Heydarian’s agenda is to build a wall between a strong state and authoritarian rule. As he implied, one of the telling characteristics of a strong state is a “capable and competent” bureaucracy. He used Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore-model as an example. But since Lee’s Singapore is under authoritarian rule, albeit benevolent, Heydarian distanced that city-state’s success from Lee’s iron hand.
“Lee’s Singapore shouldn’t be taken as an inspiration for authoritarianism,” Heydarian concluded, “…but instead as a modern and effective bureaucracy that serves as the foundation of a functioning democracy.”
Consistent with his agenda, Heydarian downplayed the importance of Lee’s authoritarian leadership style. For him, Lee was just “authoritarian at times.” If Lee was just “authoritarian at times,” what was he most of the time? Democratic?
Lee was prime minister for 31 years. He didn’t rule Singapore for three decades with kid gloves. As he emphatically said in an election rally in 1980, “whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him. Or give it up.”
And why shouldn’t Singapore be an inspiration for polities that need or are currently under authoritarian rule to put them on track to a stronger statehood? China did it under Deng Xiaoping. And that’s an unforgivable historical omission Heydarian did.
He used Deng’s quote that Singapore was just a “city state” to caution against its system’s replicability in larger states. Yet he didn’t mention that Deng deliberately copied Singapore. If the disparate size of the two countries is an issue to Heydarian, it wasn’t for Deng.
That China is 13,769 bigger than Singapore didn’t matter to Deng. After his first visit to Singapore in 1978, Deng wanted China to emulate it. Since then, thousands of Chinese officials went to Singapore to study its system. As Chris Buckley reported in The New York Times on March 23, 2015 (“In Lee Kuan Yew, China Saw a Leader to Emulate”), around “22,000 Chinese officials made study visits to Singapore between 1990 and 2011. Singaporean universities offer public administration programs and courses tailored for Chinese administrators.” The lesson China wanted to learn from Singapore wasn’t just how to run a good bureaucracy but “how to combine authoritarian rule with ‘good governance’ (‘meritocratic’ one-party rule),” as professors Stephan Ortmann and Mark Thomson noted in an article on “China and the ‘Singapore Model’.”
Historical omission isn’t the only tactic Heydarian used to erect a wall between strong statehood and authoritarian rule. He also employed deliberate intellectual dishonesty.
To further divorce Singapore’s strong statehood from Lee’s authoritarian rule, Heydarian invoked political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s book Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Present Day. For Heydarian, Fukuyama’s book argued that “what lay at the heart of the success of newly industrialized nations was the presence of a strong, autonomous, and meritocratic bureaucracy.”
That’s true. However, that’s already the politically hygienic and ahistorical version of what Fukuyama discussed. Though he doesn’t prefer authoritarian rule, Fukuyama didn’t divorce strong statehood, which is characterized by a strong bureaucracy, from authoritarian rule. The latter, as his historical analysis demonstrated, actually served as the foundation for the former in a number of currently strong democratic states.
In Chapter 4, Fukuyama highlighted the strong, autonomous, and meritocratic bureaucracy Prussian-Germany built in the 19th century. That system wasn’t built within the condition of democracy but of autocracy. As Fukuyama emphatically ended that chapter, just like Japan and a few other countries, Germany gets “high rankings for the quality of their governments and low levels of corruption in the present due to an inheritance from an authoritarian phase in their political development.”
In these states, strong statehood preceded democracy. And in some countries with reverse sequencing, i.e. democracy before an effective statehood, the outcome isn’t as good. Fukuyama used Greece and the United States as telling examples. Both countries democratized before having a strong, autonomous, and meritocratic bureaucracy.
Greece’s bureaucracy is plagued with clientelism, the practice of providing goods and services in exchange for political support. Fukuyama argued that this is “the result of the early arrival of electoral democracy, before a modern state had an opportunity to coalesce.” This “democratic patronage system” developed from the “rural patron-client relations” which characterized Greek society in in the 19th century.
Later on in Chapter 10, Fukuyama observed that until now, the United States, another country plagued with clientelism for most of its history, “has never succeeded in establishing the kind of high-quality state that exists in certain rich democracies, particularly those coming out of absolutist traditions such as Germany and Sweden.” The US was able to reform its system but it took several generations to do it because “democracy,” as Fukuyama noted, “can make political reform difficult.”
Thus, the wall Heydarian built between authoritarian rule and strong statehood isn’t supported by Fukuyama’s book nor by Singapore’s experience. Instead of blanket disavowal of authoritarian rule, political scientists like him should instead think how that tool could be merged with our current democratic heritage in order to build a strong state.
E-mail: sass@forthemotherland.net
Website: www.forthemotherland.net
https://www.manilatimes.net/heydarians-wall/460553/
https://www.manilatimes.net/heydarians-wall/460553/
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