A new East-West synthesis? APEC and competing narratives of regional integration in the post-Cold War Asia-Pacific

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Volumn 23, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 1-28

  Berger, Mark T ^a  

^a MURDOCH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

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EID: 0344700414     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437549802300101     Document Type: Article

References (151)

1. Contemporary visions of the coming of a Pacific Century have antecedents in Japan that can be traced back to the late nineteenth century, when Japanese intellectuals began to anticipate a "Pacific Age" in global history. See Pekka Korhonen, "The Pacific Age in World History," Journal of World History 7, no. 1 (1996).
2. In the United States powerful ideas about the growing importance of the Pacific similarly reach back to the nineteenth century and are linked to wider ideas about the inexorability of westward expansion in North America. M. Consuelo Leon W., "Foundations of the American Image of the Pacific," in Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik, eds., Asia/Pacific As Space of Cultural Production (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). At the same time, ideas of a Pacific Century have shifted with changing circumstances; the regional visions of a hundred years ago are grounded in very different politicoeconomic and sociocultural contexts than those of the current expectations.
3. C. Fred Bergsten, "APEC and the World Economy: A Force for Worldwide Liberalisation," Foreign Affairs 73, no. 3 (1994),
4. reprinted in Ross Garnaut and Peter Drysdale, eds., Asia Pacific Regionalism: Readings in International Economic Relations (Sydney: Harper Collins, 1994).
5. C. Fred Bergsten, "The APEC: The Bogor Declaration and Its Implications for the Future," in Dilip K. Das, ed., Emerging Growth Pole: The Asia-Pacific Economy (Singapore: Prentice Hall, 1996).
6. For a similar perspective, see Ross Garnaut, Open Regionalism and Trade Liberalization: An Asia-Pacific Contribution to the World Trade System (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asia Studies, 1996).
7. Also see APEC Eminent Persons Group (EPG), A Vision for APEC: Toward an Asia Pacific Economic Community (October 1993);
8. APEC EPG, Achieving the APEC Vision: Free and Open Trade in the Asia Pacific (August 1994);
9. APEC EPG, Implementing the APEC Vision (August 1995; all three, Singapore: APEC Secretariat).
10. Helen E. S. Nesadurai, "APEC: a tool for U.S. regional domination?" Pacific Review 9, no. 1 (1996): 52.
11. Mark T. Berger, "The Triumph of the East? The East Asian Miracle and Post-Cold War Capitalism," in Mark T. Berger and Douglas A. Borer, eds., The Rise of East Asia: Critical Visions of the Pacific Century (London: Routledge, 1997).
12. David Wright-Neville, "The Politics of Pan Asianism: Culture, Capitalism and Diplomacy in East Asia," Pacifica Review: Peace, Security and Global Change 7, no. 1 (1995).
13. Alan Dupont, "Is There An 'Asian Way'?" Survival 38, no. 2 (1996).
14. William K. Tabb, The Postwar Japanese System: Cultural Economy and Economic Transformation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 255-284.
15. Walter Hatch and Kozo Yamamura, Asia in Japan's Embrace: Building a Regional Production Alliance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
16. Glenn Hook, "Japan and the Construction of Asia-Pacific," in Andrew Gamble and Anthony Payne, eds., Regionalism and World Order (London: Macmillan, 1996).
17. "Containing China," Economist (Aug. 4, 1995): 11.
18. "China: A Funny-Looking Tiger," Economist (Aug. 23, 1996): 15-17.
19. Bruce Cumings, "The Political Economy of the Pacific Rim" in Ravi Arvind Palat, ed., Pacific-Asia and the Future of the World-System (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993).
20. Barbara Stallings, "Introduction: Global change, regional response," in Barbara Stallings, ed., Global Change, Regional Response: The New International Context of Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
21. Peter J. Katzenstein, "Introduction: Asian Regionalism in Comparative Perspective," in Peter J. Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi, eds., Network Power: Japan and Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
22. Mark Beeson, "Asia's Disparate Political Economies and Prospects for Transnational Convergence" Asian Journal of Public Administration 18, no. 2 (1996).
23. Mark Beeson, "The Clash of Institutions: APEC and Institutional Theory," paper presented at International Studies Association Conference, Toronto, March 1997.
24. Benedict Anderson, "The Last Empires: The New World Disorder," New Left Review 193 (1992).
25. Donald Crone, "Does Hegemony Matter? The Reorganization of the Pacific Political Economy," World Politics 45, no. 4 (1993): 512-515.
26. Also see Hadi Soesastro, "Pacific Economic Cooperation: The History of an Idea," in Garnaut and Drysdale, eds., Asia Pacific Regionalism (1994).
27. Lawrence T. Woods, Asia-Pacific Diplomacy: Nongovernmental Organizations and International Relations (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1993), pp. 8-10.
28. Pekka Korhonen, Japan and the Pacific Free Trade Area (London: Routledge, 1994).
29. Woods, note 11, pp. 41-65.
30. Michael Mansfield, "Prospects for a Pacific Community," in Paul F. Hooper, ed., Building a Pacific Community: The Addresses and Papers of the Pacific Community Lecture Series (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press/East-West Center, 1982), p. 86;
31. cited and discussed in Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik, "Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production," in Wilson and Dirlik, eds., Asia/Pacific As Space of Cultural Production (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 2.
32. Ronald Reagan, quoted in Simon Winchester, Pacific Rising: The Emergence of a New World Culture (New York: Prentice Hall, 1991), p. 24; cited and discussed in Wilson and Dirlik, note 13, p. 3.
33. Christopher L. Connery, "Pacific Rim Discourse: The U.S. Global Imaginary in the Cold War Years" in Wilson and Dirlik, eds., note 13, pp. 31-32, 54-56.
34. Woods, note 11, pp. 121-122.
35. Yoichi Funabashi, Asia Pacific Fusion: Japan's Role in APEC (Washington: Institute for International Economics, 1995), pp. 58-69.
36. Bill Mellor, "The Pacific Rim: A Year for Crowing," Time International (Feb. 22, 1993): 12.
37. James Walsh, "Toward the Pacific Age," Time International (Nov. 22, 1993): 22-27.
38. Cited in Michael Gordon, "APEC's Great Leap Forward?" Weekend Australian (Nov. 12-13, 1994): 21.
39. Michael Gordon and Patrick Walters, "Historic Trade Deal for Pacific," Australian (Nov. 16, 1994): 1.
40. "A Dream of Free Trade" Economist (Nov. 25, 1994): 29-30. The member governments of APEC in 1989 were Australia, Brunei, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and the United States. China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan joined in 1991. Mexico and Papua New Guinea joined in 1993. Chile joined in 1994.
41. Frank Ching, "APEC Moving Along 'Asian Way'" Far Eastern Economic Review (Dec. 7, 1995): 48.
42. On the ostensibly consensual character of Asia-Pacific diplomacy, see Woods, note 11, pp. 116-117.
43. Fidel V. Ramos, Time for Takeoff (Manila: Friends of Steady Eddie, 1994); cited in Funabashi, note 17, p. 50.
44. Also see "Democracy and Growth: Why Voting is Good For You," Economist (August 27, 1994): 15-17.
45. William Keegan, The Spectre of Capitalism: The Future of the World Economy After the Fall of Communism (London: Vintage, 1993, 1st ed. 1992), p. 4.
46. Will Hutton, "Why the Asian Tigers Burn So Bright," Guardian Weekly (Aug. 6, 1995): 12. The way in which the dominant Anglo-American narratives continue to celebrate the superiority of the modes of political and economic organization associated with an idealized North America and Britain was clearly manifested at the end of the 1980s, in the argument by Francis Fukuyama - a Rand consultant and former US State Department employee - that the end of the Cold War might well be the "end of history." In a now famous article, he characterized the waning of the conflict between Washington and Moscow as the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." He emphasized that the liberal "victory" was still unfinished, and it had occurred mainly "in the realm of ideas or consciousness." The process was "as yet incomplete in the real or material world." However, with regard to East Asia, he saw liberalization as well advanced. In Japan, where "the essential elements of economic and political liberalism" had been "successfully grafted onto uniquely Japanese traditions and institutions," Fukuyama he was confident that liberalism's "survival in the long run" was assured. In the case of South Korea, he argued that "political liberalism" had been trailing "economic liberalism, more slowly than many had hoped but with seeming inevitability," and South Korea "could not possibly be isolated from the larger democratic trends" sweeping the globe.
47. Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" National Interest 16, no. 8 (1989): 3-4, 15. Then, in 1992, Fukuyama argued that East Asia's "postwar economic miracle" makes clear that "capitalism is a path toward economic development that is potentially available to all countries." More specifically, he argued that "the established industrial powers" have not been "capable of blocking the development of a latecomer, provided that country plays by the rules of economic liberalism." From his point of the view, the "newly industrialized economies" (NIEs) of Asia "have proven that economic liberalism allows late modernizers to catch up with and even overtake" established industrial powers.
48. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992), pp. 101-107. At the same time, he has qualified his prediction somewhat, allowing that an East Asian capitalist development model led by Japan may embody a major challenge to the Anglo-American model.
49. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man Ibid., p. 243.
50. Fukuyama, "Capitalism and Democracy: The Missing Link" Journal of Democracy 3, no. 3 (1992): 108-110.
51. Fukuyama, "Asia's Soft-Authoritarian Alternative," New Perspectives Quarterly 9, no. 2 (1992): 60-61.
52. For example, some Anglo-American commentators continue to assume that Japan is not so much a challenge to the West as inevitably becoming more like the West. See Sebastian Mallaby, "Japan: Oriental Renaissance" Economist (July 15, 1994).
53. Brian Beedham, "Tomorrow's Japan," Economist (July 19, 1996).
54. Also see C. Fred Bergsten and Marcus Noland, Reconcilable Differences? The United States - Japan Economic Conflict (Washington: Institute for International Economics, 1993).
55. Jeffrey Garten cited in William Shawcross, "A New Dark Age?" Weekend Australian (August 20-21, 1994): 23.
56. Jeffrey Sachs, "Beyond Bretton Woods: A New Blueprint," Economist (Oct. 1-7, 1994): 23-29.
57. For a good critique of Sachs and his work in relation to Eastern Europe, see Peter Gowan, "Analysing Shock Therapy: NeoLiberal Theory and Practice for Eastern Europe," New Left Review 213 (1995).
58. On "transition orthodoxy" more generally, see Peter Nolan, China's Rise, Russia's Fall: Politics, Economics and Planning in the Transition from Stalinism (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 54-109.
59. Also see David Lane, The Rise and Fall of State Socialism: Industrial Society and the Socialist State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
60. Robert Wade, "East Asia and the Neo-Liberal World: Japan, the World Bank and the Art of Paradigm Maintenance - The East Asian Miracle in Political Perspective," New Left Review 217 (1996).
61. Catherine Caufield, Masters of Illusion: The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), p. 160.
62. World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993), pp. 347, 366-368.
63. Apart from the challenge from within East Asia, there is an increasing number of "revisionist" Anglo-American policy-oriented works that foreground the role of the state or government institutions in capitalist development. Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
64. James Fallows, Looking at the Sun: The Rise of the New East Asian Economic and Political System (New York: Pantheon, 1994).
65. Chalmers Johnson, Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).
66. Linda Weiss and John M. Hobson, States and Economic Development: A Comparative Historical Analysis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
67. Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
68. Mark Borthwick (with contributions by selected scholars), Pacific Century: The Emergence of Modern Pacific Asia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 1-3, 543-545.
69. Richard Madsen, China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 223, 227-228.
70. James L. Richardson, "Asia-Pacific Security: Challenge to Diplomacy" New Asia-Pacific Review 3, no. 2 (1997): 30-34.
71. He anticipated that the two major "trading states" of the United States and Japan would persist as the dominant economic powers in the Pacific, noting that both of them have important trade and investment linkages with Western Europe. Writing just as the Cold War was coming to an end he also saw the Pacific as being the preserve of four major military powers: the United States, the USSR, Japan, and China. However, he was optimistic that the overall security situation in the Pacific would improve. He perceived a trend toward the blurring of distinctions between socialism and capitalism, arguing that the "success" of "state capitalism" in Japan (not to mention countries such as South Korea and Taiwan) "offers a bridge of sorts between the two ideals of 'East and West'." At the same time, he envisioned a Pacific region which would remain characterized by cultural and ideological fragmentation and anticipated that the "alliances" which develop will continue to extend well outside the region. Ultimately, for Segal, "thinking Pacific" did not mean "thinking only in regional terms" and the future "success" of states in the Pacific will flow more from "their ability to play the global game" than their position in the region. Gerald Segal, Rethinking the Pacific (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991; first published 1990), pp. 1-2, 367-368, 385-386, 390-391.
72. Manning and Stern, "The Myth of the Pacific Community," Foreign Affairs 73, no. 6 (1994): 80-81.
73. For Japan, see Clyde Prestowitz, Trading Places: How We Are Giving Our Future to Japan and How to Reclaim It (New York: Basic Books, expanded ed. 1989; 1st ed., 1988).
74. Karel van Wolferen, The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation (London: Macmillan, 1989).
75. Clyde Prestowitz, Ronald Morse, and Alan Tonelson, eds., Powernomics: Economics and Strategy After the Cold War (Washington: Economic Strategy Institute, 1991).
76. George Friedman and Meredith Lebard, The Coming War With Japan (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991).
77. William S. Dietrich, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: The Political Roots of American Economic Decline (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).
78. Andrew Dougherty, Japan 2000 (Rochester: Rochester Institute of Technology, 1991).
79. Robert Harvey, The Undefeated: The Rise, Fall and Rise of Greater Japan (London: Macmillan, 1994).
80. Eamonn Fingleton, Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the US by the Year 2000 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
81. For China, see Richard Bernstein and Ross Munro, The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Knopf, 1997).
82. Humphrey Hawksley and Simon Holberton, Dragon Strike: The Millennium War (London: Sidgewick & Jackson, 1997).
83. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp. 34, 209.
84. Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993).
85. Samuel P. Huntington, Foreign Affairs Ibid.: 22-28.
86. Murray Weidenbaum, Greater China: The Next Economic Superpower? (St. Louis: Washington University Center for the Study of American Business, Contemporary Issues Series 57, Feb. 1993), pp. 2-3; cited in Huntington, note 38: 28.
87. Also see Murray Weidenbaum and Samuel Hughes, The Bamboo Network: How Expatriate Chinese Entrepreneurs Are Creating a New Economic Superpower in Asia (New York: Martin Kessler Books, 1996).
88. Other books in this vein include Claudia Cragg, The New Taipans: A Vital Source Book of the People and Business of the Pacific Rim (London: Arrow Books, 1995)
89. Sterling Seagrave, Lords of the Rim: The Invisible Empire of the Overseas Chinese (London: Corgi, 1995).
90. For discussion and critique of the concept of Greater China, see Stephen Uhalley, Jr., "'Greater China': The Contest of a Term," positions: east asia cultures critique 2, no. 2 (1994).
91. Michael Backman, et al., East Asia Analytical Unit, Overseas Chinese Business Networks in Asia (Canberra: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Commonwealth of Australia, 1995).
92. The problem with fixed and purified conceptions of East and West can be illustrated by reference to any number of cases of contamination. For example, while Alvin Toffler certainly has his Chinese critics - the Beijing-based professor of politics Gao Fang has dismissed the work of Toffler and other "futurologists" as "international capitalist utopianism" - he did a lecture tour of the country in 1983 under the direct auspices of the Chinese government and the Chinese translation of the The Third Wave was a best-seller in the mid-1980s. It appears to have been particularly popular among young technocrats, and in the 1980s Toffler was invoked or referred to in hundreds of Chinese journal articles on economic development. See Alexander Woodside, "The Asia-Pacific Idea as a Mobilization Myth," in Dirlik, ed., What Is in a Rim? (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 16-18.
93. Huntington, note 38: 41. Huntington drew explicitly on an article by Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's deputy secretary of foreign affairs, when making his sharp distinction between the West and the non-West. Kishore Mahbubani, "The West and the Rest," National Interest (summer 1992).
94. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2d revised and extended ed. 1992; 1983).
95. Although the deployment of the concept of hybridity serves to criticize fixed conceptions of culture and ethnicity, given its own history, its very use also draws attention to the continued power of racist categories and racialized political discourses in ordering knowledge about the rise of the East and political and social change more generally. The term hybrid first gained currency in late-nineteenth-century Europe as a biological or physiological term for the offspring of parents of different "races." As Robert Young has noted, the current appropriation of the term by critical theory to problematize fixed notions of identity and assertions of cultural/racial purity suggests that contemporary critical theory may not have transcended the racial concepts of an earlier era as much as it is sometimes assumed. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 6, 10, 27-28.
96. Mahathir cited in "Asia and Europe: Friends Apart" Economist (March 9, 1996): 27.
97. Arif Dirlik, "The Asia-Pacific Idea: Reality and Representation in the Invention of a Regional Structure," Journal of World History 3, no. 1 (1992): 71.
98. There have, of course, been many outspoken Japanese officials and intellectuals. For example, in the early 1990s Sakakibara Eisuke, a senior official in the Japanese finance ministry, emerged as a relatively outspoken advocate of the Japanese model. Fluent in English, Sakakibara rejected the more traditional forms of Japanese nationalism as vague and mystical, at the same time expressing a determination to protect what he thinks is distinctively Japanese from the "West." Furthermore, in his book Beyond Capitalism, he sees "the Japanese Model" as being "of great educational value for future economic development in areas such as Latin America, South-East Asia and Africa." He argues that Japan is a "non-capitalist market economy" insofar as companies compete in the market; however, they do not privilege profit over everything else and shareholders have virtually no power. From his perspective, Japanese companies put people before profits, keeping loyal employees on the payroll even if there is an economic downturn, and the government works to protect industry even at the expense of wider questions of economic efficiency. Sakakibara, who is also involved with a new study group of Japanese politicians, academics, and business leaders, holds the Japanese model up in sharp contrast to the US model and warns that if Japan went down the North American road the result would be "a wider gap in income distribution, rampant money worship and the vulgarisation of culture." Sakakibara Eisuke, cited in "Japan: The New Nationalists," Economist (January 14, 1995): 20.
99. Eisuke Sakakibara, Beyond Capitalism: The Japanese Model of Market Economics (Washington: University Press of America, 1993).
100. Shigeyuki Abe, "Prospects for Asian Economic Integration," in Shoji Nishijima and Peter H. Smith, eds., Cooperation or Rivalry? Regional Integration in the Americas and the Pacific Rim (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 244-245.
101. Sandra Burton, "The Stubborn Holdout," Time International (November 22, 1993): 27.
102. Funabashi, note 17, pp. 68-69.
103. François Godemont, The New Asian Renaissance: From Colonialism to the Post-Cold War (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 282.
104. Glenn Hook, "Japan and the Construction of Asia-Pacific" in Andrew Gamble and Anthony Payne, eds., Regionalism and World Order (London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 194-195.
105. The centrality of fixed cultural/racial categories to the Malaysian prime minister's thinking was foreshadowed in his early political testament The Malay Dilemma, which he wrote in the late 1960s - while he was cooling his heels in the political background following his expulsion from the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) for publicly criticizing the leadership of Tunku Abdul Rahman. This book is full of reductionist and biologically centered cultural/racial explanations for human behavior. Mahathirbin Mohamad, The Malay Dilemma (Kuala Lumpur: Federal Publishers, 1982; 1st ed., 1970)
106. Khoo Boo Tiek, Paradoxes of Mahathirism: An Intellectual Biography of Mahathir Mohamad (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 332.
107. Mark T. Berger, "The End of the 'Third World'?" Third World Quarterly: Journal of Emerging Areas 15, no. 2. (1994).
108. Ishihara is well known for an earlier book - Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say No: Why Japan Will Be First Among Equals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).
109. The Japanese version, which was coauthored with Morita Akio, the head of Sony, was published in 1989 as No To Ieru Nihon. The unauthorized English-language edition, which, significantly, was financed by the US Department of Defense, included Morita's contribution; however, he withdrew from the authorized North American edition. Richard J. Barnet and John Cavanagh, Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 55.
110. Mahathir Mohamad and Ishihara Shintaro, The Voice of Asia: Two Leaders Discuss the Coming Century (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1995).
111. See Mahathir Mohamad and Ishihara Shintaro, "East Beats West," Asiaweek (September 8, 1995).
112. Edward W. Desmond, "One Happy, Culturally Superior Family," Time Australia (November 21, 1994): 54.
113. Mahathir Mohamad, Asiaweek, note 57: 41.
114. Excerpted from Mahathir and Ishihara, The Voice of Asia, note 57.
115. "Saying No," Economist (Nov. 25, 1994): 31.
116. Anwar Ibrahim, The Asian Renaissance (Singapore: Times Books International, 1996), p. 45.
117. George Yeo, "A New Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," in Greg Sheridan, ed., Living With Dragons: Australia Confronts Its Asian Destiny (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995), p. 179.
118. John Naisbitt, Megatrends Asia: The Eight Asian Megatrends That Are Changing the World (London: Nicholas Brealy, 1995): ix-x.
119. In an earlier book, Naisbitt and his coauthor emphasized that the rise of East Asia and the growing significance of the Asia-Pacific was a cultural as well as an economic shift, but "in a global economy the rise of the Pacific Rim need not signify the decline of the West unless the West ignores the significance of this trend and fails to capitalize on it." John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene, Megatrends 2000 (London: Pan Books, 1990), pp. 158-159.
120. Tommy Koh, "The ten values that undergird East Asian strength and success," International Herald Tribune, December 11, 1993.
121. This is discussed in Richard Robison, "The politics of 'Asian values'" in Richard Robison, ed., Pathways to Asia: The Politics of Engagement (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996), pp. 319-320.
122. Murray Hiebert, "Small Talk: Asian and EU Ministers Skirt the Sticky Issues," Far Eastern Economic Review, February 27, 1997: p. 22.
123. Kishore Mahbubani, "The Pacific Way" Foreign Affairs 74, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 1995): 107.
124. Tommy T. B. Koh, The United States and East Asia: Conflict and Co-operation (Singapore: Institute of Policy Studies, 1995), pp. 107-108.
125. Chan Heng Chee (former executive director of the Singapore International Foundation, former director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, and now Singaporean ambassador to the United States) has emphasized that at the present time "Asian countries are joining in the global debate with confidence and vigour" and "(i)f they speak stridently, it is because Western countries have pushed hard in the post-Cold War era to set the agenda for change and pace of change. This is not, as Samuel Huntington argues, a clash of civilisations leading inevitably to war. This is a clash of ideas and a temporary phase. Hopefully the exchange will promote better appreciation and understanding on all sides so we can learn the best from each other." Chan Heng Chee, "World Searches for New Paradigms," Straits Times (August 21, 1994): 1, 6.
126. The articulation of a new East-West synthesis is also apparent in other responses to Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations?" See, for example, Liu Binyan, "Civilization Grafting: No Culture is an Island," Foreign Affairs 72, no. 4 (1993).
127. The notion of a new East-West synthesis is reinforced by a number of other political and business leaders and commentators in the region. For example, M. S. Dobbs-Higginson has argued that "the Asia Pacific region, with both its collective old civilisations and new strengths, will hopefully be able to make a real contribution to the global effort to avoid a regression either to endless trade Cold War bickering/fighting or, even worse, to the age old warfare of ethnic cleansing on root civilisation lines." M. S. Dobbs-Higginson, Asia Pacific: Its Role in the New World Disorder (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1993), p. 426.
128. Funabashi, note 17, pp. 10-11.
129. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjunctive and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 4-6.
130. Kees van der Pijl, "The Second Glorious Revolution: Globalizing Elites and Historical Change," in Björn Hettne, ed., International Political Economy: Understanding Global Disorder (London: Zed Press, 1995).
131. Harold Perkins, The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World (London: Routledge, 1996).
132. Matthew Horsman and Andrew Marshall, After the Nation-State: Citizens, Tribalism and the New World Disorder (London: Harper Collins, 1994).
133. David J. Elkins, Beyond Sovereignty: Territory and Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
134. Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
135. Martin Albrow, The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 1996).
136. Victor Keegan, "Highway Robbery By the Super-Rich" Guardian Weekly (July 28, 1996): 13.
137. United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1996 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
138. According to the World Bank, by the beginning of the twenty-first century the total number of people living in poverty in Asia will only drop from the 805 million that it recorded for 1985 to 435 million (and it should be emphasized that the World Bank defines anyone receiving more than 2,150 calories a day as living above the poverty line). For the Caribbean and Latin America, the projected trend is from 75 million to 60 million people, while it is anticipated that the number of people living below the poverty line in sub-Saharan Africa will rise to 265 million by 2000 from a 1985 figure of 85 million. James H. Mittelman, "The Globalization Challenge: Surviving at the Margins," Third World Quarterly: Journal of Emerging Areas 15, no. 3 (1994): 439-441.
139. Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld, Dragons in Distress: Asia's Miracle Economies in Crisis (San Francisco: Institute for Food Development Policy).
140. Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1996).
141. John K. Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992).
142. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1995).
143. Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1995).
144. James Petras and Morris Morley, Empire or Republic? American Global Power and Domestic Decay (New York: Routledge, 1995).
145. Significantly, annual wages in the United States for people without high-school education have declined by almost 25 percent since 1973, while there was a 17 percent drop for high-school graduates, but a 5.2 percent rise for college graduates. Even more dramatic is the claim that 1 percent of the wealthiest households in the United States now control 40 percent of the "national" wealth, while in Britain the top 1 percent controls 18 percent of the "national" wealth. Richard Cohen, "Capitalism Brings Rich Pickings," Guardian Weekly (April 30, 1995).
146. According to conventional economic indicators, the US economy has been growing between 1992 and 1995 rate reminiscent of the boom years of the 1950s. However, the growth in investment, increases in productivity, continued low inflation, and the appearance of new jobs numbering more than eight million, was not accompanied by an improvement in living standards. After taking into account inflation, the weekly earnings of the average "rank-and-file worker" fell by almost 20 percent between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, while the annual pay of corporation heads went up by almost twenty percent during the 1980s and almost 70 percent after taxes. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the "real wages" of a majority of workers in the United States have not risen, despite the dramatic economic recovery after 1991. Technological change, among other things, is making it possible to replace large numbers of skilled white-collar and blue-collar workers with relatively unskilled and lower-paid workers. Simon Head, "The New, Ruthless Economy," New York Review of Books 43, no. 4 (1996): 47-52.
147. Also see Lester Thurow, The Future of Capitalism: How Today's Economic Forces Will Shape Tomorrow's World (New York: William Morrow, 1996), pp. 1-2, 6, 20-42.
148. Ed Kaptein, "Neo-liberalism and the Dismantling of Corporatism in Australia," in Henk Overbeek, ed., Restructuring Hegemony in the Global Political Economy: The Rise of Transnational Neo-liberalism in the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1993).
149. Belinda Probert, "Globalisation, Economic Restructuring and the State," in Stephen Bell and Brian Head, eds., State, Economy and Public Policy in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994).
150. Some of the most interesting contemporary strategies of progressive action focus on the importance of local modes of empowerment. These approaches emphasize the cultural and socioeconomic concerns of particular groups and organizations and the way in which they face problems refracted through global, regional, national, and local relations of power. Mark T. Berger, "Post-Cold War Capitalism: Modernization and Modes of Resistance After the Fall," Third World Quarterly 16, no. 4 (1995).
151. One interesting effort to suggest a way of moving beyond the dominant discourses on the Pacific Century and the relations of power that they complement, has been provided by Arif Dirlik, a China specialist and professor of history at Duke University. His most complete discussion of an alternative theory and practice can be found in After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism. In this extended essay, Dirlik provides a wide-ranging history of capitalism, at the same time as he attempts to historicize Marxism (he focuses on Chinese Marxism, which he argues is "a localised or vernacular version of a global Marxism that claimed a subject position for itself within a universalised Marxist discourse") and evaluate the rise, demise, and significance of the state-socialist model. From his perspective, all of the main concepts of Marxism, including class analysis, are inadequate to the task of "liberation." Nor do they represent a sufficient means by which to come to grips with "the full complexity of contemporary capitalism" and "the social formations and problems that it has generated." He is opposed to efforts at totalization and attempts to inject new categories and formulations that are not "implicit" in Marxism. Ultimately, he argues, a new "vision of liberation" has to come from outside because, despite what advocates have believed, "it is not immanent in Marxism." In particular, he argues that the crucial shortcoming of "actually existing socialism," in those countries - such as China and Vietnam - where Marxism became a hegemonic discourse, was that it attempted to duplicate capitalist goals that both "distorted socialism" and "undermined the legitimacy of the system." He argues that earlier forms of Marxism are no more capable of addressing the processes of "fragmentation" brought on by the global spread and reconfiguration of capitalism than are the dominant modernization paradigms in their Anglo-American and East Asian variants. In a concise statement of the problem facing those in the Asia-Pacific and beyond who want to bring about progressive political and social change, Dirlik argues that the "challenge" is to mesh "a non-totalizing discourse of liberation with a theoretical discourse that of necessity must address the problem of totality (however fragmented) under capitalism." From his perspective, if any particular project of liberation is going to be faithful to its goals, it can concern itself only with "local propositions for general consideration" or "general propositions for local consideration" and it must avoid either "binding axioms formulated in accordance with teleological presuppositions" or "the reification of local cultures." At the same time, Dirlik emphasizes that capital remains a "'foundational' principle of contemporary life" and "any discourse of liberation worthy of the name must address the problems of material and social existence that it presents." In this context, Marxism remains relevant. Rather than signaling the "death of marxism," the demise of state-socialism in East Asia and beyond has simply ended the "servitude to bureaucratic modernizationism" in which Marxism was ensnared. Ultimately, Dirlik proposes what he calls "critical localism." The local is a key site of resistance against global power, but it must also be the site where efforts to abolish oppression and inequality grounded in particular histories are carried out. Critical localisms must continue to evaluate the present from the perspective of the particularities of the past, at the same time as they examine the past through the lens of modernity (including revisionist Marxism). Dirlik is highly critical of those decidedly uncritical localisms that romanticize traditional communities or are grounded in "hegemonic nationalist yearnings," such as neo-Confucian revivalism, and the wide variety of explicitly antimodernist fundamentalist movements in many parts of the world. Arif Dirlik, After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 6, 31, 44, 81-82, 84, 105-106, 108-109. Critical localism represents an important attempt to engage with the overwhelming material and discursive power of capitalist modernity and its destructive consequences. It represents a way of moving beyond the celebratory visions offered by powerful Anglo-American and East Asian discourses that complement processes of regional and international elite integration and conflict.