Challenges to Governance in Southeast Asia

Sulak Sivaraksa

Governance implies a power relation between the governor and the governed, and there is no such thing as the timeless governed for the nature of the relationship changes; that is, it is not engraved in stone. Sometimes the governor plays the role of the parents or the father, while the governed, the children. Sometimes the governor is the all-knowing technocrat, and the governed becomes a bunch of witless rabbles.

In any case, good governance is opposite to domination, which is a relationship of violence. It should nurture an egalitarian relation, such as the one between virtuous companions or what the Buddhist calls �kalyanamitta.� The Sangha was once a model of good governance. And the Sangha once served as a virtuous companion of the ruler or the governor.

Good governance must have a place for politics, which entails critical resistance: people think and feel, and of course they do not necessarily have to like the way they are being governed. Nowadays, politics is often confused with merely dialoguing or upholding tolerance for a diversity of viewpoints, which often fall on the deaf ear of the State anyway. Politics is simply about maintaining or finding consensus or creating unity, especially through parliamentarianism. Or it has become confused with technocratic management and the provision of stability and security, especially economically. I don�t deny the importance of debates or the freedom of expression. But let�s not forget that politics about changing society or the world, about disrupting the unjust order, for instance. So politics is about social engagement, and it may be disruptive. The Buddhist would say politics should be geared towards egalitarianism and should be fused with spirituality; that is, affirming compassion and nonviolence.

Put differently, governance without politics becomes unreflective or unthinking, and a �post-political� order is therefore oppressive and dominating. If the ultimate objective of governance is simply to uphold security and stability, then its human cost would be horrific. Many governments in the region as well as worldwide are fighting Evil in the form of terrorism. In negating the negation, they present themselves as �Good� disregarding the human cost; the war on terror thus becomes the war of terror. Another instance of �post-political� governance is the rush to mindless development along capitalist-consumerist lines without regard to environmental degradation and life, especially at the grassroots level. �There is no alternative,� the governor consoles the governed. There is no alternative means what is, is already good, and therefore politics is dead. Resistance is dead. There is no alternative because we don�t have the tools to even think about it. As long as �I shop therefore I am� there will be no alternative because we will be able to talk only about cars, long vacations abroad, houses, and so on. But if we say �I breathe therefore I am� then there will still be a place for thought, for politics, for nonviolent social engagement.

From the perspective of a socially engaged Buddhist or spiritualist, good governance must rely on the Wheel of Dhamma. On the one hand, the Wheel of Dhamma will roll in compassion and nonviolence through social engagement, emphasizing our shared humanity. Thich Nhat Hanh says we are all �inter-being.� Let me elaborate on this view. We are all in our skins. We all rely on the kindness of strangers since out earliest days. We are all physically vulnerable, and nothing will ever erase this condition. These are our shared humanity, meaning that our primary relations to others�including all sentient beings�are that of interdependence�not war, aggression, or violence. The master precept in Buddhism�if there is such a thing�is therefore ahimsa or nonviolence, which is not a matter of choice. Nonviolence does not mean passivity or inaction. Rather, it can be a powerful political resource. Nonviolence affirms our inter-being, our common vulnerability or precariousness, which cannot be willed away. Therefore, we need to nurture interdependence and cultivate seeds of peace. Vengeance, hostility, and militarism adhere to the very opposite condition: invulnerability�the dream of the superpower. We can only be invulnerable at the expense of our humanity. The State often fuels these divisions in the name of invulnerability or absolute security. Enemies and Evil are seemingly everywhere.

Inter-being not only questions the feasibility of a fortress mentality but also unravels the whole idea of an autonomous or Cartesian self (�I think therefore I am�). There is no such thing as an individual salvation in Buddhism, hence the Buddhist assertion of non-self. This not only means the reduction of self-attachments in the forms of greed, hatred, and delusion, but also an acknowledgement of opacity of the self, which cannot be willed away. Hence we need virtuous companions, and hence nonviolence as our primary relations to others. This opacity opens up the possibility of an ethical relation with the other. Here ethics may be broadly defined as an obligation that is un-enforced. It is a gift we owe to one another because of our opacity and �shared humanity.� It is the responsibility that grows from the lack of complete self-certainty. And so good governance cannot choose not to acknowledge this ethical relation. Many weeks ago Buddhist monks in the deep south of Thailand mindlessly forgot about this aspect of the Wheel of Dhamma and became cheerleaders of state violence.

The Wheel of Dhamma also serves as a brake the Wheel of the State, which is often unthinking. Challenges to governance in Southeast Asia are numerous. We can talk about corruption, environmental degradation, mega-development projects, mainstream education, structural violence, terrorism, media censorship, ethnism, consumerism, neoliberalism, and so on. But I will focus on state power and violence. And I will direct my attention at Siam, especially its implementation of the Emergency Decree on Public Administration in Emergency Situations since 16 July 2005. Why this emphasis? On the one hand, this is the paradigm of sovereign power that is globalizing. On the other hand, it is a�if not the�major challenge to egalitarianism and the principle of shared humanity.

Let me begin with the observations of Brad Adams, Executive Director of the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch, in his letter to the Thai Prime Minister dated 4 August 2005. Among other important points, Adams stresses, and it is worth quoting him at length, the following:

• the lack of appropriate judicial supervision of arrests and detentions and summons, which heightens the risk of torture or other mistreatment of individuals in custody or while under interrogation;

• the lack of appropriate judicial authorization or supervision of searches and seizures;

• the removal of jurisdiction of the Administrative Court and its procedures for human rights violations committed by state agents;

• limitations on the ability of victims of human rights violations to use civil, criminal, or administrative remedies to gain redress; the possibility of blanket state censorship, after years of progress in Thailand towards greater media freedom;

• the requirement that suspects not be detained in police stations, detention centers, penal institutions, or prisons, raising the prospect of the use of secret, undisclosed, or inaccessible places of detention where detainees may be mistreated and where monitoring is impossible;

• unnecessary restrictions on the fundamental rights to freedom of expression, assembly, association, and movement; and

• the broad provision allowing the Prime Minister to �issue a notification not to perform any act or to perform an act to the extent that this is necessary for maintaining the security of the state, the safety of the country or the safety of the people.� This apparently can be applied to any person or institution. This is a broad and shocking assertion of governmental power in a free society, more reminiscent of totalitarian regimes than a democracy.

From the abovementioned observations, we can deduce that the Emergency Decree is not really a new law, but rather a suspension of the law. Hence, as Adams puts it, the �Emergency Decree Violates Thai Constitution and Laws.� We can further point out that the suspension of the law brings into force a lawless sovereign power, which is subject to neither constitutional nor international laws. With this lawlessness comes an arbitrary, errant, and excessive power on the part of the premier and the executive wing. Since it is boundless, the real horror of this power is best viewed from the side of the governed, from those subject to it�in particular, what will be done to them and how much they will suffer. So this climate of unaccountability and impunity sets in a relation of violence between the governor and the governed. It opens the avenue for �preemptive strikes� against the designated enemies of the State. Who are the enemies? How do we detect the enemies? Here ethnic or racial profiling comes into play. The enemy (however remotely) looks �Indian, Arab, or Muslim.� For instance, several months ago Thai security officials detained and interrogated a few teenage tourists from the South who traveled to a Bangkok theme park because they were acting suspiciously�they had a marked map of the leading tourist attractions in Bangkok. So much for the government�s campaign to encourage Thais to travel in the kingdom.

Life in the suspension of the law is not life, only something less. It seems that the Emergency Decree heralds a pre-modern form of sovereign power where there is no separation of power, no checks and balances�and this is being done in the very heart of a highly modernist state, a state overcome by modernity: witness its obsession with mega-projects, bilateral free trade agreements, and rapid economic growth. The lawlessness of this power becomes most apparent when the premier and his officials promised to use the Emergency Decree with utmost care.

The Emergency Decree was modeled after the USA Patriot Act. The United Kingdom also has its own anti-terror legislation. The Thai government weakly reasoned that since the major democracies of the world are implementing similar decrees, it has to be all right or legal. But something that is legal may nonetheless be morally indefensible or outright violent. After all, the Emergency Decree operates by the security paradigm, and not the paradigm of justice�hence the suspension of the law. Again reflecting its unthinking and superpower nature, the Thai state is oblivious to the threat to civil liberties and the principle of shared humanity that the Decree entails.

Perhaps, �oblivious� is not the correct adjective. Arrogant and smug seem to be better defining characteristics of the modern State. In the absence of any competing ideology or alternative, the State simply says, �You can say whatever you want but I won�t listen to you for the absolute power of preemption is on my side.�

Inter-being comes with a sense of humility and the willingness to take back one�s commitment to a course of action or to be open to other possibilities should one decide to persist in that course of action. So the challenge of governance as I see it is to make this relation of violence and this lawless power visible�to demystify its logic and make it reveal its violent nature or excessiveness through compassion and nonviolence. (The invisibility of this lawless power is apparent in the talks about secret detention centers. In Siam, the name concern seems to be whether or not there is an American, CIA-run secret detention center, and not whether or not the Emergency Decree requires the construction of these centers. In the suspension of the law, the subject of power is protected by neither constitutional nor international laws. And therefore s/he cannot be detained in �ordinary� military prisons or police stations.) In other words, we must not only critique violence and its institutions, but also its very nature. The Wheel of Dhamma must be used to put a brake on the dreadful long-term impacts of this lawless power, bringing about a three-fold transformation of greed into generosity, of hatred into compassion, and of delusion into wisdom. These are the �miracles� of Buddhism.

Nonviolence is the recognition of anatta or �non-self,� which seeks to foster conditions that will cultivate or nurture precarious lives throughout the world. This calls for an engagement with others based on interdependence, compassion, generosity, understanding, and mindfulness, for an enjoining of knowledge and spirituality. And this is not a matter of choice, for a choice implies the presence of a fully autonomous self. Rather, it is because we are nothing without the others. In sum, the main challenge to governance in Southeast Asia and elsewhere is how to rejuvenate politics and spirituality.

Talk organized by the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences (FABC) and the Office for Human Development (OHD), 17 January 2006

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