ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: THE EAST ASIAN MIRACLE AND POST-COLD WAR CAPITALISM
The end of the Cold War has drawn renewed attention to the emergence of East Asia as a dynamic and increasingly integrated economic zone. This regional dynamism and integration derive in part from the Cold War itself (particularly the period from the late 1940s to the early 1970s), during which the US-led push to contain communism and secure a capitalist economic order in Asia combined with the resurgence of Japanese corporate activity in the region to provide the overall framework for the so-called East Asian Miracle.1 The East-Asian Miracle has emerged as a major and flexible concept, embedded in wider discourses on capitalist development and industrialization which homogenize and seek to manage a changing ‘national’, regional and international political and economic order. Some of the most influential explanations for the origin and character of East Asian dynamism continue to flow from liberal Anglo-American discourses which represent the dramatic industrialization of the region as a vindication of a free-trade model of capitalist development. A less influential, but still significant, set of Anglo-American approaches views the East Asian Miracle as a sort of lesson in neo-Keynesian economics. At the same time, a growing number of North American, West European and Australian observers now attribute the rise of East Asia primarily to Confucianism or other perceived cultural/racial characteristics. Linked to these approaches are more explicitly racial discourses, which regard the rise of the ‘East’, especially Japan (and now China), as a threat to the ‘West’.
