Bounding the Mekong: The Asian Development Bank, China, and Thailand

Chapter 1. Approaching the Greater Mekong Subregion

CHAPTER 1 Approaching the Greater Mekong Subregion This is a book about the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), a unit originally comprising Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, and Yunnan province of China and expanded in 2005 to include Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China (Map 1.1). More accurately, it is a book that travels about the GMS—or at least a corner of it—to tell a story. The story is not really the story of the GMS itself, its origins, its development, or its prospects. Much less is it a story of all the different peoples and places within the GMS and the ways their lives are being knit together, or torn apart, as a result of GMS development. Some of these issues feature centrally in my narrative, but this narrative is most fundamentally about regionalization, a process some see as a piece of globalization—or what I will call, variously, neoliberal globalization and “actually existing globalization,” to highlight the differences between textbook representations of “win-win” integration and the realities of uneven development . I travel around the GMS, especially the corner of it referred to as the Economic Quadrangle—Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Yunnan—to tell a story about the process of economic, political, and sociocultural integration that is putatively erasing borders, or at least bending them and making them more porous. Why regionalization, and why the GMS? Globalization, Regionalization, and the GMS In the early 1990s, “globalization” became a buzzword in the corporate media and subsequently in scholarship (Yeung 2002a; cf. Ohmae 1990; O’Brien 1992; Friedman 2000, 2005). This much-noted and often criticized euphoria of “globalism” quickly gave way, however. In the world of practical politics, phenomena such as the Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s, the Argentine crisis of the early twenty-first century , and the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon put a damper on premature celebrations of the “one world” that was being born with the end of the cold war (Bello 2002). In response to these and other issues, proponents of neoliberal globalization—global economic integration driven through reregulation of the global economy and transnational investment by the most geographically mobile MaP 1.1 The Greater Mekong Subregion and Major Study Sites APPRoAcHING THE GREATER MEkoNG SUbREGIoN 5 and financialized capitalists—retreated to a modified version of the “Washington Consensus,” still advocating global economic integration, but with more concern to develop regulatory structures that are adequate to the process (Williamson 1990, 2000, 2002; Peet 2007). Scholarly literature in the social sciences, though deeply affected by globalization euphoria, was rarely as theoretically carefree or uncritically celebratory in discussing neoliberal globalization as was the financial press, and various critical assessments have suggested that what was hailed by the media was scarcely historically novel (Wallerstein 1979, 2000; Hirst and Thompson 1999), let alone productive of a more evenly developed or unified world (Harvey 1989; Swyngedouw 1997; Bello 2002). Yet even many of the more theoretically critical studies of globalization have been, perforce, inclined to take seriously the notion that there have been significant forms of global economic integration and reorganization in recent decades (Friedmann 1995; Dicken 2007), with important consequences for various aspects of society, including the roles played by states (Taylor 2000; Brenner 2004) and the development of culture (Harvey 1989; Jameson 1991; Dirlik 2007). What has evolved as the result of all this is a complex of theoretically varied studies that attempt to take seriously the changes wrought by developments such as the growth of transnational corporations, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system , and the end of the cold war, while paying attention to the unevenness, social exclusions, forms of resistance, and reversibility of “actually existing globalization” (cf. Brenner and Theodore 2002; Peck and Tickell 2002). This terrain of “globalization studies,” as I will refer to it, has many different areas, and my purpose in this book is only to examine a small corner of one of them—namely, studies of transnational “regionalization.” Moreover, I do not intend to engage in any systematic analysis or critique of the notion of regionalization or “regional communities” (see Sidaway 2002). Rather, I take the socially produced scale of the supranational “region” to be a useful one for critical interrogation of “actually existing globalization.” If the project of analyzing neoliberal globalization as a putative or actual process creating “one world” has proven too ambitious, perhaps some insights into...