Romantic history painting commemorating French Revolution
Source: Wikipedia
Social contract theory is about what kind of relationship a government should have with its citizens. In the academic discipline of International Relations, this is usually conveyed in Hobbesian terms, whereby citizens forego aspects of their liberty in exchange for security. In other words, it is a rational, transactional relationship. However, in his famous treatise on the social contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau described ‘government’ as an expression of the general will of the population.[1] In this telling, the social contract is an emotional bond. Governments are not only meant to fulfil material needs but also to embody the emotional character of the people.
Thus, there is a tension inherent in the concept of a social contract—governments must look after the impulsive and emotional wants of the populace (what, in the individual, Freud called the id) as well as their rational and objective needs (in Freud’s terms, the ego).
Befitting its geographical and population size, and ethnic diversity, the Asian space displays a wider spectrum of ways in which this relationship is played out. These range from the strongman approach of leaders—such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, with his death squads and boasts that he personally killed suspected criminals,[2] and Kim Jong-un in North Korea, with his staged executions and 200,000 political prisoners in re-education camps—to the more bureaucratic authoritarianism of China and its one party rule, the democratic authoritarianism of Singapore, and on to the more liberal democratic systems of Japan and India.
It would be trite even to attempt to posit a single Asian approach to this dilemma given the region’s diversity. However, there are certain trends emerging which can be identified that will have an impact on the way the social contract is managed in Asia. The four we will explore in this essay are the return of authoritarianism, the impact of technology, continuing inequality and urbanisation. Each of these is likely to challenge existing structures of governance in the region and test the prevailing notions of social contract in Asian states.
The return of authoritarianism
In the hubris of the immediate post-Cold War era, Francis Fukuyama famously declared the “end of history.”[3] Liberal democracy and economics had supposedly triumphed and faced no foreseeable challenge from rival systems. Although a few diehard autocrats remained, most states were liberalising and moving to democratic forms of government. By the mid-1990s, authoritarian structures of governance were in the minority.[4] The assumption was that this rump would quietly decline and whither. Yet, recent years have seen a resurgence in authoritarianism.
The problem was that whilst the number of electoral democracies globally increased to a high of 64% in 2006, the following eight years saw an annual decline in political rights and civil liberties.[5] Even though more countries were holding elections, the extent to which this actually amounted to a free contest was severely limited. Commentators coined the terms ‘illiberal democracies’ and ‘semi-authoritarianism’ to describe this phenomenon.[6] Thus, despite the apparent spread of democratic governance in recent decades, according to Freedom House, more countries in the Asia-Pacific region are not free (42%) than free (38%).[7]
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