Asia's Cauldron (18 page)

The Australian strategist Hugh White has written, “Many in Southeast Asia would now agree” with that line of thinking.
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Lee's opinions may be hard for some to take, though not as hard as some of the statements made by Mahathir over the decades. The reality of the South China Sea region is different from that of the Middle East: here there really has been such a thing as enlightened authoritarianism, which has built not only civil societies, but those
that are economic dynamos and therefore primed to become pulsating democracies.

The stories of Lee and Mahathir would appear less strange to the Western liberal mind if we revisit what some of the West's most liberal thinkers in modern times have actually written about political development. For while their writings do not fully exonerate Lee's and Mahathir's authoritarian tendencies, they do lead us along a path that makes sense of how their regimes have brought progress and stability, and, yes, robust military budgets, to Asia.

In his extended essay
On Liberty
, published in 1859, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill famously declares, “That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”
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Mill's irreducible refutation of tyranny leads him to—I have always felt—one of the most moving passages in literature, in which he extols the moral virtues of Marcus Aurelius, only to register the Roman's supreme flaw. Mill writes,

And yet, as Mill laments, this “unfettered intellect,” this exemplar of humanism by the standards of the second century ad, persecuted Christians. As deplorable a state as society was in at the time, Marcus Aurelius assumed that what held it together and kept it from getting
worse was the acceptance of the existing divinities, which the adherents of Christianity threatened to dissolve. He simply could not foresee a world knit together by new and better ties. “No Christian,” Mill writes, “more firmly believes that atheism is false and tends to the dissolution of society than Marcus Aurelius believed the same things of Christianity.”
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If even such a ruler as Marcus Aurelius could be so monumentally wrong, then no dictator, no matter how benevolent, can ever be trusted, it would seem. It follows, therefore, that the persecution of an idea or ideals for the sake of the existing order can never be justified. And if we can never know for certain if authority is in the right, even as anarchy must be averted, the only recourse for society should be to choose and periodically replace its forever imperfect leaders.

But for Mill, given the complexity of his thought, it is never so simple as that. While famous for his liberalism, Mill was keenly aware of the shortcomings of democracy. (Principal among his fears was that of the tyranny of the majority.) So indeed there is a catch. As Mill admits earlier in his essay, “Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing … but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one.”
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Mill knows that authority has first to be created before we can go about limiting it. “Order,” he writes in
Considerations on Representative Government
, published in 1861, is a prerequisite of “Progress.” He further explains: “Order means the preservation of peace by the cessation of private violence.”
²⁶

For without authority, however dictatorial, there is a fearful void, as we all know too well from Iraq in 2006 and 2007. And Lee and Mahathir achieved order in their respective countries without nearly the level of repression practiced by Saddam Hussein. Indeed, to speak of the Iraqi strongman in the same breath as the Malaysian and Singaporean ones is itself a sacrilege.

In fact, no greater twentieth-century proponent of individual liberty than Isaiah Berlin himself observes in his introduction to
Four
Essays on Liberty
, “Men who live in conditions where there is not sufficient food, warmth, shelter, and the minimum degree of security can scarcely be expected to concern themselves with freedom of contract or of the press.”
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In “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin allows that “First things come first, there are situations … in which boots are superior to the works of Shakespeare; individual freedom is not everyone's primary need.” Further complicating matters, Berlin notes, “there is no necessary connection between individual liberty and democratic rule.” There might be a despot “who leaves his subjects a wide berth of liberty” but cares “little for order, or virtue, or knowledge.”
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Mill clarifies: in some cases a “civilized government … will require to be in a considerable degree despotic.” For a people “may be unprepared for good institutions; but to kindle a desire for them is a necessary part of the preparation.”
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That is exactly what Lee and Mahathir did.

To be sure, just as there are good and bad popularly elected leaders, there are good and bad autocrats. And the South China Sea region has surely seen some good ones. When Lee Kuan Yew stepped down as prime minister in 1990, handing his job off to a chosen successor in his own party, he had been elected and reelected seven times, making him the longest-serving prime minister in the world. The democracy he had fostered was a limited one with a strong authoritarian streak. But it worked to prepare his people for something better.

The signal fact of the Middle East in the early years of the so-called Arab Spring was that, for the most part, it encompassed few of those subtleties and apparent contradictions that so define Asia. Middle Eastern societies had long since moved beyond basic needs of food and security to the point where individual freedom could be contemplated. After all, over the past half century, Arabs from the Maghreb to the Persian Gulf experienced epochal social, economic, technological, and demographic transformation; it was only the politics that had lagged behind. And while enlightened autocrats there were, the
reigning model was sterile and decadent national security regimes, deeply corrupt and with sultanist tendencies, that sought to perpetuate their rule through offspring—sons who had not risen through the military or other bureaucracies, and thus had no legitimacy. Marcus Aurelius was one thing; Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, and Syria's Bashar al-Assad quite another. Certainly, the Arab Spring proved much: that there is no
otherness
to Arab and Muslim civilization, that Arabs yearn for universal values just as members of other civilizations do—something that I saw with Malaysian Muslims at the Kuala Lumpur mall. But as to difficult questions regarding the evolution of political order and democracy, the Arab Spring in its early phases actually proved very little. No good autocrats were overthrown. The regimes that had fallen had few saving graces in any larger moral or philosophical sense, and the wonder is that they lasted as long as they did, even as their tumultuous demise was sudden and unexpected at the time.

Yet the issues about which Mill and Berlin cared so passionately must still be addressed. Both men understood that such issues are not easy: though each favored representative government, their nuanced sensibilities stand in opposition to the self-righteous cries of some commentators in the West to topple all autocrats, right now, no matter the circumstances. For in some places in the Arab world, and particularly in Asia, there have been autocrats who can, in fact, be spoken of in the same breath as Marcus Aurelius. So at what point is it right or practical to get rid of these men? For as Berlin intimates, it is not inevitable that what will follow their rule will further the cause of individual liberty and well-being. Care must be taken. Absent relentless, large-scale human rights violations, soft landings for non-democratic regimes are always preferable to hard ones, even if the process takes some time. A moral argument can be made that monsters like Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Kim Jong-il in North Korea should be overthrown any way they can, as fast as they can, regardless of the risk of short-term chaos.

But that argument quickly loses its appeal when one is dealing with dictators who are less noxious. And even when they are not less
noxious, as in the case of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, the moral argument for their removal is still fraught with difficulty, since the worse the dictator, the worse the chaos left in his wake. That is because a bad dictator eviscerates intermediary institutions between the regime at the top and the extended family or tribe at the bottom—professional associations, community organizations, political groups, and so on—the very stuff of civil society. The good dictator, by fostering economic growth, among other things, makes society more complex, leading to more civil society groupings, and to political divisions based on economic interest that are by definition more benign than divisions of tribe and sectarian or ethnic group. A good dictator can be defined as one who makes his own removal less fraught with risk, by preparing his people for representative government. All this is exactly what Lee and Mahathir accomplished. Mill's exhortations in
Considerations on Representative Government
that “the first lesson of civilization” is “obedience,” and that freedom “breaks down altogether” without “skilled administration,” are the very lessons Lee Kuan Yew learned from the hard knocks of his early life.
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While one logical conclusion of Mill's essay is to deny the moral right of tyranny, his admission of the need for obedience to an Akbar or Charlemagne at primitive levels of social development leaves one with the question of where and when, exactly, is the transition point at which society should discard the autocrat. For the difference between the rule of even a wise and enlightened individual like the late-sixteenth-century Mughal Akbar the Great and a political circumstance in which one is only ever pressured against his will when it is a case of preventing direct and immediate harm to others is vast: so vast that Mill's proposition remains theoretical and may never be achieved, since even democratic governments must coerce their citizens for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, certainly, the ruler who moves society to a more advanced stage of development is not only good, but perhaps the most necessary of historical actors—to the extent that history is determined by free-willed individuals as well as by larger geographical and economic forces. And the good autocrat, I submit,
is not a contradiction in terms; rather, he stands at the center of the political questions that we face and will continue to face. The South China Sea region proves it.

Good autocrats there are actually quite a few. For example, in the Middle East, monarchy has found a way over the decades and centuries to engender a political legitimacy of its own, allowing leaders like King Mohammed VI in Morocco, King Abdullah II in Jordan, and Sultan Qaboos bin Said al-Said in Oman to grant their subjects a wide berth of individual freedom without fear of being toppled. Not only is relative freedom allowed, but extremist politics and ideologies are unnecessary in these countries. For it is only in the modernizing dictatorships such as Syria and Libya, which in historical and geographical terms are artificial constructions, and whose rulers are inherently illegitimate, where brute force and radicalism have been required to hold the state together.

It is true, Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's Ben Ali did not run police states on the terrifying scale of Libya's Gaddafi and Syria's Assad, even as their economic policies were more enlightened. But while Mubarak and Ben Ali left their countries in conditions suitable for the emergence of stable democracy, there is little virtue that can be attached to their rule. Their countries are stable and are not lacking in institutions for reasons that go back centuries: Egypt and Tunisia have been states in one form or another since antiquity. The economic liberalizations of recent years that Mubarak and Ben Ali engineered were haphazard rather than well planned. Moreover, they promoted a venal system of corruption built on personal access to their own ruling circles. And Mubarak, rather than move society forward toward democracy, sought to move it backward by installing his son in power. Mubarak and Ben Ali were dull men, enabled by goons in the security services. They, unlike Mahathir and Lee, are nothing in the sense of what Mill and Berlin had in mind. In fact, the real story in the Middle East beyond the toppling of these decrepit regimes is the possible emergence of authentic constitutional monarchies in places
like Morocco and Oman. Here is where the Middle East begins to look like the South China Sea region.

Both Morocco and Oman, which lie at the two geographical extremities of the Arab world, have not been immune to demonstrations. But the demonstrators in both cases explicitly called for reform and democracy within the royal system, and have supported the leaders themselves. King Mohammed and Sultan Qaboos have both moved vigorously to get out in front of popular demands and reform their systems, rather than merely fire their cabinets. Indeed, over the years they have, in the style of Lee and Mahathir, championed women's rights, the environment, the large-scale building of schools, and other progressive causes. Qaboos, in particular, is sort of a Renaissance man who plays the lute and loves Western classical music, and who—at least until the celebrations in 2010 marking forty years of his rule—eschewed a personality cult.