STATEACTIVISMWITHOUTTHESTATISTMODEL.doc

EXITING ETATISME? NEW DIRECTIONS IN STATE POLICY IN FRANCE AND JAPAN by Jonah D. Levy, Mari Miura, and Gene Park Paper prepared for workshop, “The State after Statism: New State Activities in the Age of Globalization and Liberalization,” University of California Berkeley, 14-15 November 2003. Rough draft. Not for citation or attribution without permission of the authors. EXITING ETATISME? NEW DIRECTIONS IN STATE POLICY IN FRANCE AND JAPAN France and Japan have long been seen as embodying the possibilities for state-led economic development (Shonfield 1965; Cohen 1977; Katzenstein 1978; Johnson 1982; Zysman 1983; Hall 1986; Tyson and Zysman 1989). In the postwar period, both countries experienced far-reaching economic and social transformation guided by state technocrats. Their apparent success was celebrated and, in some countries, notably Korea, emulated. Over the past twenty years, however, all of the exemplars of state-led economic development have experienced profound crisis. In the early 1980s, France’s vaunted dirigiste model was repudiated by a leftist government that had been elected on a pledge to take dirigisme to new heights (Cohen 1989; Hall 1990; Levy 1999; Levy 2000). Japan’s statist system, once the object of envy and fear among Japan’s trading partners, is now blamed for the country’s decade-long period of economic stagnation. And in the wake of the 1998 financial meltdown in East Asia, the Korean offshoot of the Japanese model has been recategorized as “crony capitalism.” The predominant interpretation of these crises portrays globalization (and, in the case of France, European integration) as having rendered state intervention obsolete. Whatever the merits of state activism in the past, today’s internationalized environment leaves no place for free-spending, interventionist ways. In perhaps the most extreme version of this line of thinking, Peter Hall and David Soskice reduce the “varieties of capitalism” fro