Revisiting Development Theories: Some Francophone Views on East Asia's Success

Résumé 0

The industrial take-off of the East Asian countries, as from the years 1960-1970, shook the concept of « Third World ». This development phenomenon has extended and gained such a scale of global significance, that was hardly seen before in human history. The rise of East Asia has been studied and analysed primarily by international organisations like the World Bank or OECD, by Anglo-Saxon scholars, and also by a number of Japanese scholars, which was rarely been translated. The French-speaking contributions have remained marginalised in terms of international scientific production. Their interpretations of the so-called Asian miracles, questioning development theories, have been discrete and rather late. A small group of francophone authors have focused their attention on the concept of « development states », and have refuted explanatory models based only on the supposed virtues of the free market. This contribution hardly found a second breath in the context of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. Whereas a great international debate opened on the possible crises derived from globalisation, it remained almost deaf, both to the potentials of catch-up strategies adopted by the East Asian development states until the 1990s, and to their capacities for defining post-Asian crisis modes of mobilising domestic resources and of sharing growth wealth from 2000 onward. If the obsolescence of the concept of the « Third World » seems to be confirmed with the early 21st century rise of China and India, it could also contribute to a possible paradigm shift in development history. One can question whether the recent growth trajectory of China and India will illustrate or not the concept of industrial catching-up traced by Japan since the late 19th century, and then reproduced by the newly industrialising East Asian economies during the post-1945 era. If not, the different contributions of emerging economies like China and India in terms of reshaping globalisation could lead to the making of new development concepts.