A Research Agenda for the Study of Southeast Asian Liberalisms

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a research agenda for a sympathetic study of liberalism in Southeast Asia. To do so, it outlines a vision for liberal scholarship, after which it responds to three obstacles that retard investigations of liberalism in the region: that liberalism is an elite project; that liberalism is ill-suited and detrimental to Asia; and that liberalism is emotionally barren. In addressing these obstacles, the article hopes to encourage capacious research on how liberalism has been interpreted and reinterpreted to address historical and contemporary political problems in Southeast Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• Liberalism
• populism
• Southeast Asia
• Asian values
• postcolonialism

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Peter Zinoman, Caroline Hau and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical feedback. Many thanks as well to Mark Thompson and Michael Connors for shepherding this Special Issue and commenting on this piece.

Notes

1. This is an apt summary of what Milner (2002, p. 89) has posited at greater length in a volume on the intellectual history of colonial Malaya.

2. The use of “republicanism” in French Indochina and “liberalism” in Spanish Philippines is a function of the different regimes that influenced liberal-democratic politics in these colonies. In the former, the French Third Republic (1870–1940) mediated the values of the French Revolution. In the latter, these same principles were initially mediated through the Cadiz Constitution of 1812, which served as a symbol of “liberalismo” during the years of the Carlist Wars. In fact, the contemporary usage of the word “liberalism” to define a political ideology began amid debates over the Cadiz Constitution.

3. Zinoman cites Goscha (2016) and Peycam (2002) as other key works in the study of Vietnamese republicanism.

4. This disposition was most evident in the Vietnam War-era journal Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (now Critical Asian Studies), which opposed the intervention in Vietnam specifically and American imperialism more broadly, while generally voicing solidarity toward Asian socialist movements.

5. Though clearly indebted to Agoncillo, advocates of Pantayong Pananaw nevertheless view Agoncillo’s work as too Western in its reliance on Marxisant categories such as “haves” and “have nots”. They also view this earlier work as inadequately grounded on a native cultural and linguistic milieu.

6. Thompson’s (1995) work, however, shows a clear qualitative difference between liberal anti-dictatorship elites and those who collaborated with Marcos, or did nothing to oppose his regime.

7. For example, Reynaldo Ileto (2017) has deployed his own “history from below” to defend the popularity of the mass murderer Rodrigo Duterte.