The Asian tigers as they had come to be called, were hailed by the World Bank as prototypes of the model other developing countries should emulate. Their collapse, and the Bank s total failure to predict it, has shaken the credibility of the international organization. The discussion in the seminar quickly moved to the essentials, beyond the purely technical problems of the Bank s approach to the rationale of economic development. The key issue was what legitimacy the Bank enjoys in coming forward with recipes to overcome crisis situations in developing countries. Especially when these recipes have often been criticized as interfering with the sovereign prerogative of the state.
Sovereignty is a particularly sensitive issue in the developing world.
At a time independence was being won from the colonial powers, safeguarding national sovereignty was regarded as pivotal for the whole enterprise. This was all the more true at a time the independence drive was supported by an overwhelming majority of the country s population. In the more recent period, the gradual erosion of state sovereignty has become a worldwide phenomenon, thanks primarily to giant strides in science and technology. Over and above the material means of violating state sovereignty, there is also the emergence of a supra-state structure based on economic, informational and media networks that states cannot immunize themselves against. In the electronic age, no state barriers can prevent the free motion of electrons used in electronic mail, electronic money, electronic computers or electronic audio-visual devices.