843

Is there a Sovietology of
South-East Asian studies?
International Affairs 77, ()
DAVID MARTIN JONES AND MICHAEL L. R. SMITH

You do not become a dissident just because you decide one day to take up this most
unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility,
combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing
structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do
your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
Vaclav Havel
What, it may be asked, could the former Soviet Union and post-Cold War
South-East Asia have in common? Ostensibly not a lot, given their respective
geopolitical settings and contingent historical experiences. Yet on further
investigation a curious similarity does emerge in the form in which inter-
national relations and area studies specialists conceived these regions as objects
of disciplinary enquiry.
Interestingly, within the decade 198898, both regions experienced crises
that undermined the established scholastic verities that governed their study. In
Cold War Soviet studies, the crisis was the sudden disintegration of the Soviet
Union that terminated the Cold War. In South-East Asia, it was the financial
crisis of 19978 and its political and economic ramifications that exposed the
Asian miracle. In both cases the disciplinary mainstream that examined the
domestic political economy and international relations of each area failed to
identify the causes that provoked crisis.
This analysis attempts two things. First, we set out to identify the failings that
afflicted Sovietology prior to 1989, and trace its similarities to and differences
from the study of domestic politics and international relations in contemporary
South-East Asia. Second, we assess the implications of this failure for the social-
scientific endeavour to explain, predict and test the practices of non-liberal
political arrangements.
1
Before proceeding it is necessary to define precisely what we mean by South-
East Asian studies and Sovietology. This is not without difficulty. South-East
1
Karl Popper, The poverty of historicism (London: Routledge, 1959), p. 133.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 843
David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith
844
Asian studies, especially, suffers from the fact that Asia is itself an amorphous
and ambiguous idea. For comparative ease we use the term South-East Asia to
denote the geographical area encompassed by members of the Association of
South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN);
2
South-East Asian studies thus refers to
the scholarly community that focused on the contemporary politics, economics,
security and international relations of the region primarily in the years after the
end of the Cold War. In terms of this study, we are dealing with two related
discourses: one generated internally within the region by South-East Asian
scholarbureaucrats who presented ASEAN as the basis of a new regional iden-
tity and dispensation; and another involving the way in which this understand-
ing shaped Western scholarship upon the region. In particular, this approach
primarily informed the constructivist and strategic culturalist mode of thought
in international relations; but it also affected international political economists
who sought to explain the particular economies of the ASEAN states through a
developing and distinctive regional framework. Moreover, although the
elements of this line of thinking were evident early in the 1980s in the work of
the scholars of the Singapore School like Chan Heng Chee, Jon Quah and
K. S. Sandhu and their Western admirers such as Thomas Bellows, R. S. Milne,
Diane Mauzy, Philippe Regnier and Raj Vasil,
3
it attained the status of an
orthodoxy only during the extremely short Pacific century that ran from 1989
to 1999. Therefore, what we are referring to specifically is a particular brand of
South-East Asian scholarship that might be termed ASEANology, which
engendered a distinctive scholarly/ideological practice of ASEANthink.
Similarly, defining Sovietology is problematic since it embraced not only
those concerned with domestic Soviet politics, but also a spectrum of analytical
opinion interested in the wider implications of superpower relations during the
Cold War. Therefore, we shall use the term to encompass both those
specifically interested in Soviet politics and foreign policy and also those with a
focus on the more general security implications of Cold War confrontation.
Soviet specialists in fact recognized the utility of the term and, in the aftermath
of the Cold War, conducted enquiries into its poor performance in identifying
the causes that led to the demise of the Soviet Union. Peter Rutland, in particular,
identified four failings in Sovietology that may also apply to the shortcomings
confronting the study of ASEAN. It is to these that we initially turn.
4
2
Namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Brunei, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar
(Burma).
3 For a selection of this oeuvre, see Heng Chee Chan, Singapore: the politics of survival 196567 (Singapore:
Oxford University Press, 1971): Heng Chee Chan, The PAP and the structuring of the political system,
in K. S. Sandhu and Paul Wheatley, eds, Management of success: the moulding of modern Singapore
(Singapore: ISEAS, 1989); Jon S. T. Quah, Heng Chee Chan, Chee Meow Seah, eds, Government and
politics of Singapore (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987); R. S Milne and Diane Mauzy, Singapore:
the legacy of Lee Kuan Yew (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990): Raj Vasil, Governing Singapore (Petaling Jaya:
Eastern Universities Press, 1984); T. J. Bellows, The People's Action Party of Singapore: emergence of a
dominant party system (New Haven, CN: Yale University, South East Asian Studies, 1970); T. J. Bellows,
The Singapore polity: community leadership and institutions, Asian Journal of Political Science 1: 1, June
1993, pp. 11332.
4
Peter Rutland, Sovietology: notes for a post-mortem, National Interest 31, spring 1993.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 844
Is there a Sovietology of South-East Asian studies?
845
Failing to predict the future
The fact that analysts got it wrong provides the starting point for any comparative
assessment of Sovietology and ASEANology. Despite the resources devoted to
the study of the Soviet Union, the vast majority of Cold War commentators failed
to predict the collapse of the Eastern bloc. Worse still, every event that happened
after 1989 contradicted predictions made before that date.
5
American graduate
schools, which constructed theories of hegemonic rivalry explicitly to anticipate
change, discovered only that the change they envisioned failed to eventuate.
6
Paul Kennedy, like many others, assumed that it was the United States that was
overstretched and in decline.
7
As Wohlforth observes: The debate focused upon
US decline, even when the Soviet Union was entering its final stages of collapse.
8
Surprised by the Cold Wars unexpected end, scholars appeared reluctant to
accept that superpower competition had resulted in victory for one side. The
belief persisted that the Soviet Union had unwittingly dissolved itself.
9
Indeed,
it was widely held in the early 1990s that US decline had been exacerbated by
the effort to contain the Soviet threat. Despite the American victory, the late
Cold War mentalit continued to haunt post-Cold War scholarship. For example,
on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, Ken Booth somewhat obscurely contended
that: In countering talk of declinism it [the United States] is actually showing
how much it had declined. Iraqs invasion of Kuwait proved that US deter-
rence had failed because Saddam Hussein felt he could disregard Western
threats. If war in the Gulf broke out, Booth posited, It will be the clearest signal
yet of the decline of US power in the region; the use of force will demonstrate
that the US lacks power. He further asserted: Some if not all Americans know
that a conflict against war-bloodied Iraq is not likely to be a three day turkey
shoot.
10
Booth was partly right. The land war was a four-day turkey shoot. In
all other respects, however, this scenario was deeply flawed. Ten years after the
Gulf war, the United States stands unequalled as a military superpower, a global
projector of soft power and an engine for world economic growth.
However, this misunderstanding of the nature of American hegemony also
contributed to the misreading of power relations elsewhere in the world,
particularly in Asia. For if US power was declining, the rise of Japan and
Western Europe as economic superpowers marked major milestones in inter-
national politics. In particular, the growth in the economic and political influence
of Asia seemed to presage a significant shift taking place in the international
5
Rutland, Sovietology, p. 109.
6
William Wohlforth, Realism and the end of the cold war, International Security 19: 4, winter 1994, p.
103.
7
See e.g. Paul Kennedy, The rise and fall of the great powers: economic change and military conflict from 1500 to
2000 (London: Fontana, 1989), pp. 564692.
8
Wohlforth, Realism, p. 103.
9
See Edward Kolodziej, What is security and security studies: lessons from the cold war, Arms Control 13:
1, April 1992, p. 5. See also Robert Ned Lebow, The long peace, the end of the cold war, and the
failure of realism, International Organization 48: 2, spring 1994, p. 262.
10
Ken Booth, Preface, in Ken Booth, ed., New thinking about international security (London: HarperCollins,
1991), p. 2.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 845
David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith
846
political economy towards the Pacific Basin.
11
This shift, it was contended
prior to 1997, heralded the formation of an axis of power, wealth, knowledge
and culture that was likely to shape world history as decisively as the North
Atlantic Community has for the last several centuries.
12
This change in the structure and balance of economic power further required
the alteration of the governing paradigm of international relations theory.
13
From this evolving post-Cold War perspective, the impressive economic growth
of the AsiaPacific region compared favourably with Western economic sluggish-
ness.
14
The informal, consensus-oriented relationships practised by South-East
Asian states had paved the way for harmonious regional development. By
contrast, the otiose individualism and rule-bound governance of Western
societies produced only welfarism, stagnation and moral decay.
15
The fact that
ASEAN had survived the US military withdrawal from the region after 1975
and outlasted the Soviet colossus reflected a regional resilience that reinforced
the image of a tidy Cold War fin de sicle terminating an era of European and
American international dominance and announcing a new Asian Age.
16
We now know that this optimistic prognosis for the region failed to antici-
pate the devastating economic meltdown of 19978. From being a miracle, the
various tiger and dragon economies of the AsiaPacific came to require one. No
less remarkable was the degeneration of ASEANs much-vaunted consensual
style of diplomacy. Internal tensions rose and regimes tottered. In Indonesia, the
largest and most important state in the regional grouping, an unstable coalition
and a disintegrating periphery replaced Suhartos kleptocratic New Order that
had ruled the archipelago between 1966 and 1998. Clearly, the collective
inability of ASEANology to recognize the long-standing fissures in the pre-
meltdown regional order suggests a discipline suffering problems analogous to
those of Sovietology, the most obvious similarity being a shared lack of insight
into the region culminating in a woeful record of predictive ineptitude. How-
ever, to attain a more complete insight into these deluded worlds of scholarly
endeavour, it is necessary to examine three additional reasons for their failure.
Surface impressionism
The preoccupation during the 1980s with current events rather than long-term
trends represented an additional analytical weakness in Sovietology. The role of
11
Ken Booth, Introduction: the interregnum: world politics in transition, in Booth, New thinking, p. 2.
12
John Curtis Perry, Asias telectronic highway, Foreign Policy 59, summer 1985, p. 41.
13
Steve Smith and John Baylis, Introduction, in Steve Smith and John Baylis, eds, The globalization of world
politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 10.
14
See e.g. World Bank, The East Asian miracle: economic growth and public policy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993); John Wong, The ASEAN economies (Singapore: Economic Research Centre, 1977).
15
See Kishore Mahbubani, The Pacific impulse, Survival 37: 1, 1995, pp. 10510; Kishore Mahbubani,
You may not like it Europe, but this Asian medicine could help, International Herald Tribune, 1 Oct.
1994; Bilhari Kausikan, Asias different standard, Foreign Policy 92, fall 1993, p. 34.
16
See John Naisbett, Megatrends Asia: the eight Asian megatrends that are changing the world (London: Nicholas
Brealey, 1995).
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 846
Is there a Sovietology of South-East Asian studies?
847
media pundit and soothsayer proved all too attractive to the well-placed
Sovietologist. By contrast, careful empirical research afforded paltry rewards.
17
Particularly disturbing was the fixation with the personality of Mikhail
Gorbachev. This obsession transformed the somewhat inept Gorbachev into the
efficient cause of the USSRs big bang.
18
As Rutland notes, Gorbachev was
neither genius, arch-villain, nor superheromerely an above average product
of the nomenklatura who wished to preserve the Soviet system.
19
Yet, as a
consequence of the media-driven preoccupation with celebrity, Gorbymania
led commentators to ignore other, more salient, factors that accounted for the
USSRs slide into oblivion. More precisely, they neglected the fateful legacy of
the war in Afghanistan, which overstretched Russian resources and eroded
public confidence in both the political elite and socialist internationalism, and
the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in provoking popular dissent.
20
ASEANology evinced a similar infatuation with the superficially newsworthy.
The object of concern here, however, was not a person but an economic and
political phenomenon, the Asian Way, widely advertised as one of the most
successful experiments in regionalism in the developing world,
21
affording a
model for emulation by other states in South-East Asia.
22
In this respect,
ASEANology resembled Sovietology in its propensity to overlook long-
standing political, economic and cultural tensions in favour of current media
enthusiasms.
The governing assumption pervading much commentary upon ASEAN
during the 1980s and 1990s was that the grouping had made steady progress
towards the development of a security community.
23
ASEAN, it was asserted,
had evolved shared norms of diplomatic behaviour that were operationalized
into a framework of regional interaction based on a high degree of discreet-
ness, informality, pragmatism, expediency and non-confrontational bargaining
styles.
24
Indeed, the ASEAN model seemed to offer the prospect of long-term
stable peace in the region.
25
If, in 1988, Gorbachev seemed the harbinger of
Soviet rebirth, the ASEAN way, by 1996, was the outward and visible sign of a
new multilateral economic and political order. The serendipitous conjunction
of market economics with specifically Asian values of thrift, harmony and con-
sensus encouraged both economic interdependence and innovative multilateral
17
Rutland, Sovietology, p. 112.
18
Rutland cites the obsessive distracting focus on Gorbachev in Gail Sheehys biography, which put
Gorbachevs attempt to reinvigorate the Soviet Union down to the male menopause. Gail Sheehy, The
man who changed the world (New York: Perennial Library, 1990), cited in Rutland, Sovietology, p. 109.
19
Rutland, Sovietology, p. 112.
20
Ibid., p. 110.
21
Amitav Acharya, A new regional order in South-East Asia: ASEAN in the post-cold war era, Adelphi Paper
279 (Oxford: Oxford University Press/IISS, 1993), p. 3.
22
Malcolm Chalmers, ASEAN and confidence building: continuity and change after the cold war,
Contemporary Security Policy 18: 1, April 1997, p. 53.
23
Amitav Acharya, The Association of South-East Asian Nations: security community or defence
community?, Pacific Affairs 64: 2, summer 1991, p. 176.
24
Amitav Acharya, Ideas, identity and institution-building: from the ASEAN way to the Asia-Pacific
way, Pacific Review 10: 3, 1997, p. 329.
25
Chalmers, ASEAN, p. 53.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 847
David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith
848
security practices. Hence, while the end of the Cold War had led to violent
turmoil elsewhere, in South-East Asia, analysts effused, it has led to increased
domestic tranquillity and regional order.
26
This understanding was, of course, fundamentally mistaken. Students of inter-
national relations in the AsiaPacific exaggerated the economic performance
and political stability of the region. In the same way that unbounded faith in
Gorbachevs capacity to lead the Soviet Union out of its Brezhnevite sloth mili-
tated against scepticism, so euphoria about the coming Pacific century fostered
an intellectual environment inimical to empirical evidence that might have
revealed a less seductive picture. Like Sovietologys Gorbymaniacs, students of
South-East Asia became cheerleaders for ASEAN. Instead of exposing the
limitations of Asian financial and business practices, academe and the grant-
giving agencies that fuel it, directed their attention to discovering the secret of
the miracle economies, and the lessons to be derived from the Asian way.
27
Compromising academic objectivity: the emergence of tacit concurrence
In any field of scholarly enquiry there exists an inevitable tension between the
received wisdom of accumulated opinion and those who question ruling
assumptions. In theory this requires the recognition that participants in con-
ceptual combat can legitimately maintain debate about contested concepts
deriving from different perspectives and different sources.
28
In practice, however,
scholars often seek conditional resolution through a synthesis of antagonistic
viewpoints. Sometimes this search for synthesis can lead to concurrence, which
subsequently inhibits the free exchange of ideas. Concurrence mutates into
consensus. Consensus is taken as resolution, which forecloses further debate. In
other words, a powerful academic consensus can effectively silence dissent.
From the perspective of an increasingly bureaucratized social science, healthy
scepticism, once considered the sine qua non of scientific investigation, is
dismissed as mere polemic. In the 1980s and 1990s this practice came to define
both Sovietology and ASEANology.
In any discipline there are those whose insights, retrospectively, offer a more
accurate interpretation of events. In the 1970s Randall Collins controversially
anticipated the collapse of the USSR from geographical overstretch and sub-
sequent institutional exhaustion.
29
Analogously, Rutland identified Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Alexander Shtromas, Morton Kaplan, Richard Burks and A. A.
26
Amitav Acharya, The periphery as the core: the third world and security studies, in Keith Krause and
Michael Williams, eds, Critical security studies (London: UCL Press, 1997), p. 310.
27
See particularly World Bank, The East Asian miracle, pp. 125.
28
For the term conceptual combat see David Baldwin, The concept of security, Review of International
Studies 23: 1, 1997, p. 11.
29
Randall Collins, Weberian sociological theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chs 78, and
Some principles of long term social change: the territorial power of states, in Louis Kriesberg, ed.,
Research in social movements, conflicts and change, vol. 1 (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1978), pp. 134,
cited in Wohlforth, Realism, p. 102, n. 24.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 848
Is there a Sovietology of South-East Asian studies?
849
Fedoseyev as analysts who got it more or less right.
30
These writers, however,
represented a minority who ran against the grain of conventional thinking.
Interestingly, Shtromas and Kaplans edited volume, The Soviet Union and the
challenge of the future, one of the very few texts to foresee the collapse of Soviet
power in 198991, evolved from a conference sponsored by the Unification
Church. Rather worryingly for the social sciences, the Moonies got it right when
the CIA, Brookings, RAND, Harvard, Columbia and the rest got it wrong.
31
But why were those analysts who identified the structural faults in the Soviet
system consigned to the disciplinary margins? Partly, it was because none of
them was, strictly speaking, a Sovietologist. Rather, they were, for the most
part, east Europeanists; more precisely, in the case of Brzezinksi, Shtromas and
Fedoseyev, along with others like Vladimir Bukovsky and Ernest Gellner, all of
whom expressed doubts about the Soviet Unions long-term viability, they
were exiles from communist eastern Europe. Western academics persistently
dismissed migr scholarship on grounds of bias.
32
From this somewhat self-
serving rationalistic perspective, a lived experience of communism inexorably
poisoned true understanding. By contrast, those who empathized with Soviet
governance, while not necessarily having any direct acquaintance with com-
munist rule, were considered more objective. This practice promoted a curious
inversion of the insideroutsider problem in social-scientific enquiry, whereby
those whose lives had been shaped by the trauma of totalitarianism were
considered intellectually compromised and assigned the category of outsider.
Soviet studies spanned the best part of three-quarters of a century. Yet,
despite its consensus-bound deficiencies, a diversity of opinion did eventually
emerge. By contrast, Pacific Rim enthusiasm, which began in the aftermath of
the Vietnam War,
33
and reached a disciplinary epiphany between 1990 and
1997, provided even less space for contending views. In a way not dissimilar to
Sovietology, those who voiced alternative interpretations of South-East Asias
political and economic development often struggled to be heard. In assessing
the disciplinary orthodoxy that took hold of ASEANology, however, we must
initially distinguish between criticism of the Asian growth model and the more
general avoidance of the incoherences in the political institutions of ASEAN
and the states that comprised it. Interestingly, a number of economists disputed
the view advanced by both Asian statesmen and their scholarbureaucrats that
Asian growth reflected a specifically Asian cultural disposition.
34
Significantly,
those who challenged the viability of the Asian growth model made a limited
30
Rutland, Sovietology, p. 112.
31
Rutland, Sovietology, p. 111.
32
Ibid., p. 112.
33
Bruce Cumings, Boundary displacement: area studies and international studies during and after the cold
war, in Mark Seldon, ed., Bulletin of concerned Asian scholars, special edition: Asia, Asian studies and the
national security state 1: 1, 1997, <http://www.csf.colorado.edu/bcas/sympos/current.htm>, pp. 34.
34
See Kishore Mahbubani, The United States: go East young man, Washington Quarterly 17: 2, 1994, pp.
67, and The Pacific way, Foreign Affairs 74: 1, Jan.Feb.1995; Mahathir Mohamad and Shintaro
Ishihara, The voice of Asia (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1995); Fareed Zakaria, Culture is destiny: a
conversation with Lee Kuan Yew, Foreign Affairs 73: 2, MarchApril 1994, pp. 10913.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 849
David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith
850
impression before the currency crisis took hold in the latter part of 1997. For
example, Paul Krugman and Alwyn Young had observed significant weakness
in the input-mobilizing economies of Asia prior to 1994.
35
Krugmans scepticism
represented the first expression of doubt concerning the sustainability of
economic growth in the region of the kind officially espoused by regional
governments, regional scholars and the World Bank in its report The East Asian
economic miracle (1993).
36
Over the same period, journals like The Economist and
the occasional scholar such as Kunio Yoshihara and Christopher Lingle identi-
fied a number of problems with the Asian model of growth generally and the
South-East Asian variety in particular.
37
Significantly, then, a small band of scholars committed to empirical rigour
and not tied to Asian banks or institutions pointed to flaws in the Asian
economic model. By contrast, scepticism towards an evolving ASEAN multi-
lateralism was far more muted. Instead, social scientists and international relations
experts queued up to support the view that ASEAN had become the hub of
confidence building activities and preventive diplomacy in the region,
38
which
offered the model of inter-state Cooperation that would be a key-building
block for a new global community.
39
In the multilateral glow that initially
illuminated the New World Order, few analysts demurred from this con-
sensus.
40
The potential ethnic and religious fault-lines in South-East Asia received
scant attention. Superficially, with the conclusion of the Cambodian peace
process (1991) and the expansion of ASEAN membership after 1993 to include
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, relations among the states of South-East Asia
appeared harmonious. Increasing regional self-confidence fuelled by high
growth rates provided the platform upon which analysts erected the notion that
ASEANs successful model of cooperative security could be extended across the
Pacific. Just as the Sovietological consensus dismissed migr scepticism, so an
analogous process inhibited the emergence of contrarian views in ASEANology.
The academic review process and the grant-giving machinery actively discounted
countervailing opinions. Merely questioning the inevitability of the Pacific
century earned reproof as a one-sided polemic.
41
35
Paul Krugman, The myth of Asias miracle, Foreign Affairs 73: 6, Nov.Dec. 1994; Alwyn Young, A
tale of two cities: factor accumulation and technical change in Singapore and Hong Kong, in O. J.
Blanchard and S. Fischer, eds, NBER macroeconomics annual 1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press); Alwyn
Young, The tyranny of numbers: confronting the statistical realities of the Asian growth experience,
The Quarterly Journal of Economics 110: 3, 1995, pp. 65579; David Martin Jones, Asian values and the
constitutional order of contemporary Singapore, Constitutional Political Economy 8: 1, 1997, pp. 283300.
36
World Bank, The East Asian economic miracle, ch. 1.
37
Kunio Yoshihara, The rise of ersatz capitalism in South-East Asia (Singapore: Oxford University Press,
1988); Christopher Lingle, Singapores authoritarian capitalism: Asian values, free market illusions and political
dependency (Fairfax, VA.: Locke Institute, 1996).
38
Jose T. Almonte, Ensuring the ASEAN way, Survival 39: 4, winter 19978, p. 80.
39
Ibid., p. 90.
40
Robert Manning and Paula Stern, The myth of the Pacific community, Foreign Affairs 73: 6, Nov.Dec.
1994 , did in fact take issue with the idea that a multilateral security system could deal with the tensions
in the Pacific region. The focus for their discussion, though, was confined to North-East Asia.
41
Contemporary Security Policy, reviewers report (1), reviewer no. 180335, 1 May 1997, p. 1.
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Is there a Sovietology of South-East Asian studies?
851
Even more worryingly, the collapse of the miracle economies and the sub-
sequent implosion of ASEAN failed to generate any disciplinary introspection.
Bizarrely, regional experts moved unproblematically from pre- to post-crisis mode
without missing a beat. Popular pre-crisis volumes such as Asia rising, Negotiating
the Pacific century and The new Asian Renaissance,
42
which once graced the bookstores
of South-East Asia, were replaced within a year by titles such as Asia falling and
The downsizing of Asia, many of them by the same authors.
43
Such a disciplinary
volte-face could be sustained only by the fiction that the financial crisis that
gripped East Asia in the second quarter of 1997 took everyone by surprise.
44
The fact is that there were a number of people on the ground who did identify
serious structural weaknesses that made the South-East Asian economic model
unsustainable, and who, certainly in the case of Lingle, suffered severe harass-
ment for indulging in such thought-crime. The financial crisis did not come out
of the blue. This is the myth of the unreconstructed Sovietology of South-East
Asian studies, the chief characteristic of which was to silence those voices that
saw the economic and political shortcomings, but which now seeks to excuse its
analytical failings by promulgating the false defence of surprise.
What were the forces at work that permitted a consensus to flourish in a way
that inhibited the emergence of a diversity of opinion? An examination of this
question again reveals an interesting parallel between the two disciplines. It was
alleged that ideological polarization inhibited Sovietology. Each side accused
the other of manipulating Soviet studies to serve its domestic political agenda,
to the detriment of objective enquiry.
45
In fact, as Rutland observes, the notion
of a simple left/right cleavage in Sovietology is actually misleading. Rather,
Sovietology rejected conflicting viewpoints which might have yielded con-
tested, but falsifiable, academic interpretations as biased.
46
It favoured instead a
scholarly neutrality. Scholars of a liberal disposition repressed their political
intuitions in order to analyze the USSR in a non-judgmental fashion.
47
This neutral stance actually deflected attention from glaring inefficiencies in the
Soviet systemflaws which Western Marxists and conservatives alike found it
much easier to recognize.
48
In other words, academic neutrality required the
42
Jim Rohwer, Asia rising: how historys biggest middle class will change the world (London: Nicholas Brealey,
1996); Roger Bell, Tim McDonald and Alan Tidwell, eds, Negotiating the Pacific century: the new Asia, the
United States and Australia (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995); Franois Godement, The new
Asian Renaissance: from colonialism to the post-Cold War (London: Routledge, 1996); Ross Garnaut, Enzo
Grilli and James Reidel, eds, Sustaining export-oriented development: ideas from east Asia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
43
Callum Henderson, Asia falling: making sense of the Asian currency crisis and its aftermath (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1998); Franois Godement, The downsizing of Asia (London: Routledge, 1998); R. H.
McLeod and Ross Garnaut, eds, East Asia in crisis: from being a miracle to needing one (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1998).
44
See e.g. the remarks of S. Grenville, the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank in Australia, in The
Asian economic crisis, talk to the Australian Business Economists and the Economic Society of Australia,
Sydney, 12 March 1998. According to Grenville, no one forecast the crisis (p. 1). This is a line that
was also repeated by an anonymous referee of this article.
45
Rutland, Sovietology, p. 112.
46
See Popper, The poverty of historicism, p. 134.
47
Ibid., p. 113.
48
Ibid.
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David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith
852
suppression of ideological difference. As a result, a tacit concurrence to abstain
from divisive rhetoric developed across the discipline.
Several egregious consequences followed from this tacit concurrence. First, it
erected informal entry barriers against anyone who promulgated strongly held
heterodox views. Second, it curtailed intellectual exploration by establishing the
limits of useful knowledge. This problem was most apparent where Sovietology
met Cold War international studies. Here, intellectual energy focused upon
EastWest bipolarity, defined by the USSoviet balance of terror and the
confrontation of two massed armies in central Europe.
49
Thus, even in 1989,
Fred Halliday pronounced that the great contest between the superpowers was
permanent and global.
50
By concentrating attention on the international level,
the discipline allowed itself largely to ignore those domestic events that would
have revealed the crippled Soviet economy that accounted for the sudden end
of the USSR together with the Cold War.
An analogous tacit concurrence established itself in South-East Asia studies.
This version of concurrence derived from the fact that the Asian economic
paradigm served ideological agendas from social democrat, conservative and
economically liberal provenances in Europe and North America. For those of
an interventionist disposition the title of the volume edited by the former
President of Singapore C. V. Devan Nair, Socialism that works,
51
best sums up
the attraction of the Asian economic success story. Former socialists and neo-
Marxists, redescribed as social democrats and neo-Keynesians, ranging from
Will Hutton, Anthony Giddens and Martin Jacques in Britain to Richard
Robison and Mark Latham in Australia and to Clinton Democrats like Robert
Reich and William Galston in the United States, found much to admire in the
Asian model.
52
Indeed, it particularly influenced those Anglo-Saxon academic
policy advisers helping to shape a new left response to the Republican- and
neo-conservative-inspired economic liberalism of the 1980s. These writers
found in the apparent socially cohesive and community-sensitive Asian model a
plausible alternative to the exuberances of an uncaring and uncommunitarian
free-market casino capitalism. The Asian model constituted a corrective to the
excesses of finance capital excoriated by Will Hutton in The state were in and by
John Gray in False dawn.
53
In so doing, it constituted the foundation for the
elaboration of a third way that offered post-Cold War socialist proponents of
49
Edward Kolodziej, Renaissance in security studies: caveat lector!, International Studies Quarterly 36: 4,
1992, p. 425.
50
Fred Halliday, The making of the second cold war (London: Verso, 1989), p. 264.
51
C. V. Devan Nair, Socialism that works the Singapore way (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1976).
52
See Anthony Giddens, The third way: the renewal of social democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); Will
Hutton, The state were in (London: Vantage, 1995); Mark Latham, Civilising global capital: new thinking for
Australian capital (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998); Richard Robison, Looking north: myths
and strategies, ch. 1 in Richard Robison, ed, Pathways to Asia: the politics of engagement (St Leonards,
NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1996); Robert B. Reich, The work of nations: preparing ourselves for 21st century
capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1991); William A. Galston, Liberal purposes: goods, virtues and diversity in the
liberal state (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
53
See Hutton, The state were in; John Gray, False dawn: the delusions of global capitalism (London: Granta,
1998).
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 852
Is there a Sovietology of South-East Asian studies?
853
big government the seductive prospect of a future that was both post-
communist and post-Thatcherite.
Paradoxically, at the same time, the Asian model also appealed to a curious
collection of moral conservatives, Australian economic rationalists and Anglo-
American free-marketeers. From William Rees-Mogg of The Times to William
F. Buckley Jr in the National Review, conservative pundits and think-tanks
applauded the deregulation and open markets of many Asian economies. They
noted with satisfaction that East Asia has prospered over the past forty years
largely because it had small, pro-business governments which have refused to
offer much public compassion for the unfortunate or improvident. This has
been hard on unlucky or feckless individuals, but it has created exceptionally
strong and resilient economies.
54
The Asian model possessed a further seductive blandishment for neo-
conservatives, communitarians and third way democrats in that it promoted
family values against the depredations of market libertarianism. Patriarchs of
single parties or military juntas like Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore or Chun Doo-
Hwan in South Korea emphasized the Confucian family unit as the cornerstone
of society and the antidote to dependence on state welfare. Economic thrift and
family-induced responsibilitarianism reinforced a virtuous cycle that enabled
government to reduce welfare spending and taxation while promoting high
domestic savings, which in turn afforded the resources for productive invest-
ment in infrastructure, education and health. The Asian model, unlike its
Anglo-Saxon alternative, therefore, appeared morally as well as economically
justified. It offered a prophylactic against the Western dependency syndrome
which insisted on over-taxation, over-regulation and an over-eagerness to
throw money at teenage mothers in ghettoes.
55
In contrast to the dynamic
communitarianism of Asia, the degenerate welfare states of the West appeared
effective at producing growth only in crime, disorder and social alienation.
Ultimately, the resolution of the paradoxical appeal of the Asian model to all
sides of the Western political spectrum may be explained by its constituting
ambivalence.
56
Both neo-liberals and third way social democrats looked at only
those aspects of the Asian miracle that reinforced their pre-existing opinions.
They established an ambivalent but tacit concurrence that set the boundaries of
useful knowledge. Western commentators, sceptical in their assessment of
Thatcherite economics, accepted uncritically the path of the Asian way, strewn
with double-digit growth. Scholarly enquiry thus devoted itself to divining the
wider meaning of the miracle. After its meaning had been identified, all that
remained was to discern the particular Western ideological creed it vindicated.
54
Rohwer, Asia rising, p. 44; see also Ross Garnaut and Peter Drysdale with John Kunkel, Asia Pacific
regionalism: readings in international economic relations (Sydney: Harper, 1994); William Rees-Mogg, Blair
could make it the year of the tiger, The Times, 1 Jan. 1997.
55
Ibid., p. 45.
56
Catherine Jones, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan: oikonomic welfare states,
Government and Opposition 25: 4, 1990, p. 462.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 853
David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith
854
Whether there was a miracle at all constituted the truth that dare not speak its
name.
Such analytical ambiguity, of course, could identify neither the long-term
drivers of economic growth nor the reasons for incipient financial meltdown. In
the aftermath of the meltdown, it went largely unremarked that former econo-
mic virtues were suddenly transmogrified into Asian vices. Long-term planning
now became market distortion; high savings equalled a drag on consumption;
and governmentbusiness links, which supposedly facilitated such far-sighted
planning, mutated into market-distorting financial opacity hiding cronyism and
corruption.
57
In a similar vein, tacit concurrence pervaded the discussion of the Asian
security dispensation. Regional stability provided by ASEANs apparent success
as a conflict resolution mechanism, it was ubiquitously maintained, underpin-
ned South-East Asias two-decade-long economic expansion. This assumption
again curtailed the scope of analytical enquiry. The prevailing multilateral
orthodoxy concentrated its focus on process-oriented assessments of ASEANs
diplomatic style in order to demonstrate ASEANs success as a regional experi-
ment. The fashionable post-Cold War deconstruction of privileged Western
realist understandings added further academic legitimacy to an uncritical accept-
ance of ASEANs distinctive consensual style, which emphasized non-interference
in the domestic affairs of member states.
58
This orthodoxy radically curtailed
understanding of what was important to study, restricted debate and obscured
the weaknesses in the regional order that belied its superficial harmony.
System stability: the flawed methodological consequences of tacit
concurrence
Ironically, tacit concurrence, which sought to demonstrate scholarly value neu-
trality, merely depoliticized the academic space in a way that proved deleterious
to conventional scientific standards of scholarship. Scholarly neutralism increas-
ingly considered sceptical questioning of the prevailing orthodoxy a mixture of
bad manners and polemic, which raises a largely unexplored methodological
question: What inspires different shades of opinion and opposed ideological
perspectives to reach tacit concurrence? Once again, it is possible to turn to the
inquest performed upon Sovietology to illuminate the methodological flaws of
ASEANology.
Thomas Remington argues that it was pointless to criticize Sovietologists for
failing to notice the disintegration of the Soviet Union. They could no more
have predicted the collapse of the USSR than seismologists can say when the
next great earthquake will strike the San Andreas fault. Instead of blaming
Sovietology for failing to predict a particular event, he continued, we should
57
Ibid., p. 17.
58
Acharya, Ideas, p. 329.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 854
Is there a Sovietology of South-East Asian studies?
855
ask how well students of the Soviet political system understood the underlying
tectonics. Remington concluded that ultimately Sovietology promulgated an
underlying faith in the stability of the Soviet system that overestimated its
capacity to adapt to change.
59
In other words, the dominant functionalist para-
digm required the Soviet system to be considered inherently stable. Function-
alists assumed the system worked.
60
System stability was necessary because
analysts believed that the Soviet political machinery possessed the capacity to
evolve. American social science during the Cold War assumed a necessary and
universal correlation between modernization and progressive democratization.
Hence it presented the uncertain shifts from Leninist and Stalinist totalitarianism
to Brezhnevite managerialism and Gorbachev era reformism in terms of a
progressive teleology within an essentially stable system.
61
In particular, Gorba-
chevs reforms seemed to support the view that the Soviet system possessed the
functional capacity to modernize and liberalize itself. Western social science
consequently averred that, together, perestroika and glasnost have put the
Soviet Union on the road to becoming a more normal country, defined
broadly in Western terms (multi-party and market-orientated).
62
This bias
towards system stability had the further deleterious consequence of encouraging
the Sovietological community to go native, accepting Soviet categories at face
value.
63
It was this academic disposition that provided the intellectual rationale
for presenting Gorbachev as an agent of adaptation, change and normalization.
A similar preoccupation with system stability and gradual change in a
progressive direction informed accounts of South-East Asian political economy
and international relations in the course of the 1990s. For comparable reasons,
ASEANology unquestioningly accepted the official terms of Asian economic
success and regional order. Here again the ruling social science paradigm of an
inexorable liberal-democratic end of history promoted the comfortable
acceptance that, Asian values notwithstanding, economic progress inevitably
presaged eventual liberalization and democratization.
64
Western social scientists
also accepted that the Asian way underpinned the system stability that had
facilitated regional order and economic progress. As a result, academic endeavour
focused upon the contradictory task of unravelling those aspects of Asian values
that both guaranteed continuing stability and facilitated progressive change.
The assumption of system stability thus provides the fundamental common-
alty between Sovietology and ASEANology. This predilection further reinforced
the academic self-disciplining instinct, for the lack of an agreed framework of
59
Thomas Remington, Sovietology and system stability, Post Soviet Affairs 8: 3, July/Sept. 1992, pp. 240
1, 258.
60
Rutland, Sovietology, pp. 11618.
61
Seweryn Bialer, The Soviet paradox (New York: Knopf, 1986), pp. 32, 169, cited in Rutland,
Sovietology, p. 117.
62
Booth, Introduction: the interregnum, p. 3.
63
Rutland, Sovietology, p. 116.
64
See Kevin Hewison, Bankers and bureaucrats: capital and the role of the state in Thailand, South-East Asian
Studies Monograph Series, no. 34 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 214.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 855
David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith
856
explanation promoted the consensus-seeking tendency in order to overcome
the inherent methodological insecurity in the field. The consequence was
disciplinary groupthink that either ignored or discouraged alternative think-
ing.
65
In this way, powerful orthodoxies took hold that, once entrenched,
could be negated only by the wholesale collapse of the erstwhile stable system
which scholars ostensibly studied, but, in practice, mythologized.
More Sovietological than Sovietology: the distinctive distortions of
ASEANology
Although the intellectual approaches of the two disciplines reveal striking
parallels, a number of crucial differences also emerge. Here a defining feature of
Sovietology was the difficulty, in terms of both language and research skills
required, of examining a closed society. To an extent, these difficulties excuse
some of the disciplines shortcomings. Such excuses are not, however, available
to students of South-East Asia. The closed despotisms of Myanmar and (prior to
1995) communist Indochina notwithstanding, information-gathering in this
region was far less onerous. Certainly, the ASEAN states restricted access to
government records and curtailed the activities of the foreign media. Even so,
access to information was not an issue. Centres of higher education in South-
East Asia and institutes specializing in regional affairs maintained a continuous
output of scholarly publications. Equally, student and academic specialists found
access to the region for fieldwork broadly encouraged. Indeed, regional univer-
sities and institutes often employed expatriate teachers or welcomed visiting
scholars from abroad. Western university departments specializing in South-
East Asia maintained close links and even established offshore faculties in the
region. The fact that English, ironically, constituted a common bahasa across
ASEAN further facilitated the flow of information.
This quantitative difference in accessibility to the Soviet Union and South-
East Asia raises the question: why did ASEANology fail so miserably to generate
either predictive capacity or a plurality of opinion? Three related factors that
both distinguish ASEANology from its Sovietological counterpart and, collectively,
constitute a distinctive South-East Asian Sovietology account for this failure.
The scholar and the state: the bureaucratization of academia
First, the incestuous relationship between the scholar and the state in South-East
Asia became a defining feature of ASEANology. Historically, Western social
science has maintained its distance from the policy-making professions.
66
In
theory, one profession analyzes, the other operationalizes.
65
Rutland, Sovietology, p. 116.
66
David Newsom, Foreign policy and academia, Foreign Policy 101, Winter 19956, p. 55. On the need
for this distance see also Robert Hefner, Civil Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), ch. 1.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 856
Is there a Sovietology of South-East Asian studies?
857
In the post-colonial states of South-East Asia, however, the operationali-
zation of policy determined the terms of its analysis. This academic mutation
reflected both the socio-political character of the ASEAN states themselves and
the alliance structure of the Cold War that discouraged too critical an analysis of
the internal mechanisms of authoritarian allies. By the early 1980s, it was evi-
dent that the ASEAN states were following a model of enterprise association
wherein the state mobilized all resources towards economic growth while
maintaining political stability.
67
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, explaining
the nature of the project in 1987, termed the state that he increasingly domin-
ated Malaysia Incorporated. This evolving corporatism required modification
of the post-colonial constitution, abrogation of the independence of the
judiciary and money politics to oil the cumbersome machinery of single-party
rule. As these countries modernized, moreover, the media and academe were
drawn into the bureaucratic web that defined the collective project, populari-
zing its goals and promoting the ruling ideology.
This reduction of academe to a department of government in an organically
incorporated body politic had critical implications for the understanding of both
domestic politics and international relations in the AsiaPacific region. In the
wake of the Cold Wars end, the ASEAN states advertised the virtues of their
consensual, interpersonal and non-binding cultural arrangements for maintain-
ing peace and security. To the extent that the regional arrangement possessed a
governing principle it embraced, somewhat equivocally, the idea of non-
interference in the domestic affairs of member states.
68
To explore the opera-
tion of this practice ASEAN governments established research institutes that in
effect functioned as ideological proponents of the ASEAN way. Bodies like the
Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore and their Malaysian,
Indonesian, Thai and Philippine counterparts nurtured a generation of scholar
bureaucrats that gave ideological specificity to the regions distinctive approach
to security and economic growth. Like the regions political economy, regional
scholarship functioned in terms of a cronyist maintenance of good interpersonal
relations oiled by nepotism and the money politics of large grants. The role of
the scholar-bureaucrats was not to question, but to give intellectual credibility
to distinctive values and practices that sustained the developmental ideology.
Consequently, scholarly assessments of South-East Asian international relations
primarily attended to narrowly focused accounts of the successful procedural
application of the ASEAN way and shared values.
69
Publications with titles such
as Go East young man and The Pacific impulse, and studies of the internal
arrangements of the developmental state like Jon Quahs seminal work on the
Singapore police, Friends in blue, indicate the extent to which scholars
67
James Cotton, The new insecurity in Asia, Quadrant, December 1998, pp. 1721.
68
Michael Leifer, ASEAN and the security of South-East Asia (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 69.
69
See e.g. Acharya, Ideas, p. 329; Kusuma Snitwongse, Thirty years of ASEAN: achievements through
political cooperation, Pacific Review 11: 2, 1998, p. 183.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 857
David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith
858
suspended critical judgement in order to gain official approval and career
advancement.
70
The fact that the most influential analysts of South-East Asian international
relations enjoyed careers as prominent civil servants in the foreign ministries of
their respective states, or transferred easily from careers as advisers to new
careers as soldierstatesmen directing regional centres for strategic and inter-
national studies, illustrates how far the state had bureaucratized academia and set
the rules of permissible study.
71
Moreover, as authoritarian single-party rule
directed the developmental state in South-East Asia, state agencies increased
their surveillance of the civil space where independent association and alterna-
tive views might flourish.
72
Scholars who harboured differing opinions from
those of the state refrained from airing them, knowing that their careers would
come to a sudden conclusion if they did.
73
On the rare occasion that an
academic publicly articulated dissent, he anticipated prosecution for libel and
sedition, and punishment that minimally entailed a humiliating retraction of his
incorrect views in the state-owned media.
70
See e.g. Mahbubani, The Pacific impulse, The United States: go East young man and The Pacific
way; Kausikan, Asias different standard; Jon S. T. Quah and Stella Quah, Friends in blue: police and the
public in Singapore (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987). The career of Professor Quah is a case in
point. All of his extensive oeuvre reflects an obsessive advocacy of shared Asian values and the merits of
Singapore as a regional model for good governance. Appointed Professor of Political Science at the
National University of Singapore, Quah displayed on his desk a homily mounted on a wooden frame
proclaiming that an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of wisdom. In 1994 Quah played a conspicuous
role in the prosecution of the American economist Christopher Lingle for writing a critical response in
the International Herald Tribune to another Singaporean ideologist, Kishore Mahbubani. Despite this
questionable activity, Quah has received the palme dacademiques of France, has held honorary fellowships
at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and sits on the board of one of the major scholarly
journals in the field, Political Studies. See Lingle, Singapores authoritarian capitalism, p. 10.
71
The career of Jusuf Wanandi (aka Lim Bian Kie) offers an interesting illustration of this career path. In his
initial incarnation as Lim Bian Kie, he advised Indonesian General Ali Murtopo on the utility of invading
East Timor in 1975, while keeping Australian proponents of Asian engagement like Gough Whitlam
and Richard Woolcott well informed to the point of embarrassment; see Wendy Way, ed., Documents on
Australian foreign policy: Australia and the Indonesian incorporation of East Timor, 19741976 (Melbourne:
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Melbourne University Press, 2000), pp. 377, 486. Subsequently
reincarnated as Jusuf Wanandi and director of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in
Jakarta, he facilitated Western scholarship that embraced the ASEAN way and together with a number of
other scholarbureaucrats, such as Chan Heng Chee and Noordin Sopie, was invited on to the boards of
key international relations journals like Survival and Pacific Review. In such ways, networks of surveillance
were created that had the potential to police dissenting opinion.
72
See James Gomez, Self-censorship: Singapores shame (Singapore: ThinkCentre, 2000), pp. 3353.
73
In this context the experiences of former Singapore academic Chee Soon Juan are instructive. Dr Chee
lost his job, his house and his savings and is regularly denounced in the state-directed press as a cheat
and a liar for his temerity in standing against the Prime Minister during a by-election and criticizing
official statistics. Similarly illustrative is the case of another lecturer in Singapore, Bilveer Singh, who
published an article in the Jakarta Post in 1994 critical of Singapores redistributive policy. Both Chee and
Singh were denounced in the local press. While Singh offered a profuse apology and was subsequently
allowed to continue his career at the National University of Singapore, albeit at a lower pay scale, Chee,
by refusing to apologize, showed a lack of remorse and was subjected to the full rigours of the Asian
version of administrative law.
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Is there a Sovietology of South-East Asian studies?
859
Coercion and cooption: the role of outside academics
Ostensibly, the subordination of academe to the requirements of nation-building
in South-East Asia resembles the experience of Soviet academics who were
similarly expected to promulgate the official party line. However, there was a
critical difference. Soviet scholars were not considered Sovietologists; Soviet-
ology was the preserve of Western analysts observing the system from the
outside. This was not the case with South-East Asia studies, where indigenous
scholarship played an increasingly influential role in framing the discipline and
its methodology. By contrast, the closed system of the Soviet bloc, and mutual
suspicion generated by superpower hostility, thwarted any meaningful dialogue
between Soviet scholars and Western Sovietologists.
South-East Asian scholars, of course, have every right to study their region.
Ideally, indigenous scholarship would contribute to the diversity of opinion
within area studies. Even the bureaucratization of scholarship in South-East
Asia might have been overcome if scholars beyond the region had defended the
principle of independent enquiry more vigorously. Unfortunately, this did not
happen. Rarely did Western scholars of South-East Asian states or international
relations subject regional values to critical scrutiny. Instead, they reinforced the
claim of the local scholarbureaucrats to articulate the authentic voice of the
region.
74
This process of cooption both extended and externalized the bureaucratic
orthodoxies of local scholarship. The evolution of this incestuous relationship
represents a second critical difference between Sovietology and the South-East
Asian variety. The propensity of the Western specialist to over-identify with his
or her chosen area is not uncommon. Sovietologists rarely challenged the tenets
of MarxismLeninism. It was not that these writers were convinced Marxists,
Rutland contends: it was simply assumed that MarxismLeninism shaped
Soviet reality, so that was the logical place to begin.
75
The difficulty of access to
the USSR to some extent explains this scholarly passivity. No such excuse is
available to South-East Asianists, who appeared exceedingly willing converts to
the norms of the Asian way.
Why did this happen? Ironically, instead of enhancing disciplinary pluralism,
the links between local and Western scholars actively undermined it. The
barriers that impeded exchange between Western and indigenous students of
Soviet affairs maintained a diversity of views in a way that ASEANology did
not. ASEANology, by contrast, could deploy the fear of exclusion to promote
the tyranny of the single truth. The fact that Western intellectuals who criti-
74
Curiously susceptible to this predilection has been the self-proclaimed independent International
Institute of Strategic Studies, which has regularly allowed its publications to be used as platforms for
South-East Asian scholarbureaucrats and other proponents of the ASEAN way orthodoxy (see e.g.
Mahbubani, The Pacific impulse), with very little in the way of counterbalancing opinion. The
Institute continues to adopt a strangely tame attitude particularly towards the authoritarian regime in
Singapore. For an illustration of its peculiarly uncritical stance see Strategic Survey (London: IISS, 2000),
pp. 20810.
75
Rutland, Sovietology, p. 116.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 859
David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith
860
cized regional economic and political practice suffered the regional equivalent
of excommunication reinforced this tendency. In Singapore and Malaysia,
periodic purges of expatriate political science lecturers and journalists deemed
to have expressed unacceptable views reinforced the reluctance to engage in
academic controversy.
76
Fear of exclusion, however, was not the only reason for this growing academic
subservience. South-East Asian governments also deliberately garnered the
support of foreign academics. Influencing external opinion reflected Asian elite
conceptions of the political arena, which accentuated harmony, consensus and
conformity. As Catherine Jones explains, in South-East Asia The proper place
for politics is behind the scenes, out of sight, absorbed into the administration
People who matter will as far as possible have been recruited, co-opted or
assiduously cultivated, as appropriate, by the ruling establishment.
77
Interest-
ingly, external scholarship proved as pliable as indigenous scholarship. At its
most direct, the cultivation of big names took the form of lucrative visiting
professorships for eminent scholars in return for lavish endorsement of the local
managerial practice.
78
More often, ASEAN states achieved the depoliticization
of a potentially critical external intellectual environment through the subtle
induction of foreign academics into the norms of the prevailing regional ortho-
doxy. The evolving political correctness of Western institutions and grant-
giving agencies from the late 1980s, which considered any criticism of Asian
practice orientalist, facilitated the process.
Participation in the plethora of ASEAN-sponsored discussion forums further
socialized academics into regional norms. The belief that they were contri-
buting to the development of a non-Western and fashionably post-colonial
approach to peace-building sustained the involvement of academics from
outside South-East Asia in what became known as Track II diplomacy.
79
In
practical terms, there could be little pretence that such gatherings offered any
critical evaluation of regional relations. The capacity of Track II discourse to
induce acceptance of official ASEANthink manifested itself in the shared
76
See e.g. Christopher Lingle, The smoke over some parts of Asia obscures some profound concerns,
International Herald Tribune, 7 Oct. 1994. Singapores tradition of pouncing on errant expatriate lecturers
with either public excoriation or even prosecution has been in evidence for the last thirty years, from D.
J. Enright in the early 1960s to Christopher Lingle in 1994. See D. J. Enright, Memoirs of a mendicant
professor (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990) and Lingle, Singapores authoritarian capitalism, pp. ixxi.
77
Jones, Hong Kong, pp. 45152.
78
A case in point was the speech made by Michael Howard during the 39th Annual Conference of the IISS
in Singapore on 12 September 1997. Professor Howard, a former Lee Kuan Yew Distinguished Visitor
(21 Feb.6 March 1996), echoing earlier writers on the city-state, like Phillippe Regnier, pronounced it
the Venice of the East. The post-modern Chinese fascist chic of downtown Singapore is no doubt
impressive, but otherwise not exactly redolent of a Renaissance state. See, inter alia, Phillippe Regnier,
Signapore: city state in South East (London: Hurst & Co., 1992) for an uncritical account of the rise of
Singapores technocatic planning and Edgar H. Scheins paeon to Singaporean pragmatism, Strategic
capitalism: the culture of Singapores Economic Development Board (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). For a
somewhat sceptical review of Regniers tome see Steven Knipp, Venice of the east, Far Eastern Economic
Review, 1 Oct. 1992, p. 34.
79
See Acharya, The Association of South-East Asian Nations, p. 176, and Richard Higgott and Kim
Richard Nossal, Australia and the search for a security community in the 1990s, in Emanuel Adler and
Michael Barnett, eds, Security communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 2816.
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Is there a Sovietology of South-East Asian studies?
861
vocabulary of scholarbureaucrats on the one hand and Western scholars of
South-East Asia on the other. Thus, claims by indigenous scholars that the
process was more important than any eventual agreement found a responsive
echo in statements from Western regional specialists who argued that the process
is always held to be more important than the product. ASEAN multilateral-
ism is process-orientated, rather than product orientated.
80
Ultimately, this
obsession with process at the expense of empirical analysis obscured the fault-
lines in regional relations that emerged with devastating consequences after
1997.
Intellectual regimes in international relations
Finally, the distinctively South-East Asian process of academic cooption did not
occur by accident. Asian academic managerialism coincided with a growing
trend towards the bureaucratization of research in British, American and
Australian institutions of higher education. Driven by performance manage-
ment targets and so-called quality assessment systems, Western academics were
coopted because they functioned in an academic structure already predisposed
to bureaucratic guidance.
Wider intellectual trends at work in the 1990s, which from the end of the
Cold War systematically assaulted the traditional Western realist-oriented and
empirically based paradigm in international relations, further reinforced a
predisposition to groupthink. From a theoretical perspective, revisionism,
multilaterialism and post-modern constructivism all maintained that balance of
power politics and the dominance of state-centric concerns had overdetermined
Cold War international relations theory.
81
The new post-Cold War dispensa-
tion, consequently, encouraged those who considered security a discourse
capable of construction and amenable to rethinking in novel and culturally
sensitive ways. The fashionable assumption of the early years of the New World
Order that state sovereignty was in the process of being overtaken by a system
of complex interdependence arising from rapid globalization reinforced the
propensity to abstruse theorizing. In the early 1990s ASEAN became the bene-
ficiary of this conjunction of alternative security approaches. Seemingly, it
embraced a post-colonial capacity to be with the other, accentuating as it did
a sense of shared common interests and values, even if still limited, and
belonging together.
82
The origins of this enthusiasm are worth tracing. ASEANs emergence into
the international relations limelight reflected the initial Western scholarly
uncertainty that marked the end of the Vietnam War. The period 197590
80
Almonte, Ensuring the ASEAN way, p. 81; Acharya, Ideas, p. 329.
81
Ken Booth, Dare not to know: international relations versus the future, in Ken Booth and Steve Smith,
eds, International relations theory today (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 32849.
82
Kusuma Snitwongse, Meeting the challenges of a changing South-East Asia, in Robert Scalapino,
Seizebura Sato, Jusuf Wanandi and Soo-Joon Han, eds, Regional dynamics: security, political and economic
issues in South-East Asia (Jakarta: Centre for Strategic and International Studies, 1990), p. 40.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 861
David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith
862
witnessed an emerging concern with regionalism at the expense of specialist
area studies, giving rise to what Bruce Cumings called Rimspeak. Rimspeak,
initially, sought to explain Asian development according to the canons of
modernization theory, which looked with curiosity if not disdain upon anyone
who did not privilege the market. Organized into the new inventory, Cumings
noted, were miracle economies in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong,
Malaysia, and Singapore, with honorable mention for Thailand, the Philippines,
Indonesia, and post-Mao (but pre-Tiananmen) China.
83
In this way, Asian
studies formalized the concept of regionalism. Subsequently, during the 1990s, a
developing regionalism adumbrated by notions of strategic culture and multi-
lateralism enabled a collocation of local and Western theorists to articulate the
view that ASEAN states had pioneered the notion of a security community.
84
From this perspective, ASEAN had successfully forged new collective regional
identities through the deliberate creation of, and adherence to (indigenous)
norms, symbols, and habits.
85
Promiscuously assembled from elements of
modernization, post-modernist and multilateral theories, the ASEAN experience
challenged the neorealist preoccupation with anarchy and the inevitability of
war as well as the rationalist and materialist foundations of cooperation assumed
by the neo-liberal institutionalists.
86
Whenever momentum builds behind an intellectual trend, no matter how
incoherent, research grants and career opportunities inexorably follow. As David
Newsom observes, to outsiders much of the process of modern scholarship seems
[and indeed is] incestuous, imbricated in a web of self-promotion.
87
Intel-
lectual endeavour represents not a search for wider meaning but a process
designed to fashion labels and categories intended to gain the kind of academic
identification with a theory or equation that will lead to professional
advancement.
88
This was particularly the case in the international relations of
South-East Asia. Here, voguish theoretical approaches, lubricated by large grants,
promoted a self-fulfilling groupthink where researchers arrive with their
analytical engine as part of their baggage, their chief mission being to feed the
engine the evidence it needs.
89
There is no doubt that, prior to the economic
meltdown, the analytical engine operated at full throttle, producing a disci-
plinary orthodoxy that made it de rigueur to extol the ASEAN way, and a bad
career move to question it.
83
Cumings, Boundary displacement, p. 4.
84
Ken Booth, Security and emancipation, Review of International Studies 17: 4, 1991, pp. 317, 319. See also
Amitav Acharya, Collective identity and conflict management in South-East Asia, in Adler and Barnett,
Security communities, pp. 20713.
85
Acharya, Collective identity, p. 218.
86
Ibid.
87
Newsom, Foreign policy, p. 62.
88
Ibid., p. 63.
89
Chalmers Johnson and E. B. Keehn, A disaster in the making: rational choice and Asian studies, The
National Interest, summer 1994, p. 17.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 862
Is there a Sovietology of South-East Asian studies?
863
Post-modern enthusiasm and the abandonment of academic scepticism
Three further consequences stemmed from this bureaucratization of academe
and the post-Cold War international relations penchant for obscure theorizing
that further distinguished South-East Asia studies from its Sovietological counter-
part.
First, South-East Asian scholars confined their attention almost exclusively to
the regional level, thereby neglecting the domestic and bilateral tensions that
constrained regional behaviour. By contrast, Sovietologists devoted themselves to
uncovering the domestic sources of Soviet conduct. During the Cold War, for
instance, alternative defence theorists like Ken Booth, acknowledged that the
search for cognitive consistency permeated academia. To minimize this problem,
he maintained, we must act as our own devils advocates. This meant that
those who took a more relaxed view of the Soviet threat must remind our-
selves about Soviet ideology, the suppression of human rights, the Gulag and
all those negative aspects of Soviet behaviour which make the prospect of living
together a bumpy prospect.
90
Curiously, however, Booth and his culturally
relativist confrres jettisoned such considerations when they turned their attention
to South-East Asia. Thus, while perfunctorily acknowledging the existence of
internal conflicts in the region, they nevertheless insisted that the end of the
Cold War in South-East Asia led to increased domestic tranquillity and
regional order.
91
This triumph of politically correct hope over scientific rigour
found expression in unalloyed praise for ASEAN and the growth of processes
that embedded conflict management into the culture of [its] members.
92
This enthusiasm for ASEANs conflict management technique explains why
international relations analysts ignored the underlying ethnic and religious
tensions that made a mockery of regional harmony and consensus after 1997.
Their unexamined assumptions of domestic tranquillity and regional order
would have come as something of a surprise to all those being shot, starved or
otherwise oppressed in an authoritarian pact that ran the gamut of repression
from curtailment of free speech and harassment of opposition politicians to child
slavery in Myanmar and genocide in East Timor.
The academic disposition to multilateral region-building had the additional
effect of negating the capacity to weed out false theories.
93
Indeed, the scepti-
cism with which Booth and others greeted inflated projections of the Soviet
threat during the Cold War, and which contributed to the diversity of opinion
within Sovietology, was entirely absent from ASEANology. In an area where
post-colonial theorizing increasingly dominated the field, there developed an
90
Ken Booth, New challenges and old mindsets: ten rules for empirical realists, in Carl G. Jacobsen, ed.,
The uncertain course: new weapons, strategies and mindsets (Oxford: Oxford University Press/SIPRI, 1987),
p. 59.
91
Acharya, The periphery as the core, p. 310.
92
Russell Trood and Ken Booth, Strategic culture and conflict management in the AsiaPacific, in Ken
Booth and Russell Trood, eds, Strategic cultures in the AsiaPacific (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 354.
93
For Karl Popper on the central duty of the scientist, see Popper, The poverty of historicism, p. 133.
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David Martin Jones and Michael L. R. Smith
864
unspoken injunction against scepticism towards the post-colonial regime. Hence,
scholarly enthusiasts of ASEAN multilateralism claimed that while it might be
easy to be sceptical of the ASEAN way, in fact the ASEAN brand of soft
regionalism was a symbol of collective uniqueness and source of considerable
satisfaction and pride for ASEAN members.
94
Second, the problem with much contemporary social science is that post-
Marxist and post-modernist theories often present truth and reality as social
constructs.
95
Such an epistemology restricts open debate by promoting an
extreme form of relativism which holds that objectivity and the ideal of truth
are altogether inapplicable in the social sciences where only success can be
decisive.
96
The preoccupation with deconstructing European Enlightenment
notions of truth and the inauguration of an anti-orientalist discourse that
privileges the subaltern voice enabled a post-colonial orthodoxy to dominate
international relations thinking. The generous disbursement of grants to those
who follow the ASEAN line or its multicultural Western equivalent further
facilitates deference to Asian difference. If money politics corrupts due process
across South-East Asia, an equally disturbing money political science corrupts
the discipline and lends credibility to a bureaucratic managerialism that erodes
scholarly pluralism.
This suffocation of critical enquiry contributed a final defect to the study of
South-East Asia. For scholars, like the governments they studied, increasingly
observed the principle of non-interference. Indifference to country specialism
obscured internal conflicts, intraregime tensions and a variety of domestic religi-
ous and ethnic instabilities. Scholars rationalized this indifference on the modish
grounds that an anachronistic empiricism had vitiated South-East Asia area
studies during the Cold War.
97
Ultimately, what resulted was an intellectual
culture of self-censorship that kept regional studies within tacit and self-
regulated boundaries.
Conclusion
Pronouncing his verdict on Sovietology, Rutland contended that it had failed
to confront the magnitude of its failure, and that in the years after the end of the
Cold War academics were more interested in damage control in order to
preserve their research funding and falling student enrolments. Such behaviour
was not conducive to a frank discussion of the intellectual flaws in the
discipline.
98
Even so, the fact of Rutlands expos of Sovietologys pretensions
at least suggested a discipline ready to accept and respond to criticism.
99
94
Acharya, Collective identity, p. 212.
95
Khoo Kay Kim, US dominating world intellectually, New Straits Times, 16 Oct. 2000.
96
Popper, The poverty of historicism, p. 16.
97
Yuen Foong Khong, Making bricks without straw in the Asia-Pacific?, Pacific Review 10: 2, 1997,
pp. 2945.
98
Rutland, Sovietology, p. 122.
99
Remington, Sovietology, p. 241.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 864
Is there a Sovietology of South-East Asian studies?
865
ASEANology, as we have indicated, shared many of the shortcomings of
Sovietology. Significantly, it did not share a willingness to accept criticism. The
problems of ASEANology, moreover, were largely self-inflicted. Its theoretical
incontinence dates from the end of the Cold War and the assault upon the
realist/empiricist paradigm of international politics. Its constructivist turn towards
allegedly more diverse perceptions of the international system only enveloped
the region in an inspissating intellectual gloom. In practice, it rendered South-
East Asia studies vulnerable to cooption by illiberal regimes.
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to ascribe all the incoherence that arose in
South-East Asia studies to the increasing bureaucratization of South-East Asian
academe. The role of scholarbureaucrats in promoting the ideology of regional
developmentalism was, after all, transparent. The onus consequently fell upon
Western scholars to uphold academic independence. This they signally failed to
do. As a result, ASEANology failed more completely than Sovietology, as
manifested most starkly in its unwillingness even to recognize its failings. Four
years after meltdown and the effective disintegration of ASEAN as a multilateral
engine of regional security, there has been no inquest into the state of the
discipline and only limited appreciation of the regions growing instability. A
distinctive feature of the academic reaction to the events of 1997 is a conveni-
ently Orwellian amnesia about previous panegyrics to the Asian way. For a
post-mortem of South-East Asian international relations would reveal not only
the predictive weakness of social and political scientism but also the extent to
which academe welcomed a progressively sclerotic bureaucratization that played
into the hands of a variety of plausible but deeply authoritarian governments.
In its evolution, moreover, it might be further argued that the South-East
Asian case represents a particularly egregious variety of the problem of incoher-
ence in the study of international relations. IRism generally demonstrates little
capacity for theoretical consistency. As Richard Ashley has noted, international
relations is a language that enables us to shift and manoeuvre, outflank and
charge, turn tail and run, retreat into historical ambiguity, commandeer
resources where we find them, shed one uniform and don another, and return
to fight another day.
100
The evolving Sovietology of South-East Asian
domestic and international politics offers an extreme example of this propensity.
However, if as Karl Popper maintained, we make progress, if and only if we
learn from our mistakes: to recognise our errors and to utilise them critically,
progress in South-East Asian studies would seem to be a somewhat utopian
aspiration.
101
100
Richard Ashley, The achievements of post-structuralism, in Ken Booth, Steve Smith and Marysia Zalewski,
eds, International theory: positivism and beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 240.
101
Popper, The poverty of historicism, p. 87.
INTA77_4_04/Jones 26/9/01, 2:09 pm 865