Post-September 11th Political Economy Changes: Non-traditional Security Issues or International Political Economy Concerns?

摘要

These are momentous times for Southeast Asia. No street violence is occurring, no gunshots are being heard. and still mild but self-imposed censorship guides the press in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, it isn't unlike the incipient malaise of 1968, for those old enough to remember. when the war in Vietnam was on the verge of provoking a turbulent generation-splitting political change in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. It would take another decade or more before those rebellions infected Asian campuses. It was the university students back then who brought down governments. injected new thinking in social policies, and were co-opted into corporate and government elitist services once they graduated. Life went on. Economic programs in the 1960s in Latin America--especially Brazil. Mexico, and Chile--were lauded as 'economic miracles." Asia would soon rack up its own miracles: Japan in the 1960s. Korea and Taiwan in the 1970s, and Singapore. Malaysia. Thailand. Indonesia, and the Philippines in the 1980s all emerged as much admired economic engines of the world. By the 1980s, the military dictators who ruled Latin America had gone back to the barracks. turning their countries over to elected civilian governments. In Chile, civilian presidents chose to continue the same economic strategies that the generals before them had designed. In Argentina, politics held down meaningful reform measures until 1989 when Carlos Menem was elected. Then, in the decade of the 1990s, Argentina became the darling of global bankers, corporate chieftains, government officials of the United States and Europe, and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. In fact, Argentina, until its inglorious demise in December 2001, was the neoliberal model for how a third world country could get its act together. Then the game of finger pointing and naming names began: who should be blamed for bringing down the neoliberal Argentina that had wiped out hyperinflation fixed its peso on par with the US dollar for ten years, and crafted a political openness theretofore unknown in the country's history?