Philippines' Duterte: Neither Trump, Nor A Lee Kuan Yew

MANILA, Philippines -- Similar to Lee Kuan Yew, Duterte can become a good leader by not only inspiring discipline and diligence but also investing in a meritocratic, clean and effective state that fulfills its basic functions in an efficient and sustainable manner.
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Philippines' president-elect Rodrigo Duterte speaks during a press conference in Davao City, in southern island of Mindanao on May 26, 2016. Explosive incoming Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has launched a series of obscenity-filled attacks on the Catholic Church, branding local bishops corrupt 'sons of whores' who are to be blamed for the nation's fast-growing population. / AFP / MANMAN DEJETO (Photo credit should read MANMAN DEJETO/AFP/Getty Images)
Philippines' president-elect Rodrigo Duterte speaks during a press conference in Davao City, in southern island of Mindanao on May 26, 2016. Explosive incoming Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has launched a series of obscenity-filled attacks on the Catholic Church, branding local bishops corrupt 'sons of whores' who are to be blamed for the nation's fast-growing population. / AFP / MANMAN DEJETO (Photo credit should read MANMAN DEJETO/AFP/Getty Images)

MANILA, Philippines -- "[A]ll men of sense," one of America's most imaginative founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, once said, "will agree in the necessity of an energetic executive." Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines' most popular mayor, was just elected to the presidency with the highest number of votes in the Southeast Asian country's history. And his legions of supporters -- who relish the provincial mayor's off-the-cuff honesty and celebrate his unmatched bravado against the establishment -- fervently believe that they may have elected not only the country's first president from the southern island of Mindanao, but also, perhaps, its most energetic so far.

But what can we expect from the new president? Does Duterte resemble any contemporary leader, providing some clues into his governance style as a head of state? Recently, Karen Davila, one of the country's most celebrated journalists, asked me whether I see similarities between Duterte, on one hand, and Donald Trump and Lee Kuan Yew, on the other. My answer? Let Duterte be his own man, let him set a new standard of leadership. After all, he faces a set of very unique challenges that neither the American colossus nor tiny Singapore have ever faced.

It must be said that Duterte is absolutely no Trump, the bigot who has openly slandered one underprivileged minority after other, while showing little appreciation of the complexities of 21st century global politics. In contrast, Duterte, who has embraced his Muslim and Christian roots, boasts decades of experience in an actual political realm -- not some phony reality show. Unlike the neo-mercantilist Trump, who belongs more to the 19th century age of empires if not the "Game of Thrones," Duterte has also exhibited a particularly savvy understanding of regional politics, including the South China Sea disputes. (See my articles for Foreign Affairs and Brookings Institution, inter alia).

Nonetheless, one can't deny Duterte's similar penchant for provocative statements and, not to mention, uncanny media savvy, which allowed the former mayor of Davao to stay in the headlines without spending a single penny. But what about Lee Kuan Yew (LKY), the Cambridge-trained prime minister and master strategist, who -- through an odd mixture of high-minded eloquence, technocratic lexicon, and soft authoritarianism -- turned Singapore, historically known as the "Gibraltar of the East," into a Platonic Republic, a utopia of meritocracy and harmony?

Well, unlike the legendary Singaporean leader, Duterte isn't set to govern a tiny city-state on the intersection of global trading routes. Duterte will, instead, govern a middle-sized democratic nation of about 100 million souls, racked by structural overheads such as complex rural-urban divides and massive inequality between the industrialized north and the conflict-ridden south. He confronts a totally different matrix of governance challenges that demand correspondingly distinct policy responses.

As Deng Xiaoping -- China's admirably humble "paramount leader," who reawakened a sleeping giant after centuries of self-imposed stupor and decades of destructive megalomania under Mao Zedong through the introduction of calibrated market liberalization - crisply reminded his boisterous adviser, Lee Kuan Yew: "If I only had Shanghai, I might be able to change Shanghai just as quickly [as you did in Singapore]. But I have the whole of China!"

Perhaps, one could argue, Duterte can better learn -- but not necessarily emulate -- from the experiences of other charismatic and democratically elected leaders, who were also former provincial officials or mayors, say Jokowi of Indonesia, or Narendra Modi of India, not to mention Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

There are, however, certain things that Duterte can learn from not only Lee Kuan Yew, but also other visionary Asian leaders who took their nations from the Third World to the First World. What all these successful leaders shared in common was their simultaneous reliance on and empowerment of state institutions, which competently handled the day-to-day challenges of governance and nation-building.

What great leaders of the modern age established was what Max Weber, one of Germany's greatest social scientists, would call a "modern bureaucracy." The 21st century, with its dizzying array of policy conundrums, is after all about strong institutions rather than strongmen. It's about rule of law, rather than the rule of men. Without a robust and capable state, the Philippines stands little chance of upgrading to the next stage of development.

Strong States, Not Strongmen

Where "the bureaucratization of administration has been completely carried through, a form of power relation is established that is practically unshatterable," Weber wrote in Economy and Society. It is precisely the "iron cage" of bureaucracy, which allows large, complex organisms such as modern societies to achieve internal coherence, maintain order and rationally pursue collective goals such as national development.

One of the most misguided aspects of contemporary debates in development economics is the argument on whether "big" or "small" states or whether "open" or "closed" policies are responsible for the success stories of late-developing countries in Asia. The partisans of laissez-faire economics fondly cite the (more contemporary) openness of city-states such as Hong Kong and Singapore, while partisans of developmental statism enthusiastically attribute the success of mid-sized countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in the middle of the 20th century, and more recently in the case of giant China, to their strategic protectionism, particularly in their early stages of development.

What this binary debate tends to miss is the appreciation of the unmistakable commonality among all of Asia's industrialized states. "Regardless of the degree of government intervention, the fast-growing economies of East Asia share a common feature: they all possess competent, high-capacity states," Francis Fukuyama brilliantly explains in Political Order and Political Decay. "A capable state is particularly important for activist governments," Fukuyama explains, during their "catch-up" phase of development.

Now contrast Northeast Asian strong states with Southeast Asian strongmen, from Marcos to Suharto and Myanmar's generals, who, after ravaging their countries for decades under an iron fist, never managed to establish even a single world-class technology or national manufacturing niche. At best, especially in the case of Marcos, the country established, over a span of decades, a wide network of basic infrastructure, which was, however, built on the back of crushing foreign debt. The Philippines is still paying the Marcos-era debt -- and up until 2025.

Aside from the sheer incompetence and the legendary decadence of Southeast Asian dictators, what they lacked, compared to their Confucian counterparts, were precisely the "competent, high capacity states" that Fukuyama sees in the case of China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Vietnam.

The Right Models

But as the case of North Korea poignantly shows, bad leadership and wrong-headed policies can turn robust state institutions into a beast of tyranny, something that is not far from the memory of fellow Confucian countries, who had their own share of despotic leaders in the past. In short, the Confucian state is a double-edged sword: it can be deployed for national development, whether via autocratic or democratic means, or for the attainment of the objectives of a "bad emperor."

This is not too dissimilar from the experience of Germany, which, thanks to Frederick the Great and his Prussian predecessors, was also able to develop robust state institutions. But the country faced disaster as soon as Kaiser Wilhelm II and, even more tragically, Adolf Hitler took over the state institutions. The result -- two world wars -- changed human history.

From Lee Kuan Yew to Deng Xiaoping, we see examples of good (but not perfect and often autocratic) leaders who showed a constant penchant for self-education and asceticism, learned from the best minds, and employed a competent cadre of subordinates, who -- leveraging the vast bureaucratic machine -- deployed a sustained stream of innovative policies geared towards national development. Instead of mindlessly listening to (self-serving) foreign or Western-trained advisers, they tried to understand the unique developmental challenges they confronted and dedicated their lives not to narrow interests, whether ethnic or sectoral, but instead the wellbeing of the entire body-politic. Thus, they served as true "national" leaders.

Nonetheless, Duterte will operate in very different context. First of all, unlike Lee and Deng, Duterte is an elected official, with a time-bound mandate, operating within the constitutional framework of a liberal democracy. So, for instance, America's 20th century experience could prove more instructive. In democratic countries like America, visionary leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt, who busted oligopolies, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who introduced the New Deal, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, who build on FDR's welfare programs in the context of the civil rights movement, were responsible for the empowerment of American bureaucracy and expansion of public services for ordinary citizens.

All these leaders also built on the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which reduced political appointments in favor of meritocracy. And unlike the case of Germany and Confucian states, bureaucratic empowerment in America, Britain and other major democracies didn't undermine public accountability and transparency. So clearly, one can't also deny that leadership matters. And, crucially, that democratic leaders can also achieve great accomplishments while remaining accountable to the electorate.

Second, the 20th century provided a significant space for strategic protectionism and strong-minded leadership that is no longer available in today's globalized world of hyper-connectivity. Trade liberalization regimes, 24-hour television and citizen-driven journalism, inter alia, present a unique set of constraints on the powers of 21st century state leaders. As keen observers such as Moisés Naím, in The End of Power, note, power is decaying, diffusing and diminishing in its returns, mainly thanks to advances in information technology, economic globalization and the emergence of a new array of players on the political chessboard.

In today's world, great leadership is about acknowledging the limits of power and, accordingly, pursuing necessary reforms within the coordinates of possibilities.

21st Century Leadership

What about contemporary leaders? Well, Duterte will be wise to carefully watch the fate of his fellow democratically elected leaders in India, Indonesia and Turkey who, despite their larger-than-life charisma, have had to constantly wrestle, with varying degrees of success, against the weight of bureaucratic inertia, political opposition and vested interest.

Erdogan, in particular, should serve as a reminder of the risks of the emergence of illiberal democracy in rapidly developing countries, while Jokowi and Modi, so far, should serve as a brutal reminder of how weak state institutions can frustrate even the most purposeful and popular leaders. A look at Duterte's recently revealed (prospective) cabinet evinces the newly elected president's likely plan to rely not only on his own political will, but also the competency of seasoned technocrats, trusted friends and a proportionately large number of individuals with military background.

Moving forward, Duterte's grandiose plans to suppress crime and proliferation of drugs, ameliorate Metro Manila's suffocating traffic and end the conflict in Mindanao will constantly run against the grain of political reality. To achieve his goals, albeit within a more realistic timeframe, he will not only have to use tough language and rely on his fear-inducing persona, but also heavily invest in the capacity of state institutions.

The police forces, for instance, need better compensation, training and equipment to fight against organized crime. The armed forces will have to be also similarly empowered to fight against domestic and external threats -- meaning the modernization of the armed forces should continue and be upgraded. Such bureaucracy-boosting measures should definitely be extended to other corruption-vulnerable bureaus such as internal revenue, immigration and customs.

Investing in the capacity of the state means more effective delivery of basic services, improved tax collection and an enhanced business environment, which is crucial for sustained national development. What the Philippines needs isn't a new set of laws, or another autocrat, but instead a competent state, which can actually implement a wide array of existing laws. Similar to Lee Kuan Yew, Duterte can become a good leader by not only inspiring discipline and diligence, but also investing in a meritocratic, clean and effective state that fulfills its basic functions in an efficient and sustainable manner.

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