East Asia in the post–Cold War era has been the world's most peaceful region. Whereas since 1989 there have been major wars in Europe, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and significant and costly civil instability in Latin America, during this same period in East Asia there have been no wars and minimal domestic turbulence. Moreover, economic growth in East Asia has been faster than in any other region in the world. East Asia seems to be the major beneficiary of pax Americana.

Since late 1998, Japan reversed its exclusive support for the multilateral trade regime and endorsed for the first time bilateral and preferential trade pacts, signing one with Singapore, negotiating another with Mexico, and announcing free trade talks with South Korea. The newfound Japanese interest in pursuing free trade agreements (FTAs) therefore represents one of the most significant departures in Japanese trade diplomacy of the past half-century. This article seeks to explain the birth of a preferential trading policy in a country that until recently had been a staunch multilateralist, and to analyze the reasons for the launch of FTA negotiations between Japan and Mexico. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of Japan's new trade bilateralism is its cross-regional orientation, seeking preferential trade with a Latin American nation. Trade negotiations with Mexico are of great consequence to the development of Japan's FTA strategy for one more reason. Japan has embarked on this new regionalism to offset the negative effects of competing FTAs, but at the same time it has tried to minimize agricultural concessions to bilateral trade partners. Mexico is the first large agricultural exporter that Japan has approached for trade negotiations and is therefore an important test for the success of the Japanese FTA strategy.

Globalization pressured a rebirth of the state in Korea, but in an unexpected direction. Whereas the welfare state retrenched in Western Europe under pressures of the borderless global economy, the Korean state reinvented itself into the guardian of public welfare. That regime shift occurred when the “Asian crisis” struck in 1997 to end the developmental state's way of growth. Previously, the state channeled subsidized bank loans to the chaebol firms (monopolistic conglomerates in strategic industries) and the chaebol company welfare to its workforce in order to secure industrial peace in strategic growth sectors. This de facto class bargain, partly forced by the developmental state and chaebol firms and partly prodded by organized labor, crumbled with the Asian crisis. No longer too big to fail, the chaebol firms plunged into downsizing and restructuring in order to raise profitability, thus precipitating a profound social crisis. The rules and norms of lifetime employment and promotion by seniority gestated during Park Chung Hee's authoritarian rule (1961–1979), and labor's acquiescence—if not consent—to the chaebol-led hypergrowth strategy collapsed as the crisis damaged a third of Korea's top thirty business conglomerates in 1997 and 1998.

March 20, 2000, constituted a milestone in Taiwan's modern political history. That day its electorate chose as president Chen Shui-bian, the candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) who had been defamed as an antistate rebel only a decade before. The election also marked the end of the forty-year-plus hegemony of the Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalists). That the DPP ascended to the island's supreme political office in spite of its rival's powerful organizational and economic arsenal suggested that the rules of the democratic electoral game finally took root in society, respected by all major political players to produce a peaceful and orderly regime change. Taiwan joined the club of consolidated democracies, so declared many observers.

One of the fascinating theoretical questions posed by the spread of industrialization and today's nation-state-building process is how these originally Western and quintessentially modern institutions come to take root in other civilizations. The question becomes even more intriguing when the process of adaptation is unusually swift and successful as in East Asia. In Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, the states and peoples had scant time to learn and absorb modern practices, norms, and concepts before undertaking, or being subjected to, countless reforms and revolutions in the name of “modernization.” How, or in what terms, did the people in this “great transformation” understand and interpret what they were doing? If the as-yet imperfectly understood concepts and values could not be appealed to, what resources—intellectual and ethico-moral—were at their disposal to use to motivate themselves and persuade others to undertake or endure such massive changes?

Although Korea has made significant strides to strengthen its democratic system since the successful transition in the late 1980s as part of the “third wave” of global democratization, a look into the process of making budgetary policy in the National Assembly would suggest that Korean democracy is far from consolidation. Korean politics has shed itself for the most part of its authoritarian past, when the military was the main conduit of action and oppression. The principle of free, regular, and fair competition has taken root as the procedural norm in both national and local elections. Korean citizens enjoy civil liberties to a degree unprecedented in the authoritarian era, and civil society transformed into an increasingly open, transparent, and pluralistic field of political action.