MARK T. BERGER Bringing History Back In: The Making and Unmaking of the East Asian Miracle* T he East Asian crisis, which began in Thailand in July 1997 , has precipitated important changes in the contours of the post-Cold War international political economy. During the 1970 s and 1980 s Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, followed by Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, were increasingly celebrated as miracles of capitalist development. In this period the domi­nant interpretations of the making of the East Asian Miracle were linked to the rise and spread of neo-liberalism as a growing number of commen­tators used the dynamic new Asian capitalisms to support their case for laissez-faire economic policies. By the time the Cold War came to an end, Japan, and the other miracle economies of Northeast and Southeast Asia, were also widely perceived as a challenge to the»West« generally, and to the United States more specifically. 1 How­ever, despite expectations in some quarters that the end of the Cold War might signal the decline of the U.S . role in Asia, the United States remained the hegemonic power in the region and revised forms of neo-liberalism continued to provide the most influential understanding of the East Asian Miracle, and of capitalist development generally. In fact, since the second half of 1997 there has been a reassertion of U.S. hegemony in East Asia, via the International Monetary Fund( IMF ) in particular. The IMF , and advocates of neo-liberalism generally, blame the crisis on the state-centred elements of the East Asian model(»crony capitalism«) and continue to hold out liberalization and deregula­tion as the key to economic progress in East Asia and world-wide. 2 More broadly, it is clear that the United States is attempting to administer the last rites to Japanese-style developmentalism, and its imitators, sending a message about what form(s) of economic development are deemed to be accep­table in the post-Cold War era. 3 Despite the continued dominance of neo­liberal ideas and practices, the crisis has called further into question many of the lessons which proponents of neo-liberalism have drawn from East Asia over the years. It has also raised questions about the descriptions and prescriptions provided by advocates of the developmental state, whose formulations are characterised by many of the problems associated with neo-liberalism. At the outset, this article will look at the way the domi­nant neo-liberal approaches to capitalist develop­ment, and the state-centred perspectives which have emerged as their main challengers, have increasingly extracted technocratic and ahistorical lessons from the East Asian development experi­ence. This leads to an emphasis on the impor­tance of a more historically grounded approach to capitalist development in East Asia and beyond. Of particular importance is the way in which the history of the Cold War provided the crucial foun­dation for the emergence of various, far from uni­form, but usually authoritarian, developmental states at the same time as U.S. hegemony imposed a range of important limits on all states in the region. It will be argued that the likelihood of a significant and / or unified regional response to the * Support for the research and writing of this article was provided by the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch Uni­versity, Perth, Western Australia, and a Special Research Grant, as well as a Small Australian Research Council Grant, from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. I would also like to thank Anthony Aspden, Jasper Goss, Andrew Rosser and Catherine Waldby for assistance and / or comments. 1 . Mark T. Berger,»The Triumph of the East? The East Asian Miracle and Post-Cold War Capitalism« in Mark T. Berger and Douglas A. Borer, eds., The Rise of East Asia: Critical Visions of the Pacific Century[London: Rout­ledge, 1997 ]. 2. Charles Wolf,»Blame Government for the Asian Melt­down« Asian Wall Street Journal February 5 1998 . p 14 . 3. Bruce Cumings,»The Korean Crisis and the End of ›Late‹ Development« New Left Review no. 231. 1998 . pp. 45, 51–52, 71–72 . IPG 3/99 Berger, East Asian Miracle 237