The Pacific Rim: Current Debates

Abstract

The dramatic emergence of the Pacific region poses a double challenge for policymakers and social scientists. Both need to understand change in the region as well as to adapt tools of analysis and guides to policy. Two large issues dominate debate, though there are many other important ones as well. These two are prosperity and peace: why have parts of the Asian Pacific side grown so quickly while other parts of the Pacific, much of Latin America, Africa, and other areas not; and how have these changes altered the international system of security? To answer these questions, the issue of level of analysis must be raised. Social outcomes can be interpreted by focusing on the individual, on social institutions, or on the international environment. Arguments about the role of culture, the functioning of markets, the impact of government institutions, the distribution of power in society among groups and classes, the distribution of power among countries in the state system - these are classic variables of analysis. Debates about the Pacific region give rise to new ways of integrating these variables into arguments that permit deeper analysis.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

1. Gary Gereffi and Donald Wyman , eds., Manufactured Miracles: Development Strategies in Latin America and East Asia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

idem , Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).

3. Max Weber , The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner's, 1958).

4. James R. Kurth , “The Pacific Basin versus the Atlantic Alliance: Two Paradigms of International Relations,” this issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

5. Michael Piore and Charles Sabel , The Second Industrial Divide (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

6. Takashi Inoguchi , “Shaping and Sharing Pacific Dynamism,” this issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Joann Gowa , “Political Correlates of Open International Markets: The Advantages of Bipolarity,” American Political Science Review (forthcoming).

8. Kenneth Waltz , Man, the State, and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).

For theoretical and empirical discussion of the use of state power for developmental purposes, see Tun-jen Cheng , “Political Regimes and Development Strategies: Korea and Taiwan,” in Manufactured Miracles, ed. Gereffi and Wyman ; Stephan Haggard and Tun-jen Cheng , “State and Foreign Capital in the East Asian NICs,” in The Political Economy of New East Asian Industrialism, ed. Frederic C. Deyo (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).