Amid all the current economic gloom, most commentators remain convinced that this will be Asia’s century. Magazines and book shelves still bulge with predictions of Asia’s “return” to a pre-eminent position in the global economy and world power rankings.
Not so fast. The processes of rapid economic growth have unleashed social and political forces in Asia’s societies that could lead to serious conflict. If not properly managed, this may be Asia’s century in a darker sense. Just as Europe’s conflicts afflicted and defined the 20th century, so Asia’s conflicts—within and between its states—may come to define this one.
The people who fought or negotiated for the independence of Asia’s states faced three challenges. First, they had to forge unity from diversity. The land and people they were fighting to free were in most cases defined not by them but by their colonizers, who more often than not grouped together different ethnicities, languages and religions, or arbitrarily divided ethnic, linguistic and religious communities. What became Laos was the result of French imperial administrative convenience; in the end, many more ethnic Lao became citizens of Thailand than of Laos. The people of northern Sumatra were divided by an Anglo-Dutch compact from their ethnic, religious and linguistic kin across the Malacca Straits; the former were united as Indonesians, while the latter became Malaysians. Second, the founding fathers had to craft meaning from circumstance. The uncomfortable truth was that the new nations they had fought to free were continuations of former colonies in outline, administrative structure and composition. What became India in 1947 had never existed as a single entity prior to the completion of the Raj across the subcontinent in the late 19th century. Third, the independence generation had to conjure a sense of national pride. With a few exceptions, freedom came, as it had formerly been taken, as the result of circumstances and incentives fought over in Europe. For 200 years, history was something that was done to Asian societies, not something they made. New, viable nations faced the therapeutic challenge of restoring initiative and dignity to peoples who had been derided by the racist categories of their colonizers.
Across the region, nationalist movements struggled to respond to these dilemmas. One solution was to make the new nation look like the resurrection of a civilization or empire that had existed before the Europeans arrived. Korea, Indonesia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam and Burma all laid claim to be the descendants of glorious empires.
Stress the Differences
Another way of making their state appear inevitable was to maximize its apparent differences with neighboring societies. Internal diversity could be masked by promoting a common language; borders that divided ethnic or religious groups could be more clearly drawn by changing the cultural practices on each side. Thailand’s substantial border minorities, who overlapped linguistically and ethnically, were forced to learn Thai. Bhutan not only mandated the use of the majority Dzongkha language, but a “code of cultural correctness” and the wearing of traditional Bhutanese clothing on its large Nepalese minority. If borders coincided with ethnic, linguistic or religious cleavages, they would appear natural and immutable.
Asia’s new nations also had to gain theirf people’s loyalty. Nationalists across Asia had reacted to colonial domination and racism by fostering beliefs that even if the Europeans were technologically more advanced, their own civilization was spiritually or culturally superior. As they struggled for independence, they used these cultural assertions to build mass support; as they gained statehood, they used what they defined as the cultural essence of their societies to define the institutions of state.
Invariably, the challenge for each nationalist movement came down to its ability to articulate a strong and distinctive identity that could compel the loyalty of the people and the respect of other states. Invariably, this meant building a distinctive national identity around the language, ethnicity, or religion of the majority. Monarchs, dictators and Maoists in Cambodia made use of the Khmer symbol of Angkor Wat as a central image of the nation. The major buildings and symbols of Malaysia have been designed around the traditional Malay cultural forms of an ethnic group that comprises just over half of the nation’s population. The cultural values of the majority became a new national religion of liberation and distinctiveness, from Ghandi’s satyagraha to Kim Il Sung’s juche.
The passionate secularist ideals of nationalist leaders, such as Nehru and Sukarno, had to yield to these imperatives. While minority rights were respected, the majority’s religious or ethnic values were incorporated deeply into the definitions and justifications of the new state. The Indian state drew heavily on Hindu symbols, concepts and values; Singapore became ever more forthrightly a Chinese state; despite its commitment to Pancasila, Indonesia relied strongly on Muslim and Javanese cultural forms to forge its sense of self and its narrative of history. Sri Lanka proclaimed the “multireligious character” of its nation while the symbols of its Sinhalese majority were used to define the ethos of its state.
In many states, the “core” ethnicity dominated state institutions: Malays in Malaysia; Tagalog in the Philippines; Khmer in Cambodia; Kinh in Vietnam. The very names adopted by some states advertised the identification of the state with a dominant group: Thais, Burmans, Lao, Malays, Bangla. In countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia, minorities could prosper, if only they didn’t try to use their wealth to gain political power. But too often, these deals were entered into—and benefited from—by minority elites, while the vast proportion of their ethnic kin remained poor and discriminated against. Sometimes, the state pumped resources and settlers from the majority group into restive minorities’ regions—such as Tibet and West Irian—in the belief that economic development would trump their marginalization by the dominant culture.
These foundational compacts, used to define and justify Asia’s new nations, became the ideology of each country’s entrenched elites, who came to see it as the only way of maintaining the unity of the state and negotiating its way in the international arena. In country after country, a single party or dynasty embodied the foundational compact, and dominated all politics for decades: Congress India, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, the People’s Action Party in Singapore, Indonesia’s Golkar, the Kuomintang in Taiwan—not to mention the communist parties in China, North Korea and Vietnam. They came to see themselves as the only viable custodians of national unity and success. Remaining in power came to be seen as fundamentally in the national interest, and they stopped at nothing to stay in charge.
These governments may have looked increasingly authoritarian and corrupt, but people were prepared to overlook these faults as they watched what was achieved. Gleaming skyscrapers, bullet trains and the astonishment of the rest of the world at Asia’s headlong development, crowded out concerns about what governments were doing to stay in power.
Economic success created a new, larger middle class across Asia. With greater wealth came political consciousness and a demand for status. Many in the new middle classes, unsurprisingly, felt disenfranchised by the hammerlock on political power held by a single-party elite, and their extensive patronage networks into business and the media. In some places, such as Korea, Thailand and Indonesia, these sentiments triggered people-power protests that brought down tottering dictatorships. But in others, such as India and Sri Lanka, they gave rise to ethnic or religious chauvinism as a tactic that would allow the new middle classes to mobilize enough mass support to break the elite’s hold on power.
An added source of volatility is the growing income disparities that have emerged in most of Asia’s economies over the past decade. Whereas in the 1980s and 1990s, incomes rose in rough parity, the new economics of competition in the global knowledge economy have fostered growing inequalities within and between countries. This has struck the middle classes hardest. Their standards of living are rising more slowly than at any time in a generation, and their frustration and anger is a potent political resource.
The tactic of the India’s BJP, or Malaysia’s PAS, or the Bangladesh Nationalist Party was to attack the modified secularism that was at the heart of the postcolonial elite’s ideology and claim to rule. They argued that the marginalization of religion threatens the basis of the nation’s moral community, and that politics divorced from religion has inevitably become venal and corrupt. Asian secularism is seen by its enemies as an extension of Western imperialism; it is only by reasserting a society’s religious identity that the project of decolonization will be completed. Their most effective tactic was to direct popular anger at what they alleged were the privileges of minorities under the original secular compact. Almost to their surprise, they tapped into deep and politically potent wells of resentment, whether directed at the educated and well-connected, such as English-speaking Tamils in high office in Sri Lanka, or the impoverished and marginalized, such as the Shia and Ahmadiyas in Pakistan. Many of these ethnic or religious chauvinist movements have seen their fortunes increase amid economic crises and growing income inequalities.
Under potent popular and electoral challenge, the single-party elites that dominated many Asian states since independence seemed to lose sight of their original ideals. The Congress Party in India began to dabble more in sectarian politics. Malaysia’s UMNO moved to head off pas by becoming more stridently Muslim and Malay. Even where governments weren’t faced with a populist opposition, many still resorted to promoting the ideals of the majority more assiduously as a way of shoring up their legitimacy. A Chinese state that once denounced Confucianism has rehabilitated the sage and identified ever more closely with Han Chinese history and traditions.
An intensification of minority identity politics is also occurring. The most potent rises in minority identity and assertion are occurring among Muslims, Chinese and Indians. The major reason, of course, is the economic successes of their ancestral homelands: the oil-rich Arabian peninsula, and surging China and India. Now with the aura of material success and dynamism, each has assumed the role of a spiritual-civilizational, if not actual, homeland for its diasporas and co-religionists. The result has been a growing dissatisfaction among these minorities with their status. The foundation compacts guaranteeing freedom of enterprise for political quiescence seem less appealing now as sluggish growth in Asia’s smaller economies is compared to China’s and India’s. Newly aware and active minority populations have begun to chafe at the compacts their elites agreed to and benefited from. The loud commitments to secularism appear increasingly hypocritical to those who face discrimination and marginalization on a daily basis. The complex of minority politics is changing. What was once thought impossible is occurring, as Chinese Malaysians contemplate votes for pas in some states.
Caught between growing economic disparities, rising demands from the electorate, and growing ethnic and religious nationalism among both majority and minority populations, the foundational compact of many of Asia’s states is in desperate trouble. Attacking from one side are those who argue that it does not go far enough in defining and running society on the ideals and values of the majority. Attacking from the other are newly assertive minorities who claim that for too long their identity has been marginalised and their interests discriminated against by the pseudosecularism of the original compact. In between, it appears that few in government have the talent to reconcile these demands.
Courting Catastrophe
To allow the situation to drift is to court disaster. Rising conflict among the incompatible demands of majorities and minorities will bring internal turmoil and undermine the economic future of the region and its countries. Chauvinistic politics is not only internally threatening. A time-honored tactic of such politics is to try to seize the nationalist mantle by accusing the state of being insufficiently willing to assert “national” values against both internal and external enemies. There is much political mileage to be gained from advocating hardline policies and accusing the government of betraying national interests. Such forces are now at work in India and Pakistan.
How can Asian countries individually and collectively deal with this looming crisis? Unfortunately, the obvious solutions are not practical. Redrawing boundaries or relocating minorities offer the prospect of beginning an endless process of claim and counter-claim that could see a stable region unravel into chaos. Hard experience shows that re-engineering populations and boundaries often causes more conflict than it resolves. Neither do the several current proposals to forge an EU-style regional organization offer much prospect of success. Achieving Europe’s current level of integration and sovereignty transfer is unlikely to happen in Asia for several decades. And it is not even certain that regional institutions defuse internal conflicts; while “Europe” may have contributed to peace in Northern Ireland, it has made little impact on Basque disgruntlement.
The solution must be a re-forging of the national compact across the states of East, Southeast and South Asia, based on the rejection of ethnic, religious or linguistic identity as a motivating force in politics. There must be a renaissance of the secular compact in Asia’s states. The new secularism must be driven by three principles.
First, it must be scrupulously protected from compromise by identity politics. The original reasons for mobilizing the symbols of national majorities—however surreptitiously—are less compelling now than they were half a century ago. Then, the need to forge distinctive national identities had arisen from uncertainties about the viability and legitimacy of the political units that remained after the colonial retreat. But now, after six decades of stability and success, these insecurities are less justified. And the humiliation of colonization will decrease with each passing generation, taking with it the need to assert cultural or spiritual superiority. Second, Asia’s new secularism must be popularized and promulgated throughout Asia’s societies, rather than becoming again the ideology of elite dominance. Asia’s secularism will not be like Europe’s, where the official separation of the state and religion has been accompanied by a century-long decline in the public’s interest in religion. Instead, Asia’s secularism will need to be grafted onto societies in which religion plays a central role in everyday life. But even a deeply religious society can come to accept at all levels that the state must at no stage become the vehicle for advancing religious agendas, and must never be able to use ethnic, religious or linguistic symbolism in promoting its own agendas. To be effective, this agenda needs to be championed by that genuinely, deeply secular force, the media, and promoted through the public education system. Third, the integrity of Asia’s new secularism needs to be constantly guarded from the forces of opportunistic populism. The most potent drivers of contemporary identity politics in Asia are driven by contemporary economic and technological events and a surge in political populism.
A model for Asia’s new secularism is, perhaps improbably, the United States. There, despite the persistence of a deeply religious population, a profoundly ethnically-conscious social culture, and an increasingly diverse citizenry, an ever-more perfect form of secular state has been forged over the course of a tortuous and bloody history. Despite the vestiges of Christian symbols remaining in public ceremonies, the concept of the separation of church and state is reinforced and vigilantly monitored by a majority American civic culture that has become increasingly blind to ethnic, linguistic or religious identity.
Building a new secularism in Asia will not be easy. After Iraq and subprime, the U.S. is not exactly gold-plated as a source of advice and ideas these days. And Asia’s states seem to have their hands full handling current issues. What is required is a common realization in Asia that what seem to be singular problems in each country are to some extent parallel problems, stemming from a surge in chauvinistic identity politics. Asia awaits the emergence of a generation that is disgusted alike by the old politics of modified secularism and elite patronage, and the new politics of chauvinistic identity, that will see the need for new secular compacts as the basis for taking command of Asia’s century.
Michael Wesley is the director of Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University in Australia.
Comment:
by Tarun Khanna
Passing the Buck on Burma
Posted April 3, 2009
Amid all the current economic gloom, most commentators remain convinced that this will be Asia’s century. Magazines and book shelves still bulge with predictions of Asia’s “return” to a pre-eminent position in the global economy and world power rankings.
Not so fast. The processes of rapid economic growth have unleashed social and political forces in Asia’s societies that could lead to serious conflict. If not properly managed, this may be Asia’s century in a darker sense. Just as Europe’s conflicts afflicted and defined the 20th century, so Asia’s conflicts—within and between its states—may come to define this one.
The people who fought or negotiated for the independence of Asia’s states faced three challenges. First, they had to forge unity from diversity. The land and people they were fighting to free were in most cases defined not by them but by their colonizers, who more often than not grouped together different ethnicities, languages and religions, or arbitrarily divided ethnic, linguistic and religious communities. What became Laos was the result of French imperial administrative convenience; in the end, many more ethnic Lao became citizens of Thailand than of Laos. The people of northern Sumatra were divided by an Anglo-Dutch compact from their ethnic, religious and linguistic kin across the Malacca Straits; the former were united as Indonesians, while the latter became Malaysians. Second, the founding fathers had to craft meaning from circumstance. The uncomfortable truth was that the new nations they had fought to free were continuations of former colonies in outline, administrative structure and composition. What became India in 1947 had never existed as a single entity prior to the completion of the Raj across the subcontinent in the late 19th century. Third, the independence generation had to conjure a sense of national pride. With a few exceptions, freedom came, as it had formerly been taken, as the result of circumstances and incentives fought over in Europe. For 200 years, history was something that was done to Asian societies, not something they made. New, viable nations faced the therapeutic challenge of restoring initiative and dignity to peoples who had been derided by the racist categories of their colonizers.
Across the region, nationalist movements struggled to respond to these dilemmas. One solution was to make the new nation look like the resurrection of a civilization or empire that had existed before the Europeans arrived. Korea, Indonesia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam and Burma all laid claim to be the descendants of glorious empires.
Stress the Differences
Another way of making their state appear inevitable was to maximize its apparent differences with neighboring societies. Internal diversity could be masked by promoting a common language; borders that divided ethnic or religious groups could be more clearly drawn by changing the cultural practices on each side. Thailand’s substantial border minorities, who overlapped linguistically and ethnically, were forced to learn Thai. Bhutan not only mandated the use of the majority Dzongkha language, but a “code of cultural correctness” and the wearing of traditional Bhutanese clothing on its large Nepalese minority. If borders coincided with ethnic, linguistic or religious cleavages, they would appear natural and immutable.
Asia’s new nations also had to gain theirf people’s loyalty. Nationalists across Asia had reacted to colonial domination and racism by fostering beliefs that even if the Europeans were technologically more advanced, their own civilization was spiritually or culturally superior. As they struggled for independence, they used these cultural assertions to build mass support; as they gained statehood, they used what they defined as the cultural essence of their societies to define the institutions of state.
Invariably, the challenge for each nationalist movement came down to its ability to articulate a strong and distinctive identity that could compel the loyalty of the people and the respect of other states. Invariably, this meant building a distinctive national identity around the language, ethnicity, or religion of the majority. Monarchs, dictators and Maoists in Cambodia made use of the Khmer symbol of Angkor Wat as a central image of the nation. The major buildings and symbols of Malaysia have been designed around the traditional Malay cultural forms of an ethnic group that comprises just over half of the nation’s population. The cultural values of the majority became a new national religion of liberation and distinctiveness, from Ghandi’s satyagraha to Kim Il Sung’s juche.
The passionate secularist ideals of nationalist leaders, such as Nehru and Sukarno, had to yield to these imperatives. While minority rights were respected, the majority’s religious or ethnic values were incorporated deeply into the definitions and justifications of the new state. The Indian state drew heavily on Hindu symbols, concepts and values; Singapore became ever more forthrightly a Chinese state; despite its commitment to Pancasila, Indonesia relied strongly on Muslim and Javanese cultural forms to forge its sense of self and its narrative of history. Sri Lanka proclaimed the “multireligious character” of its nation while the symbols of its Sinhalese majority were used to define the ethos of its state.
In many states, the “core” ethnicity dominated state institutions: Malays in Malaysia; Tagalog in the Philippines; Khmer in Cambodia; Kinh in Vietnam. The very names adopted by some states advertised the identification of the state with a dominant group: Thais, Burmans, Lao, Malays, Bangla. In countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia, minorities could prosper, if only they didn’t try to use their wealth to gain political power. But too often, these deals were entered into—and benefited from—by minority elites, while the vast proportion of their ethnic kin remained poor and discriminated against. Sometimes, the state pumped resources and settlers from the majority group into restive minorities’ regions—such as Tibet and West Irian—in the belief that economic development would trump their marginalization by the dominant culture.
These foundational compacts, used to define and justify Asia’s new nations, became the ideology of each country’s entrenched elites, who came to see it as the only way of maintaining the unity of the state and negotiating its way in the international arena. In country after country, a single party or dynasty embodied the foundational compact, and dominated all politics for decades: Congress India, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, the People’s Action Party in Singapore, Indonesia’s Golkar, the Kuomintang in Taiwan—not to mention the communist parties in China, North Korea and Vietnam. They came to see themselves as the only viable custodians of national unity and success. Remaining in power came to be seen as fundamentally in the national interest, and they stopped at nothing to stay in charge.
These governments may have looked increasingly authoritarian and corrupt, but people were prepared to overlook these faults as they watched what was achieved. Gleaming skyscrapers, bullet trains and the astonishment of the rest of the world at Asia’s headlong development, crowded out concerns about what governments were doing to stay in power.
Economic success created a new, larger middle class across Asia. With greater wealth came political consciousness and a demand for status. Many in the new middle classes, unsurprisingly, felt disenfranchised by the hammerlock on political power held by a single-party elite, and their extensive patronage networks into business and the media. In some places, such as Korea, Thailand and Indonesia, these sentiments triggered people-power protests that brought down tottering dictatorships. But in others, such as India and Sri Lanka, they gave rise to ethnic or religious chauvinism as a tactic that would allow the new middle classes to mobilize enough mass support to break the elite’s hold on power.
An added source of volatility is the growing income disparities that have emerged in most of Asia’s economies over the past decade. Whereas in the 1980s and 1990s, incomes rose in rough parity, the new economics of competition in the global knowledge economy have fostered growing inequalities within and between countries. This has struck the middle classes hardest. Their standards of living are rising more slowly than at any time in a generation, and their frustration and anger is a potent political resource.
The tactic of the India’s BJP, or Malaysia’s PAS, or the Bangladesh Nationalist Party was to attack the modified secularism that was at the heart of the postcolonial elite’s ideology and claim to rule. They argued that the marginalization of religion threatens the basis of the nation’s moral community, and that politics divorced from religion has inevitably become venal and corrupt. Asian secularism is seen by its enemies as an extension of Western imperialism; it is only by reasserting a society’s religious identity that the project of decolonization will be completed. Their most effective tactic was to direct popular anger at what they alleged were the privileges of minorities under the original secular compact. Almost to their surprise, they tapped into deep and politically potent wells of resentment, whether directed at the educated and well-connected, such as English-speaking Tamils in high office in Sri Lanka, or the impoverished and marginalized, such as the Shia and Ahmadiyas in Pakistan. Many of these ethnic or religious chauvinist movements have seen their fortunes increase amid economic crises and growing income inequalities.
Under potent popular and electoral challenge, the single-party elites that dominated many Asian states since independence seemed to lose sight of their original ideals. The Congress Party in India began to dabble more in sectarian politics. Malaysia’s UMNO moved to head off pas by becoming more stridently Muslim and Malay. Even where governments weren’t faced with a populist opposition, many still resorted to promoting the ideals of the majority more assiduously as a way of shoring up their legitimacy. A Chinese state that once denounced Confucianism has rehabilitated the sage and identified ever more closely with Han Chinese history and traditions.
An intensification of minority identity politics is also occurring. The most potent rises in minority identity and assertion are occurring among Muslims, Chinese and Indians. The major reason, of course, is the economic successes of their ancestral homelands: the oil-rich Arabian peninsula, and surging China and India. Now with the aura of material success and dynamism, each has assumed the role of a spiritual-civilizational, if not actual, homeland for its diasporas and co-religionists. The result has been a growing dissatisfaction among these minorities with their status. The foundation compacts guaranteeing freedom of enterprise for political quiescence seem less appealing now as sluggish growth in Asia’s smaller economies is compared to China’s and India’s. Newly aware and active minority populations have begun to chafe at the compacts their elites agreed to and benefited from. The loud commitments to secularism appear increasingly hypocritical to those who face discrimination and marginalization on a daily basis. The complex of minority politics is changing. What was once thought impossible is occurring, as Chinese Malaysians contemplate votes for pas in some states.
Caught between growing economic disparities, rising demands from the electorate, and growing ethnic and religious nationalism among both majority and minority populations, the foundational compact of many of Asia’s states is in desperate trouble. Attacking from one side are those who argue that it does not go far enough in defining and running society on the ideals and values of the majority. Attacking from the other are newly assertive minorities who claim that for too long their identity has been marginalised and their interests discriminated against by the pseudosecularism of the original compact. In between, it appears that few in government have the talent to reconcile these demands.
Courting Catastrophe
To allow the situation to drift is to court disaster. Rising conflict among the incompatible demands of majorities and minorities will bring internal turmoil and undermine the economic future of the region and its countries. Chauvinistic politics is not only internally threatening. A time-honored tactic of such politics is to try to seize the nationalist mantle by accusing the state of being insufficiently willing to assert “national” values against both internal and external enemies. There is much political mileage to be gained from advocating hardline policies and accusing the government of betraying national interests. Such forces are now at work in India and Pakistan.
How can Asian countries individually and collectively deal with this looming crisis? Unfortunately, the obvious solutions are not practical. Redrawing boundaries or relocating minorities offer the prospect of beginning an endless process of claim and counter-claim that could see a stable region unravel into chaos. Hard experience shows that re-engineering populations and boundaries often causes more conflict than it resolves. Neither do the several current proposals to forge an EU-style regional organization offer much prospect of success. Achieving Europe’s current level of integration and sovereignty transfer is unlikely to happen in Asia for several decades. And it is not even certain that regional institutions defuse internal conflicts; while “Europe” may have contributed to peace in Northern Ireland, it has made little impact on Basque disgruntlement.
The solution must be a re-forging of the national compact across the states of East, Southeast and South Asia, based on the rejection of ethnic, religious or linguistic identity as a motivating force in politics. There must be a renaissance of the secular compact in Asia’s states. The new secularism must be driven by three principles.
First, it must be scrupulously protected from compromise by identity politics. The original reasons for mobilizing the symbols of national majorities—however surreptitiously—are less compelling now than they were half a century ago. Then, the need to forge distinctive national identities had arisen from uncertainties about the viability and legitimacy of the political units that remained after the colonial retreat. But now, after six decades of stability and success, these insecurities are less justified. And the humiliation of colonization will decrease with each passing generation, taking with it the need to assert cultural or spiritual superiority. Second, Asia’s new secularism must be popularized and promulgated throughout Asia’s societies, rather than becoming again the ideology of elite dominance. Asia’s secularism will not be like Europe’s, where the official separation of the state and religion has been accompanied by a century-long decline in the public’s interest in religion. Instead, Asia’s secularism will need to be grafted onto societies in which religion plays a central role in everyday life. But even a deeply religious society can come to accept at all levels that the state must at no stage become the vehicle for advancing religious agendas, and must never be able to use ethnic, religious or linguistic symbolism in promoting its own agendas. To be effective, this agenda needs to be championed by that genuinely, deeply secular force, the media, and promoted through the public education system. Third, the integrity of Asia’s new secularism needs to be constantly guarded from the forces of opportunistic populism. The most potent drivers of contemporary identity politics in Asia are driven by contemporary economic and technological events and a surge in political populism.
A model for Asia’s new secularism is, perhaps improbably, the United States. There, despite the persistence of a deeply religious population, a profoundly ethnically-conscious social culture, and an increasingly diverse citizenry, an ever-more perfect form of secular state has been forged over the course of a tortuous and bloody history. Despite the vestiges of Christian symbols remaining in public ceremonies, the concept of the separation of church and state is reinforced and vigilantly monitored by a majority American civic culture that has become increasingly blind to ethnic, linguistic or religious identity.
Building a new secularism in Asia will not be easy. After Iraq and subprime, the U.S. is not exactly gold-plated as a source of advice and ideas these days. And Asia’s states seem to have their hands full handling current issues. What is required is a common realization in Asia that what seem to be singular problems in each country are to some extent parallel problems, stemming from a surge in chauvinistic identity politics. Asia awaits the emergence of a generation that is disgusted alike by the old politics of modified secularism and elite patronage, and the new politics of chauvinistic identity, that will see the need for new secular compacts as the basis for taking command of Asia’s century.
Michael Wesley is the director of Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University in Australia.
Comment:
by Tarun Khanna
Passing the Buck on Burma
Read Full Article »