Regions and Powers III

 

I will assume a reader's familiarity with the first two panels of this ongoing discussion of a book by Barry Buzan and Ole Waever. With our authors, we turn now to the east of Asia, the Pacific rim. Looking with the eyes of these scholars affiliated respectively with the London School of Economics and the University of Copenhagen, let us start with this quote. 

[p. 145.] "After the east Asian economic crisis in 1997, the succession crisis facing Indonesia became critical, and at the time of writing it was far from clear whether the muddled shift to electoral politics would be able to handle the turbulent mix of economic disaster, secession, (East Timor, Aceh, Irian Jaya) and recurrent bouts of communal violence in various places. Indonesia had all the appearance of a crumbling empire, and its internal disarray and weak leadership contributed to the paralysis of ASEAN, which was already burdened by both over-ambitious expansion and the impact of the regional economic crisis." 

This brief passage, which begins and ends with a now almost forgotten economic crisis, has a lot to say and would bear a good deal of explication. I will here just offer a couple of pieces of the puzzle. 

The sharp decline in value of the Indonesian rupiah (part of that broader economic crisis) forced Suharto's government to appeal to the international banking organizations for loans. This in turn led to inquiries by the World Bank and IMF that disclosed a lot of blatant embezzlement by Suharto's inner circle. Suharto had to couple his requests for help with a promise of austerity. Of course the austerity was not going to be at the expense of the embezzling cronies but at the expense of the Indonesian people broadly. This realization sparked the Indonesian revolution of 1998. Suharto abdicated in May 1998.

He left B.J. Habibie in power. Habibie was only in office for a brief period, during which he did a creditable job moving the country out of the one-party rule of the Suharto period and into a multi-party democracy. In 1999 Abdurrahman Wahid became President. The authors were writing the above during the Wahib period, and the threat of a break-up of Indonesia into a lot of small national-identitarian parts was real. 

Matters settled down. East Timor became an independent state in 2002. REGIONS AND POWERS was published the following year. The other dominoes, though, did not fall. Indonesia is these days a more-or-less successful multi-ethnic multi-cultural democracy. And I believe this is better for the region as a whole than a more complete unravelling would have been. It appears to be also the result for which they were hoping. 

Another of these authors' thoughts about the region security complex of East Asia [p. 147], with reference again to the late 1990s. "It was ironic that a profoundly anti-liberal state such as China, which embraced traditional realist Machtpolitik in much of its international thought and behavior  ... should so firmly embrace the quintessentially liberal doctrine of separating economics from politics. 'Market communism' looked like an oxymoron whose historical run would be short. In addition, there was some open and growing resistance to Beijing's control in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, the latter two taking inspiration and sometimes support from the newly independent successor states in central Asia and Mongolia respectively." 

Again, there is a lot there. The term Machtpolitik, which translates into English from German as "power politics," is a combination of classic Machiavellian realism with the sometimes quite sentimental exaltation of the military virtues. The term arose out of the Bismarck era in German history. Our authors use the phrase "liberal doctrine" to denote bodies of thought in opposition to Machtpolitik so understood: that is, bodies of thought that emphasize soft power over hard, such as emphasizing commercial ties over conspicuous displays of weapons development. 

At any rate, the clear sense of the quoted passage is that the Peoples' Republic's attempt to combine Machtpolitik with elements of liberalism, like its talk of "market communism," is an unstable merging that cannot reach equilibrium and may encourage secession. So here, too, our authors suspect an empire might be crumbling. In the paragraphs that follow, accordingly, they speculate about "a whole range of possible futures for China." 

From the standpoint of early 2025, we can say that the Chinese ideological compound with its merging of contraries still seems unlikely yet it has somehow bumbled along from crisis to crisis without national breakup.