Although the Democratic Progressive Party’s draft proposal for a transitional justice bill is focused on political archives, authoritarian symbols, miscarriages of justice and illicit party assets, the battle between the government and the opposition is clearly not restricted to those areas. From retirement pensions via education and government organization to the judiciary and civil servants, the list keeps getting longer.
As Taiwan is dealing with its biggest economic decline since the 2008 financial crisis, the controversy over setting the economy against justice following the precedent of former premier Simon Chang (張善政) will only get worse. All this raises the question of whether the government and the opposition will be able to find a common language to address the conflict.
Justice must be built on truth. Without universally accepted facts, there will be no shared justice, but if transitional justice is to be politically possible, it will require a change in social attitudes. Because of this, politicians must place shared social beliefs above their individual views of justice and allow collectively negotiated policies to replace brash proposals by individual lawmakers.
If the government and the opposition exhaust all possibilities and still find themselves in a deadlock over differing views of justice, they could introduce coordination through a previously agreed-upon framework, one that would be most beneficial to long-term stability.
Compared with the widespread system of privileged groups in power during the authoritarian era, the system in the wake of the Martial Law era has focused on efficiency and been more just. However, it placed too much focus on efficiency, which hampered Taiwan’s systemic resilience.
Looking at Vietnam, for example — the only nation that has been at war with France, the US and China — it has achieved impressive results after opening up, despite the chaos of war, poverty and communism. The reason for this is the resilience of its social system.
Systemic resilience means that a system is capable of bouncing back and adapting to a new situation following a major challenge. By comparison, the former Soviet Union was scientifically and technologically advanced and saw great economic growth, but due to a lack of systemic resilience, it still collapsed almost overnight.
Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009 and who spent a long time studying system resilience, thought that an attempt to control every variable and rule when designing systems in an attempt to maximize the efficiency of every part would instead result in the system as a whole becoming rigid and inflexible. If such a system were exposed to unexpected pressure, there would not be sufficient resources available to absorb the impact and it would hurt the system’s long-term survival.
For example, the efficiency of Taiwan’s healthcare system is the envy of the world, but this comes at the cost of excessive work hours and long-term systemic resilience. It is the same if there were not a sufficient safety distance between cars on freeways: If one person made a mistake, the whole freeway could fail.
Resilient systems can adapt to changes in the environment and stop the system from successively deteriorating to the brink of disaster. Taiwan’s military personnel, civil servants and public-school teachers only make up 10 percent of the workforce, but, astonishingly, the pension debt is the same for them as the debt is for the rest of the workforce. It is abundantly clear that both wage replacement rates and the retirement age are unfair.
Although everyone knows that the current system is unsustainable, the principle of legitimate expectation means that we must walk helplessly toward disaster with our eyes wide open.
Fair distribution and legitimate expectation are both principles of justice, but the latter damages systemic sustainability, which is why Constitutional Interpretation No. 717 is beneficial to systemic resilience.
Even state-run PetroVietnam, which has faced sharply falling oil prices, cut the income of workers by 50 percent, much more than privately owned foreign businesses, which have only cut wages by 30 percent.
Compared with Taipei’s rigid approach to staff and money — and former premier Jiang Yi-huah’s (江宜樺) failed government reform — it is clear that the authorities lack the ability to reinvent and to adapt to a changing environment.
Transitional justice and reform are risky and even if the system is unfair, once transitional justice and reform is implemented, it will change the structure of social incentives, including the incentive to change the rules.
The result would be that small numbers of interest groups throw their support behind the distribution of benefits between themselves and this has become the main cause of decay of the state in the modern era.
On the other hand, if reform does away with existing social networks and support foundations, it could hurt social resilience. For example, after the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the speed of reconstruction depended on the strength of existing local networks. The lesson is that if reform threatens essential social networks, we must be careful in how we implement transitional justice.
Shen Jung-chin is an associate professor in the School of Administrative Studies at York University in Toronto.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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