Rescripting East/West relations, rethinking Asian democracy¹

I would like to thank Albeit Paolini, Naruemon Thapchumpon, Peter Curtin, Sumalee Bumroongsook and the two anonymous readers for their helpful comments which added much to this essay

Abstract

This article enters into the debate over civilizational politics by analysing its workings in Asia through a deconstruction of the discourse of “Asian Democracy”. First, it examines the history of the concepts of “Asia” and “East/West” to argue that prominent writers such as Samuel Huntingdon and Lee Kuan Yew use them with the same cultural logic as the Cold War and European Imperialism. Thus they hardly provide a new or unique Asian way, but actually re‐Orientalise Asian politics. This is borne out in the second section which examines how “democracy” is used in an authoritarian way by states in the region. But the article also looks to how other groups in Asia have taken “Asian Democracy” as an opportunity to take culture seriously and create forms of people‐power which are based on local knowledge and culture. The Community Culture School in Thailand is presented as an exemplary case of the theoretical challenges that such communal forms of democracy pose to both authoritarian aspects of Asian Democracy and to the excessive individualism of western democracy. Third, the essay links these very local movements with discourses of transnational democracy to take a critical view of global civil society. The article concluded that because such local movements employ a more open sense of culture and politics they are able to combine in a regional (but not necessarily global) united front strategy to deal in a Democratic way with the challenges of transnational capital and sate power ‐ thus rethinking Asian Democracy.

Notes

I would like to thank Albeit Paolini, Naruemon Thapchumpon, Peter Curtin, Sumalee Bumroongsook and the two anonymous readers for their helpful comments which added much to this essay