For the first half of the twentieth century the cluster of countries that had experienced economic take-off in the nineteenth century continued to dominate the elite club of industrialized nations, with virtually no additions or alternations. It was as if the pattern of the pre-1914 world had frozen, with no means of entry for those who had missed the window of economic opportunity afforded during the previous century. [301] In the 1950s the school of ‘dependency theory’ generalized this state of affairs into the proposition that it was now impossible for other countries to break into the ranks of the more advanced nations. But there were good reasons why the economic ground froze over. While large parts of the world had remained colonized the possibilities of economic growth and take-off were extremely limited. Futhermore, two world wars sapped the energies not only of the main combatants but of much of the rest of the world as well.
From the late 1950s onwards, there appeared the first stirrings of profound change in East Asia. Japan was recovering from the ravages of war at great speed – but as a fully paid-up member of the pre- 1914 club of industrialized countries, its economic prowess was hardly new. Rather, what caught the eye was the rapid economic growth of the first group of Asian tigers – South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. They were small in number and even smaller in size – a medium-sized nation, a small country and two tiny city-states, all newly independent, apart from Hong Kong, which was still a colony. They had, in varying degrees, been debilitated by the war, in Korea ’s case also by the Korean War, and were bereft of natural resources, [302] but they began to grow at breakneck speed, with Taiwan and South Korea often recording annual growth rates of close to double-digit figures in the following three decades. [303] By the late 1970s they had been joined by Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Some of the later Asian tigers – China being the outstanding example – achieved, if anything, even faster rates of growth than the early ones. The world had never before witnessed such rapid growth. (Britain’s GDP expanded at a shade over 2 per cent and the United States at slightly over 4.2 per cent per annum between 1820 and 1870, their fastest period of growth in the nineteenth century.) [304] The result has been the rapid and progressive transformation of a region with a population of around 2 billion people, with poverty levels falling to less than a quarter by 2007 (compared with 29.5 per cent in 2006 and 69 per cent in 1990). [305]
The myth that it was impossible for latecomers to break into the club of advanced nations has been exploded. The Asian tigers have instead demonstrated that latecomers can enjoy major advantages: they can learn from the experience of others, draw on and apply existing technologies, leapfrog old technologies, use the latest know-how and play catch-up to great effect. Their economic approach, furthermore, has largely been homespun, owing relatively little to neo-liberalism or the Washington Consensus – the dominant Western ideology from the late seventies until the financial meltdown in 2008. [306] Nor is their novelty confined to the economic sphere. The Asian tigers have given birth to a new kind of political governance, namely the developmental state, whose popular legitimacy rests not on democratic elections but the ability of the state to deliver continued economic growth. [307] The rise of the Asian tigers, however, has an altogether more fundamental import. Hitherto, with the exception of Japan, modernity has been a Western monopoly. This monopoly has now been decisively broken. Modernization theory, which was very influential in American scholarship in the 1950s and 1960s, held, like Karl Marx, that the developing countries would increasingly come to resemble the developed world. [308] We can now test this proposition by reference to the East Asian experience.
