Introduction

This study offers comparative perspectives on the development of democracy and governance amongst seven East and Southeast Asian states – Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. It also examines the development of regional ties. These seven countries are less than half of the sixteen states that compose the East and Southeast Asian region. What these seven share is the (more or less recent) adoption of democratic forms of governance. Three of the omitted states – Japan, East Timor and Cambodia – are also democratic. But in the case of Cambodia and East Timor, democracy remains an exceedingly tender shoot. It has been imposed from without (Cambodia) or following civil war (East Timor). In neither case has it been associated with economic development. For its part, Japan is the most mature democratic country in the region and her domestic politics is already the subject of an extensive literature. The other six states – Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, North Korea, Brunei and China – are not democracies.