Modernization has had major influences on two sources of identity in Southeast Asia — citizenship and ethnicity. Although ethnic groupings precede citizenship as a source of identity, the birth of the nation-state has linked both of them together with different consequences. This chapter is not a comprehensive discussion of the development and specificities of citizenship and ethnicity but, instead, seeks to highlight the main challenges faced by these two communities brought about by the reduction of distance and permeation of boundaries in the age of globalization. Two particular issues are addressed here: firstly, the ways in which these communities and identities are challenged by globalization, and secondly, how they are responding.

CITIZENSHIP: RIGHTS, DUTIES, AND BELONGING

Citizenship is fundamentally a European invention and is generally underpinned by two principles. Firstly, citizenship entitles one to uniform national rights, an idea alien to pre- modern societies where slaves and serfs enjoyed no such privilege. British sociologist T.H. Marshall defined three basic rights of citizenship. “Civil rights” protect the rights of the individual to free speech and faith, ownership of property, and justice. “Political rights” are concerned with the right to direct or indirect political participation, while “social rights” entitle the citizen to economic welfare, security, and acceptable standards of living. This has been described as a liberal individualist notion of citizenship as defined under the welfare state.

Secondly, citizenship binds one to a social contract with the state where, in return for the protection of rights, one is expected to fulfil certain duties such as the paying of taxes, obeying the laws of the land, or conscription. This has been described as a civic republican notion of citizenship where the emphasis of citizenship is not on individual rights, but on a shared commitment to a common endeavour for the collective good of society. The emphasis of either principle varies from society to society.

According to modernization theory, economic growth paves the way for the development of a middle class from which universalism and democracy will engender. Based on the Western European experience, this theory sees modernization and democracy as two sides of the same coin. Unlike in Western Europe, however, the fledgling Southeast Asian middle classes are largely the result of state-centred capitalist economic development. It is argued that a middle class created under such conditions is generally beholden, even compliant, to the state, lacking the instinctive desire for democratization as historically demonstrated by its European counterpart.

To be sure, the emergence of the Southeast Asian middle class is not a uniform one. There were, generally speaking, three waves of regional economic development responsible for its emergence. The first wave of economic development, from the 1950s to the 1970s, occurred in Japan, resulting in a Japanese middle class by the mid-1970s. The second economic wave, from the 1960s to the 1980s, swept Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore (popularly known as the “Asian Tigers”) to the higher ground of middle-class comforts. Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and, to a certain degree, the Philippines caught the third wave of economic development from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s (ending abruptly with the 1997 Asian financial crisis); and saw a middle class emergence in their respective countries in the short span of one or two generations. These waves of economic development, enthusiastically encouraged by governments, were the result of economic globalization, increased foreign direct investment (FDI), the region's cheaper labour and abundance of raw materials, and later, banking and portfolio investment liberalization. All these combined to effectively integrate Southeast Asia deeper into the world economy.

Along with economic development and a broadening middle class come changes in buying and spending patterns — or mass consumption. Greater disposable income and more leisure time, together with the influx of imported products, have created an insatiable demand for consumer goods such as cars, washing machines, refrigerators, personal computers, television sets, mobile phones, and trendy street apparel in many of the capitals in Southeast Asia. The ubiquity of global brands like Nike, SONY, McDonalds, Toshiba, GAP, DKNY, Levis in highly populated urban centres has also made material consumption more conspicuous than ever before.

One fundamental trend of modernization is capitalism's ability to turn a society of diverse cultures and ethnic groups into a society of consumers. Mass consumption not only indicates the rising income levels of a consumer society, but its patterns also provide a vivid picture of the society's desires, values, and fantasies. In other words, the things people buy, the reason they buy them, and what these things mean to them, tell us about the character of a modern consumer society.

When one speaks of modernization, one usually refers to physical change such as the springing up of new buildings, roads, transportation system, and the introduction of machines and new technologies into daily life. In this sense, modernization can be seen as the industrial progress of society, conventionally signifying the material transition of a developing society to a developed one. The modernization of society has European origins. The Industrial Revolution of Britain, usually dated from 1760 to 1850, resulted in numerous technological innovations like the steam engine, the combustion engine, the spinning mule, as well as the expansion of railroads, to increase efficiency in product output and delivery. The modernization of Southeast Asia, a twentieth century phenomenon, has taken place in an era of globalization and global capital, both of which have been key factors that have shaped the development of the region.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF SOUTHEAST ASIA

Asia's economic development in the twentieth century came in three waves. The first regional economic wave began in Japan from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. This led to the regionalization of Japanese capital, which helped engender the second wave. The second regional economic wave swept through Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore — collectively known as the “Asian Tigers” — from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. The third regional economic wave took place from the 1980s to the mid-1990s and included Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines — popularly known as the “Asian Dragons”.

Cheaper labour, raw goods, and lower business costs offered by Southeast Asian countries were key factors in attracting global capital. For Indonesia and Malaysia, both oil- and gas-producing nations, the oil bonanza helped sustain their early development policies while Singapore leveraged heavily on its electronics industry. Thailand's abundance of staple crops and agricultural industry was a major contributor to its growth. Meanwhile, the manufacturing industry played a key role in all Southeast Asian countries. This combination of high-performing industries, complemented by global demand, resulted in the “Asian miracle” that was, in turn, perpetuated by undervalued currencies pegged to the US dollar and became the catalyst for industrialization.

From moral order to individual right

Subsistence need carries the moral authority of the community. Because it carries this authority, subsistence need has power over the member, the power to determine what the member needs and how that need will be satisfied. The community's power over its members carries with it an obligation to assure, so far as possible, that the member's needs, which are also the community's needs, are satisfied. The member has his or her obligation to do work of a particular kind and, more generally, to perform his or her designated function. And the community has its obligation to assure, so far as possible, the livelihood of its members. In a world where the community no longer carries the moral authority to determine need and how need is satisfied, what replaces the community's moral authority and the system of mutual obligation that goes with it is the ideal of individual right. The growing hegemony of this ideal has the most far-reaching implications for the theory of need and the idea of poverty. To see where the ideal of right takes the theory of need, we will first consider that ideal more closely.

The language of right links conduct to volition. In a moral order, conduct is determined by external imperatives. In a system of individual rights, conduct originates in individual will.

The facilitating environment and the normative order

In this book, we treat poverty as the lack of something vital in living. We consider this something vital the capacity and opportunity to make doing the expression of being. The availability of the capacity depends on a number of factors, the most important of which fall into the category Winnicott refers to as a “facilitating environment.” In concluding, we would like to explore this dimension of the problem in a preliminary way to indicate what our concept of poverty might imply for policy and institutions.

The literature directly concerned with the facilitating environment tends to conceive it narrowly as the environment in the family, and especially the relationships that shape early emotional development. If we were to summarize the issue at this level, the main elements would be (1) the conception of the emerging person held in the mind of the parent, especially whether that conception is animated by the principle of the “freedom of opportunities yet undetermined” as Erikson terms it, and (2) the provision of a setting in which it is safe to make doing an expression of being so that it is possible for self-development to occur.

We can make our main point in the following way. The parent relates to the infant or young child in a specific way, shaping a relationship that has a specific meaning into which the infant or young child fits. We can divide the modes of relating into two groups.

In this chapter, we explore three examples of how thinking about poverty and unemployment shapes poverty policy. The link forged by the Puritans between personal character and fortune has been particularly influential in shaping poverty policy. Recent and contemporary accounts of poverty often revert to the formula that character is all, circumstances nothing, while other, opposed, accounts formulate the issue in the same framework, simply reversing the causality favored by the Puritans and insisting that circumstance is all and character has nothing to do with the problem. This view, in its more recent formulations, has required that we find ways to measure poverty so that we can gauge the effectiveness of poverty initiatives, the second topic of the chapter. We begin with the problem of unemployment and suggest that the way we understand the causes of unemployment affects who we judge to be responsible and what measures for alleviating poverty are seen as appropriate. We end by considering the idea of individual responsibility and its implications for thinking about poverty policy.

Self-correcting and crisis prone markets

England's New Poor Law of 1834 responded to the concern that poor relief leads to withdrawal from the labor market and encourages idleness. We see the same concern in the last quarter of the twentieth century in the idea that welfare payments would encourage people to remain outside of the workforce.

The problem of poverty is a central issue in thinking about underdevelopment. A way to organize this thinking is to ask what the different approaches to development see as missing in the lives of the poor. In broad terms, development thought has seen the poor as lacking income, the ability to satisfy basic needs, or the capabilities to lead a fully human life. In this chapter, we consider each of these possibilities in turn.

Growth and income

An emphasis on improving outcomes in developing countries by fostering economic growth can follow from neoclassical economics. The neoclassical approach takes as its building blocks information on preferences, endowments, and technology (Debreu 1959). In order for individual welfare to improve, given that preferences are held fixed by assumption, endowments need to increase or technology needs to develop. The emphasis on technological change is consistent with a focus on industrialization. And the idea of increasing endowments is also consistent with growth. Endowments, namely goods and services that individuals have access to for consumption and production purposes, would increase with growth and are themselves inputs for growth. Some of these services can be productive, such as those provided by labor or capital. From this point of view, we can also see why there might be a specific emphasis on increasing the productivity of labor. Hence, there is a neoclassical emphasis on human capital, the idea that through education and other means, workers will invest in their own productive capacity.

We speak about the poor as if we know who they are. We speak, for example, as if the arbitrary definitions used by government agencies to determine eligibility for their programs tell us who is poor and who is not. If we know who are the poor, the problem is what, if anything, to do about them. For some, knowing what to do about poverty means becoming an advocate for the poor, or for what their interests are imagined to be. Then, the problem becomes one of representation of interests, and possibly of the struggle on behalf of those interests against the interests of those who are not poor and whose interests might be opposed to the interests of the poor.

Sometimes we speak about poverty as if it were defined by wealth. The poor are those who do not have enough wealth. This is the approach taken by Adam Smith in the first paragraphs of The Wealth of Nations, where he defines the problem of political economy as the problem of wealth and poverty. When we speak this way, poverty often becomes a relative matter; the more wealth on average in our society, the more wealth we need to avoid being poor. This way of thinking about poverty makes it an implication of inequality, which, for some, makes poverty a problem of injustice. This follows if we convince ourselves that those who have less (and therefore are poor) do so because others have more.

Introduction

In Chapter 5, we considered the importance of the ideas of will, self, and identity. We suggest that the idea of will links what we do in the world to a creative act originating in the mind, which is the activity of imagining a world, or of conceiving an idea of a world, as it might be. The link between will and imaginative construction makes creativity a central element in our conception of work and its relation to freedom. We turn now to a fuller discussion of creativity so that its implications for work and poverty will become clearer.

A natural point of departure for doing so might lie in the common quality of work and creativity, which is that they are meant to produce something. Indeed, the term creativity is simply an extension of the term “to create”, which is something we imagine that working will also accomplish, if not always in the same sense. Yet, even though the two activities are linked in this way, we will begin not with the production of something, but with the prior mental act, which is the conception of what might be produced. Creativity begins not in the hands but in the mind, which means that all creativity in conduct, including creativity in work, begins with creative thinking, or at least with the creative mental process.

Thinking without presuppositions

Creativity in thinking refers to that quality of thinking that takes it out of already known channels.

A commonly stated motivation for economic policy is to benefit people's welfare, happiness, or satisfaction. We want to promote particular policies because of their beneficial impact on people's lives. Yet central aspects of conventional economic method seem to prejudge what makes people's lives go well. In the neoclassical conception, individuals choose goods and services to maximize utility subject to an income constraint, where income derives primarily from the sale of labor. Thus the goal of economic activity is consumption, which leads to higher utility. Consumption is constrained by income, so income and utility or satisfaction should be clearly related. Labor, on the other hand, is avoided, since it enters negatively into the utility function. Labor and leisure relate as negative to positive, the amount of work depending on a tradeoff between labor and leisure that is affected by the wage. Thus it is assumed that what makes life go well is income and consumption; what is to be avoided is labor. The amount of work performed depends on the amount of disutility that must be endured to derive income from the sale of labor. To the extent we want to maximize welfare, we would want to reduce work and increase income and consumption.

With this answer to the question of what makes life go well, we also have a solution to the problem of defining and alleviating poverty.