[20] The Southeast Asian Region in the World

The term “Southeast Asia” is a twentieth-century invention, and its regional organization, ASEAN, has embraced the whole space only since 1999. While this might suggest the growing coherence of a politically fragmented region, in many respects the opposite is the case. Historians are more inclined to write of the region as a whole the more remote the period they deal with. The growing importance of states and scriptural religions in Southeast Asian lives over the last two centuries has created some profound cleavages.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Southeast Asia still appeared to outsiders as a coherent whole. John Crawfurd’s qualifications as a regional observer enabled him to write that the various peoples of the tropics between India and China

differ widely from those adjacent to them in physical form, in the structure of their language, in manners, institutions and religion, [but] agree with one another in so remarkable a manner in all these characters, that I am disposed to consider them entitled to be looked upon as a distinct and peculiar form of the human race.”

(Crawfurd 1828/1967, 310)

A century later this no longer seemed the case. Imperialism had divided the region into British, Dutch, Spanish/American, and French spheres of education and idioms of modernization, linguistic scholarship had revealed it to be one of the world’s most diverse regions in speech, and nationalism was beginning to convince Europeans, Chinese, Filipinos, Thais, and others (in roughly that order) of their distinct national destinies. The following (twentieth) century divided the region bitterly along the battlefront of the Cold War, while a global jihadist trend convinced a small but divisive minority of Muslims that they should no longer tolerate the pluralities of the region. Crawfurd’s listing of religion among the commonalities seemed bizarre to those far removed from the village world of spirits, mediums, and healers. The urban, commercial, and communications revolutions rendered Southeast Asia’s distinct pattern of rice agriculture, fisheries, and material culture only a memory, while its cities looked much like the rest of the post-modern world.

Even more potentially dangerous to any sense of commonality was the divergence between Southeast Asia’s rich and poor. Lee Kuan Yew took pride in having converted Singapore to a First World country, with one of the highest per capita GDPs in the world, 35 times that of Laos and Burma (2013). With its people educated bilingually in English and “mother tongue,” which for three-quarters of the population was held to mean Mandarin Chinese, Singapore was in many ways less Southeast Asian in 2010 than it had been a century earlier when it had a Malay lingua franca and village lifestyle. Yet the resentment that Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur in particular had felt since colonial times toward the rich Island Republic, through which much of their trade passed both legally and illegally, was markedly eased by ASEAN, but still more by the commercial turn. In an ever more economically integrated world, Singapore positioned itself as an essential regional asset for financial, technical, communications, education, and medical services. The frustration of nationalist planners at the leakage to Singapore of smuggled exports was gradually overcome by the region’s manifest need for a global port. Containerization and the vast expansion of trade it heralded from the 1970s made Singapore more essential than ever as a trans-shipping center. In fact the regional integration of Southeast Asian economies around the twin hubs of Singapore and Bangkok can be seen as an aspect of the global integration taking place everywhere.

The Regional Idea

Conceptually, Southeast Asia became more distinct as it became detached from its neighbors. It had long been a region in the eyes of these neighbors themselves, as Nanyang (South Seas) to the Chinese, Suwarnadwipa (Gold-land) to the Indians, or Jawa to the Arabs. But Europeans long thought of all tropical Asia as “India,” the source of the fabled spices that had propelled them outward in the first place. Since it was clearly very different from Hindu India, for centuries it was “Further” or “Ultra-Gangetic” India. The islands became the Indian Archipelago, later Latinized as Insulinde, but increasingly also distinguished as Dutch (as opposed to British) India. The first important Anglophone journal on the region was the Singapore-based Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia (1847–62), while Moor (1837) and Crawfurd (1856) devoted their surveys to “the Indian Archipelago and Adjacent Countries.” “Indochina” was another way of defining the region in terms of its giant neighbors, first proposed by scholars at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but rendered too specific by the French adoption of the term for their colonies in 1886.

It was German-language scholarship that in the 1890s began using “Southeast Asia” (Siidostasien) as a purely geographical expression free of these problems, initially for the region of dispersion of Dongson bronze drums. By the 1930s it had become more widespread, and was adopted by the New York-based Institute of Pacific Relations, which commissioned a number of important books on the region. The Japanese invasion gave the term a more obvious political character in 1941, and the British force assembled in Sri Lanka to reconquer the region was called the Southeast Asia Command (SEAC). The question of a name appeared resolved in the post-war world, even if Southeast Asia then seemed a region of conflict rather than coherence.

Lord Louis Mountbatten’s SEAC, relying on chiefly Indian troops for its reoccupation of the region in 1945, can be considered the last effective projection of influence from India to Southeast Asia. Nehru’s independent India notably failed to continue the millennial pattern, while China’s civil war, revolution, and communist isolation delayed its return to a position of influence. It was on the Left that enthusiasm for a separate Southeast Asian solidarity was first manifest. Aung San in Burma and Ho Chi Minh in Indochina were already calling for a specifically Southeast Asian regional grouping in 1946. They tended to look to Pridi’s leftist government in Thailand as its obvious leader, since it alone was in unquestioned command of its national space. The few years between the Japanese surrender and the arrival of the Cold War offered a rare opportunity for Asian self-discovery.

Pandit Nehru was by far the best-placed Asian leader to create and lead a broader Asian solidarity movement as India moved confidently to independence in 1947. In March 1947 he hosted an Inter-Asian Conference in New Delhi, personally inviting Ho Chi Minh to send a DRV delegation, and sending a plane to Jakarta for Sjahrir to represent the other embattled republic, Indonesia. As he rightly declared in opening the conference, “Asia is again finding herself … One of the notable consequences of the European domination of Asia has been the isolation of the countries of Asia from one another.” Malaya was able to send twelve delegates from its quarreling parties, some of whom supported the pleas of Indochina and Indonesia delegates for more than words of support for the anti-colonial struggles. Nehru, however, was firmly opposed to expanding the armed conflict and bluntly refused DRV requests for arms. This disappointment, together with the manifest conflicts in the big countries, with India’s Muslim League and China’s Communist Party boycotting the meeting, convinced many of the delegates from Indochina, Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia, and the Philippines that they would be better off with their own grouping free of bigger powers. Saigon communist leader Tran Van Giau (1947), in a subsequent letter to the Bangkok Post, envisaged a kind of Southeast Asian political union as the only means to overcome their balkanization and “strengthen our right to be masters in our own land” (Goscha 1999).

The communist rebellions in Malaya, the Philippines, Burma, and Indonesia in 1948 brought the Cold War brutally to Southeast Asia and killed these early dreams. The DRV needed the support of communist China to survive militarily and economically, while the other national movements needed to distance themselves from communism to gain the western trust they needed for independence. Pridi’s support for Southeast Asia’s revolutionary struggles was unpopular with the military who overthrew him in November 1947 (Chapter 17). As a bulwark against the advance of China’s communist model, the United States enrolled the Philippines, Thailand, and six powers external to the region in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 1954. This was hardly a regional organization, and its role in legitimating the involvement of SEATO members in the Indochina wars served more to divide than unite.

Indonesia’s Sukarno was more interested in ideological solidarity beyond the region, first through the Afro-Asian Conference he hosted in Bandung in 1955 on a non-aligned basis. This signalled China’s re-entry to Asian diplomacy, as Zhou Enlai’s apparent moderation and readiness to encourage Sino-Southeast Asians to embrace the nationality of their host countries upstaged Nehru, who had been expected to lead. Sukarno himself became a highly divisive figure as he moved closer to China, confronting Malaysia in 1963, withdrawing from the United Nations in 1964, and establishing what he called the New Emerging Forces or the “Jakarta-Phnom Penh-Beijing-Hanoi-Pyongyang axis” in opposition to the UN.

Meanwhile, a network of regional cultural and sporting organizations gradually evolved in non-communist Southeast Asia, while the DRV participated in Soviet-sponsored events. The Southeast Asian cultural festival in Singapore attracted Indonesian and Burmese performers as well as the usual non-communist states during a calm before the Confrontation storm in 1963. It reasserted some long-neglected similarities of dance and theater forms among the countries of the region, and led to many further exchanges. A separate sporting body took the form of the Southeast Asian Peninsula Games, first held in Bangkok in 1959, to allow Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaya, Singapore, and South Viet Nam to compete every two years with better hope of medals than at the four-yearly Olympic and Asian Games. One of the Games’ most popular innovations was the addition of one genuinely Southeast Asian sport known as sepak raga in Malay and takraw in Thai. Though it began as an amusement to keep a rattan ball in the air as long as possible without use of the hands, it was modernized into a volleyball-like competitive sport with three men on either side of a net, and given the hybrid name sepak takraw for international purposes. After the communist victories of 1975 the games became a distinctly non-communist grouping, renamed the Southeast Asian Games and embracing Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brunei in place of Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos. Cambodia rejoined, however, in 1983, and Laos and Viet Nam in 1989, making this the most popular, if rowdily partisan, celebration of Southeast Asian interaction.

Malaysia and Singapore had a long tradition as commercial hubs around which the region’s trade and communications revolved. Too plural themselves to be unqualified nationalists, they were the most consistent boosters of the regional concept, even if their vulnerability first to communist insurrection and then Indonesia’s Confrontation made them cling to British and Australian protection. Already in 1959, the then Malayan Prime Minister sought to persuade a lukewarm Thailand and the Philippines to join an Association of South-East Asia (ASA), realized in 1961. Negotiations to forestall Indonesian and Philippine opposition to Malaysia in 1963 produced a very short-lived tripartite “Maphilindo,” evoking an old dream of some Filipino nationalists for “Malay” racial unity. Hostilities peaked during Indonesia’s Confrontation of Malaysia (1963–6), and it was negotiations to end this, brokered by Thailand, which produced the ASEAN idea. Suharto’s military regime now shared the fear of its neighbors about rising communist power, though rejecting external military alliances, and therefore Indonesia became a crucial convert to regionalism. Newly independent Singapore pressed its case to join what was first envisaged as the three ASA members plus Indonesia, allowing five countries to hammer out the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in August 1967 (Figure 20.1).

Figure 20.1 a) The five original members of ASEAN at Foreign Ministers’ signing meeting Bangkok, August 1967. From left: Narciso Ramos (Philippines), Adam Malik (Indonesia), Thanat Khoman (Thailand), Abdul Razak (Malaysia), Sinnapah Rajaratnam (Singapore); b) Southeast Asia’s warring countries at last united in ASEAN, minus Cambodia. The 1997 Kuala Lumpur summit.

Source: © Bernama/AP/Press Association.

Initially involving little more than annual meetings to build trust, ASEAN became more important as the British withdrew from Singapore (1971) and the Americans from Indochina (1975), allowing communism to triumph there. Viet Nam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and takeover from the appalling Pol Pot regime was worrying particularly to Singapore, as a possible precedent for eliminating inconvenient small states by force. ASEAN lobbied to keep Cambodia’s UN seat in the hands of an unlikely anti-Viet Nam coalition and to encourage eventual UN mediation of a settlement, elections, and Viet Nam’s withdrawal in 1989. An ASEAN secretariat was established in Jakarta in 1976, Brunei was added in 1984, and in 1992 members agreed to an ASEAN Free Trade Area, obliging members to charge no more than 5% tariff on goods originating in another ASEAN country. In the 1990s ASEAN adopted a strategy similar to the European Union’s, of expanding to include former enemies, though without Europe’s democratic admission standards. ASEAN adopted a policy of engagement with Burma’s military dictatorship rather than supporting the western-led sanctions that appeared only to force Burma into the arms of China. After its economic opening through doi moi, Viet Nam was the first of the blatantly authoritarian countries to join ASEAN in 1995, having already negotiated with it over Cambodia. With that precedent Laos and Burma were permitted to join in 1997 despite little evidence of improvement in their human rights record. Cambodia should have joined then but was delayed until 1999 because of Hun Sen’s provocative coup against the democratically elected government.

At the end of the century the whole of Southeast Asia had at last a vehicle for moderating differences and promoting integration, even if the Asian Financial Crisis (1997–8) created a mood more of cynicism than celebration. Cynicism seemed justified by ASEAN’s inability to deal with the internal crises and human rights abuses of its members, to resolve border disputes, or to present a united front on bigger global issues. Yet by any standard except that of the European Union it proved a successful regional organization. It developed means for very different regimes to meet regularly on a basis of equality and growing trust, to avoid armed conflict, and to move gradually toward integration in trade and other spheres. Explosive border conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore, and Malaysia and Indonesia were referred satisfactorily to the International Court of Justice. Some insiders gave the credit to the “ASEAN way” of informal sing-alongs, golf courses, and colorful shirts, attempting to work chiefly by consensus. A more important advantage over other regional organizations was the balance between its members, with smaller Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei making up in wealth and infrastructural capacity what they lacked in size. The giant of the group, Indonesia, was, under Suharto and his elected successors, pragmatically interested in development rather than dominance, and was among the world’s lowest military spenders in relation to GDP. Tiny Singapore was much the biggest arms buyer. No country was in a position to bully, nor to offer military assistance to embattled neighbors.

Another helpful factor was the acceptance of English from the outset as the sole working language of the grouping, sparing it the symbolic battles of other parts of the world. Since the national languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and nominally even Singapore were slightly different modernizations of the same (Malay) language, this was the only possible internal rival. In the early days of rediscovering each other in the ASEAN context, Malaysia and Indonesia did try to standardize their languages with a view to giving them a larger role in the world. They agreed to introduce a common spelling system in 1972, which for example replaced the ch sound of English/Malaysian and the tj of Dutch/Indonesian orthography with the letter c. Differences, however, persisted and even widened, with Malaysian more inclined to borrow from Arabic and Indonesian from western and local languages. English had the merit of neutrality, so that no party had to defer to others. It also helped ASEAN play an ever-larger role as host to broader Asian forums. In 1993 the annual ASEAN meeting agreed to sponsor an ASEAN regional forum, which gradually became the major regular meeting for the Asian region, with America and Europe also attending. From 1997 ASEAN +3 provided a valuable forum for fractious China, Japan, and Korea to meet annually in a broader ASEAN-hosted context where many financial, trade, security, environmental, and other problems could be addressed.

ASEAN also had profited from some trends not really of its making. It proved well placed to ride the post-Cold War pattern of global integration, and the rise of English as a global language. The return of constitutional civilian government in Burma in 2010, and of Aung San Suu Kyi to its parliament, turned Burma from an embarrassment to something that could be claimed as an achievement for regionalism. Above all, the rising strength and assertiveness of China created a common problem for the region and a strong incentive to resist pressures through greater cohesiveness. As China developed a strong naval power in the twenty-first century and began to use it to expand its claims to the whole of the South China Sea, the Philippines and Viet Nam both came into physical conflict with Chinese naval activity near their shores. Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei also have Exclusive Economic Zones that conflict with China’s unexplained “nine-dot-line” that appears to include virtually all the maritime space. Burma’s anxiety about Chinese dominance was a factor in its military rulers’ opening toward ASEAN and the West. Although ASEAN’s members diverged widely about how to deal with the northern giant that was also their major trade partner, all could see the advantage of a common front.

Global Comparisons

Southeast Asia in 1941 began a period of four decades in which it was of central strategic interest to the world as a battleground of how the colonial system would end. First the Japanese, then the communists, made it the major region of challenge to western dominance, where the Cold War was at its hottest. Since relative peace and global integration returned to the region, how does it compare to others in the world? It started its economic take-off before China and India, and while surpassed by China after 2000, it retained a more balanced pattern, less vulnerable to ageing, credit, and environmental crises. Most of its countries had climbed up to the third quartile of the global wealth rankings by 2010, though with super-rich Singapore and Brunei, as well as Malaysia and Thailand, in the top half. It is undoubtedly a star among the tropical areas historically less given to capital accumulation.

It has retained, or rather regained, its historical character as a crossroads, relatively open to trade, migration, and ideas. Sriwijaya, Champa, Melaka, Manila, Batavia/Jakarta, Bangkok, and Singapore all had their turns at pre-eminence in the seaborne trade of Asia, but the hubs and routes were always multiple and competitive, and many cities lived primarily by trade. High colonialism certainly diminished this pattern in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as populations were peasantized and much regional trade redirected to supplying Europe with tropical commodities. Nationalism in turn had a half-century of experimenting with autarchy to different degrees, including self-defeating attempts to curb or even expel its productive cosmopolitan minorities. As a result Singapore and Bangkok, the two cities most friendly to such minorities, became the only global hubs during the commercial turnaround, disproportionately well-endowed with capital, expertise, and global connectivity. The communist countries and Myanmar were the most resistant to the return of foreign capital and entrepreneurship, as indeed they had been at earlier times, but from the 1990s they competed all the more vigorously for it. The triumph of the mobile phone, the shopping mall, and global consumer trends appeared secure in the new millennium.

Throughout this long story it has been easy to picture Southeast Asia, indeed, as primarily a consumer rather than a producer of global trends. What surprised Janet Abu-Lughod (1989, 296) about its past, that “a region that for so long occupied the position of cross-waterway of the world should have had so little to say for itself,” appeared to be still true in this era of integration. Khmer architecture, Javanese music, and Balinese dance were discovered by Europe in the nineteenth century, but only Southeast Asian food has so far been carried triumphantly around the world by its own people. In winning such recognition as Nobel Prizes, Olympic medals, and civilizational landmarks it has performed below what its size would warrant. The long years of conflict and repression, the flight of much of its outstanding minority talent, and linguistic obstacles are all part of the explanation for this. But it must also be conceded that Southeast Asian societies, in marked contrast with those of Northeast Asia, have valued oral more than written communication, performance more than literary entertainment, and harmony more than competition.

Their post-colonial education systems were developed quickly, valuing quantity more than quality and discipline. With the exception of Singapore and Viet Nam with their Northeast Asian features, Southeast Asia performed disappointingly in international student assessments, with Indonesia near the bottom of PISA tables for mathematics, science, and reading. Total new book publications were well below the level of Europe or Northeast Asia, though comparable with South Asia. The picture was more dire in international scholarly publications. Singapore was again up with the best at about 1,000 a year per million people in the period 2002–8, while Indonesia was near the bottom and the Philippines and Viet Nam also below ten per million. Even in publishing internationally about their own country, the larger Southeast Asian states had little to say for themselves, Indonesia and the Philippines being the source of less than 20% of the articles on themselves (Guggenheim 2012). It is not in these areas that one looks for Southeast Asian leadership.

In the Preface I suggested three reasons Southeast Asia and its history were critical – environment, gender, and low states. The dramatic changes of the twentieth century rendered these factors no less relevant. The exceptional biodiversity of the region has been diminished by deforestation, but remains a resource for the world. Southeast Asia’s vulnerability to environmental disaster appears more acute than ever, as global warming and the subsidence of mega-cities like Bangkok and Jakarta made floods, typhoons, and tsunamis threatening to ever more people. The 2004 tsunami that devastated Aceh and damaged coastal areas around the Indian Ocean, the world’s worst that we know of, underlined the exceptional tectonic dangers of this most populous section of the “ring of fire.” It also prompted an unprecedented global effort to assist in the recovery of these areas, a critical learning experience for our global future. When volcanic eruptions recur on the scale of Tambora 200 years ago, much more global resourcefulness will be called for.

As I argued in Chapters 15 and 19, urban and industrial modernity powerfully affected the gender pattern, introducing an urban dichotomy between male work-place and female home-place. Neo-traditional religious puritanism sought to make contemporary Southeast Asian women appear in some respects more constrained than their western sisters. Yet Southeast Asia’s experience of this modern urban transition from a relatively gender-balanced starting point is an important model for a world seeking to reinvent its gender relations in post-industrial ways. Women moved relatively smoothly from rural to urban work, often leaving home to do so. There was little overt confrontation on gender issues, in part because of the high values placed on harmony and on acceptance of the different but complementary roles of male and female. Nevertheless, women continued to participate vigorously in the workforce even as they modernized, and remained in control of their own and much of the family assets.

There is little doubt that the low state role in Southeast Asian lives has contributed to the low profile of the region in the world. The region’s new states (always excluding Singapore) have appeared unable to deliver what they promised through international agreements or domestic legislation. Gunnar Myrdal (1968) attempted to define the problem through his influential notion of the “soft state,” unwilling or unable to be punitive against those deemed part of the national moral community. Others saw the return of “patrimonial,” “personalist,” “patron-client,” or “network” features deemed characteristic of pre-colonial political systems in the region. Personal charisma or military arbitrariness often took the place occupied by institutional strength and legal discipline in twentieth-century European states.

Past attempts to analyze the “problem” were generally in response to crisis, when particular states dramatically failed the tests of order, democratic accountability, or a reliable climate for investment and growth. The period, since 1980, of relative peace, high growth, and the partial return of democracy is often understood to be simply catching up with the strong states of the West, implicitly taken to be the norm. It is appropriate to ask, however, whether the “softness” of Southeast Asia’s states is part of a distinctive political pattern that has inherited some positive as well as negative elements from its past. This book has sought to demonstrate that the adjustment to a world-system based on the absolute sovereignty and coherence of nation-states was a huge challenge for Southeast Asian societies with no experience of state absolutism except the brief colonial one, rejected as alien in the 1940s. The “soft” uncertainties of the following attempts at nation-building probably accentuated the terrible conflicts and foreign interventions of the Cold War. Yet the states survived, and in effect invented an increasingly stable layer of nationhood on top of the immense diversity of society. In comparison with other such transitions in world history this was a success, embracing pluralism as Europe and Northeast Asia did not in their nationalist phase, yet escaping acute poverty and oppression as South Asia did not. The comparisons with either China’s strong but not accountable state, or India’s democratic state still unable to emancipate lower castes and women, make the Southeast Asian transitions an important third way.

The twenty-first century of global economic integration caused all states to lose their real or imagined autonomy. All were required to deal with increasing cultural pluralism internally as well as in their foreign entanglements. The inescapable pluralism of all Southeast Asian societies has never gone away even in the age of nationalism. They have demonstrated that profound conflicts, even those involving massive killings, can be overcome without effective legal systems to punish the guilty and exonerate the innocent. Although state law remains little trusted and weakly imposed, social cohesion is maintained by the high value placed on civility and harmony in personal interactions and public life, as well as by shared religious cultures and new national myths. The attachment to consensus rather than majority rule has been abused by dictators, but remains a feature of public life in a very plural region. Electoral politics have necessarily institutionalized a pattern of negotiation and coalition-building. In a world in need of new ways of combining cultural pluralism with human rights and government accountability, this experience demands attention.