Having grown up and lived in a few countries across Asia during my youth, and even taken part in helping with the activism organized by local social democratic parties in the late 2000s, I can only give my personal impressions on how things had changed in the region, mostly through interacting with the older generations (leftists and otherwise).

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new wave of young Western-educated professional class began to return to their home countries, brought back new Western liberal ideas to otherwise traditionally conservative societies and vowing to reform their home countries and transition into an advanced economy.

These people would form new centrist neoliberal political parties and fashioning the ideology as the Third Way politics (which was pushed by Clintonite Democrats in the US but especially hard by the Blairite New Labour Party in the UK, which won them the historic landslide election on May Day, 1997). The idea is that they are not your traditional left or right wing parties, but represented the third “middle of the road” way that transcended the traditional left-right divide.

The main thrust of these new centrist liberal politics focused on fighting corruption and bringing social justice and technocracy to reform a society already falling behind the times. You see, the reason that our country is poor and underdeveloped is not because of capitalism and imperialism, but because our right-wing leaders are corrupt and our way of thinking is outdated. We can all become part of the advanced countries we see in the West, we just need to fight corruption and adopt modern Western liberal values.

Immediately, this was already splitting the working class votes against the more established left wing parties. More than that, younger people are generally more progressive and they are naturally attracted to such new ideas, so these younger Western-educated professional class also began to take over the youth wing of leftist parties as well, often pitting against the older generation party members, who saw their takeover as hostile and an overemphasis on social justice rather than the class struggle they had been fighting for their entire lives, a path they think is doomed to fail. Often the reformism is far from radical and even liberal in nature (i.e. anti-labor), which would allow foreign capitalist powers to easily maneuver into the domestic market and destroy whatever hard-earned worker’s rights they had fought for over the years.

This represented a new and perhaps even more effective means of spreading neoliberal ideology across the world, not by employing right wing paramilitary death squads to coup left wing governments (though it still happens), but through an ideological indoctrination of the overseas students who came to study in Western institutions, who would then bring the seeds back to their home countries and allow it to germinate there.

A couple things to note here: first, when we’re talking about the 1990s and early 2000s, it bears to remember that most people had already become disillusioned with socialism and communism as an alternative system to capitalism. The USSR had fallen, all the post-Soviet states had already opened up to liberal reforms, North Korea was undergoing a severe famine, China wasn’t even something that resembles a strong economy yet. The resurgence of socialist and communist ideas among the youth is more recent trend than you think, not just in the West but across the Global South as well.

Second, while even the West had yet to fully accept what we take for granted as progressive values today, like the LGBT movements as mainstream, the push was already happening in those countries and their ideas were being carried back by Western-educated students.

However, this new wave of centrist or left-leaning movements would soon fail to make a clear material impact on the society. In some countries, the right-wing governments were able to exploit the conservatism of the society to pit the voters against the centrist parties. In others, the victory of neoliberal parties (and social democratic parties with neoliberal platforms) led to even worse material outcome for the vast majority of the people. In almost every case, liberal reform has invariably been a failure in the Global South.

The failures of liberal reform would in turn give way to the return of right-wing governments. Working class voters saw this as a betrayal, which had led to even more worker’s rights being stripped away to make way for foreign multi-national corporations to exploit, so whether consciously or not, these new liberal reformers are effectively functioning as “foreign agents”. Local petty bourgeoisie soon found themselves incapable of competing with foreign companies with huge capital, and flocked to nationalist right-wing parties.

This turns into a vicious cycle that enables a perpetual shift towards the right, with no end in sight. The fact is that no amount of reform will be able to fix a country that has been deliberately positioned in such a way that is vulnerable to foreign imperialism. Every move you make, you end up worse. For example, let’s say the new government wants to nationalize a certain natural resources, what happens? You get sanctioned, the exchange rate falls, the debt multiplied, and you end up with an even more unpopular government than the previous right-wing government, who would then use the opportunity to appeal to their conservative base and distract them from the obvious looting going on by the crony capitalists.