2 - The Role of the State in Southeast Asia

Summary

At first glance, it seems odd that the subject of the state should be brought into a volume that has as its primary focus that of privatization, deregulation and marketization. But after some careful, thinking, it is not all that difficult to see the relevance, indeed the pertinence, of bringing in the subject of the state, for the issue of state involvement in the economy versus “rolling back the frontiers of the state” basically revolves around the proper role of the state in national development. Indeed, the state has played a central role as an institution in the politics and economics of development in Third World countries.

However, discussion of the nature and role of the state was, for a long time, left very much in the cold by both mainstream political scientists and sociologists on the one hand as well as economists on the other. This is not difficult to understand for the former have already taken as resolved “some of the larger questions which have traditionally been asked about the state, and makes unnecessary, indeed almost precludes, any special concern with its nature and role in Western-type societies” (Miliband 1969: 2). To the latter, the role of the state is often assumed away as an exogenous parameter or as a neutral arbiter in the economic system.

While discussions on the nature and role of the state have been very much neglected by mainstream social scientists, the performance of the radical social scientists (those on the left of the political spectrum) has not been much better. Except for some early contributions made during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period up till the 1950s and much of the 1960s in this century was marked by a dearth of literature on this subject. It was not until the late 1960s and 1970s that attention began to be focused on the state as an institution. Stimulated by books and articles by Miliband, Murray, Poulantzas, Esping- Anderson, Friedland and Wright, to name but a few, there is by now a substantial collection of works on the nature and role of the advanced capitalist state in the process of development (Miliband 1969; Murray 1971; Poulantzas 1973, 1975; Esping-Anderson, Friedland and Wright 1976). Even so, no general theory of the state has been derived.