5 - The Role of Economic Performance

Summary

This chapter addresses a puzzle set up in Chapter 5: Why did Africa become so much more intrusive than Southeast Asia in the post–Cold War period, given that neither region experienced widespread democratization? A partial explanation for this variation in outcomes is that Africa’s normative priors were different – by the time these regions arrived at the 1980s, the norm of non-interference had already eroded to a greater extent in Africa than Southeast Asia. In this chapter, I make the case for another more proximate factor – economic performance. Poor economic performance renders states materially and socially vulnerable and creates legitimacy deficits, and these vulnerabilities make states more open to normative and institutional reform. In Africa, reform took the form of more intrusive regional norms and institutions. Southeast Asia’s stellar economic performance prior to the 1997 financial crisis served to reaffirm and reinforce its norm set – including non-interference. The crisis prompted some reform (and some erosion of non-interference) but not to the same degree as in Africa.