ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the prior political circumstances of the five countries in East and Southeast Asia whose foreign currencies were hardest hit in the 1997-8 crisis as discussed in Chapter 2: Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines. I focus, in particular, on their elite configurations, driven by my thesis, in Chapter 1, that the chances of a consensual political elite forming during a crisis depend in part on the elite type that existed before a crisis. For this purpose, I follow Higley and Burton in distinguishing four ideal types of elites according to the extent of their integration and differentiation (Table 1.1).1 The four types are labeled ideocratic, consensual, fragmented, and divided. Basically, these labels denote different modes of elite behavior and structure that result from the number of elite groups and their relations with each other.
