"CEAC Commentary" introduces news analyses andopinions in Japan on the concept of an East AsianCommunity, but they do not represent the views ofCEAC as an institution.
September 12, 2007

Community Building in East Asia: In Search of Common
ValuesBy FUKUOKA Yuki
In the process of building an ‘East Asian Community’, the issue of creating
common values that member states agree on cannot be avoided. However, there has
been no clear regional consensus as to exactly what sort of values should be explicitlyembraced. Take ‘democracy’ for example – though Asian states may agree on the ideaof respecting democracy in principle, when it comes to the question of its precise
meaning and the means to achieve it, Asian nations tend to push for the idea ofacknowledging a diversity of democratic forms. In this respect, the distinction between‘Asian’ human rights and ‘Western’ human rights has often been pointed out, as has theidea of exploring an ‘Asian’ version of democracy that is rooted in the various contexts
particular to Asia. Simply adding the adjective of ‘Asian’, however, does not help us
have a clearer understanding of what we are talking about, and usually results increating further ambiguous concepts open to multiple interpretations that are not a
useful guide when it comes to offering direction on where the process of community
building should be heading.
At the same time, it should also be noted that the literature on democracy, anddemocratisation, has largely been dominated by supposedly ‘universal’ theories
developed out of the ‘particular’ experience of the West. Here, democracy essentiallyrefers to a Western-style liberal democracy which is driven by a naïve hope that it hasuniversal potential. It is often implicitly argued that regardless of local needs, habits andtraditions, economic development inevitably produces the social forces that drive a
democratic transformation of the political system. Whenever this model does not workin Asia, special factors are sometimes pointed out in order to explain, often with anoutcry, such ‘deviant cases’ where liberal democracy has ‘stagnated’ or been ‘rolled
back’ with little consideration given to the possibility of other kinds of democraticevolution. What is missing from this perspective is an attempt to develop a morenuanced understanding of what has actually been happening in Asia in terms of thetransformation of political systems and where they are heading. In fact, the experienceof Asia to date would seem to suggest that Western-style liberal democracy is one of theleast likely outcomes. It is hardly surprising, then, that democracy activists exporting
liberal democracy have often encountered much resistance in the region.
In relation to the issue of common values in Asia, those ‘deviant cases’ should, Ithink, receive greater attention, rather than being casually dismissed as ‘exceptions’ tothe rule. It would be more sensible to get away from a blind deductive application of‘universal’ theories, which see all countries as traveling on the same historical path, andrevisit the experience of political change in Asia through an empirical and inductiveinvestigation. Through such an exercise, one may be able to gain a clearer
understanding of what democracy, and hence democratisation, is all about in the region.

If that can be achieved, then light may be shed on the direction in which the region isheaded, so facilitating the process of community building.
In this respect, a statement by an Indonesian academic at an international
conference, which I recently attended, may be helpful. Though there has been noconsensus as to the precise meaning of democracy in Asia, he argued, the bottom line isto create a situation where ‘no one is tortured or raped by the state security apparatus.’
The approach of establishing a ‘bottom line’ which member states can agree on andabide by, in terms of what democracy and democratisation stand for, and workingtogether not to fall short of that target might perhaps be worth considering as the firststep. Given that community building in East Asia is about ‘integration with diversity’,such a patient but still steady approach might perhaps be a more desirable way forward.
(This is the English translation of an article written by Mr. FUKUOKA Yuki, PhD candidate at
the University of Bristol, which originally appeared on the BBS “Hyakka-Somei” of CEAC on
August 25, 2007.)