‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

The third way: the renewal of social democracy

The Limits to Capital

Globalization is reconfiguring the modern state. Differences in types of co-ordination are pivotal to understanding the changing nature of the state. These changes are best captured in Scharpf's distinction between positive and negative co-ordination which can be used to explore the mutations of the state. In place of those state structures which provided a framework for bargaining - be it corporatism or the developmental state - it is argued that emergent forms of coordination of economic behavior provide a procedural foundation for the self-regulation of economic governance. One significant exemplar of the emergence of this new state architecture is the growing importance of independent central banks in the management of monetary policy. The article explores these issues through an analysis of changes in central bank independence in Western Europe and East Asia.

Globalization and the changing architecture of the state: the regulatory state and the politics of negative co-ordination

Transition theory literature has been preoccupied with either identifying why democracy has not arrived or with how it can be consolidated where it has emerged. Most recently, arising out of the interest in consolidation, attention has turned to scrutinizing institutions for their democratic quality or lack thereof, not least within so-called hybrid regimes. However, such approaches obscure important political regime dynamics in Southeast Asia. This article argues that the definitive features of a political regime pertain to how social conflict is organized, managed or ameliorated through modes of political participation. Modes of participation encompass institutional structures and ideologies that shape the inclusion and exclusion of individuals and groups in the political process. The paradox in Southeast Asia over the last decade has been that increasing political participation has often been accompanied by a narrowing of the channels for political contestation. The article argues that modes of partici...

Beyond Hybrid Regimes: More Participation, Less Contestation in Southeast Asia

This book challenges the view that liberal democracy is the inevitable outcome of economic modernization. Focusing on the stable and prosperous societies of Pacific Asia, it argues that contemporary political arrangements are legitimised by the values of hierarchy, familism and harmony. An arrangement that clearly contrasts with a western understanding of political liberalism and the communicatory democracy it facilitates. Instead of political change resulting from a demand for autonomy by interest groups in civil society, the adoption of democratic practice in Asia ought to be viewed primarily as a state strategy to manage socio-economic change.

Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia

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Towards Illiberal Democracy

What became of that great debate between the revisionists or the ‘statists’ and neoclassical economists on the causes of the Asian miracle on which so much ink was spilt? Something curious happened. In the wake of the Asian economic crisis, neoclassical economists crossed the floor and discovered in what they had previously termed ‘market-conforming intervention’ the existence of malevolent political interference in the economy.1 But, if neoclassical economists had uncovered the effects of malign state intervention in the now distinctly tarnished Asian miracles, their erstwhile opponents underwent an equally remarkable conversion and discovered that the much vaunted policy capacities of East Asian developmental state had in fact been sapped by progressive financial liberalisation.2 East Asian political economies, after all, were much more market-oriented than claimed by the statists. All of this confirms the insight of Lakatos that declining research programmes will strive to protect their hard core – the key assumptions of their theory – from falsification through ad hoc hypotheses.3 And one of the things the Asian crisis produced was ad hoc hypotheses by the dozen...

Kanishka Jayasuriya

Papers

Globalization and the changing architecture of the state: the regulatory state and the politics of negative co-ordination

Beyond Hybrid Regimes: More Participation, Less Contestation in Southeast Asia

Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia

Towards Illiberal Democracy

Beyond institutional fetishism: From the developmental to the regulatory state