More Thoughts on Current Orthodoxies
Featured image courtesy president.gov.lk
Editor’s Note: This piece is in response to Sunil Bastian’s “Some Thoughts on Current Orthodoxies”, which can be read here.
I very much like Sunil Bastian’s critical perspective on the current Sri Lankan policy agenda “Some Thoughts on Current Orthodoxies,” dated 14 March. Let me support his case, from an historical perspective.
When Maithripala Sirisena won the Presidential election just over a year ago, there was a great deal of highly justified celebration. At the same time, plenty of people have observed, both on Groundviews and elsewhere, that current political arrangements are fragile. Much needs to be done to re-embed democracy and create more effective and inclusive government. How to do that? There is one recipe, emanating routinely from international organisations, that is very attractive to Lanka’s more prosperous, educated, cosmopolitan and Anglophone citizens. That recipe combines economic and political liberalism – more democracy, more market competition, more ‘opening’ to the outside world in almost every sense – with a more pro-Western foreign policy. See, for example, Razeen Sally’s ‘A Chance to Close Sri Lanka’s One-Family Show’ in the Wall Street Journal. The recipe is attractive because it represents a reversal of the key features and policies of the Rajapakse regime: political liberalism in place of autocracy; economic liberalism in place of a relatively ‘closed economy’ model; and a pro-Western in place of a pro-Chinese foreign policy.