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3. Post-War Regional Co-operation
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Chapter
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16 Peter Lyon By: ROS Size: 7.5" x 10.25" J/No: 03-14474 Fonts: New Baskerville 3. POST-WAR REGIONAL CO-OPERATION PETER LYON Reprinted in abridged form from Peter Lyon, “ASEAN and the Future of Regionalism”, in New Directions in the International Relations of Southeast Asia: The Great Powers and Southeast Asia, edited by Lau Teik Soon (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1973), pp. 156–64, by permission of the author and the publisher. If there were a verb ‘to regionalize’ then a dispassionate student of regionalism in Southeast Asia might conjugate it thus: past, imperfect; present, indicative; future, indefinite . Regionalism in and/or for Southeast Asia has passed through three stages since 1945 and is still in the third stage. The first phase, which lasted from the end of the Second World War until the second half of the 1950s, was shaped and characterized mostly by the dominance of the United States and Britain in deciding what of regional associations in and for Southeast Asia there should be. Within Southeast Asia in these years Malaya (and the Borneo territories) and Singapore remained British colonies, thus cordoned off from conducting an independent diplomacy of their own; Vietnam was convulsed by war; Cambodia and Laos were still French colonies until 1954; Burma looked westwards to India or even further to Britain and the United States rather than to Southeast Asia, and relations with the ancient enemy Thailand were quietly cordial though in foreign affairs the Thai leaders were mostly preoccupied with the United States in these years; the Philippines was for all practical purposes a camp-follower of the United States despite rhetorical proclamations in favour of Asian regionalism from 1946 onwards; Indonesia seemed uninterested and uninvolved in Southeast Asia as such — for Sukarno, Bandung and Afro-Asian stages probably seemed more exciting and promising. These were the years which saw the inception of ECAFE and the Colombo Plan — both worthy in their different ways, but each in their formative years institutionally weak and very reliant on British and American backing. Then, in September 1954, SEATO was formally launched, avowedly a Southeast Asian treaty organization, but with only two full members from Southeast Asia. In these years, then, Southeast Asian initiatives in the matter of creating new regional associations, or in working the few existing ones, were either non-existent, negligible, or merely rhetorical. 003 AR Ch 3 22/9/03, 12:37 PM 16 Post-War Regional Co-operation 17 By: ROS Size: 7.5" x 10.25" J/No: 03-14474 Fonts: New Baskerville The second phase, from the late 1950s until the mid-1960s, as well as witnessing the continuance of ECAFE and the Colombo Plan very much as before,1 also saw the first significant stirrings of Southeast Asian initiatives in regionalist matters which then led on to some abortive, or to individually undramatic but cumulatively quite important , attempts to create institutionalized cooperation . Two rather different sets of innovation should be distinguished. At the level of what might loosely be termed ‘high polities’ two schemes were launched — ASA and Maphilindo (three, if one adds ASPAC). Both were not to live beyond infancy, though for quite different reasons. A useful account, and — in a sense — an epitaph, on these two experiments was provided in Bernard K. Gordon’s book.2 The second trend, which was to be more durable and probably more significant than the superficially more eye-catching ASA and Maphilindo, was almost completely missed even by Bernard Gordon as well as by myself.3 This less-than-luminous trend was made by the well-nigh simultaneous launching of a considerable number of functional regional organizations — not only the ADB, which both Bernard Gordon and I noted, or even APO (that little favourite with many Americans), but also AIEDP, AIDC, AIT, AIEPA (see Glossary). Another significant sign of early gusts that began to make the next prevailing wind was the initiative of Japan in bringing into being not only — or least — the ADB but also MCEDSEA and SEAMEO. A third phase, of which the present is a part, was formally inaugurated by the inception of ASEAN in August 1967 (though it is arguable, by stressing Japan’s role, that the inception of ADB two years earlier was more significant). The most striking and important thing about the launching of ASEAN was Indonesia’s active membership in it from the start, symbolizing an end to Indonesia’s Confrontation campaign and to her previous indifference to practical...