Viewed over the longue durée, modern Southeast Asian history follows what Karl Polanyi described as a "double movement." In the late nineteenth century, the region experienced a protracted period of rapid export-oriented economic growth, spurred by foreign investment, with ‘Chinese’ immigrants as compradores for foreign firms and revenue farmers for colonial states. Sustained economic growth fueled dramatic demographic and social change but was accompanied by remarkable political quiescence in the shadow of the newly constructed Liberal state. The emerging hierarchy of the "plural society" remained intact for several decades without serious challenge. Yet as Takashi Shiraishi has noted, an "Age of Motion" followed upon the "Age of Capital." Beginning with the Philippine Revolution at the turn of the century, the early 1900s witnessed the proliferation of a wide variety of associations, movements, and political currents. These new forms of popular movement and mass politics threatened to disrupt the hierarchy of the colonial "plural society" that had underpinned the Great Transformation of the previous half-century.

A parallel "double movement" has begun to crystallize in recent years. The last three decades of the twentieth century have witnessed rapid, sustained export-oriented growth in Southeast Asia, fuelled largely by foreign capital, with ethnic-Chinese businessmen as partners for foreign capital and operators of monopoly franchises. Rapid industrialization has led to dramatic social and demographic change, yet, as in the late nineteenth century, has not generated commensurate political dynamism. Even in "democratizing" Thailand and the Philippines, bossism and money politics have prevailed. Against this backdrop, the upcoming years carry the threat—and the promise—of a wave of popular politics parallel to that seen in the region one hundred years ago, a kind of politics that is not merely "business by other means."

This panel thus examines the new forms of "populist" and "reformist" mass politics which have begun to emerge in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Focusing on national-level political figures, parties, and movements, the papers discuss the social bases of support and the political institutions which have shaped the varying style, substance, and success of these new challenges to ‘business/politics as usual.’ While today’s reformists and populists in Southeast Asia recall analogous figures in U.S. and Latin American history, for example, their popular appeal and mobilizational trajectories have hinged on class constellations, religious and ideological inflections, and historical traditions that are distinctly local and vary considerably across the region. The panel offers the first scholarly treatment of this nascent "counter-movement" under way in the region, both through individual case studies and cross-national comparative analysis.

Eva Lotta Hedman, University of Nottingham

Post-independence Philippine history has witnessed several cycles of radical popular mobilization followed by conservative, ‘transformist’ or ‘caesarist’ reform: the Huk Rebellion and then Magsaysay in the late 1940s and early 1950s; the First Quarter Storm and then Marcos’ "constitutional authoritarianism" in the early 1970s; the growth of the CPP/NPA and then "People Power" and Aquino in the mid-1980s. Each cycle has left residual traces, not only in the popular memory but also in terms of prominent political figures and organizations, repertoires of collective action and public discourse, and even the institutions and practices of the Philippine state. Yet to date these cycles appear to have done little to undermine the hegemony of the landed oligarchs and machine politicians who have dominated the archipelago’s economy and political system throughout the twentieth century.

In the post-Marcos era, the ‘re-equilibration’ of Philippine politics has occurred in tandem with a distinctly new trend: the increasing importance of popularity—as opposed to money and machinery—in national elections. On the one hand, in 1992, former judge and renowned ‘graft-buster’ Miriam Defensor-Santiago nearly won the presidency on the sole basis of her reputation as a vigorous "reformist" and opponent of corruption, especially among urban, middle-class voters. On the other hand, in the 1998 presidential election, ‘blockbuster’ action-film star Joseph "Erap" Estrada emerged victorious by a considerable margin, thanks to a combination of substantial campaign funds, political machinery, and above all else, enormous "populist" appeal among the millions of Filipinos who have long cheered him on as their larger-than-life consummate underdog.

This paper examines these diverging trajectories of ‘popular’ politics in the Philippines in the 1990s—their origins, nature, and limitations—in the context of major sociological and political changes under way in the archipelago. To that end, the paper also seeks to situate the contemporary Philippines against the literature on ‘reformism’ in the turn-of-the-century United States and ‘populism’ in mid-century Latin America.

Duncan McCargo, University of Leeds

Siam’s absolute monarchy was brought to an end by a palace revolution in 1932, but was replaced by an elite-dominated order in which the military often played the leading role. For the past twenty years, Thai politics has been highly commercialised and exclusionary. Vote-buying and other abuses of the electoral system are widespread, political parties are little more than business enterprises, and politicians are held in low public esteem.

One response to this parlous state of affairs has been a movement for political reform, which culminated in the promulgation of the 1997 constitution. Reformists argue that Thailand’s political and social order can be overhauled through legal, bureaucratic, and structural changes that check abuses of power by elected politicians and unelected officials alike.

However, the currency crisis and economic turmoil that began in 1997 also helped generate more populist ideas about the curing of Thailand’s woes. Long-standing notions of community culture (based on an idealised view of the Thai village) were recycled, this time combined with a knee-jerk nationalism based on resentment against the West in general, and against the IMF in particular. These notions were fuelled by the King’s birthday speech of 5 December 1997, in which he sketched out a populist, Buddhistic vision of a more self-sufficient Thai economy.

This paper will argue that reformism and populism are two contradictory but nevertheless overlapping discourses, which serve both to shape and to confuse public debate about the direction of Thailand’s social and political order.

Farish A. Noor, University of Berlin

This paper looks at the discursive dynamics underlying the so-called ‘reformasi’ movement in Malaysia that has appeared over the period known as the ‘Anwar Ibrahim’ crisis that followed from the Asian Financial crisis of 1997. It will analyse the manner in which the popular discourse of political Islam, as it has developed in Malaysia since the 70s, was utilised by a number of actors as a critique against the government dominated by the UMNO-led Barisan Nasional Front and the leadership of the Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad in particular. The paper hopes to examine how and why this discourse came to the fore at this particular juncture in contemporary Malaysian history, why it managed to play such an effective tool as a counter-hegemonic device and rallying point, and how it has effectively re-drawn the political frontier between the government and the increasingly Islamic Malay opposition constituency.

Some questions need to be asked: Does this entail the strengthening of political and ideological frontiers in Malaysia along Islamist vs. Secular grounds? What does this do to the popular understanding of Islam as a belief system as well as a political and ideological tool? What effect will it have in the shaping of political consciousness of the Malay-Muslim constituency in particular? And what will be the final outcome (if any) on the process of creating a pluralist and democratic civic space in the country? The paper relies heavily on two sources of popular narrative: the publications of the Islamic opposition parties and movements, and the increasingly popular genre of Islamically-oriented political ‘hack’ writers that abound in contemporary Malay political discourse.

Daniel Ziv, University of London

The June 1999 Indonesian general election—the country’s first democratic poll since 1955—saw the emergence of a new and formidable political force in Megawati Soekarnoputri and her Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P). The party secured 34 percent of the votes for parliament in a 48-way race, an extraordinary achievement by any electoral standard. During the three-week official campaign, PDI-P’s boisterous presence dominated Indonesia’s streets in an unprecedented show of force, particularly in the party’s ‘heartland’ of Central and East Java and the island province of Bali.

More tellingly, PDI-P’s campaign was to a large extent based on an extensive network of posko—neighborhood posts—which in the year since the downfall of former president Soeharto had in many districts sprouted up on every street comer. These posko were locally created and operated along the principle of communal self-reliance, but rapidly became a potent political network for the ‘party in red’ as well as a mantle of sorts for its leader, Megawati, daughter of Indonesia’s revered founding president, Soekarno. The posko are one seemingly populist element in PDI-P politics. PDI-P symbolism—in the form of colors, numbers, and the personality of Megawati—is another. Similarly, the nostalgic link to her father’s towering image and the pre-New Order era has resonated deeply amongst ordinary Indonsians disenchanted with an oppressive and corrupt regime, and her party’s appeal has cut across religious, ethnic, and class divides.

Populist politics has been suppressed for the past 32 years in Indonesia, as the New Order relentlessly ‘de-politicized’ society and ruthlessly ‘cleansed’ politics of anyone or anything associated with the most populist pre-New Order party, the PKI (Communist Party of Indonesia). Historically and demographically, there is reason to believe that the PDI-P’s constituency has its roots in two previous parties, the similarly grassroots and working-class PKI and the nationalist PNI, both of which enjoyed prominence in the 1950s and early 1960s under Soekarno.