Globalization and New Strategies of Ruling in Developing Countries
Aihwa Ong
2Globalization
studies encompass a range of approaches. Anthropologists have
participated in the conversation by questioning the naturalized
territorial space of the state, focusing on emerging transnational
networks and collective consciousness in an era of intensified flows
(Appadurai 1996; Ong 1999). Other social theorists, pointing to the
growth of transnational corporations, financial regimes, and
informational technologies, stress the transformation in organization of
social relations and transactions, paying particular attention to the
extensity of networks, the velocity of flows, and the intensity of
enmeshment of nations and societies in global processes which are
historically unprecedented (Castel 1992; Held et al. 1999).
They thus use terms such as thick or thin globalization to describe the
thickening or thinning of relationships or activity that unevenly mold
the world into “a shared social space.” (Held et al. op. cit.:
21-22) As a consequence of the behavior of economic globalization, John
Ruggie points to “the unbundling” of state power and national territory,
a shift that has wide implications for our understanding of global
politics (Ruggie 1998, chap. 7).
3But,
as social geographers have argued, what has been underplayed in
different approaches is the historical role of global capitalism in
making space as a constitutive element of contemporary geographical
reorganization (Brenner 1999; Lefebvre 1992). Indeed, the expansionary
logic of capitalism has reached the final frontiers of our worlds.
Global capital has rescaled social spaces, from the geographies of
trading blocs to the national territory of state power, to the intimate
crevices of human cells. What researchers have not done, however, is to
link such multi-scalar reconfiguration of the spaces of power to
changing forms of ruling and the cultural production of norms.
4I
believe that anthropologists have an analytical contribution to make
that will enrich our grasp of the remaking of strategies of government,
the production of cultural norms, and the practice of politics in the
current “reconfigurations of superimposed social spaces that unfolds
simultaneously upon multiple geographical scales.” (Brenner op. cit.:
42) We have a tradition of analyzing the transformation of social
organization at different community, societal, national, and regional
levels, and our strength is in the study of cultural change and
norm-making within particular historical conjunctions of political,
economic and social transformations. Some anthropological approaches to
globalization have tended to stress the imaginary, the magical, and the
symbolic dimensions of peoples’ responses in developing countries
(Comaroff and Comaroff 1998), but have little to say about the kinds of
social relations and forms that have been produced in the encounters
with global market forces. Culture-making is often reduced to a
minimalist defensive reworking of a residual tradition, not part of the
critical processes constructing state-society relations in the modern
era of globalization. The state is treated as the abstract object of
cultural resistances. Sometimes, “the postcolony” is invoked simply as a
rhetorical gesture, a move that carelessly suggests that all
“postcolonial” formations have fixed locations on a linear trajectory of
development. The idea of postcoloniality does not take into account how
particular states or networks are actually connected with global
markets forces, nor do it draw attention to specific mechanisms of
market-political interactions.
5A
popular view suggests that globalizing forces have engendered “deeply
disjunctive relationships among human movement, technological flow, and
financial transfers.” (Appadurai op. cit.: 35) There are indeed
severe contradictions in economic globalization, and the effects of
global markets are highly uneven and polarizing, fracturing the world
into different zones, and individual societies into extremes of rich and
poor. But the disjunctures are not between the so-called ethnoscapes,
financescapes and mediascapes, but between zones with extreme
concentration of media, financial, and technological powers, and other
areas where such powers are virtually-absent. How and why, in an era of
globalization, the respatializing and rescaling of political and
economic power have thickened or thinned particular kinds of social
networks across different zones of wealth and poverty are questions we
could be asking. Different countries respond in different ways to
neoliberal challenges, and it would be useful to unpack the state as a
unified entity. We need to identity and analyze how different strategies
of ruling respond to globalizing forces, and how new forms of
governance produce particular effects on subject-making and on political
practices.
6My
approach is guided by the assumption that global capitalism has induced
critical changes in the forms that sovereignty can take, as space
becomes a constitutive element in the reorganization of state-market
relations. Global capitalist processes now compel states to reorganize
state power at different levels and scales within and beyond the space
of the nation. The rescaling of the state and of transnational networks
of production and trade has radically changed state power, bringing
about a graduation of ruling practices, of national territory, and of
what means to be a subject, and even human, in relation to state and
capital. I will build my case by answering the following questions about
globalization: a) What are fundamental changes in state practices? b)
What is the impact of the market agenda on the rescaling of sub-national
and regional spaces? c) Does globalization or its crisis promote civil
society?
What Are Fundamental Changes in State Practices?
7We
can now accept that claims about the demise of the state are a non-issue
in globalization debates. The question is whether the state systems are
“yielding in some instances to postmodern configuring of political
space?” (Ruggie op. cit.: 174-175) What changes in our analysis of the state are necessary, and what kinds of vocabulary can be used?
8My
first move is to specify what kinds of states we are talking about when
we deal with the encounter with globalization. The relative positions of
nation-states in the global ranking of rich and poor countries
influence the ways globalizing forces penetrate and rework their
national spaces, and by extension, reorganize regional political spaces.
For instance, in parts of Asia and Latin America, some industrializing
countries have emerged as critical sites for global production, and as
emerging markets for speculative capital.
9The
so-called Asian tiger states – S. Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong (SAR),
Malaysia, and Thailand – have reached a stage when the
technical-organizational aspects of economic development are handled by
private enterprises. Their primary “postdevelopmental strategy” is to
manage populations in relation to the demands of world markets. While
South American countries may borrow aspects of a postdevelopmental
strategy, what is distinctive to Asian postdevelopmentalism is its
claims of cultural unity and stability combined with the selective
adoption of neoliberal practices that have made Southeast Asia seem more
“bankable” in the eyes of global corporations.
10There
are two aspects to postdevelopmental strategy. On the one hand, there
is the strengthening of nationalist concepts or ideologies about
civilization, be it neo-Confucianism or the New Islam. On the other
hand, there is the proliferation of state policies and practices through
which different segments of the population relate or do not relate to
the global market economy.
11Benedict
Anderson (1991) has maintained that nations are imagined communities,
providing meanings linked with the past, tradition, and sacrifice that
people can identify. But globalization has induced a different
representational strategy of national culture. In Southeast Asia, the
discourses of New Islam and neo-Confucianism stress not merely
continuity but also a resurgence of ancient traditions. After the
interruption of colonialism, we are supposed to witness a transformation
that goes beyond past achievements to meet new challenges of modernity.
In Malaysia, a burgeoning sense of economic power and cosmopolitanism
has inspired a narrative of the nation with an emphasis on Islamic
resurgence. The deputy prime minister wrote a book called Asian Renaissance
(1997) that harks back to the precolonial centuries when Islam was the
force that brought commerce and splendor to Southeast Asian trading
empires. This narrative claims that a new era of Asian cultural vitality
and autonomy has dawned, due to religious revivalism, the end of
socialism, and the vibrant economic transformation of the region.
Malaysia and other nations have overcome their “capitulation to Atlantic
powers” and are now “reflowering at the dawn of a new millennium.”
Spiritual traditions linked with Islam “possess the intellectual
capacity to perceive the cultural unity of Asia, its meta-culture.”
(Anwar 1997: 187) The revival of the term “civilization” by Samuel
Huntington (1996) seems to validate such nationalist claims of
“enduring” Asian civilizations that can engender a modern sense of
regionalism.
12Along
with the discourse of New Islam, the secular Malaysian state moved to
gain control of Islamic law from “chauvinist” and “narrow-minded
ulamas.” (Ong 2000) The New Islam narrative is now infused with messages
of economic development and entrepreneurialism, wedding a religious
re-flowering to a common destiny of new prosperity. Islam is reframed as
a faith that “wants its followers to be self-sufficient, independent,
and progressive.” (Khoo 1995: 165) What politicians have in mind is not
another Iran but rather a state in which a moderate and reasonable Islam
helps to strengthen the state by working and meshing smoothly with
global capitalism. But how does the new Islamic normativity inform new
modes of ruling that treat different parts of the population according
to their roles in capitalism?
13In
his discussion of “the art of government,” Foucault notes that modern
sovereignty is no longer simply a “supreme power” over the population
(1977: 95, 1991). He notes that “there are several forms of government
among which the prince’s relation to his state is only one particular
mode; while on the other hand, all these other kinds of government are
internal to the state and society.” (Foucault 1991: 91) Different
modalities of state power coexist, and the distinctive modern forms are
concerned with “governing” populations, individuals, and oneself. In
short, “the art of government… is essentially concerned with answering
the question of how to introduce economy – that is to say, the correct
manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family… into
the management of the state.” (Ibid.: 92) State management of
the population thus requires different modalities of government, based
on mechanisms of calculation, surveillance, control and regulation that
set the terms and are constitutive of a domain of social existence. The
different forms of regulation of course do not mean that states do not,
now and again, here and there, resort to police and military action
against their own people.
14The
new modalities of state power have come from the adoption of neoliberal
norms by neo-authoritarian Southeast Asian states. Robert Castel
observes the emergence, in neoliberal states, of “differential modes of
treatment of populations, which aim to maximize the returns on doing
what is profitable and to marginalize the unprofitable.” (1991: 294)
Asian tiger states, which combine authoritarian and economic liberal
features, are not neoliberal formations, but their insertion into the
global economy has required selective adoption of neoliberal norms for
managing populations in relation to corporate requirements. Such
differential modes of government overlap with the pre-existing state
discourses that politically and socially differentiate the population by
ethnicity, gender, class and nationality, thus producing ethnoracial
entities. In countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and to some
extent Singapore, certain groups become the object of special treatment
based on biopolitical calculations of their capacity to work with global
capitalist enterprises. To remain globally competitive, the Asian tiger
state makes different kinds of investments in different subject
populations, privileging one ethnicity over another, the male over the
female, and the professional over the manual worker. Different sectors
of the population are subjected to different technologies of regulation
and risk, and in the process assigned different social fates.
15Although
the state has made major investments in the biopolitical improvements
of the Malay majority, the pastoral benefits have been skewed in favor
of the middle and upper middle classes. These so-called “preferred
Malays” have been given extensive benefits in education, employment, and
business activities, and groomed by the government to take their places
in new investment centers, and high-tech industrial parks. They are
groomed by the government to become Muslim entrepreneurs who can play
the game of global capitalism, alongside ethnic Chinese and foreign
businessmen. In addition, preferred Malays have special access to
political power that enables them to enjoy special tax breaks and state
bailouts for their risky ventures (Jomo 1998). The Malay elite thus
enjoys both state pastoral care and corporate citizenship (or crony
capitalism) in a time of astonishing economic growth.
16Another
modality of governing regulates migrant workers and factory workers in
the free trade zones that are administered by semi-official corporate
agencies catering to the conditions of global capital. The majority of
these workers are young Malay women, subjected to labor discipline in
the old sense, as well Foucaudian-type social regulations (including
Islamic surveillance) that transform them into skilled and disciplined
workers. Foreign workers like Filipino maids have limited rights and are
subject to expulsion during economic downturns.
17The
third modality of governing is a mix of civilizing and disqualifying
policies directed towards populations who are consider uncompetitive and
who resist state efforts to make them more productive in the eyes of
the state. Administrators and developers view aboriginal groups as
backward and wasteful, frequently an obstacle to state projects
(dam-building) and corporate development (golf courses, timber
plantations). Officials seek to lure the aborigines away from their
nomadic life in the jungles and persuade them to become settlers like
the Malay peasants. Jungle dwellers who resist the civilizing missions
of schools, sedentary agriculture, markets, and Islam are left to their
own devices in the midst of destruction caused by the encroaching
logging companies. Generally, aboriginal groups in practice enjoy very
limited protection vis-à-vis their territory, their livelihood, or their
cultural identity. In O’Donnell’s terms, such aboriginal populations,
unprotected by rights and often exposed to violence, dwell in the
“brown” areas of newly democratized countries (1993: 1361). Irredentist
and outlaw groups also dwell in the brown areas, and SE Asia is riddled
with such internal colonies of poverty and neglect. Frequently, the
state seeks to evict rebel populations and open-up their resource-rich
areas to timber logging and dam construction.
18Graduated
sovereignty then, as I have discussed it, refers to the differential
treatment of populations – through schemes of biopolitical disciplining
and pastoral care – that differently insert them into the processes of
global capitalism. These gradations of governing may be in a continuum,
but they overlap with pre-formed racial, religious, and gender
hierarchies, and further fragment citizenship for people who are all
nominally speaking citizens of the same country.
19What
are the implications of graduated sovereignty for Southeast Asia as a
region? Some observers, seeing a bunch of islands, assume that the area
is not well-integrated as a region. Indeed, the eight member-country
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has not succeeded as a
free-trade area, mainly because the economies are not complementary, but
rather compete with each other in their export-production (Mattli 1999:
169-171). ASEAN has been more important as a political entity to fend
off external threats. For instance, ASEAN recently declared itself a
nuclear-free zone. But even in the aftermath of the financial crisis,
the countries have not been able to agree on a set of norms governing
regional capital flows and currency trading.
20Instead,
graduated sovereignty is linked to two non-political forms of regional
integration, undertaken mainly by global enterprises and ethnic Chinese
economic networks. Global capital, led mainly by Japanese firms, has
redrawn the economic space of the region. During the era of economic
take-off in the 1980s and early 1990s, Japanese foreign direct
investments have been the greatest in the region (almost $60 billion in
1990), followed by Taiwanese capital (ibid.: 175). Massive
investments have stimulated new strategies of regional sourcing and
intra-industry trade. Such corporate arrangements have produced growth
triangles that integrate portions of two or more national economies.
These transnational production networks are based on cost-benefit
calculations for doing business in the region, using the time-space
coordinates of flexible production techniques (Harvey 1989) to gain
access to and control over diverse forms of labor and resources in
adjacent national territories. There are four or more growth triangles
that straddle nations in the archipelago, and plans for a new production
zone that cuts across mainland Southeast Asia. The largest growth
triangle is Sijori which draws cheap Indonesian female workers and raw
resources, Malaysian technical staff, and Singaporean managers into a
single production network. As part of the system of graduated
sovereignty, GTs are administered by quasi-governmental agencies that
take over the local functions of the state without challenging its
formal sovereignty.
21Perhaps
an unintended effect of graduated sovereignty is to reinforce the
ethnic Chinese networks that criss-cross the region. The perceived
biases of state policies towards ethnic Chinese minorities in Malaysia,
Indonesia and Thailand, the rise of huge family-owned businesses, and
the lure of market reforms in China since the 1980s have all increased
ethnic Chinese capital flows and extended their regional networks, now
spanning sites in SE Asia and in China. After the Tiananmen crackdown,
when US and Japanese capital fled China, overseas Chinese investments
made up for the outflow. It is estimated that about 80% of foreign
investments in China have come from the Chinese diaspora. Some writers
have gone so far as to claim that overseas Chinese, not the
nation-state, are “the mother of China’s [economic] revolution.” The
economic term for this regional integration is Greater China (Da
Zhonghua), an economic space of banking and trade that includes coastal
China, Taiwan, and much of Southeast Asia, and whose combined foreign
reserves exceed that of Japan, making the bloc Asia’s first rank
economic giant (Ong 1999: 60). China has rejected the Greater China
category as an affront to its sovereignty, but its national space has
nevertheless become deeply enmeshed with transnational trade networks
flowing out of Southeast Asia. Globalization has induced an embedded
regionalism, one that has been articulated in terms of a homogenizing
set of Asian values.
22Thus,
the term deterritorialization, used to suggest the encroachment of
global capital on sovereignty territory, is at best imprecise when used
to describe cross-border flows of capital. Nor does it specify the
actual mechanisms for adjusting modes of ruling, the meaning and forms
of sovereign rule. We need to discover how particular states come to
adopt neoliberal norms for the differential management of its
population, and investigate how a particular kind of strategy does not
characterize an entire national space (neocorporatism for the preferred
elites, brown areas for aboriginal others, and transnationalism for
ethnic others). Such graduation of sovereignty in relation to market
forces have regional implications, indicating that the state is very
strong in certain areas where its protections of special rights are very
significant, while in other areas it is structurally irrelevant because
of flexibility in dealing with corporations which leave the state
unable to control the exit and influx of capital into transnational
networks.
What Is the Impact of the Market Agenda on National and Regional Spaces?
23The
series of devaluations of Asian currencies in late 1997 plunged
Southeast Asian states into a crisis of sovereignty. The very strategy
of graduated sovereignty that embeds society in global production and
financial markets can be their undoing, exposing them to disruptive
economic forces. Asian states have responded in two interesting ways:
Indonesia (like Thailand) submitted to the economic prescriptions of the
IMF, while Malaysia resisted, instead reimposing its territorial state
sovereignty.
24The
so-called Asian financial crisis was viewed by the international press
as the outcome of reckless borrowing and lending, the building of
megaprojects, and the lack of market controls in the tiger economies.
Western observers tend to see the problem as one caused exclusively by
crony capitalism or “lack of transparency” in economic practice. What is
needed, they argue, is a heavy dose of neoliberal rules of global
market efficiency imposed mainly through the International Monetary Fund
on third world politicians. Asian observers point to the fact that
global companies and bankers have been happy to work with these same
problems for decades, and global institutions like The World Bank (1993:
9) have lauded the capitalist take-off in Asia. Politicians like
Malaysia’s Mahathir, who has been criticized for crony capitalism,
preferred to blame international financiers as the “rogue speculators”
bent on destroying weak countries in their crusade for open societies (NST
1999). Indeed, while Asian economies are guilty of economic
irrationality in their practices, very little attention has been paid to
irrational financial markets that have made integration into the global
economy the source for both the strengthening and weakening of the
state. Gradually, as the financial crisis unfolded across a number of
major countries, more observers admitted that the crisis was fueled by
speculation in hot money and market panics that engendered massive
outflows. Particularly troublesome were not only the effects of unstable
markets on emerging states, but also the moral hazards that may require
the IMF and advanced states to bail out bad loans by profligate
investors. In any case it is difficult if not impossible to distinguish
between explosive growth and speculative bubbles, and debate continues
about the causes of the crash.
25The
Asian crisis had an immediate effect on state sovereignty, providing an
opportunity for neoliberal global agenda to be installed in key
institutions in the national space of developing countries. The IMF
represents the strategic aspect of “disciplinary neoliberalism” (Gill
1997: 214) whereby emerging states are subjected to rules that intensify
their subordination to global market forces. The battered Thai state
had little choice but to adopt IMF prescriptions which transformed the
financial crisis into a full-blown economic crisis. The collapse of
credit forced the government to pass laws that open once-closed sectors
of the economy to foreign companies. This move ignited a wave of strikes
as laid-off state workers protested “Stop selling the country!” while
US investors returned to buy state enterprises at bargain-basement
prices. A local businessman complained that the Thai government had
“slavishly” obeyed the IMF. He went on: “That the government does so
without… a sense of protection of the future of our national interests
is nothing short of despicable.” (SF Chronicle 1999)
26Another
example of the loss of national financial control is an IMF-sponsored
Indonesian “state agency” to seize the assets of companies in order to
bail-out banks. The Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (IBRA) is
formally charged with getting back loans worth $35 billion in order to
revive banks and to develop accountability in the economy. Its larger
claim is to uproot crony capitalism, a goal that is unlikely to succeed
since IBRA itself is already entangled in doing state favors. Instead,
IBRA’s job pays money back to global banks which had poured loans into
Indonesia. They are welcomed back to purchase huge corporations that
used to be linked to the Suharto government. While the IMF prescriptions
are necessary to improve banking practices and curtail corruption in
high places, industrializing countries are now subjected to the same
rules of benefiting capitalist interests, and their populations more
vulnerable to global market forces.
- 1 But in Washington, defenders of neoliberalism warned about the dangers of economic isolation, and h (...)
27Only
a few countries have challenged the view that money should be allowed
to move unimpeded around the world. Mahathir of Malaysia was denounced
in global capitals as an economic retrograde when he imposed controls on
capital flows in and out of his country. But Mahathir had merely
followed the suggestion of Paul Krugman of MIT who argued that
developing countries must restrict exposure to capital flows, and that a
temporary regulation of money markets will allow the economy to recover
faster than IMF-prescriptions. Other countries that reasserted their
financial autonomy vis-à-vis global money markets are Hong Kong, where
the government intervened to drive foreign speculators out of the real
estate market, and Chile, which imposed an exit fee to regulate bank
loans. China and India, which do not allow their currencies to be traded
outside the country, weathered the financial storm much better than
Asian tigers because they are not vulnerable to a sudden withdrawal of
capital.1
Their actions recall Polyani’s (1957) observation that modern society
is propelled by the double dynamic of the expansion of market forces on
the one hand, and the reactions of society to protect itself against
capital’s socially destructive and polarizing impact on the other.
Contemporary neoliberal globalization has intensified this double
movement between market and society, and intensified the global exposure
to uncertainties and risks. It is more than a year later, and the
economies that resisted unlimited market speculation are recovering, but
still languishing are the countries that adopted the IMF regime of high
interest rates and open markets. Jeffry Sachs of Harvard sums it all
up: “The year has been a fiasco, and so has the [US] policy. Asia would
have been better if the IMF had never set foot in these countries.” (NYT 1998)
28This
is perhaps too hasty a judgement. There is still a healthy debate about
the plusses and minuses of the “materialization” of the global market
agenda in the space of the nation (Sassen 1998). The lesson of the
crisis, I argue, is that globalization has made it impossible to think
about transnational relations in simply market-versus-state terms.
29The
crisis has demonstrated in the most naked terms that many states are
unable to control significant parts of their national functions, and
would have fared worse in the long run with the adoption of some norms,
rules and practices of a globalized economy system.
30The
larger point for the sovereignty of Asian countries is that neoliberal
norms of regulation can mean a lot of different things. Here the issue
of graduation can help show that for states at a particular point of
historical development, control over certain areas can be very strong,
as in the management of the population under postdevelopmentalism, but
in certain other areas like national finance, regulation is near-absent
because it is irrelevant, or supplanted, by political flexibility in
doing international business (or crony capitalism). Thus, for example,
Malaysia has demonstrated an interesting mix of graduated controls: it
rejected global market norms in monetary and fiscal policies, and
continues to depend on political patronage for making decisions about
national wealth, spending, and taxation. On the one hand, it seems to be
protecting society against roving flows of global capital, on the other
hand it is preserving an exclusive corporate citizenship for the
preferred few, against the interest of the majority.
- 2 The original 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement inaugurated our current post-1945 growth of global financ (...)
- 3 See M. Khor (1999), for a discussion of the merits of a move towards limited financial liberalizati (...)
31At
the regional level, the result of the crisis has been for states to
adopt neoliberal technologies for monetary cooperation. The IMF has
drafted a Code of Good Practices on Transparency (1999) to
guide a new “architecture of the international monetary and financial
system.” The crisis has also spurred Anglo-American leaders to talk
about “a new Bretton Woods,” to reassert global norms of an “embedded
liberalism” (Ruggie op. cit., chap. 7) that will not subordinate national economic objectives to global financial discipline.2
However, short of concrete action for the protection of the global
public good, SE Asian states have begun to consider the formation of
regional currency clusters to reduce their exposure to market risks.3
There are recommendations for setting two regional currency regimes –
for the more and less developed ASEAN nations – with fixed exchange
rates tied to the value of a group of currencies, and not subject to
political influence. Significantly, the program entities entrusted with
such a reconfiguration of ASEAN identity themselves as East Asian or Far
Eastern (NST 1999). The creation of such an East Asian
regional currency bloc means the acceleration of processes towards
“dis-synchronization” in economic cycles in Asia, Europe, and North
America (Beddoes 1999; Smadja 1998). In short, the impact of
globalization and its crises on the reconstitution of the regional
cannot simply be attributed to the “clash of civilizations,” (Huntington
1996) but rather to the ways political economic strategies reframe
normative values of identity and differentiation on a regional scale.
32Of
course, in other parts of the world, market forces have produced other
forms of regionalization in which capital accumulation and neoliberal
norms are thin or absent. N. Korea and parts of Africa have been
disconnected from the global production of wealth (Ferguson 2000) and
they suffer from a different set of market risks. So at the level of the
globe as well, one can talk about the gradation of zones of extreme
privilege associated with the ethos of embedded liberalism, of emerging
areas developing norms of limited financial liberalization, and other
areas where market regulation is absent. A Citibank manager thinking
about the tradeable assets of particular regions, divides the world into
“bankable” and “unbankable” areas, and it is such converging forms of
regionalization that increasingly fracture pre-existing differences,
shaping and reproducing the ways regions and countries come to think of
themselves as different kinds of civilization.
Does Globalization or Its Crisis Intensify Political Activism?
- 4 See F. Loh (1996), for an overview of NGOs in Southeast Asia before the financial crash.
33It
should be clear by now that the economic liberalization of Asian
countries has depended on the state to modernize the economy and
society. Globalization has strengthened the so-called authoritarian
states in Southeast Asia, but the strength of the Asian tiger state lies
in the fact that no single strategy of government characterizes the
entire national space. Asian postdevelopmentalism is based on different
modes for governing different parts of the population that can be linked
or unlinked from market investments. For years, NGO activists fighting
for environmental rights, social and economic rights, and the rights of
indigenous peoples have been tightly controlled and muzzled;
“quarantined” in university forums and hotel rooms, they could only
create “turbulence in a glass” (NYT 1999).4 For years as well, insurgent groups in resource-rich regions have struggled against military repression by the state.
34The
impact of the financial crisis has been to expose the extreme contrast
between the islands of neocorporatist privilege, the production zones of
cheap labor, the brown spots of jungle-dwellers, and the internal
colonies of extreme repression. Hundreds of NGOs had existed in
Suharto’s Indonesia, but with his downfall, the political climate has
opened up. The reformasi movements have gone on to mobilize
women, workers, peasants, ethnic minorities, bringing heretofore
excluded citizens into the realm of political participation. The result
is a broadened space for NGOs, political parties, and secessionist
movements to flex their muscles, challenge state authority, and demand
state accountability.
35Beck
uses the term “unbinding of politics” to describe the gradual loss of
power experienced by the centralized political system, as sub-political
entities, under the jurisdiction of business, media, or legal
institutions, come to play a bigger role in the production of a new
political culture (1992: 190). Beck is talking about the situations in
modern Western societies, where the stabilization and establishment of
basic rights, and the protection of such rights against the
encroachments of state power, have led to “the broad political
activization of citizens.” (Ibid.: 190-191, 194-195) But in
developing Asian countries, the birth of a broad new political culture
has not come about through the systematic implementation and protection
of basic rights. Rather, it is economic crises which disrupt the sense
of general well-being and political acquiescence found in privileged
sectors of society. What is distinctive about SE Asian social movements
is the diversity of different constituencies, engaged in different kinds
of highly localized battles, rather than a coalescing of forces against
the state.
- 5 For an account of the Suharto family’s amassming of ill-gotten assets worth $15 billion, see Time M (...)
- 6 For a UN fact-finding report on the May 1998 rapes of minority ethnic women in Java, Sumatra, and E (...)
36In Indonesia, the reformasi movement is mainly led by members of the middle classes. Using the protest slogan KKN: kolusion, koruption, and nepotism, reformasi
NGOs have been focused on fighting the staggering graft of the former
Suharto regime, seeking to rid the state of crony capitalism and
demanding open elections.5
The other focus of NGOs activities is the protests of women’s groups in
the aftermath of the torture and gang rape of ethnic minority women
throughout the archipelago.6
- 7 Partai Bhinneka Tunggal Ika Indonesia is the Indonesian national slogan meaning “various, but one; (...)
37Feminist
NGOs formed a National Commission on Violence against Women to fight
for women’s rights in the country. At the same time, a political ferment
built up around the election of the next president. Hundreds of new
political parties have been formed, among them the Indonesia Democracy
Party (Partai Democrasi Indonesia), led by Megawati Sukarnoputri, and
the Muslim Partai Amanat Nasional (PAN or National Mandate Party). For
the first time, ethnic Chinese – some of whom were fed to the raging
crowds by the military – formed a political party (Partai Bhinneka
Tunggal Ika Indonesia: PBI) to demand protection of their basic rights
as citizens (Coppel 1999).7
38In
Malaysia, state legitimacy was challenged mainly in the area of rule of
law, following the arrest and trail of Anwar Ibrahim, the former deputy
prime minister. Anwar was sacked by prime minister Mahathir for favoring
the adoption of IMF prescriptions; he is in jail after being brought to
trail for abusing his position and related sexual misdemeanors. His
supporters, mainly educated and professional members of the Malay middle
class, combining forces with the activist NGO Aliran, formed a National
Justice Party (Parti-Keadilan Malaysia), with the slogan “justice,
progress, and unity.” For them, reformasi means exposing and
struggling against state crony capitalism, demands for reforms of the
judiciary system and the police, and protection from the arbitrary
exercise of state power. In both countries, a revitalized political
culture is demanding that government actions be explained and justified
to sub-political units, and that such groups have the right to negotiate
state policy. This is a major step forward for citizens accustomed to
putting their faith in state developmentalism, and a crucial step in
their becoming modern reflexive subjects.
- 8 Under the Suharto regime, a few Chinese tycoons enjoyed special political access which enabled them (...)
- 9 A government-sponsored team admitted links between the rapes and an army unit headed by Suharto’s s (...)
39But
non-elite political activism is focused less on reforming the
government than in seeking protection from the risks of global market
forces. There is a gap of perception between middle class activists and
the poor and dispossessed, their size newly increased by the millions of
workers laid off from the jobs who have returned to poverty-stricken
neighborhoods and villages. Historically, the rage against market
uncertainties and crises had focused on local Chinese as the sacrificial
scapegoats.8
In May 1998 and the following weeks, attacked ethnic Chinese shops, and
participated in military instigated rapes of an estimated 168 Chinese
girls and women, twenty of whom subsequently died.9
The fears engendered by market crashes, the anonymous speculative mania
wrecking the country’s economy was transfigured into images of local
Chinese shopkeepers hoarding food, Chinese “traitors” fleeing the
country with ill-gotten capital, and ninja murderers of Muslims. In some
neighborhoods, local vigilante groups hunted for ninjas, or phantom
sorcerers who were killed on sight (approximately 200 ninjas were killed
in Java). The heads of ninjas were paraded on pikes, a way of keeping
invisible uncertainties and risks at bay. Such grisly mutations of
market-induced fears, and the demands by the masses for some kind of
redistribution of “Chinese” wealth in favor of the “pribumi” indigenous
population, have been considered in terms of a possible
affirmative-style policy like the one that exists in Malaysia. But there
has been little consideration of the extremely vulnerable position of
the majority to volatile market conditions. NGOs like the Urban Poor
Consortium and the Walhi, or the leading environmental groups, are the
few that attend to the economic consequences of globalization, but none
has yet begun to consider how different state strategies of development
have affected different areas of the nation.
40Then there are the on-going dirty wars in the pockets of resource-rich areas seeking autonomy from Jakarta. Middle class reformasi
movements in Java are little connected with the struggles of ethnic
minorities in the Outer Islands struggling against military repression.
Since their invasion by Indonesia in 1976, the East Timorese have
struggled to gain independence. A potentially more dangerous battle is
brewing in Aceh – home to 4 million Muslims, and even richer in gas,
oil, timber, and minerals – because of the failure of the interim
Habibie government to prosecute past abuses, repressive military
control, and extraction of locally-produced revenues. The Gerakan Aceh
Merdeka (Free Aceh Movement) is fueling a Muslim grass-roots insurgency,
with funds from other Muslim countries. The return of foreign-trained
guerrillas and claims of wide international support have helped launch a
fight for independence. Thus the impact of the financial crisis on
political activities has been diverse, and it is unlikely that middle
class movements fighting for a less corrupt and more accountable
government in Jakarta will be comfortable with demands for greater
provincial autonomy and the threat of national dismemberment. The
diversity of political activism reveals that despite the centralized
image of Suharto’s New Order, or Malaysia’s vision of industrial
progress, these states have adopted different strategies of government
for different parts of the national space. The effects have been to
produce highly differentiated communities with different kinds of
political subjectivity, each engaged in an embedded struggle for a
different vision of shared fate, a fate conditioned by their particular
treatment by the state and their links to or potential for market
investments.
* * *
41I
have argued that economic globalization has induced small, developing
states to experiment with a set of strategies in governing segments of
their population, and administering certain areas of the national
territory, depending on whether they are linked to or delinked from
global market networks. The graduation of sovereignty, I have argued, is
constituted by a plethora of norm-making activities. At the level of
the nation, the question becomes of what kind of civilization the state
sees itself as belonging to; at the level of state-society relations,
cultural norms define who constitutes a worthy citizen (and who does
not); and at the level of regional integration, regional identity – the
vague set of “Asian values” invoked by Asian foreign ministers – is
defined against the more disruptive forces of neoliberal capitalism
associated with the American bloc.
42I
also maintain that the anthropological approach can make a special
analytical contribution to the study of globalization. In this way
anthropologists can demonstrate that we have something to say about what
globalizing forces do to as well as what they may mean to people in
their particular worlds. Anthropology has a long tradition of studying
the evolution of social organization, concerned in particular with
linking localities with the larger regional and global forces that shape
their evolution.
43•
Our attention to transformations in social relationships, to cultural
production within shifting power networks, and new interest in forms of
governance are critical tools for studying the strategic aspects of
globalization, and enable us to demonstrate what are distinctive about
the links between market, state, and society in a particular part of the
world.
44•
Our understanding of particular historical trajectories and
contingencies, especially in the colonial and post-colonial remaking of
new nations and alternative modernities, are important insights in an
analysis of the contemporary global reconstitution of the local, the
regional and the national.
45• International relations theorists have talked about the “unbundling” of national territories by globalizing processes (Ruggie op. cit.),
but it will be the task of anthropologists to make analytical
specifications about how certain relationships between market, state,
and society are reworked, and what mechanisms of regulation and cultural
logics accompany such reconfigurations.
46•
Our attention to cultural production and contestation within structures
of power, and our interest in issues of authority make us especially
sensitive to the allegories and cultural normalizing of forms of
governance, and their varied impact on different types of subject
formation.
47In
short, economic globalization requires us to rethink issues and
strategies of governance within the space of the national, and the
different technologies that shape ideas about political subjectivity and
what it means to be human. What then, is the role of a cosmopolitan
humanism today? We can deepen our own reflexive modernity. We can be
vigilant about the neoliberal doctrine that infuses our liberal
thinking, and that induces us to focus on multiculturalism while
resolutely neglecting the structures of power in which it is imbricated.
This trend seems reminiscent of an earlier anthropological practice of
writing about cultural others, but ignoring the colonial structures that
shaped their existence and transformation (Asad 1973). If we can take
our eyes off the ruins that embody the beauty of that which has been
lost, we can pay attention to the contemporary processes that have
transformed natives into contemporary moderns like us. We might then
understand how they have been uprooted from their social networks, and
in what kinds of new social arrangements they are now re-embedded. In
sum, we might ask what kinds of modern subjects they are becoming in the
new spaces of globalization, still haunted as they are by fragments of
their old cosmology.
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Notes
1
But in Washington, defenders of neoliberalism warned about the dangers
of economic isolation, and hoped that the Malaysian economy, which is
the darling of American electronic companies, would go down in flames.
The president of a major fund investing in emerging markets admitted:
“If the Malaysian experiment is successful, and other Asian countries
are still struggling a year from now, it could lead to some
disillusionment with naked capitalism and Anglo-Saxon markets.” (NYT 1998)
2
The original 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement inaugurated our current
post-1945 growth of global finance. Keynes, as Britain’s chief
negotiator at Bretton Woods, strongly maintained that national monetary
autonomy was essential to the successful management of a macroeconomy
policy geared towards full employment. The United States negotiator
agreed with the decision to resist Wall Street’s opposition to capital
controls. The IMF needs to return to its original commitment to the
promotion and maintenance of high levels of employment and real income
as the primary objectives of economic policy (Held et al. op. cit.: 199-200).
3 See M. Khor (1999), for a discussion of the merits of a move towards limited financial liberalization.
4 See F. Loh (1996), for an overview of NGOs in Southeast Asia before the financial crash.
5 For an account of the Suharto family’s amassming of ill-gotten assets worth $15 billion, see Time Magazine (May 24, 1999).
6
For a UN fact-finding report on the May 1998 rapes of minority ethnic
women in Java, Sumatra, and East Timor, see R. Coomaraswarmy (1999).
7 Partai Bhinneka Tunggal Ika Indonesia
is the Indonesian national slogan meaning “various, but one; diverse
but united.” The Chinese thus seeks to be recognized as ethnically
different and equal citizens of Indonesia.
8
Under the Suharto regime, a few Chinese tycoons enjoyed special
political access which enabled them to amss huge fortunes and dominate
sectors of the economy. The majority of ethnic Chinese, numbering some 4
million, suffer from the historical legacy of anti-Chinese sentiments
and legal status as racialized citizens. The Suharto government, through
inaction, had practically “legalized” attacks on Chinese property and
persons (Coppel op. cit.).
9
A government-sponsored team admitted links between the rapes and an
army unit headed by Suharto’s son-in-law, then lieutenant general
Prabowo Subianto. His elite special forces (Kopassus) were also involved
in the disappearance of 24 activities earlier in the year. See reports
in The Jakarta Post, July 14, 1998 and Dec. 21, 1998.
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