Asia’s economies have been hard hit by the current global financial crisis, despite in most cases enjoying strong macroeconomic fundamentals and stable financial systems.  Early hopes were that the region might be “decoupled” from the Western world’s financial woes and even able to lend the West a hand through high growth and the investment of large foreign exchange reserves.  But that optimism has been dashed by slumping exports, plunging commodity prices, and capital outflows.  The region’s most open, advanced and globally-integrated economies—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan—are already in severe recession, with Japan, Korea and Malaysia not far behind, and dramatic slowdowns are underway in China, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.  What role did Asian countries play in the genesis of the global crisis, and why have they been so severely impacted?  How is their recovery likely to be shaped by market developments and institutional changes in the West, and in Asia itself in response to the crisis?  Will the region’s embrace of accelerated globalization and marketization following the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis now be retarded or reversed?

Linda Lim is a leading authority on Asian economies, Asian business, and the impacts of the current global financial crisis on Asia, and she has published widely on these topics. Her current research is on the ASEAN countries’ growing economic linkages with China.

Forthcoming in 2009 are Globalizing State, Disappearing Nation: The Impact of Foreign Participation in the Singapore Economy (with Lee Soo Ann) and Rethinking Singapore’s Economic Growth Model. She serves on the executive committees of the Center for Chinese Studies and the Center for International Business Education at the University of Michigan, where formerly she headed the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Before coming to Michigan, she taught economic development and political economy at Swarthmore. A native of Singapore, she obtained her degrees in economics from Cambridge (BA), Yale (MA), and Michigan (PhD).

The U.S. financial crisis has spread around the globe. Financial globalization means that most countries and regions are not immune to the contagious effects of a financial crisis that originates in one country.

East Asian countries had already experienced the contagious effects of a financial crisis in 1997. That year, a financial crisis that broke out in Thailand and Indonesia reached Malaysia and then South Korea. Each of these countries reacted differently to the crisis. South Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand accepted International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities that required neoliberal economic restructuring in return for emergency loans, while Malaysia rejected the IMF offer and instead encouraged the inflow of speculative financial capital, while reforming the banking and financial system. In the aftermath of the East Asian financial crisis, regional economic, financial and security cooperation were discussed among East Asian countries. These efforts resulted in the Chiang Mai Initiative, the Bond Initiative, the East Asian Summit, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Six Party Talks.

Thus, regionalism in East Asia was revived in response to external shocks, such as global financial volatility, endogenous opportunities such as East Asian market compatibility (Pempel, 2008), endogenous security threats such as the North Korean nuclear development, and exogenous opportunities such as "bringing in the U.S." (Pempel, 2008).

Nonetheless, East Asian regionalism is still at a low level of institutionalization compared to Europe. East Asian regionalism is still basically "bottom-up, corporate (market)-driven regionalism" (Pempel, 2005). 

I will discuss the obstacles and the opportunities that Northeast Asian countries are facing since the end of the Cold War and the advent of globalization.

Hyug Baeg Im is Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea. He is Dean at the Graduate School of Policy Studies and Director at Institute for Peace Studies. He received B.A. in political science from Seoul National University, M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He was visiting professor at Georgetown University (1995-1996), Duke University (1997), Stanford University (2002-2003) and visiting fellow at International Forum for Democratic Studies, National Endowment for Democracy, Washington DC (1995-1996). He served as a presidential adviser of both Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun presidency. His current research focuses on the impact of IT revolution and globalization on Korean democracy. His publications include “The Rise of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism in South Korea,” World Politics, Vol. 34, No. 2 (1987), “South Korean Democratic Consolidation in Comparative Perspective” in Consolidating Democracy in South Korea (Lynne Rienner, 2000) and “’Crony Capitalism’ in South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan: Myth and Reality,” (co-authored with Kim, Byung Kook) Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2001), “Faltering Democratic Consolidation in South Korea: Democracy at the End of Three Kims Era” Democratization, Vol. 11, No. 5(2004), “Christian Churches and Democratization in South Korea” in Tun-jen Cheng and Deborah A. Brown (eds.), Religious Organizations and Democratization: Comparative Case Studies in Contemporary Asia (M.E. Sharpe, 2006) and “The US Role in Korean Democracy and Security since Cold War Era,” International Relations of the Asia Pacific, Vol. 6, No.2 (2006).

Abstract: Nuclear testing has a special place in the Indian nuclear discourse. India's activism on disarmament issues can be traced back to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's 1954 call for a test ban. In recent times, at three critical junctures: CTBT negotiations (1994-96), the dialogue with the U.S. after the nuclear tests of May 1998 (1998-2000) and the negotiations on the civil nuclear agreement with the U.S. (2005-2008), the testing issue has made a demand for answers on fundamental questions. Gill and Gopalaswamy believe that the debate on the politics and science of nuclear testing in India reflects two larger questions: firstly, in the manner in which India should relate to the wider nonproliferation regime pending nuclear disarmament and secondly what should be the nature and extent of the Indian nuclear deterrent in a world with nuclear weapons? Neither of these questions has been satisfactorily answered and thus it is still an open debate.

There are significant international dimensions to this debate. The first aspect is the fate of the CTBT, which India refused to sign after two and half years of engagement. The second aspect is the perceptions of the credibility of India's deterrent in a fluid strategic landscape. Gill and Gopalaswamy argue that while India has begun to be relatively more engaging with the nonproliferation regime, it is unlikely that New Delhi will ratify the CTBT anytime soon. Rather, engagement with India on fissile material/fuel cycle control and delegitimization of nuclear weapons may turn out to be a more productive use of scarce political capital in New Delhi and elsewhere in the short run. As this engagement develops, the CTBT would be seen less as a step child of the regime from which India was kept apart but more as one among a number of regimes that involve India in a network of mutual restraints, thus improving the prospects for India's participation in a formal, global ban on testing.

On the scientific aspects, Gill and Gopalaswamy argue that a ‘perceptual set' induced by U.S. nuclear history is at the heart of the controversy over the two-stage device tested on May 11, 1998. They believe that in the light of new data made available by Indian scientists, the option of renewed explosive testing should be considered by India only as a demonstration of intent to maintain the credibility of India's deterrent if certain redlines were to be crossed. The fact that India has such redlines in mind would act to induce more responsibility on part of the other nuclear weapon states relevant to India's decisions, thus reducing the probability of renewed testing by India.

Amandeep Singh Gill is a visiting fellow at CISAC. He is a member of the Indian Foreign Service and has served in the Indian Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, the Indian Embassy in Tehran and the High Commission of India in Colombo. At headquarters in New Delhi, he has served twice in the Disarmament and International Security Affairs Division of the Ministry of External Affairs from 1998 to 2001 and again from 2006 to 2008 at critical junctures in India’s nuclear diplomacy. He was a member of the Indian delegation to the Conference on Disarmament during the negotiations on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He has also served as an expert on the UN Secretary General’s panels of experts on Small Arms and Light Weapons and on Missiles.

His research priorities include disarmament, arms control and non proliferation, Asian regional security and human security issues.  He is currently working on the interaction of nuclear policies of major states, particularly in Asia.

Before joining the Indian Foreign Service, Amandeep Gill worked as a telecommunications engineer. He retains an abiding interest in the interaction of science, security and politics. He is founder of a non-profit called Farmers First Foundation that seeks to reclaim agriculture for the farmers and demonstrate the viability of integrated agriculture in harmony with nature.

Bharath Gopalaswamy is a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University's Peace Studies Program. He has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in Numerical Acoustics. He has previously worked at the Indian Space Research Organization's High Altitude Test Facilities and the European Aeronautics Defense and Space Company's Astrium GmbH division in Germany.

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Alexander Montgomery, a visiting assistant professor in 2008-09, was a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC in 2005-2006 and is an assistant professor of political science at Reed College. He has published articles on dismantling proliferation networks and on the effects of social networks of international organizations on interstate conflict. His research interests include political organizations, social networks, weapons of mass disruption and destruction, social studies of technology, and interstate social relations. His current book project is on post-Cold War U.S. counterproliferation policy, evaluating the efficacy of policies towards North Korea, Iran, and proliferation networks.

He has been a joint International Security Program/Managing the Atom Project Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has also worked as a research associate in high energy physics on the BaBar experiment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as a graduate research assistant at the Center for International Security Affairs at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has a BA in physics from the University of Chicago, an MA in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in sociology and a PhD in political science from Stanford University.

Emilie Hafner-Burton is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Politics at Princeton University and an affiliate at CISAC, as well as a visiting fellow at Stanford Law School. Formerly she was a predoctoral fellow at CISAC and an associated fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She was at Oxford University as a Postdoctoral Research Prize Fellow, Nuffield College, and Senior Associate, Global Economic Governance Programme. She writes and teaches on international organization, international political economy, the global governance of gender, social network analysis, design and selection of international regimes, international human rights law and policy, war and economic sanctions, non-proliferation policy, and quantitative and qualitative research design. Her dissertation, Globalizing Human Rights? How Preferential Trade Agreements Shape Government Repression, 1972-2000, won the American Political Science Association Helen Dwight Reid Award for Best Dissertation in International Relations, Law and Politics for 2004-2005, as well as the Best Dissertation in Human Rights Prize for 2003-2004. Her articles are published or forthcoming in International Organization, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Feminist Legal Studies, European Journal of International Relations, Journal of European Public Policy, and Journal of Peace Research. PhD. Wisconsin.

Walter W. Powell is Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology, Organizational Behavior, Management Science and Engineering, and Communication at Stanford University. He is also an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute. He is co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. He joined the Stanford faculty in July 1999, after previously teaching at the University of Arizona, MIT, and Yale. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences three times, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna twice. Powell has received honorary degrees from Uppsala University, the Helsinki School of Economics, and Copenhagen Business School, and is a foreign member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. He is a U.S. editor for Research Policy, and has been a member of the board of directors of the Social Science Research Council since 2000.