James Cotton, ‘The Limits to Liberalisation in Industrialising Asia: Three Views of the State’, IR Working Paper 1990/9, Canberra: Department of International Relations, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, October 1990.

Pluralist, political culture, and statist analysis approaches to the state offer differing accounts of the sources and causes of political and social liberalisation. The failure of liberalisation to emerge in the Asian NICs is explained from each of these perspectives, and the prospects for future liberalisation are generally found to be limited despite recent political changes. Following an attempt to offer and integrated analytical view of the state, a prognosis is offered of the consequences for the Asia-Pacific regional order of the continued existence of largely non-liberal NIC state systems.