ABSTRACT
Beginning in the late 1980s, peaking in the 1990s and continuing into the 2000s, both scholars of Southeast Asia and reformers in the region enthused about the democratic potential of civil society (for example, Budiman 1990; Uhlin 1997; Clarke 1998; Alagappa 2004). They imagined civil society, commonly defined as the realm of associational life between family and state, as a site where ordinary Southeast Asian citizens were organizing autonomously, carving out democratic space, and challenging the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes. Scholars and activists alike pointed to the enormous range of associations – human rights, environmental and women’s groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) of various stripes, growing labour and farmers’ organizations, to name just a few – that were emerging across the region. These organizations were apparently flourishing in conditions as diverse as post-Marcos Philippines and Suharto’s Indonesia, and even sending out shoots in the infertile soil of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore and the yet more desert-like conditions of military-ruled Burma (Kyaw 2004) or the one-party state of Vietnam (Kerkvliet et al. 2003). Both the patterns of civil society organization that arose in the 1980s and 1990s in Southeast
Asia, and the enthusiasm for such organization, were in large part a product of the nondemocratic regimes then dominating the region. Suppression of or limitations on opposition political parties led many middle-class reformers to look to alternative means of exercising political influence, often within radically decentred and loosely coordinated civil society sectors. Many of these reformers also sought to expand democratic space and promote political reform. In countries like Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, it was this combination of diversity and reform potential that made civil society resemble, in the eyes of its supporters and advocates, an engine of democratic change. The prevalence of the civil society model as a strategy to oppose, or at least survive under,
authoritarianism, was encouraged by wider regional and even global trends of political and ideological change. For example, emerging enthusiasm for the civil society model in part reflected the efforts of a post-Marxist left to seek new ways to advance agendas of popular empowerment and social justice while avoiding both the risks of repression and authoritarian tendencies they saw as coming with Leninism. Equally important was the rise of a new spirit of classical liberalism which understood the major division in society, not as one between antagonistic social classes, but as that between a society struggling for greater autonomy and an over-reaching state. This liberal vision in turn received both intellectual and financial succour from the advanced capitalist countries, with an array of both non-governmental and governmental
agencies from the 1980s increasingly willing to support NGOs and other civil society organizations throughout the developing world, including Southeast Asia. Much of this support was channelled toward the promotion of alternative development models – farmer cooperatives, micro-credit schemes, alternative technology and the like – but especially from the 1980s, there was increasing support for groups working on more politically sensitive issues, such as human rights or environmental protection, land disputes and even labour rights. A major shift occurred in the 1990s, as donor governments, such as that of the United States, began to develop democracy-promotion programmes that supported civil society groups in some countries. Even the major international development agencies such as the World Bank began to incorporate support for civil society into their programmes, packaging it as ‘participation in development’ and support for ‘good governance’. As a result of these converging trends, for a brief moment reformers in Southeast Asia became
enamoured of a new model of alternative politics that put civil society, popular empowerment and people’s participation front and centre. In fact, however, and viewed more than a decade on, what is perhaps most striking about the shape of civil society and the social movements that populate it across Southeast Asia is its variety. This variety, in turn, substantially reflects the variety of political regimes in the region. Regimes in Southeast Asia run the gamut from military authoritarian to approaching liberal democratic. All these polities share some degree of space, however controlled or curtailed, for social movements of various forms. How these movements and their component social movement organizations (SMOs) figure into the polity, though, differs greatly. Indeed, we may categorize the region’s regimes less by regime type per se than by the nature of their civil societies: those with a ‘legitimate civil society’, a ‘controlled and communalized civil society’ (which may be difficult to distinguish fully from the state) or a ‘repressed civil society’ (Alagappa 2004). Southeast Asian states with legitimate civil societies include post-1998 Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand – this category is the broadest one, although few of its members would be termed liberal democracies. States with controlled and communalized civil societies include Malaysia and Singapore. States in the region with repressed civil societies include Burma and Vietnam. Importantly, civil society may be legitimate without being terribly strong or internally unified.1
