Alternative Votes: "Non-Western" Democracies and Asian Political Systems
The economic and political rise of the
non-Western world in the second half of the 20th century
brought to the fore the issue of de- Westernization, raising the idea
that culture, history and civilization are probably the most important factors
for determining the type of market, political system and regime that
a given state will adopt. Several countries in Asia —
a region that, as a whole, embarked on the path
of modernization later than the West — have found their own way,
different from the Western one in practical implementation but within
parameters accepted in democratic and market theory. By modernizing
and at the same time preserving their culture and civilization, they have
enriched the process of global development.
Today, there are more and more scholars, both in Western and
non-Western countries, as well as in my home
country, Russia, who are casting doubt on theories of Western
political modernization (or Westernization) and «democratic transition»
based on a vision of the world from the 1980s-90s.
These scholars do not believe that Western-style democracies
are necessarily ideal, and instead see the global political process
as based on varied regional and national characteristics. They
do not negate the idea of democracy, or democratic theories and
concepts; neither do they deny the prevalence of global democratic
trends over autocratic ones. They do, however, argue for expanding the
methodological base and the nomenclature of approaches,
in particular, by using the methodology of regional and spatial
analysis for a less biased, de-Westernized explanation
of the global political process.
The roots of this concept are in the idea of political
«tutelage» envisaged by the Chinese revolutionary nationalist Sun
Yat-sen, attempted unsuccessfully by Chiang
Kai-shek in mainland China and later with greater success
in Taiwan by him and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo —
such that it indeed resulted in the creation of a Chinese
democratic regime. A debate in the United States over these issues
after the Communist government seized power in 1949 («Who lost China?»
or «Why was China lost?») found that free competitive elections under
certain circumstances can produce more harm than good. The idea that democracy
is the worst form of government except for all the others does not
deny structural/cultural hegemony or, occasionally, the selfish attempts
of the stronger to prosper at the expense of weak political
regimes or unstable democracies (Easterly 2006). Democracies first need
to be stabilized politically in order to defend their
economic interests. The slogans «do like us» and «be like us»
do not necessarily result in prosperity and democracy (Nolan
1975).
THE PROBLEM OF POWER
It is clear that some non-Western countries have
problems deconstructing a dominant party system; it took Japan, for
example, more than 60 years to do this, and even now the
long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) remains relatively
dominant. Because of the fear of economic consequences
in a modern world based on structural differences and unfair
competition, the leaders of some of these countries have
psychological problems stepping down from office, perhaps because power
is seductive or because they feel that their societies are still not
ready for greater democracy and freedom and might become unstable and unable
to compete.
Having pointed out the existence of these problems
in non-Western countries, Lucian Pye, among others,
formulated rules for defining the «non-Western» political process
(Pye 1956, 1985), while Fareed Zakaria (1997) later put forward the idea
of illiberal democracy. In liberal democracies, all the democratic
conditions are met. By contrast, non-liberal democracies have
free and fair elections — hence they can be called democracies —
yet their measure of constitutional liberalism is highly limited
or absent altogether and they do not provide open
socio-political access. At the very least, their rules for
maintaining this system are openly contested by full democracies
as well as segments of their own population. The least liberal
of the non-liberal democracies — the ones that verge
on authoritarian rule — are participatory democracies (also called
limited plebiscitary democracies) that have clear curbs on the system
of socio-political access. Such regimes combine authoritarian
party rule with the expansion of national participation in the
political process on a grassroots level, which is then managed
by legal means. At the same time, the authoritarian ruling party
in these regimes generally avoids introducing general suffrage,
or limits it by not welcoming the creation
of an effective parliament, a system of checks and balances
or elections with genuine multi-party participation.
During the last 20 years a heated debate has been going on among
the politicians and political scientists of East and West concerning the
degree to which countries should adhere to democratic conditions,
given the specifics of national character and political development. This
discussion, although never quite saying so explicitly, is indeed
related to the possibility that there should be some national —
as opposed to universal — forms of maintaining
socio-political access (North, Wallis, Weingast 2009, 2011) and
direct or indirect rules to control this system. This discussion has
been expressed in numerous ways: human rights (interpreted differently
in the West) and Asian values (Lee Kuan Yew and Kishore Mahbubani
in Singapore, Mahathir Mohamad in Malaysia); Islam and civil society
(Mohammad Khatami in Iran); the «Three Represents» (sange daibiao) (Jiang
Zemin in the People’s Republic of China); the harmonious (hexie
shehui) socialist society (Hu Jintao in China); and «sovereign
democracy» (suverennaya demokratiya) (Vladislav Surkov in Russia). The
notion of limited or controlled democracy is generally used
to describe the way power is organized in participatory
democracies (limited plebiscitary democracies), and therefore differs from
those democracies with open socio-political access. These limited
democracies, even those with an electoral system, often have
non-transparent, but obvious, rules that curb
socio-political access.
Non-Western democracies are characterized
by a different relationship between democracy and constitutional
liberalism from that of liberal democracies, yet they are more democratic
than either non-liberal or participatory democracies.
Therefore, the parameters to be controlled by this type
of democracy (economic, political, social, legal) are greater than
in a liberal democracy and they are not consolidated by the
approval of the whole society. The distinction lies in the amount
of sovereignty parameters that the state controls (Ziegler 2012, pp.
14–20); socio-political access, for example, can
be maintained through the educational system or rules
on meritocracy. Two clear examples of this system are Singapore and
Malaysia, both of which are described by political scientists
as «limited liberal democracies», because their system
of socio-political access differs from that of liberal
democracies, yet enables socio-political access through their own
channels (a highly selective educational system, meritocracy rules,
political competition under the umbrella of a dominant party and
«personalized» selection of political elites). In such political
regimes, religion can play a special role, one that can be guaranteed
by the state and/or by law (for example, Islam in Malaysia;
Judaism in Israel; Buddhism in Sri Lanka) or state ideologies
such as Pancasila in Indonesia. The Asian, non-Western
type of democracy is currently present in Turkey, Lebanon,
Morocco, Jordan, Israel, Japan, India, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore,
Taiwan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
BRINGING EAST AND WEST TOGETHER
Asian democracies have accomplished a synthesis of Western and
Eastern cultures, albeit to different degrees. The individual
is free, but moral laws and institutions, including religious ones, play
a major role. Notwithstanding this confessional unity, the church
is in most cases separated from the state, and its influence
on society is exercised largely by moral and ethical example.
Society in the non-Western democracy
is a socio-centric self-determining system,
yet its domain is determined by religious preference and can
be cosmo-centric if this does not hinder the efficiency
of the state or contradict personal preferences. In other words,
these societies are simultaneously conglomerative and pluralistic. The public
sphere in societies of this type is distinguished by the
primacy of the law; universal and constitutionally legal norms are
paramount. The economies of such states are transparent enough, yet may
have nation-specific features within international norms (this
describes, in particular, the economies of Islamic democracies).
In politics, the societies that have accomplished a synthesis
of the two traditions have equality of opportunity, yet one power
guarantees the stability of the political process. This is the
so-called dominant party, or a combination of the
dominant party and the leader-guarantor. As a rule,
however, this is not a party created by the authorities, but one
that actually creates the authorities. Though political competition
in such countries can be limited to some extent, its
authoritarianism is civil rather than military, is enlightened and
modernizes society rather than remaining tethered to traditionalism. The
state in this type of Asian democracy plays a guiding role
in social transformation, yet does not limit economic competition;
on the contrary, it encourages job creation. In these societies,
the principle of separation of powers exists, but can be amended
according to the norms of traditional political culture
or certain religious provisions. The ruling power in such societies
is elected by majority vote, and regulated by obligatory
constitutional laws (again, some countries add
on nation-specific features), and can thus extend
to certain spheres of private life to a greater extent than
in societies of the Western type. At the same time, authority
functions in such societies under principles that include legitimacy,
efficiency, power that is not alienated from the people and
an independent judiciary that upholds justice instead of undermining
it. These states have their own sequence of transformation: change
in the economic sphere (even in states that are already basically
market-oriented) followed by state reform, the creation
of an efficient bureaucracy, limited and controlled competition under
the umbrella of the dominant party and a unique system
to guarantee stability. And finally, a system that ensures that
further democratization does not wreak havoc on the economic and social
system.
In non-Western democracies that are building societies
of this synthetic type, values are not always completely separated from
interests, yet, because of democratic elections, the results
of political competition are not final. After a certain period
of time, it is possible to once again come to power
legally, and the losers in a political competition may not forever
be kept out of power, forced to emigrate or physically
destroyed (as in dictatorships). In societies of this type,
there are divisions across class and other parameters, yet also dynamic social
mobility. National sovereignty becomes a guarantee against external
illegitimate influence, a guarantee that is zealously protected.
Fundamental universal values — equality, tolerance and free
competition — exist to various degrees, depending on the measure
of tolerance in a given society and its traditional culture;
even in such an open society as Japan, these fundamentals have
only recently been opened up to discussion.
In non-Western democracies, the system of open
socio-political access described by North, Wallis, and
Weingast (2009, 2011) is evolving, but not yet consolidated. The
social/political institutions are not yet strong enough to maintain the
stability of the state and society without the direct or indirect
rules needed at this stage of their historical and cultural
development. Under certain circumstances, these rules may be contested
by liberal democracies that have strong institutions and a long
history of democratic development, and which are at the forefront
of social and political innovation, because they are
at a different stage of historical development.
AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL
Thus, democracy becomes a process of governing that
is maintained through a system of open
socio-political access, but which is a general rather
than a specific parameter for all democracies, although its form may
be specific due to the civilizational, cultural and historic
parameters of the society in question. Even with some restraints
in transitional societies, this model has resulted in impressive
economic growth in such places as Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South
Korea and India. It may be key to understanding the current rise
of East Asia and the speed with which it is catching
up with the West.
Before proceeding to political democratization, some of these
countries created a new and effective political elite and bureaucracy,
later entering on a path that led to political strife
in the form of parliamentary competition. As a result, they
have found a way to foster an efficient elite/bureaucracy rooted
in their own history and cultural traditions, and therefore their own way
of managing socio-political access — for example,
through exam systems and limited access to the type of education
needed to be appointed to political or governmental posts,
political competitiveness under the umbrella of a dominant party,
etc. This model may be contested under certain circumstances
by extra-liberal and liberal democracies, because local
political elites might hesitate to create an open access system with
transparent rules that are approved by social consensus. So,
if we agree to the possibility of certain
local/cultural/confessional differentiation in the conditions and
parameters for maintaining open socio-political access,
we may consequently find it useful to introduce the concept
of non-Western democracy. If we fundamentally
disagree with this possibility, then a Western democracy becomes the only
model of best governance. However, the idea
of non-Western democracy opens up space for
an understanding of how democracy can, and perhaps should,
be practiced in countries with different historical, political,
cultural and confessional settings from those in the West. Such
is the essence of the present-day fierce ideological
debate between the West and the political elites of the Rest.
From the point of view of political theory, the study
of national variations in «non-Western democracies»
of the Asian type — such as liberal constitutional democracy
in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Malaysia and Sri Lanka — and also
models of evolutionary transformation of non-liberal
democracies (authoritarian states or constitutional monarchies) and
participatory democracies (plebiscitary democracies) into
non-Western democracies, will probably provide the key
to finding such a model in other countries,
if a considerable portion of their elites disagree with the
Western mode of governing. Meanwhile, countries that resist a system
of open socio-political access will find their political
system contested from outside by other democracies and from within
by opposition forces, if any exist.
Alexei D. Voskressenski is Dean of the School of Political
Affairs and Professor of Comparative Politics and Asian Studies,
MGIMO-University (Moscow). He edits a Russian journal,
Comparative Politics. He can be contacted
at voskressenski@yahoo.com.
The author is grateful for having been able to discuss the ideas
in this essay with Adam Przeworski, John Dunn, John Ferejohn, Stephen
Holmes, Boris Makarenko, José María Maraval, Andrei Melville, Andranik
Migranyan, Bernard Manin and Pasquale Pasquino, and to have received their
comments.
REFERENCES
Easterly, W. (2006) The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts
to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (New
York, Penguin)
Mahbubani, K. (2008) The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift
of Global Power to the East (New York, Public Affairs)
Nolan, P. (1995) China’s Rise, Russia’s Fall: Politics, Economics and
Planning in the Transition from Stalinism (Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire and London, Macmillan Press Ltd)
North D., Wallis J., Weingast B. (2009, 2011) Violence and Social Orders:
A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), Russian translation (Moscow, Izdalel’stvo
Instituta Gaidara)
Pye, L. (1956) «The Non-Western Political Process," Journal
of Politics, 20, 468–486
Pye, L. (1985) Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions
of Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press)
Zakaria, F. (1997) «The Rise of Illiberal Democracy," Foreign Affairs, 76,
6, 22–43
Zakaria, F. (2009) The Post-American World (New York, W. W.
Norton & Co.)
Ziegler, Ch. (2012) «Contrasting US, Chinese and Russian Perceptions
of Sovereignty," Comparative Politics (Moscow), 1, 14–23
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