Growing Asian economic power and business interests blunted Western human rights pressure

Evidence

The ability of Asian regimes to resist Western human rights pressures was reinforced by several factors. American and European businesses were desperately anxious to expand their trade with and their investment in these rapidly growing countries and subjected their governments to intense pressure not to disrupt economic relations with them. In addition, Asian countries saw such pressure as an infringement on their sovereignty and rallied to each other’s support when these issues arose. Taiwanese, Japanese, and Hong Kong businessmen who invested in China had a major interest in China’s retaining its MFN privileges with the United States. The Japanese government generally distanced itself from American human rights policies: We will not let “abstract notions of human rights” affect our relations with China, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa said not long after Tiananmen Square. The countries of ASEAN were unwilling to apply pressure to Myanmar and, indeed, in 1994 welcomed the military junta to their meeting while the European Union, as its spokesman said, had to recognize that its policy “had not been very successful” and that it would have to go along with the ASEAN approach to Myanmar. In addition, their growing economic power allowed states such as Malaysia and Indonesia to apply “reverse conditionalities” to countries and firms which criticize them or engage in other behavior they find objectionable. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 518

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘reverse conditionalities’ concept — weak states punishing critics with economic retaliation — is a strong hook for an essay on how economic leverage flows both ways in globalization, against the assumption that it only flows from rich to poor.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier framework chapters where Huntington describes Western dominance of human rights discourse; also echoes Milgrom’s reputation/institution work in reverse — here economic power substitutes for institutional enforcement.