The Battle for Asia

From Decolonization to Globalization

Mark T. Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134343102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Asia has long been an ideological battleground between capitalism and communism, between nationalism and Westernisation and between the nation-state and globalization. This book is a history of the Asian region from 1945 to the present day which delineates the various ideological battles over Asia's development. Subjects covered include:
* theories of development
* decolonization
* US political and economic intervention
* the effects of communism
* the end of the Cold War
* the rise of neo-liberalism
* Asia after the crisis
* Asia in the era of globalisationBroad in sweep and rich in theory and empirical detail, this is an essential account of the growth of 'Asian miracle' and its turbulent position in the global economy of the twenty-first century.

Part I
The modernization project

When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the concept of the nation was taken up in very different ideological contexts and led to popular mobilizations in regions and countries within and outside Europe that had experienced neither the liberal revolution nor the same level of primitive accumulation, it still always was presented as a concept of capitalist modernization, which aimed to bring together the interclass demands for political unity and the needs of economic development. In other words, the nation was posed as the one and only active vehicle that could deliver modernity and development.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire,
Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 96

The postwar “naturalization” of the relatively closed national economy as the taken-for-granted object of economic regulation can be seen as a product of convergent public narratives about the nature of key economic and political changes facing postwar Europe and North America…Although this constitution of national economies and national modes of growth was mediated through national states, it was closely connected with the “making of an Atlantic ruling class” under US hegemony.

Bob Jessop, “Narrating the Future of the
National Economy and the National State:
Remarks on Remapping Regulation and
Reinventing Governance” in George Steinmetz, ed.,
State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, p. 397

1
US hegemony and national development

The new global order that emerged in the Cold War era was premised on the sovereign equality of all nation-states, despite the substantial inequalities between and within them. Against this backdrop the nation-state was naturalized as the key unit of (capitalist and socialist) development worldwide. The idea and practice of development was enshrined between the 1940s and the 1970s as a national and state-guided process of modernization. Decolonization and the universalization of the nation-state system brought the leadership (and even the general population) of diverse postcolonial polities in Asia and Africa (as well as the older nation-states of Latin America and Europe, not to mention the mandates and/or nation-states that had emerged in the Middle East after the First World War) into increasingly direct relations with the main protagonists of the Cold War—the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Apart from growing links with one or the other (or both) superpowers, the leadership of the new nations interacted with each other in a range of new international organizations such as the United Nations (UN). In the Cold War era, the US was central to the elaboration in many parts of the world of an anticommunist modernization project centered on state-guided national development.

The primary challenge to the US-led modernization project came from the USSR and its allies. However, it was also challenged by particular radical nationalist regimes and movements, often as part of a wider series of Third Worldist initiatives in the Bandung Era (1955–1975). Specific national and regional initiatives, and Third Worldism as an international movement, ultimately failed. But, in part, as a result of the various challenges, the US-led modernization project had entered a period of transition, by the late 1960s, symbolized most powerfully by the Vietnam War. The reorientation of US hegemony in the late 1960s and early 1970s paved the way for the uneven reconfiguration of the role of nation-states in the global political economy of the Cold War, a process that increasingly challenged the idea of development as a state-led national project by the beginning of the 1980s. This chapter discusses decolonization, the Cold War and the elaboration of the nation-state system in an effort to situate US hegemony in relation to the rise and decline of national development between the 1940s and the 1970s. It then turns to an examination of Bandung regimes and Third Worldism in this period as a way of clarifying the contradictions of national development and the paradox of the nation-state in the Cold War era. What is particularly salient in retrospect is the fact that even as these regimes and movements sought alternative development paths and alliance arrangements to those being offered by the US and the USSR, they always accepted that the nation-state was the vehicle for liberation and that development should involve some form of state-mediated national process.

Decolonization, the Cold War and the nation-state system I

The origins of national development

Many observers trace the roots of the dominant post-1945 idea and practice of development as national development to the transition to industrial capitalism and the consolidation of nation-states in Western Europe in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century For example, M.P.Cowen and R.W.Shenton regard the work of Friedrich List, the influential German nationalist and political economist, as “the fountainhead of ‘national development’”.¹ However, any attempt to locate the origins of the modern notion of national development also needs to look further east, particularly to Russia and Japan where, by the nineteenth century, nationalist politicians and policymakers were increasingly seeking to emulate the nation-states of Western Europe via state-directed economic growth.² Following the Russian Revolution and the US entry into the First World War in 1917, the debate about the form that national development should take was an important element in the wider struggle between Wilsonianism and Leninism.³ The Russian Revolution ensured that an increasingly state-socialist version of national development became central to the Soviet project. By the 1930s the late-industrializing efforts of the USSR were attracting the attention of economists and policy-makers in North America, Western Europe and beyond.⁴ In fact, it was during the 1930s that the idea of development as a state-mediated and economically redistributive (although not necessarily politically democratic) process of national mobilization and development was consolidated in the United States, parts of Latin America and, of course, Western, Central and Eastern Europe.

The rise of the new or reconfigured nation-states of East Central Europe after the First World War is, in fact, widely regarded as the locus classicus of the practice of national development as it was elaborated after the Second World War. A significant number of the pioneers of development economics (the intellectual anchor of national development efforts in many of the nation-states of the developing world after 1945) were born in East Central Europe, and their early research focused on national development in the region. For example, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan (who played a particularly important role in the establishment of development economics in Britain and the US in the 1940s), along with a number of other economists, sought to prescribe ways in which the nation-states of East Central Europe could be developed following the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century German experience. The idea that industrialization was the key to national development, and that government planning was necessary for this to take place, was the central element in the work of virtually all of these economists. Between the 1930s and the 1960s their views also meshed with the developmental preoccupations of Latin American economists and policymakers.⁵ For example, Raúl Prebisch, Under Secretary of Finance in Argentina in the early 1930s, emerged as a key figure in development economics and a major promoter of state-guided national development after the Second World War. In the post-1945 era Prebisch served as Director-General of the UN-sponsored Economic Commission for Latin America (Comisión Economica para America Latina—CEPAL) from 1948 to 1962. He also founded and then headed the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) from 1964 to 1969, a position from which he sought to encourage preferential tariffs for the exports of late-industrializing nation-states.⁶

The consolidation of the idea of national development, centered intellectually on development economics, was also an outgrowth of the late-colonial era in Asia and Africa.⁷ In the late-colonial era the idea of development was increasingly used by the British Colonial Office as a framework for a series of policy interventions and metropolitan financial initiatives that were aimed at improving living standards in the colonies and re-legitimizing empire. A similar pattern, with a somewhat different timeframe was also apparent in the case of French colonialism.⁸ The emergence of the idea of development as state-mediated national development was also linked to greater regulation and control over the economy as part of the war effort during the Second World War. This was certainly the case in the Middle East.⁹ Following the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940, the British government used this new conception of development to try and revitalize its colonial project in Africa and parts of Asia at the very moment when it was under siege from within and without.¹⁰ This eventually led to the establishment of the Colonial Development Corporation in 1948. It was renamed the Commonwealth Development Corporation in the mid1960s.¹¹ The British were also committed to retaining imperial influence in the Middle East in the post-1945 era, but did not necessarily see the Colonial Development and Welfare Act as having much relevance to their relations with the region.¹² At the same time, the ideas associated with the colonial development initiative still impacted on the Middle East. The intrusive character of this new found developmentalism (whether as part of the direct effort by colonial officials or the more indirect result of war-time exigencies) resulted in, or at least contributed to, increased conflict in the late-colonial era as nationalists and trade-unionists in Asia, Africa and the Middle East appropriated the language and concepts of state-mediated development escalating their demands for better wages, social services and improved living standards as well as political power and national sovereignty or independence.¹³

It was increasingly clear that, in contrast to earlier efforts to justify empire, the post-1940 idea and practice of colonial development, and the Keynesian instrumentalities that went with it, appealed strongly to nationalist elites in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. As decolonization gained momentum, it became apparent that by attempting to use the idea of development to bolster their influence and power, British colonial officials had helped to fatally undermine the powerful metropolitan view that the British empire was primarily about the elaboration and maintenance of a finely graded social hierarchy grounded in the semi-feudal and agrarian vision of the British aristocracy. This vision, and the increasingly complex array of honors and pageants on which it rested, had helped to link the British ruling elite to the traditional chiefs and princes of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.¹⁴ With some exceptions (mainly in the Middle East and Oceania), it was not a framework that could contain the young, often urbanized, and educated nationalists who increasingly took over both the newly established colonial development projects and the more longstanding machinery of the colonial or semi-colonial states in the 1950s and 1960s.¹⁵ Ultimately the developmentalism promoted by the colonial officials had undermined the long-standing colonial claim to be bringing civilization and order to savage peoples whose backwardness was thought to be grounded in distinct cultures and/or immutable racial shortcomings. The idea of development that emerged in the 1940s out of the crisis of colonialism increasingly assumed that all colonial subjects could operate as modern subjects.¹⁶ This was a central thread in the shift from a global order of colonial empires to a worldwide system of nation-states.

US hegemony and the creation of an international framework for national development I

The United States played a key role in the consolidation of the nation-state system after 1945, with the Soviet Union emerging as its only significant rival. During the Cold War, both the position of the US in the nation-state system and the foreign policies and practices of the USSR still bore significant traces of the colonialism and imperialism practiced by the European powers and Imperial Japan, as well as by the United States (in places such as the Philippines and the Caribbean) in an earlier era. It should be emphasized, however, that despite continuities the Cold War “empires” of both the US and the Soviet Union departed in important ways from earlier colonial or imperial projects. Most significantly, in political and administrative terms both the United States and the Soviet Union presided over empires that were made up more or less entirely of formally independent and sovereign nation-states, rather than colonies. The role of the US in Latin America by the early twentieth century and the role of Britain in Latin America, as well as Britain and France in the Middle East after the First World War had foreshadowed this form of indirect rule. In the Cold War era the relationship between the respective superpowers and their allies was increasingly mediated by systems of military alliances, regional organizations, and new in...