ABSTRACT
As was pointed out in preceding chapters and especially in Chapter 2, a number of prominent politicians and academics from East and Southeast Asia propounded the notion that there were commonly-held ‘Asian values’ across the region (Koh, 1993; Kausikan, 1997; Goodman, White and Kwon, 1998; Kelly and Reid, 1998; Bell and Bauer, 1999; Mahbubani, 2002). Admittedly, in Chapter 3, we found little evidence to sustain the view, at the level of the citizenry at large, that the basic societal values of East and Southeast Asians were profoundly different from those of Western Europeans: this does not mean, however, that the citizens of East and Southeast Asia do not hold values in common. It may well be, even if the basic societal values held in the two regions are not as sharply distinct as is often believed, that the same values are broadly shared among East and Southeast Asians. Yet this view is challenged, as we also saw, by those scholars, both from Asia and from the West who claim that, far from being based on a single political culture, East and Southeast Asia has long been divided into a number of cultural areas. We need at this point to examine the matter more closely, as was done in the previous chapter with respect to Western Europe, and examine, first, whether there are indeed strong grounds for suggesting that a ‘common’ political culture prevails among the citizens of the nine countries analysed here, but also see, second, what profound distinctions indicate that there may not be one but on the contrary several ‘sub-regional’ cultural groupings among these countries.
