3 - Imagining Southeast Asia

Summary

Introduction

For most students of the “international relations” of Southeast Asia, the starting point of investigation is often the end of World War II. This is also the beginning of the international recognition of Southeast Asia as a distinctive region. Political scientists examining the international relations of Southeast Asia have paid little attention to its pre-colonial interstate system. The latter has largely been left to historians and, to a lesser extent, anthropologists. And it is the historians who account for much of the scholarship on the diplomatic interactions and interstate relations of the pre-colonial period.

To some extent, this reflects a general bias in the literature of international relations, much of which sees the roots of the modern international system as lying in the European political order that emerged from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. From this perspective, the modern state system in Southeast Asia is but an extension of the Westphalian model of sovereign, equal and territorial nation-states, scarcely modified by any indigenous political tradition and institutional framework that might have existed before the advent of European colonialism. The long period of European colonial rule saw not only the erosion of traditional polities but, at the time of their departure, the colonial powers also ensured that the newly created polities would at least possess the nominal attributes of the “nation-state”, which had become the centrepiece of the modern international order. Since the concept of the nation-state in Southeast Asia is very much a post-World War II phenomenon, it seems therefore proper to begin one's understanding of the “international relations” of the region from the post-1945 period.

But the tendency to ignore the pre-colonial interstate system of Southeast Asia has three unfortunate consequences for scholarship on the region's international relations. The first is to ignore the possibility that an indigenous and “regional” pattern of interstate relations did exist in Southeast Asia before the advent of colonialism. This possibility in itself is enough to challenge the view that those seeking to study the idea of Southeast Asia need not look before the Southeast Asia Command (SEAC), established in 1943. The second is to miss an opportunity to remedy the essentially Euro- and Americanocentric nature of contemporary international relations theories and concepts.