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Asian crisis as a moral crisis

A Question Of Values?

As the economic turmoil unfolds across Asia, KWOK KIAN-WOON argues that it is apparent this is also a political and social crisis that is part of the painful transition to modernity in the post-colonial societies of Asia

THE Pacific Century, heralded during the early '90s, appears to have ended before the end of the century.

The Asian miracle has suddenly given way to the Asian crisis. "From miracle to meltdown", "from miracle to debacle" -- these are the new catchphrases describing the crisis that has swept across the continent.

Tiger talk is out. Former Hongkong governor Chris Patten introduces his book, East And West, by saying that he does not want to add to "the temporarily discontinued library of books puffing Asia". "Tiger virtues, Tiger values, Tiger futures have been so recklessly celebrated that we now find ourselves, boom to bust, told that all the Tigers are skinned and stuffed".

Indeed, what has happened to "Asian values"? Some critics are quick to suggest that these were precisely the values that legitimised the "corruption, cronyism, and nepotism" now identified as the scourge of Asian capitalism.

Others who once decried the triumphalism of the proponents of "Asian values" have themselves turned triumphalist, suggesting that they were right all along about the emperor's new clothes.

In his May 1998 New York Times Magazine article Asia Devalued, Walter Russell Mead declared that "the financial crisis has exposed the 'Asian values' of hard work, thrift and family for what they always were: bunk".

This is a bad time for "Asian values". Precisely so, it is a crucial time for a deeper consideration of the place of values in the context of the awesome challenges Asian societies are facing.

For, in these times, one may ask: Don't intellectuals have more important things to do than discuss "Asian values" in the abstract? What are the stakes in the question today?

MORE THAN FINANCIAL CRISIS

TO BEGIN with, I suggest that the Asian crisis is, among other things, a moral crisis -- a crisis of "Asian values" that is endemic to the making of 20th-century modernity in Asia. And it is a crisis that has a deeper social and cultural significance, which can be appreciated from a broader historical -- and perhaps philosophical -- perspective.

In his article, Mead argues that Asian values are "preindustrial customs" and that industrialisation, urbanisation and economic growth will eventually change these values: "Asia, for reasons that have nothing to do with Western imperialism and everything to do with its own social and economic development, will look more and more like western Europe and North America and less and less like traditional Asia. It's called progress, and it is, despite many shortcomings, a good thing."

This optimistic, neo-liberal perspective overlaps partly with Francis Fukuyama's more sober analysis on Asian Values And The Asian Crisis in the February 1998 issue of Commentary. If Asian nations were to get back on the pre-crisis trajectory, the changes that have to come about will, he suggests, "puncture the idea of Asian exceptionalism".

In catching up with the West, "growth rates will slow and social problems will accumulate" and "the complex nature of industrial or post-industrial societies will increasingly favour the rule of law and greater popular participation".

To be sure, Asian societies cannot take themselves out of the historical path of Western-led modernity. Yet this familiar storyline gives short shrift to the unequal relations between Western and non-Western nations in the global capitalist system, and to the struggles among people within nations and the region to develop a form of modernity that fulfills their highest ideals and deepest aspirations.

It is along these two axes that the discourses on "Asian values" can be located. By the early '90s, the economic rise of the Asian region, amid signs of economic slowdown and social crisis in Western countries, was accompanied by a new-found confidence on the part of Asian societies on the global stage.

Some Asian leaders and intellectuals sought to highlight the significance of "Asian values" in underpinning the Asian miracle and in resisting the ills of Western liberalism and welfarism.

For example, they positioned Asian "communitarianism" as the moral basis of "Asian capitalism"and "Asian democracy", which were seen to be radically different from the Western model based on excessive "individualism".

In the process, the "East versus West" discourse tended to reduce the multi-sided complexity of the world into basic contrasting images and opposing categories. Hence a selected list or core of "Asian values" was often pitted against "Western values" in a black-and-white, positive-versus-negative way.

WHAT ARE ASIAN VALUES?

NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING economist Amatrya Sen has argued that the emphasis on the radical differences between Western and non-Western "cultures" or "civilisations" also obscures the diversity of traditions within each of them. Thus, contrary to ideological stereotypes, bearers of certain Asian -- Buddhist, Confucian and Islamic -- traditions do value freedom, stress speaking truth to power, and counsel tolerance and mutual understanding.

In Sen's words, "the rhetoric of cultures, with each 'culture' seen in largely homogenised terms, can confound us politically as well as intellectually".

To look at the discourse as a contestation of values within Asian cultures, a good place to start is The Asian Renaissance (1996) by former Malaysian deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, not least because it illustrated that there were significant differences between his idea of "Asian values" and that of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, both leaders ostensibly belonging to the same "nation", "culture", "religion" or "tradition".

These differences have, of course, come to the fore, with Anwar's recent exit from the corridors of official power in Malaysia.

As much as he was still locked into the "East versus West" polarity that informed much of the ideological discourse, Anwar offered a more sophisticated perspective, which did not depend rigidly on invidious contrasts between Asian and Western values. Perhaps a single quotation may suffice to show this:

"If the term Asian values is not to ring hollow, Asians must be prepared to champion ideals which are universal. It is altogether shameful, if ingenious, to cite Asian values as an excuse for autocratic practices and denial of basic rights and civil liberties. To say that freedom is Western or unAsian is to offend our own traditions as well as our forefathers who gave their lives in the struggle against tyranny and injustice... No Asian tradition can be cited to support the proposition that in Asia, the individual must melt into a faceless community."

In one stroke, then, he addresses key issues such as the false dichotomy between Asian versus universal values, the alleged Asian disregard for human rights, the emphasis on community or society at the expense of the respect for the individual.

Moreover, he traced his idea of an Asian Renaissance to national and cultural sources as diverse as Filipino patriot and writer Jose Rizal, Islamic poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal and Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, "transmitters par excellence of the humanistic tradition" who "were able to transcend cultural specificity to inhabit the realm of universal ideas" and "sought to reinvigorate the Asian self, fractured and deformed by colonialism".

These words provide a springboard for us to understand three broad stages of development in discourses of values in a number of Asian societies.SOWING THE SEEDS OF NATIONALISM

THE discourse on Asian values was, in a sense, prefigured by proto-nationalist discourses on the part of subjects under the colonial order in different parts of Asia.

Such discourses invariably took the form of the "native" turning to his "own" culture for sources of what might be called "cultural empowerment". And this involved the appeal to forms of humanism vis-a-vis the oppressiveness of colonial rule.

This process also entailed a "reinvigoration" of a native "self", which has been denied or stripped away by the debilitating processes of colonial domination. It represented a new kind of "consciousness" of the self as an autonomous subject in relation to the colonial master -- a decolonisation of the mind.

To illustrate my point, I shall draw from a 1995 study by Shiraishi Takashi on The Modern In Southeast Asia, in which he highlights the case of a certain Mas Marco, a journalist who lived in Dutch Java who in the '10s wrote about himself as someone who was humanly, although not socially, on par with the colonial administrators: "Marco is person from the little-man-class; he has never stepped through a school door; his views are not broad... Nonetheless, by the ordaining of the one god, Marco has been given two ears, two hands, one head, one mouth, etc. -- just like most people."

As Shiraishi puts it, "this sort of writing was composed by South-east Asians after the modern era began, or perhaps it would be better to say that the modern era began when they began to write like this. A new history, politics, and literature emerged from this new attitude toward the world in which they lived".

The pre-war and post-war nationalist movements in South-east Asia can be considered the culmination of this new consciousness that came into being.

Indeed, the decolonisation period also saw the development of a wider sense of the "Third World" that spanned across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Once national regimes were established, however, state-building along developmentalist lines ensued, integrating the national economies into the global capitalist order.

The entire process of fast-paced post-colonial development within a short span of a few decades represents what might be called a case of "modernisation without modernity".

Citizens were mobilised by the state towards "national" goals with the promise of material improvement -- which was, in varying degrees, delivered.

In the process, there was a kind of "leapfrogging" from the old order into the structures and mentalities of modernisation, into the scientific-technological and capitalist rationality -- generally bypassing the development of the cognitive development of modernity in the form of a new self-consciousness.

Into this vacuum some discourse akin to Asian values emerged, especially during a period of ascendency out of the underdevelopment bequeathed by colonialism.

Moreover, when the rate of capital accumulation increased in the region, there was a felt need to express the sense of an "Asian-ness" that accorded with the new stature of the continent in relation to the "West" -- which nonetheless continued to hold economic and geo-political dominance on the global stage.

The earlier sense of "Third World" had declined with the emergence of the "miracle" first-tier newly-industrialising economies, followed by the second-tier ones.

In the discourse, however, the East-versus-West mode of argument tended to foreclose any kind of critical self-reflection on the nationalist project of capitalist modernisation.

That is, until the forces of global capitalism brought home the fragility of such a project and unleashed a situation in which the lack of transparency, accountability, and equity on the part of the state in relation to ordinary citizens became painfully evident.

TOWARDS A NEWREFORMATIONANWAR'S idea of an Asian Renaissance is both a reference to the European Renaissance and a call for a rebirth of ideas which have their roots in the advent of modernity in Asia.

However, I want to stretch his idea a little further. Historically, the Renaissance was marked out conventionally by the years 1493-1520, and was followed by the Protestant Reformation of around 1520-1559.

Now, within a few years, his call for an Asian Renaissance has been followed, in the aftermath of his fall from grace, by his call for reformasi ("reform" in Malay).

On the regional stage, the Asian values discourse has given way to calls for reform, with the cry of reformasi strongest in Indonesia. To put it provocatively, it might be suggested that world history has been "recapitulated" in a more condensed period of time in the late 20th-century Asian setting.

Of course, my drawing of an historical analogy between reformasi and the Reformation is intentionally far-fetched. And I do not mean to suggest that historical change in South-east Asia must follow the Western trajectory.

But the important point is this: What the Protestant sects placed emphasis on was, in Robert Bellah's words, "the absolute centrality of religious freedom, of the sacredness of individual conscience in matters of religious belief".

Modern -- Western, if you will -- ideas of rights owe their lineage to this source. Freedom of conscience is "the most powerful Right of Man because it comprises all ethically conditioned action and guaranteed freedom from compulsion, especially from the power of the state".

This is not the place to review the huge sociological literature on the significance of both the Renaissance and the Reformation in the making of Western, and hence also global, modernity, especially in supporting the rational structures of law and administration that are, in turn, necessary for capitalist development.

Among other things, this, I think, is what reformasi in Indonesia and Malaysia ultimately represents: the right of individual conscience vis-a-vis state power. And this tension has come to the fore in a manner and to an extent that has been unprecedented in the post-colonial history of the two countries.

Hence the crucial issues in the reformasi movements revolve around the question of justice and the rule of law (as contrasted with legality and the rule by law).

A great deal of moral premium is also placed on the question of "truth", whether it is the truth about crimes against humanity, or charges against particular individuals. All of this is to suggest that the manner in which these movements develop will have significant impact on capitalist transformation in South-east Asia.

In addition, the manner in which reformasi works -- or does not work -- hand-in-hand with reconsiliasi (Malay for "reconciliation between contesting groups") will also determine the degree of violence involved in such transformation.

The current crisis was first called a "currency crisis", then a "financial crisis", and then an "economic crisis". As the months went by, events showed that in some national settings, the crisis is also, at bottom, a political and social crisis.

In suggesting that it is also a moral crisis, I would not like to downplay its roots in the workings of global capitalism, in which men as different as Dr Mahathir and American financier George Soros have seen the need for some kind of international regulation -- just as domestic financial systems need a prudent combination of liberalisation and regulation.

Ultimately, the paradox of capitalism is that the amoral -- and not always "rational" -- workings of the market lead to morally questionable effects, which some groups will be more vulnerable to.

Therefore, human values, and call them "Asian values" if we must, are still very much on the agenda as Asian societies face the forces of capitalist globalisation.Kwok Kian-Woon is a sociologist. This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the panel discussion on Asian Values: Asian Miracle And Asian Mirage, during the Institute of Policy's Conference on Singapore: The Year In Review 1998, last Wednesday.

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