Entire Volume 17 issue 1 - Journal of World-Systems Research ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

BARRIERS TO ACCESSION 8 advantage. As R. Taggart Murphy (2006) and Kees van der Pijl (2006) have demonstrated, the way in which the strange alignment between Japanese money and US might was temporarily resolved was the 1985 Plaza Accord. By adjusting upward the value of the yen relative to the dollar, the Accord made it politically feasible for Japan to continue exporting manufactures to the US and underwriting US spending (including Reagan’s outsized Pentagon budgets) without provoking a protectionist reaction harsh enough to unsettle the entire US-Japan relationship (van der Pijl 2006:309-310). But the value of the yen soared to heights unforeseen by all parties. One consequence of this was an acceleration in the pace at which Japanese (and other Northeast Asian) transnational corporations shifted the lower end of their supply chains to the dollar-linked Southeast Asian economies (Bello 2009; Tabb 1996:257; van der Pijl 2006:309-310). An unintended knock-on effect was a bidding up of the prices of Southeast Asian factors of production, with a concomitant hastening in the movement of cheap labor-seeking foreign investment to the export platforms of the urban coastal Chinese mainland (Lo 1999:17; van der Pijl 2006:309). Sino-Japanese Tensions and the Limits to Regional Cooperation To be fair, in The Long Twentieth Century Arrighi did stress how a centripetal intra-regional process – namely the spinning off of metropolitan productive capital to less expensive land and labor in the hinterland – was a leading animator of East Asia’s becoming a locus of world accumulation (Arrighi 1994:344-349). He notes that the latest stage of this “flying geese” pattern was the quest by Japanese, South Korean, and Taiwanese transnational companies and middleman contractors to access cheaper land and lower cost workers in post-Maoist China (and doi moi Vietnam as well) (Arrighi 1994:347). But herein lies another flaw with Arrighi’s outlook, one bedeviling not only The Long Twentieth Century but also his subsequent efforts. Like other surveyors of the trans-Pacific scene (Balakrishnan 2009:16; Beeson 2009; Hung 2009:6-7; Palat 2004), Arrighi keenly understands that the post-1945 surge of East Asian economic potency is inexplicable outside the context of US Cold War geo-strategy and the various ways in which that geo-strategy boosted the dynamic growth of the region’s “capitalist archipelago” (Arrighi 1994:338-342). But when he considers the trajectory of East Asian development, Arrighi oddly discards this conceptual framework and the apposite geopolitical questions melt away. When it comes to looking toward the future, Arrighi holds fast to the view that despite the surficial incursions of the US hegemonic order since World War II, an underlying East Asian civilizational continuity persists. 8 Considering that until recently Japan’s elected leaders spent the better part of a decade spurning an Asian identity – and minimizing the seamier sides of its Asian history – in favor of a “special relationship” with the US (Kingston 2007; Selden 2009b), Arrighi’s view is quite cheeky indeed. 8 A view propounded at some length in Arrighi 2002a, and one which he continued to uphold until the final year of his life. To quote from an interview published in 2009 (Arrighi 2009:89-90): “What is most interesting about East Asia is how, in the end, the economy is determinant of states’ dispositions and policies towards one another, in spite of their nationalisms... It was striking that the nationalist resurgence in Japan, under the Koizumi government, was suddenly checked when it became clear that Japanese business was interested in doing business with China. In China, too, there was a big wave of anti-Japanese demonstrations, but then they stopped. The general picture in East Asia is that there are deep nationalist dispositions, but at the same time they tend to be superseded by economic interests.”
9 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH In essence, Arrighi suggests that whatever many-sided interstate frictions currently plague the region, in the medium- to long-run the resurgent forces of de facto regional economic integration will by necessity triumph over these frictions, thus rendering their analysis relatively trivial. Consequently he gives short shrift to the multiple potential pathways through which closer and deeper economic links in East Asia will not translate into the region’s emergence as an autonomous power center. Arrighi seriously entertains neither the possibility that even a weakened US will enjoy continued success playing its “offshore balancing” games in the region, nor the more ominous possibility that a lower or non-existent US security profile in the region will actually aggravate long-standing tensions that (despite the illusions of some) have a deep- seated existence independent of US imperial intriguing (Calder 2006; Selden 2009b). 9 The practice of Japanese transnationals relocating production operations to China, importing capital goods and high-tech parts and components from Japan, and exporting intermediate materials and completed manufactures back to Japan (as well as to the world market) is indeed well-ensconced (van der Pijl 2006:318). This is so much the case that by 2004 Japan and China were one another’s top trading partners for the first time since the US initially darkened East Asia with its Cold War shadow (Shorrock 2005). Some scholars suggest that successively greater levels of Sino-Japanese commercial exchange will spur Japanese and Chinese ruling elites not only to repair their bilateral relationship, but also to jointly build pan- East Asian institutions with a mandate to address regional issues (air pollution, financial instability, maladjusted currencies, nuclear proliferation, renewable energy, etc.) free of US mediation (e.g. Beeson 2009). These possibilities are not mutually exclusive and they rest upon a reality that Arrighi plays down: the ongoing geopolitical schism between Japan and China is a fact of world-historic consequence equal to any synchronic tendency toward Sino-Japanese economic integration (Gulick 2004a:511- 512). 10 But on the question of Sino-Japanese bilateral amity, the necessary anchor of independent regional cooperation, the echoes of the unresolved past, and the political inertia of the present, may prove more compelling than the mere thickening of economic links (Pei and Swaine 2005; van der Pijl 2006:326, 328; Selden 2009b). The decade-long ascendancy of the neo-nationalist right in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), and the serial affronts Japanese heads of state and top LDP officials have displayed toward sensitive Chinese memories of Japanese war crimes, are well-known 9 In Adam Smith in Beijing, Arrighi acknowledges that through the extension of its security partnership with the US, Japan has been re-harnessed to US strategic goals in East Asia, and in a way specifically arrayed against China’s ascent (Arrighi 2007:281-282, 288, 294, 299-300). But he seems to associate Japan’s willingness to serve as the US’ “Britain in Asia” more with the policy disposition of the Koizumi Prime Ministership rather than with the deep structure of the contemporary Japanese polity (see my argument later in this article). Moreover, in his discussion of the possibility that the US might draw down its imperial legions stationed in East Asia (Arrighi 2007:301), it becomes clear that Arrighi significantly overestimates the extent to which Sino-Japanese enmity is a byproduct of Japan’s vassalage to the US. Survey research shows that popular Chinese attitudes about the US are considerably more favorable than those about Japan (Committee of 100:2008). 10 Palat (2005) limns a nuanced version of this argument, maintaining that China’s rise as an East Asian economic power attenuates regional fears of recrudescent Japanese imperialism; thus overlapping and complementary Japanese and Chinese trade and investment networks in East Asia as a whole boost the possibilities of autochthonous regional monetary and even security cooperation.
Page 1 and 2: Journal of World-Systems Research V
Page 3 and 4: James Rice—New Mexico State Unive
Page 5 and 6: BOOK REVIEW ESSAY 236 Review Essay:
Page 7 and 8: INTRODUCTION: THE WORLD-HISTORICAL
Page 9 and 10: 3 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH
Page 11 and 12: 5 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH
Page 13: 7 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH
Page 17 and 18: 11 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARC
Page 45 and 46: THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY & THE CU
Page 65 and 66:
59 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARC
Page 67 and 68:
Page 69 and 70:
Page 71 and 72:
Page 73 and 74:
Page 75 and 76:
Page 77 and 78:
Page 79 and 80:
Page 81 and 82:
Page 83 and 84:
Page 85 and 86:
Page 87 and 88:
Page 89 and 90:
Page 91 and 92:
Page 93 and 94:
Page 95 and 96:
CUTTING THE GORDIAN KNOT OF WORLD H
Page 97 and 98:
Page 99 and 100:
Page 101 and 102:
Page 103 and 104:
Page 105 and 106:
Page 107 and 108:
101 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEAR
Page 109 and 110:
Page 111 and 112:
Page 113 and 114:
ECOLOGY, CAPITAL, AND THE NATURE OF
Page 115 and 116:
Page 117 and 118:
Page 119 and 120:
Page 121 and 122:
Page 123 and 124:
Page 125 and 126:
Page 127 and 128:
Page 129 and 130:
Page 131 and 132:
Page 133 and 134:
Page 135 and 136:
Page 137 and 138:
Page 139 and 140:
Page 141 and 142:
Page 143 and 144:
Page 145 and 146:
Page 147 and 148:
Page 149 and 150:
Page 151 and 152:
Page 153 and 154:
Richard York Department of Sociolog
Page 155 and 156:
Page 157 and 158:
Page 159 and 160:
Page 161 and 162:
Page 163 and 164:
Page 165 and 166:
Page 167 and 168:
Page 169 and 170:
Page 171 and 172:
EXTERNALITY AND INCORPORATION IN TH
Page 173 and 174:
Page 175 and 176:
Page 177 and 178:
Page 179 and 180:
Page 181 and 182:
Page 183 and 184:
Page 185 and 186:
Page 187 and 188:
Page 189 and 190:
Page 191 and 192:
Page 193 and 194:
Page 195 and 196:
Page 197 and 198:
Page 199 and 200:
Page 201 and 202:
Page 203 and 204:
Page 205 and 206:
FIVE CENTURIES OF REGIONAL DEVELOPM
Page 207 and 208:
Page 209 and 210:
Page 211 and 212:
Page 213 and 214:
Page 215 and 216:
Page 217 and 218:
Page 219 and 220:
Page 221 and 222:
Page 223 and 224:
Page 225 and 226:
Page 227 and 228:
Page 229 and 230:
Page 231 and 232:
Page 233 and 234:
Page 235 and 236:
Page 237 and 238:
Page 239 and 240:
Page 241 and 242:
Page 243 and 244:
Page 245 and 246:
Page 247 and 248:
Page 249 and 250:
Page 251 and 252:
Page 253 and 254:
Page 255 and 256:
Page 257 and 258:
Page 259 and 260:
Page 261 and 262:
Page 263 and 264:
Page 265 and 266:
Page 267 and 268:
Page 269 and 270:
Page 271 and 272:
Page 273 and 274:
Page 275 and 276:
Page 277 and 278:
Page 279 and 280:
Page 281 and 282:
Page 283 and 284:
show all

Entire Volume 17 issue 1 - Journal of World-Systems Research ...

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?