HSS: A Strategy for Development as Freedom: Integrating Markets and the Enabling Developmental State in the 21st Century

The main purpose of this paper is to explore a fairly comprehensive strategy for development as freedom. Accordingly, I try to find a way to integrate useful markets with the key characteristics of the Enabling Developmental State for the 21st Century in order to build a growing ecologically sustainable economy with equity in terms of capabilities. This is both for theoretical clarification and for aiding the strategies of popular democratic movements. A few tentative steps are taken here to serve this dual purpose. Proceeding from a critical capabilities perspective that is fully grounded in social reality of deepening structural and ecological crises of the World Capitalist System, we discover that such a perspective leads to the need to include among the characteristics of the Enabling Developmental State for the 21st Century its capacity to build an ecologically sustainable egalitarian development strategy from the beginning. In addition, democracy must be deepened from the beginning. For Asia in particular a new cooperative community of Asian nations following their own rhythm to reach their own dynamic trajectories towards development as freedom will be possible if they cooperate regionally on the basis of equal sovereignty and mutual respect. One precondition is to pragmatically unite to end US hegemony in East and Southeast Asia. For this a decolonization of the Asian mind is also necessary.