Soek-Fang Sim Macalester College

Dewesternising Theories of Authoritarianism:

Economics, Ideology and the Asian Economic Crisis in Singapore

Working Paper No. 103

June 2004

The views presented in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Asia Research Centre or Murdoch University.

© Copyright is held by the author(s) of each working paper: No part of this publication may be republished, reprinted or reproduced in any form without the permission of the paper’s author(s). National Library of Australia.

ISBN: 86905-872-X ISSN: 1037-4612

ABSTRACT This essay critically evaluates contemporary theories of authoritarianism and, through

looking at one of the most outstanding cases of stubborn authoritarianism, suggests a new

approach for understanding it based on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony.1 Hegemony theory

focuses directly on issues of legitimacy and popular perception and offers valuable insights

into phenomena (e.g., ‘popular dictatorship’, ‘soft authoritarianism’ and ‘fascism’) that would

otherwise be dismissed as exceptions to the rule. Additionally, while being sensitive to

historical contingency, hegemony theory does not lapse into an ‘it depends’ mode but presses

on to rigorously clarify the precise relationship between material conditions and ideology.

The author is not unaware of the irony of drawing upon a Western theory to dewesternise

theories of authoritarianism but pursues this trajectory nonetheless because she believes that

the quality of being of the ‘West/non-West’ is not an issue of skin or birth. Additionally,

unlike dominant theories that categorise world regimes into dichotomised and moralised

categories of democracies and dictatorships, Gramsci’s theory offers us a less

epistemologically biased paradigm that can be utilised equally to understand and criticise

authoritarian tendencies in the West and non-West.

Keywords: hegemony, authoritarianism, democratisation theories, economic crisis, Singapore

1

THE PROBLEM OF STUBBORN (AND LEGITIMATE) AUTHORITARIANISM2

The prevalence of authoritarianism in East Asia and especially Southeast Asia has been noted

time and again. Leary (1990: 13-15) noted that every region in the world except Asia had

been able to establish some cultural commonality upon which to found a regional system of

human rights. Current typologies such as Diamond’s (2002: 31) classify most East Asian

countries as authoritarian. Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea are

considered democracies; Indonesia is considered ambiguous; all other East Asian states

(Brunei, Cambodia, China, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, North Korea, Singapore and Vietnam)

are considered authoritarian.

While this way of organising and talking about East and Southeast Asian countries is

prevalent and rarely questioned in academic, political and even popular discourses, the

problems with this classification system and its assumptions emerge rapidly upon closer

scrutiny.

Mediating the dichotomous categories of democratic/authoritarian are various theories

of democratisation whose predictions about East Asian regimes are as often accurate as they

are inaccurate. The absence of democracy is explained by factors tied to modernisation,

which tends to be narrowly understood in terms of economic development and its social

effects (especially as indicated by the Human Development Index).3 The prevalence of this

paradigm should not be underestimated: to this day, international organisations such as IMF

and World Bank continue to prescribe economic development as a panacea for a variety of

social and political problems.

Within East Asia, the thesis is generally supported by the examples of states in

Northeast Asia and problematic for understanding Southeast Asian states. In Northeast Asia,

economic development in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea appeared to have triggered a

transition to democracy4 while its absence in Mongolia and North Korea is correctly

predicted to stall democratisation. China is an outstanding exception; it remains staunchly

non-democratic despite impressive economic growth (8.1% average annual GDP per capital

from 1975-2000).

Among Southeast Asian countries, economic growth seems to induce the reverse (see

Table 1, which is created using the indicators that modernisation theorists typically rely on).

Among the five Southeast Asian countries rated as ‘un-free, only three support the thesis that

economic stagnation inhibits democratisation. In prosperous Brunei and in Vietnam (which

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has the second highest average annual GDP among the 10 countries), there appears to be no

correlation between economic development and democratisation.

Table 1: Indicators of political freedom and economic growth

Southeast Asian countries

Freedom House rating (2000)

Average annual GDP per capital (1975-2000)

Un-free countries (Rating 5.5-7) Myanmar 7.7 1.3% Vietnam 7.7 4.8% Laos 7.6 3.2% Brunei 7.5 unavailable Cambodia 6.6 1.9% Partly free countries (Rating 3-5.5) Malaysia 5.5 4.1% Singapore 5.5 5.2% Indonesia 4.4 4.4% Free countries (Rating 1-2.5) Philippines 2.3 0.1% Thailand 2.3 5.5%

Sources: Freedom House and Nation Master.5

The most significant counter-evidence to the theory comes from the ‘free’ and ‘partly

free’ countries, with Singapore and the Philippines being especially significant counter-

examples. Singapore was able to forestall democratisation despite impressive economic

development (considering the devastation of the recent Asian economic crisis that

significantly lowered these figures. Singapore’s average annual GDP per capital from 1965-

1990 was a stunning 6.5%). In the case of the Philippines, the absence of economic

development did not appear to handicap political development; it is the most free despite

being worst off economically.

Empirically, the reality of political regimes in East Asia offers mixed evidence to the

economic determinism of modernisation theories. Modernisation theorists are themselves

cognisant of these shortcomings and have attempted to repair the theory without relinquishing

the essential paradigm or categories.

Confronted with miraculous economic progress in East Asia during the 1980s and

early 1990s, the theory was revised by theorists to argue that authoritarianism benefited

newly industrialising countries as they kick-started their economies and that after the initial

phase of growth, contradictions between authoritarianism and capitalism would trigger the

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evolution to democracy. What is noteworthy for our purpose here is that revised

modernisation theorists (Cf. Rodan 1993) do not deviate significantly from the modernisation

paradigm; they merely redefine authoritarianism as a stepping-stone towards the end-point of

democracy.

Another attempt to revise modernisation theory is the ‘modern authoritarianism’

thesis. Prior to this revision, authoritarianism had been thought of as a pre-modern phase and

it was believed that with modernisation, societies either develop into totalitarian or

democratic polities. Rejecting this typology, Linz’s (1970: 255) observation of Spain led him

to argue that regimes could be authoritarian and modern. His definition of authoritarianism

has become classic:

Authoritarian regimes are political systems with limited, not responsible, political pluralism; without elaborate and guiding ideology (but with distinctive mentalities); without intensive nor extensive political mobilization (except some points in their developments); and in which a leader (or occasionally a small group) exercises power within formally ill-defined limits but actually quite predictable ones.

Note that even though authoritarianism is now seen as modern, it continues to be viewed as

unstable and lacking in legitimacy. What (revised) modernisation theorists cannot afford to

acknowledge (without having to undergo a paradigm shift) is that, even in the most coercive

of states, authoritarian governments have always attempted to justify their policies (e.g., with

religion, national security, etc.) so as to acquire legitimacy. Especially with the global

hegemony of democratic values, authoritarian governments are devoting more and more

attention to the articulation of coherent national ideologies and are less content to rely on

sporadic justification or sheer coercion. From Vietnam’s exhortation to citizens to become

‘revolutionary soldiers in the field of culture and ideology’ (Mares 2000: 244), Myanmar’s

labelling of dissident journalists and politicians as ‘anti-national’ (Rich 2000: 23),

Indonesia’s Pancasila Democracy and the variants of Asian Values discourse articulated by

Cambodia, China, Malaysia, Myanmar and Singapore, the effort of authoritarian governments

to legitimise their rule in East Asia poses potential challenge to the view that authoritarianism

regimes are ideologically weak, unable to secure consent, and thus illegitimate and unstable.

The inability of modernisation theories to acknowledge and examine how

authoritarian regimes may be stable and legitimate underscores a deeper issue: the conflation

of morality and politics with ‘science.’6 For example, Kirkpatrick (1979: 34-35) observed

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that regimes were classified less by their political form (e.g., regular elections, civil and

political liberties) and more by their ideologies and economic organisations. For instance,

totalitarian regimes were exclusively communist regimes with command economies while

authoritarian regimes, being market driven, were typically seen as more ‘benign’ despite

being equally repressive.

Such infusion of analytical categories with normative overtones can also be seen in

the dependency of modernisation theorists on numerical rankings created by organisations

such as Freedom House. Not only are such rankings accepted at face value and classified into

groups within typologies,7 attempts are also made to give these (numerical) groups

conceptual and analytical substance so as to make them analytically distinct. Needless to say,

it is quite an impossible task and what results is the proliferation of ‘hybrid regimes’ and sub-

categories,8 including the category of ‘hegemonic authoritarianism’ – in which there is only

one occupant (Singapore). Such unquestioned reliance on information and knowledge

generated by organisations raises the complicated question of whether information collected

by agencies should guide theory, or vice versa.

Furthermore, it is also disturbing to note the relationship between politicians and

academics. Not only do governments involve scholars in their international programs (e.g.,

Alliance For Progress), politicians also sit on Board of Trustees that direct seemingly ‘non-

political’ organisations. Freedom House, for instance, is a New York based organisation that

professes to be ‘non-partisan’ despite being founded and led by illustrious American

politicians.

It is telling that in spite of the many problems that plague modernisation theories –

from inaccurate economic determinism to the proliferation of categories to contain ‘hybrid

regimes’ that defy the path laid out by the transition paradigm – theorists continue to

subscribe to modernisation theories without questioning its fundamental premise that there

are only two main types of regimes in the world – democracies and others. Given that

modernisation theories seem more trouble than they are worth, and given the availability of

alternative paradigms for understanding state power (see next section), the reluctance to

embark on a paradigm shift suggests vested interest in the present paradigm. Where would

we be if our world was not organised in terms of democracies, pseudo-democracies and non-

democracies? Where would we be if we did not have authoritative discourses and statistical

evidence (re-)produced by academics to organise our world into good and evil?

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ACKNOWLEDGING LEGITIMATE(D) AUTHORITARIANISM

While many theorists focused on the transitory nature of authoritarianism, some theorists

concerned themselves with the internal logic and staying power of authoritarianism in East

Asia. For instance, Wittfogel’s (1957) ‘Oriental Despotism’ thesis argued that water control

and distribution (especially the management of an extensive system of canals) spawned

hydraulic civilisations with centralised empires and sprawling bureaucracies, both deeply

hostile to change. Critiques of this thesis range from observations that irrigation is often

organised locally rather than by centralised bureaucracies to counter-evidence from the West

such as the rise and fall of Ancient Greece and the chronic backwardness of Eastern Europe.

Another important category of explanation of authoritarianism stems from cultural

psychology. Pye and Pye (1985: 22) argued that Asians’ sense of power generates

authoritarian regimes. They argued that, for Asians, power is not understood as ‘participation

in the making of significant decisions’ or choice but as status, especially the freedom from

having to decide at all. ‘When power implies the security of status, there can be no political

process. Contention and strife cease.’ Insofar as power derives from status, any challenge to

the system or democratic competition is necessarily an affront to the leader and thus,

responded to with a heavy-hand.

This thesis has been criticised for its culturalism (using culture as an explanation

rather than as something to be explained), which in this case generates the tautological thesis

that authoritarian cultures produce authoritarianism. Exactly what is Asian or Confucian

culture, and is culture destiny? While Pye and Pye focused on hierarchical features, others

‘re-discover’ egalitarian roots to argue that Asian cultures have the potential to realise their

democratic trajectories. For instance, de Bary (1983) and Tu (1993) demonstrate the affinities

between Confucianism and liberalism while Chai and Chai (1973) argue that current

authoritarian regimes distort Confucian values and that if implemented correctly,

Confucianism would produce democracy. Furthermore, even if there is agreement on the

nature of Asia’s values and historical roots, its future – what to preserve and what to change –

remains something hotly debated by East Asian leaders, for example, Singapore’s Lee Kwan-

Yew versus South Korea’s Kim Dae-Jung and Cambodia’s preference of Malaysia’s

developmental path.9

While these approaches acknowledge and study the legitimacy of authoritarian

regimes, they do so in a static way, ignoring the possibility of crisis and change. As

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Huntington (1991: 108) observed, ‘if he had wanted to, a politician far less skilled than Lee

Kwan-Yew (first PM of Singapore) could have produced democracy in Singapore.’ The task

of sustaining one-party rule requires considerable effort and skills. To explain the endurance

of authoritarianism with social structures and cultural essentialism trivialises the unceasing

and painstaking ideological and political work that must be done to sustain legitimacy.

This weakness relates to the next: the failure to study the precise entity that gives

legitimate authoritarianism its meaning – popular perception and consent. A theory that

directly addresses the question of consent and legitimacy is Gramsci’s (1971) theory of

hegemony, which concerns itself with elites’ attempts to secure consensus so that their rule

would be appear just and natural.

This last point vitally distinguishes Gramsci’s approach from prior approaches. In

classical Marxism, political elites are portrayed as being partial towards the interests of

capital and notions such as ‘common culture’ and ‘collective values’ are seen as inauthentic –

a form of false consciousness manufactured by ideological apparatuses such as religion and

the state. Nowell-Smith (1977) captures this sentiment well by arguing that if ‘the popular’

existed, it is merely the people’s sense of itself as reflected by the political elite. Elaborating

on Gramsci’s insistence of commonsense as fragmented and contradictory, Hall’s (1977)

landmark intervention in rehabilitating Marxist epistemology is especially noteworthy.

Instead of thinking in terms of true/false consciousness, Hall refused to privilege any mode of

consciousness as more true than another, preferring to relativise the issue as one where there

is always more than one way of perceiving reality and social relations. The question of

hegemony is then the question of whose version of reality is being universalised and which

alternatives are rendered unthinkable.

Contrast this to more functionalist approaches that see the state as natural, rational,

coherent and beneficial to society. Far from being a natural effect of a shared worldview or

the inevitable consequences of social development, hegemony or ideological unity is seen as

the consequence of hard ideological work – or what Jessop (1990) calls ‘governance projects’

– of a historical bloc that succeeds in persuading other groups to its view of the world,

thereby securing their consent and willingness to compromise. Given the difficulty of this

project, it is not surprising that Gramsci sees hegemony as something that is always

temporary and as something that can never be complete.

These unique features of hegemony theory are vital for understanding hegemonic

states, including authoritarian ones insofar as elites embark on ideological projects to secure

consent. Although the theory was created upon observations of political processes in

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democratic societies, there are reasons to believe that the theory can be successfully applied

to understand authoritarian societies. Indeed, the dichotomy of authoritarian/democratic is

problematic within Gramsci’s theory. Although he distinguished between governance by

coercion (domination) and by consensus (hegemony), the two forms are not mutually

exclusive. Certainly, he did not see them as a bi-polar dichotomy or continuum, and his

categories hardly allow for distinguishing between superior and inferior regimes. By

examining the relationship between consensus and coercion, Gramsci’s theory underscores

the fragility of consensus in all regimes. This attention to the contingency of hegemony

additionally distinguishes it from the economic determinism of modernisation theory.

Like Weber (1946: 78-79) whose definition of the state is by now canonical – an

institution with ‘a monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force’ – Gramsci saw

coercion as constitutive of the state. The difference between authoritarian and democratic

polities (if it is even possible to distinguish between them) is not the absence of coercion but

the presence of consensus. The distinction between domination and hegemony then is a

question of whether the state’s ‘outer ditch’ or ‘armor of coercion’ was buttressed by an

‘inner ditch’ (1971: 124, 238, 363) of consensus that legitimises state coercion (Gramsci

especially saw civil society as constituting this inner ditch).

This point is so important that it bears reiteration and elaboration. Gramsci and later

theorists of hegemony made it very clear that coercion is a part of all states and that in certain

states, the presence of consensus renders it unnecessary to mobilise repressive state

apparatuses to discipline subjects – ideological alternatives are sufficiently de-legitimated by

commonsense. Characterising the crushing of student uprising in France in 1968 as

‘authoritarian statism,’10 Poulantzas (1972: 239) argued that the French government needed

to rely on its armour of coercion precisely because its ‘inner ditch’ of consensus had

collapsed. Elaborating on Poulantzas’ concept, Hall (1988: 153) coined the term

‘authoritarian populism’ to describe how Thatcher was able to capture popular imagination

and commonsense. By channelling popular anxiety towards lax moral standards and

weakening social authority, Thatcher successfully induced a moral panic that legitimised a

‘dominative and authoritarian’ form of governance.

The author is not unaware of the irony of de-westernising theories of authoritarianism

with the theory of hegemony as espoused by Gramsci, Poulantzas or Hall, especially since the

key concerns of all three were to explain the rise of fascism and authoritarianism in Italy,

France and Britain. There are certainly many issues to address before the theory can be

applied to understand state power outside Europe.

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A relatively easy issue to address is the Western European background of these

theorists. Such a criticism draws upon problematic understanding of what constitutes the

‘West.’ The quality of being ‘of the West’ is not simply an issue of skin or birth, but an issue

of whether, in Said’s terms, scholars create classification systems, concepts and categories

(e.g., ‘Orient,’ ‘East’ or ‘the Other’) that not only dominate our symbolic universe, but that

also promote all sorts of unequal relations materially. To this end, the theory of hegemony

has so far been drawn upon to critique such material and ideological domination (especially

by ‘Western’ governments and ‘the West’) rather than to establish its own hegemony. Unlike

dominant theories that categorise world regimes into dichotomised and moralised categories

of democracies and dictatorships, Gramsci’s theory offers us a less epistemologically biased

paradigm that can be utilised equally to understand and criticise authoritarian tendencies in

the West and non-West.

A more important issue is the question of whether a theory developed locally in ‘the

West’ can be applied to non-Western societies. The issue of the place of civil society is

especially weighty – Gramsci accorded this institution a central place in his theoretical

paradigm. But, as scholars have observed, East Asian societies tend to have unevenly

developed or weaker civil societies, rendering the applicability of hegemony theory suspect.

Gramsci (1971: 238, 263) noted that in the East, the state (political society) tended to be

‘everything,’ unlike in the West where the state is constituted not only by the outer ditch of

political society but also encompasses a more sturdy centre of ‘collective will’ represented by

civil society.

Before concluding that hegemony is therefore not applicable to East Asian societies,

we need to look at indicators of its applicability. Firstly there are at least two important

attempts to apply hegemony to East Asia. Hilley (2001) examines how national ideologies

transform (from race to non-race based) in response to the Malaysian PM’s economic visions

for his nation. Focusing on Malaysia’s active civil society during the late 1990s, Hilley traced

the institutional and ideological strategies of various groups in their attempt to articulate a

counter-hegemonic alternative to Mahathirism. Girling (1996) traces the hegemony of

middle-class values in Thailand to the changing balance of power within the elite (from

military to civilian to business elites). He argues that increasingly, the state’s agenda has been

hijacked by business interests such that the state finds itself a disseminator of pragmatism,

materialism and individualism. Although these are chiefly values of the economic elite (a

small sector of the middle-class), they have come to be universalised beyond their particular

origins so as to become apprehended as middle-class (rather than bourgeois) values.

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It may be argued that in Malaysia and Thailand, the existence of vibrant civil societies

make hegemony a relevant concept and that in societies where this is not the case, hegemony

may not be applicable. A second argument in support of using hegemony theory to analyse

Singapore, where civil society is weak, is to rethink what Gramsci meant by the term ‘civil

society.’ By calling civil society a ‘representation’ (of collective will), Gramsci appears to

use the term ‘civil society’ to refer to institutions that have a certain relative autonomy from

the state and thus, acquire a certain aura of popular authenticity (an organic centre of

collective will.) That civil society is considered a representation of something else suggests

that Gramsci is not interested in civil society for its own sake but as a terrain where struggles

over meaning and commonsense take place.

It is precisely because civil society appears to be a representation of popular organic

(folk) values that its relative autonomy becomes an issue. Gramsci (1971: 196, 242, 254, 262-

263) was most articulate about the importance of civil society in the battle for hegemony. It is

the ‘autonomy’ of civil society that allows civil and political society to be confused so that

‘coercion is not a State affair but effected by public opinion’ and confronts citizens as their

free choice, more effectively transforming singular individuals into the ‘collective man’ (a

socialised being). Thus, the more autonomous and ‘organic’ civil society is seen to be, the

easier it is for civil society to disseminate particular ideologies and re-mediate commonsense.

Although he does not draw upon Gramscian theories, Rodan advances a similar

criticism of the liberal assumptions that underpin modernisation theorists’ conceptualisation

of civil society. He (1993) criticises approaches such as O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead

(1986)11 for romanticising civil society as ‘the locus of free-minded and mutually

cooperative groups and individuals beyond the state’s purvey.’ Because civil societies cannot

exist as alternatives to states but only in relation to them, Rodan argues, the notion of civil

society not only presupposes the state but its autonomy crucially depends on and can only be

guaranteed by the state.

That is, what is important is not only the presence/absence of civil society but the

presence of any social institution (e.g., family) that could serve as a terrain for the hegemonic

struggles over commonsense. Secondly, in the case of societies with weaker civil societies,

what is of essence is how they come to be so – is it through coercion or through the state

successfully securing the consensus of civil society to accept a different role? For instance,

the Singapore government’s Asian Values project included a project that invited social

activities from all over Southeast Asia to envision an ‘Asian’ civil society. Besides

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successfully selling this as a project that empowers society, where it also succeeded was in

shifting the question from whether an adversarial (autonomous) civil society was beneficial

for society to the question of whether an adversarial civil society is Asian.

As the reader may already realise, the shift from modernisation theory to hegemony

engenders many significant implications. A final one that I will highlight here is a theoretical

and methodological break with previous approaches. Because legitimacy is a subjective

concept pegged to the perceptions of the ruled, the question of how authoritarian regimes can

be seen as legitimate and why they endure must be approached as an issue of hegemony and

popular consent. Methodologically, this suggests that close examination of cultural and

historical conditions within specific regimes would be more helpful in giving us a sense of

the internal logic of stubborn (legitimate) authoritarianism than macro economic

comparisons.

This theoretical-methodological turn directly impacts the task at hand in this paper. In

the next section, I will leave off the macro survey of Asian regimes to focus on the most

significant case – Singapore – before broadening the insights gained from this case study.

ECONOMICS AND IDEOLOGY: THE CASE OF SINGAPORE

Modernisation theorists frequently highlight Singapore as an exception because it is

stubbornly and stably authoritarian despite undeniable economic and social development. In

terms of economic and social development, Singapore has received more than its fair share of

accolades, including world’s highest foreign reserves per capita, world’s busiest port, world’s

second freest economy and world’s smartest city (in terms of e-governance). In terms of

social development, it’s highly literate, English-speaking and completely urban population

live in the world’s third best city. Despite having the smallest population in Asia (4 million),

it is the largest single country market for regional publications like Asian Wall Street Journal

and Far Eastern Economic Review. Yet, despite being an outstanding model of economic and

social development, it continues to be listed in the company of China, Myanmar, North Korea

and Vietnam as countries that do not endorse the Union of Civil Liberty. Indeed, it inspires

others to condemn liberal democracy with its discourse of Asian Democracy.

What is frustrating to modernisation theorists is, as Castells (1988: 78) points out,

‘although clearly authoritarian, Singapore is not a dictatorship but a hegemonic state, in the

Gramscian sense… it is based not simply on coercion, but also on consensus.’ Furthermore,

popular support for the People’s Action Party (PAP) seems unshakable. During the recent

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economic crisis, not only was its legitimacy un-dented, it even managed, to Hong Kong’s and

Taiwan’s envy, to rally citizens to ‘tighten their belts’ and accept austere policies aimed at

restructuring the economy. In November 2001, when Singapore was experiencing its deepest

economic recession since Independence (in 1965), the PAP managed to improve its electoral

margin by 10% (to 75.3%).

These examples of strengthened political legitimacy in face of economic crisis nicely

illustrate the incongruity between modernisation paradigm and hegemony theory. Firstly,

these cases suggest that there is relative autonomy between ideology (economic legitimacy)

and material conditions (economic performance). If ideology ‘expresses a will, a hope or a

nostalgia, rather than [describes] a reality’ (Althusser 1969: 234), then legitimacy is less

about sustaining double-digit growth than about keeping citizens’ dreams and hopes alive.

During the crisis, the PAP’s constant emphasis of meritocracy and economic recovery was

vital in assuring citizens that even if they could not attain the Singapore Dream (of the 5Cs –

car, condominium, credit card, cash and club membership) in their lifetime, their children

would have a fair chance at it.

Secondly, the case of Singapore suggests that material realities such as ‘economic

performance’ and ‘economic crisis’ are themselves ideologically mediated. The PAP

embarked on a long and hard media project to ensure that its citizens understood that the

economic crisis was an ‘Asian’ economic crisis and thus, not to be blamed on the

government.

This was by no means an easy task, with experts like Krugman (1994: 70-71)

espousing the opposite: that economic miracles in Asia were not sustainable because they

were based on ‘perspiration, not inspiration’ and that the Asian capitalism model of high

savings and low spending was structurally weak because it stunted the development of local

markets, rendering Asian economies susceptible to global fluctuations. Meanwhile, all over

Southeast Asia, another regime-threatening discourse prevailed. On a daily basis, citizens in

Singapore were exposed to recurring media coverage of corruption and pro-democracy

movements in neighbouring countries, such as ‘KKN’ (Indonesia’s pro-democracy slogan for

corruption, cronyism and nepotism).

What was there to stop citizens in Singapore from asking the same about the PAP?

While this question obviously warrants deep and lengthy enquiry, here, I would like to

highlight a few relevant themes and explanations based on my field research there. In 1997-

1998, I spent eight months in Singapore interviewing citizens of different generation, race,

gender and class for at least two hours each. Thirty-two ordinary citizens were selected based

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upon a combination of snowball and skip method, where individuals who recommended

others were ‘skipped’ and not interviewed. This was done with the hope of diluting whatever

ideological proximity might exist between my recommenders and myself.

The goal of the research was to investigate the PAP’s hegemony, particularly, whether

and how its ideologies may be inscribed onto commonsense and where and when official

discourses become relevant in (and frame) everyday discourse. Although the focus of the

fieldwork was not on the economic crisis, it was a subject that interviewees chose to talk

about extensively.

Every interviewee accepted the economic crisis as ‘Asian’ and even interviewees who

were otherwise critical of the government acknowledged that the crisis was ‘regional’ and

beyond the control of the government. All interviewees also reproduced the media’s selective

comparison frame, where Singapore was selectively compared to worse-off neighbours. I do

not want to suggest that this was specific to Singapore, since it is routine for news media in

all parts of the world to focus on bad news.

The effect of such a notion of newsworthiness was extremely regime-supportive.

Widely embraced and invoked by interviewees, this regional comparison frame was refracted

in the context of citizens’ everyday life and experienced as ‘luck.’ Without exception,

interviewees were familiar with the spicy details of the horrors of life in neighbouring

countries (e.g., murders, rapes and the general fate of Chinese during the 1998 riots in

Indonesia) and considered Singaporeans extremely lucky to have, in their own words, ‘the

best government in the world’ in the ‘honest’ and ‘non-corrupt’ PAP.

Indeed, the PAP was so ideologically successful that its citizens, despite believing that

the crisis was ‘regional’ and thus beyond the PAP’s control, also believed that the PAP was

the only option to lead Singapore out of the economic storm. This is a remarkable feat

because it is tantamount to an ideological short-circuit: if the crisis is regional and beyond the

control of the state, how can it be conquered by the PAP or by any government? Not

surprisingly, the converse question of ‘if the government is so good, why did the crisis

happen’ was a thought that none of my interviewees articulated.

Singapore’s experience of the economic crisis demonstrates the lack of

correspondence between economic performance and economic legitimacy. An economic

crisis is not necessarily a hegemonic crisis – indeed, the converse seems to be true in

Singapore. In the late 1980s when Singapore was at the height of its miraculous economic

growth, the PAP was faced with what it dubbed ‘the price of success’ – a liberal middle class

who, accustomed to consumerist choices, began demanding political options. In November

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2001, when Singapore was experiencing its worst recession since independence (in 1965), the

PAP improved its electoral popularity by 10%. These accounts suggest that economic

legitimacy is as much an ideological project to secure citizens’ perception and sense of

economic satisfaction as much as economic performance.

Let me summarise what I have identified so far as the basis of PAP hegemony in face

of the economic crisis. Firstly, the lack of congruence between economic performance and

legitimacy, or that an economic crisis is not tantamount to a political crisis, suggests

hegemony at work at a deeper level (beyond contingent material conditions). In fact, the

evidence of ideological short circuits and of unquestioning trust in the government seem to

illustrate March’s (2003: 216) argument that politics in authoritarian societies tend to be

shifted to the ‘pre-political’ sphere of ‘epistemic claim[s]’ about a nation’s a priori needs and

realities. In the case of the economic crisis, the work of hegemony occurs at the level of

interpreting and naming the material conditions at hand. Insofar as citizens accept this

interpretation as reality, the options that are unthinkable become limited.

However, unlike March, I would suggest that this hegemonic strategy is not merely a

strategy of authoritarian states but a generic strategy.12 Consider September 11 – in its

immediate aftermath, public discourse was disoriented and looked to authorities to define the

phenomenon that had just taken place – was it an accident, was it terrorism (or freedom

fighters), was it another Timothy McVeigh act of Christian Fundamentalism, was it a

Hiroshima revenge, was it God’s will? Needless to say, the way the event became defined

vitally relegated certain options as unthinkable while rendering others as inevitable.

Yet, no matter how sophisticated the PAP’s ideological strategy may be, any

characterisation of the PAP’s project to secure hegemony in terms of ideology only would be

insufficient. Had it relied solely on ideology to sustain one-party rule, it is unlikely that the

PAP could have secured such a high degree of consensus and a large reservoir of legitimacy

to tide it through economic crises. Aware that economics matter, and that sustaining

hegemony in an extended period of crisis requires more than the alteration of perceptions, the

PAP initiated an S$11.3 billion stimulus package (comprising of measures on various fronts –

tax cuts, rebates, concessions, etc.) to ‘sweeten the ground’ for the 2001 elections and to

combat recession. A new scheme to give all Singaporeans a tangible monetary share in the

nation called the ‘New Singapore Shares’ was launched with a caveat that low-income

residents stood to benefit more. (As usual, the scheme was picked up the following day by the

Hong Kong government, who expressed admiration and intentions of imitating it.)

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At the same time, the PAP is aware that these are merely short-term measures and that

in the long-term, its economic legitimacy would have to be sustained through economic

performance. Deeply aware that ultimately, economics matter profoundly, the PAP was quick

to implement austere programs to restructure the economy because it was aware that ‘bitter

medicine’ had the best change of being ‘swallowed’ when the ground is sweet, when its

legitimacy is still strong.

Contrast the PAP’s response to governments in Thailand and South Korea, who

blamed previous governments for exacerbating the economic downturn and the Malaysian

government, who blamed foreign (especially Western) investors for irresponsible

speculations in its economy – these governments seemed to prioritise ideological projects

over industrial re-structuring. The Hong Kong government, by contrast, was aware of the

urgent need to restructure its economy but was unable to do so because it did not have

sufficient economic legitimacy to convince citizens to swallow the bitter pill. Because of its

foresight and intricate understanding of the nature of legitimacy, the Singapore is likely to

recover quickest among its competitors, thereby further strengthening its ‘track record,’

rendering O’Leary and Coplin’s (1983: 21) 1983 prophetic insight that the PAP regime ‘is

likely to continue indefinitely’ as relevant today as it was in the past.

CONCLUSION: ECONOMISM, IDEOLOGISM AND THE RELATIONSHIP

BETWEEN ECONOMICS AND IDEOLOGY

The purpose of this detour into how the PAP bolstered its legitimacy during the economic

crisis is two-fold: to offer concrete examples so as to build up a compelling and intricate

argument about the specific place of ideology for understanding authoritarianism.

Additionally, before I do that, I would like to review the different ways of thinking

about the relationship of economics and ideology by looking at how modernisation theorists

deal with the general question of ideology and specifically at how scholars have analysed the

Singapore case.

Modernisation theorists appear to use two strategies to address the question of

ideology. Faced with recalcitrant states that refuse to ‘evolve’ or make a transition to

democracy despite having the conditions to do so, one strategy modernisation theory can take

is to re-categorise or sub-categorise. In the case of Singapore, modernisation theorists have

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resorted to giving it its own category of ‘hegemonic electoral authoritarianism’ with their

typology of the world. However, this strategy contributes less to a sophisticated

understanding of these regimes and more towards enabling modernisation theorists to hold on

to their map of the world. With its expanded hybrid categories and less distinct boundaries,

such typologies are problematic because they ‘obscure internal differences within categories’

(Levitsky and Way 2002: 52) and because thinking of regimes as combinations of other types

of regimes prevents us from grasping their internal logic.

A second strategy is to make small allowances for the factor of ideology. For instance,

the notion of ‘skill’ and ‘leadership’ can be read as shorthand for ideological strategy, and

often also its successful outcome (notions that are not conflated or used inter-referentially by

hegemony theorists). Other useful concepts include ‘political capital’ and ‘reservoir of

(economic) legitimacy’ (Diamond, Juan and Lipset 1995) which explain how authoritarian

governments can withstand short-term crises. Although legitimacy tends to be narrowly

pegged to economics rather than to bureaucratic legitimacy (Wittfogel) or traditional

legitimacy (Pye and Pye), what makes these concepts more sophisticated is that, instead of

predicting or predicting democratisation with economic development, there is a stirring

awareness that an economic crisis is not necessarily a political or a hegemonic crisis.

However, these attempts are generally too fragmented and peripheral to actually

trigger a fruitful revision of modernisation theory or even a rethinking of what constitutes

economics, economic growth and economic crises. The role of ideology continues to have

very little impact on the types of questions that are asked. Panebianco (1988: 4) for instance

suggested that if we take a different point of view, the puzzle is not why authoritarianism

endures, but why it ends. This is because the longer a party is in power, the greater is its

opportunity to shape its following and the more compelling the pressures on social groups,

even those originally hostile to the party, to accommodate themselves to its seemingly

unshakeable control.

When the question of ideology does arise in democratisation studies, it tends to be

treated dismissively as an excuse for coercion, rather than as something that might have a

palpable or even fundamental effect on political outcomes. As early as 1990, Pempel (1990:

7) lamented that the evolution of authoritarianism in modern or soft (hegemonic)

authoritarianism is one of the most important but least theorised processes in understanding

the long-term single-party dominance. The trend continues to this day.

Even when studying Singapore - which modernisation theorists themselves describe

as a classic case of ‘hegemonic authoritarianism’ - the role of ideology continues to be treated

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dismissively. For Thompson (2001: 157), the PAP’s Asian Values project was merely a

rhetorical justification for ‘draconic laws and crackdowns on political opposition.’

Alternatively, ideological effects are trivialised.13 Scholars conclude without irony that,

despite ideological effect being ‘impossible to gauge,’ the PAP’s projects are ‘not popular’

(Means 1996: 157; Thompson 2001: 157).

Thompson’s work is a good example of the trivialisation of questions of ideology and

clearly illuminates the disparity between modernisation theory and hegemony theory.

Thompson understands the ‘hegemonic authoritarian’ case of Singapore in terms of

authoritarianism, which in terms of modernisation theory, means making a list of the

coercive regulations that abound in Singapore. By approaching the case with a checklist of

indicators generated by broad generalisations, such a study contributes neither to an

understanding of how hegemonic authoritarianism differs from other forms of

authoritarianism nor to an understanding of why authoritarianism endures.

In sum, the mechanical and supplementary ways in which ideology is incorporated,

without thinking through all the ramifications, contribute little towards a richer or more

sophisticated understanding of authoritarianism. Contrast this with the richness of a

Gramscian approach to understanding of the same question of why authoritarianism endures.

While acknowledging the presence of coercive institutions, the theory compels scholars to go

further to ask how regimes may nonetheless attempt to secure consensus so as to avoid

relying on coercive regulations.

Ideology matters, but not only as a supplement or even an equal complement to

economics. The relationship between the two is not one of mutual exclusion so that it is

possible to focus on one without the other; nor is it one of equal and separate

complementarity. Rather, both are deeply implicated in the constitution of each other.

In the case of economics, I have suggested that material facts and conditions like

‘economic crisis’ or ‘Asian economic crisis’ do not exist independently of the discursive

frames that give them meaning and significance. For instance, the material reality for

Singaporeans in 1997-1998 could have been experienced as a crisis within a historical frame

if it was compared to the nation’s earlier miraculous economic development. If a

geographical-regional comparison frame is selected instead, the crisis becomes experienced

as ‘luck.’

That there may be multiple ways of naming and articulating what is our material

condition suggests that the question of economics is as much a question of ideology and that

it is vital that politicians present the current material conditions in a way to cull consent on

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economic reality. Gramsci (1971: 145) noted how the representation of material conditions

vitally influences consent:

A company [of military officers] would be capable of going for days without food because it could see that it was physically impossible for supplies to get through; but it would mutiny if a single meal was missed as a result of neglect of bureaucratism.

The intricate relationship between the material and the ideological is perhaps best summed up

by Hall’s (1988: 145) argument that hegemony is a product of specific conjunctures and

material conditions:

Gramsci always insisted that hegemony is not exclusively an ideological phenomenon. There can be no hegemony without “the decisive nucleus of the economic.” On the other hand, do not fall into the trap of the old mechanical economism and believe that if you can only get hold of the economy, you can move the rest of your life… The question of hegemony is always a question of new cultural order… The notion of a “historical block” is precisely different from that of a pacified, homogenous ruling class. It entails a different conception of how social forces and movements, in their diversity, can be articulated into strategic alliances.

By way of conclusion, I would like to establish a balance sheet of the different paradigms. In

spite of its flaws, modernisation theory can be useful if an element of contingency is

introduced to weaken its economic determinism. Indeed, in the case of Singapore,

modernisation theories very accurately described the democratisation pressures confronting

the PAP. It is when modernisation theorists go beyond the descriptive to the prescriptive that

the paradigm is unable to take into account other factors – factors that might equally or more

strongly determine political development. However, to ask modernisation theorists to

relinquish this prescriptive element might be tantamount to asking them to give up more

fundamental premises such as a linear transitional model of political progress, which is in

turn, premised on yet another fundamental assumption that regimes can be classified into the

dichotomous categories of democratic and authoritarian.

In view of the many problems with modernisation theory, Gramsci’s theory of

hegemony appears much more attractive. In the least, its theory exhibits less epistemological

bias because its concepts, being un-dichotomised, do not lend themselves readily to moral

hijacking. Besides situating consent and coercion in terms of concentricity rather than in

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terms of a dichotomy or continuum (with hybrid positions in between poles), the biggest

strength of hegemony theory is its sensitivity to how history, culture and ideology can come

together to engender countervailing forces that stabilise and legitimise authoritarian regimes,

arrest the drift towards democracy and thus offer a genuine response to the question of why

authoritarianism endures.

NOTES 1. The author thanks Garry Rodan and Kanishka Jayasuriya for their comments on a prior

draft. 2 The material in the first section has been adapted from a forthcoming encyclopedia entry

‘Authoritarianism, East Asian,’ New Dictionary of The History of Ideas. References to non-governmental organisations (e.g., Freedom House), international politics and ideas pertaining to the interconnections between science and politics are new.

3. See Lipset (1959) for a classical approach. For a recent and comprehensive update, see Diamond, Linz and Lipset (1995).

4. See Park, Kim and Sohn (2000). Also see Kim and Hong (2001). These authors argue that economic openness and development had not weakened the South Korean state vis-à-vis society. Rather, modernisation or globalisation is often state-led and precipitates a ‘clientalistic’ rather than democratic relationship between social institutions.

5. Accessed on 15 February 2004 on their respective websites. 6. Readers should note that the author herself does not believe that it is possible to create an

ideology-free science. She uses the term to reflect the beliefs of the subjects in question. 7. Not unlike what I did at the beginning of the essay to demonstrate how, even by indicators

and criteria set by them, modernisation theories are as often inaccurate as they are inaccurate.

8. These are ‘liberal democracy,’ ‘electoral democracy,’ ‘ambiguous regimes,’ ‘competitive authoritarian,’ ‘hegemonic electoral authoritarian’ and ‘politically closed authoritarian’ (Diamond 2002: 31).

9. For Lee and Kim’s debate, see Kim (1994); for Cambodia’s preference, see Öjendal and Antlöv (1998).

10. Poulantzas defined ‘authoritarian statism’ as ‘a situation of intensified state control … combined with radical decline of the institutions of political democracy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called ‘formal’ liberties.’

11. O’Donnell et al. rejected the economically deterministic modernisation theories and offered a more voluntaristic model that focused on the role of civil society in triggering a transition to democracy. It should be noted that their revision does not constitute a significant departure from modernisation theories: they continue to frame the question of authoritarianism within the transition paradigm (with democracy as the end-point).

12. March argues further that authoritarian governments with this type of consent (secured on the a priori and the pre-political) often feel the compunction to secure consent on a wider range of issues (than a democratic government). While perceptive and intuitively accurate, his thesis needs to be refined. Perhaps it is the case that in younger and less integrated or homogenised societies, the project of securing consent is more visible and has to reach areas that have not yet been incorporated within its ideological umbrella. In the case of Singapore, I have observed that even a generation makes a difference. In the 1970s, the state has to campaign against spitting. Four decades latter, citizens brought up

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with a different vision of the good society considers it uncouth to spit in public. Needless to say, the PAP no longer devotes funds towards such a campaign. The implication of my intervention is, again, that it seems needless to distinguish between democratic and authoritarian regimes in terms of the reach of their hegemonic projects. As I have argued earlier (especially with examples from Britain and France), hegemony theory prefers to think of authoritarianism and democracy as tendencies, rather than as a quality of particular regimes.

13. This trivialisation of ideology is not limited to modernisation theorists, but can also be seen in sociological studies of Singapore regime. Even while professing a theoretical interest in questions of culture, ideology and hegemony, scholars prefer not to investigate whether state ideologies infiltrate popular discourse and commonsense. Nonetheless, they make conclusions about them, such as that the PAP’s Asian Values project approximates to a ‘discursive artefact,’ that it is ‘a disembodied uninstitutionalizable ideology,’ that it is ‘a pure ideological exercise with no political effect.’ See Chua (1995: 33), Clammer (1993: 42), Hill and Lian (1995: 219).

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