Halliday: Architects of the State: International Financial Institutions and the Reconstruction of the State

Terence C. Halliday (American Bar Foundation) has posted Architects of the State: International Financial Institutions and the Reconstruction of States in East Asia (Law and Social Inquiry, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

For international financial institutions (IFIs), it is a continuing puzzle why the global norms they propagate are enacted either reluctantly or not at all. This article shows that failures of enactment and implementation frequently occur because many IFI-initiated law reforms go far beyond changing the law; they amount to a restructuring of the state itself and the accompanying redistributions of power. This article demonstrates how state restructuring can occur in a technical area of commercial law by re-analyzing the ways global and transnational designs of corporate bankruptcy regimes fared between 1998 and 2006 in three countries variously affected by the Asian Financial Crisis: China, Indonesia and Korea. State restructuring occurred by (1) shifting the boundary between the market and state; (2) shifting power inside the state; and (3) vesting new powers in the state. The article identifies the recursive dynamics through which the changes unfolded and shows how variations in the efficacy of international architects of the state can be attributed to the interplay of four sets of factors: the coherence of global norms; the relative power of global versus state actors; domestic demand and mobilization for restructuring; and the extent of state restructuring that reforms will induce.