Asia
December 1998

December Article Abstracts

Title: India: The Nuclear Politics of Self-Esteem
Author: Pratap Bhanu Mehta
"It would be a grave mistake to view India's nuclear tests simply as a product of short-term expediency" on the part of the present government. "To understand their full significance, the tests must be placed in the broader context of recent Indian history."

Title: The (Nuclear) Testing of Pakistan
Author: Samina Ahmed
"Appeals to national unity by invoking the Indian threat are unlikely to divert domestic attention from the harsh economic climate as well as the crisis of governance within [Pakistan]. . . The Sharif government might just find itself a victim of the problems that have emerged because of its decision to test Pakistan's nuclear capability."

Title: Toward Nuclear Rollback in South Asia
Author: Toby F. Dalton
"India's and Pakistan's nuclear tests in May 1998 shocked the world" and destabilized the already tense relations between the two countries. "A new agenda is required," one that includes "measures adapted from lessons already learned in the past two decades from successful nonproliferation efforts, including the bilateral process that led Argentina and Brazil to end their military nuclear programs and South Africa's unilateral decision to destroy its arsenal of nuclear weapons."

Title: Asia and the "Magic" of the Marketplace
Author: Jeffrey A. Winters
"It is evident that the reemergence of global finance on a scale last seen at the end of the nineteenth century, in combination with late-twentieth-century technology and communications, is a volatile mix that wrenches governments and populations alike. . . The political question is whether people want their fates to be determined so thoroughly, randomly, suddenly, and irrationally by the controllers of mobile capital."

Title: All in the Family: Reforming Corporate Governance in East Asia
Author: Meredith Woo-Cumings
"Western discourse on East Asian capitalism has. . .tended to miss two key points: first, that East Asian business has developed in a cocoon of particular historic practice, where what appears irrational from a Western standpoint may be an effective local adaptation in the interests of wealth accumulation; and second, that development has been so incredibly rapid that practices that might have been expected to die out have persisted because everything seemed to work."

Title: Japan's Search for a New Path
Author: T. J. Pempel
"The severe international repercussions of Japan's continued political procrastination have. . .generated intense pressures that will make it much more difficult for Japan's political leaders to remain at a standstill. . . If [they] do not move Japan along a new path, others will surely emerge to lead the way."

Title: South Korea: Anatomy of a Crisis
Author: Ha-Joon Chang
"Many commentators initially claimed that South Korea's economic travails were proof that the country's inherently inefficient and corrupt state-led economic system had finally reached its limits. The medicine to cure the country's economic ills, they argued, was to ditch the defunct state-directed economic system and create in its place a 'genuine' market economy in the Anglo-American mold through the extensive liberalization of finance, international trade, and the labor market. Was this analysis correct?"

Title: The Month in Review

Title: Index

Title: Perspectives