is there a sovietology of southeast asian studies, daivd martin jones

8/12/2019 Is There a Sovietology of Southeast Asian Studies, Daivd Martin Jones

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843

Is there a Sovietology of

South-East Asian studies?

International Affairs77, ()

DAVID MARTIN JONES AND MICHAEL L. R. SMITH

You do not become a dissident just because you decide one day to take up this most

unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility,

combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing

structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do

your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

Vaclav Havel

What, it may be asked, could the former Soviet Union and post-Cold War

South-East Asia have in common? Ostensibly not a lot, given their respective

geopolitical settings and contingent historical experiences. Yet on furtherinvestigation a curious similarity does emerge in the form in which inter-

national relations and area studies specialists conceived these regions as objects

of disciplinary enquiry.

Interestingly, within the decade 198898, both regions experienced crises

that undermined the established scholastic verities that governed their study. In

Cold War Soviet studies, the crisis was the sudden disintegration of the Soviet

Union that terminated the Cold War. In South-East Asia, it was the financial

crisis of 19978 and its political and economic ramifications that exposed the

Asian miracle. In both cases the disciplinary mainstream that examined thedomestic political economy and international relations of each area failed to

identify the causes that provoked crisis.

This analysis attempts two things. First, we set out to identify the failings that

afflicted Sovietology prior to 1989, and trace its similarities to and differences

from the study of domestic politics and international relations in contemporary

South-East Asia. Second, we assess the implications of this failure for the social-

scientific endeavour to explain, predict and test the practices of non-liberal

political arrangements.1

Before proceeding it is necessary to define precisely what we mean by South-East Asian studies and Sovietology. This is not without difficulty. South-East

1 Karl Popper, The poverty of historicism(London: Routledge, 1959), p. 133.


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David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith

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Asian studies, especially, suffers from the fact that Asia is itself an amorphous

and ambiguous idea. For comparative ease we use the term South-East Asia to

denote the geographical area encompassed by members of the Association of

South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN);2South-East Asian studies thus refers to

the scholarly community that focused on the contemporary politics, economics,security and international relations of the region primarily in the years after the

end of the Cold War. In terms of this study, we are dealing with two related

discourses: one generated internally within the region by South-East Asian

scholarbureaucrats who presented ASEAN as the basis of a new regional iden-

tity and dispensation; and another involving the way in which this understand-

ing shaped Western scholarship upon the region. In particular, this approach

primarily informed the constructivist and strategic culturalist mode of thought

in international relations; but it also affected international political economists

who sought to explain the particular economies of the ASEAN states through adeveloping and distinctive regional framework. Moreover, although the

elements of this line of thinking were evident early in the 1980s in the work of

the scholars of the Singapore School like Chan Heng Chee, Jon Quah and

K. S. Sandhu and their Western admirers such as Thomas Bellows, R. S. Milne,

Diane Mauzy, Philippe Regnier and Raj Vasil,3 it attained the status of an

orthodoxy only during the extremely short Pacific century that ran from 1989

to 1999. Therefore, what we are referring to specifically is a particular brand of

South-East Asian scholarship that might be termed ASEANology, which

engendered a distinctive scholarly/ideological practice of ASEANthink.

Similarly, defining Sovietology is problematic since it embraced not only

those concerned with domestic Soviet politics, but also a spectrum of analytical

opinion interested in the wider implications of superpower relations during the

Cold War. Therefore, we shall use the term to encompass both those

specifically interested in Soviet politics and foreign policy and also those with a

focus on the more general security implications of Cold War confrontation.

Soviet specialists in fact recognized the utility of the term and, in the aftermath

of the Cold War, conducted enquiries into its poor performance in identifying

the causes that led to the demise of the Soviet Union. Peter Rutland, in particular,

identified four failings in Sovietology that may also apply to the shortcomingsconfronting the study of ASEAN. It is to these that we initially turn.4

2 Namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar(Burma).

3 For a selection of this oeuvre, see Heng Chee Chan, Singapore: the politics of survival 196567(Singapore:Oxford University Press, 1971): Heng Chee Chan, The PAP and the structuring of the political system,in K. S. Sandhu and Paul Wheatley, eds, Management of success: the moulding of modern Singapore(Singapore: ISEAS, 1989); Jon S. T. Quah, Heng Chee Chan, Chee Meow Seah, eds, Government andpolitics of Singapore(Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987); R. S Milne and Diane Mauzy, Singapore:the legacy of Lee Kuan Yew(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990): Raj Vasil, Governing Singapore (Petaling Jaya:Eastern Universities Press, 1984); T. J. Bellows, The People's Action Party of Singapore: emergence of adominant party system(New Haven, CN: Yale University, South East Asian Studies, 1970); T. J. Bellows,

The Singapore polity: community leadership and institutions,Asian Journal of Political Science1: 1, June1993, pp. 11332.

4 Peter Rutland, Sovietology: notes for a post-mortem, National Interest31, spring 1993.


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Is there a Sovietology of South-East Asian studies?

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Failing to predict the future

The fact that analysts got it wrong provides the starting point for any comparative

assessment of Sovietology and ASEANology. Despite the resources devoted to

the study of the Soviet Union, the vast majority of Cold War commentators failedto predict the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Worse still, every event that happened

after 1989 contradicted predictions made before that date.5American graduate

schools, which constructed theories of hegemonic rivalry explicitly to anticipate

change, discovered only that the change they envisioned failed to eventuate.6

Paul Kennedy, like many others, assumed that it was the United States that was

overstretched and in decline.7As Wohlforth observes: The debate focused upon

US decline, even when the Soviet Union was entering its final stages of collapse.8

Surprised by the Cold Wars unexpected end, scholars appeared reluctant to

accept that superpower competition had resulted in victory for one side. Thebelief persisted that the Soviet Union had unwittingly dissolved itself.9Indeed,

it was widely held in the early 1990s that US decline had been exacerbated by

the effort to contain the Soviet threat. Despite the American victory, the late

Cold War mentalit continued to haunt post-Cold War scholarship. For example,

on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, Ken Booth somewhat obscurely contended

that: In countering talk of declinism it [the United States] is actually showing

how much it had declined. Iraqs invasion of Kuwait proved that US deter-

rence had failed because Saddam Hussein felt he could disregard Western

threats. If war in the Gulf broke out, Booth posited, It will be the clearest signalyet of the decline of US power in the region; the use of force will demonstrate

that the US lacks power. He further asserted: Some if not all Americans know

that a conflict against war-bloodied Iraq is not likely to be a three day turkey

shoot.10Booth was partly right. The land war was a four-day turkey shoot. In

all other respects, however, this scenario was deeply flawed. Ten years after the

Gulf war, the United States stands unequalled as a military superpower, a global

projector of soft power and an engine for world economic growth.

However, this misunderstanding of the nature of American hegemony also

contributed to the misreading of power relations elsewhere in the world,particularly in Asia. For if US power was declining, the rise of Japan and

Western Europe as economic superpowers marked major milestones in inter-

national politics. In particular, the growth in the economic and political influence

of Asia seemed to presage a significant shift taking place in the international

5 Rutland, Sovietology, p. 109.6 William Wohlforth, Realism and the end of the cold war, International Security19: 4, winter 1994, p.

103.7 See e.g. Paul Kennedy, The rise and fall of the great powers: economic change and military conflict from 1500 to

2000(London: Fontana, 1989), pp. 564692.8

Wohlforth, Realism, p. 103.9 See Edward Kolodziej, What is security and security studies: lessons from the cold war,Arms Control13:1, April 1992, p. 5. See also Robert Ned Lebow, The long peace, the end of the cold war, and thefailure of realism,International Organization48: 2, spring 1994, p. 262.

10 Ken Booth, Preface, in Ken Booth, ed.,New thinking about international security (London: HarperCollins,1991), p. 2.


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political economy towards the Pacific Basin.11This shift, it was contended

prior to 1997, heralded the formation of an axis of power, wealth, knowledge

and culture that was likely to shape world history as decisively as the North

Atlantic Community has for the last several centuries.12

This change in the structure and balance of economic power further requiredthe alteration of the governing paradigm of international relations theory.13

From this evolving post-Cold War perspective, the impressive economic growth

of the AsiaPacific region compared favourably with Western economic sluggish-

ness.14The informal, consensus-oriented relationships practised by South-East

Asian states had paved the way for harmonious regional development. By

contrast, the otiose individualism and rule-bound governance of Western

societies produced only welfarism, stagnation and moral decay.15The fact that

ASEAN had survived the US military withdrawal from the region after 1975

and outlasted the Soviet colossus reflected a regional resilience that reinforcedthe image of a tidy Cold War fin de sicleterminating an era of European and

American international dominance and announcing a new Asian Age.16

We now know that this optimistic prognosis for the region failed to antici-

pate the devastating economic meltdown of 19978. From being a miracle, the

various tiger and dragon economies of the AsiaPacific came to require one. No

less remarkable was the degeneration of ASEANs much-vaunted consensual

style of diplomacy. Internal tensions rose and regimes tottered. In Indonesia, the

largest and most important state in the regional grouping, an unstable coalition

and a disintegrating periphery replaced Suhartos kleptocratic New Order that

had ruled the archipelago between 1966 and 1998. Clearly, the collective

inability of ASEANology to recognize the long-standing fissures in the pre-

meltdown regional order suggests a discipline suffering problems analogous to

those of Sovietology, the most obvious similarity being a shared lack of insight

into the region culminating in a woeful record of predictive ineptitude. How-

ever, to attain a more complete insight into these deluded worlds of scholarly

endeavour, it is necessary to examine three additional reasons for their failure.

Surface impressionism

The preoccupation during the 1980s with current events rather than long-term

trends represented an additional analytical weakness in Sovietology. The role of

11 Ken Booth, Introduction: the interregnum: world politics in transition, in Booth, New thinking, p. 2.12John Curtis Perry, Asias telectronic highway, Foreign Policy59, summer 1985, p. 41.13 Steve Smith and John Baylis, Introduction, in Steve Smith and John Baylis, eds, The globalization of world

politics(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 10.14 See e.g. World Bank, The East Asian miracle: economic growth and public policy(Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1993); John Wong, The ASEAN economies(Singapore: Economic Research Centre, 1977).15 See Kishore Mahbubani, The Pacific impulse, Survival37: 1, 1995, pp. 10510; Kishore Mahbubani,

You may not like it Europe, but this Asian medicine could help, International Herald Tribune, 1 Oct.

1994; Bilhari Kausikan, Asias different standard, Foreign Policy92, fall 1993, p. 34.16 See John Naisbett, Megatrends Asia: the eight Asian megatrends that are changing the world(London: Nicholas

Brealey, 1995).


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security practices. Hence, while the end of the Cold War had led to violent

turmoil elsewhere, in South-East Asia, analysts effused, it has led to increased

domestic tranquillity and regional order.26

This understanding was, of course, fundamentally mistaken. Students of inter-

national relations in the AsiaPacific exaggerated the economic performanceand political stability of the region. In the same way that unbounded faith in

Gorbachevs capacity to lead the Soviet Union out of its Brezhnevite sloth mili-

tated against scepticism, so euphoria about the coming Pacific century fostered

an intellectual environment inimical to empirical evidence that might have

revealed a less seductive picture. Like Sovietologys Gorbymaniacs, students of

South-East Asia became cheerleaders for ASEAN. Instead of exposing the

limitations of Asian financial and business practices, academe and the grant-

giving agencies that fuel it, directed their attention to discovering the secret of

the miracle economies, and the lessons to be derived from the Asian way.27

Compromising academic objectivity: the emergence of tacit concurrence

In any field of scholarly enquiry there exists an inevitable tension between the

received wisdom of accumulated opinion and those who question ruling

assumptions. In theory this requires the recognition that participants in con-

ceptual combat can legitimately maintain debate about contested concepts

deriving from different perspectives and different sources.28In practice, however,

scholars often seek conditional resolution through a synthesis of antagonistic

viewpoints. Sometimes this search for synthesis can lead to concurrence, which

subsequently inhibits the free exchange of ideas. Concurrence mutates into

consensus. Consensus is taken as resolution, which forecloses further debate. In

other words, a powerful academic consensus can effectively silence dissent.

From the perspective of an increasingly bureaucratized social science, healthy

scepticism, once considered the sine qua non of scientific investigation, is

dismissed as mere polemic. In the 1980s and 1990s this practice came to define

both Sovietology and ASEANology.

In any discipline there are those whose insights, retrospectively, offer a more

accurate interpretation of events. In the 1970s Randall Collins controversiallyanticipated the collapse of the USSR from geographical overstretch and sub-

sequent institutional exhaustion.29Analogously, Rutland identified Zbigniew

Brzezinski, Alexander Shtromas, Morton Kaplan, Richard Burks and A. A.

26 Amitav Acharya, The periphery as the core: the third world and security studies, in Keith Krause andMichael Williams, eds, Critical security studies(London: UCL Press, 1997), p. 310.

27 See particularly World Bank, The East Asian miracle, pp. 125.28 For the term conceptual combat see David Baldwin, The concept of security, Review of International

Studies23: 1, 1997, p. 11.29 Randall Collins, Weberian sociological theory(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chs 78, and

Some principles of long term social change: the territorial power of states, in Louis Kriesberg, ed.,Research in social movements, conflicts and change, vol. 1 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1978), pp. 134,cited in Wohlforth, Realism, p. 102, n. 24.


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Fedoseyev as analysts who got it more or less right.30These writers, however,

represented a minority who ran against the grain of conventional thinking.

Interestingly, Shtromas and Kaplans edited volume, The Soviet Union and the

challenge of the future, one of the very few texts to foresee the collapse of Soviet

power in 198991, evolved from a conference sponsored by the Unification

Church. Rather worryingly for the social sciences, the Moonies got it right when

the CIA, Brookings, RAND, Harvard, Columbia and the rest got it wrong.31

But why were those analysts who identified the structural faults in the Soviet

system consigned to the disciplinary margins? Partly, it was because none of

them was, strictly speaking, a Sovietologist. Rather, they were, for the most

part, east Europeanists; more precisely, in the case of Brzezinksi, Shtromas and

Fedoseyev, along with others like Vladimir Bukovsky and Ernest Gellner, all of

whom expressed doubts about the Soviet Unions long-term viability, they

were exiles from communist eastern Europe. Western academics persistently

dismissed migr scholarship on grounds of bias.32 From this somewhat self-

serving rationalistic perspective, a lived experience of communism inexorably

poisoned true understanding. By contrast, those who empathized with Soviet

governance, while not necessarily having any direct acquaintance with com-

munist rule, were considered more objective. This practice promoted a curious

inversion of the insideroutsider problem in social-scientific enquiry, whereby

those whose lives had been shaped by the trauma of totalitarianism were

considered intellectually compromised and assigned the category of outsider.

Soviet studies spanned the best part of three-quarters of a century. Yet,despite its consensus-bound deficiencies, a diversity of opinion did eventually

emerge. By contrast, Pacific Rim enthusiasm, which began in the aftermath of

the Vietnam War,33 and reached a disciplinary epiphany between 1990 and

1997, provided even less space for contending views. In a way not dissimilar to

Sovietology, those who voiced alternative interpretations of South-East Asias

political and economic development often struggled to be heard. In assessing

the disciplinary orthodoxy that took hold of ASEANology, however, we must

initially distinguish between criticism of the Asian growth model and the more

general avoidance of the incoherences in the political institutions of ASEANand the states that comprised it. Interestingly, a number of economists disputed

the view advanced by both Asian statesmen and their scholarbureaucrats that

Asian growth reflected a specifically Asian cultural disposition.34Significantly,

those who challenged the viability of the Asian growth model made a limited

30 Rutland, Sovietology, p. 112.31 Rutland, Sovietology, p. 111.32 Ibid., p. 112.33 Bruce Cumings, Boundary displacement: area studies and international studies during and after the cold

war, in Mark Seldon, ed., Bulletin of concerned Asian scholars, special edition:Asia, Asian studies and thenational security state1: 1, 1997, , pp. 34.34 See Kishore Mahbubani, The United States: go East young man, Washington Quarterly17: 2, 1994, pp.

67, and The Pacific way, Foreign Affairs 74: 1, Jan.Feb.1995; Mahathir Mohamad and ShintaroIshihara, The voice of Asia(Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1995); Fareed Zakaria, Culture is destiny: aconversation with Lee Kuan Yew, Foreign Affairs 73: 2, MarchApril 1994, pp. 10913.


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impression before the currency crisis took hold in the latter part of 1997. For

example, Paul Krugman and Alwyn Young hadobserved significantweakness

inthe input-mobilizing economies of Asia prior to 1994.35Krugmans scepticism

represented the first expression of doubt concerning the sustainability of

economic growth in the region of the kind officially espoused by regionalgovernments, regional scholars and the World Bank in its report The East Asian

economic miracle(1993).36Over the same period, journals like The Economistand

the occasional scholar such as Kunio Yoshihara and Christopher Lingle identi-

fied a number of problems with the Asian model of growth generally and the

South-East Asian variety in particular.37

Significantly, then, a small band of scholars committed to empirical rigour

and not tied to Asian banks or institutions pointed to flaws in the Asian

economic model. By contrast, scepticism towards an evolving ASEAN multi-

lateralism was far more muted. Instead, social scientists and international relationsexperts queued up to support the view that ASEAN had become the hub of

confidence building activities and preventive diplomacy in the region,38which

offered the model of inter-state Cooperation that would be a key-building

block for a new global community.39 In the multilateral glow that initially

illuminated the New World Order, few analysts demurred from this con-

sensus.40The potential ethnic and religious fault-lines in South-East Asia received

scant attention. Superficially, with the conclusion of the Cambodian peace

process (1991) and the expansion of ASEAN membership after 1993 to include

Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, relations among the states of South-East Asia

appeared harmonious. Increasing regional self-confidence fuelled by high

growth rates provided the platform upon which analysts erected the notion that

ASEANs successful model of cooperative security could be extended across the

Pacific. Just as the Sovietological consensus dismissed migrscepticism, so an

analogous process inhibited the emergence of contrarian views in ASEANology.

The academic review process and the grant-giving machinery actively discounted

countervailing opinions. Merely questioning the inevitability of the Pacific

century earned reproof as a one-sided polemic.41

35 Paul Krugman, The myth of Asias miracle, Foreign Affairs73: 6, Nov.Dec. 1994; Alwyn Young, Atale of two cities: factor accumulation and technical change in Singapore and Hong Kong, in O. J.Blanchard and S. Fischer, eds, NBER macroeconomics annual 1992(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press); Alwyn

Young, The tyranny of numbers: confronting the statistical realities of the Asian growth experience,The Quarterly Journal of Economics110: 3, 1995, pp. 65579; David Martin Jones, Asian values and theconstitutional order of contemporary Singapore, Constitutional Political Economy8: 1, 1997, pp. 283300.

36 World Bank, The East Asian economic miracle, ch. 1.37 Kunio Yoshihara, The rise of ersatz capitalism in South-East Asia(Singapore: Oxford University Press,

1988); Christopher Lingle, Singapores authoritarian capitalism: Asian values, free market illusions and politicaldependency(Fairfax, VA.: Locke Institute, 1996).

38Jose T. Almonte, Ensuring the ASEAN way, Survival39: 4, winter 19978, p. 80.39 Ibid., p. 90.40 Robert Manning and Paula Stern, The myth of the Pacific community, Foreign Affairs73: 6, Nov.Dec.

1994, did in fact take issue with the idea that a multilateral security system could deal with the tensionsin the Pacific region. The focus for their discussion, though, was confined to North-East Asia.

41 Contemporary Security Policy, reviewers report (1), reviewer no. 180335, 1 May 1997, p. 1.


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Even more worryingly, the collapse of the miracle economies and the sub-

sequent implosion of ASEAN failed to generate any disciplinary introspection.

Bizarrely, regional experts moved unproblematically from pre- to post-crisis mode

without missing a beat. Popular pre-crisis volumes such asAsia rising, Negotiating

the Pacific centuryand The new Asian Renaissance,42which once graced the bookstores

of South-East Asia, were replaced within a year by titles such asAsia fallingand

The downsizing of Asia, many of them by the same authors.43Such a disciplinary

volte-face could be sustained only by the fiction that the financial crisis that

gripped East Asia in the second quarter of 1997 took everyone by surprise.44

The fact is that there were a number of people on the ground who did identify

serious structural weaknesses that made the South-East Asian economic model

unsustainable, and who, certainly in the case of Lingle, suffered severe harass-

ment for indulging in such thought-crime. The financial crisis did not come out

of the blue. This is the myth of the unreconstructed Sovietology of South-East

Asian studies, the chief characteristic of which was to silence those voices that

saw the economic and political shortcomings, but which now seeks to excuse its

analytical failings by promulgating the false defence of surprise.

What were the forces at work that permitted a consensus to flourish in a way

that inhibited the emergence of a diversity of opinion? An examination of this

question again reveals an interesting parallel between the two disciplines. It was

alleged that ideological polarization inhibited Sovietology. Each side accused

the other of manipulating Soviet studies to serve its domestic political agenda,

to the detriment of objective enquiry.45In fact, as Rutland observes, the notionof a simple left/right cleavage in Sovietology is actually misleading. Rather,

Sovietology rejected conflicting viewpoints which might have yielded con-

tested, but falsifiable, academic interpretations as biased.46It favoured instead a

scholarly neutrality. Scholars of a liberal disposition repressed their political

intuitions in order to analyze the USSR in a non-judgmental fashion.47

This neutral stance actually deflected attention from glaring inefficiencies in the

Soviet systemflaws which Western Marxists and conservatives alike found it

much easier to recognize.48In other words, academic neutrality required the

42Jim Rohwer,Asia rising: how historys biggest middle class will change the world(London: Nicholas Brealey,1996); Roger Bell, Tim McDonald and Alan Tidwell, eds, Negotiating the Pacific century: the new Asia, theUnited States and Australia(St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995); Franois Godement, The newAsian Renaissance: from colonialism to the post-Cold War(London: Routledge, 1996); Ross Garnaut, EnzoGrilli and James Reidel, eds, Sustaining export-oriented development: ideas from east Asia (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995).

43 Callum Henderson,Asia falling: making sense of the Asian currency crisis and its aftermath(New York:McGraw-Hill, 1998); Franois Godement, The downsizing of Asia(London: Routledge, 1998); R. H.McLeod and Ross Garnaut, eds, East Asia in crisis: from being a miracle to needing one(Cambridge: PolityPress, 1998).

44 See e.g. the remarks of S. Grenville, the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank in Australia, in TheAsian economic crisis, talk to the Australian Business Economists and the Economic Society of Australia,

Sydney, 12 March 1998. According to Grenville, no one forecast the crisis (p. 1). This is a line thatwas also repeated by an anonymous referee of this article.45 Rutland, Sovietology, p. 112.46 See Popper, The poverty of historicism, p. 134.47 Ibid., p. 113.48 Ibid.


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big government the seductive prospect of a future that was both post-

communist and post-Thatcherite.

Paradoxically, at the same time, the Asian model also appealed to a curious

collection of moral conservatives, Australian economic rationalists and Anglo-

American free-marketeers. From William Rees-Mogg of The Timesto William

F. Buckley Jr in the National Review, conservative pundits and think-tanks

applauded the deregulation and open markets of many Asian economies. They

noted with satisfaction that East Asia has prospered over the past forty years

largely because it had small, pro-business governments which have refused to

offer much public compassion for the unfortunate or improvident. This has

been hard on unlucky or feckless individuals, but it has created exceptionally

strong and resilient economies.54

The Asian model possessed a further seductive blandishment for neo-

conservatives, communitarians and third way democrats in that it promoted

family values against the depredations of market libertarianism. Patriarchs of

single parties or military juntas like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore or Chun Doo-

Hwan in South Korea emphasized the Confucian family unit as the cornerstone

of society and the antidote to dependence on state welfare. Economic thrift and

family-induced responsibilitarianism reinforced a virtuous cycle that enabled

government to reduce welfare spending and taxation while promoting high

domestic savings, which in turn afforded the resources for productive invest-

ment in infrastructure, education and health. The Asian model, unlike its

Anglo-Saxon alternative, therefore, appeared morally as well as economicallyjustified. It offered a prophylactic against the Western dependency syndrome

which insisted on over-taxation, over-regulation and an over-eagerness to

throw money at teenage mothers in ghettoes.55In contrast to the dynamic

communitarianism of Asia, the degenerate welfare states of the West appeared

effective at producing growth only in crime, disorder and social alienation.

Ultimately, the resolution of the paradoxical appeal of the Asian model to all

sides of the Western political spectrum may be explained by its constituting

ambivalence.56Both neo-liberals and third way social democrats looked at only

those aspects of the Asian miracle that reinforced their pre-existing opinions.They established an ambivalent but tacit concurrence that set the boundaries of

useful knowledge. Western commentators, sceptical in their assessment of

Thatcherite economics, accepted uncritically the path of the Asian way, strewn

with double-digit growth. Scholarly enquiry thus devoted itself to divining the

wider meaning of the miracle. After its meaning had been identified, all that

remained was to discern the particular Western ideological creed it vindicated.

54

Rohwer,Asia rising, p. 44; see also Ross Garnaut and Peter Drysdale with John Kunkel,Asia Pacificregionalism: readings in international economic relations(Sydney: Harper, 1994); William Rees-Mogg, Blaircould make it the year of the tiger, The Times, 1 Jan. 1997.

55 Ibid., p. 45.56 Catherine Jones, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan: oikonomic welfare states,

Government and Opposition25: 4, 1990, p. 462.


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Whether there was a miracle at all constituted the truth that dare not speak its

name.

Such analytical ambiguity, of course, could identify neither the long-term

drivers of economic growth nor the reasons for incipient financial meltdown. In

the aftermath of the meltdown, it went largely unremarked that former econo-mic virtues were suddenly transmogrified into Asian vices. Long-term planning

now became market distortion; high savings equalled a drag on consumption;

and governmentbusiness links, which supposedly facilitated such far-sighted

planning, mutated into market-distorting financial opacity hiding cronyism and

corruption.57

In a similar vein, tacit concurrence pervaded the discussion of the Asian

security dispensation. Regional stability provided by ASEANs apparent success

as a conflict resolution mechanism, it was ubiquitously maintained, underpin-

ned South-East Asias two-decade-long economic expansion. This assumptionagain curtailed the scope of analytical enquiry. The prevailing multilateral

orthodoxy concentrated its focus on process-oriented assessments of ASEANs

diplomatic style in order to demonstrate ASEANs success as a regional experi-

ment. The fashionable post-Cold War deconstruction of privileged Western

realist understandings added further academic legitimacy to an uncritical accept-

ance of ASEANs distinctive consensual style, which emphasized non-interference

in the domestic affairs of member states.58This orthodoxy radically curtailed

understanding of what was important to study, restricted debate and obscured

the weaknesses in the regional order that belied its superficial harmony.

System stability: the flawed methodological consequences of tacit

concurrence

Ironically, tacit concurrence, which sought to demonstrate scholarly value neu-

trality, merely depoliticized the academic space in a way that proved deleterious

to conventional scientific standards of scholarship. Scholarly neutralism increas-

ingly considered sceptical questioning of the prevailing orthodoxy a mixture of

bad manners and polemic, which raises a largely unexplored methodological

question: What inspires different shades of opinion and opposed ideologicalperspectives to reach tacit concurrence? Once again, it is possible to turn to the

inquest performed upon Sovietology to illuminate the methodological flaws of

ASEANology.

Thomas Remington argues that it was pointless to criticize Sovietologists for

failing to notice the disintegration of the Soviet Union. They could no more

have predicted the collapse of the USSR than seismologists can say when the

next great earthquake will strike the San Andreas fault. Instead of blaming

Sovietology for failing to predict a particular event, he continued, we should

57 Ibid., p. 17.58 Acharya, Ideas, p. 329.


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ask how well students of the Soviet political system understood the underlying

tectonics. Remington concluded that ultimately Sovietology promulgated an

underlying faith in the stability of the Soviet system that overestimated its

capacity to adapt to change.59In other words, the dominant functionalist para-

digm required the Soviet system to be considered inherently stable. Function-

alists assumed the system worked.60 System stability was necessary because

analysts believed that the Soviet political machinery possessed the capacity to

evolve. American social science during the Cold War assumed a necessary and

universal correlation between modernization and progressive democratization.

Hence it presented the uncertain shifts from Leninist and Stalinist totalitarianism

to Brezhnevite managerialism and Gorbachev era reformism in terms of a

progressive teleology within an essentially stable system.61In particular, Gorba-

chevs reforms seemed to support the view that the Soviet system possessed the

functional capacity to modernize and liberalize itself. Western social science

consequently averred that, together, perestroika and glasnost have put the

Soviet Union on the road to becoming a more normal country, defined

broadly in Western terms (multi-party and market-orientated).62 This bias

towards system stability had the further deleterious consequence of encouraging

the Sovietological community to go native, accepting Soviet categories at face

value.63It was this academic disposition that provided the intellectual rationale

for presenting Gorbachev as an agent of adaptation, change and normalization.

A similar preoccupation with system stability and gradual change in a

progressive direction informed accounts of South-East Asian political economyand international relations in the course of the 1990s. For comparable reasons,

ASEANology unquestioningly accepted the official terms of Asian economic

success and regional order. Here again the ruling social science paradigm of an

inexorable liberal-democratic end of history promoted the comfortable

acceptance that, Asian values notwithstanding, economic progress inevitably

presaged eventual liberalization and democratization.64Western social scientists

also accepted that the Asian way underpinned the system stability that had

facilitated regional order and economic progress. As a result, academic endeavour

focused upon the contradictory task of unravelling those aspects of Asian valuesthat both guaranteed continuing stability and facilitated progressive change.

The assumption of system stability thus provides the fundamental common-

alty between Sovietology and ASEANology. This predilection further reinforced

the academic self-disciplining instinct, for the lack of an agreed framework of

59 Thomas Remington, Sovietology and system stability, Post Soviet Affairs8: 3, July/Sept. 1992, pp. 2401, 258.

60 Rutland, Sovietology, pp. 11618.61

Seweryn Bialer, The Soviet paradox(New York: Knopf, 1986), pp. 32, 169, cited in Rutland,Sovietology, p. 117.62 Booth, Introduction: the interregnum, p. 3.63 Rutland, Sovietology, p. 116.64 See Kevin Hewison, Bankers and bureaucrats: capital and the role of the state in Thailand, South-East Asian

Studies Monograph Series, no. 34 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 214.


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explanation promoted the consensus-seeking tendency in order to overcome

the inherent methodological insecurity in the field. The consequence was

disciplinary groupthink that either ignored or discouraged alternative think-

ing.65 In this way, powerful orthodoxies took hold that, once entrenched,

could be negated only by the wholesale collapse of the erstwhile stable systemwhich scholars ostensibly studied, but, in practice, mythologized.

More Sovietological than Sovietology: the distinctive distortions of

ASEANology

Although the intellectual approaches of the two disciplines reveal striking

parallels, a number of crucial differences also emerge. Here a defining feature of

Sovietology was the difficulty, in terms of both language and research skills

required, of examining a closed society. To an extent, these difficulties excusesome of the disciplines shortcomings. Such excuses are not, however, available

to students of South-East Asia. The closed despotisms of Myanmar and (prior to

1995) communist Indochina notwithstanding, information-gathering in this

region was far less onerous. Certainly, the ASEAN states restricted access to

government records and curtailed the activities of the foreign media. Even so,

access to information was not an issue. Centres of higher education in South-

East Asia and institutes specializing in regional affairs maintained a continuous

output of scholarly publications. Equally, student and academic specialists found

access to the region for fieldwork broadly encouraged. Indeed, regional univer-

sities and institutes often employed expatriate teachers or welcomed visiting

scholars from abroad. Western university departments specializing in South-

East Asia maintained close links and even established offshore faculties in the

region. The fact that English, ironically, constituted a common bahasaacross

ASEAN further facilitated the flow of information.

This quantitative difference in accessibility to the Soviet Union and South-

East Asia raises the question: why did ASEANology fail so miserably to generate

either predictive capacity or a plurality of opinion? Three related factors that

both distinguish ASEANology from its Sovietological counterpart and, collectively,

constitute a distinctive South-East Asian Sovietology account for this failure.

The scholar and the state: the bureaucratization of academia

First, the incestuous relationship between the scholar and the state in South-East

Asia became a defining feature of ASEANology. Historically, Western social

science has maintained its distance from the policy-making professions.66 In

theory, one profession analyzes, the other operationalizes.

65 Rutland, Sovietology, p. 116.66 David Newsom, Foreign policy and academia, Foreign Policy101, Winter 19956, p. 55. On the need

for this distance see also Robert Hefner, Civil Islam(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), ch. 1.


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In the post-colonial states of South-East Asia, however, the operationali-

zation of policy determined the terms of its analysis. This academic mutation

reflected both the socio-political character of the ASEAN states themselves and

the alliance structure of the Cold War that discouraged too critical an analysis of

the internal mechanisms of authoritarian allies. By the early 1980s, it was evi-

dent that the ASEAN states were following a model of enterprise association

wherein the state mobilized all resources towards economic growth while

maintaining political stability.67Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, explaining

the nature of the project in 1987, termed the state that he increasingly domin-

ated Malaysia Incorporated. This evolving corporatism required modification

of the post-colonial constitution, abrogation of the independence of the

judiciary and money politics to oil the cumbersome machinery of single-party

rule. As these countries modernized, moreover, the media and academe were

drawn into the bureaucratic web that defined the collective project, populari-

zing its goals and promoting the ruling ideology.

This reduction of academe to a department of government in an organically

incorporated body politic had critical implications for the understanding of both

domestic politics and international relations in the AsiaPacific region. In the

wake of the Cold Wars end, the ASEAN states advertised the virtues of their

consensual, interpersonal and non-binding cultural arrangements for maintain-

ing peace and security. To the extent that the regional arrangement possessed a

governing principle it embraced, somewhat equivocally, the idea of non-

interference in the domestic affairs of member states.68To explore the opera-tion of this practice ASEAN governments established research institutes that in

effect functioned as ideological proponents of the ASEAN way. Bodies like the

Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore and their Malaysian,

Indonesian, Thai and Philippine counterparts nurtured a generation of scholar

bureaucrats that gave ideological specificity to the regions distinctive approach

to security and economic growth. Like the regions political economy, regional

scholarship functioned in terms of a cronyist maintenance of good interpersonal

relations oiled by nepotism and the money politics of large grants. The role of

the scholar-bureaucrats was not to question, but to give intellectual credibilityto distinctive values and practices that sustained the developmental ideology.

Consequently, scholarly assessments of South-East Asian international relations

primarily attended to narrowly focused accounts of the successful procedural

application of the ASEAN way and shared values.69Publications with titles such

asGo East young man and The Pacific impulse, and studies of the internal

arrangements of the developmental state like Jon Quahs seminal work on the

Singapore police, Friends in blue, indicate the extent to which scholars

67James Cotton, The new insecurity in Asia, Quadrant, December 1998, pp. 1721.68 Michael Leifer,ASEAN and the security of South-East Asia(London: Routledge, 1980), p. 69.69 See e.g. Acharya, Ideas, p. 329; Kusuma Snitwongse, Thirty years of ASEAN: achievements through

political cooperation, Pacific Review11: 2, 1998, p. 183.


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suspended critical judgement in order to gain official approval and career

advancement.70

The fact that the most influential analysts of South-East Asian international

relations enjoyed careers as prominent civil servants in the foreign ministries of

their respective states, or transferred easily from careers as advisers to newcareers as soldierstatesmen directing regional centres for strategic and inter-

national studies, illustrates how far the state had bureaucratized academia and set

the rules of permissible study.71Moreover, as authoritarian single-party rule

directed the developmental state in South-East Asia, state agencies increased

their surveillance of the civil space where independent association and alterna-

tive views might flourish.72Scholars who harboured differing opinions from

those of the state refrained from airing them, knowing that their careers would

come to a sudden conclusion if they did.73 On the rare occasion that an

academic publicly articulated dissent, he anticipated prosecution for libel andsedition, and punishment that minimally entailed a humiliating retraction of his

incorrect views in the state-owned media.

70 See e.g. Mahbubani, The Pacific impulse, The United States: go East young man and The Pacificway; Kausikan, Asias different standard; Jon S. T. Quah and Stella Quah, Friends in blue: police and the

public in Singapore(Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987). The career of Professor Quah is a case inpoint. All of his extensive oeuvrereflects an obsessive advocacy of shared Asian values and the merits ofSingapore as a regional model for good governance. Appointed Professor of Political Science at theNational University of Singapore, Quah displayed on his desk a homily mounted on a wooden frameproclaiming that an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of wisdom. In 1994 Quah played a conspicuousrole in the prosecution of the American economist Christopher Lingle for writing a critical response inthe International Herald Tribuneto another Singaporean ideologist, Kishore Mahbubani. Despite thisquestionable activity, Quah has received thepalme dacademiquesof France, has held honorary fellowshipsat the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and sits on the board of one of the major scholarly

journals in the field, Political Studies. See Lingle, Singapores authoritarian capitalism, p. 10.71The career of Jusuf Wanandi (aka Lim Bian Kie) offers an interesting illustration of this career path. In his

initial incarnation as Lim Bian Kie, he advised Indonesian General Ali Murtopo on the utility of invadingEast Timor in 1975, while keeping Australian proponents of Asian engagement like Gough Whitlamand Richard Woolcott well informed to the point of embarrassment; see Wendy Way, ed., Documents on

Australian foreign policy: Australia and the Indonesian incorporation of East Timor, 19741976(Melbourne:Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Melbourne University Press, 2000), pp. 377, 486. Subsequentlyreincarnated as Jusuf Wanandi and director of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in

Jakarta, he facilitated Western scholarship that embraced the ASEAN way and together with a number ofother scholarbureaucrats, such as Chan Heng Chee and Noordin Sopie, was invited on to the boards ofkey international relations journals like Survivaland Pacific Review.In such ways, networks of surveillancewere created that had the potential to police dissenting opinion.

72 See James Gomez, Self-censorship: Singapores shame(Singapore: ThinkCentre, 2000), pp. 3353.73 In this context the experiences of former Singapore academic Chee Soon Juan are instructive. Dr Chee

lost his job, his house and his savings and is regularly denounced in the state-directed press as a cheatand a liar for his temerity in standing against the Prime Minister during a by-election and criticizingofficial statistics. Similarly illustrative is the case of another lecturer in Singapore, Bilveer Singh, whopublished an article in theJakarta Postin 1994 critical of Singapores redistributive policy. Both Chee andSingh were denounced in the local press. While Singh offered a profuse apology and was subsequently

allowed to continue his career at the National University of Singapore, albeit at a lower pay scale, Chee,by refusing to apologize, showed a lack of remorse and was subjected to the full rigours of the Asianversion of administrative law.


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859

Coercion and cooption: the role of outside academics

Ostensibly, the subordination of academe to the requirements of nation-building

in South-East Asia resembles the experience of Soviet academics who were

similarly expected to promulgate the official party line. However, there was acritical difference. Soviet scholars were not considered Sovietologists; Soviet-

ology was the preserve of Western analysts observing the system from the

outside. This was not the case with South-East Asia studies, where indigenous

scholarship played an increasingly influential role in framing the discipline and

its methodology. By contrast, the closed system of the Soviet bloc, and mutual

suspicion generated by superpower hostility, thwarted any meaningful dialogue

between Soviet scholars and Western Sovietologists.

South-East Asian scholars, of course, have every right to study their region.

Ideally, indigenous scholarship would contribute to the diversity of opinionwithin area studies. Even the bureaucratization of scholarship in South-East

Asia might have been overcome if scholars beyond the region had defended the

principle of independent enquiry more vigorously. Unfortunately, this did not

happen. Rarely did Western scholars of South-East Asian states or international

relations subject regional values to critical scrutiny. Instead, they reinforced the

claim of the local scholarbureaucrats to articulate the authentic voice of the

region.74

This process of cooption both extended and externalized the bureaucratic

orthodoxies of local scholarship. The evolution of this incestuous relationshiprepresents a second critical difference between Sovietology and the South-East

Asian variety. The propensity of the Western specialist to over-identify with his

or her chosen area is not uncommon. Sovietologists rarely challenged the tenets

of MarxismLeninism. It was not that these writers were convinced Marxists,

Rutland contends: it was simply assumed that MarxismLeninism shaped

Soviet reality, so that was the logical place to begin.75The difficulty of access to

the USSR to some extent explains this scholarly passivity. No such excuse is

available to South-East Asianists, who appeared exceedingly willing converts to

the norms of the Asian way.Why did this happen? Ironically, instead of enhancing disciplinary pluralism,

the links between local and Western scholars actively undermined it. The

barriers that impeded exchange between Western and indigenous students of

Soviet affairs maintained a diversity of views in a way that ASEANology did

not. ASEANology, by contrast, could deploy the fear of exclusion to promote

the tyranny of the single truth. The fact that Western intellectuals who criti-

74 Curiously susceptible to this predilection has been the self-proclaimed independent InternationalInstitute of Strategic Studies, which has regularly allowed its publications to be used as platforms for

South-East Asian scholarbureaucrats and other proponents of the ASEAN way orthodoxy (see e.g.Mahbubani, The Pacific impulse), with very little in the way of counterbalancing opinion. TheInstitute continues to adopt a strangely tame attitude particularly towards the authoritarian regime inSingapore. For an illustration of its peculiarly uncritical stance see Strategic Survey(London: IISS, 2000),pp. 20810.

75 Rutland, Sovietology, p. 116.


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860

cized regional economic and political practice suffered the regional equivalent

of excommunication reinforced this tendency. In Singapore and Malaysia,

periodic purges of expatriate political science lecturers and journalists deemed

to have expressed unacceptable views reinforced the reluctance to engage in

academic controversy.76

Fear of exclusion, however, was not the only reason for this growing academic

subservience. South-East Asian governments also deliberately garnered the

support of foreign academics. Influencing external opinion reflected Asian elite

conceptions of the political arena, which accentuated harmony, consensus and

conformity. As Catherine Jones explains, in South-East Asia The proper place

for politics is behind the scenes, out of sight, absorbed into the administration

People who matter will as far as possible have been recruited, co-opted or

assiduously cultivated, as appropriate, by the ruling establishment.77Interest-

ingly, external scholarship proved as pliable as indigenous scholarship. At itsmost direct, the cultivation of big names took the form of lucrative visiting

professorships for eminent scholars in return for lavish endorsement of the local

managerial practice.78More often, ASEAN states achieved the depoliticization

of a potentially critical external intellectual environment through the subtle

induction of foreign academics into the norms of the prevailing regional ortho-

doxy. The evolving political correctness of Western institutions and grant-

giving agencies from the late 1980s, which considered any criticism of Asian

practice orientalist, facilitated the process.

Participation in the plethora of ASEAN-sponsored discussion forums further

socialized academics into regional norms. The belief that they were contri-

buting to the development of a non-Western and fashionably post-colonial

approach to peace-building sustained the involvement of academics from

outside South-East Asia in what became known as Track II diplomacy.79In

practical terms, there could be little pretence that such gatherings offered any

critical evaluation of regional relations. The capacity of Track II discourse to

induce acceptance of official ASEANthink manifested itself in the shared

76 See e.g. Christopher Lingle, The smoke over some parts of Asia obscures some profound concerns,International Herald Tribune, 7 Oct. 1994. Singapores tradition of pouncing on errant expatriate lecturers

with either public excoriation or even prosecution has been in evidence for the last thirty years, from D.J. Enright in the early 1960s to Christopher Lingle in 1994. See D. J. Enright, Memoirs of a mendicantprofessor(Manchester: Carcanet, 1990) and Lingle, Singapores authoritarian capitalism, pp. ixxi.

77Jones, Hong Kong, pp. 45152.78 A case in point was the speech made by Michael Howard during the 39th Annual Conference of the IISS

in Singapore on 12 September 1997. Professor Howard, a former Lee Kuan Yew Distinguished Visitor(21 Feb.6 March 1996), echoing earlier writers on the city-state, like Phillippe Regnier, pronounced itthe Venice of the East. The post-modern Chinese fascist chic of downtown Singapore is no doubtimpressive, but otherwise not exactly redolent of a Renaissance state. See, inter alia, Phillippe Regnier,Signapore: city state in South East(London: Hurst & Co., 1992) for an uncritical account of the rise ofSingapores technocatic planning and Edgar H. Scheins paeon to Singaporean pragmatism, Strategiccapitalism: the culture of Singapores Economic Development Board(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). For asomewhat sceptical review of Regniers tome see Steven Knipp, Venice of the east, Far Eastern EconomicReview, 1 Oct. 1992, p. 34.

79 See Acharya, The Association of South-East Asian Nations, p. 176, and Richard Higgott and KimRichard Nossal, Australia and the search for a security community in the 1990s, in Emanuel Adler andMichael Barnett, eds, Security communities(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 2816.


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vocabulary of scholarbureaucrats on the one hand and Western scholars of

South-East Asia on the other. Thus, claims by indigenous scholars that the

process was more important than any eventual agreement found a responsive

echo in statements from Western regional specialists who argued that the process

is always held to be more important than the product. ASEAN multilateral-

ism is process-orientated, rather than product orientated.80Ultimately, this

obsession with process at the expense of empirical analysis obscured the fault-

lines in regional relations that emerged with devastating consequences after

1997.

Intellectual regimes in international relations

Finally, the distinctively South-East Asian process of academic cooption did not

occur by accident. Asian academic managerialism coincided with a growing

trend towards the bureaucratization of research in British, American and

Australian institutions of higher education. Driven by performance manage-

ment targets and so-called quality assessment systems, Western academics were

coopted because they functioned in an academic structure already predisposed

to bureaucratic guidance.

Wider intellectual trends at work in the 1990s, which from the end of the

Cold War systematically assaulted the traditional Western realist-oriented and

empirically based paradigm in international relations, further reinforced a

predisposition to groupthink. From a theoretical perspective, revisionism,multilaterialism and post-modern constructivism all maintained that balance of

power politics and the dominance of state-centric concerns had overdetermined

Cold War international relations theory.81The new post-Cold War dispensa-

tion, consequently, encouraged those who considered security a discourse

capable of construction and amenable to rethinking in novel and culturally

sensitive ways. The fashionable assumption of the early years of the New World

Order that state sovereignty was in the process of being overtaken by a system

of complex interdependence arising from rapid globalization reinforced the

propensity to abstruse theorizing. In the early 1990s ASEAN became the bene-ficiary of this conjunction of alternative security approaches. Seemingly, it

embraced a post-colonial capacity to be with the other, accentuating as it did

a sense of shared common interests and values, even if still limited, and

belonging together.82

The origins of this enthusiasm are worth tracing. ASEANs emergence into

the international relations limelight reflected the initial Western scholarly

uncertainty that marked the end of the Vietnam War. The period 197590

80

Almonte, Ensuring the ASEAN way, p. 81; Acharya, Ideas, p. 329.81 Ken Booth, Dare not to know: international relations versus the future, in Ken Booth and Steve Smith,eds, International relations theory today(Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 32849.

82 Kusuma Snitwongse, Meeting the challenges of a changing South-East Asia, in Robert Scalapino,Seizebura Sato, Jusuf Wanandi and Soo-Joon Han, eds, Regional dynamics: security, political and economicissues in South-East Asia(Jakarta: Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 1990), p. 40.


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witnessed an emerging concern with regionalism at the expense of specialist

area studies, giving rise to what Bruce Cumings called Rimspeak. Rimspeak,

initially, sought to explain Asian development according to the canons of

modernization theory, which looked with curiosity if not disdain upon anyone

who did not privilege the market. Organized into the new inventory, Cumingsnoted, were miracle economies in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong,

Malaysia, and Singapore, with honorable mention for Thailand, the Philippines,

Indonesia, and post-Mao (but pre-Tiananmen) China.83 In this way, Asian

studies formalized the concept of regionalism. Subsequently, during the 1990s, a

developing regionalism adumbrated by notions of strategic culture and multi-

lateralism enabled a collocation of local and Western theorists to articulate the

view that ASEAN states had pioneered the notion of a security community.84

From this perspective, ASEAN had successfully forged new collective regional

identities through the deliberate creation of, and adherence to (indigenous)norms, symbols, and habits.85 Promiscuously assembled from elements of

modernization, post-modernist and multilateral theories, the ASEAN experience

challenged the neorealist preoccupation with anarchy and the inevitability of

war as well as the rationalist and materialist foundations of cooperation assumed

by the neo-liberal institutionalists.86

Whenever momentum builds behind an intellectual trend, no matter how

incoherent, research grants and career opportunities inexorably follow. As David

Newsom observes, to outsiders much of the process of modern scholarship seems

[and indeed is] incestuous, imbricated in a web of self-promotion.87 Intel-

lectual endeavour represents not a search for wider meaning but a process

designed to fashion labels and categories intended to gain the kind of academic

identification with a theory or equation that will lead to professional

advancement.88This was particularly the case in the international relations of

South-East Asia. Here, voguish theoretical approaches, lubricated by large grants,

promoted a self-fulfilling groupthink where researchers arrive with their

analytical engine as part of their baggage, their chief mission being to feed the

engine the evidence it needs.89There is no doubt that, prior to the economic

meltdown, the analytical engine operated at full throttle, producing a disci-

plinary orthodoxy that made it de rigueurto extol the ASEAN way, and a badcareer move to question it.

83 Cumings, Boundary displacement, p. 4.84 Ken Booth, Security and emancipation, Review of International Studies17: 4, 1991, pp. 317, 319. See also

Amitav Acharya, Collective identity and conflict management in South-East Asia, in Adler and Barnett,Security communities, pp. 20713.

85 Acharya, Collective identity, p. 218.86 Ibid.87 Newsom, Foreign policy, p. 62.88 Ibid., p. 63.89 Chalmers Johnson and E. B. Keehn, A disaster in the making: rational choice and Asian studies, The

National Interest, summer 1994, p. 17.


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863

Post-modern enthusiasm and the abandonment of academic scepticism

Three further consequences stemmed from this bureaucratization of academe

and the post-Cold War international relations penchant for obscure theorizing

that further distinguished South-East Asia studies from its Sovietological counter-part.

First, South-East Asian scholars confined their attention almost exclusively to

the regional level, thereby neglecting the domestic and bilateral tensions that

constrained regional behaviour. By contrast, Sovietologists devoted themselves to

uncovering the domestic sources of Soviet conduct. During the Cold War, for

instance, alternative defence theorists like Ken Booth, acknowledged that the

search for cognitive consistency permeated academia. To minimize this problem,

he maintained, we must act as our own devils advocates. This meant that

those who took a more relaxed view of the Soviet threat must remind our-selves about Soviet ideology, the suppression of human rights, the Gulag and

all those negative aspects of Soviet behaviour which make the prospect of living

together a bumpy prospect.90Curiously, however, Booth and his culturally

relativist confrres jettisoned such considerations when they turned their attention

to South-East Asia. Thus, while perfunctorily acknowledging the existence of

internal conflicts in the region, they nevertheless insisted that the end of the

Cold War in South-East Asia led to increased domestic tranquillity and

regional order.91This triumph of politically correct hope over scientific rigour

found expression in unalloyed praise for ASEAN and the growth of processesthat embedded conflict management into the culture of [its] members.92

This enthusiasm for ASEANs conflict management technique explains why

international relations analysts ignored the underlying ethnic and religious

tensions that made a mockery of regional harmony and consensus after 1997.

Their unexamined assumptions of domestic tranquillity and regional order

would have come as something of a surprise to all those being shot, starved or

otherwise oppressed in an authoritarian pact that ran the gamut of repression

from curtailment of free speech and harassment of opposition politicians to child

slavery in Myanmar and genocide in East Timor.The academic disposition to multilateral region-building had the additional

effect of negating the capacity to weed out false theories.93Indeed, the scepti-

cism with which Booth and others greeted inflated projections of the Soviet

threat during the Cold War, and which contributed to the diversity of opinion

within Sovietology, was entirely absent from ASEANology. In an area where

post-colonial theorizing increasingly dominated the field, there developed an

90 Ken Booth, New challenges and old mindsets: ten rules for empirical realists, in Carl G. Jacobsen, ed.,

The uncertain course: new weapons, strategies and mindsets(Oxford: Oxford University Press/SIPRI, 1987),p. 59.91 Acharya, The periphery as the core, p. 310.92 Russell Trood and Ken Booth, Strategic culture and conflict management in the AsiaPacific, in Ken

Booth and Russell Trood, eds, Strategic cultures in the AsiaPacific(London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 354.93 For Karl Popper on the central duty of the scientist, see Popper, The poverty of historicism, p. 133.


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unspoken injunction against scepticism towards the post-colonial regime. Hence,

scholarly enthusiasts of ASEAN multilateralism claimed that while it might be

easy to be sceptical of the ASEAN way, in fact the ASEAN brand of soft

regionalism was a symbol of collective uniqueness and source of considerable

satisfaction and pride for ASEAN members.94

Second, the problem with much contemporary social science is that post-

Marxist and post-modernist theories often present truth and reality as social

constructs.95 Such an epistemology restricts open debate by promoting an

extreme form of relativism which holds that objectivity and the ideal of truth

are altogether inapplicable in the social sciences where only success can be

decisive.96The preoccupation with deconstructing European Enlightenment

notions of truth and the inauguration of an anti-orientalist discourse that

privileges the subaltern voice enabled a post-colonial orthodoxy to dominate

international relations thinking. The generous disbursement of grants to thosewho follow the ASEAN line or its multicultural Western equivalent further

facilitates deference to Asian difference. If money politics corrupts due process

across South-East Asia, an equally disturbing money political science corrupts

the discipline and lends credibility to a bureaucratic managerialism that erodes

scholarly pluralism.

This suffocation of critical enquiry contributed a final defect to the study of

South-East Asia. For scholars, like the governments they studied, increasingly

observed the principle of non-interference. Indifference to country specialism

obscured internal conflicts, intraregime tensions and a variety of domestic religi-

ous and ethnic instabilities. Scholars rationalized this indifference on the modish

grounds that an anachronistic empiricism had vitiated South-East Asia area

studies during the Cold War.97Ultimately, what resulted was an intellectual

culture of self-censorship that kept regional studies within tacit and self-

regulated boundaries.

Conclusion

Pronouncing his verdict on Sovietology, Rutland contended that it had failed

to confront the magnitude of its failure, and that in the years after the end of theCold War academics were more interested in damage control in order to

preserve their research funding and falling student enrolments. Such behaviour

was not conducive to a frank discussion of the intellectual flaws in the

discipline.98Even so, the fact of Rutlands expos of Sovietologys pretensions

at least suggested a discipline ready to accept and respond to criticism.99

94 Acharya, Collective identity, p. 212.95 Khoo Kay Kim, US dominating world intellectually, New Straits Times, 16 Oct. 2000.96 Popper, The poverty of historicism, p. 16.97Yuen Foong Khong, Making bricks without straw in the Asia-Pacific?,Pacific Review10: 2, 1997,

pp. 2945.98 Rutland, Sovietology, p. 122.99 Remington, Sovietology, p. 241.


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ASEANology, as we have indicated, shared many of the shortcomings of

Sovietology. Significantly, it did not share a willingness to accept criticism. The

problems of ASEANology, moreover, were largely self-inflicted. Its theoretical

incontinence dates from the end of the Cold War and the assault upon the

realist/empiricist paradigm of international politics. Its constructivist turn towards

allegedly more diverse perceptions of the international system only enveloped

the region in an inspissating intellectual gloom. In practice, it rendered South-

East Asia studies vulnerable to cooption by illiberal regimes.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to ascribe all the incoherence that arose in

South-East Asia studies to the increasing bureaucratization of South-East Asian

academe. The role of scholarbureaucrats in promoting the ideology of regional

developmentalism was, after all, transparent. The onus consequently fell upon

Western scholars to uphold academic independence. This they signally failed to

do. As a result, ASEANology failed more completely than Sovietology, as

manifested most starkly in its unwillingness even to recognize its failings. Four

years after meltdown and the effective disintegration of ASEAN as a multilateral

engine of regional security, there has been no inquest into the state of the

discipline and only limited appreciation of the regions growing instability. A

distinctive feature of the academic reaction to the events of 1997 is a conveni-

ently Orwellian amnesia about previous panegyrics to the Asian way. For a

post-mortem of South-East Asian international relations would reveal not only

the predictive weakness of social and political scientism but also the extent to

which academe welcomed a progressively sclerotic bureaucratization that playedinto the hands of a variety of plausible but deeply authoritarian governments.

In its evolution, moreover, it might be further argued that the South-East

Asian case represents a particularly egregious variety of the problem of incoher-

ence in the study of international relations. IRism generally demonstrates little

capacity for theoretical consistency. As Richard Ashley has noted, international

relations is a language that enables us to shift and manoeuvre, outflank and

charge, turn tail and run, retreat into historical ambiguity, commandeer

resources where we find them, shed one uniform and don another, and return

to fight another day.100 The evolving Sovietology of South-East Asiandomestic and international politics offers an extreme example of this propensity.

However, if as Karl Popper maintained, we make progress, if and only if we

learn from our mistakes: to recognise our errors and to utilise them critically,

progress in South-East Asian studies would seem to be a somewhat utopian

aspiration.101

100 Richard Ashley, The achievements of post-structuralism, in Ken Booth, Steve Smith and Marysia Zalewski,eds,International theory: positivism and beyond(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 240.

101 Popper, The poverty of historicism, p. 87.