If Japan won the Cold War, is it losing the post-Cold War global politics of accumulation?
Within the politics of global accumulation, is this the end of “Asian exceptionalism”? As the price of massive assistance, the IMF-US has demanded, apparently successfully, the dismantling of the financial policy capacity of the South Korean mercantilist state. Is the Japanese developmentalist or mercantilist state yielding to the pressure of US-led globalization forces in a comparable manner? Or is the Japanese developmentalist state in fact beating a strategic retreat on financial policy in order to buy time for the completion of a longer-term strategy of “Asia-wide” restructuring of its political economy? What do the responses to this set of concatenating regional financial crises by the Japanese state and capital indicate about the flows of power embedded within the processes of American-led financial, economic and political globalization? For Japan, questions of “globalization” and the Japanese relation to the United States are effectively much the same issue. For half a century t
