On 11 March, 32 years after he directed the coup de force which brought him to power, President Suharto of Indonesia spoke the following words as he was sworn in for a seventh term of office: 'We will never enjoy again an economic growth such as we have experienced for more than a quarter of a century.' This is the language of the milltowns of New England, the coal-and-steel belts of Pennsylvania and Belgium, the ghost towns of Australia and the American West - places where capitalism has been and gone, leaving behind scarred landscapes and ruined social edifices. It is a language that poses two related questions about the 'Asian crisis' which are rarely raised in the flood of contemporary analyses of its proximate causes. The first: what made the World Bank's 'Asian miracle' of the past two decades possible? The second: is Suharto's prognosis correct, not merely for Indonesia, but also for the other advanced countries of South-East Asia?

LRB 16 April 1998 | PDF Download