Introduction: Local Cultures, Economic Development, and Southeast Asia

Summary

It has become less easy to understand economic development as a process in which “traditional” societies become modernized and rationalized as a unilinear transformational process of the world. This process, it is often thought, started from seventeenth-century Europe and went on to post–Second World War United States. The result of this process was that the cultures of all newcomers were increasingly made “the same”, or culturally homogenized.

The Japanese experience, important as the major and the first industrialized Asian society, has not been completely assimilable into this process of homogenization in terms of its values or social structures. The “unique Japan” hypothesis came about, in which Japanese tradition, instead of being seen as a retrograde element, was trumpeted as a vessel suited for economic development (McCormack and Sugimoto 1988).

The economic rise of other East Asian societies (including Singapore), and the newer Asian Tigers of Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia) led to variants of the “unique Japan” hypothesis. One variant, of course, was the much-debated Confucianist model. The values of an underlying common culture, it was argued, fostered the virtues of austerity, harmony and group orientation, hard work, and a submissive attitude towards authority, contributing to rapid growth. The entry of obviously non-Confucian societies then led to further modifications. Now, it was argued, you could see a generalized (pan-)Asian values system — representing, some claimed, an Asian modernity for a New Asia — that had contributed to economic growth.

The detractors saw such arguments as ideological tools used to justify authoritarian politics, and the 1997 Asian economic crisis only heightened the controversy surrounding the “Asian values” discourse. While ideological dimensions incontestably exist, it is of significance that “culture” — conceived of here as a society's value systems and local traditions notionally separable from political rhetoric — has become a part of the discussion as to what is entailed in rapid economic development, and of understanding the success and also some of the difficulties of the new Asian capitalisms.