"We Southeast Asians no longer have any confidence. We're simply confused. We lost our way in the crisis of 1997, and we haven't found it again."
Odd to hear this observation dropped casually into a conversation with a senior member of Thaksin Shinawatra's entourage during his recent swing through Washington and New York.
The theme is familiar enough: It is sounded everywhere one travels in the region these days. But isn't the Thai prime minister the best proof Southeast Asia has that it can think, imagine, and innovate its way out of its malaise?
Recession or no, most economists now agree that Thailand and its neighbors have pushed themselves up from the bottom of the trough into which the Asian financial crisis landed them (Indonesia being the possible exception). So it is perhaps bearable at last to recognize that some abrupt rupture with the past was inevitable.
"We're doing something different," Thaksin told me when I met him in his New York hotel suite. "The economic crisis of 1997 forced us to evaluate the failures of the past."
True all around. Southeast Asia as an export platform, a source of cheap labor, a site of processing zones -- the befouled, unbalanced producer of goods and services others consume: The model was a relic of an era that had to end, and its shortcomings even when it worked are now apparent.
What is missing most now are those things Thaksin traffics so well in. What is missing now are ideas. There is no going back.
Thaksin an exception
Even after the temptations of 1999 and 2000, when the dotcom thing gave Southeast Asians a last taste of the good old days, everyone seems to understand this. But few occupants of presidential palaces or prime ministers' residences have said yet where his or her nation should point itself next. Only a year in office, Thaksin has made himself the outstanding exception.
Legal problems have troubled him, and disappointment with the pace of his progress mounts. But the clarity of his vision remains beyond challenge: Thailand is more than a low-wage export platform; the imbalances of the old model can be corrected.
A few points are worth making here. First, the dearth of -- what shall we call it? -- intellectual vigor among the region's technocrats and policy-makers long predates the late-1990s crisis.
The EAEM -- the East Asian export model -- was a Cold War creation that required little thinking on anybody's part. Run an orderly shop, make it cheaply, box it, and ship it. Not too many moving parts in any of that.
Second, the East has ever been diffident in the face of the West. The non-Western world, that is to say, is simply unaccustomed to articulating ideas of its own devising. This preference for silence -- the occasional outburst notwithstanding -- was confirmed in spades with the arrival of neoliberal thinking in the 1980s and 1990s, delivered with missionary zeal by merchant bankers and official exponents of the Washington consensus.
Beyond exporting
Now for the reverse sides of these points. East Asians -- and the developing world in general, for that matter -- must now grasp the new imperative: They must come forward with their own ideas.
If the globalist project is to achieve any acceptable degree of balance, and if Southeast Asia is to get beyond its more-of-the-same export strategy, non-Western leaders must articulate modifications and straight-out alternatives to the neoliberal formula that address the needs of their constituents.
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