Author: Benjamin Reilly

Democracy is a difficult subject for Asia.

Asian leaders may no longer advocate ‘Asian values’, but they still tend to shy away from discussing the internal politics of their neighbours. And when they do, they almost never talk about it in terms of democracy.

Today’s Bali Democracy Forum, an Indonesian initiative which will be attended by the governments of all East Asian nations, including China and other assuredly non-democracies, will do exactly that.

Co-chaired by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, it represents an ambitious step to place democracy squarely on Asia’s regional agenda.

This will not be easy. But it is well past due.

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Author: Benjamin Reilly

East Asia contains three of the world’s semi-presidential democracies (as pointed out in the latest APEC Economies Newsletter here) : Taiwan, Mongolia, and East Timor. Each of these countries is an unusual case of democratisation: Taiwan is one of East Asia’s famous ‘tiger’ economies and the world’s only Sinitic democracy, but faces an ongoing crisis of nationhood; Mongolia is one of the few unambiguous cases of a successful transition to democracy and a market economy in the post-Communist world; while East Timor is both Asia’s poorest nation and its newest democracy. Prior to their democratic transitions, each was also under the influence of a large foreign power — be it Russia in relation to Mongolia, Indonesia in East Timor, or China’s claim to sovereignty in relation to Taiwan. This is not a propitious starting point for a transition to democracy; indeed, in different ways, each country seemed to lack some of the essential preconditions for successful democratisation.

Nonetheless, each has succeeded to the extent that successive free elections and peaceful changes of power have now occurred.As part of their transitions to democracy, East Timor, Mongolia and Taiwan each chose semi-presidential constitutions. Semi-presidentialism is an increasingly popular constitutional model which combines a directly elected president with significant powers as well as a prime minister chosen by the legislature. France and Portugal are long-standing examples, along with many new democracies in Eastern Europe and Southern Africa. In Asia, East Timor, Mongolia and Taiwan are all clearly semi-presidential in the sense of having ‘a popularly elected, fixed-term president existing alongside a prime minister and cabinet who are responsible to parliament’.

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Author: Benjamin Reilly (from opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal)

History has a funny way of repeating itself. In a little-reported development last month, Japan offered to contribute peacekeepers to the Australian-led stabilization mission in the Solomon Islands—the site of some of the fiercest fighting between Japanese and Allied forces of the Pacific campaign in World War Two. While the prospect of Japanese troops returning to Guadalcanal may raise eyebrows on both sides of the Pacific, this is a positive development: It signals Japan’s willingness to cooperate with Australia and other liberal democracies in securing regional stability—and to balance the growing weight of China.

Japan’s offer follows from the annual Trilateral Security Dialogue between the U.S., Japan and Australia, as well as the Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation between Australia and Japan signed in March 2007.

Help is certainly needed in the South Pacific. The Solomon Islands government collapsed in 2002, necessitating armed intervention from Australia and other neighbours. Fiji still has not recovered from its 2006 coup, Papua New Guinea remains volatile, and deep-seated problems of weak governance, conflict and corruption afflict much of the region. For this reason alone, Japan’s willingness to re engage in the Pacific Islands should be encouraged.

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