Elections vs. ‘Selections’ in Southeast Asia

The region is marked by a deep pattern of authoritarian rule and a disparate practice of democracy.

By Bridget Welsh

The tumultuous events in Burma this September have put Southeast Asia on the international stage. While attention has centered on the brave protests of the monks—the “Saffron Revolution”—the events also remind us of the critical interrelationship between elections and foreign policy. At the core of opposition to the military junta known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) is an election. In 1990 the Burmese population overwhelmingly elected the National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to office. The SPDC rejected the outcome and has stayed in power by force, renaming the country “Myanmar” and systematically using fear, violence, exploitation of its abundant natural resources and strategic ties with regional allies to hold onto power.

Elections legitimize governments, both domestically and internationally. Burma’s 1990 election underscores that the SPDC remains illegitimately in power. As such, actors in the international system have repudiated it, refusing to call it “Myanmar,” and some (such as the United States) have imposed sanctions and actively worked to support the elected opposition, the NLD. In response, the SPDC has devoted its energies to winning over allies and has forged close relations with regimes that reject elections, namely China.

The tie between elections and foreign policy is not often directly obvious when one looks at elections in Southeast Asia. Voters in this region of 540 million people in 11 different countries rarely vote on foreign policy concerns. None of the countries in Southeast Asia plays a prominent international role, as do the United States and China, for example, so their own foreign policy measures do not evoke a lightning-rod response such as the Iraq War has provoked among Americans. The principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of neighboring countries—the guiding mantra of the region’s key multilateral organization, the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN)—has reinforced the perception that foreign policy plays a minimal role in shaping electoral campaigns and outcomes. Elections are touted as domestic affairs, legitimating exercises for national governments or, rather, for some of the national governments.

In fact, today only six of the 11 Southeast Asian countries hold regular elections. The largest country in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, has the most elections in the region. Indonesians vote directly not only for the president but for their local government. In parts of Indonesia, the ballots are almost as long as those in California. This is a relatively recent practice, however, instituted in 1998 when public protests led to the overthrow of 32 years of military rule.

The practice of elections in Southeast Asia is uneven. As the accompanying chart shows, elections historically have been regularly conducted in the Philippines, Malaysia and Singapore. After resolving ongoing conflicts in Cambodia and East Timor, elections have become the norm.

Yet election results often have been ignored. This happened not only in Burma in 1990 but also last year in Thailand, when a military coup deposed the elected leader Thaksin Shinawatra. The region has a deep pattern of authoritarian rule and a disparate practice of democracy.

Even today, a number of countries have yet to hold regular elections—Vietnam, Laos and Brunei. In the elections that do occur, such as in Singapore and Malaysia, real concerns exist about the fairness of these contests. Of the Southeast Asian countries, only Indonesia is seen currently to have genuine free and fair elections. All the others fall short of the mark of providing free and fair contests to legitimate their rule—even in the Philippines, where in 2006 some candidates were shot during the campaign.

It is thus not surprising that foreign policy has just not entered into the analysis of elections in Southeast Asia. Analysts assess the fairness of the electoral process or look at the effectiveness of the national campaigns as mandates for leaders. But this narrow national focus ignores how foreign policy has significantly shaped who contests in elections, the conduct of elections and voting behavior in the region. Foreign policy toward and from Southeast Asia has had an important impact on elections.

Elections or ‘Selections’?
The main area where foreign policy has affected elections is in shaping who contests. The Cold War set Southeast Asia on a specific path that reinforced authoritarian rule and exclusion that had important spillovers on elections. Most mainland Southeast Asian countries, notably Vietnam, became communist closed regimes, devoid of elections. The noncommunist regimes—the handful of those that held elections in the 1960s through the 1980s—excluded communist parties from participating. The organized left was either repressed or squashed. Singapore is an excellent example; the arrests of Lim Chin Siong, a key Socialist leader in “Operation Cold Storage” in 1963 served to allow Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party (PAP) to dominate in Singapore. The PAP has won every election, making the contests there effectively “selections.”

The Cold War also underscored Western support for noncommunist authoritarian regimes allied with the United States. Elections in countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines became ritualized exercises without real choices. The militaries and dictators in these countries, such as Ferdinand Marcos, were supported by the United States, as elections were effectively plebiscites for incumbent dictators. The practice of using repression and denying electoral choice like that in Burma has a long history in Southeast Asia. While the guns in Burma use the bullets bought from their regional allies China and India, the guns in Cold War Southeast Asia were often provided by the United States. In short, the ideological divide of the Cold War marginalized the left in noncommunist countries and created conditions where real elections were not effectively conducted in most of the region.

One sees this pattern of ideology affecting who participates in electoral contests in the post-9/11 world. Yet, instead of excluding actors, the new ideological schisms have brought new actors into electoral politics and strengthened others. The key division today is not communism but political Islam. New political parties such as the National Justice Party in Indonesia have emerged, and older parties such as the Islamic Party of Malaysia have redefined their identities. For these Islamic political actors, the main issue is to what extent religion should shape policies and what role religious leaders should have in shaping policy. The post-9/11 context has pushed Islamists into the electoral arena. Those articulating a broader role of Shariah or Islamic law, for example, have sought public mandates, gaining support in places such as Indonesia and Malaysia. Here, too, the United States has played a role in this development as policies toward the Middle East, including in Palestine and Iraq, have strengthened the hand of Islamists among Muslim publics in Southeast Asia. Islamist political parties have used the perceived U.S. attack on Islam to build their electoral positions.

Beyond who contests in elections, foreign policy in Southeast Asia also has affected the form of electoral contests. Although the Cold War reinforced a climate of authoritarianism and electoral exclusion, the immediate post-Cold War environment fostered greater democratization and electoral participation. The shift began in 1986, before the end of the Cold War, when the United States recognized that support for Marcos was unsustainable. It encouraged support for the top-down democratization process in Thailand that began in the late 1980s. Under the Clinton administration, from 1992 onward, however, democratization efforts deepened, as democracy promotion became more institutionalized in foreign policy.

The impact was direct and indirect support for democracy movements in Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia and Malaysia. The United States—often working in tandem with European countries and the United Nations—pushed for free and fair elections throughout the region, funding election monitoring and in some cases elections themselves. This happened in Cambodia in 1993 and in East Timor in 2003. Indonesia’s 1999 parliamentary elections were the pinnacle of success for these efforts, where international funding strengthened the democracy activists in civil society and led to the first free and fair elections held in the country in 49 years. Indonesia’s opening up led to the independence of East Timor in 2003 and widened electoral options even farther.

The push for electoral democracy had its opponents in the region and led to clashes, couched in discussions of “Asian values.” Singapore and Malaysia resented the push for widening political space, in part since it would potentially challenge their electoral base by strengthening opposition actors. Differences over the conduct of elections in Cambodia in 1997—marked by the death of an International Republican Institute worker—led to strong opposition to Hun Sen’s government. More recently, the uproar over alleged rigging of the 2005 election of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo contributed to a souring of relations between the Philippines and the United States.

Effects of Globalization
Concern over electoral process exists within the foreign policies of Southeast Asia countries as well. In 1997 Cambodia was excluded from joining ASEAN because of its conduct and repudiation of its polls. And Indonesia’s haphazard conduct of the 1999 contest raised concerns among its neighbors, who feared increased instability.

Beyond the limiting of choice and process noted above, foreign policy has also affected electoral outcomes. Nowhere is this more clear than in assessing the impact of globalization on elections in the last 10 years. Southeast Asia on the whole is a region that has embraced globalization, from the Internet to a dependence on international trade. The region has increased its vulnerability to global forces as well. The 1997 Asian financial crisis is perhaps the best example. The economies of the region suffered tremendously. The impact was to lead to the downfall of the Chavalit Yongchaiyudh government in Thailand and serve as a catalyst for reform in Indonesia and Malaysia that would play itself out in their 1999 elections.

Globalization has indirectly shaped elections through transforming campaigning, bringing the use of Web sites, text messaging and more to the fore. Now parties in places such as the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia have Web sites and use these as a means to engage with voters. They send out campaign messages directly to voters’ cell phones. The impact of this new technological revolution on campaigning has been most felt in Malaysia, where the opposition now relies on these means to bypass restrictions on traditional media. Whether the impact of globalization and the use of YouTube, a video-sharing Web site, in places such as Burma will lead to dialogue and elections there remains to be seen. If elections eventually are held, globalization will deserve at least part of the credit.

In understanding the impact of foreign policy on elections in Southeast Asia, one has to look beyond the surface. The important consequences are there, however, as international conditions and policy options at different times and in different places have affected elections. One hopes the current climate that favors democratization and has fostered technological innovations even in the closed regime of Burma will allow more people in the region to vote more freely and with more choice.

Bridget Welsh is assistant professor of Southeast Asia Studies.

Elections in Southeast Asia

Notes: Bolded dates are free elections. Most elections listed above were parliamentary. In Indonesia, Philippines-, Timor L’Este and Vietnam, presidential elections were held as well.