearly a perspective of ‘democracy as responsibility’ has emerged with differences
between the three thinkers. At a minimum, all three agree that it is democracy where the
individual is situated within society in relation to the definition of rights, leadership and
subsistence. Binding the individual within the community is an ethic of care – hence of
responsibility – which operates both ways in strengthening the community as well as giving
succor to the individual. Rizal and Sukarno are more enamored of the ordinary individual
whereas Lee comes across as the most authoritarian. One point of debate which ought to
emerge in any subsequent exploration of the themes raised by this article is the extent to which
the claims of community become severe and stifles the individual. In short, where does
responsibility end and the freedom of initiative begin?
The Asian Contribution: Debating Democracy through Dignity and Responsibility
Some advocates of democracy might feel at this point tempted to dismiss the preceding
arguments as the ramblings of a superannuated supporter of Asian Values. But this misses the
wider potential for an Asian contribution to democracy as an ongoing and dynamic debate.
Rizal, Sukarno and Lee grew to political maturity through anti-colonialism. Conversely, they
were interested in democracy as a means of opposing injustice. Along the way they inevitably
conflated socialism, nationalism and culture as well. Amidst this complex hybridism, they were
Page 19 of 23
single-minded in wanting to enlighten themselves on redeeming the plight of their respective
Asian peoples. Hence, the role of dignity.
To gain self-respect, harsh words, and sometimes hard measures, had to be justified in
disciplining their brethren while indicting the colonial other for their excesses in perverting the
potential of their fellow humanity who had every desire to be differentiated on their own terms.
Hence, the saliences of responsibility as a valid subject in examining rule by and for the people.
One might further object that Rizal, Sukarno and Lee are irrelevant for a postcolonial Asia. But
the counter to that would be to query philosophically the prospects of genuine cosmopolitan
democracy locally and globally. Does structural power to perpetuate social inequalities not exist
anymore in a world with porous frontiers? If the answer reached is a qualified ‘yes’ or anything
more negative, then this article would have served its purpose. Democracy must still debate
Dignity and Responsibility.
Page 20 of 23
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Endnotes
1
The author wishes to thank Ma Shaohua for diligent research assistance for this piece. Lily Tope of the University
of the Philippines has also been a special inspiration for my interest in the writings of José Rizal. This work is
dedicated to her friendship.
2
The Dutch colonial name for Indonesia.
3
According to the translator of Rizal (1992), this is a metaphorical reference in Spanish to underground prison
cells in ancient Rome set aside for slaves condemned for grave crimes.
4
See detailed exposition in the next section.
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