Democratic staples in an oriental diet

While all the western contributors to this anthology are anxious to disprove Orlando Patterson's belief that "freedom was a peculiarly western value and ideal", the sole Asian, Thanet Aphornsuvan, is not at all squeamish about admitting that "a notion of freedom as a positive social value for the common people" was absent in Thailand.

No less striking is the reluctance of the authors to trace any link between freedom as an historical abstraction and the modern understanding of political rights. True, we have an absorbing and authoritative discussion of the dimensions of freedom - its place in religion, its relationship with rights and duties, and, as Ian Mabbett poses it, the question of "freedom to" and "freedom from" - but it could have been more helpful in understanding present-day conditions. For, until Asia's miracle economies dissolved in misery, individual liberty versus communitarian needs was the subject of passionate debate, Patterson unwittingly providing latter-day Confucianists with a credo that became the defining watershed between East and West.

But first, a warning about generalisations. Asian Freedoms deals only with what I call Chopsticks Asia - a passing mention of Rabindranath Tagore being about the only intimation of any other Asia. There are gaps even in the Sinic fringe, for Malaysia and, more understandably, Singapore are omitted. Other countries are discussed as self-contained units so that though each essay tells us a great deal about social, political and cultural mores, the ten do not add up to a picture of even Chopsticks Asia as a whole.

The political use to which any such examination can be put is worrying. Aphornsuvan might play into the hands of politicians who assert that democracy and human rights are western values, that a measure of authoritarianism is necessary for development, and, finally, that civil rights will automatically follow the full rice bowl. While shrinking from Hegel's view that "the Orientals knew only that one (the ruler) is free" (which this anthology sets out to rebut), Asia's leaders will lap up the 2,400-year-old Chinese belief, cited by W. J. F. Jenner, that "diversity of opinion is inherently bad", a claim that found favour with both Sun Yat-sen and Burma's Aung San who promised, albeit under Japanese influence, that he would tolerate "no nonsense of individualism".

These are presented as exceptions. The consensus is that notwithstanding such evidence, and even without political manifestations, the democratic spirit has always been embedded deep in Asia's psyche. That sounds suspiciously like Pakistan's field marshal Ayub Khan telling a London press conference that representative government was unnecessary for Pakistanis because democracy was inherent in Islam. Not that the claim is without a grain of truth in its wider application. The examination system did establish a meritocracy in China and Vietnam; Asian slavery often approximated to a form of adoption; the absence of a hereditary feudal order gave the peasantry a certain space; and the Buddhist social contract evinces some of the values of civic freedom. But to seize on these nebulous elements in the Asian heritage to insist that a formal commitment to human rights or democratic governance is redundant, smacks of political casuistry.

Other parallels are suggested by Anthony Reid's invocation of a 19th-century writer's mention of "the untamed freedom-loving masses" of Besemah in Indonesia where democracy prevailed "to the point of anarchy" and by James C. Scott's reading of the obsession with disloyalty and treason in pre-colonial Malay texts. The wheel seems to have turned full circle in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Beyond immediacies, the anthology's rationale bears scrutiny. Any discussion of whether Patterson was right to claim that "freedom failed in the non-western world" assumes that it succeeded in the West; indeed, that it has always been integral to western thinking. Not everyone would agree. For Nirad C. Chaudhuri, western democracy began with the American revolution; Amartya Sen more generously traces it to the Enlightenment. Neither concedes an especially hoary provenance. Even Isaiah Berlin "found no convincing evidence or any clear formulation" of individual liberty in the ancient world. Plato's view of Asian despotism cannot be divorced from his other belief that democracy would entrust government to the least educated, least cultured, least steady and most whimsical elements.

This does not invalidate individual essays like Josef Silverstein's moving account of Aung San Suu Kyi's efforts to claim Buddhist legitimacy for her heroic struggle, or Alexander Woodside's illuminating discourse on the "academic democracy" of pre-French Vietnam. But it does affect the superstructure.

Asian Freedoms is a convenient binder with a contemporary ring. But it is not entirely apposite; nor does it provide the right entree to, for instance, Scott's detailed examination of scientific forestry under different systems. The second edition of this book should be able to find a more appropriate, if less catchy, title.

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is editorial consultant, The Straits Times, Singapore, and former editor, The Statesman, Calcutta.