Don't Discard State Autonomy: Revisiting the East Asian Experience of Development

Abstract

Rapid East Asian economic growth was commonly credited to the existence of strong, autonomous developmental states. Subsequently a new ‘institutionalist’ school of thought emerged which argued that an effective state must be connected to civil society, not autonomous from it, and which reinterpreted East Asian development in these terms. This paper is a critical reappraisal of the institutionalist school. The evidence of state autonomy (seen in relativistic rather than absolute, either-or terms) in East Asia's recent history is too great to be ignored. And since some institutionalists themselves acknowledge autonomy as a necessary foundation for developmentally effective relationships with civil society, we should recognize autonomy as a potentially important element of state capacity. State autonomy remains an important analytical concept that deserves the attention of scholars.

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