Abstract - "Capitalist Development in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Neoliberalization, Elites, and Authoritarian Liberalism in the Philippines and Malaysia"

Capitalist Development in Contemporary Southeast Asia:

Neoliberalization, Elites, and Authoritarian Liberalism in the Philippines and Malaysia

Bonn Juego

Abstract for the 5^th Annual Nordic NIAS Council Conference

Stockholm, 22-23 November 2011

There is something distinctive in the evolution of capitalism in Southeast Asia. This historical specificity of present-day capitalist moment concerns the differences in dynamics that the process of neoliberalization may have in different social contexts depending on the conflict-ridden interaction between local and transnational elite interests and on the contradictions between the political and economic imperatives of capital accumulation. Understanding the region’s complex structural relations and their attendant manifestations demands a dynamic analysis of processes, interests and transformations.

The paper will seek to identify the specificities of capitalism in Southeast Asia focusing on the contrasting cases of the Philippines and Malaysia and explain the social transformations and struggles that brought it about, producing a particular social form with distinctive dynamics. To this end, it opens up three important areas of inquiry about post-1997 political-economic transformation and social change in the region. 

• First, how has the process of neoliberalization evolved since 1997? Here the impetus given by the crises of 1997 and 2008 to the construction of new opportunities for economic restructuring and political reforms is called into question. 

• Second, how and why class relations, specifically national and transnational elite interests, shape the evolution of capitalism in the region? This examines the role of domestic and transnational political-economic elites and the extent of their respective vested interests in shaping, negotiating, promoting, or resisting neoliberal reforms. 

• And third, what particular social form (political-economic structure) is emergent in the region as a consequence of the interactions between the process of neoliberalization and the dynamics of elite interests? It also interrogates the how and why in the emergence of a seemingly contradictory social regime called ‘authoritarian liberalism’, which combines a strong state with liberal market economy, in the Philippines and Malaysia that results from conflicts in contemporary capitalist relations.