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Book reviews Niels Mulder, Southeast Asian images; Towards civil society? Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2003, ix + 253 pp. ISBN 974.9575.03.2. Price: USD 14.97 (paperback). MONIKA ARNEZ Niels Mulder has conducted research in the field of civil society for decades. This book, which concludes his Images series, introduces the reader to the way modern urban middle classes conceive of their public world, and how they think about current problems affecting the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia. Mulder draws on school teaching materials, as well as the writ- ings of intellectuals and novelists, to point out social and cultural similarities among the three nations. In schoolbooks, he finds, reality is often distorted, important facts are suppressed, and autonomous individuals are absent. Problems actually arising from the instability of social structures are blamed instead on the shortcomings of individuals, but at the same time pupils are not taught to develop individual creativity or critical thinking. In intellectual circles, by contrast, social problems are clearly identified and widely discussed. Mulder reviews recent debates on the necessity of a strong civil society, focusing on the place of women’s issues, Islam, educa- tion and the military in those debates. He also discusses several fictional texts that either incorporate strong social criticism, or demonstrate the rather new phenomenon of women writing freely about sexuality. In this way Mulder intends to make the reader aware of attempts to deal with problems such as the repression of women and the dominance of state ideologies. The book is a good introduction to the topic of civil society in Southeast Asia, and is suited for a general readership because of the way it points out similarities between the three countries considered and tries to track the most prominent themes in debates about civil society. However, Mulder’s attempt to meet the expectations of both general and academic readerships is a balancing act that does not succeed. Letting the written materials speak for themselves, giving practically no references, and commenting only briefly on important problems, is not scientific. The book does not refer to research conducted by other scholars. Another problem is that in Section III Mulder aims at providing the reader with information about the present, but the Philippine short story ‘Cadena de amor’ which is treated in that section was drafted in 1979. It is hard to imagine how this story can be compared with the other, more recent works Mulder has chosen here. Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access 144 Book reviews A lack of coherence is also evident in Section II, where school materials are presented in the cases of Thailand and the Philippines, whereas for Indonesia intellectual debates and fictional texts are taken as illustrations. The author seems to regard the intellectual debates, the textbooks and the novels as parts of one whole which can be compared with one another at random. In my view this is like comparing apples and oranges. Despite these shortcomings, I would recommend Southeast Asian images; Towards civil society? to a general readership and to undergraduates studying Southeast Asia. Connie Carter, Eyes on the prize; Law and economic development in Singapore. The Hague: Kluwer Law International, xviii + 307 pp. [The London-Leiden Series on Law, Administration and Development 7.] ISBN 90.411.1728.8. Price: USD 162.00 (hard- back). ADRIAAN BEDNER Connie Carter’s Eyes on the prize provides an excellent overview of the legal dimension of the successful Singaporean route to economic development. Although much has already been written on this subject, Carter’s account stands out for its comprehensiveness and clarity of argument. This is in large part due to her approach which is to analyse the genesis, and to a lesser extent the implementation, of the key legislation underlying eco- nomic development. The core of the book consists of two parts. The first is a chronologically ordered ‘macro-level analysis’ which provides a thorough account of the roots and structure of Singapore’s legal system, and of the various phases of the city-state’s economic development policies in their political context. The second, labelled ‘micro-level analysis’, looks in more detail at three fields of law and government that have been at the centre of the developmental effort: labour law and industrial relations, land law and housing, and intellectual property law. The main conclusion, briefly summarized, is that the govern- ment managed to avoid labour unrest by redistributing social welfare in the field of housing, and that the ensuing stability helped Singapore to attract foreign investment. Carter convincingly undermines the neo-liberal position of spurning state intervention on the road towards economic development – although it is unlikely that she will actually convince any remaining ‘believers’ here as she is not the first to present such evidence. More original is her analysis of the Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 145 conditions favouring an ‘Asian’ model of state intervention, which identifies the elements of Singapore’s success that can potentially be transplanted to other countries. However, the author’s ambitions go beyond the significant achievements mentioned above, and here – in my opinion – she is less successful. ‘The purpose of this study’, she states on page 2, is to discover whether key law and development (LAD) predictions about the relationship between law and economic development proved viable in the practice of economic develop- ment in Singapore from 1959 to 1999’. Carter goes on to state that these predictions are not part of a clearly outlined theoretical position because there is ‘no rigorous theory of law and development’: what she examines is ‘the abundance of rhetoric, which is made compelling by the status of some law and development protagonists like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’. In this way she somewhat reduces her enemy before starting the attack. During the ensuing discussion of much LAD literature of the past thirty years – certainly not all of it mere rhetoric, to my mind – it gradually becomes clear that Carter also circumscribes the target of her criticism in another, much more significant way: whereas much of the LAD literature deals with legal institutions, she looks only at laws, more specifically those laws which are expressions of what she calls ‘law as “mature policy”’ (p. 38). As a result the book offers little real critique of LAD positions on the relation between development and the rule of law, but confines itself largely to the economic sphere and the use of economic developmental policy in the form of law. The main deficiency of Eyes on the prize from an LAD perspective follows directly from this choice: nowhere does the author discuss the role of the Singaporean judiciary, which – like the Singaporan civil service – stands out for its incorruptability and may well have been an important factor in decision-making by foreign investors. Neither does the author make the point that Singapore laws were stable, predictable and general in their application, or discuss the controls on government discre- tion, or explore the significance of Singapore’s questionable human rights record. As a result of this limited approach, Carter has very little ammunition to shoot at the positions of her intellectual opponents. In fact in the end she concludes only that ‘the rule of law can and does serve to entrench and con- solidate the power of the state, and that it does not always exalt the protec- tion of individual rights above the state and the public interest’ (p. 260) – not a very revolutionary finding. Nonetheless, Eyes on the prize is a significant contribution to the histori- ography of Singapore’s road to prosperity, offering well-written and com- prehensive information about the legislation underpinning its economic Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access 146 Book reviews achievements and the genesis of its ‘mature policy’. The book can be warmly recommended to anyone interested in Singapore, successful state-led eco- nomic development, or both. J.R. van Diessen and F.J. Ormeling (editors, with the collaboration of R.C.M. Braam, W. Leijnse, P.A. Levi, J.J. Reijnders, R.P.G.A. Voskuil and M.P.B. Ziellemans), Grote atlas van Nederlands Oost- Indië/Comprehensive atlas of the Netherlands East Indies. Zierikzee: Asia Maior, Utrecht: Koninklijk Nederlands Aardrijkskundig Genootschap (KNAG), 2004, 480 pp. ISBN 90.74861.22.9. Price: EUR 265.00. AMRIT GOMPERTS This is the most comprehensive atlas of the Indonesian archipelago as it was at the end of the Dutch period. The editors are leading experts on cartography in the Netherlands who have a special interest in maps of the former Netherlands East Indies. In the Grote atlas they have compiled material from the former Dutch colonial survey (Topografische Dienst in Nederlandsch-Indië, TDNI), the Royal Dutch Geographical Society (KNAG), the Allied forces during the Second World War, and a wide variety of other sources. The second (2004) edition of the atlas includes a supplement that is also separately available for owners of the first edition (2003). For non-Dutch readers, the bilingual (Dutch and English) text provides easy access to original Dutch colonial cartography. Nearly all maps from the Atlas van tropisch Nederland (1938) which deal with (parts of) Indonesia have been reprinted in the Grote atlas. In addi- tion, the new atlas contains facsimiles of thematic maps on history, physical geography, geology (by J.J. Reijnders), social geography, economy, colonial administration, and transport. The editors have also paid attention to the insular character of the archipelago. There are many maps of commercial and navy harbours, coastal types and shipping lanes, and a few hydrographical charts.