ABSTRACT
The term “grassroots” refers to the local level of politics and society, indeed the most local level of all: the realm of individuals within the communities where they live, of face-to-face relationships, of meetings so small that most people in the room know one another’s names. The image of a field of grass, each blade tightly interwoven with those around it, connotes close proximity and embeddedness in dense networks. Often, though, the term also implies a kind of authenticity or purity: ideas and demands and action coming directly from the people, without adulteration from outside forces or powerful institutions. When considering the role of associational life in politics, our attention tends to be drawn to citizens’ organizations that are untainted in these ways, and separate from government in particular. David Horton Smith, for instance, limits his eloquent study of grassroots associations to those that are “significantly autonomous of other groups (even if formally affiliated)” (Smith 2000: 9). In Manuel Castells’ landmark work of urban sociology, local neighborhoods and communities constitute a fertile source of protest movements that can well up and transform the status quo – but only if (among other conditions) they maintain their independence (Castells 1983: 322). Yet not all forms of local organization emerge in such a spontaneous and autonomous fashion. Indeed, in some parts of the world they are not even typical. Particularly in East and Southeast Asia, large swaths of the grassroots do not grow in unchecked profusion like a wild prairie, but rather are cultivated and tended, more like a garden. Here governments actively shape their citizens’ associational energies in ways that are unfamiliar to Western readers. The purpose of this book is to examine several cases of these organizations, which we loosely call “straddlers” for their spanning of the state-society divide.2 These are groups that have extensive presence at the grassroots and that engage widespread participation, yet are institutionally linked to the state rather than independent of it. There are many ways in which associations can be said to straddle the realms of state and society. An extreme version is when government officials actually run local organizations themselves. Much more commonly, of course, states provide at least partial funding for groups; even many organizations that are otherwise independent and self-governing bid for public grants and contracts. As Lester Salamon
reminds us, 36 percent of the funding of the U.S. nonprofit sector comes from government (Salamon 1999: 36).3 States also sometimes get associations to do things for them: collecting information, publicizing state policies, distributing coupons for subsidized food, and so forth. In other settings, groups may form a part of electoral-machine politics, they may receive special access to decision-making, or they may merely register with the government or otherwise obtain its imprimatur. While researchers are aware of these phenomena, there has been little study of how the political and social properties of associations themselves change when they take on these functions (but see Smith and Lipsky 1993; Brown 1998; Coston 1998; Foster 2001). James Scott memorably characterized modern states as yearning to take the impenetrable complexity of natural and social ecologies and render it “legible” – measurable, taxable, and regimented (Scott 1998). Security and revenue remain two of the powerful imperatives that drive public authorities to reach down into the warp and woof of local life. Yet today’s states look to the grassroots for a great variety of purposes. As it turns out, local organizations provide a tremendously convenient platform for projects of just about every stripe. These include disseminating and collecting information, gathering input from constituents, and facilitating administrative programs concerning welfare, infrastructure, and public health. In many cases the groups in question obtain government resources such as stipends, office space, and budgets, but they also receive less tangible though no less important support in the form of prestige, legitimation, and access to officialdom. States systematically propagate such organizations, giving them a widespread presence throughout society and greatly magnifying their impact. Some of these groups are meant to embody (or impose) a form of local community that is integrated with the nation as a whole. At the same time, they typically provide a channel through which ordinary people can articulate demands, address local issues, and sometimes vote for representatives. Cases of straddler organizations appear in many parts of the world, but are particularly abundant in the countries lining the western edge of the Pacific. As discussed below, some descend from imperial or colonial institutions of social control and taxation, while others have origins in societal initiatives. Though they have generally been conceptualized along totalitarian lines (to the extent that they have attracted theoretical attention at all), this volume confronts the striking fact that such organizations exist in democracies and authoritarian systems alike. Similarly, the groups range from those tightly linked to – indeed almost part of – local government, to those with a considerable degree of formal autonomy. Researchers have published a scattering of English-language case studies on such groups, some of them deftly executed, painting their subjects in vivid colors (Guinness 1986; Bestor 1989). Yet the social sciences remain without a convincing understanding of them. This can in part be attributed to the tendency for Asia to remain marginal in theory-building. More fundamentally, the attention of scholars steeped in the liberal tradition tends to be drawn to independent citizen initiatives, whether in the form of social movements or less contentious types of
association. State-backed institutions, conversely, are often seen not only as deleterious but also as uninteresting, inherently stale. Why then do straddlers deserve careful study? To begin with, the associations in question have a sprawling presence throughout this region. As Robert Pekkanen points out in Chapter 2, Japan boasts as many as 300,000 neighborhood and village groups, which work closely with local government.4 The Indonesian network of community organizations that Aiko Kurasawa discusses in Chapter 3 was found by a World Bank study to figure prominently in the lives of the urban and rural poor, and indeed it is widely considered to be “a very important, effective, and trusted institution” (Mukherjee 1999: 94). In Taiwan, my own study (Chapter 6) explains, some 146,000 citizen volunteers serve as linzhang or block captains, components of a finely grained system of ultra-local administration. While non-state associations (whether religious, clan-based, recreational, charitable, or oriented toward social change) also flourish in many parts of Asia, to ignore this quasi-public sector is to miss an immense part of the picture. Their pervasiveness alone suggests that they ought to be understood, but they also deserve attention because of the practical uses to which many of these institutions are put. Some of these purposes – such as reporting information on dissidents to authoritarian regimes – many readers will find deeply troubling. Other institutions work to further policy goals rather than repression. For example, in both China and Indonesia, local women’s associations are enlisted by the state to popularize family planning programs.5 Straddlers form an essential component of the social security infrastructure in many cases, helping connect disadvantaged populations with government agencies whose purpose is to provide assistance. Whatever their flaws, these networks of organizations constitute a potential resource for just about any developmental or governance-related undertaking, The most central reasons for this book, though, are theoretical in nature. There exist four broadly recognized frameworks within which associations are understood in political terms. The first is civil society theory, which focuses on citizens’ groups that are autonomous from government. Second are theories of mass organizations as found in state socialist and fascist regimes. The third are accounts of corporatism, which can be defined broadly as state structuring of the representation of societal interests. Finally, the concept of state-society synergy offers a template for understanding cooperative partnerships between governments and communities. Each of these provides a salient framework for thinking about at least some of the straddlers found in Asia, yet each contains important lacunae that these hybrid organizations speak to and in some ways fill. The civil society paradigm dominates current discussions about citizen associations in the world of politics. Contemporary theories within this long tradition isolate a specific class of organization – voluntary groups that stand independent of government – as distinct, possessing special properties.6 They assert that civil society groups contribute to a host of salutary outcomes, and that this happens partly in unintended ways, through action that is only incidental to the organizations’ primary purposes. More specifically, such groups are said to have internal
effects on members, making them better citizens by encouraging political participation and providing practice in democratic self-governance, as well as external effects on the state, making it more accountable by asserting interests and exerting pressure.7 Certain theories of social capital take these claims another step, arguing that dense interpersonal connections among people who join such associations serve to multiply and propagate these beneficial effects. The networks are said to undergird the commitment of community members to civic norms and drive them to more insistently demand responsiveness from the government (see Chapter 6 for citations and further discussion). In short, civil society enhances politics both by enriching the practice of electoral democracy and also by supplementing electoral mechanisms with direct forms of action. If one were asked to think of the exact opposite of an independent civil society organization, the ultimate in government control, then theories of mass organizations would surely come to mind. Accounts of communism, fascism, and totalitarianism all highlight such organizations as a means through which ruling parties extend their grasp to dominate specific sectors of society, with groups for youth, workers, women, neighborhoods, and so forth (Linz 1975; Linz and Stepan 1996). Many of the goals that regimes strive to accomplish through these institutions are fairly straightforward: spreading official beliefs, values, and doctrines; exercising surveillance over political threats or opposition; and drawing the population out of passivity and into active displays of loyalty. In his survey of what he terms “administered mass organizations” in dozens of authoritarian states, Gregory Kasza also points out several other functions: preempting autonomous groups, consuming members’ time through many kinds of diversions, and throwing up an illusion of mass democracy through “pseudopolitical” activities (Kasza 1995). Some research on postcommunist systems builds on this by emphasizing the blight that such Leninist structures may leave behind on the civic landscape even after the regimes that created them collapse (Howard 2002, 2003). To be sure, some studies have cast these organizations in a more benign or at least neutral light (Townsend 1967: chap. 6; Fagen 1969; Friedgut 1979). Even so, few scholars would take issue with the fact that mass organizations are tools of control, “transmission belts” that powerfully extend the authoritarian ruling party’s reach throughout society. At least one step removed from these stifling, wholly top-down institutions, corporatist arrangements constitute another fashion in which states intervene in the associational sphere. To paraphrase Philippe C. Schmitter’s classic definition, the term refers to interest groups that accept constraints on the leadership they choose and the demands they make in exchange for receiving a representational monopoly in their category of activity (Schmitter 1979: 13). He distinguishes two variants: societal corporatism, where interest groups form at their own initiative and acquire exclusivity and special treatment largely through their own power, and state corporatism, where controls are imposed from above and groups exist in a highly dependent relationship to the state (Schmitter 1979: 20-22; Collier 1995). The concept of corporatism grows from deep roots in a number of political philosophy traditions, resonating with what is called the
“organic statist” perspective, whether in Catholic, fascist, Confucian, or other value systems (Stepan 1978: 26-45). Particularly in the rubric of state corporatism, it has clearly applied widely in East and Southeast Asia, whether to state controls on labor in the authoritarian period of South Korea and Taiwan, or to the organization of Indonesian society under Suharto, or to business groups in today’s China.8
