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ABSTRACT
A peculiar set of discontinuities and contradictions has recently emerged in the institutions-oriented literature that spans comparative capitalism, developmental states, and strategic techno-industrial governance. Around the globe, developmental states are reported to be both disappearing (chiefly in East Asia) an proliferating (not least in the United States). These depictions, we argue, are indicative of how the developmental state concept has become unmoored from its theoretical and historical grounding, and inadvertently politicised in scholarly debate. The concept has thus become unproductive (even if still of heuristic value). In this paper we offer a fresh way of thinking about the state’s activism in both Korea and the United States. Specifically, we refurbish the idea of statecraft as it plays out in two very different national agendas, and as it is shaped by contrasting state-society relations. By paying attention to the differential international drivers and state ambitions, our analysis delivers a new and improved understanding of the character, purpose and capacities of the state in each national setting and, by implication, of their commitment and ability to confront specific challenges.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In addition to these policy advocates, the industrial policy idea has also found favour among policy critics who seek to play up the existence of a gap between the U.S. government’s free-market advocacy and its actual practice (e.g. Wade Citation2017).
2 For an empirically grounded critique of this literature see Thurbon (Citation2016a). For another critique of the declinist literature see Wade (Citation2018).
3 The US think-tank RAND corporation maintains that the risk of large-scale conflict on the Korean peninsula remained relatively low from the 1960s right through to 2015, after which acceleration of the North’s nuclear ambitions posed a strategic concern for South Korea (and the US), alongside the ongoing risk of state collapse (RAND Citation2018). Nonetheless, the South remains wholly dependent on US military leadership and operational control in response to any Northern attack, offering some insight into why commercial competitiveness concerns continue to dominate domestic debates about Korea’s techno-economic policy direction.
4 Although Korea has ramped up military R&D over the past decade, analysts observe that ‘South Korea’s defence industrial strategy is to a great extent guided by the political [economic] ambition to increase the quantity and value of its exports of defence materiel’ (Korkmaz and Rydkvist Citation2012, p. 92) and to establish itself as an ‘[arms] export powerhouse’ (FPRI Citation2019) – rather than the (security) ambition to achieve greater technological independence in the military sphere. Although Korean leaders have occasionally expressed a desire to establish military independence, the reality is that substituting a larger proportion of US-made arms for Korean ones is likely to put interoperability with US forces at risk, compromising Korean security (ISDP Citation2019). This underscores our point that economic (export) concerns today trump military security ambitions in the high-tech arena.
5 On semiconductors, see Mathews and Cho (Citation2000); on leapfrogging more broadly, see Lee (Citation2016).
6 For case studies of techno activism at the frontier, see Kim and Thurbon (Citation2015) and Kim (Citation2019) on renewable energies and Thurbon and Weiss (Citation2019) on intelligent robotics.
7 For a comparison of Australian and Korean approaches to techno-industrial governance that emphasises the differences in strategic intent, see Thurbon (Citation2016b).
8 For an argument along these lines see Hockmuth (Citation2018).
9 And throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, their authoritarianism.
10 Hockmuth (Citation2018) provides an excellent analysis of this period, and a comprehensive review of the literature on this topic.
11 An important counter-case is Taiwan since the early 2000, where a fragmented and increasingly politicised national identity has made it far more difficult for policymakers to rally the population behind a shared national project, and thus frustrated the pursuit of strategic activism (Thurbon Citation2019).
12 For the detailed history and empirics see Weiss (Citation2014).
13 See e.g. Breznitz and Cowhey (Citation2012) on the greater social benefits of an incremental approach to innovation.
14 A typical example of this crossover between security and commerce is the CIA’s 2001 lead investment in Keyhole, a company producing mapping software to enable full spectrum dominance. Keyhole’s technology (used in the second Iraq war) was later acquired by Google and is now integrated as Google Earth. More recent still is InQTel’s partnership with Google to back the startup Recorded Future, a company that monitors the web in real time to identify relationships and predict future actions and events (Hardy Citation2010).
15 The term ‘spin-around’ has been coined to describe the process whereby an innovation originating in or devised for a national security agency is subsequently adapted for the commercial market, and then spun back to users in the NSS (Weiss Citation2014, 83–4; 112–4).
16 DS ‘discoverists’ propose that the US is a ‘networked developmental state’ (NDS) because of the many agencies involved, rather than one central agency (e.g. Schrank cited in Block Citation2011). But the NDS could easily apply to contemporary South Korea. Their contrast of the NDS with the East Asian developmental state, only works for an earlier era when the EPB held sway – hence their nomenclature ‘developmental bureaucratic state’.
17 It is interesting to note the work of Weiss (Citation2014, Preface) who reveals that – at the beginning of her US research in 2007 – she shared the ‘hidden industrial policy’ view of the US, but had to discard this in light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
18 It is not just financialisation that has contributed to the offshoring trend. Of equal importance in the migration of production (and profits) is the role of the federal government in effectively globalising its intellectual property rules; on the blowback impact on US state capacity, see Weiss and Thurbon (Citation2018).
19 As outlined in the document ‘Made in China 2025’.
20 To those industrial policy advocates who think it simply a matter of changing hearts and minds, a policy suggestion: they might appeal to skeptics by raising the status of what they are advocating and rebranding it as ‘statecraft’.
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Linda Weiss
Linda Weiss is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Professor Emeritus in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and Honorary Professor of Political Science at Aarhus University. She specialises in the comparative and international politics of economic development, with a focus on state capacity and public-private sector relations. Her most recent works include America Inc?: Innovation and enterprise in the national security state (Cornell University Press).
Elizabeth Thurbon
Elizabeth Thurbon is a Scientia Fellow and Associate Professor in International Political Economy at the School of Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney. Her research specialism is the political–economy of techno-industrial development and change, with a focus on the developmental role of the state. Her most recent works include Developmental mindset: the revival of financial activism in South Korea (Cornell University Press).