East Asian growth rhetoric by the 1990s declared Asian independence from American economic health

Evidence

The name given to the process that emerged in the 1990s, by which the entire world seemed to be integrating into a single capitalist system, was “globalization.” Harvard historian Odd Arne Westad has claimed that a better name for what really happened is “Americanization”—the United States had succeeded in shaping a global economic system and establishing itself as its hegemon. … For sociologist Georgi M. Derluguian, who watched carefully as the old system fell apart in his native Caucasus region, globalization signified the revival of an old idea about automatic human progress, in liberal capitalist form. It was “the latest technological embodiment of the Hegelian universal spirit pursuing its self-realizing plan.” Concretely, globalization was simply “the inter-related consequences of the collapse of the former developmentalist states.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 112 (#complicates, via linked claim)

All of this was secured under the hegemonic umbrella of the United States’ financial and economic power backed by military domination. The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 turned the dollar into the world’s reserve currency and tied the world’s economic development firmly into US fiscal and monetary policy. The United States acted as the world’s banker in return for an opening up of the world’s commodity and capital markets to the power of the large corporations. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 825 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: East Asian economic success generated a cultural self-assertion movement — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 291; Late-20th-century globalization was Americanization plus the fallout of Third World state collapse — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 112; East Asian elites articulated a shared Confucian-tinged civilizational identity against the West — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 295 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Late-20th-century globalization was Americanization plus the fallout of Third World state collapse #complicates (0.76) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 112
• US financial-military hegemony structured the postwar Fordist world economy #complicates (0.73) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 825