The ASEAN Miracle

A Catalyst for Peace

Kishore Mahbubani,Jeffery Sng

• Publisher: National University of Singapore Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9789814722650
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is a miracle. In an era of growing cultural pessimism, there is a pervasive belief that different civilizations cannot function together. Yet the ten countries of ASEAN are a thriving counter-example of coexistence. Here, more than 625 million people live together in peace.In 1967, leaders from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand struck a landmark agreement, forming ASEAN. They had realized that political and economic cooperation would bring greater stability and prosperity to the region. Fifty years and five additional countries later, the alliance has remained one of the world's most successful collaborations. Kishore Mahbubani and Jeffery Sng explain how this partnership has benefited the ten member countries and why it should serve as a model for other regions of the world, challenging our assumptions about international cooperation. As the world turns to Asia and the United States and China jostle for dominance, the ASEAN region will have an undeniably powerful role in shaping our global systems. Mahbubani and Sng offer an important primer for understanding this immensely successful—and woefully underappreciated—regional organization.

1	The Four Waves

Why is Southeast Asia the most culturally diverse region on our planet?

One simple answer could be that it is the only region to have felt the impact of four distinct waves of cultural influence. Southeast Asia has been intimately associated and involved with four of the great universalist cultures and civilizations of the world: India, China, Islam and the West. It may be an understatement to view these encounters as waves. Given their long-lasting impact, they should be called tsunamis. However, the word “wave” may be more appropriate because, with the exception of the Western wave, these interactions were mostly peaceful. It is important to develop a good understanding here because, as George Yeo told us, “ASEAN is but the continuing expression of historical Southeast Asia”.¹⁸

We should also emphasize at the outset that the term “wave” is used metaphorically. The arrival and impact of these four distinct civilizations into Southeast Asia could not have been more different. Yet, what makes Southeast Asia truly unique is that it is the only region to have absorbed so many different and distinct civilizations. The expression “four waves” highlights this distinctiveness. This also makes Southeast Asia a unique human laboratory for historical study. The goal of this chapter is to give a glimpse into why this region is so fascinating in historical terms.

The big question that needs to be answered at the outset is what existed in Southeast Asia before these four waves. At the beginning of the 20th century, historians were likely to say “not very much”. The Indian nationalist historian R.C. Majumdar proclaimed, “The Hindu colonists brought with them the whole framework of their culture and civilization and this was transplanted in its entirety among the people who had not yet emerged from their primitive barbarism.”¹⁹ He wrote this in 1941. The French scholar George Coedés would write similar words around the same period.

More recent historians have thoroughly revised the old picture painted by Majumdar and Coedés. Among other revisions, new research shows just how active Southeast Asians were in the long-distance maritime trade across Asia,²⁰ with Southeast Asian ships carrying out trade across the Indian Ocean²¹ some 500 years before the Hindu religion and the Sanskrit language came into common currency. In recent years, historians have emphasized the commonalities across the region that underlie the impact of big ideas from outside, religions, court rituals and so on. The eminent historian Anthony Reid looks at it this way:

The bewildering variety of language, culture and religion in Southeast Asia, together with its historic openness to waterborne commerce from outside the region, appear at first glance to defy any attempts at generalizations. Yet as our attention shifts from court politics and religious “great traditions” to the popular beliefs and social practices of ordinary Southeast Asians, the common ground becomes increasingly apparent.²²

Southeast Asia’s deep cultural diversity is reflected in its linguistic map: it is among the most linguistically diverse regions in the world. However, the hundreds of Southeast Asian languages and dialects can be subsumed under several language families that comprise broad groupings of related languages with a common root. These language families are the Austronesian (including most of the languages of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, as well as the subgroup of Polynesian languages spoken in Hawaii and New Zealand); the Austroasiatic (including Khmer and Vietnamese); the Tai (Thai and Lao); and the Tibeto-Burman (Burmese).²³ The alignment of geography and culture tends to reinforce the fundamental division of the region into mainland Southeast Asia—dominated by Austroasiatic, Tai and Burmese speakers—and the maritime archipelago—dominated by Austronesian speakers. All of these languages have changed and adapted under the impact of the four waves, taking words from Sanskrit and other Indian languages, from Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch and English.

In the centuries before the Common Era, Austronesian speakers were masters of the seashores and oceans, with a culture oriented to water. Austronesian speakers were the pioneering seafaring traders, explorers and settlers of Eastern Asia, the Indian Ocean and even the Pacific. Their exploits more than rival those of the legendary Phoenicians of the Mediterranean Basin. Skilled navigators who were fearless in confronting the dangers of the open sea, Austronesian speakers populated shores from Madagascar—off the coast of Africa—to New Zealand and Hawaii—deep in the Pacific Ocean.

In later centuries, a group of Austronesian speakers around the Straits of Malacca and the Java Sea took advantage of their location at what Chinese travellers described as the end of the monsoons. The early Indonesians benefited from occupying a strategic position for maritime commerce on a wide scale. Situated at the junction between the Northeast and Southwest Monsoon winds, the Straits of Malacca served as the commercial crossroads through which people, ideas and trade goods passed. The prevailing wind patterns in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean allowed ships sailing southwest from China and southeast from India or Persia to meet in the straits and on the Malay Peninsula, where they exchanged goods. They sailed back home when the winds reversed. From their strategic location at the Straits of Malacca, early Malay-Indonesian seafarers dominated both the China trade and the Indian Ocean trade. The Indonesians “traded with India by 500 BCE and China by 400 BCE, and around the beginning of the Common Era, they carried goods between China and India”.²⁴ A Chinese observer in the 3rd century CE was impressed by the large multi-masted ships that were more than 50 metres in length and able to carry 600–700 people and up to 600 tons of cargo.²⁵

With China and India once again set to resume their traditional places as the world’s two largest economies, it is only natural that the close connections between Southeast Asia and China and India, which were disrupted by centuries of Western colonial occupation, will once again resume. This is another reason why modern Southeast Asia should make a greater effort to understand the deep history of the region’s links with Europe, South Asia, the Middle East and East Asia. Even as we try to understand the impact of these waves, we should bear in mind that Southeast Asians were not just passive recipients of foreign influences. They explored outwards and made use of outside ideas for their own purposes. This may explain Rabindranath Tagore’s cryptic remark during his visit to Southeast Asia in 1927. He said that he saw India everywhere in Southeast Asia but did not recognize it.

The Indian Wave

It is not surprising that Tagore saw India everywhere. Some records place the contact between India and Southeast Asia as far back as 3,000 years. The millennia of cultural contact clearly left a deep impression on Southeast Asia.

It is significant that Indian cultural influences penetrated both mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. Anyone who doubts this should visit the magnificent monuments of Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Borobudur in Java. The British historian William Dalrymple describes the Ta Prohm temple, part of the Angkor complex:

Tree trunks spiral out of the vaults of the shingled Buddhist temple roofs like the flying buttresses of a Gothic cathedral; branches knot over Sanskrit inscriptions composed in perfect orthography and grammar, before curving around the reliefs of Indic lions and elephants, gods and godlings, sprites and tree spirits. The trees’ roots fan out like fused spiderwebs and grip crumbling friezes of bare-breasted apsarasas (heavenly dancing girls) and dreadlocked sadhus (wandering holy men).²⁶

Traces of the region’s contact with the high cultures of India are not preserved only in dead monuments. Indian influences remain alive and well in the rituals of Southeast Asia’s royal courts. To this day, for example, Brahmins have a special role in Thai court ritual.

The Chinese presence is also deep-seated in Thailand. The founder of the Chakri dynasty, King Rama I (who began his reign in 1782), was of Chinese descent. Indeed, one of his successors, King Mongkut (r. 1851–68), was very proud to proclaim his Chinese lineage. Today, Chinese have assimilated so completely into Thai culture that it is hard to tell who is Thai and who is Chinese in Thai society. But when the Chinese assimilated into Thai society, they accepted the Indian cultural legacy that was embedded in the arts, philosophy, writing system and religion of Thailand. A Thai of Chinese origin can therefore feel comfortable in both Chinese and Indian cultures.

This ability of Thailand to comfortably assimilate both the Indian and Chinese cultural waves may well demonstrate a secret cultural genius of Southeast Asian societies: the ability to accept and live with differences. This may be why the Indian and Chinese cultural waves were able to overlap comfortably with each other as Southeast Asia began to interact with both civilizations around the same time.

In the early years of the new millennium, trading activity across the Indian Ocean intensified. Societies began to become more stratified, with ruling groups entrenching their power into institutions of kingship and royal courts. And at a certain point, they adopted ideas and a new language from India. Sheldon Pollock’s magisterial The Language of the Gods in the World of Men shows how the Sanskrit language became the language of power across the Indian Ocean world, being adopted by kings and princes “from Kashmir to Kelantan”.²⁷ Hinduism and Buddhism were nurtured and promoted by courts around the same time, and across a broad area of Asia, in what Pollock calls a Sanskrit cosmopolis.

Hindu ideas of kingship and Sanskrit as the sacred language of court and religious rituals could soon be found across Southeast Asia.²⁸ Especially in mainland Southeast Asia, local elites who spoke radically different languages—such as Mon-Khmer, Tai and Malay—and lived in different cultural worlds suddenly adopted Sanskrit and its attendant political philosophy and literary aesthetic.²⁹ (This process was occurring across different regions of India at roughly the same time.) Societies in the plains and deltas of mainland Southeast Asia became more and more organized, with rituals and great temples and palaces. And the symbolism and the names and texts were Indian. Travellers from India—craftsmen, Brahmins, experts—were certainly part of the cosmopolitan scene in these courts, just as Southeast Asians were present in India, though historians continue to find it difficult to reconstruct their numbers, roles and exact place in Southeast Asian societies.³⁰

One of the earliest Khmer inscriptions records how a 5th-century ruler in what is now Laos took the Indic name Devanika and the Sanskrit title Maharaj Adhiraja (King of Kings) during a ceremony in which he installed a Shiva lingam—the phallic symbol representing the Hindu deity Shiva—under a phallic-shaped mountain that overlooked his capital city of Champasak. In addition, he consecrated a water tank with the name Kurukshetra after the plain in India where the great battle of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata was fought.³¹

Even though the ardent converts to Indian civilization were largely elites, Indian influence also enriched local Southeast Asian folk culture, through the introduction of new religious ideas, mythology and folklore that interacted with older stories and ideas. Through the Indian connection, Hinduism and Buddhism both spread to these early states and for many centuries existed there in a complex interaction. Eventually, the states of the mainland became predominantly Buddhist.

Significantly, this Indianization was felt in both mainland and insular Southeast Asia. The earliest Indianized states appeared on the mainland, along the lower reaches of the Mekong River and on the southern coasts of Cambodia and Vietnam, where they benefited from maritime trade with India and China. Prior to the rise of the Indonesian port polities, they were the most prosperous states. The first of these Indianized states to achieve historical prominence was Funan, located on the Mekong near present-day Phnom Penh, and in the Mekong delta. Local inhabitants of Funan are likely to have spoken the Khmer language like today’s ethnic Cambodians. In fact, the people of present-day Cambodia trace their descent to the people of the kingdom of Funan. The Hindu-Khmer empire of Funan flourished for about 500 years.

The rise of Funan reveals something about the relationship between the Indian and Chinese waves. It occurred during the first great period of global trade, when the Silk Road was opened, linking Han China and the Roman empire across Asia. The overland Silk Road excites our imagination, with its caravans and oases, but in recent years we have learned more of the maritime routes that passed through Southeast Asian seas. In its heyday, Funan carried on a lucrative trade with both India during the Murunda dynasty and China in the period of the Three Kingdoms.

It seems that in the earliest days of this trade, rather than passing through the Straits of Malacca, cargoes from Chinese junks plying the South China Sea were transported overland across the narrow Isthmus of Kra in Southern Thailand. Upon reaching the coast of the Andaman Sea, for example at the port of Kedah, the cargoes were reloaded on ships sailing across the Bay of Bengal to India and the Persian Gulf, where they rejoined the overland routes on the way to Europe. Goods coming in the opposite direction were transshipped overland across the isthmus to the shores of the South China Sea. Merchants then boarded other vessels sailing along the Gulf of Thailand until they reached Funan.

Funan’s domination of the trade networks was eventually challenged by rival trading powers emerging in maritime Southeast Asia, especially around the Straits of Malacca. This was possibly also a result of changes at both ends of the Silk Road, with the Roman empire in decline and the Han no longer able to keep the overland Silk Road open. The decline of Funan heralded the end of the initial phase of Indianization in Southeast Asia. With the passing of Funan power on the Indochinese mainland, the locus of Indianization shifted away from mainland Southeast Asia towards the maritime archipelago of Indonesia.

Borobudur became the embodiment of Mahayana Buddhism, which spread from India to Southeast Asia, China and Japan after the 7th century. It must have been a time of great intellectual and religious ferment, as Buddhism and Brahmanist cults existed side by side and intertwined, sometimes mobilized by rival political clans. Both Hinduism and Buddhism flourished in central Java, witnessed by the monumental architectural legacies of Prambanan and Borobudur respectively, a few dozen kilometres apart.

Soon a new Buddhist kingdom emerged in Sumatra, centred on Palembang. With a fine natural harbour accessible even to the largest ocean-going vessels, and located strategically in the Straits of Malacca, the new kingdom of Srivijaya became a more competitive port of call as trade between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean flowed through the straits. Srivijaya prospered rapidly and was able to maintain a commercial hegemony over the smaller ports of the ...