The Making of Southeast Asia

international relations of a region

Amitav Acharya

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801466342
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Asiatische Politik

Developing a framework to study "what makes a region, " Amitav Acharya investigates the origins and evolution of Southeast Asian regionalism and international relations. He views the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) "from the bottom up" as not only a U.S.-inspired ally in the Cold War struggle against communism but also an organization that reflects indigenous traditions. Although Acharya deploys the notion of "imagined community" to examine the changes, especially since the Cold War, in the significance of ASEAN dealings for a regional identity, he insists that "imagination" is itself not a neutral but rather a culturally variable concept. The regional imagination in Southeast Asia imagines a community of nations different from NAFTA or NATO, the OAU, or the European Union.

In this new edition of a book first published as The Quest for Identity in 2000, Acharya updates developments in the region through the first decade of the new century: the aftermath of the financial crisis of 1997, security affairs after September 2001, the long-term impact of the 2004 tsunami, and the substantial changes wrought by the rise of China as a regional and global actor. Acharya argues in this important book for the crucial importance of regionalism in a different part of the world.

1

Introduction: Region, Regionalism and Regional Identity in the Making of Southeast Asia

A central concern of this book is to explore the issue of “identity” in the international relations of Southeast Asia. The term “identity” is understood here as “regional identity”, and is examined with specific reference to two basic propositions. The first holds that the international relations of Southeast Asia have much to do with conscious attempts by the region’s leaders (with some help from outside scholars and policy-makers) to “imagine”, delineate, and organize its political, economic, social and strategic space. In this sense, politics among the states of Southeast Asia may be understood as a quest for common identity in the face of the region’s immense diversity and myriad countervailing forces, including the ever-present danger of intraregional conflict and the divisive impact of extraregional actors and events. The second proposition holds that regional cooperation, in various conceptions and guises, has played a central role in shaping the modern Southeast Asian identity. By seeking to limit external influences and by developing a regulatory framework for managing interstate relations, regional cooperation has made the crucial difference between the forces of conflict and harmony that lie at the core of the international relations of Southeast Asia.

By emphasizing the idea of “region”, this book seeks to overcome what John Legge once described as “the almost universal tendency of historians to focus on the constituent parts of Southeast Asia rather than to develop a perception of the region as a whole as a suitable object of study.”1 While some historians have now overcome this tendency (notably Anthony Reid in his two-volume Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce and Nicholas Tarling in his Nations and States in Southeast Asia),2 regional perspectives on Southeast Asian politics and international relations remain scarce. Scholarly works on the foreign policies of individual Southeast Asian states, as well as studies of regional security and regional political economy, are often undertaken without regard to the question of what constitutes the region and its identity. Through the analysis of the international relations of Southeast Asia, this book seeks to ascertain whether there are regional patterns and characteristics that could validate or negate Southeast Asia’s claim to be a region.

It is important to bear in mind that many scholars who made important contributions to the development of Southeast Asian studies in the post-war era did not find it worthwhile to adopt a regional perspective. As Victor Lieberman notes in a review of the historiography of Southeast Asia, the earlier “externalist” historiography of Southeast Asia, with the exception of Coedès (who defined Southeast Asia mainly in terms of Indic influence), “had no vision of Southeast Asia as a coherent region”, and “the criteria for regional identity, potential or actual, were not discussed”.3 Similarly, several important post-war texts “devoted to ‘Southeast Asia’ consist of chapters on individual countries”, and pay “little attention to the region as a whole”.4 D.G.E. Hall, a doyen of Southeast Asian history and author of one of the earliest and most influential books on Southeast Asian history, devoted a mere paragraph to the controversy surrounding the emergence and usage of the term.5 Characterizing the area as “chaos of races and languages”,6 Hall observed that the term “South-East Asia” only “came into general use during the Second World War to describe the territories of the eastern Asiatic mainland forming the Indo-Chinese peninsula and the immense archipelago which includes Indonesia and the Philippines”. Hall did note the various spellings of the term. These included “SouthEast Asia” (used by the British Royal Navy); “South East Asia” (used by the Southeast Asia Command most of the time but not always); and “Southeast Asia” (preferred by many American writers). But he found “no valid reason” why the last should be considered better than the others. For him, all these were terms of convenience and, like many other large areas, open to objections. Yet further discussion of these controversies, Hall contended, would be “unnecessary, since our use of the term is dictated solely by convenience”.7 Hall was not alone in choosing to ignore the controversies surrounding the definition of the region. One of the most important post-war collections of essays on the politics of the region, Governments and Politics of Southeast Asia, published by the Cornell University Press in 1964, consisted of country studies and contained no attempt to develop a regional or comparative (cross-country) perspective involving more than one Southeast Asian state.8

Recent scholarship on Southeast Asia has increasingly acknowledged the importance of studying Southeast Asia from a regional perspective. Commenting on a special issue of the Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science that served as a precursor to this volume, Hans-Dieter Evers notes, “As the field of Southeast Asian studies is dominated by empirical studies on individual communities, villages, towns and nation-states it is refreshing to read the papers in this volume that take on the region as a whole.”9 A primary catalyst of this interest in regional affairs is the emergence of Southeast Asian regionalism. By emphasizing the role of “regionalism”, this book highlights one of the defining features of the international relations of Southeast Asia in the post-World War II period. The history of Southeast Asia’s international relations is, to a great extent, a history of attempts to forge regional unity — and of the success and failure of these attempts. Yet most studies of Southeast Asian regionalism have dealt with the political, strategic and economic aspects of regional cooperation without attempting to assess their cumulative impact on regional identity. A specific aim of this book is to investigate the impact of regionalism on the idea of regional identity.

The task of rethinking Southeast Asia in terms of the categories of region and regionalism has assumed a new importance in view of several developments. First, intraregional linkages within Southeast Asia have been transformed. For the first time in its history, there is a regional organization that claims to represent the “entire” region of Southeast Asia. The political division of Southeast Asia — based on the relative intensity of nationalism and competing ideological orientations of regimes that characterized intraregional relations after the end of World War II — has come to an end. Notwithstanding differences among Southeast Asian states in terms of their openness to the global economy, their domestic social and political organization, and their relationship with outside powers, Southeast Asia today arguably displays far more homogeneity and convergence than at any other time in the modern era.

Second, there has been a shift from external, imperial and orientalist constructions of Southeast Asia to internal, indigenous and regional constructions. As John Legge points out, much of the pre-war study of Southeast Asia (largely done by outside observers) saw “events [in the region] being shaped by external influences”.10 This is not surprising for a region where outsiders have, since the classical period, played a dominant role in defining its regional space. Indeed, the main terms of reference to the area now regarded as Southeast Asia were coined by outsiders, for instance the term Suvarnabhumi (covering areas east of the Bay of Bengal) found in Indian Buddhist writings, or the Chinese concept of Nanyang (the Southern Ocean) or Nanhai (the Southern Sea), an area extending roughly in the west from the port of Fuzhou to Palembang, and in the east from Taiwan to the west coast of Borneo.11 In the past, scholars of Southeast Asia have been justly accused of being “interested…primarily in external stimuli, to the detriment of the study of indigenous institutions”.12 Today, there is a greater sense that the affairs of Southeast Asia, including its international relations, are to a larger extent being shaped by local actors and processes of interaction. The shift is from a simplistic Cold War geopolitical view of Southeast Asia prevailing in the West to a regionalist conception of Southeast Asia as a region-for-itself, constructed by the collective political imagination of, and political interactions among, its own inhabitants.

Looking at the main forces of continuity and change in Southeast Asia, I have been struck by the way in which debates about “regionness” and regional identity have lurked beneath the surface of major issues in the foreign policy and international relations of Southeast Asian states. This is true of the principal geostrategic events, such as the end of the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, or the establishment of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which have shaped Southeast Asian history since World War II. It is also true of the way in which economic and political issues, be they economic globalization or contemporary debates over human rights and democracy, have been perceived and debated within the region. In all these cases, questions such as “Where is Southeast Asia?”, “Who is a Southeast Asian?” and “What is the typical and appropriate Southeast Asian way of doing things?” have been crucial factors influencing both Southeast Asia’s intraregional international relations and its relationship with the outside world. Thus, no serious study of Southeast Asia’s international relations can afford to ignore the question of regional identity.

Unity in Diversity

But what makes Southeast Asia a “region”? Any scholar writing a book on Southeast Asia is immediately confronted with this difficult question. Any generalizations about the region run the risk of oversimplification. A principal reason for this has to be the sheer diversity — geographical, ethnosocial, political and so on — of the region. Clark Neher, a political scientist, argues that the diversity of Southeast Asia is the main reason why there have been so few scholars who attempted to study the region systematically.13 But diversity can be a unifying theme as well. One could even argue that it is this very diversity that underlies Southeast Asia’s claim to be a distinctive region.

Wang Gungwu, the noted historian of Southeast Asia, raises such a possibility in his preface to a famous volume on Southeast Asian history during the period between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. During this era, Wang notes, the boundaries of Southeast Asia were not so clearly defined. Moreover, “local peoples during this period showed little consciousness of strong cultural commonalities”. As a result, “[t]here was no sense of belonging to a region, and it is probably anachronistic to expect such feelings”. But then he wonders, “[w]as that very lack of consciousness of boundaries itself a major common trait that distinguished the region from others?”14

From this perspective, one could argue that diversity is what gives Southeast Asia its distinctiveness and makes Southeast Asian studies interesting and worthwhile. Certainly, diversity is not a deterrent to applying the label of “region” to Southeast Asia. Indeed, the sociologist Hans-Dieter Evers suggests that diversity provides a useful focus for studying the region:

There is, undoubtedly, some unity ranging from a certain ‘South-East Asianism’ in culture and social organization to a commonality of political interest expressed in the recent formation of ASEAN. But there is no need…to deny the obvious diversity in the South-East Asian region. In fact, this diversity should be recognized and analysed.15

While some may dismiss it as a mere “academic” question, the “regionness” of Southeast Asia is a matter of considerable significance for its states and societies. It is a crucial issue for those who want to study the international relations of the region, including, as with this author, those assessing not only the pattern of conflict and cooperation within the region but also the relationship between the region and the outside world.

In addressing the question of the regionness of Southeast Asia, scholars writing on the region have usually begun with a “unity in diversity” approach, which relies heavily on a consideration of the...