ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 examines Ireland’s rapid structural economic transformation during the 1990s, and the debates that emerged about the potentialities and limits of this idiosyncratic ‘developmental model’, and its apparently successful integration into the global economy. Whilst neo-liberal economists have tended to explain the Irish experience of rapid growth in terms of the adoption of a liberalisation and export-led strategy that opened the economy to vast infl ows of ‘high-tech’ FDI (foreign direct investment), critical commentators have argued that such an account ignores the active role actually played by the Irish state and related institutions and organisations in shaping the precise mode in which the ‘local’ economy integrated into ‘globalised networks’ of high-tech production and innovation. According to this alternative view, the Irish case is actually that of a Network Developmental State that manages the connection between the local and the global and, through its active involvement in industrial development, steers the national economy along a path of integration into the technologically most dynamic elements of the world economy. In contrast to the authoritarian state developmentalism of the East Asian Tigers, and their (initial) reliance on the ‘super-exploitation’ of cheap manual labour, the Celtic Tiger model would be predicated on democratic institutions and more qualifi ed, higher-wage jobs in cutting-edge sectors of the economy. Tomás Friedenthal and Guido Starosta take issue with these apparently opposed explanations insofar as they both explain the trajectory of the Irish developmental process on the basis of the successful implementation of ‘correct’ nation-state policies (even if they disagree on the precise nature of those policies). By contrast, this chapter argues that the Irish experience is yet another concrete expression of the further development of the essentially global dynamics of the NIDL. More specifi cally, it argues that the continuous skill-replacing technical change characterising the production of relative surplus-value across the globe has allowed capital to integrate national working classes with more skilled, but still relatively cheaper, labour-power into the NIDL. The peculiar state policies and institutions prevailing in Ireland are therefore grounded in this specific form of integration into the NIDL.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Ireland; Celtic Tiger; International division of labour; High-tech production