Major economic reforms are often politically difficult.  They may cause pain to voters and provoke unrest.  They may be opposed by politicians whose time horizons are shortened by electoral cycles.  They may collide with the established ideology and long-standing practices of an entrenched ruling party.  They may be resisted by bureaucrats who fear change, and by vested interests with stakes in the status quo.  Obstacles to major economic reform can be daunting in democratic and autocratic polities alike. 

And yet, somehow, past leaders of today's Asian dragons did manage to get away with critical and creative economic reforms.  Sly political foxes nudged their countries onto high-growth paths toward global renown as economic dragons.  What lessons can be learned from their experiences?  Are tactics that worked in authoritarian systems applicable to democratic ones, and vice versa?  Can one identify a set of stratagems that would amount to an equivalent, for economic reformers, of the advice Machiavelli gave political princes? 

Arroyo will recount the crafty political maneuvers used by leaders of economic reform in Asia during these pivotal eras:  China under Deng Xiaoping; India in the 1990s; Thailand under General Prem Tinsulanonda; Vietnam's Doi Moi; South Korea under Park Chung Hee; Malaysia under Mahathir Mohamad; and Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew.  Arroyo's remarks will be drawn from the paper he has been writing at Stanford on "The Political Economy of Successful Reform: Asian Stratagems," which he describes as "a playbook of useful maneuvers for economic reformers."

Dennis Arroyo is presently on leave from his government post as a director of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) of the Philippines.  He has held consultancies with the World Bank, the United Nations, and the survey research firm Social Weather Stations, and has written widely on socioeconomic topics.  His critique of the Philippine development plan won a mass media award for "best analysis."  He has degrees in economics from the University of the Philippines.  

The UN and the Cambodian government have finally established a “hybrid-style” tribunal in Phnom Penh to begin prosecuting senior leaders from the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime that caused the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians more than thirty years ago. This tribunal is widely viewed as one of the most important experiments in transitional justice in a post-conflict society. Prof. Hall will show, however, that the hybrid structure mixing international and local lawyers, judges, and staff is deeply flawed. Cambodia’s legal system is notoriously corrupt, inefficient, and politically controlled. Predictably, the UN-sponsored tribunal has been plagued by accusations of corruption, opacity, distrust, and woeful human resource management. Against this backdrop, the international lawyers and judges at the tribunal continue their up-hill battle to forge a venue that meets minimum international legal standards.

John A. Hall specializes in international law and human rights. His controversial 21 September 2007 op ed in the Wall Street Journal (“Yet Another U.N. Scandal”) helped focus international attention on corruption and mismanagement at the Khmer Rouge tribunal. In addition to writing widely on Cambodia, he has worked for Legal Aid of Cambodia in Phnom Penh and the Public Interest Law Center in the Philippines. He holds a doctorate in Modern History from Oxford University, graduated from Stanford Law School in 2000, and before going to law school was a tenured professor of history.

John Ciorciari is Senior Legal Advisor to the Documentation Center of Cambodia, a leading NGO dedicated to accountability for the abuses of the Khmer Rouge regime. He holds a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD from Oxford University.

During the Cold War, China was regarded in many corners of Southeast Asia as a sponsor of subversion and communist insurgency. Until the “four modernizations,” its anemic economy and limited ability to project power offered little incentive for Southeast Asian governments to cozy up to Beijing. Relations were often frosty or worse. Clearly, times have changed. Essentially all of the states in Southeast Asia have robust diplomatic and economic engagements with the PRC. Yet security concerns have not evaporated. Most Southeast Asian governments now embrace China, but “hedge” by setting up fall-back security options with the United States and other partners in case the PRC becomes more menacing.

This seminar will explore some of the nuances in Southeast Asian “hedging” strategies. How do various governments view China’s intentions and capabilities? How have they variously sought to engage the United States and others to gain and retain security without antagonizing Beijing? How do these strategies relate to multilateral diplomacy in ASEAN and related forums, and how do they affect the overall “balance of power” in the Asia-Pacific region? Lastly, what pitfalls might hedging entail? These questions are critical, because the reaction of Southeast Asian states to China’s rise will have a major effect on the shape and stability of regional security for years to come.

John D. Ciorciari is a 2007-08 Shorenstein Fellow and is currently completing a manuscript entitled Hedging: Southeast Asian Alignments with the Great Powers since the Fall of Saigon.  He has extensive work experience in Southeast Asia, both as an academic and as a U.S. government official.  He also served as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore in 2003-04.  He holds a JD from Harvard Law School and DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Some observers of Japan have pointed to a dangerous rise in Japanese nationalism. Advocates of that idea claim that this is evident in a number of events, such as, the visits of former Prime Minister Koizumi to the Yasukuni Shrine; former Prime Minister Abe's plan for constitutional reforms and his statements regarding the comfort women; the adoption of "revisionist" history textbooks; the territorial disputes with countries such as China and South Korea; and Japan's efforts to strengthen the Japan-U.S. security arrangements.

However, such observations invite the following questions:

• If there are such signs in Japan, do they reflect Japanese society as a whole? Japan has been strongly pacifistic since the war, avoiding any entanglement in military conflict. This seems to be deeply rooted in the minds of the Japanese people. Just what is the relationship between the purported rise in nationalism and these pacifistic tendencies?
• Most commentators who warn of rising nationalism in Japan fear a return of the extreme nationalism of prewar Japan. However, are not today's political regime, economic institutions and social conditions, all vastly different from those of prewar Japan?
• Even though a trend toward nationalism can be witnessed in some quarters of Japan, it doesn't necessarily mean that Japan has become a country that would take dangerous actions. Nationalistic emotions and movements are not directly linked to the actions of a country. Rather, are there not some intervening factors between them?

Minister Kitano will address three points in answering these questions. First he will examine the current situation of Japan by discerning the ‘goals' of Japanese nationalism. Second, he will evaluate the strength of the nationalist movement in Japan by comparing the contemporary movement with the movement in prewar Japan. Last, he will analyze the function of nationalism in different stages of nation states. Through this process, Minister Kitano will reveal the 'myth and reality' of Japan's nationalism.

Mitsuru Kitano currently serves as minister for public affairs at the Embassy of Japan to the United States in Washington, D.C. where he is in charge of outreach to press/media, intellectual exchanges, art and cultural exchanges as well as support for Japanese language education. Kitano has written a number of op-ed articles, including ones analyzing U.S. opinions about Japan in such papers as the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and the International Herald Tribune.

Minister Kitano is a career diplomat and has been posted in Tokyo, France, Geneva, China and Vietnam since joining Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1980. He has been professionally engaged in Japan's bilateral relationship with the U.S., China and Southeast Asian countries, and Japan's policies regarding the United Nations and other international organizations. He was active also in such areas as economic cooperation and nuclear energy issues.

His academic achievements include being a lecturer at Sophia University (Tokyo) and a senior visiting fellow at RIETI (Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry) in Japan. In 2007, he co-authored a book, Paburikku Dipuromashi: Seron no Jidai no Gaiko Senryaku (Public Diplomacy: Diplomatic Strategy in the Age of Public Opinion) (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyujo).

Minister Kitano received a B.A. from the University of Tokyo in 1980 and a M.A. in international relations from the University of Geneva in 1996.

This program will bring together some of the world's leading experts on Southeast Asia and democracy to consider critical questions facing the region. Has the American model of democracy become tarnished in Asia, and is the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism of growing appeal and significance? What are the dimensions and implications of Islamicization for Southeast Asia? What are the prospects for cleaning up notoriously corrupt party politics? Will the military ever be driven out of politics in places like Thailand and the Philippines? Is the American-led "war on terror" helping stabilize politics in the region, or is it exacerbating already serious problems? What do these developments mean for U.S. foreign policy and American influence in Asia?

 

Kishore Mahbubani, one of Asia's leading public intellectuals, is author of the forthcoming The New Asian Hemisphere: the Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East; and Can Asians Think? and Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World. Now the dean and professor of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, he served for 33 years as a diplomat for Singapore.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author or editor of more than twenty books, including Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq, and the newly-released The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World.

Donald K. Emmerson has written or edited more than a dozen books and monographs on Southeast Asian politics, including the forthcoming Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia and Indonesia Beyond Suharto. His latest publication is titled "Challenging ASEAN" (Jan 2008). He is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, where he also heads the Southeast Asia Forum.

Douglas Bereuter (moderator) is president of The Asia Foundation. He assumed his current position after 26 years of service in the U.S. Congress, where he was one of that body's leading authorities on Asian affairs and international relations.

Co-sponsored with the Asia Society; Business Executives for National Security; UC Berkeley Center for Southeast Asian Studies; USF Center for the Pacific Rim; and the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

Click here to listen to the audio recording of this panel discussion.