In writing about the life and impact of Chalmers Johnson Sunday, Steve Clemons focused considerable attention on the work Johnson did before the Blowback trilogy, work that essentially prepared him for the final stage of his evolution as a thinker, without necessarily being apparent at the time. That work had at least two fundamental aspects to it: first a break with the static view of the US as the all-knowing elder in relationship with Japan–and by extension all the East Asian nations, and second, strong opposition to the incursion of rational choice theory into the study of East Asia, and area studies in general. Both these facets were a reflection of Johnson’s empirically-based conception of the “developmental state”, about which Wikipedia says:
Developmental state, or hard state, is a term used by international political economy scholars to refer to the phenomenon of state-led macroeconomic planning in East Asia in the late twentieth century. In this model of capitalism (sometimes referred to as state development capitalism), the state has more independent, or autonomous, political power, as well as more control over the economy. A developmental state is characterized by having strong state intervention, as well as extensive regulation and planning. The term has subsequently been used to describe countries outside East Asia which satisfy the criteria of a developmental state. Botswana, for example, has warranted the label since the early 1970s.[1] The developmental state is sometimes contrasted with a predatory state or weak state.[2]
The first person to seriously conceptualize the developmental state was Chalmers Johnson.[3] He wrote in his book “MITI and the Japanese Miracle”:
In states that were late to industrialize, the state itself led the industrialization drive, that is, it took on developmental functions. These two differing orientations toward private economic activities, the regulatory orientation and the developmental orientation, produced two different kinds of business-government relationships. The United States is a good example of a state in which the regulatory orientation predominates, whereas Japan is a good example of a state in which the developmental orientation predominates.
A regulatory state governs the economy mainly through regulatory agencies that are empowered to enforce a variety of standards of behavior to protect the public against market failures of various sorts, including monopolistic pricing, predation, and other abuses of market power, and by providing collective goods (such as national defense or public education) that otherwise would be undersupplied by the market. In contrast, a developmental state intervenes more directly in the economy through a variety of means to promote the growth of new industries and to reduce the dislocations caused by shifts in investment and profits from old to new industries. In other words, developmental states can pursue industrial policies, while regulatory states generally can not.
As noted in Quick Hits by doubledown, historian and critic of American empire Chalmers Johson has died at age 79. Although I never knew him personally (I met him briefly after a lecture in which he read from his then-forthcoming book, Sorrows of Empire), I felt like I did. And I can remember the exact moment when I first felt that I knew him. It was in 2000, when I read the following passage in the prologue of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire:
Knowing what I did about guerilla war, revolutionary politics, and foreign armies, I thought it a mistake for us (the United States) to involve ourselves further in what was visibly a Vietnamese civil war. But once we did so in the mid-sixties, I was sufficiently aware of Mao Zedong’s attempts to export ‘people’s war’ to believe that the United States could not afford to lose in Vietnam. In that, too, I was distinctly a man of my times.
It proved to be a disastrously wrong position. The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the United States government and its Department of Defense. I was also in those years irritated by campus anti-war protesters, who seemed to me self-indulgent as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework. One day at the height of the protests, I went to the university library to check out what was then available to students on Vietnamese communism, the history of communism in East Asia, and the international Communist movement. I was surprised to find that all the major books were on the shelves, untouched. The conclusion seemed obvious to me then: these students knew nothing about communism and had no interest in remedying that lack. They were defining the Vietnamese Communists largely out of their own romantic desires to oppose Washington’s policies. As it turned out, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America’s imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naivete and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.”
You can count the number of people who have the wisdom and integrity to admit to that level of profound error in judgment on the fingers of one hand. But it wasn’t just the admission that he had been wrong–despite what seemed like very good evidence, intelligently obtained–it was the simple, unassuming eloquence of how he expressed it: “In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naivete and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.”
Johnson himself had a deep knowledge of East Asia, as he had explained in passages just prior to this one. He was actually already primed to become a critic of empire, although the seeds hadn’t ripened yet:
