Greater Mekong Subregion: From Geographical to Socio-economic Integration

12. Linking the Social to the Economic: Broadened Ambitions and Multiple Mitigations in New Mekong Corridors

12 Linking the SociaL to the economic Broadened ambitions and multiple mitigations in new mekong corridors Chris Lyttleton Rapid social change, in and of itself, is not new to the region as it has been marked historically by imperialism, wars, and multiple migrations.The Upper Mekong, a previously remote area, has often been the subject of ambitious visions of infrastructure development, but, until recently, seldom the site of their realization. In the nineteenth century, British and French colonial authorities sent numerous missions to the region in search of land-based trade routes that might link mainland Southeast Asia to China. The French built a railway from Haiphong to Kunming via the Red River, while the British considered doing the same from northern Thailand. Later in 1937 the Chinese, seeking trade links with India, extended a road from Kunming as far as the Myanmar frontier. Subsequently, World War II, the Communist Revolution in China, and minority rebellions in northeast Myanmar halted further development of cross-border transport and trade connections. Likewise, the Cold War and regional geopolitics further hampered subsequent linkage projects. 233 234 Chris Lyttleton But since the 1990s, economic reforms have given renewed impetus to streamlining trading arrangements in the border regions of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, and southern China. By the turn of the millennium, visions of an integrated economic entity finally began to take shape when the Asian Development Bank launched the Greater Mekong Subregion Program. The initiative aims to build corridors that link the Mekong countries and provide the ability for trade goods, trucks, travellers, and tourists to move rapidly between and through previously remote and hinterland areas of neighbouring states. In a mid-term review of the regional programme, the ADB notes: The GMS (Greater Mekong Subregion) Program has made very good progress in the “hardware” aspects of cooperation involving the first strategic thrust of the GMS–SF, but less so in the “software” components of cooperation involving the four other thrusts of the GMS–SF, especially in the measures necessary to enhance competitiveness and in activities addressing social and environmental issues in the GMS. This is not surprising, as the initial phases of the GMS Program had placed substantial emphasis on the need to remove the physical barriers to subregional economic cooperation. (ADB 2007, p. viii) The first strategic thrust referred to in the ADB review is “Strengthening Infrastructure Linkages”, with a transport component which includes three (nearly) completed economic corridors linking countries of the Mekong Subregion and various other thoroughfares under construction. These new roads have now greatly improved physical connectivity, allowing increased mobility and cross-border trade while at the same time, bringing economic opportunities to previously remote areas. In so doing, national polities are physically stitched together with a new architecture that is transforming local livelihoods and diverse aspects of everyday life. Nowadays, as other chapters in this volume discuss, economic integration is indeed becoming concrete throughout the GMS as increased traffic and commerce offer clear indicators of progress. New corridors are thereby a cornerstone of a globalizing marketplace and expanding neoliberalism which, as Harvey (2005, p. 2) describes, is “in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets and free trade”. While it can be debated to what extent states and individuals in the region either create, or have the leeway to act as fully fledged neoliberal subjects, there is no doubt premises underlying Linking the Social to the Economic 235 the construction of the new economic corridors support ongoing privatization and market expansion. As such, roads and infrastructure development are about more than just the increased movement of people and growth in trade and commerce. They also envisage other types of mobility: the movement of ideas, changing lifestyles, and above all, evolving entrepreneurialism — that is to say, the “software” components indicated in the above-mentioned ADB review. At heart, the notion of regional integration via these corridors relies on people interacting with people. Roads are magnets as well as thoroughfares. Despite being about movement, they are also about openings, connections, opportunities, and new forms of economic and social engagement. For thousands — perhaps millions — they represent new choices due to the conduits and passage they provide. And people connect in any number of social and trade-related FIGURE...