State power and economic strength revisited: what’s so special about the Asian crisis?

This chapter addresses one of the most influential views that inform contemporary debate about the Asian crisis in particular and global economic change in general. This is the view that state power is inimical or at best irrelevant to economic strength in an increasingly integrated world economy (so-called globalisation). Such a perspective is directly at odds with the thesis of our earlier study, States and Economic Development (SED) (Weiss and Hobson 1995). SED’s central thesis is that ‘state power enables economic strength’ . In the light of the Asian events of 1997, we revisit that thesis, asking to what extent it has been blown apart by the winds of global finance, as manifested most recently in the Asian meltdown.