The 1993 World Bank publication of The East Asian Miracle celebrated the region’s rapid growth and transformation but also obscured important variations within. Japan’s endaka and Big Bang ended its post-war boom and anticipated the 1997 East Asian financial debacle. Meanwhile, coerced economic liberalization from the 1980s gave way to an era of globalization in a seemingly unipolar world following the West’s victory in the Cold War. But liberalization and globalization’s downsides soon accelerated U-turns. American sovereigntism was soon eroded by some consequences of its unipolar hegemony. Earlier liberalization and globalization also undermined industrial capitalism in favour of financialization. Capturing rents for wealth concentration has accelerated with enabling changes in the rule of law. Most of Southeast Asia remains focused on generating wealth, jobs, and revenue. But the ‘New Cold War’ is forcing Southeast Asian nations to take sides as the rules of engagement become fluid. Already Southeast Asian countries are implementing measures previously deemed to be unthinkable, measures which may well provide policy inspiration if not leadership to the Global South.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Jomo Kwame Sundaram is Senior Adviser at the Khazanah Research Institute, Fellow of the Academy of Sciences Malaysia, and Emeritus Professor of the University of Malaya. He was Founder-Chair of International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs), United Nations Assistant Secretary General (2005-15), and received the 2007 Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).
Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky on Unsplash