Organizer and Chair: Eva-Lotta Hedman, University of Nottingham
Discussant: Robert H. Taylor, SOAS, University of London
Current political developments in Southeast Asia have once again focused attention on national elections and popular participation in the region. Recent years have witnessed, for example, the restoration of electoral politics in the Philippines, the restabilization of parliamentary democracy in Thailand, as well as the reintroduction of national elections in Cambodia. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, elections have continued to reproduce large majorities for the ruling parties and do not appear to offer plausible mechanisms for far-reaching political change in the foreseeable future. Finally, in Burma, regime entrenchment rather than electoral succession followed the opposition's landslide victory in the national legislative elections of 1990. With some notable exceptions (see especially Bouchier and Legge, ed., 1994; and Taylor, ed., 1995), however, existing scholarship has typically fallen short of analyzing the current puzzle of electoral politics and popular participation in Southeast Asia within a broader historical and regional perspective.
This panel proposes to discuss early national elections in several countries of the region with an eye to generating cross-case comparative insights and to stimulating a more historically grounded perspective on contemporary problems of political participation and electoral representation in Southeast Asia. By focusing on a period when the institutional mechanisms for national representation-featuring elections in all cases-themselves crystallized in many of these countries, the panel recaptures something of the contingency and contestation that characterized electoral mobilization in the 1950s. At the same time, the individual papers highlight how variations within common regional parameters-the sudden weakness of all Southeast Asian states, American domination and intervention, and Asian communism-helped to define the boundaries of legitimate political participation which in many ways continue to circumscribe electoral competition in Southeast Asia today.
This reexamination of early national elections in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines helps to situate the actual processes of electoral inclusion, contestation and pacification within a conjuncture of national and international political conditions. Against the backdrop of nationalist mobilization and decolonization, for example, the institutionalization of contestation through electoral mechanisms largely served to demobilize political forces to the left of center. With the arrival of the Cold War in Asia, moreover, neo-colonial intervention favored electoral mechanisms for communist containment involving explicit political prohibitions against candidates and parties associated with the left as well as more subtle forms of disenfranchisement of such would-be contenders for the popular vote.
Political Stability and Elections in Malaysia: The Legacy of the Emergency and
"Late" Independence
Francis Loh Kok-Wah, Universiti Sans Malaysia
With one brief interruption (1969-71), parliamentary rule has persisted in Malaysia since independence. While local elections were abolished in 1963, state and national level elections have been held regularly in accordance with Malaysia's original, albeit oft-amended, Constitution. Compared to its neighbors, Malaysia appears a beacon of constitutional democracy in Southeast Asia. How does one explain this apparent difference?
This paper elaborates on two factors which have contributed to circumscribed electoral politics in Malaysia. Firstly, independence came to Malaysia comparatively late, in 1957. By that time, the British were not unwilling to relinquish power, provided ethnic violence among Malaysia's multiethnic population could be prevented, and Britain's vast economic interests could be secured. Time allowed the British to introduce participation in government by stages. The franchise was extended gradually, elections were held first locally and only subsequently at the national level and political parties led by local elites considered amicable to British groups were fostered. Radical parties, however, were proscribed.
Related to this extended transitional period was the experience of the Emergency (1948-60) which ultimately resulted in the defeat of the communists. Whereas the modern state was challenged by other Southeast Asian nationalists, Malayan 'nationalists' worked with the British to consolidate the colonial state. The Emergency Regulations further facilitated the expansion of the state which began to penetrate deep into the everyday lives of the population. These Regulations were transformed into coercive laws for independent Malaysia-ensuring central control of the media, the operation of societies and trade unions, educational endeavors, etc.-the most draconian of which is the Internal Security Act allowing detention without trial.<
The Rise and Fall of Electoral Politics in Late
Colonial Cambodia
Steve R. Heder, SOAS, University of London
Elections and armed violence were predominant modes of contestation for control of the late-colonial Cambodian state by several strata of its Khmer elite. Elections opened the way for the elite's younger, "best educated" (in French lycées) members-organized in the Democrat Party-to challenge successfully the predominance of older, less-well-educated figures and the young King Sihanouk. These latter forces reacted with repression and cooptation strategies that reversed or accommodated the formers' electoral victories, and that left it unclear whether further elections would take place. Armed struggle against continued French colonial influence had meanwhile been organized by more marginal strata of the elite, whose entrée into Francophone circles was limited. With increasing support from Vietnamese Communists, they rejected electoral "farces" and the "puppet King" Sihanouk in favor of "new democratic" revolution.
However, the 1954 Geneva Agreements obliged Indochinese insurgents to give up violence in exchange for participation in "free" elections and committed a reluctant Cambodian government to the exercise. Sihanouk, senior Cambodian civil servants and coopted democrats worked together to turn the ballot into a referendum against competitive party politics that would ensure their political predominance. Opposition came from a revamped Democrat Party led by a new generation of radicalized activists, and from the Communist-front Pracheachon group. Both disputed American replacement of French influence in IndoSoutheast Asia. The U.S. therefore acquiesced in a partially-rigged election in 1955 that eliminated opposition rather than giving it a chance to compete. This paper will show how such developments cleared the way for the institutionalization of a neo-patrimonial autocracy under Sihanouk and further radicalized the opposition, and will analyze how they prefigured a profound political crisis for Cambodia's future.
Elections in the Early Philippine Republic: The "Showcase of Democracy"
in Post-War Southeast Asia
Eva-Lotta Hedman, University of Nottingham
As the dust began to settle after the much-celebrated resurrection of competitive electoral politics in the Philippines in 1986, national elections once again both raised and dashed hopes of laying new foundations for legitimate political participation out of the debris left in the wake of the long martial law years. While putschist and revolutionary pressures from Right and Left presented sometimes formidable challenges to the transitional regime under Aquino, post-EDSA elections have nevertheless clinched the comeback of the pre-Marcos "ancien régime." The resilience of such familiar patterns, even in the face of widespread extra-electoral mobilization, thus raises a compelling puzzle which calls for a historical reexamination of the meaning of elections in the post-war Philippines.
This paper illuminates the contemporary dilemma of Philippine electoralism from the perspective of the 1953 presidential election. It situates this election, which earned the Philippines its reputation as "America's showcase of democracy" in the region, against the backdrop of early U.S.-Philippine neo-colonial relations as well as within the broader context of the Cold War. To that end, the paper traces the evolution and impact of such early neo-colonial relations from the 1946 presidential contest, held under conditions of virtual U.S. occupation. In addition, it returns to a period when electoral politics featured serious challenges supported by Huk peasant guerrillas and the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP), subsequent efforts at mobilizing organized election boycott campaigns, and increasingly rampant election-related fraud and violence across the country. By focusing on the critical election of 1953 within the context of larger political struggles during early independence, this paper thus helps to highlight the process of contestation involved in defining the underlying parameters of electoral politics in the post-war Philippines.
Indonesia's Cold War Elections
Geoffrey B. Robinson, University of California, Los Angeles
The Indonesian national elections of 1955 were the most freely contested in the country's history and probably the most open anywhere in Southeast Asia, with unrestricted participation of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) at a time when Cold War pressures were squeezing parties of the left out of electoral politics elsewhere in the region. Some forty years later, however, Indonesia's democratic institutions are arguably among the weakest in the region, while political organizations of the left exist only in exile or on the extreme margins of national political life.
This paper traces the current weakness of Indonesia's democratic institutions to the elections of 1955. It focuses on the international context within which the 1955 elections were held, and the way in which international and domestic reactions to the PKI's success coincided to bring about the end of genuine electoral politics and, later, the violent decimation of the left. After the 1955 elections, U.S. policy toward Indonesia shifted from benign indifference-to active intervention aimed at undermining the PKI and destabilizing President Sukarno and contributed to aborting a nascent tradition of electoral democracy in Indonesia.
Instead, the military and the bureaucracy have established themselves in power behind a veil of regular but tightly-controlled elections. One of the enduring ironies of this current arrangement is the New Order regime's success in portraying the genuine electoralism of the 1950s as an undesirable "western" import, based on "liberal" principles fundamentally ill-suited to Indonesian "traditions" and "values." In doing so, it has deliberately obscured the extent to which the regime itself-together with its system of sham electoralism-is, at least in part, the product of foreign intervention and maSoutheast Asiation.