Development Without Freedom

The Politics of Asian Globalization

Songok Han Thornton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754672272
• eBook ISBN: 9781351944687
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Thanks to the inroads of IMFism and the "war on terror, " America has lost much of the soft power it enjoyed in Asia during the early 1990s. The winners, by default, are some of the world's most undemocratic development models, such as Sino-globalism. "Asian values" took a hard blow from the Asian Crash, but have returned in this even more virulent form. The West is left sitting on the sidelines of a distinctly Asian contest of development with or without freedom. Development Without Freedom explores this crucial trial-by-development, which will define the politics of globalization for decades to come.

Chapter 1
Globalization on Trial: Rethinking Asian Exceptionalism vis-à-vis the Third World

The Making of Third Worldism

The end of the Cold War put America in the curiously unenviable position of having no major geopolitical rival. Triumphalism and growing economic hubris trumped geo-realist common sense about the dangers lurking behind US “unipolarny.” Now. instead of having one preeminent enemy, America finds itself at odds with much of the entire world. It is telling that Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates—who for years served in the CIA tête-à-tête a KGB agent named Vladimir V. Putin—expresses nostalgia toward the “less complex” days of the Cold War.¹

The last glimmers of appreciation for America’s global primacy were seen in the Gulf War coalition and the vanguard role that America was invited to play in Kosovo, after European countries proved incapable of handling this relatively small crisis in their own backyard. However, even as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright toasted America for being the “indispensable nation,” the global drift was toward a very dispensable view of US hegemony. In the face of what has justly been called the criminalization of American foreign policy,² the only surprising thing is that many nations taking this view—let us call them the contras—are not programmatically anti-American. They are simply non-aligned.

This, to be sure, is a new kind of non-alignment. Whereas the old Non-Aligned Movement had been a distinctly Third World phenomenon, today’s version has expanded to include a broad range of both developed and newly industrialized countries (NICs). One of their few common denominators is an intense aversion to US unilateralism. Rarely is this pushed so far as Chávez’s anti-American rants or Putin’s blasts at the “hyper-force” of US militarism. After throwing down the gauntlet at a February 2007 Security Conference in Munich,³ Putin rushed over to the Middle East to elaborate his “New Course” for a multilateral world order. Even so, he draped himself in the borrowed imagery of US soft power by having his chief propagandist, Vladislav Sourkov, describe him as a new Franklin D. Roosevelt.⁴ The point is that Washington has so completely lost its way as to appear, from a Third World perspective, more fundamentally “un-American” than Putin is. What Russia claims to offer, ironically, is nothing less than a global New Deal.

That would be a fine contribution, if only it were true. Unfortunately, as the Chechen holocaust amply proves, this progressive image is a hoax. Putin’s patent objective, understood through his actions rather than his words, is a reconfigured Second World. The more likely locus for a real New Deal is Latin America, which naturally takes the contra route after the grievous failure of its Washington-directed restructuration of the 1980s and early 1990s. At that time the Pacific Rim was still relatively content with its US affiliation, and might have remained so as long as its “miracle” era lasted. That all changed with the Asian Crisis, which was intensified and prolonged by IMF-dictated “reforms.” It was no secret that these strictures were a product of collusion between the IMF and the US Treasury Department. Asia in general took a hard lesson from this dubious “rescue” operation, and Bush era unilateralism widened the East/West gap still farther.

The Bush agenda not only ignored the core tenets of geopolitical realism but also the dismal outcome of past American flirtations with imperialism. Though neoconservatives often trace their ideas to Teddy Roosevelt, they forget that T.R. tacitly dropped his imperialist stance during his presidency, just as Woodrow Wilson would more openly renounce his.⁵ Having pressured Congress to grant citizenship to Puerto Ricans and independence to Filipinos, Wilson worked to put an end to all colonialism after World War I. He was convinced that America faced a stark choice between the ideals of democracy and those of unfettered national interest, which is to say imperialism.⁶ Having come to see the latter as both unjust and unstable, his Fourteen Points and his proposal for a League of Nations sought a mediating system of international law to promote global democracy by strictly democratic means. Granted, he hoped other countries would model themselves on his Calvinist vision of America,⁷ but he opposed any unilateral imposition of the US model.⁸

This Wilsonian sense of restraint—keeping one’s means in tune with one’s ends, and foreign policy in tune with democracy—was still an operative principle at the end of World War II. It made its mark, for example, on postwar Bretton Woods organizations: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in 1944, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947. Unfortunately these institutions would soon be absorbed into a Cold War security system that was subject to US fiat and given to callous disregard for Third World interests. This shift was already manifest in the 1947 Truman Doctrine, which stood Wilson’s philosophy on its head by casting America as the military and economic policeman of the world. Although Pax Americana worked rather well until the early 1970s,⁹ for America at least, it rested on a dubious conflation of capitalist and democratic values.¹⁰ It hardly needs to be said which of these concerns took priority in American foreign policy.

This bracketing of democratic values meant that foreign affairs were cut loose from any serious ethical evaluation or restraint.¹¹ When friendly persuasion failed, America was more than willing to intervene forcefully, as it did in Korea, Greece, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Grenada and Lebanon. Likewise it was behind the destabilization of regimes such as Iran, Turkey, Guatemala, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, El Salvador, Chile, Ghana, Zaire and Mali.¹² Military adventurism was matched by environmental destruction, such that the US Department of Defense became the world’s largest polluter.¹³ First World domination and contamination were two sides of the same coin, just as they came together in the Soviet Union’s Second World dominion over Eurasia.

Hope for a progressive world order lay with the developing world. Having fought long and hard to rid themselves of colonialism, some Third World countries understandably resisted First World neocolonialism by seeking their own path to development.¹⁴ Thus Third World nationalism of the 1950s and 1960s grew hand-in-hand with a distinctly non-aligned internationalism. At first this Third Way, like early pan-Arabism,¹⁵ was simply anti-colonial; but increasingly its goal shifted to escaping co-optation by the superpowers. That common cause helped Third Worldism bridge the ethnic, religious and linguistic gaps that divided it,¹⁶ thus making it the undeclared second front of the Cold War. Washington found it necessary to depict this thorn in its side as a Soviet pawn. Otherwise there could be no hiding the fact that America’s primary goal was hegemony, not global security or democratization.

Rise and Fall of the Old Non-Alignment

One of the first to recognize the threat of capitalist recolonization in the postwar era was India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. By the late 1940s his government was already forging a non-aligned blend of socialist economic development and secular democracy.¹⁷ Like Gandhi, Nehru rejected both communism and capitalism, but supplemented Gandhi’s eco-social austerity with his own pro-tech utopianism. This was most unfortunate, for Nehru’s second declaration of Indian independence—liberation from the Cold War system¹⁸—was coupled with a gigantism that effectively declared war on nature. Thus it duplicated rather than supplanted the eco-imperialism of First and Second World modernisms.

This destructive legacy has yet to be overcome. Its bigger-is-better mindset is so deeply ingrained that more eco-friendly approaches to development have rarely been embraced by ruling elites outside the US and Western Europe.¹⁹ Purging the Third Worldism of Gandhi’s values meant that none of the “three worlds” would offer an alternative to the ecosocial pillage that has appropriated the name “development.”

In other respects Nehru’s vision was more progressive. His idea of nationalism drew upon his sense of Asia’s relatively harmonious past, as compared to Europe’s. Using secularism and federalism to bridge the gap between Hindus and Muslims. Nehru urged the new nation-state to seek unity in diversity rather than uniformity.²⁰ Meanwhile he continued his struggle against imperialism by refusing to enter the Cold War or the US-directed world system. When the World Bank retaliated by refusing to fund two badly needed oil refineries, Soviet funding came to the rescue. That of course threw Washington into a state of apoplexy. The rift with Washington was widened further by India’s Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) of 1973, which set limits on Western equity holdings. Corporations that refused to comply were forced to leave the country. So it was that Indians were deprived of Coca Cola.²¹

African non-alignment followed a similar pattern. In the 1950s Africans had been optimistic about their postcolonial future. The aims of African nationalism reached far beyond the raw economism that would mark Pacific Rim development in coming decades. Stress was laid on freedom as well as the dignity and equality of African peoples.²² Rather than pure Marxist materialism, African socialism was rooted in tradition and culture. This capacious sense of Third Worldism infused the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia, where Asian and African countries jointly framed a non-aligned development strategy.²³

Likewise, the 1958 Conference of Independent African States in Accra, attended by all independent African governments, tried to assert a distinctive African voice. Despite America’s charge that African non-alignment was a mere front for Soviet vassalage,²⁴ Accra refused co-optation by either superpower.²⁵ Its initiatives were echoed in later Third World demands for a reformed world system, e.g., the New International Economic Order (NIEO), launched at the 1973 non-aligned summit in Algiers. The NIEO attempted to stabilize the prices of raw materials and to regulate the capital flows of TNCs.²⁶

Naturally this strategy met strong resistance from US corporations, and hence from the US government. The Tunis non-aligned meeting of 1976 took anti-imperialism as its theme,²⁷ with special stress given to cultural hegemony.²⁸ That same year UNESCO presciently called for the decolonization of information technolo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Senism and the Invisible Asia
• 1 Globalization on Trial: Rethinking Asian Exceptionalism vis-à-vis the Third World
• 2 Korean Social Democratization: A Good Idea While it Lasted
• 3 Booty Globalism: The Neocolonization of the Philippines
• 4 Lesson of the “Broken Hearts”: The Rise and Fall of Indonesian Reformasi
• 5 Another Thailand Was Possible: Thaksin and the Thai Response to Globalization
• 6 Sino-Globalization—Part 1 : Politics of the CCP/TNC Symbiosis
• 7 Sino-Globalization—Part 2: Selling Chinese Maldevelopment
• 8 The Price of Alignment: India in the New Asian Drama
• 9 The Japan Model Goes Global: A New Reverse Course
• 10 After the New World Order: The Rise of Second Way Globalization
• Conclusion The Crisis of Asian Globalization: Toward a Senism of the Left
• Index