ABSTRACT
The idea of Southeast Asia is a recent political invention. The lexicon derives from the South East Asia Command (SEAC), the military body set up during the Second World War to be in overall charge of Allied operations in the area between China and Australia. The most striking characteristic of the region is its sheer diversity-geographic, religious, linguistic, political, ethno-social-which has led some authors to argue that what makes Southeast Asia a region is indeed its heterogeneity.1 In the past, the region was typified by the relative lack of contacts between the various countries, centuries-old inter-group strife, and authoritarian and controlled political systems.2 The political fragmentation of Southeast Asia is further reflected in the numerous conflicts that erupted after the Second World War. In the early 1960s, the decision to unite Singapore and the Borneo territories of Brunei, Sabah, and Sarawak with the Federation of Malaya triggered a series of regional conflicts: the Philippines broke off diplomatic relations with Malaysia,3 rebels in Brunei launched an armed rebellion, and Indonesia launched a low-level war against Malaysia known as konfrontasi. Thailand also had latent conflicts with Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and Malaysia of a historical nature and as a result of colonization, the Second World War, and the subsequent decolonization. Vietnam and Myanmar were born into civil wars and Indonesia had a record of expansionist policies. The hostility in this regional peace and security cluster fell prey to
the Cold War dynamic.4 As early as in 1955, the United States instigated the creation of the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) conceived as a bulwark against communism in the region. In practice it was part of the worldwide US-led system of anti-communist military alliances rather than a true Southeast Asian regional arrangement. All countries in the region, except Singapore, had a local communist insurgency to deal with and for this reason China’s Cultural Revolution
rhetoric was regarded as a threat to the whole region. The Association of Southeast Asia (ASA) and MAPHILINDO followed in 1961 and 1963 respectively, but lasted only until tensions in the region forced them to be abandoned. Even more ill-fated was the Asian and Pacific Council (ASPAC), established in 1966, which brought together most of the leading non-communist nations of the Western Pacific to deal with external threats and to provide a framework for more widespread cooperation. As argued by Öjendal, these projects were not initiated from within and they neither solved regional problems nor addressed regional needs as defined from within.5
