Introduction

There is a common Malay idiom: ‘Gajah sama gajah bergadu, kancil mati di tengah-tengah’ (trans: ‘When elephants fight, the mouse deer gets trampled between’). For scholars of international politics, this idiom will resonate. It suggests the precarious circumstances small states find themselves in when caught between major powers inclined towards rivalry. In many respects, this scenario describes much of the international politics of Southeast Asia since the colonial era. Over the course of history, Southeast Asia has found itself an arena for great power politics. This has taken the form of the carving up of the region by various European (and North American, in the case of the Philippines) powers, Japanese hegemony and occupation during World War Two couched as the ‘liberation’ of Asia under the banner of ‘Asia for the Asiatics’, Cold War rivalry between the United States, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China which found bloody expression in the Vietnam conflict, and, with the end of the Cold War, the rise of China and the United States’ reassessment of its engagement with the region. At the same time, through these various epochs of great power rivalry, regional states have demonstrated a remarkable deftness and dexterity, not unlike the mouse deer in Malay folklore, in how they have navigated the rough waters of intervention and proxy warfare during the Cold War, in the process cultivating a sense of regional identity and purpose which has ensured that regional interests have not been overwhelmed.