Regionalism in Southeast Asia

To foster the political will

Nicholas Tarling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780415379625
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134181056
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Regionalism in Southeast Asia provides the reader with an historical analysis of Southeast Asia from the distinct perspective of regionalism. Southeast Asian history is usually written from a national point of view, which underplays the links between neighbouring states and nations and the effects of these bonds on the development of regionalism. This innovative book begins by defining the meaning of 'region' and 'regionalism' and then applies it to periods in history in Southeast Asia, looking at how patterns of regionalism have shifted through time to the present day. By focusing on the regional perspective Nicholas Tarling gives an original treatment of Southeast Asian history, its political dynamics and its international realtions.

Regionalism in Southeast Asia completes a trilogy of books on Southeast Asia by Nicholas Tarling published by Routledge, the other two are Nationalism in Southeast Asia and Imperialism in Southeast Asia.

Part I

Definitions and Chronologies

All cooperation is political.

(D. Crone, 1988)

1 Definitions

The author sees this book as one in a series which, with Imperialism in Southeast Asia and Nationalism in Southeast Asia, will form a kind of trilogy with a common pattern. Each focuses on a concept that has framed the political structures of the region in modern times. Examining the concept helps in understanding the development of the region and in placing its history in the mainstream. At the same time examining the region helps to define the concept, so far as it has been or may be used more generally.

In each book the author has endeavoured to follow a somewhat similar structure. In the opening chapters he searches for definitions and examines chronologies in the region and in the wider world. Then he discusses the colonial period and the Japanese interregnum. A sequence of chapters covers decolonisation, the independent states and the impact of globalisation. That approach means that there are overlaps as well as similarities or possibilities for comparison. But the books are meant to be free-standing as well as parts of a trilogy, and, while imperialism, nationalism and regionalism may be conceived as describing three phases in the history of the region, they themselves overlapped and overlap.

Writing in 1982 on Regional Organization and Order in South-East Asia,¹ Arnfinn Jorgensen-Dahl suggested that there were ‘two routes by which to approach such an undertaking’ as his. ‘One can start with specific generalizations and hypotheses taken from the wider body of already accumulated knowledge about regional cooperation, organization, and integration and proceed to test them within the context of Southeast Asia.’ Alternatively, one could ‘examine the conditions and processes in Southeast Asia and relate the results to relevant elements of the wider body of theoretical understanding’. He chose the latter path, partly because ‘little or nothing of the evidence on which present theoretical understanding rests has been drawn from Southeast Asian experiences’ but rather referred to Europe, Latin America and Africa. Moreover, the ‘empirical generalizations arrived at’ dealt with ‘conditions and processes the outcome of which represent levels of cooperation and integration not reached in any parts of Southeast Asia’ and might be ‘considered “ideal” outcomes in whose attainment in the region there is no a priori reason to believe’. Starting with existing generalisations might lead to ‘acts of oversight with regard to possible alternative outcomes and to the rejection or neglect of factors and variables unique to the area’; and to explain why ‘levels of cooperation, organization, and integration achieved elsewhere’ had not been achieved in Southeast Asia, which the first approach seemed to require, would involve ‘a considerable amount of speculation about possible intervening factors as well as extrapolations into the future from the past and the present’, which could be used ‘neither to confirm or disconfirm existing hypotheses’.² Jorgensen-Dahl thus adopted the second approach.

Since he wrote regional cooperation and organisation have attracted more practical attention in Southeast Asia, and so has the study of them. But though they have to some extent been placed in a larger context, both actual and theoretical, that has largely been created by the development of what has become the European Community (EC). In that sense, Jorgensen-Dahl’s reservation remains: there is a risk that theoreticians as well as practitioners will be searching for deviancy rather than for comprehensiveness. ‘Studies in regionalism frequently but erroneously reflect the expectation of a progressive development which proceeds from consultation and co-ordination to integration. … A regional organization is judged by what it has achieved along this path towards integration.’ But that is an ‘over-simplification’. Integration should not be ‘a terminal condition’.³ By contrast Vincent Cable remarked ten years later that ASEAN had ‘survived’ but had ‘little concrete to show’ for its ‘integration efforts’.⁴

The present author suggests, however, that it may still be possible to avoid a choice between the two kinds of approach Jorgensen-Dahl outlines. Regionalism may be examined in a theoretical way without assuming that Southeast Asia has to be fitted into a particular pattern or process, or that there is, say, a necessary evolution towards ‘integration’ even if in different ways towards different forms, while yet recognising that it may add to the understanding of the Southeast Asian experience. At the same time, it may be possible to suggest that a study of the Southeast Asian experience may test out and possibly afford the means of amplifying or sharpening the theoretical approach. Unsatisfactory as it may be logically speaking, it may be a practical way to proceed, and a profitable one, as well as, perhaps, one a historian might be expected to prefer.

It is indeed this course the author endeavoured to adopt in the two previous books on ‘imperialism’ and ‘nationalism’. There he began with definitions. Those he endeavoured to supplement with chronology, in the recognition that the meanings of words may vary from place to place but are also likely to change or be changed over time as circumstances and conditions change. That does not necessarily mean that a theoretical approach is completely time-bound and so of limited, even but snapshot, value. It may rather lead to a more useful definition, further dislodging the risk of seeing regionalism as taking one particular course of development and no other and regarding it as somehow questionable, even unsuccessful, if it does not always end up with the same outcome. It provides a historical context for a topic too often discussed more or less in its absence. That does not make it easier to discuss but may make it more worthwhile.

In the case of ‘imperialism’ and ‘nationalism’, the search for a definition itself took differing forms. Both words had not only shifted their meaning over time but also had – also shifting – political overtones. In the first case, the author decided that it might be best tentatively to adopt a limited definition, applied to a particular time-phase, allowing readers to set other definitions against it if they were so disposed. In the second case, he took a rather different course. ‘Nationalism’ could not be confined to a particular time-phase, and it seemed best to adopt a kind of definition that would enable it to be studied in its continuity and discontinuity over a long, though not undefined, period.

‘As a political doctrine regionalism is even more incoherent than nationalism’, James Mayall writes, ‘since those who advocate regional solutions to political and economic problems do not merely differ on the meaning and implications of the concept, but are frequently pursuing contradictory projects’.⁵ Defining ‘regionalism’, however, is perhaps a less fraught venture than finding a useful definition of ‘imperialism’ or ‘nationalism’. As a movement, it does not extend over a long period, and thus requires either to be chronologically pinned down or treated in an expanded manner. Nor – though it is not entirely free of political overtones – does it carry the political baggage of ‘imperialism’ or ‘nationalism’, even though it is in a measure a comparator and a successor. The definition of ‘regionalism’ – and of correlatives like ‘region’, ‘regionalist’, ‘regionalise’ and ‘regionness’ – is not, however, uncontested, even if, in this case, it is less on account of political or ideological overtones or purposes, and more on account of varying approaches to comment and analysis. The concepts are, however, increasingly being used or developed in the course of or as a basis of public action, not merely though primarily political, and both practice and theory are increasingly placed in the conflicted context of ‘globalisation’.

In discussing ‘nationalism’ the author was able to enjoy some recourse to an extensive non-historiographical theoretical literature. Writers on the topic, he found, have attempted to classify their approaches to the topic. Some are ‘primordialist’ or ‘perennialist’ in emphasis, some ‘functionalist’ and some ‘constructivist’. No doubt partly because of his historical training, the author found some truth in all of them, and deployed parts of each. ‘Primordialism’ he found least convincing, however, and an element of ‘constructivism’ he deemed essential. ‘Nations’ had not always existed, only to be awakened. Nor were they simply brought into being by changing conditions, such as the advance of industrialisation or literacy. Instead they were ‘constructed’ by those who reckoned with such factors and turned them to account. Such categorisations may also help in discussing ‘regionalism’, in some ways not only as comparator, but collaborator and competitor.

In discussing ‘regionalism’ the author has had recourse to a theoretical literature that, not surprisingly, overlaps in part the literature on nationalism, and indeed in some cases has been produced by the same writers. He was struck by the contention in the discipline of international relations, so much in evidence, indeed, that there seemed a risk that scholars in the field might find it difficult to offer composite accounts and explanations. That risk has been coupled with another, given that so much of the writing has focused on one case, that of Europe and the EC.

Unlike that on nationalism, the literature on regionalism rarely gives ‘primordialism’ explanatory force. Michael Haas’ suggestion that ‘the peoples of Asia share a common culture in regard to international relations’⁶ is scarcely convincing, and, in discussing the mandala concept advanced by Oliver Wolters as a means of understanding interstate relations in early Southeast Asia, Craig Reynolds warns that its emphasis on non-coercive cultural authority, playing down warfare and violence, may perpetuate ‘an exotic, idealist, Orientalist construction of the Southeast Asian past’.⁷ Does that point to ‘realism’?

By contrast again to the debate on ‘nationalism’, the state – for which nationalists contended or which took up that cause – is throughout the main focus of the debate on ‘regionalism’. One approach is the ‘realist’, which analyses international relations in terms of contending states relentlessly pursuing their interests in a more or less anarchic world. Whether states, even in Europe before the Second World War, behaved like that a historian may readily question, but, during and after that war, it was urgent to argue that they need not. It was in that context that David Mitrany conceived, in A Working Peace System (1943), what came to be seen as the ‘functionalist’ approach.⁸ That approach was practically exemplified in the post-war attempts to ensure that France and Germany would not fight again. ‘Functionalism’ and ‘neo-functionalism’ described actuality and hope. Statesmen saw the Coal and Steel Community as a first step towards a wider community. Theorists analysed their achievement and supported their aspiration. There were and would be ‘spillovers’ from economic collaboration, as Ernst Haas argued in The Unity of Europe (1958), though it has been suggested that ‘neofunctionalists do not fully explain the starting up of an integration process, but advance a hypothesis on the course for further expansion’,⁹ and Haas, taking account of De Gaulle, later added in a leader with ‘dramatic-political’ aims.¹⁰

The development of the EC was certainly led from the top and was strikingly contractual and rule-bound, and some ‘intergovernmentalists’, like Andrew Moravcsik, saw ‘integration’ in terms of a series of bargains among heads of state.¹¹ The major shift in international relations studies was, however, towards ‘constructivism’, and it became the main contender with its supposed opposite, ‘realism’, even as modified by the stress placed on conventions and expectations by Robert Keohane’s ‘institutionalism’.¹² To some extent ‘constructivism’, too, goes back to the 1950s, to the ideas of Karl Deutsch, who also influenced theories of nationalism. States, he suggested, might develop a habit of peaceful interaction as a means of managing the anarchy that ‘realists’ took for granted: a ‘security community’ might emerge. His ‘transactionalism’ was an insight into the past itself taken up by ‘constructivists’ in the 1980s and 1990s, when scholars ‘finally caught up with Deutsch’s vision’.¹³ But they were also influenced, if not misled, by the ‘linguistic turn’, exemplified in the debate on nationalism by Ben Anderson and his concept of ‘imagined communities’. ‘In the constructivist approach’, writes Björn Hettne, ‘regions come to life as we talk and think about them.’¹⁴ Like the nation, the region is an ‘imagined community’.

A balance is required. Constructivists’ studies may focus on ‘the effects of norms on the behaviour of actors or the development of norms by actors through their agency’. Most, Hiro Katsumata thinks, currently focus on the first. ‘This is why today’s constructivists are criticised for not paying sufficient attention to the actors’ construction of ideational structures despite their claim that structures and agents are mutually constitutive.’¹⁵

Summarising complex theories is a risky task, especially when undertaken by someone outside a discipline. The historian may find the risk worth taking, for they may offer new insights into his own discipline. The present author hopes to offer something in return, not only by presenting a fuller account than most of regionalism in Southeast Asia, but also by taking another risk. For he has found that, while most of the theories have offered some new insights, they seem less at odds with each other than their proponents at times seem to suggest, and he fears that, as it were, a single lens may distort. In his view Jean Monnet was a ‘realist’, but it was part of his ‘realism’ that he recognised the value of what theorists would describe in terms of ‘functionalism’ and ‘constructivism’. The point is all the more important if the study of international relations is to be, as Keohane hoped, ‘a policy science as well as a theoretical activity’.¹⁶

What is true of Monnet is surely also true of the creators of the Association of Southeast Asian States, ASEAN, such as Ghazali, ‘realists’ to a man, but also ‘constructivists’. Richard Higgott saw the Asia-Pacific networks of the early 1990s as ‘an important laboratory for enhancing our conceptual and theoretical understanding of the importance of ideas in identity formation and policy learning in international relations’.¹⁷ The same may be true of Southeast Asia even before then. ‘Without a constructivist understanding, it would be difficult to explain the emergence of ASEAN.’¹⁸

For the most part modern understanding of the word ‘region’ and its correlatives are geographic in character, though the English word comes, perhaps significantly, from the Latin regere, to direct; and it was earlier used also to describe levels of air, and is also used metaphorically. Contiguity or proximity seem to be essential, though some have denied even that, and others have extended the boundaries very wide, while allowing or advocating the ‘imagining’ of ‘sub-regions’, ‘meso-regions’¹⁹ and ‘micro-regions’.²⁰ But it would still be hard to conceive of ‘regionalism’ as ‘primordial’, though the associations and loyalties that might grow up or be cultivated within it might over time bring it within the ambit of those who wish to use that category.

Far more, regions appear to be constituted by ‘function’ and ‘construction’, a mixture, in varying proportions, partly depending on type and purpose. Over a period economic, social and cultural connections may be built up, taking more or less account of geographical relationships, as a result of ‘function’ but also as a result of ‘construction’. More directly, perhaps more immediately, it may be effected by leaders, perhaps particularly in the political sphere, who are advocating and pursuing regionalism. Those who ‘imagine’ – or ‘invent’ – this community are likely, like Anderson’s nationalists, to include the elite rather than or sooner than the masses: indeed the elite might be more likely actually to know others than merely imagine a relationship with them. But they may also be – or solely comprising – outsiders, who perceive the area as a region, however its occupants perceive it. And the region does not have to be conflictless to be a region: it may be marked by conflict, or by a mixture of agreement and disagreement, ‘the interdependence of rivalry’, in Barry Buzan’s words, as well as ‘the interdependence of shared interests’.²¹

Indeed ‘outside’ factors are important as well as ‘outsiders’. The discussion of ‘nationalism’ suggested the extent to which, in at least two senses, it was formed as a response – by way of contention, collaboration or negotiation – to changes in a larger world. That world, first, might be affected by all-encompassing or potentially all-encompassing changes of an economic origin, improvements in communication, industrialisation and now ‘globalisation’. Second, there were all-encompassing changes of a political nature, creating first a world of empires, and then a world of states, generally identified with or as nations. States and nations indeed formed themselves in contact or contest with one another, imitating example, emulating power. Overall they constituted a way in which segments of humanity organised themselves and, in order to av...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Definitions and chronologies
• Part II: The view from without
• Part III: The view from within
• Part IV: Historiography
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index