In an influential 1995 article in Pacific Review, Don Emmerson contended that Southeast Asia constituted a regional exception. By this Emmerson understood that the then six states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) — Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines — deviated from the preferred developmental route. This assumes initial stability and growth under bureaucratic guidance by military leaders or authoritarian single parties, followed by gradual liberalization as ageing autocrats responded to pressure from an emerging urban middle class, to the final epiphany of democratization and the polymorphous joys of pluralism and civil society.

Emmerson's perplexity reflected a widespread Western political science orthodoxy that, in that curious period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the World Trade Center in 2001, seemed, as Samuel Huntington (1993) and Francis Fukuyama (1992) contended, to intimate either an inexorable third wave of democratization or, even more hubristically, a liberal democratic end of history. In order to confirm this liberal democratic teleology, new scholarly journals devoted to democracy, democratization, or both, exerted much intellectual effort explaining why the kind of anomalies that Emmerson identified in Southeast Asia survived in economic and political circumstances that theoretically required their erasure.

Western scholars generally contended that economic success over several decades might afford legitimacy to the otherwise deviant Southeast Asian developmental experience. It, therefore, followed that if the export-oriented growth model faultered, it would engender a legitimacy crisis that would require a liberalizing and democratizing opening in response.

The 1997 Asian financial crisis constituted the economic test that analysts predicted would undermine the legitimacy of the developmental state model in Southeast Asia. Indeed, the crisis profoundly affected the subsequent character of political development, although not quite, as we shall demonstrate, in the manner political science assumed.

Indeed, given that after 9/11 and the global war on terror that witnessed, inter alia, the failed attempt of a Wilsonianism with boots on to export democracy, it is evident that the teleological inevitability driving democratic theory trades at something of a discount.