Editor's Note

Introduction

The significance of education for economic growth and a progressive society needs no argument, but providing even basic education to a billion people is a gargantuan task. So how can the Indian masses be educated? What are the roles of the state, the market and civil society in this venture? This discussion on the delivery of quality education is India centric, but its lessons are applicable generally, particularly in the countries of South Asia.

This book was in essence the brainchild of Chanaka Amaratunga, leader of the Liberal Party of Sri Lanka until his tragic death in a car accident in August 1996. He had founded the party ten years previously, at a time when the word liberalism seemed to many in Sri Lanka an anachronism. It is a tribute to the intensity of his vision, and the single mindedness with which he articulated it, that by the time of his death almost all major politicians in the country claimed to be upholders of liberal democracy, thus acknowledging the claims of a doctrine none of them had taken seriously a decade previously.

Of course the increasing popularity of the views Dr Amaratunga articulated owes something also to the times in which he lived. He was born in 1958, ten years after Sri Lankan independence, in a period in which the subcontinent was dominated by statism. In Sri Lanka it was of the socialist variety that had been propounded by Laski at the London School of Economics, a philosophy that also held most Indian political theorists of the time in its thrall; while even under ostensibly right wing military regimes in Pakistan, the necessity of centralised control was never challenged.

It cannot be denied that these dispensations enjoyed some successes. Sri Lanka developed an enviable score on the quality of life index; while India, a regular victim of famines in the colonial period, advanced towards agricultural self-sufficiency, laid the basis for future industrialisation, and also managed despite various fissiparous tendencies to maintain both unity and democracy.

Editor's Note

Thus goes the opening of John Gray's introduction to the volume of essays on Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy.

Few would give such a sentence a second glance. Such generalisations are a commonplace, not only of scholarship, but of the modern Western tradition that cherishes a concept of culture-bound values which places what seem the more appealing of those values squarely within the West. And such attitudes are almost subconscious – there is little doubt that a statement such as the above is, not to any great extent, concerned with asserting or establishing a dichotomy between Western and Eastern (or, to use the term such commentators would prefer, non-Western) traditions. Such a dichotomy would be taken for granted, not worth a further glance. Instead what would be argued for (as is indeed the case with Gray), so as to make the statement necessarily true, indeed tautologically so, is that particular conceptions of liberty or the weight attached to them vary. Gray in fact deals also with Western thinkers ‘who have sought to devalue freedom as a political ideal’ and a later essay in the book is concerned with ‘The Marxian Conception of Freedom’, characterised as central to Marxist philosophy, though of course, with a somewhat different meaning attached to freedom from that commonly associated with it.

When Liberal Values for South Asia was published, way back in 1998, the future of democracy seemed reasonably secure in South Asia. India of course, except during the relatively brief period of the Emergency, had never really swerved from the path of democracy and the rule of law, and the preceding decade had shown how governments could change at the polls without extravagant rivalries or ill effects; but every other country in South Asia had suffered the rigours of authoritarianism, from which a few at least seemed to have moved into democratic systems during the nineties.

Though previous lapses in Sri Lanka had been less protracted than elsewhere, during the eighties the impact of the Jayewardene regime, and its efforts to guide democracy (on what its less authoritarian apologists presented as an East Asian model) had been tragically divisive. Though his efforts had been accompanied by what was seen as economic liberalism, the entrenched statist mentality had meant that little of the economy that had been taken into government hands was actually privatised. An open economy for Jayewardene only meant the encouragement of private business and trade, without the shrinking of the government sector or the opening up of the social sector, so that rent seeking became further entrenched. Insistence on continuing centralised control of government, with a growing economy, meant that disparities grew worse, and in the end the state had to deal with two youth insurgencies.

In both political and intellectual terms, liberalism is at present in the midst of a powerful advance. The word revival is deliberately not being used in this context. Certainly, the recent flowering of liberal writing in Western Europe and North America, which has made the intellectual running in this respect in the modern era, testifies to the revival of interest in a form of ideological writing that had been surpassed in influence during the very different intellectual debates of the 1930s and after. But at the directly political level, that is to say with regard to direct influence in terms of political parties and political programmes, ‘revival’ is an inappropriate word because the last decade has seen, in fact, an advance of liberal ideas and values in areas where they had seldom or never existed in the past.

In a sense the process initially began as an enterprise at the highest level of ideas to combat the apparent mastery of the Marxist left and its intellectual, though bitterly hostile kinsman, the Fascist right. But the process was undertaken with a power of thought and expression which, though slow to make converts, has at last impacted upon the intellectual consciousness of the world with an unvanquishable authority: the writings of Friedrich Hayek, of Karl Popper, of Isaiah Berlin have now flowed into and become the mainstream of ideas. And thus today an explicit interest in liberalism as an ideology accompanies an advance of liberalism across the political agenda and at the ballot box.

The last two decades have seen in South Asia the resilience of liberal democratic traditions in the face of formidable challenges. In India and Sri Lanka, liberal democracy survived difficulties such as sectarian conflict and human rights violations. In Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal, liberal democratic institutions were revived after several years of authoritarianism. This is more remarkable in that for many years it was fashionable to claim that liberal democracy was in fact unsuitable for former colonies, and that they would, instead, do well to follow one or the other of the authoritarian models that had established themselves elsewhere in Asia. Such claims, whether advocating the merits of left or right wing authoritarianism, poured scorn not only on liberalism but even democracy as being relics of colonialism that were unsuitable for nations anxious to develop speedily. The sorry results of the other experiments that were tried in the region bear witness perhaps to the universal applicability and efficacy of the liberal democratic model.

The rest of the chapter takes a brief glance at two aspects of the historical background to what is called the tradition of South Asian liberal democracy. It is not necessary for this purpose to spend time on what might be termed the strictly political element in this, since the need for democratic institutions and practices is no longer in question. What is more important, given too the theme of this book, is the distinctive liberal contribution to the debate, since it may be argued that the recognition and acceptance of a coherent socio-political outlook is vital if the problems of recent years are not to be renewed.

The idea of freedom is deeply imbedded in the political cultures of South Asia. Especially the experiences of absolute power of royal dynasties and, later, of colonial rule had triggered the quest for justice, civil equality and democratic forms of government. Freedom for all citizens and responsible government were, thus, the most important values to be secured when finally the societies of South Asia gained their full and unequivocal independence in the middle of last century.

Yet, as a main political direction, liberalism was and remained weak in comparison to other political directions and mainstreams. When the anti-colonial struggle came to an end, it was primarily socialism, its off springs and variations, which became dominant in many countries of the region. The opponents of socialism usually gathered around ideologies and concepts, which – although lacking a coherent ideational framework – can best be subsumed as conservatism. In all political camps, nationalism in various forms played an important role for the origins and developments of political parties. When, in the course of time and as a general trend, deficiencies of the political systems and misgovernment of the ruling parties and elites became a more or less constant pattern, thus putting the democratic set-ups themselves under enhanced pressure, new forces of opposition with their own bases of legitimacy and interpretation of history grew in importance. Religious extremists found their ways into the political spectrums of South Asia, whether of Hindu, Islamic or Buddhist denomination.

The liberal view on the market economy is not guided by economic theory but by ideological commitment. It is therefore necessary to understand at the outset that a liberal would base his economics on the political commitment to maximise individual liberty. This is because, crucially, for liberals the most important political value is a fundamental commitment to individual liberty.

Classical liberals were unequivocal in their belief that it was a minimal degree of state intervention that would optimise individual liberty. It is well known that classical liberals such as David Ricardo, John Locke and Adam Smith were in favour of the laissez-faire economy. Indeed from the seventeenth century onwards, when John Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government, the advocacy of the market economy and the support of individual liberty have been inextricably linked. This, certainly, is a tendency that continues to the present day.

However, the nineteenth century saw divisions within liberalism on the extent of state intervention required in a liberal society. While even revisionist liberals such as Mill and de Tocqueville were in principle advocates of market economics, others were suspicious of it. In his Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, the Oxford philosopher TH Green developed a new, interventionist form of liberalism which he believed could, in fact, enhance the liberty of individuals. He declared categorically that the state could, by appropriate intervention, enable individuals to exercise their liberty successfully, and that the state indeed had a moral obligation to create the conditions in which individual liberty was maximised.

Like most things, liberalism has been subject to a process of evolution. Its emphases, its primary concerns and motivations have altered according to the age and other political and sociological conditions. An understanding of the evolution of liberalism is therefore useful in applying it to our present condition. Of even greater importance is a discovery of liberalism's ideological character, for we cannot consider the worth and the relevance of a political idea without coming to grips with its essential nature.

Those who take a sociological view of the evolution of political ideas, many of them influenced by Socialism and Marxism, see liberalism as the inevitable consequence of the transition of the feudal world into that of the early era of industrialisation.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of liberalism to modern political science has been in the area of constitutionalism, in particular through the emphasis liberalism places on appropriate institutional arrangements in society. The importance of a critical focus on power and on the limits of power has been highlighted by liberals throughout the ages. Indeed many liberals have argued that it is the extent of power rather than the manner in which power is exercised that concerns them more.

While the distinction should not be over-emphasised, as will be argued later, there is considerable truth in the observation that:

This paper will not deal with all the institutional devices which are commonly established to protect liberal democracy. It will, instead, focus on the elemental or foundational ground rules of constitutionalism. It is submitted that all other institutions and mechanisms should, in a successful liberal democracy, ultimately be subordinate to this pivotal principle. It will be argued further that, in former British colonies like the countries of South Asia, there are often misconceptions as to the meaning of constitutionalism which have vitiated the political process.

The Liberal Democratic State

A liberal democracy is a qualified democracy. Democracy stresses popular participation and accountability and the rule of the majority.

Editor's Note

We mentioned at the end of our previous address that there are in circulation among us still more false ideas and delusive theories concerning the affairs of peoples, and that these prevent the Germans from coming to a definite view of their present situation that would be appropriate to their particular character. These phantoms are at this very time being offered around for public veneration with even greater zeal and, since so much else has begun to totter and become uncertain, they might be considered by some solely as a way of filling the vacuum that has arisen; therefore, it seems pertinent to the matter in hand to submit these to a more serious examination than their importance would otherwise merit.

To begin with, and above all else, the first, original and truly natural frontiers of states are undoubtedly their inner frontiers. Those who speak the same language are already, before all human art, joined together by mere nature with a multitude of invisible ties; they understand one another and are able to communicate ever more clearly; they belong together and are naturally one, an indivisible whole. No other nation of a different descent and language can desire to absorb and assimilate such a people without, at least temporarily, becoming confused and profoundly disturbing the steady progress of its own culture. The external limits of territories only follow as a consequence of this inner frontier, drawn by man's spiritual nature itself.