-
2. Post-Colonial Southeast Asia
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Chapter
- Additional Information
12 John Bastin and Harry J. Benda By: ROS Size: 7.5" x 10.25" J/No: 03-14474 Fonts: New Baskerville 2. POST-COLONIAL SOUTHEAST ASIA JOHN BASTIN and HARRY J. BENDA Excerpted from John Bastin and Harry J. Benda, A History of Modern Southeast Asia: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Decolonization (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1968), by permission of John Bastin. Only twenty-odd years have elapsed since Japan’s sudden surrender to the Allied powers dramatically inaugurated the most recent chapter in Southeast Asian history. The decolonization process has, historically speaking, barely begun, and it is therefore difficult to know what on the swiftly changing scene is ephemeral and what destined to perdure. In such countries as Burma, Indonesia, and Vietnam, postwar changes have, moreover, borne many of the hallmarks of political and incipient social revolutions; and these almost certainly have not yet run their full course. What has up to now emerged may, then, be no more than surface phenomena shrouding hidden factors and forces that may still emerge. Postwar developments in Southeast Asia are, however, only one facet of the new power relationships in Asia as a whole, just as the area’s incorporation into the Atlantic state system had been part of a larger historical process. The rise of the West in Asia had culminated in the subjugation of the Indian subcontinent by Britain in the late eighteenth century, followed by the virtual disintegration of the Chinese empire in the second half of the nineteenth. Though the great powers continued to pay lip service to her “territorial integrity,” China ceased to be a truly independent country. Moreover, Japan, at that time Asia’s only modernizing state, had become a partner in the Atlantic system from about the turn of the twentieth century: she owed this spectacular ascendancy to her victories over China in 1894–95 and over Tsarist Russia in 1904–5, as well as to her participation in World War I on the side of the victorious Allies. Japan’s contracting out of the Atlantic system by making war on the Western colonial powers in 1941 and the lightning speed with which she made herself master of the Nampo mark the beginnings of the decolonization process in Southeast Asia. Ironically, this process was immensely accelerated by the collapse of Japan as a world power in 1945. Nippon’s withdrawal from China (large parts of which she had occupied since the 1930s) and from Southeast Asia occurred before either the Western Allies or the Soviet Union could 002 AR Ch 2 22/9/03, 12:37 PM 12 Post-Colonial Southeast Asia 13 By: ROS Size: 7.5" x 10.25" J/No: 03-14474 Fonts: New Baskerville decisively fill the suddenly vacated Asian space. In South Asia, Britain voluntarily liquidated her Indian empire, granting independence to India and Pakistan in 1947 (and shortly thereafter to Burma and Ceylon). Russian power in East Asia only sufficed to install a Communist government in the northern part of Korea, since 1910 a Japanese colony; the Soviets apparently also provided some military aid to the Chinese Communists, for decades embroiled in a civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. American intervention protected South Korea, but could not prevent the ejection of Chiang from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan (Formosa) in 1949. The consolidation of Communist rule marked the end of a century’s foreign dominance over China. A decolonized India and Pakistan, a united China freed from alien control, and a prostrated Japan — these provide the larger Asian setting for Southeast Asian history since 1945. In turn, that history all of a sudden shed its parochial limitations. Gone was the confining seclusion, the virtual isolation, which the Westerners had imposed on Southeast Asians in colonial times. Gone, too, was Japanese over-lordship which, for all the internal upheavals it had caused, had after all kept them more tightly insulated from the rest of the world than ever before. Henceforth, Southeast Asian developments, more volatile than ever before, were destined to be increasingly influenced by political events from the outside. At times, indigenous leaders would seek to involve foreign powers in their domestic affairs, but more frequently still intervention would be injected into the region without local prompting. The global confrontation between two, and latterly three, world powers inevitably came to impinge upon the Southeast Asian scene, the area’s internal developments often affecting the course of international affairs. Even though Southeast Asia’s history has become...