ABSTRACT
The dominant development discourse in Southeast Asia has been a modernist one. Throughout the independence period, with just a handful of exceptions, governments have shepherded their countries towards a vision of the future that is rooted in the desire to build modern states. This has been most clearly articulated in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. As noted in Chapter 1, a subset of these became exemplars of orthodoxy and paraded as role models by the multilateral institutions. Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam clearly wished, for a time at least, to achieve modernity taking a radically different path to riches, but it is important to realize that this was still couched in modernist terms. The only country which, for a tragic halfdecade, attempted something rather different was Cambodia under Pol Pot. Not only do the countries of Southeast Asia, at a general level, have a largely shared vision of the future but this has, to a significant degree, survived the economic crisis. In Chapter 1 the notion of the developmental state, or semidevelopmental state, was applied to some of the countries of Southeast Asia (see page 11). But we can also employ the term in a rather looser sense and apply it across the region: these were developmental states to the degree that the guiding elites, almost to a woman and man, subscribed to a modernist agenda.
