Dec 18th 2021
Banyan
Democracy declined across Asia in 2021
But there are ways it can revive
IT WAS, IN
much of Asia, not a good year for fair, free and open societies.
“Democratic recession”, the phrase used by some analysts, does not
really do service, especially in so motley a region. It is too clinical,
eliding the profound human impact of lurches towards authoritarianism.
It is also too optimistic: “recession” has embedded in it the notion of a
bottom in the cycle, with inevitable recovery. In much of Asia, that is
a heroic assumption.
Brutally so in Myanmar. Its army chief seized power in a coup in February and has since ruled through terror. Not only has General Min Aung Hlaing wiped out years of fragile democratic gains. With dogged ignorance he attempts to stuff his country back into some prelapsarian mould of discipline, order and benevolent military rule. In reality his troops slaughter unarmed citizens as foreign investors flee and the economy implodes. Far from pulling Myanmar together, he is hastening its dissolution.
Myanmar becomes the second coup-led military dictatorship in South-East Asia, joining next-door Thailand. It, too, is under a (now-retired) general of limited intelligence, Prayuth Chan-ocha, the prime minister. One of the bleaker jokes of the past year is that General Min Aung Hlaing turned to Mr Prayuth for advice on building a flourishing democracy.
The ten countries of the Association of South-East Asian Nations also include two Leninist dictatorships, Laos and Vietnam (three, if, tongue in cheek, you include Singapore); an absolute monarchy, Brunei, with whippings and amputations as potential punishments; and a dirt-poor autocracy, Cambodia, where Hun Sen, in power for nearly 37 years, dispenses favour with the munificence of an emperor of yore in Angkor.
As for the region’s nominal democracies, in the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte has assaulted the judiciary and the press. In Indonesia President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, uses internet laws to silence critics and has defanged the anti-corruption commission. Malaysia’s reform movement has succumbed to the same grubby dealmaking as the corrupt former ruling party, which it dislodged from power in 2018. In 2021 some of the reformists joined that party to form a new government.
In South Asia, even less joy. A drug-running theocracy seized power in Afghanistan. In Sri Lanka President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his brothers continue transforming the state into a family fief. And in India the prime minister, Narendra Modi, hounds critics, stokes sectarian tensions and hollows out Parliament’s supervisory functions. The irony of his imperial-scale plans to reshape New Delhi is in plain view: the old parliament building is to become a museum of democracy.
The pandemic has only emboldened authoritarian tendencies. But, to revert to financial metaphors, even if a cyclical recovery is not inevitable, there is still scope for secular improvement. Parliamentary systems are embedded in enough Asian countries to allow democratic consolidation to reassert itself after strongman rule. India, after all, recovered from the Emergency, Indira Gandhi’s dictatorship between 1975 and 1977. Elsewhere, work by Don Lee of Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul and Fernando Casal Bértoa of the University of Nottingham suggests that the accretive habits of democratic elections help keep the worst instincts of past authoritarianism at bay. For all Jokowi’s backsliding, future elections in Indonesia are likely to remain fair.
Above all young Asians offer hope. They are sick of rigged political systems, graft-based economies and poor job prospects. In 2022 Malaysia is a country to watch. New automatic voter registration and a lowering of the voting age will swell the electorate by over a third.
As for the influence of outside powers, perhaps it is exaggerated. Authoritarian China has not been the democracy-undermining force some in the region feared. Indeed Taiwan, the main object of China’s bullying, is a rare democratic beacon. By the same token America’s rhetorical promotion of democracy, to say nothing of its summitry, does not resonate widely: Asian liberals know the priority for American democracy is not to lead but simply to hang on.
For all that, more stable democracies elsewhere can help in practical ways, such as by supporting independent media. When Maria Ressa won the Nobel peace prize, even Mr Duterte, who has hounded her and her brave news website, Rappler, was forced to congratulate her. Count that, in 2021, as a success.