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900 years of the common law. It has also had 800 years since
Magna Carta, and 300 years since civil war and major
constitutional realignments, to adjust, adapt and modernise its
democratic institutions, a task with never stops. Asian countries
have had less than 130 years in which to absorb foreign imposed
or radically transplanted law, and even less time to develop
democracy. These decades have seen, moreover, immense changes
of every kind, social, economic, political.

The Asian response to this has been to superimpose on this
basic structure of foreign-derived law and political structures a
developmental state. A developmental state takes different forms
if we compare Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia,
Indonesia, and Thailand, for example. If we include the
communist party-states of China and Vietnam the differences are
even more obvious. What this has meant, albeit within different
political structures, is that the state has been obliged to render
itself more and more powerful in order to achieve the rapid
industrial development it needed to catch up with the West, avoid
colonisation or its effects, and sometimes to build or rebuild its
societies. In the process they have tended to marginalise the rule
of law and democracy. However, having built these strong states
development itself has dictated that Asian states dismantle the
developmental state, and move towards more democracy,
accountability and rule of law.

In the context of development we therefore find a similar
conundrum to that regarding democracy and rule of law. Is the
rule of law necessary to create development?

Again we need to decide what we mean by ‘development’.
Economists are convinced that rule of law is necessary because
only rule of law can provide the entrenchment of property rights,
the security of transactions, and the guarantee of good
governance. Others may see development as a broader concept
including all aspects of improvement of the human condition.

Here it seems to be there is no sequence of events. No
society in history seems to me to have perfected the rule of law

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