ABSTRACT
Since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s, global social, economic and political interconnections have proliferated, stimulating renewed interest by large trading nations and international agencies in global legal harmonisation.1 In the opinion of global lawmaking elites, financial and trading stability in developing countries require Western legal structures, such as rights-based commercial law, and above all else the ‘rule of law’.2 By attributing the East Asian financial crisis in 1997 to poor laws and governance procedures, the World Bank reinvigorated pressure for legal harmonisation in developing Asian states.3
