ABSTRACT
The current East-West interface at the front line of corporate Southeast Asia has its precedents in the cultural and historic background to our focal region. Because of its distinctive location, lying as it does between India and China, two areas with huge populations and quite distinctive cultural characteristics, Southeast Asia is positioned to serve as a crossroads over and through which trade passes, along with the movement of peoples, ideas and innovations. In many respects this still happens today and forms an integral part of the region’s identity (see Ulack and Leinbach, 2000). Banded together to form the beginnings of an anticommunist trading zone, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc now consists of the original six market economies of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand – with a total population of 330 million – latterly joined by Vietnam’s 80 million, and the three other reforming socialist economies of Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos.
