Abstract
It is hardly surprising that the recent economic instability in East Asia has spawned a cottage industry in crises analysis, approximating in output the writing on economic development which accompanied the meteoric rise of that region in the world economy. As with the latter work, so the atmosphere surrounding the production of literature on the ‘Asian Crisis’ remains highly politically charged. Furthermore, each current of writing has been marked by mono-causal theorizing; a tendency that has culminated in arid debates around binary oppositions such as ‘state vs. market’, ‘crony capitalism vs. market capitalism’, ‘Asian values vs. democratic values’, ‘catch-up development vs. mature economic development’ and so on. This chapter follows up on calls by critics of the above perspectives in the ‘Asia’ literature for a more multi-dimensional ‘structural’ analysis of the questions of Asian economic development and crisis.1 However, such analysis is itself fraught with pitfalls as it involves grappling with difficult epistemological questions and devoting increased attention to the elaboration of complex conceptual frameworks. Nevertheless, in comparative and international political economy it is my belief that a structural ‘level of analysis’ is mandatory for the production of enduring knowledge and as a necessary basis for carrying out fruitful historicalempirical studies.
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Notes
1 See for example Paul Burkett and Martin Hart-Landsberg, ‘East Asia and the Crisis of Development Theory’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 28, no. 4. (1998); idem, Development, Crisis, and Class Struggle: Learning from Japan and East Asia, Japanese Economic Crisis 225(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Dic Lo, ‘The East Asian Phenomenon: The Consensus, the Dissent, and the Significance of the Present Crisis’, Capital & Class, 67 (1999).
3 On questions of epistemology and method there is no substitute to the in-depth study of Sekine, An Outline of the Dialectic of Capital. More succinct statements may be found in John R. Bell, ‘Dialectics and Economic Theory’, in Albritton and Sekine (eds), A Japanese Approach to Political Economy; Thomas Sekine, ‘The Dialectic of Capital: An Unoist Interpretation’, Science & Society 62, no. 3 (1998).
4 To date, Albritton, A Japanese Approach to Stages of Capitalist Development, is the most comprehensive work on stage theory in the Unoist tradition, and this chapter draws heavily upon his formative effort.
5 Sources are cited in Richard Westra, ‘Periodizing Capitalism and the Political Economy of Post-war Japan’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 26, no. 4 (1996).
6 James C. Abegglen, Sea Change: Pacific Asia as the New World Industrial Centre (New York: The Free Press, 1994), pp. 204–5.
14 (1993); Tony Elger and Chris Smith eds., Global Japanization? (London: Routledge, 1994)
8 For an interesting non-Unoist unpacking of some of the related issues here, see Tony Smith, Technology and Capital in the Age of Lean Production: A Marxian Critique of the New Economy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000).
9 Abegglen, Sea Change, p. 32.
10 Westra, ‘Periodizing Capitalism and the Political Economy of Post-war Japan’.
11 In fact, economists today continue to question the explanatory reliance upon ‘structural’ variables in Japan’s ascendancy as well as for its recent decline. See David E. Weinstein, ‘Historical, Structural, and Macroeconomic Perspectives on the Japanese Economic Crisis’, in Magnus Blomstrom, Byron Gangnes and Sumner La Croix (eds), Japan’s New Economy: Continuity and Change in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
226 Regional and National Contexts
12 Makoto Itoh, The Japanese Economy Reconsidered (London: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 4–6.
13 See for example Matsuko Takahashi, The Emergence of Welfare Society in Japan (Aldershot, England: Avebury, 1997).
14 Itoh, The Japanese economy Reconsidered, p. 12.
15 Jacob B. Schelsinger, Shadow Shoguns (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 49–50.
16 See for example Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
17 See Note 4 above; also Robert Albritton ‘Theorizing the Realm of Consumption in Marxian Political Economy’, in Albritton and Sekine (eds), A Japanese Approach to Political Economy.
18 Gavan McCormack, The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996).
19 Itoh, The Japanese Economy Reconsidered, pp. 37–8; also Charles Beaupre, ‘Changing Behavior of Japanese Consumers’, in Paul Bowles and Lawrence T. Woods (eds), Japan After the Economic Miracle: In Search of New Directions (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000).
20 Abegglen, Sea Change, pp. 73–7. To be sure, there is also an argument to be made that despite the demise of the soviet style socialism, the United States itself has found it difficult to shed the institutional trappings of the cold war both in domestic politics and its international affairs. See for example Joel Kovel, ‘Post-Communist Anti-Communism: America’s New Ideological Frontiers’ in Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch (ed.), Socialist Register. New World Order? (London: The Merlin Press, 1992).
21 See Kataoka Tetsuya (ed.), Creating single Party Democracy: Japan’s Post-war Political System (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1992).
22 See the excellent discussion in Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 19ff. 23 See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 301–2.
24 William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. 137.
25 Westra, ‘Periodizing Capitalism and the Political Economy of Post-war Japan’, p. 443.
26 Itoh, The Japanese Economy Reconsidered, pp. 84–5.
27 See for example Rob Steven, Japan and the New World Order: Global Investments, Trade and Finance (London: Macmillan, 1996); also, Walter Hatch and Kozo Yamamura, Asia in Japan’s Embrace: Building a Regional Production Alliance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
28 Abegglen, Sea Change, p. 210.
29 Gowan, The Global Gamble, pp. 114–15.
30 Ibid., pp. 19ff.
31 Ibid., pp. 46–8, 127–31; also Mitchell Bernard, ‘East Asia’s Tumbling Dominoes: Financial Crises and the Myth of the Regional Model’, in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds), Socialist Register. Global Capitalism Versus Democracy (London: The Merlin Press, 1999); and Itoh, The Japanese Economy Reconsidered, pp. 78ff.
32 Burkett and Hart-Landsberg, Development Crisis and Class Struggle, p. 141. Japanese Economic Crisis 227
33 See for example Michael J. Webber and David L. Rigby, ‘Growth and Change in the World Economy Since 1950’, in Robert Albritton, Makoto Itoh, Richard Westra and Alan Zuege (eds), Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crisis and Globalizations (London: Palgrave, 2001)
34 Greider, One World, Ready or Not, Chapter’s 6 and 11 in particular, adduce some telling figures in this regard.
35 Some unpacking of the notion of globalization with regards to international finance may be found in David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 201–16.
36 See for example Susan Strange, Mad Money: When Markets Outgrow Governments (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998).
37 See for example John Eatwell and Lance Taylor, Global Finance at Risk: The Case for International Regulation (New York: The New Press, 2000); Miles Kahler, ‘The New International Financial Architecture and its Limits’, in Gregory W. Noble and John Ravenhill (eds), The Asian Financial Crisis and the Architecture of Global Finance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
39 See Kathleen Thelen and Ikuo Kume, ‘The Effects of Globalization on Labor Revisited: Lessons from Germany and Japan’, Politics & Society 27, no. 4 (1999).
40 See for example, ‘Through the Cracks’, Far Eastern Economic Review (23 March 2000), 40–2
41 Itoh, The Japanese Economy Reconsidered, p. 51
42 Jennifer A. Amyx, ‘Political Impediments to Far-reaching Banking Reforms in Japan: Implications for Asia’, in Noble and Ravenhill (eds), The Asian Financial Crisis and the Architecture of Global Finance, pp. 143–5.
43 Besides Bernard, ‘East Asia’s Tumbling Dominoes’, see for example Francois Godement, The Downsizing of Asia (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 36–47.
44 Such is maintained in the collection of Robert Boyer and Toshio Yamada (eds), Japanese Capitalism in Crisis: A Regulationist Perspective (London: Routledge, 2000).
45 Itoh, The Japanese Economy Reconsidered, pp. 94–105; also Costas Lapavitsas, ‘Transition and Crisis in the Japanese Financial System: An Analytical Overview’, Capital & Class, 62 (1997) 40–3.
46 As I have argued elsewhere, Westra, ‘Phases of Capitalism and Post-Capitalist Social Change’, in Albritton, Itoh, Westra and Zuege (eds), Phases of Capitalist Development; the use value cluster that potentially could rejuvenate human material existence, the outlines of which exist on the horizon, could not be developed on a capitalist basis.
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Westra, R. (2003). Phases of Capitalism, Globalizations and the Japanese Economic Crisis. In: Busumtwi-Sam, J., Dobuzinskis, L. (eds) Turbulence and New Directions in Global Political Economy. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403918451_12
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