“Disruptive World: Innovative Political Science?”

by Daniel Slater Professor of Political Science and Director of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies (WCED) University of Michigan,

Good morning. It was such an honor to be invited to speak with you all today on this wonderful and auspicious occasion: the 70th anniversary of Chulalongkorn University’s Department of Political Science. In these trying and, indeed, disruptive political times, we can all use every auspicious occasion we can get.

I first visited your beautiful and historic campus in 2003. I was conducting fieldwork for my dissertation project that would culminate in my first book, Ordering Power. I spent many hours in your library culling sources from the American Cold War collection on the history of communist insurgency and state-building in Thailand: a virtuous if bitter fruit of my government’s disastrous role in conducting the Vietnam War. More personally, and more importantly, it was on this occasion when I first met your very own colleague, Thitinan. We realized then, to our mutual delight, that our 1-year-old daughters were born only one day apart. I should also confess that I spent a lot of my time that year in Bangkok in the political science and economics libraries at Thammasat University. But I hope you will not consider me disloyal as a result.

Our dual themes for this auspicious occasion are “disruptive world” and “innovative political science.” In my limited time with you today, I will first say a few words about how I think about what it means to innovate in political science. My main point will be that the most important innovations in political science tend to be conceptual, not methodological or technical. This should be good news for political scientists around the world who spend far less time than most American political scientists amassing methodological skills, especially of the quantitative variety. Since I never amassed advanced quantitative methods skills myself, it is certainly good news for me.

In the second part of my talk, I will offer an example of how new concepts might offer new order and clarity to one very large and very diverse part of our “disruptive world”: Northeast and Southeast Asia. Or as some people lump them both together, East Asia. For good reason, the vast majority of comparative politics and international relations scholarship on East Asia has been single-country in approach. Each country is at some level unique. Colonial histories and national languages vary considerably. It is challenging enough to keep track of disruptive politics in any one East Asian country, much less across the entire region.

But here is where innovating with concepts can hopefully bear fruit. Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia are already both extremely diverse, as regions go. Grouping them together as East Asia is an even bigger leap. I will argue that reconceptualizing this part of the world as a region I call “developmental Asia” can help us make more systematic sense of this vast political space. A Keynote Speech on the occasion of the 70th years Anniversary of the Faculty of Political Science, 1 Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, August 17, 2018. 1 Specifically, by looking at developmental Asia as a set of distinctive developmental clusters, we can better understand two very big puzzles in this part of the world.

The first puzzle is from comparative politics. Why do we see so much variation across East Asia both in the introduction and consolidation of democracy? Attention to variation is essential. Neither modernization theory’s expectation that growth would universally lead to democracy, nor the “Asian values” perspective that democracy should not take solid root in this part of the world, has proven correct – or perhaps even helpful. East Asia is neither a region of democratic convergence nor authoritarian convergence. I argue that attention to Asia’s developmental clusters can help explain this variation.

The second puzzle is from international relations. For all its raw power, China is struggling to project its influence in most of East Asia. Paradoxically, in fact, and in contrast to how we assume power projection across space should work, China’s influence seems to get stronger as it travels greater distance. China is ironically less effective at establishing uncontested leadership in its own backyard – even in territories over which it claims formal sovereignty, like Hong Kong and Taiwan – than it is in some distant pockets of Africa and Latin America. Again, I argue that developmental clusters matter, and that East Asia’s political and economic diversity virtually ensure that China will never truly dominate it.

But let us start with innovation in political science. Innovation often implies technology, or at least technique. American political scientists are either famous or notorious, depending on your perspective, for the stress we put on high-end methodological skills, especially of a quantitative variety. Unfortunately this often leads to friction, or at least misunderstandings, between American political scientists who study East Asia and scholars who live and work in the region, or in Australia or Europe. As one renowned European political scientist expressed his exasperation when attending an American Political Science Association conference: we Americans are “methods freaks.” In the other direction, Americans might sometimes either dismiss or be seen as dismissing the work our colleagues outside the United States produce as supposedly unscientific or lacking in innovation.

There are real differences in how political scientists do their research, of course. Many would portray the key difference as qualitative vs. quantitative. In my recent work with colleagues on historical legacies in the Annual Review of Political Science, I have argued that the more important distinction lies between those working in the Comparative Historical Analysis tradition and the Modern Political Economy tradition. We argue that these approaches tend to look at politics from different angles and in different ways. Yet they are mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory. I would make the same argument about the literature on East Asian politics as I would about historical legacies.

It is not methods, but concepts that are of the essence when it comes to innovation. Concepts matter because they provide at least some order and clarity to the radical political diversity and seemingly constant political disruption that we confront, in East Asia and around the world. Think of the many examples of new concepts that made it impossible for us to see familiar features of political life in the same old way ever again. Imagined Communities from Benedict Anderson. Weapons of the Weak from James Scott. Bureaucratic Polity from Fred Riggs. And from the literature on China, adaptive institutions from Kellee Tsai, solidary groups from Lily Tsai, Kevin O’Brien on rightful resistance, Elizabeth Perry on emotion work in China’s age of 2 communist mobilization, and experimentation under hierarchy in the age of reform. Obviously conceptual innovation is not and should never be an American monopoly than any other kind of innovation. It should be the work of Asian universities every bit as much as your American counterparts.

To the extent that my own work has been successful, it has had far more to do with concepts I introduced and developed than the methods or techniques I used. Systemic vulnerability as an explanation for developmental states; promiscuous powersharing as a threat to democratic accountability; protection pacts as the strongest source of authoritarian durability; democratic careening as an unsettled political condition in cases such as Thailand; and packing, rigging, and circumventing as the ways in which authoritarian leaders personalize power. The fact that I developed all these concepts in the context of Southeast Asia has almost surely limited their wider impact in American political science to some degree. But that has also perhaps given them at least enough credibility and grounding here in the region that I am lucky enough to be invited here today.

In the remainder of my time, please allow me to show how I am currently trying to innovate with concepts to make the case for a new approach to the political geography, economy, and sociology of this wider region. I suggest that we should transcend the standard distinction between Northeast and Southeast Asia, not with an even bigger grab-bag category like East Asia, but by thinking instead of “developmental Asia” as a region that includes some but not all cases in both regions. I will suggest further that developmental Asia can be divided into four clusters containing three cases each.

Before I go any further, though: what exactly is developmental Asia, what exactly are the four clusters, and exactly which cases belong in each? I define developmental Asia as those Northeast and Southeast Asian polities that have at least minimally followed a state-sponsored, export-led strategy of rapid economic growth and “catch-up” with both “the West” and Asia’s leading economies, albeit with widely varying degrees of commitment and success.

Developmental Asia is thus determined politically and economically, not just geographically. For instance, the Philippines, North Korea, Laos, Brunei, and Mongolia may all be located in “East Asia,” but none of them are in developmental Asia. Importantly, developmental Asia is a zone of historically overlapping American, British, Japanese, and Chinese regime influence. As I explain momentarily, it is not Sino-centric, even though China is clearly becoming its greatest power. Developmental Asia is a region with four identifiable clusters of distinctive types of developmentalism. Comparisons across cases should shed more light, all else equal, when they are crafted within one of these clusters rather than across them. That being said, the three cases within each cluster are as different as they are similar; they are like siblings, not triplets.

What are the four clusters? The cluster of developmental statism is comprised of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. All long-lasting, stable, rich democracies. The developmental militarist cluster encompasses Indonesia, Myanmar, and Thailand. All three have experimented with democratic reforms at times. But they have struggled much more than the developmental statist cluster to sustain democracy and build up democratic substance. Malaysia is in a cluster with Hong Kong and Singapore that I call developmental Britannia. At least until Malaysia’s recent elections, the outcomes of which for democratization remain uncertain, none of developmental Britannia has been democratic. But it has all been electoral authoritarian. Meanwhile, the cluster China has essentially invented and clearly leads – the developmental socialist cluster – has no democracies. China and Vietnam are enduring single-party regimes. Cambodia has now rejoined the ranks of the opposition-less: staying true to its cluster. These developmental socialist countries are electorally closed, not electorally competitive regimes like the developmental Britannia cluster.

These four clusters of development are also clusters of democratization for multiple reasons. The fact that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have been such stable democracies is surely not unrelated to the fact that all three have been strong American allies. But America does not deserve credit for these democracies, and it certainly did not build their developmental states. Obviously America supported many countries during the Cold War that became autocracies. What made this developmental statism cluster different, more than anything else, is strong states that could provide stability, and strong conservative parties that could prevail in democratic elections. Where conservatives can win elections, they do not need to turn against democracy to stay in power. The LDP in Japan is Asia’s consummate example.

This helps explain why the developmental militarist cluster – Indonesia, Myanmar, and Thailand – has had a much rockier experience with democratic politics. When conservative parties allied with the military cannot win elections, their commitment to democracy predictably becomes more tenuous. The good news is that militaries worry more about political stability than elections per se. So if democracy promises to dampen down popular protest and help restore stability, as in Indonesia in the late 1990s, the military can be expected to support it. In Myanmar, the military could live with a landslide victory by a party it dislikes in 2015, because it had written and imposed a constitution allowing it to control most of the state apparatus regardless. Here in Thailand, similarly, a return to democratic politics will require military confidence in an outcome that avoids the polarized and destabilizing partisanship of the early 2000s. I am cautiously optimistic that such an outcome, democratic if somewhat suboptimally so, can be arranged in relatively short order.

Developmental Britannia, meanwhile, may be turning from a lagging to a leading zone of Asian democratization. Malaysia has just experienced what appears to be its first democratic breakthrough after half a century of dominant-party authoritarianism. If this goes relatively smoothly, the impact on Singapore next door could be profound. As a country with a relatively strong state and steady political institutions, Malaysia should hopefully be poised for the smoother kind of democratization seen in the developmental statist cluster (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan) than in the developmental militarist cluster (Indonesia, Myanmar, and Thailand). Singaporean democratization would be Asia’s smoothest democratization experience ever, if the ruling party there would simply brave it. Democratic reforms in Hong Kong may be at least currently out of the question due to China’s control. Yet in Hong Kong as in Singapore and Malaysia, we see legacies of impressive economic development and deeply rooted electoral practices growing out of British rule. This should give conservative politicians ample confidence that democratic elections would not produce unfriendly outcomes for them, at least in the longer term.

The developmental socialist cluster is a very different story. China is gaining national strength, but this does not necessarily translate into the kind of incumbent confidence necessary to prompt and oversee the kind of top-down democratic transition in the People’s Republic of China once seen in the Republic of China, or Taiwan. Single-party regimes are also not vulnerable to the 4 kind of potentially democratizing electoral upset witnessed in Malaysia, for example. The fact that China, Vietnam, and Cambodia remain unlikely candidates for regime change, absent currently unforeseeable revolutionary pressures from below, is inseparable from their shared developmental socialist cluster.

Reconceptualizing East Asia as developmental Asia in this clustered fashion not only helps us understand Chinese authoritarianism, and its prospects, in comparative perspective. It also sheds new light on China’s international relations in Asia. Along China’s borders, Beijing appears to be on the march and in the ascendant. Especially in light of the headlong “America First” retreat of the Trump Administration from its global and multilateral leadership responsibilities and commitments. Yet China’s seeming strength in projecting its power and influence outward is counterbalanced by its many enduring liabilities.

I say this as an empirical claim, not a moral assertion. Even if you believe that China is the fully legitimate sovereign power over Hong Kong and Taiwan, for instance, you need to reckon with the reality that it is not going very smoothly. To understand why, I argue that we need to set aside deeper questions of shared civilization or ancient territorial claims. They tell us nothing about what is happening now or what is likely to happen – except perhaps in Vietnam, where deep civilizational history makes things even harder for China, not easier. We should focus instead on how this region had already been shaped by multiple powers long before China became strong enough to stake a claim to regional leadership. Considering that China did not even join developmental Asia until the reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era at the earliest, one could argue that China did not even enjoy regional membership until long after the United States, Great Britain, and Japan had shaped the region in line with their own visions.

The overlapping historical influence of the United States, Great Britain, and Japan in developmental Asia remains profound. As colonial powers, they have long since lowered their flags. But the legacies of the political institutions and economic development models they built remain deeply entrenched. Not only in the institutions of places they once ruled, but in the way they forged a multipolar region. As disastrous as the role of these three great powers has often been in developmental Asia, the fact remains that their rule spread much wealth, creating a region loaded with rich and confident peoples. These peoples unsurprisingly continue to believe in the institutions and models that got them rich in the first place. China is not the leader in this development game; it is the latecomer.

Of developmental Asia’s four clusters, China dominates only one, at most. And it is harder to project power outside one’s developmental cluster than within it, because the political institutions and economic models simply do not fit. Oil and water, if you’ll forgive the cliche. What this means is that for all its undeniable strength, China is in a different cluster from all the cases over which it would most like to assert control. This sheds much light on why China is struggling to do so. Taiwan is developmental statist. Myanmar is developmental militarist. And Hong Kong is in developmental Britannia. Not because it properly should be – Britain’s original conquest of Hong Kong was obviously an opium-driven disgrace – but because it simply is. Cambodia is the exception that proves the rule. It is developmental socialist like China, and it has found China’s embrace most welcoming of all.

In conclusion, developmental Asia is not on the verge of convergence toward either an authoritarian or democratic character. Nor is China on the verge of creating a peaceful and stable 5 Asian order in America’s place. In large measure because this part of the world is so diverse – not so much culturally as politically and economically – it will naturally remain disruptive. But compared with the grim orderliness that comes from a region dominated by a single unchallenged superpower, or ruled by multiple unchallenged authoritarian regimes, a disruptive Asia might be an attractive alternative. And speaking of orderliness: hopefully the concept of developmental Asia offers a more orderly understanding of this region’s politics of regime change and superpower influence. More orderly frameworks for this disruptive region might be the best goal for an innovative political science to pursue. And it should always be powered by innovative political scientists on both sides of the Pacific.