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Meanings and chronologies
Who are historians to write about neutrality? At least since the early nineteenth century, inspired by Leopold Ranke, they have spoken of objectivity, and even now many of us believe that, while that is not realisable, it is a worthwhile aim, better than a readiness to relapse into a comfortable relativism. Yet Ranke was writing at a time when nations were emerging, and nation-builders have found historiography a useful instrument. Writing of international relations also had fraught origins. The discipline arose in the aftermath of the First World War and tended to be framed in terms of avoidance and prevention, to give too much play to mechanisms and too little to human beings.
Yet such questionings should not perhaps prevent attempts to tackle some of the concepts that arise in the study of states and their inter-relationships, before, during and after the rise of nations. Such concepts are, of course, bound to shift their meanings over time, and to be deployed in differing ways as circumstances change. That gives the historian an opportunity as well as a challenge. Whether it also allows for advocacy or prophecy is more questionable, but they may, too, be worth an attempt.
The term âneutralityâ appears quite early in discussions of the relationships among states so far as Europe is concerned; much later in reference to the states in Southeast Asia on which the book is more particularly focused. But it has seemed worthwhile to place the meanings it assumed and its practical deployment in Southeast Asia in the context of its meanings and deployment in Europe and indeed in other parts of a âglobalisingâ world both in earlier and contemporary periods.
The book also considers some cognate words and terms and the meanings that have been attributed to them during their deployment. Among them are terms that are in some sense similar, but have different overtones and may be used with different purposes. They include ânon-alignmentâ, for example, credited to the Indian statesmen Krishna Menon in 1953/4.1 The word âuncommittedâ was initially used by the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961. Others â with a seeming paradox â had spoken of being âactively neutralâ, of âpositive neutralityâ. In the inter-war years, George Cohn wrote of âneo-neutralityâ.2
It is indeed the intention of this book to discuss âneutralismâ, even though Peter Lyon drew a line between that and âneutralityâ.3 Less controversially, perhaps, it will also consider an older term, âneutralisationâ, along with attempts to implement it in new forms in Southeast Asia in much more recent times.
The book will also consider the emergence of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the extent to which the âASEAN wayâ it purports to adopt may be regarded as a kind of âneutralisingâ action (or inaction), irrespective of the fate of its attempt to create a Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (ZOPFAN).
Finally the book will suggest that âneutralityâ (and its cognates?) may have a role in contemporary Asia and indeed beyond. Is the concept no longer of relevance in the post-Cold War period? Has it been mistakenly by-passed? Could it be even now or become a concept of greater utility? Such questions seem worth at least asking.
Dictionary
In its application to animate beings, the notion of âneutralityâ emerged before its application to the politics of the state, and it survives it. The word âneuterâ derives from two roots: âneâ, meaning not; and âuterâ, meaning either. The adjective would apply to a creature who was neither masculine nor feminine; neither active nor passive, possibly sterile. The verb means to castrate, to âneuterâ, as with a luckless tomcat.
From it derive the noun and the adjective âneutralâ. The noun may refer to a person who does not âtake sidesâ, is âneutralâ between two other parties. The adjective also applies to a person who takes neither side in a dispute, belongs to neither of two parties. It also applies to those who belong to neither of two specified categories or occupy a middle position between them. It may then be more or less equivalent to indifferent, undefined, vague. In English such meanings date back to the sixteenth century.
A âneutralâ may also be the subject of a neutral state. In English, the application of the word to the state itself also goes back to the sixteenth century. The adjective âneutralâ was applied in 1549 to rulers who or states which did not assist either party in a war between other states; in 1551 to those who took neither side in a dispute; in 1564 to those belonging to neither of two parties or sides.
Another noun, âneutralityâ, emerged even earlier, the OED finding a meaning dating from 1494: âabstention from taking part in a war between other statesâ. It was also applied to individuals: âthe condition of being inclined neither way, the absence of decided views; indifferenceâ (dating from 1561). A 1600 reference takes in the readers of history if not historians themselves: it alludes to âthose Readers that can judge of the truth of a historie and the neutralitie of the writerâ.
âNeutraliseâ seems to emerge as a term in Faradayâs chemistry. Its political overtones apparently date from 1795, only a few years after the French revolution of 1789: to counterbalance; to render ineffective by an opposite force or effect. âNeutralisationâ â exempting or excluding a place from the sphere of warlike operations â dates from 1856, the year of the treaty that ended the Crimean War and that indeed marks a particular development of the concept in international relations.
A third term to be considered is âneutralismâ. It is, again, a sixteenth-century word, but then applied in a religious context, as again three centuries later by Matthew Arnold. The more familiar political usage of the term comes much later, in the period of the Cold War, also the period of decolonisation. The illustrative quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary offer a rather surprising ambivalence, if not indeed contradicting the usage that became more regular. Surely even then it was more than âan attitude of mind in times of peaceâ, as The Times put it in 1959. The OED also quotes Michael Brecher as suggesting that neutralism went further than non-alignment, since it implied an obligation to reduce tensions between the Cold War âblocsâ. But that seems questionable, if not indeed the reverse of the usage that even then prevailed.
Two things are striking about these explorations in the English dictionary. First, many of the words seem to appear earlier than might perhaps be expected by those who associate the words with the politics of the Cold War. The word âneutralistâ â one who maintains a neutral attitude â dates back to 1623. Second, the words, especially but not exclusively, appear to date back, for the most part, to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ce, when overarching authorities in Europe were giving way to emergent sovereign states, a major staging point usually being ascribed to the Westphalia treaties of 1648. The words seem to be associated, so far as the state is concerned, with the displacement of what students of international relations call âhierarchyâ by what they term âanarchyâ.
Indeed, whatever the fate of the individual, there seems to be little scope for neutrality, neutralism or neutralisation, in a hierarchic system, such as the Holy Roman Empire, or, outside Europe, the Indian or Chinese empires. A state might seek protection from an overlord, and an overlord find it worthwhile to offer it. If it was not under one overlord, it might be under two, but it would never be under none. International relations, if indeed the word may be used, fell into tributary patterns: there was no standing aside of the kind neutral states envisaged.
A Europe of states
In the âWestphaliaâ concept, by contrast to the hierarchic concepts, states, though differing in power, are theoretically equally sovereign, a different and indeed somewhat paradoxical representation of their asymmetry. A state might seek to stand outside the conflict of other states, particularly if it was smaller than they were, avoiding, like the Malayan mousedeer, being trampled underfoot by the elephants. Perhaps, indeed, it could benefit, if it could continue to trade with both sides in a conflict in which it was itself not otherwise involved. It would in any case seek to maximise its degree of independence, though admitting its limits. It might recognise that there could be degrees of neutrality: it might be possible, even desirable, to âleanâ to one side, though it might also be necessary to adopt a âstrictâ neutrality. For a smaller power, indeed, the attitude of the greater powers would be a determining factor so far as concerned the degree of flexibility that was available. They might find a âbufferâ state useful; they might even welcome some kind of mediatory role. By contrast, a small state in a disputed region might have to accept, willingly or otherwise, some form of neutral-isation, curbing its theoretical scope for independent action in order to secure the maximum in practice available. That could be more or less formal, sometimes a matter of treaty agreement, as with Switzerland at the end of the French wars, sometimes what was called âFinlandisationâ, in reference to a close neighbourâs relationship with the Soviet Union after the Second World War.
Other aspects of the Westphalia system are also relevant. States had to have frontiers that were accepted by other states, not challenged by invasion, and perhaps endorsed by treaty, even demarcated on maps and on the ground. The pressure of the more powerful might extend, however, behind those frontiers. A religious purpose might be behind that â the treaties purported to end a period of devastating religious wars â and find supporters or defend their survival. Westphalia was indeed intended to end religious wars by adopting the formula cuius regio eius religio. It implied co-existence despite ideological difference. The price of such co-existence was putting up with regimes whose systems were unacceptable, even heretical. States were neither to invade nor to subvert the authority of other states, though they might be smaller and less powerful.
As recourse to the dictionary and its exemplary quotations suggests, the meanings of neutrality and neutralisation shifted over time in focus, in usage, in application. Like the meanings of other words, they âslip, slide and perishâ, as T.S. Eliot put it in his poem âBurnt Nortonâ, though in perishing they often leave the ghost of a meaning behind. For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the focus was on neutrality, particularly on the ârightsâ of neutral trade at sea during war among other European powers. The question of neutrality on land was, however, never absent. Immanuel Kant defined neutrality as âthe right to be at peace when there is a war in the vicinityâ.4 The emergence of an independent United States â after a war with the colonial power that had itself prompted Russia and other European powers to create a League of Armed Neutrality â offered not a new definition but a new inflection. A state could attempt to isolate itself from the âentanglingâ politics of the Europeans, associating isolation with independence. Other states, less geographically advantaged, would attempt to make neutrality a badge of independence, even an assertion of it. That applied within Europe in the nineteenth century. It was also to apply to states that, like the US in an earlier period, were in the twentieth century to secure independence of the control over the territories they claimed that Europeans had established in the previous centuries.
For the most part, of course, the emergence of modern states in Europe had been coterminous with its pursuit of wealth and power overseas, in part indeed in order to obtain security or obtain dominance in Europe as it broke up into states. The colonial territories they acquired in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could not, of course, play an independent political role: they were involved in war or they were not according to the stance of the metropolitan government concerned, though, especially in the earlier centuries, its remote grip was not always firm, and colonial authorities might pursue their own quarrels or make their own agreements. Neutrality was involved only to a limited extent in the building of empires, being then more a matter, perhaps, of rivalsâ agreeing on no manâs lands, sometimes of temporary duration. It came into its own in the age of decolonisation, which was also the age of Cold War.
The nineteenth century, an age of imperialism, had, however, seen an extension of international law in this field as in others. With the assent of the major power, Britain, the rights of neutral traders were expanded in the treaty of 1856 that concluded the Crimean War. It sought to end the controversy over the confiscation of enemy goods in neutral ships by admitting that neutral flag meant neutral goods, except in the case of contraband.5 Blockades, to be legal, had to be effective, not merely declaratory. Those were concessions made by Britain, reflecting the fact that it was not only the greatest naval power of the day, but also the worldâs largest trader and financier and insurers of ships, and dependent on imported food. Moreover, with no territorial aspirations on the Continent, Britain, as Isabel Hull puts it, âcould imagine that in many major wars it would remain neutralâ.6 It entered the Crimean conflict
seeking to control and undermine the power of Russia. . . . It came out of it understanding that warfare with any of the great powers jeopardised its other major foreign Poli...
