ABSTRACT
Southeast Asian states looked out on an increasingly hostile world as they developed foreign policy positions, so that "from 1945 to the early 1960s, most decisions and actions of the major Asian statesmen were responses to the cold war conflict between Washington and Moscow". Early postindependence foreign policies were often conditioned by the actions of returning colonial powers. Most obviously in Burma, Indonesia, and Vietnam, conflicts with former European metropoles prompted policies that rejected political alignments with former colonial powers. In the new global multistate system, each state was viewed as sovereign within its territory and as equal among others internationally, concepts that were significantly different from those of traditional systems. Singapore's foreign policy has been linked closely to that of Malaysia. It obtained self-government in 1959, but foreign affairs and defense remained under British control, and Singapore was the primary base for support of the British-Malaya defense agreement.
