Southeast Asia's strongmen

LAST Tuesday I began to write about Southeast Asia's contemporary strongmen, which included our own Ferdinand Marcos, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, Indonesia's Suharto, and Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad, who retired just last Saturday after 22 years in power.

Of the four countries that experimented with authoritarianism, Malaysia and Singapore fared well, so much so that neighboring countries often point to them as models. Filipino politicians, in particular, prate endlessly about how we need to be as disciplined as Singaporeans, with hints that they are ready to step into the shoes of a benign dictator, if necessary, to lead the Philippines to prosperity.

Authoritarian rule is tempting but it is dangerously simplistic to credit Malaysia's and Singapore's progress to strongman rule alone. We forget, for example, that Singapore is a city-state, with a population less than half that of Metro Manila and with one ethnic group--the Chinese--comprising the vast majority.

There is, of course, more to governance than the size of a country. I feel that what made Lee and Mahathir so successful was not their ruling with an iron fist as their ability to negotiate a social contract with their constituents. After all, there were other Southeast Asian countries such as Burma, Cambodia, and Laos that had even more harsh dictatorships but these countries floundered, precisely because of the complete absence of democratic institutions to challenge their dictators' disastrous economic and political programs.

In contrast, Southeast Asia's strongmen often had a strong sense of history, knowing that they would be judged later on their leadership. Marcos, too, had this sense of history but never developed the accountability that other leaders had. An even more important difference was that from the time they declared independence, the leaders of Malaysia (Malaya at that time), Singapore and Indonesia carved out a unifying national ideology and built a strong political party committed to that ideology.

This visionary approach was particularly important because of the tribal, ethnic, and religious divisions that accompanied the births of Southeast Asian countries. As I mentioned in my last column, Indonesia alone has some 300 ethnic groups. The role then of the Southeast Asian strongman was to become a kind of paramount tribal chief, able to respect the many different groups and yet assert authority over them.

I am not a fan of Mahathir or Lee but I have to say both, as well as Suharto, were masters of statecraft, balancing diverse and often conflicting interests. Malaysia and Singapore were less developed than we were in the 1950s, but both have since surged far ahead of the Philippines, thanks in part to long-term economic visions that also emphasized the common good.

We tend to credit their success to capitalism but in reality, their development models were more of a mixture of a welfare state with free market economics. Lee's socialist background from his younger years shows in the program he mapped out for Singapore, with a womb-to-tomb package of services for citizens. Malaysia also has strong state support for social services. In contrast, the Philippines chose a free market model more like that of the United States, oblivious to the fact that so many Filipinos were wallowing in poverty, unable to compete with the oligarchs.

Mahathir launched his controversial "bumiputra" policy, which gave priority to ethnic Malays with economic loans, schooling and other government services. My Malaysian-Chinese friends complained endlessly about the policy but would admit it was needed, a way to provide a much-needed headstart for ethnic Malays.

Mahathir pushed for Malaysia's economic modernization, but refused to follow a Western model, even standing up against the global economic czars. When the Asian financial crisis broke out in 1997, he was the only leader in the region to disregard the International Monetary Fund's prescriptions for economic recovery. He imposed controls on capital flow and exchange rates, even as the IMF warned that this would lead to Malaysia's collapse. In the end, Malaysia weathered the financial storm quite well, certainly much better than the more IMF-compliant countries such as the Philippines.

Mahathir pushed for Malaysia's economic modernization, but also knew this would bring heavy opposition from religious fundamentalists. His anti-Western rhetoric was really part of his "performance" as a leader, pushing for a model of modernization while upholding "traditional" values. A few weeks back there was an uproar in the international media over a speech where he made anti-Semitic comments. Curiously other parts of his speech, where he lashed out as well at Muslim terrorists, were not picked up all. Taken as a whole, the speech was another example of how Mahathir was playing to his diverse constituencies.

It is not surprising that Lee and Mahathir left office amid profuse praise and sadness, so unlike the way Suharto and Marcos were drummed out of power. The reason for the contrast is well known: Lee and Mahathir led by example. Lee was clean, all through his 32 years in power. Mahathir left office amid allegations of crony capitalism but nothing on the scale of Marcos and Suharto, who continue to top the global league for kleptocracy, examples of how absolute power corrupts absolutely.

To summarize then, Southeast Asia's successful strongmen achieved what they did not so much by wielding an iron fist as by being able to use their power to unite citizens around a national vision and to deliver on their promises of national development. Mahathir, for all his faults, leaves a Malaysia that is considered among Asia's little dragons.

Marcos ushered in his "New Society" with slogans like "Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan (To progress, we need discipline)." Twenty years of Marcos, and the 18 years that followed him, we remain a nation that is economically and morally bankrupt, divided, without a vision. Amid the current crisis, the totalitarian temptation remains real. We need to learn, from Marcos and Suharto, as well as from Lee and Mahathir, that the last thing we need now are leaders vowing discipline and a "strong republic."

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