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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
ANY INVESTIGATION OF POLITICAL OPPOSITIONS IN THE ASIA-PACIFIC must necessarily begin, if not end, with the obvious. First of all, there is the evident weakness of political oppositions in much of this part of the world today — whether we focus on the commonly capitalized ‘Opposition’ denoting ‘a political party opposing, and serving as a check on, the party in power’ (Webster's, italics added), or on the more variegated lower case ‘alternative oppositions’ often associated with so-called ‘non-governmental organizations’ of some sort or another. To a considerable extent, therefore, this question involves the compounded difficulty of not merely explaining the careers and conditions of manifest political groupings and their respective trajectories but also, significantly, of retrieving the historical traces, lived experiences and collective memories of oppositions displaced — whether by means of incorporation or of exclusion. Secondly, despite its remarkable recent rise in political, financial and academic discourse, ‘the Asia-Pacific’ remains a highly elusive — and eminently elastic — conception in terms of historical, economic and cultural content. Significantly, for the present discussion, no ‘wave’ of regime transitions comparable to those witnessed in other regions — Southern Europe, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Tropical Africa — can be discerned across the countries encompassed within ‘the Asia-Pacific’.
1 A recent literature inventory revealed not merely marked discrepancies in the countries included within the Asia‐Pacific by different scholars, but also turned up more than 50 competing regional designations – the Far East, the Pacific Rim, the Pacific Asia etc. See ‘The Concept of Eastern Asia’, in Colin Mackerras (ed.), East and Southeast Asia. A Multidisciplinary Survey, Boulder, Colo., Lynne Rienner, 1993.
2 For two such recent additions, see Robison, and David, S. G. Goodman, Richard, (eds), The New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones, McDonalds and Middle‐Class Revolution, London, Routledge, 1996; and Garry Rodan (ed.), Political Oppositions in Industrialising Asia, London, Routledge, 1996.Google Scholar
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6 See, for example, Skocpol, Theda. and Goodwin, Jeff, ‘Explaining Revolutions in the Contemporary Third World’, Politics and Society, Vol. 17, No. 4, 12 1989, pp. 489–509.Google Scholar For a discussion Celaborated in Linz, Juan J. and Stepan, Alfred, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South American, and Post‐Communist Europe, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996,Google Scholar about the significance of particular regime types, see Stepan’s essay, ‘Democratic Opposition and Democratization Theory’, in this volume pp. 657–73.Google Scholar
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