Asian States

Richard Boyd, Tak-Wing Ngo, Richard Boyd, Tak-Wing Ngo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134281152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Asiatische Geschichte

A team of international leading expertsprovide a much needed re-examination of the theoretical claims and the empirical foundation of developmental state theory. Asian States argues that regardless of the merits of the developmental state as an explanation of economic growth, it falls far short of being an adequate theory of the state in Asia. The contributors critically review claims about agency, state-society and state-market relations that shape developmental projects. It broadens the analysis of state involvement in developmental projects and considers the variety of political and social bases for state projects across East and Southeast Asia in a theoretically sensitive, thematic and empirically rich way.

1 Emancipating the political economy of Asia from the growth paradigm

Richard Boyd and Tak-Wing Ngo

Political science is primarily a reflection upon Western, or even more restrictively, Anglo-Saxon political experience. It is substantially indifferent to the huge body of politics, statecraft, and state-making outside of Europe. It is almost totally ignorant of thinking and writing about politics apart from the Western tradition. Indeed, the conceptual and theoretical flow has been exclusively one way: from the West to the non-West. In consequence, the discipline risks mar-ginalization and sheer nonutility as its theorizing retreats more and more to generalizations about and abstractions from a narrow segment of the world’s political experience.

The theory of the developmental state is an exception to the rule in our universe of understanding. It has come to have its own place in the conceptual lexicon of political analysis. This is a most welcome development. The acknowledgement of the developmental state—derived as it is from contemplation of the political experience of East Asia and cognizant as it is of the possibility of difference worldwide in politico-economic development—as an addition to the theoretical arsenal of political science is to be celebrated. The developmental state thesis hinges upon the claim that the “plan-rational” state (that is to say, a state led by technocrats who enjoy a high degree of political autonomy, insulation from societal demands, and yet who are simultaneously embedded in that society) can engineer economic growth. Advocates believe that this is precisely what happened in East Asia and that the developmental state can be a model for other developing regions of the world.

For more than twenty years the theory has captured and held the imagination of researchers working across East Asia. It has extended its scholarly empire far and wide to embrace the political economies of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The theory has been taken up as much by planners, policy-makers, and international organizations such as the World Bank as by academics. The appeal of the developmental state thesis is not surprising. The theory opens up possibilities to overcome the dictates of the world system and to escape the confines of dependency and the vagaries of the marketplace. So powerful is its hold that what began life as both a robust heuristic interposed between the command economy and the market economy and a theory of growth to challenge neoclassical economics and dependency theory has passed over from political theory to the realm of political facts. The developmental state is no longer just a theory. It has become a stylized fact: the thing itself, a fixity in real-world politics in a trope that makes it possible to assert that “State X is a developmental state.”

The thesis is not without its critics. Long before the East Asian miracle lost something of its gloss in consequence of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, there were grounds for skepticism concerning some of the claims made for the developmental state. There is a sense that its empirical foundations are less than secure and that it entails a certain romanticization of the Asian experience. ¹ We share many of these reservations, some of which will be explored, exemplified, and amplified in subsequent chapters.

These are, however, not our only concerns. We noted above the importance of the developmental state thesis as an exception to the one-way flow of intellectual traffic from the West to the South and to the East. Ironically, the thesis replicates precisely this shortcoming of mainstream political science: the vision of Asia and Asian development it carries back from the periphery to the mainstream is stamped with smuggled understandings derived from the West which are projected uncritically upon Asia. The developmental state thesis notes how the growth of Asian economies eludes understanding in terms of neoclassical economics. It counters with an explanation, focused upon the leading role of the state, which seeks to capture the particularity of the Asian experience. In doing so, the state-centric analysis is construed in Western terms. In brief, the thesis projects upon the states of Asia a conception of the modern state which privileges Western experience and Western understandings. As such, the developmental state thesis distorts and misrepresents the political economy of Asia. To exacerbate matters, of the many and varied accounts and experiences of the state contained within the Western tradition, the developmental state is treated with only one: the Weberian. More exactly, the thesis takes on board only one narrow facet of the Weberian account that emphasizes legitimacy, rationality, and instrumentality at the expense of monopoly, violence, and domination. There is yet another restriction upon the scope of application of the Weberian account. Advocates of the developmental state thesis have shifted the focus from the state to the bureaucracy. They do so presumably since the bureaucracy is thought to express the agency principle of the developmental state better. The shift has been attended by an implicit and widespread endorsement of notions of the liberal state. “Liberal” here refers not so much to “limited and noninterventionist” but rather by virtue of a too sanguine assumption that contemporary states have resolved fundamental problems of power and are best characterized in terms of authority and legitimacy. The popularity and utility of the liberal state perspective in the explanation of development are the greater since the perspective enshrines a notion of the expert, instrumental bureaucrat untroubled by interests of his own, a notion which lends itself readily to functionalist and instrumentalist conceptions of the state which ease and enable the calculus of efficacy, efficiency, and functionality for growth. At a minimum it must be appropriate to subject this kind of conceptual projection to scrutiny so as to establish what is gained and lost in the exercise.²

It is one thing to point out the shortcomings of a particular theoretical approach, it is of course quite another to suggest how we might move forward to build upon the insights afforded us by two decades of work on the developmental state. Here we are more tentative. However, we would argue that if our concern is with the political economy of Asia—and this is the case with many scholars who interrogate the developmental state—then we must recognize that this is not reducible to the question of economic growth. Assuredly, economic growth is important, but the Asian political economy encompasses a broader spectrum of issues. The political economy of Asia predicates upon the organization and logic of power, the relationship between the state (and other sites of power) and the market (and other sites of exchange), and power dynamics between social classes and other groups. These are all related to development but cannot be adequately understood exclusively in terms of development. The danger is that the very success of the developmental state thesis has reduced the study of the Asian political economy to the study of economic development.

The developmental state as a theory of economic growth

Let us carefully reconsider the status of the developmental state thesis. Is it really a theory of political economy? If so, it must adequately theorize not only growth but also the state. Or is it better understood more restrictively as a theory of economic growth?

Moon and Prasad are good guides and very much to the point when they note that the developmental state paradigm is a collection of theoretical propositions and empirical descriptions which relate economic performance to institutional arrangements of the state.³ In short, the developmental state theory is essentially a theory of economic growth. Put differently, it is a “state-led growth” theorem.

Most of the advocates of the developmental state theory acknowledge their intellectual debt to Gerschenkron’s idea of late development.⁴ Gerschenkron has often been quoted as arguing that latecomers to the world economy need a centralized approach to industrialization and economic growth. “Catching up” demands a more centralized mechanism for capital mobilization, industrial adjustment, and technology upgrading. Johnson has famously argued that the role of centralized mechanism is performed by a “plan-rational” state in the case of Japan.⁵ Subsequently, the rapid economic growth of East Asian economies after the Second World War has been explained in terms of the existence of a developmental state. The argument centers on a number of interrelated observations. First, East Asian countries are said to be characterized by the presence of an authoritarian state that has a high degree of autonomy from political and social pressures. The state is believed to be a unitary decision-making machinery staffed by meritocratic technocrats. Second, these technocrats have made economic development their top priority and the long-term goal of the state. It is they who promote industrialization and economic development, raise competitiveness, develop an export strategy, and engineer rapid economic growth. Third, the state assumes a dirigiste role in targeting for economic growth. It intervenes extensively but selectively in the economy to promote its economic plans. It does so by granting subsidies to targeted industries, extending preferential loans to individual businesses, creating monopolistic enterprises to pick and protect market winners, and even engaging in direct protection to develop new industries.

However, the theory has been caught for some years now in a withering critical crossfire from, on the one side, specialists in the region shooting holes in the empirical foundations of the thesis and, on the other, the no less deadly attention of theorists skeptical of some of the methodological procedures favored by proponents of the theory. Some of those problems were revealed by the Asian economic crisis when the developmental states stopped being developmental, that is to say when institutions and relationships said earlier to be the very hallmark of the state proved compatible at least, causal at most, with stagnation and decline. Recipes for success were now said to be the ingredients of failure and, for example, what once was hailed as “close harmonious government–industry relations” was decried as “crony capitalism.”⁶ Whatever its merits or deficiencies, its claim upon our attention derives from its status as an explanation of economic growth. The status and import of the thesis are clearly recognized in the response to the critical crossfire; this takes the form of attempts either to rescue the developmental state theory as an explanation of growth or to go beyond the state-centered approach in explaining economic growth.⁷

Images of the state under the growth paradigm

It remains to be seen how far and how accurately the developmental state thesis explains the state in Asia since we have argued that this is an indispensable precondition for a theory of the political economy of Asia. Cumings is unequivocal in his view that the developmental state theory is “the most formidable theory of the East Asian state.”⁸ For him it is self-evident and in little need of clarification. We are less confident and suspect that Cumings and many others have turned the developmental state thesis on its head: what began as the claim that “the state plays a central role in promoting economic growth in some countries” has been turned round to become the claim that “a particular state form (called the developmental state) can be found in countries which experienced rapid economic growth.” The second claim embodies a characterization and a theorization of the state that go well beyond the terrain of a theory of growth. It is precisely this growth-paradigm-turned-state-theory slippage that concerns us since it smuggles into our account of the political economy of Asia a state defined and understood at the outset in terms of its functionality for growth. In this sense, the theory has invented its own ontology. From here it is a short step to the now familiar claim that the developmental state is a fact (hence the assertions noted above that State X is or is not a developmental state) and an intra type variation of the capitalist state—a claim we believe that owes more to theoretical slippage than to empirically informed theory.

Woo-Cumings also subscribes to the “fact” of the developmental state, which she defines as “a shorthand for the seamless web of political, bureaucratic and moneyed influences that structures economic life in capitalist Northeast Asia.”⁹ This is so far the most explicit (and the most ambitious) definition ever given by advocates of the developmental state. Unfortunately, in her subsequent analyses, there is no discussion of such a web of political, bureaucratic, and moneyed influences: nothing of the nature, boundary, limits and logic of the web said to constitute this developmental state. Without this kind of specification we are left with a conception too sweeping and all-encompassing to tell us much about the state in Asia.

When Woo-Cumings moves from definition to analysis she retreats to a much narrower conception in which the bureaucracy comes to stand for the state in the developmental state. Such a shift of focus is conventional in the developmental state literature. Typically, the state-led growth theorem features the (developmental) state as a decision-making apparatus that generates policy in conformity to a technocratic rationality. Since the main concern of the theorem is economic policy that affects growth, the decision-making apparatus is very often further reduced to mean only the economic bureaucracy. The economic bureaucracy qua state has specific features and scales of measurement. In particular, the developmental state theory makes claims about the nature of state strength, about the terms and conditions of effective state agency, about its goals and its direction, about the balance in the agency of the state of political and technocratic rationales (specifically the exclusion of the former and the priority of the latter), and of the relation of these to the logic of economics and so to the possibility of favorable economic outcomes. Here the distinction between the political and technocratic deserves attention. The economic bureaucracy qua state is said to be able to substitute politics for administration. In a well-known passage from Wade we read:

While state bureaucrats “rule,” politicians “reign.” Their function is not to make policy but to create space for the bureaucracy to maneuver in while also acting as a “safety valve” by forcing the bureaucrats to respond to the needs of the groups upon which the stability of the system rests: that is to maintain the relative autonomy of the state while preserving political stability. This separation of “ruling” and “reigning” goes with a “soft authoritarianism” when it comes to maintaining the needs of economic development vis-à-vis other claims, and with a virtual monopoly of political power in a single political party or institution over a long period of time.¹⁰

It is clear from this statement that viewing the state through the lens of a growth paradigm privileges a certain image of the state, highlights a single facet of the state, and encourages the reduction of the states of Asia to a single template. It requires a fantastical distinction between politics and administration, the marginalization of politics, and the mistaken attribution to the bureaucracy of an innocence and indifference to self-interest. These postulates completed by the equation of the state and bureaucracy make it possible to understand the state as the instrument of pure reason. Efficacious instrumentality is a core element in the developmental theory of the state.¹¹ Typically, proponents of the developmental account of the state eschew reference to theory that associates the state and political conflict. Reference is made overwhelmingly to a Weber-ian paradigm that makes the legitimacy of the state part of the definition of the state. Additional hypotheses, which address the insulation of the state from society, complete the removal of conflict from the field of analysis.

Moon and Prasad have rightly criticized this image of the state for failing to uncover the complex and dynamic internal workings of the state structure by depicting the state as an internally cohesive unitary actor.¹² State structure is not an internally coherent, unitary entity. According to Moon and Prasad, four elements are missing from the picture. First, executive leadership. It is unrealistic to assume that political leaders simply reign by creating space for bureaucratic maneuvers and playing the role of safety valve. Political leaders not only reign but also rule. A second absence is that of the executive-bureaucratic nexus. This is not a given; it is highly variable over time and influenced by leadership style, political calculation, and institutional constraints. A third missing element is the intrabureaucratic dynamic. For all the technical competence of East Asian bureaucrats, they are not exceptions to the generalized “bureaucratic politics” phenomenon. Bureaucratic agencies in the developmental states are not unitary, but reflect organizational complexities with diverse and often conflicting ideologies, preferences, and interests. Interagency rivalries, compartmentalization, and sectionalism are the rule rather than the exception. The fourth element deals with the clients and constituents of the bureaucracy. Bureaucratic agencies are not organizational islands but are beholden to corresponding social groups and obliged to protect their interest and to solicit their support.

These are valid criticisms. We can underpin them by reference to the searching examination of state strength, state ag...