the aseanist ? Blog Archive ? The Leviathan
リンク: the aseanist ? Blog Archive ? The Leviathan.
the aseanist
a website about the economic, security and cultural integration of Southeast Asia
The Leviathan
I recently received some thoughtful remarks from a reader, who rightly asks whether a supranational entity may just amplify the pathologies of our current nation-states — whether it will simply facilitate the exploitation of the resources and people under its control in favor of a ruling elite. It’s worth reproducing the comments at length:
Most importantly, we have to consider if general mobilisation and collaboration against the tyrannies of the day is facili[t]ated or countered by the formation of a greater political entity. Evils that have yet to be addressed or redressed adequately within the traditional nation-state may just be further reinforced within greater political entities.
If these issues are not adequately considered, the ‘Asean’ project may just be another (v)empiral project that only serves to aid in the advance of the Bourgeois project on a scale that has, till the advent of globalisation, been mainly pursued and advanced at a national level to the relative detriment of the populace (relative to the interests of the elite - i.e. rich getting richer in ‘real’ terms as opposed and compared to the masses).
Additionally, an ‘Aseanist’ project such as that which your site proposes can never be placed under the auspices of any Asian government, as these, objectively, are not of the people, by the people or for the people. They do not facilitate the articulation, expression and realisation of rights via the parallel institutional and facilitative counterpart of equality in outset, opportunity and outcome. Nor have NGOs exerted or are able to assert their standpoint institutionally.
We have to consider the possibility that the regionalist project may place a greater Leviathan at the doorstep of every individual inhabiting the region. Till the institutions that may potentially counter such dangers are in place, or if such institutions can become more effective within a regionalist project as opposed to the nationalist one, the Asean project may be best considered from an academic perspective.
Finally, the consideration of any ‘Aseanist’ project has to study its impact on the ‘Humanist’ project. We have to keep in mind that the Aseanist project seeks to create unities rather than exploit them and that this is done at the expense of creating a greater unity possible through a Globalist vision and project that transcends ‘local’ securities and familiarities.
There’s a lot to reflect on and discuss here, none of which, as I’ve said in other posts, can be fully captured in a single post. Some themes in what I’ll say here have already appeared, others are sure to recur. But such is the nature of an ongoing conversation.
First, some clarification is in order. This website isn’t proposing unification; it’s not a “project” in that sense. What it seeks to do is to discuss and understand a project that’s already happening in the real world. The idea of regional integration has long departed the realm of academic discussion. What’s now urgent and crucial is to participate in shaping how this integration proceeds and what result we, as Southeast Asian citizens, want from it.
So in some ways, the fears mentioned above are premature: we’re still trying to grasp what’s going on. We’re still trying to understand and penetrate all those resort retreats, all those government confabs in hotel ballrooms, all those ministry offices in K.L., Singapore, Bangkok, Manila and Jakarta. At the same time, I’m not sure anyone — even those inside those very rooms — really comprehends where we’re headed. There’s lots of worries, but there’s also opportunities.
So let me offer a couple of perspectives. The first you might call the pragmatic one. The reality is that Western power has shaped the world in a Western image. Even if there were administrable alternatives to capitalist democracy, entrenched elites in both East and West wouldn’t permit those alternatives to thrive. The history of the 20th century is littered with the wrecks of well-meaning experiments by Third World leaders whose idealistic attempts at “doing good for their people” have foundered, pulled under by the tides of global capital or shattered on the submerged shoals of covert actions.
At the same time, we’ve seen that the most successful developed countries have played by the rules. Two (perhaps three) of those countries are in the region: Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. The first two avoided the yoke of foreign debt that have doomed everyone else; I’m not entirely certain whether the third is as healthy as we sometimes believe it to be.
So the way forward, instead of resisting and attempting to seek a “third way” alternative to free trade and markets, is to take what we’ve been given but use it to our advantage. I believe capitalism can coexist with environmental protection, human development and the elimination of poverty, as long as you don’t make the mistake of abdicating power to purely capitalist interests, as has clearly happened in the U.S. We may worry that the “bloc-ification” of the world into competing trade groups is more divisive than unifying. But do we wait until that world government magically comes into being? Or do we arguably begin the process at home, by seeing how we can work more closely with each other first before engaging all of “humanity”? Undeniably this means raising some barriers in the meantime to the world outside ASEAN. But I’d rather have that than ten disconnected countries that will be more easily picked off and played against each other.
As for democratic legitimacy, I sometimes I wonder whether any of this would have happened had the measures I just mentioned been put to a popular vote. The whole “for the people…” meme needs to be dissected and analyzed, for far too often when we as individuals get a vote we a) don’t use it, b) don’t think before using it, or c) sell it. Are directly elected governments always the wisest or even the most legitimate ones? When you think about how easily electorates are manipulated or bought, you start to doubt whether a government “by the people” really ends up being “for the people.”
The second perspective is a more subversive vision. At its best, a supranational entity — like the E.U. or the federal U.S. government — can combat parochial local interests in a way that works for the people. The more developed countries of Western Europe would probably never have opened their doors to labor from Southern Europe had the E.U. not enforced freedom of movement. Those poorer countries are far more advanced now then they would have been without the E.U. (The E.U. also conducted a massive income transfer project from the more developed states to the less developed ones in the form of the Cohesion Fund and other development initiatives). The U.S. federal government, even more dramatically, enforced civil rights against the states. Without the U.S. Army, perhaps the Little Rock Central High School would still be all-white. For a while (although the pendelum swings now and again) federal, not state, courts were the place where minorities felt someone would listen.
So there are possibilities for progress under a supranational entity. But just like any human endeavor, it takes a dedicated group of people to make it happen.
