Developmentalism and the Selective Usage of Confucianism in Asia

HumaNetten, 2016

The present special issue of HumaNetten includes four essays about the historical development of the state and polity in Burma, Vietnam, and the archipelagic area east of Java. 1 All four articles examine the historical development of Southeast Asian states in original ways. Specifically, we are interested not in studying these polities in the conventional approach, either in isolation or restricted to a particular period. Building on comparative and regional studies by scholars such as Anthony Reid and Victor Lieberman, our articles focus on historical developments in Southeast Asia while seeking to make fresh and innovative connections and comparisons across periods or across regions. These connections and comparisons illuminate important aspects of Southeast Asian history that have been obscured in much existing scholarship. For example, Michael Charney ventures beyond the Southeast Asian region to compare the systems of transport in premodern and colonial Ghana to those in Burma of similar periods. In his paper, Hans Hägerdal contrasts the development of the small-sized kingdoms and principalities east of Java with that of larger states on mainland Southeast Asia. His focus is on the early modern period but he is able to draw implications for later periods. Tuong Vu's article borrows concepts from studies of central Asia and uses the contrast between China's northern and southern frontiers to explore the synergies between China and Vietnam over the length of their histories. He offers premodern, early modern, and modern examples of Vietnamese imperialism in the paper. Claire Sutherland calls on scholars of contemporary Southeast Asia to transcend the nation-state as an analytical framework. She proposes the concept of "postmodern mandala" as an alternative way to theorize about contemporary Southeast Asian politics, with Vietnam as a test case. While our articles do not cover every polity or every period in Southeast Asia, we believe the papers together make two important contributions to broad scholarship across the region and beyond. First, the papers enhance our knowledge about the differentiated process of integration and consolidation in Southeast Asia. Hägerdal's article shows that the process was disrupted in the archipelagic area east of Java because of European penetration in the

Narratives, Nations and Other World Products in the Making of Global History, 2024

As a concept, development denotes, at the very least, change over time along some kind of progression. Things move upwards and onwards, forwards and not back. As a historical process, the concept could be used as merely a descriptor of the changes in a particular society or relationship, to signify precisely that shift along some kind of agreed-upon metric. However, as with several such concepts, the notion of forward progression through set stages is itself a product of particular historical processes, and for this reason requires some disaggregation. For the purpose of this chapter, we will use ‘development’ to refer to an historical object: the idea and associated practices held by historical actors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in their efforts to describe or compel the movement of societies through stages of progression. We will focus on how the concept emerged in colonial and postcolonial governance and was adopted idiosyncratically in two key sites. Through two related yet contrasting cases, that of the Siamese monarchy and Siam/ Thailand and the Dutch East Indies and independent Indonesia, we will show how the sites of ‘development’ as a concept and aim demonstrate continuities between semi-colonial/monarchical and postcolonial/democratic governance. Furthermore, rather than the practices of development moving unidirectionally from ‘the West’ outwards, we will show how the circulation of these practices mirrored the emergence of nationalism, internal colonization and twentieth-century geopolitics in a region that came to be known as Southeast Asia – partly because of these practices and their implementation.

New Research on Timor-Leste, Proceedings of the Timor-Leste Studies Association Conference, 2012

Jarvis, Darryl S.L. and Toby Carroll (2017), ‘Preface: Development in Asia after the Developmental State,’ in Jarvis, Darryl S.L. and Toby Carroll (eds.), Asia after the Developmental State: Disembedding Autonomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.xvii-xxxviii. DOI 10.1017/9781316480502.001

European Journal of East Asian Studies, 2002

colecção BIBLIOTECA DIPLOMÁTICA all those who endeavoured to carry out research on the region. Thus, for instance, a question which has insistently been faced concerns what has been called "the autonomy of Southeast Asian history 5 ", "the structure of Southeast Asian history 6 ", "the integrity of Southeast Asian history 7 ", or "the structural identities of Southeast Asian civilisations 8 ". The quandary which has been approached in one way or another in all these studies has been that of determining how justified, or even feasible, it is to treat Southeast Asia, from a comparative point of view, on a par with China, India, or, more arguably, Islam. Ultimately, the plight is created by the hypothesis that there is at some level a unity and a cohesion within it which renders it possible for us to envisage it as a whole. If confronted inside out, so to speak, the question is not so easily raised since the ecological diversity of Southeast Asia (peninsulas, islands, seas, rivers, mountains, the contrasts between coast and inland, highlands and lowlands), the multiplicity of peoples and cultures, the variety of religions, the profusion of languages and linguistic families, of economies and of political forms are all factors which clearly distinguish the region from the adjacent ones (China and India) that delimit it. But if looked at inwards from the outside, to retain the metaphor I proposed, the distinctions are not that clear. And this is true from many points of view. No fixation of internal or external limits to the impressionistic image of Southeast Asia which we may spontaneously come up with is by any means obvious-as opposed to India and China, which are both entities which apparently circumscribe regularities that are very marked at the deepest levels of social structures, of shared worldviews, of the cosmologies and eschatologies with which they orchestrate themselves and even in relation to dress, adornments 5 J. R. W. Smail (1961), "On the possibility of an autonomous history of modern Southeast Asia",

Lusotopies, Karthala, Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, 2002

Modern Asian Studies, 2000

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1998

While two Southeast-Asian statesmen, Malaysia's Datuk Seri Mohamad Mahatir 8 and Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew 9 , are initiators and most ardent advocates of this idea, so far there has accumulated a vast body of additional comments, polemics and scholarly contributions from various other sources-Western as well as Asian. 10 Though the center of the discourse lies in Singapore, Malaysia, and, to a lesser extent, in Indonesia 11 , affirmative voices are resonating from Thailand, Myanmar, China, Japan, and South Korea. 12 The discourse has several dimensions. At a regional dimension, it only refers to the Asiapacific region: hence, the discourse on regional identity concerning the ongoing process of regionalization and integration for the sake of cooperation in economic and security matters. 13 These tend to be related to commonalties and affinities between various Asian societies. On another dimension, it can also remain within national boundaries, in the sense of a moral discourse and a rhetoric of self-confidence in the face of the once superior and now morally and economically declining "West". But due to its normative implications, the discourse also gained a global dimension. Emphasizing historical contingency and taking a cultural-relativist perspective, the normative heritage of the (Western) enlightenment and its "liberal" conception of human and civil rights moving the individual into its normative focus, becomes a rather arbitrary choice bare of binding quality for non-Western cultures. From this perspective, emulating Western modernity for them means merely to submit to the "imposition of incompatible values", as one phrase frequently uttered since the 1993-UN Vienna conference of Human Rights puts it. Then, for the first time, in an attempt to define a set of human values apt for "regional particularities", an Asian alternative to normative universalism was proposed. This is embedded into a conventional argumentation of developmental pragmatism giving priority to economic over socio-political development, and an increasingly self-confident Third-World anti-imperialism that denounces normative criticism of Western countries for systematic human rights violations and the 7 And among the ASEAN, particularly Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia in contrast to Thailand and the Philippines, in which democratization is under way. 8 e.g.