Recently, authors Dan Slater and Joseph Wong published From Development to Democracy: The Transformation of Modern Asia to explain why democracy emerged in some East Asian countries but not others.
The two authors examined twelve countries, all originally military dictatorships. Four became democracies—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia. Japan became a democracy after World War II because the United States decreed it would become one. The other three became democracies when their military regimes came to believe it was in their own best interest to push for elections, and because they believed they would win. These countries had good economies and well-developed institutions to keep their popular support high. In the other countries (Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Vietnam, and China), the regimes either did not enjoy popular support and so never took the risk or they took the risk of elections and then reversed course—and thus never became democracies.
In my research for World Leadership: How Societies Become Leaders and What Future Leading Societies Will Look Like, I conducted a similar examination. I focused on the Middle East, and the Arab Spring in particular. Like Slater and Wong, I found the role of institutions to be critical, but for a different reason. Institutions help individuals shift from regime loyalty and to a nationalistic mindset. Only societies that possessed a nationalistic mindset and an institutional military were positioned to become democracies. Only one of six rebellions during the Arab Spring led to a democracy. In both geographies, there was pressure to move to democracy. In the Arab Spring, it came from the people. In East Asia, it came from either the people (South Korea’s uprisings) or foreign pressure (US pressure on Taiwan). Without pressure, the regimes did not willingly risk losing power.
In East Asia, the militaries were the regimes, so the decision whether to become democratic was theirs. In the Middle East, the militaries and the regimes were distinct, so the decision whether to become democratic came down to where their loyalty resided–with the regime or the people. In either case, a nationalistic population and institutions set the stage.
Source:
Warren Cohen, “Why So Few East Asian Nations are Democracies,” Washington Post, 4 Dec 2022, B8.
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