Globalization and Southeast Asia

In the 1990s Southeast Asia became prominent in discussions of globalization. Comparative studies often pointed to the region’s capitalist economies as exemplars of pro-globalization development strategies, countries whose economic and political fortunes have been tied (for better or worse) to a deepening embrace of global trade and investment. The region’s sudden economic reversal in 1997-98 came as a startling irruption into an already contested debate about the post-Cold War ascendancy of global markets and changing state-market relationships around the world. Southeast Asia’s importance for the study of globalization, though, rests on far more than its turbulent economic fortunes in recent years. The region has experienced an unusually close interaction between global dynamics and the stateand nation-building processes that traditionally preoccupy the study of comparative politics in the developing world. Compared to most other regions of the former Third World, its capitalist economies remained broadly engaged with the international economy throughout the postindependence period. Major shifts in the global political economy have registered more swiftly and deeply here than in wealthier regions or in more powerful or inward looking states.