Abolishing Illiteracy and Upgrading Culture: Adult Education and Revolutionary Hegemony in Socialist Laos

ABSTRACT

This article examines the monopolisation of political space by the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, before and after 1975. Together with coercive measures, the Marxist-Leninist regime consolidated rule by establishing and disseminating new concepts of state power, social responsibility and socialist subjectivity, which formed the basis of a radical form of revolutionary hegemony. The Party propagated a new rhetoric of rule through mandated activities including village meetings, co-operatives and a much expanded but poor-quality mass education system. This article examines the system of adult education, where the Party sought to eradicate illiteracy and “upgrade culture” among economically productive 15 to 45-year-olds. Motivated by both politics and pedagogy, the Party imported this system from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the 1960s before institutionalising it after 1975. The resulting organisational structure fanned the rhetoric of rule across the national territory in an extensive manner that reached the illiterate “masses” in large numbers. Even where the programme encountered material shortages and apathy, mandated participation in adult education propagated the vocabulary and grammatical structure of socialist Laos, providing a codebook for how to participate in socialist society.     

Legitimation of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party: Socialism,Chintanakan Mai (New Thinking) and Reform

ABSTRACT

To date, scholars of authoritarianism have paid much attention to the use of democratic institutions in dictatorships to mitigate threats from both internal and external ruling elites, to co-opt and divide opposition and to solve commitment problems among the ruling elite. However, there have been no in-depth studies of legitimacy in an authoritarian regime. In communist states, opposition and dissent are addressed not through co-optation but exclusion. By contrast, communist parties attach great value for their survival to obtaining legitimacy from the masses. This article argues that the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) has endeavoured to acquire legitimacy since the foundation of the regime through a dialogical configuration of economic reform and socialist ideology. Economic reform and ideological legitimisation always go together, interacting with each other: economic reform requires ideological modification, and ideology defines the framework of reform. In Laos, this paradoxical configuration is necessary for the LPRP to maintain legitimacy while concurrently pursuing an ideal of socialism and reality of economic reform. In making this argument, this article reassesses the nature and significance of chintanakan mai (new thinking), which was not a formal reform policy, as often assumed, but a temporary slogan for promoting economic reforms.     

Party,State and the Control of Information in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic: Secrecy,Falsification and Denial

ABSTRACT

Since taking control of Laos in 1975, the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party and the government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) have relied heavily on secrecy, denial and information management and control to govern. These tools have been used for presenting the Party and state as united in support of the country’s one-party communist political system and as being the only real political option. This article presents a number of examples of the particular ways the Party and state have done this. The following are discussed: the little-known rift between the “Red Prince” Chao Souphanouvong and Kaysone Phomvihane; conflict between the Lao PDR and Vietnam and China; the anti-Lao PDR insurgency; calls for political change via the “Social Democratic Club” in 1990; unsuccessful student protests for political change in 1999 and 2009; the forced disappearance of Sombath Somphone; and recent attempts to control social media to publicise anti-government viewpoints. Secrecy, falsification and information management and control have important implications, both with regard to conducting research about Laos and in relation to how outsiders tend to analytically frame the study of Party and state.     

Opposition Coordination in Singapore’s 2015 General Elections

Abstract

Recent political science scholarship suggests that when opposition political parties are able to coalesce into a united coalition against an authoritarian regime, they will perform better in authoritarian elections, and can more credibly bargain with the regime for liberalising reforms. Yet, most of this literature pays little attention to the variety of ways in which opposition parties cooperate with each other. Drawing on the literature on the bargaining model of war, the author sketches out a theoretical framework to explain how opposition parties coordinate to develop non-competition agreements. Such agreements entail opposition parties bargaining over which political party should contest or withdraw in which constituencies to ensure straight fights against the dominant authoritarian incumbent in each electoral district. The author then applies this framework to explain opposition coordination in Singapore’s 2015 general elections, focusing on the conflict between the Workers’ Party and the National Solidarity Party.     

Ferrets in the Caribbean: Britain,Grenada and the Curious Case of the Armoured Cars

Abstract

When the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement seized power in Grenada in March 1979 they set about securing and defending their ‘revolution’ against the threat of a countercoup organised by the deposed Prime Minister Eric Gairy. Military aid was quick to arrive from expected allies, namely Cuba and Guyana. Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop also requested arms from Britain and the United States. The People’s Revolutionary Government’s (PRG’s) ties to Cuba and evasiveness over election plans ruled out the US providing any support. Britain remained more open-minded about the PRG’s intentions. Using recently declassified British government documents, this article will examine London’s deliberations over supplying armoured cars to Grenada. It argues that Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials focused on the bigger picture of steering the PRG away from Cuba at the cost of considering how the sale of the armoured cars to the PRG would appear to a wider audience and that the PRG’s increasingly authoritarian behaviour ultimately vetoed the sale.     

Coming in from the Cold: Grenada and Cuba since 1983

Abstract

The Grenada Revolution’s radical course was stamped by the bold turn to Cuba in April 1979. Cuban commitment to Maurice Bishop’s regime was crucial to its consolidation. In 1983 counter-revolution and invasion ruptured Grenada–Cuba ties and damaged Havana’s relations with Caribbean Community states. Since the demise of the Cold War, Havana’s survival strategy has prioritised regional integration and cooperation in the Americas. In the Anglophone Caribbean, Grenada has been at the centre of this rapprochement since 1993. Despite Washington’s disapproval, Grenada champions expanded ties with socialist Cuba. The rekindled alliance brings tangible mutual benefits and validates the strategy of South–South cooperation advocated by Maurice Bishop’s People’s Revolutionary Government and New Jewel Movement.     

The Malay Community: Voting Trends and Issues

Abstract

This article attempts to analyse the reasons for the Malay community’s seeming support for the People’s Action Party (PAP) government in Singapore, in spite of online discontent that was expressed towards the party immediately prior to the elections. The article makes three main arguments: first, that the reasons explaining the community’s support for PAP are similar to other Singaporeans, such as the death of founding leader Lee Kuan Yew and the risk-averse nature of the electorate; second, that institutional impediments exist with regard to the community that heavily favour the government; and third, that the main opposition party, the Workers’ Party, has not been able to present itself as a viable alternative to PAP for the community in terms of either quality of candidates or ideas for governance.     

Singapore Beyond Ethnicity: Rethinking the Group Representative Constituency Scheme

Abstract

The resounding victory of the People’s Action Party (PAP) in the 2015 Singapore general elections surprised many observers. Several observers had considered the previous election, held in 2011, to be the new normal in Singapore politics, with the Workers’ Party being the first opposition party to win a Group Representative Constituency (GRC). Instead of its popular vote sliding from 60% in 2011, the PAP secured almost a 10% increase in its fortunes. Analysts have spoken about PAP’s hard work and the opposition’s failures when commenting on the ruling party’s success; this article, however, points out how Singapore’s electoral system, especially the GRC, continues to favour the ruling party and why it should be rethought. Introduced in 1988, the scheme ensures minority candidates (non-Chinese) are voted into parliament. Candidates contesting in a GRC form a team of Members of Parliament (MPs) with at least one minority candidate in each team. This article argues that the 2015 election results proves that Singaporeans no longer vote along ethnic lines, and non-Chinese MPs have comfortably led the GRCs and won in Single Member Constituencies. To be sure, the GRC scheme does new PAP candidates a disfavour: it weakens their legitimacy with voters, since they remain under the shadows of senior PAP candidates and cannot win elections on their own accord.     

Gender Equality (And its Absence) in Singapore’s 2015 General Elections

Abstract

With the dust settled after Singapore’s 2015 parliamentary elections, the only aspect pundits and Singaporean politics watchers could agree on was that the People’s Action Party’s comeback from its performance at the 2011 elections, although not of Lazarus proportions, was most certainly unexpected. While the result of the 2015 elections has gone through several post-election analytical mills, what has been oddly absent in such analyses is a discussion of gender in Singaporean politics. This article considers the relationship between gender and Singaporean politics through the experience of the 2015 election and its results. It shows that while Singapore has moved some way towards assuaging the demands of liberal feminists for greater representation in the political sphere, much more has to be done in order for gender equality to be achieved. The article argues for the Group Representation Constituency method of electing parliamentarians to be adapted to ensure a greater number of female parliamentarians while a quota system may be required for cabinet to be truly representative of the female demographic of Singapore.     

Clientelism and Control: PAP’s Fight for Safety in GE2015

Abstract

This article looks at the reasons the People’s Action Party (PAP) secured its decisive victory in the 2015 general election. The discussion examines the impact of the campaign and pre-election period on voting behaviour. While the opposition’s performance before and during the campaign reactivated its core supporters, the PAP’s control of the political narrative, rejuvenation of its grassroots machinery and effective use of resources provided an advantage that was instrumental in their electoral success. Most Singaporeans had decided how they would vote before the campaign began. Despite perceptions that the election was about the economy and the nationalist rhetoric associated with Singapore’s 50th anniversary and the passing of statesman Lee Kuan Yew, the argument in the paper suggests that the 2015 election provides insights into the breadth of clientelist politics in Singapore and how important state patronage and the control of the state are for holding on to political power in the city-state.     

Electoral rules and manufacturing legislative supermajority: evidence from Singapore

Electoral authoritarian regimes usually preserve the dominance of the ruling party through electoral fraud, violence and intimidation. This paper focuses on the subtler forms of manipulation that undermine the electoral integrity and democratic outcomes. Specifically, we examine how an unusual electoral rule, involving multimember districts elected through plurality bloc voting for party slates, exaggerates the legislative seat shares of the People’s Action Party (PAP) in Singapore. This rule, used also by other electoral authoritarian regimes, facilitates the manipulation of district magnitude and gerrymandering, especially the ‘stacking’ form, to produce a large disproportionality which distorts the seats–votes linkage. It operates in an undemocratic fashion by precluding the opposition from gaining anything but token seats as long as the PAP remains the plurality-winning party. The importance of this electoral rule and its manipulation has been overlooked in current work that emphasises redistributive strategies or coercion to repress electoral competition.     

Proliferation of neopatrimonial domination in Turkey

ABSTRACT

Literature on Turkey’s post-2011 authoritarian turn – especially after the eruption of the 2013 nationwide Gezi Protests – adopts modern concepts such as ‘dictatorship’, ‘authoritarianism’, ‘totalitarianism’, ‘one-party government’, ‘party-state fusion’, and even ‘fascism’ mainly in order to pin down the nature of the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Turkish acronym) or depict the current character of Turkey’s regime. Through engaging the pre-modern concept of neopatrimonialism, which is derived from Max Weber’s concept of patrimonialism, this paper argues that Turkey’s encounter with authoritarianism is deeply associated with the proliferation of neopatrimonial domination, into which the legacy of patronage politics, fracture of security power, and the metastasis of crony capitalism have been conflated. This article argues that neopatrimonial features have always, to a degree, marked state-society relations in Turkey. Furthermore, this article suggests neopatrimonial characteristics started to dominate Turkey’s modern legal structure under the AKP, which led to a state crisis culminating in the 2016 attempted coup. However, despite the fact that neopatrimonialism cannot be argued as a pathological deviation from modern-legal domination, this paper concludes that tension exists between the crony capitalism-based economic model of neopatrimonalism and Turkey’s decades-long market-based capitalism.     

Singapore’s 2015 General Election: Explaining PAP’s Resounding Win

Abstract

While Singapore’s 15th general election came about as expected, the ensuing results did not. In view of the opposition’s performance in the 2011 general election and the general sense that the ruling party had done well despite its performance being anything but sterling, the results were somewhat shocking. Even the leaders of the ruling party were caught by surprise at the party’s ability to garner 70% of the valid votes, 10% more than in the previous election. While many factors played a role, it was the opposition parties that lost the election rather than the ruling party that won it. Most of the opposition parties were rejected by the voters on grounds of not being worthy of support. The leading opposition party, the Workers’ Party, also suffered as many voters feared that it might perform too well to the detriment of the ruling party. In the end, the 2015 general elections strengthened the one-party-dominant state in Singapore and the quest for greater political representation was placed on the back burner.     

Translating the State: Ethnic Language Radio in the Lao PDR

ABSTRACT

The nation-building project of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic has been challenged by the task of uniting the multi-ethnic country under its political ideology. The Lao National Radio broadcasts in the Khmu and Hmong languages are the only official voice of minority languages and provide insights on how political messages are sent to the population. In their creation of programming material, the broadcasters must translate the socialist ideology of the Communist Party into language that is politically correct and culturally acceptable. In the process, they are creating a political register in the two languages that is heavily influenced by the linguistic structures of Lao. This article examines these two broadcasts to see how language use at the radio effects the message that is delivered to the listeners, enhancing the calls for mobilisation by teaching the people a new political language reflected not only in terms of lexicon, but also in the syntax and phonology of their translations. The result is a way of speaking that crosses ethno-linguistic boundaries to reinforce the control of the state.     

“Neo-Sultanistic Tendencies:” The Trajectory of Civil-Military Relations in Cambodia

Abstract

This study examines the evolution of civilian control in Cambodia and its impact upon that country’s security sector reform efforts. It argues that Cambodia has witnessed a historically entrenched path dependence of civil-military relations, whereby ruling personalities and parties have consecutively dominated subservient, authoritarian militaries. Today security forces appear as a partisan, corporate arm of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). While this has ensured civilian control, it is not an institutionalized form of control. Instead Prime Minister Hun Sen has personalized supremacy over security forces through what might be termed “neo-sultanistic tendencies.” Yet how have Cambodia’s civil-military relations evolved? What is the current state of civilian control and security sector reform efforts? What is the future of civil-military relations? This analysis addresses these questions.     

Paradoxes of electoral authoritarianism: the 2015 Ethiopian elections as hegemonic performance

The 2015 elections in Ethiopia had a predictable outcome, showing an entrenched system of one-party dominance that self-referentially enacts the political order created by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) since 1991. EPRDF spokespersons continued to defend the party’s hegemony as inevitable, grounded in a logic of technocratic authority and with reference to ‘stability’ and ‘development’. This paper describes the electoral process not in the light of democracy theory but of hegemonic governance theory. Elections seem to have lost relevance in Ethiopia as a means of political expression and are only important as a performance of hegemonic governance and as ‘global impression management’ – showing state skills in securing a smooth electoral process as a major organisational feat in itself. Contradictions that the political process creates between the Ethiopian party-state and domestic constituencies, and between the attitudes/policies of certain donor countries, are downplayed or avoided, but problematic in the long run.     

Transnational cooperation of Turkish political parties as an ineffective tool of Europeanization

This paper investigates the impact transnational cooperation with European Union (EU) partners has had on Turkish political parties – the ruling Justice and Development Party and the Republican People’s Party. Two main platforms of transnational cooperation, i.e., affiliation with political families in the European Parliament and the workings of the EU–Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee, are scrutinized. The article posits that transnational cooperation with partners on a European level has had a limited – if any – socialization effect on Turkish political organization. This stems mainly from ideological divergences between Turkish political parties and their European counterparts, EU scepticism which permeates political elites in Turkey as well as rising anti-Turkish sentiments within the EU establishment.     

习近平关于加强党的政治建设的理论探析——基于《摆脱贫困》的研究

习近平在宁德地区工作期间大力推进闽东地区经济发展、脱贫致富,同时也十分重视抓党的政治建设,强调必须坚持马克思主义的指导地位,增强为人民服务的党性观念;加强党的政治领导,充分发挥党组织的核心作用;从严治党,清廉从政,把廉政建设引向深入;坚持走群众路线,练好密切联系群众这个基本功。习近平在宁德期间关于党的政治建设的理论思考,对于当前中国共产党加强党的政治建设具有十分重要的时代价值。     

Putting the Chinese State in its Place: A March from Passive Revolution to Hegemony

The Chinese party-state has been depicted in three major forms by the existing studies – the authoritarian state, developmental state and corporatist state. These depictions, however, only offer a partial understanding of the Chinese party-state and have failed to grasp its totality. Drawing upon the theoretical insights of Antonio Gramsci, this article contends that Chinese economic reform inaugurated in 1978 has been a top-down passive revolution and that, after three decades of reform, the role of the Chinese state has been changing from steering the country’s passive revolution to establishing capitalist hegemony. However, it should be noted that although the Chinese state has been undergoing a hegemonic transformation, capitalist hegemony has not been unambiguously established in the country. Some workers have given consent to the ruling class’s leadership, but a segment of workers has been able to transgress hegemony to formulate a radical critique of capitalists and the state. The transition to hegemony in China is a chaotic and tumultuous process of class struggles between the ruling class and the working class.     

Authoritarian legitimation: assessing discourses of legitimacy in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

ABSTRACT

What are the sources of authoritarian persistence in Central Asia? This study explores the argument that authoritarian regimes persist through effective authoritarian legitimation. Drawing on the theory and analysis of discourse, it develops an approach to authoritarian legitimation and examines discursive appeals to legitimacy by the Kazakh and Uzbek presidents. The study also assesses the effectiveness of the presidential discourses of legitimacy for public perception of the governing regimes in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. This research shows that by defining what constitutes legitimate power and presenting political rule as consistent with this definition, authoritarian governments can foster certain modes of reasoning and evaluation among citizens, and create possibilities for their acceptance of the regime as ‘right’ or ‘proper’.