ABSTRACT
During the decades after the Second World War, many countries in the Asia-Pacific built up strong state apparatuses which possessed significant capacities for intervening in their economies and societies. They constructed them in a variety of ways: communist states in China, Indo-China and North Korea; developmental states in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore; neopatrimonialism or bureaucratic polities in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines and bureaucratic-authoritarianism in Mexico, Chile and Peru. Today, the strength of these states appears to be on the decline, either because of their policy failings or, paradoxically, because of their policy successes. These states have been overshadowed by global trading systems and world cultures, then undermined locally by powerful economic elites and feisty civil societies. Yet it is too soon to say that state strength has dissipated entirely. None the less, one can detect enough new constraints, both external and internal, to suggest that most states in the Asia-Pacific region have lost at least some of their strength. It may be that as state strength declines in East Asia and Latin America their polities are beginning to look more like those of the Anglo-American countries in the region: the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Not all observers celebrate this convergence. In the Asia-Pacific, national leaders like Mahathir Mohamad and Goh Chok Tong lament that their societies are ‘going the way of the West’, encrusted with new welfare expectations, unruly labour organizations and undisciplined patterns of personal and political behaviour. In the Anglo-American countries of the region many neo-conservatives and neo-liberals regret the loss of the natural hierarchies and untrammelled entrepreneurialism that they believe still to exist in Asia (Robison, 1996, pp. 3–28).
