What I wanted to say is only partially related to globalization.
The theme of this panel of course primarily relates to the crisis through which Southeast Asia in particular is passing or is beginning to pass. I want to relate that to a kind of democratic transition which I presume the Southeast Asian states at their different stages are embarked upon and bound to proceed with. It seems to me no stable form of government for a highly educated, informed population has yet been devised except an open, accountable, democratic one. That's a statement of faith, I suppose, but also a reading of the historic evidence. That is the direction which Asian society is moving and must move. But there is a very dangerous passage on that road, if it is indeed a defined road. It may be, as Malaysia's Deputy Prime Minister insists, that this recession will prompt irresistible cause for greater transparency, greater accountability and greater democracy.
That is what many in Indonesia and elsewhere are hoping for, some moments of opportunity for democracy to come out of this. But historical precedent are not very encouraging, particularly he European one in the great depression. One can trace many depressions and economic crises before that to which the political response was one of xenophobia, chauvinism, scapegoating, erecting barriers and reacting fearfully. In this crisis we should look at economics, and of course that is the urgent problem of the moment, to fix the economics. But in a longer term that is not the most serious problem. The most serious problems me political and cultural.
The kind of effect this economic pain that Southeast Asia is now enduring will have, on political attitudes, the likelihood of a new kind of scapegoating and a new desire to protect "us" against "them", who are presumed to be responsible for the present suffering. Drawing this caution, I am of course thinking primarily of Europe.
This little talk is unashamedly trying to draw a lesson from what I take to be the European transition towards the situation of relatively homogeneous, democratic, market- oriented nation states integrated with each other. That European example has been extremely influential in the rest of the world. I think it is a much more appropriate example for Southeast Asia and most of Eurasia than are the North American or Australian immigrant Societies. Europe is the appropriate analogy because of the very diversity of Europe and diversity of Asia. Making that democratic transition to a system of relatively homogeneous compact integrated nation states in an area of great plurality is extraordinary difficult.
We need to be mindful not just of the attractive aspects of the European model, but of the enormous cost which the European transition brought in its terrain. I think at the moment of this economic depression we should be thinking about the cost of the two world wars and the cost of two Messianic absolutisms in terms of various forms of fascism and communism.
Perhaps the most relevant of all was the holocaust against the most obvious entrepreneurial minority in European societies, the Jews (and other minorities) who had played a role like that of the Chinese in Southeast Asia. Both these minorities had a disproportionate role in precisely those changes toward an advanced capitalist society and were held to be disproportionately responsible for the negative effects of those changes. I have some very crude figures which suggest that the kind of progress which Southeast Asia has made in the last twenty years is a rough analogy to the progress in economic terms, in urbanization and so forth, made by various European countries between about 1870 and 1930. Of course there was a great variety between States in Europe, as there is in Southeast Asia. I suggest that the crisis of the present, when we have a population of 30% or more that is urban, overwhelmingly educated and predominantly involved in the secondary and tertiary sectors rather than the agricultural sector, is taking place in societies much more like the Europe of the 1930s, than Southeast Asian societies were in any previous crises. In other words, this is likely to be the most testing time, for Southeast Asia, as the 1930s were for Europe. It is the time when the people are in urban situations where most political violence had to occur. They are difficult to control once aroused and angry. They are likely to be attracted to Messianic kinds of solutions which see the source of the problems in a particular group somewhere outside what they see as their moral community.
What happens at a time of economic crisis such as the present is that confidence in the international system is undermined.
It's undermined very quickly and very widely. Not simply the urban unemployed, but many of the intellectuals, are apt to completely lose faith in the system for what appears to be a very good reason; the system has failed and the system which seemed to inspires no confidence as long as everybody was getting a little piece of the action, inspires no confidence at a time like the precinct. It is therefore only natural that everybody in these countries looks around for who to blame and how to find a system which will work for us better. We all have at this time to be careful about the new movements arising, already evident in the Indonesian situation, and
