As we survey the world's ideological horizon after the collapse of communism, it is clear that there is one potential competitor to Western liberal democracy whose strength and legitimacy is growing daily. This alternative is not fundamentalist Islam, but rather the soft authoritarianism said to exist in Japan, Singapore and other of the region's economically vibrant states.
While Japan and South Korea may formally share the West's system of constitutional democracy, their societies are, it is argued, ordered according to inegalitarian group hierarchies that emphasize conformity to group interests over individual rights. In Asia, it is argued, capitalism has become far more universal than democracy, and countries there have found a way to reconcile market economics with a kind of paternalistic authoritarianism that persuades rather than coerces.This alternative, in the view of such proponents as Singapore's former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, comes more naturally to Asian societies than Western liberal democracy, since it builds on Asia's shared Confucian traditions.
It is clear that Asia's postwar economic success is the chief factor legitimizing the region's soft authoritarianism; unlike either fundamentalist Islam or communism, this alternative can be the underpinning of a thoroughly modern, technologically based society by promoting a highly disciplined and educated work force.
But the advantages of such a society lie as much in the moral realm as in the economic, because if there is any broadly felt sense of social malaise in the United States and other Western societies today, it has to do with the loss of community from the breakdown of the family, the absence of any meaningful sense of local attachment and the fragmentation of national purpose.
American workers do not have to sing their company song in the morning, but they feel the loss of a common purpose in impersonal neighborhoods fractured by violence and crime. With their stress on group identity, Asian societies have in a sense already realized the communitarian ideal praised by New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and a host of other American politicians.
Nonetheless, before we get carried away with visions of a Pacific century based on the soft authoritarian ideal, we should stop to consider some of its problems. In the first place, it is a tremendous oversimplification to speak of a single Asian alternative or a uniform Confucian inheritance affecting all states in the region. While Japan is a far more conformist society than the United States, it is far more individualistic than it was 45 years ago, or than Singapore is today.
As countries mature economically, they tend to produce increasingly well-educated middle classes that are connected to the world's marketplace of ideas. It is no accident that Asia's three most economically developed societies - Japan, Taiwan and South Korea - are also the most Westernized in terms of political institutions because citizens of prosperous middle-class societies begin to demand a variety of other goals beyond economic growth, such as recognition of their status and political participation.
Lee Kuan Yew may think that Singaporeans are one happy family, deferential to his wise and benevolent leadership. But they are just off the farm. Will they remain childishly obedient in another generation or two?
The second problem with Asia's group-oriented alternative is that it is ultimately based on irrational distinctions between human communities, and leads to conflict among them. All strong communities must be based on some form of exclusivity. Indeed, the stronger the community, the more pronounced its exclusiveness.
Ultimately, the result is intolerance of outsiders in domestic politics, and frequently nationalism of an aggressive sort in international relations.
Japan's well-known lack of tolerance for things non-Japanese could someday become a serious economic and political liability because, like any advanced economy, Japan cannot export all low-wage jobs and faces a critical labor shortage in the next generation.
Unlike the United States, however, Japan is poorly suited to absorb an influx of foreigners, whether they be poor Filipinos or Pakistanis or well-to-do Americans.
The final question raised by the Asian alternative is whether, in the long run, human beings are really made happy by the sacrifice of their individuality to larger communities.
Clearly, all human societies must find some balance between group and individual interests. Asian critics of contemporary American society are undoubtedly right when they criticize the absolute primacy of individual rights over collective duties, reflected in its litigiousness, in the divorce rate, in the inability of local communities to protect themselves from crime or take care of the poor, and in the continuing adversarial relationship that exists between labor and management, government and the private sector, and so on.
But if American freedom is carried to an extreme, the conformity that exists in Japan and other Asian societies can be stultifying and ultimately destructive of those values that makes a human life worth living.
Today's Japanese live in a society that is in certain ways as regimented, conformist and inflexible as any in the former communist bloc, imposed not by a police state but by social convention. They work extraordinarily long hours to earn one of the lowest standards of living in the developed world, and have little choice in what they can buy, where they can live, and how they can seek recourse when wronged.
Asian societies subject their citizens to what Tocqueville called the tyranny of the majority, whose ultimate consequence is to prevent people from growing into adults capable of self-mastery. Perhaps the social security that such a society offers its members is really what human beings want. But if there are in fact universal characteristics of human nature, one would think that Asians would eventually revolt against a life of such limited horizons.
This is all the more the case for more overt repression. Apologists for the present regime in Beijing appeal to the Confucian authoritarian idea to justify their actions, as if the Chinese hated police-state brutality less than Poles, Argentines or Koreans.
Asia, therefore, would seem to be at an important turning point. And it is possible to imagine two very different political futures for the region. Asia could remain on the path it has followed for the past century, gradually democratizing along lines familiar to the West as Asian societies develop economically.
Or there could be a sharp discontinuity in the region's political development, with Asians of the next generation becoming more open and hostile in their rejection of Western liberal democracy.
What happens in Japan will set the trend for the rest of Asia, and one can already hear voices in that country arguing that what Japan has brought to modernity from its own culture is more significant than anything adapted from the West.
The Asian alternative would not appear to be exportable outside of culturally Confucian areas, and would therefore not pose the same kind of messianic threat that communism did. It is, nonetheless, a development of great moment to mankind as a whole, since its occurrence could lay the groundwork for future political conflict, both between Asian states and the West, but also within Asia itself.
1992 New Perspectives Quarterly
Distributed by L.A. Times Syndicate