Uneven Economic Crisis, Industrial Restructuring, and the Politics of Development in a Post-Nationalist Era

Up until 1996, the interpretation of Thailand as something at least akin to an economic ‘miracle’ was hegemonic, and the analysis offered here has not so much attempted to challenge this interpretation on its own terms as to offer an alternative interpretation that recognizes why Thailand’s rapid industrialization process can be considered simultaneously a success in capitalist terms and a highly troubled process from other perspectives. The economic events that began in 1996, however, have considerably tarnished the mainstream image of Thailand as a ‘new little dragon’ and have called into question the notion that Thailand’s development has been an unquestionable capitalist success story. The framework I have presented for analysing Thailand’s uneven and contradictory success story can also be used to analyse the dynamics that are at work in the recent bout of economic bust, partial recovery, and post-crisis political manoeuvring. In this chapter, then, I round out the discussion of Thailand’s uneven industrial transformation and the role of the Thai state in this process by suggesting how the dialectically conceived internationalization processes discussed earlier might help to explain the nature of the contemporary economic crisis and the economic challenges that lie ahead. More specifically, I offer here an alternative to the dominant explanations of the Thai economic crisis, which have tended to focus narrowly either on corruption and lack of transparency in the functioning of Thai institutions (the dominant line of analysis emanating from the West and neo-liberals) or on international forces beyond the control of the Thai state, such as currency traders and IMF measures (a prominent line of analysis in much of Southeast Asia and among neo-Weberians). While these lines of analysis vary in where they place the blame for the Thai crisis, they share the view that the crisis is primarily financial and does not reflect deep, underlying structural problems in either the Thai pattern of industrial growth or the place of small industrial exporting countries in the global economy. The analysis I offer here differs from both types of views on a number of counts.