Contemporary Southeast Asia

Struggle for independence

The swift conclusion of the war in the Pacific made it impossible for the former colonial masters to return to Southeast Asia for several weeks, in some areas for months. During the interim, the Japanese were obliged by the Allies to keep the peace, but real power passed into the hands of Southeast Asian leaders, some of whom declared independence and attempted with varying degrees of success to establish government structures. For the first time since the establishment of colonial rule, firearms in large numbers were controlled by Southeast Asians. Such was the groundwork for the establishment of new independent states.

Prewar nationalism had been most highly developed in Vietnam and Indonesia, and the colonial powers there were least inclined to see the new realities created by the war, perhaps because of the large numbers of resident French and Dutch and because of extensive investments. The result in both countries was an armed struggle in which the Western power was eventually defeated and independence secured. The Indonesian revolution, for all its internal complexities, was won in little more than four years with a combination of military struggle and civilian diplomacy. The revolution of the Vietnamese, who had defeated the French by 1954, continued much longer because of an internal political struggle and because of the role Vietnam came to play in global geopolitics, which ultimately led to the involvement of other external powers, among them the United States. In both cases, however, independence was sealed in blood, and a mythologized revolution came to serve as a powerful, unifying nationalist symbol. In the rest of Southeast Asia, the achievement of independence was, if not entirely peaceful, at least less violent. Malaysia and the Philippines suffered “emergencies” (as armed insurgencies were euphemistically called), and Burma, too, endured sporadic internal military conflict. For better or worse, these conflicts were no substitutes for a genuine revolutionary experience.

Whether by revolution or otherwise, decolonization proceeded rapidly in Southeast Asia. The newly independent states all aspired toward democratic systems more or less on the Western model, despite the lack of democratic preparation and the impress of nationalist sentiment. None expressed a desire to return to precolonial forms of government, and, although some Western observers professed to see in such leaders as Indonesia’s Sukarno Southeast Asian societies returning to traditional behaviour, their judgment was based more on ephemeral signs than on real evidence. For one thing, societies as a whole had been too much altered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to make it clear what “tradition” really was. For another, the new leadership retained the commitment to modernization that it had developed earlier. They looked forward to a new world, not an old one. The difficulty, however, was that there was as yet little consensus on the precise shape this new world should take, and colonial rule had left indigenous societies with virtually no experience in debating and reaching firm decisions on such important matters. It is hardly surprising that one result of this lack of experience was a great deal of political and intellectual conflict. Often forgotten, however, is another result: an outpouring of new ideas and creativity, particularly in literature. This signaled the beginning of a kind of cultural renaissance, the dimensions and significance of which are still insufficiently understood.

Defining new states and societies

The first two decades of independence constituted a period of trial and error for states and societies attempting to redefine themselves in contemporary form. During this time, religious and ethnic challenges to the states essentially failed to split them, and (except in the states of former Indochina) both communism and Western parliamentary democracy were rejected. Indonesia, the largest and potentially most powerful nation in the region, provided the most spectacular examples of such developments, ending in the tragic events of 1965–66, when between 500,000 and 1,000,000 lives may have been lost in a conflict between the Indonesian Communist Party and its opponents. Even Malaysia, long the darling of Western observers for its apparent success as a showcase of democracy and capitalist growth, was badly shaken by violence between Malays and Chinese in 1969. The turmoil often led Southeast Asia to be viewed as inherently unstable politically, but from a longer perspective—and taking into account both the region’s great diversity and the arbitrary fashion in which boundaries had been set by colonial powers—this perhaps has been a shortsighted conclusion.

The new era that began in the mid-1960s had three main characteristics. First, the military rose as a force in government, not only in Vietnam, Burma, and Indonesia but also in the Philippines and—quietly—in Malaysia. The military establishments viewed themselves as actual or potential saviours of national unity and also as disciplined, effective champions of modernization; at least initially, they frequently had considerable support from the populace. Second, during this period renewed attention was given by all Southeast Asian nations to the question of unifying (secular and national) values and ideology. Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam had been first in this area in the 1940s and ’50s, but the others followed. Even Singapore and Brunei developed ideologies, with the express purpose of defining a national character for their people. Finally, virtually all Southeast Asian states abandoned the effort of utilizing foreign models of government and society—capitalist or communist—and turned to the task of working out a synthesis better suited to their needs and values. Each country arrived at its own solution, with varying degrees of success. By the 1980s what generally had emerged were quasi-military bourgeois regimes willing to live along modified democratic lines—i.e., with what in Western eyes appeared to be comparatively high levels of restriction of personal, political, and intellectual freedom. Whatever their precise political character, these were conservative governments. Even Vietnam, the most revolutionary-minded among them, could not stomach the far-reaching and murderous revolution of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the mid-1970s and by the end of the decade had moved to crush it.

Tempting as it may be to conclude that greater doses of authoritarian rule (some of it seemingly harking back directly to colonial times) merely stabilized Southeast Asia and permitted the region to get on with the business of economic development, this approach was not successful everywhere. In Burma (called Myanmar since 1989) the military’s semi-isolationist, crypto-socialist development schemes came to disaster in the 1980s, revealing the repressive nature of the regime and bringing the country to the brink of civil war by the end of the decade. In the Philippines the assault by Pres. Ferdinand Marcos and his associates on the old ruling elite class brought a similar result, in addition to a spectacular level of corruption and the looting of the national treasury. In Vietnam, where the final achievement of independence in 1975 brought bitter disappointment to many and left the country decades behind the rest of the region in economic development, public and internal Communist Party unrest forced an aging generation of leaders to resign and left the course for the future in doubt as never before.

The states generally thought to be most successful—Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and especially Singapore—followed policies generally regarded as moderate and pragmatic. All were regarded as fundamentally stable and for that reason attracted foreign aid and investment; all achieved high rates of growth since the mid-1970s and enjoyed the highest standards of living in the region. Their very success, however, created unexpected social and cultural changes. Prosperity, education, and increasing access to world media and popular culture all gave rise, for example, to various degrees of dissatisfaction with government-imposed limitations on freedom and to social and environmental criticism. Particularly in Indonesia and Malaysia, there was a noticeable trend toward introspection and discussion of national character, as well as a religious revival in the form of renewed interest in Islam. It appeared that the comparatively small and unified middle class, including a generally bureaucratized military, was becoming larger, more complex, and less easily satisfied. That was undoubtedly not the intent of those who framed governmental policy, but it was a reality with which they had to deal.

Reappearance of regional interests

After the end of the 17th century, the long-developed polities of Southeast Asia were pulled into a Western-dominated world economy, weakening regional trade networks and strengthening ties with distant colonial powers. In the early years of independence these ties often remained strong enough to be called neocolonial by critics, but after the mid-1960s these partnerships could no longer be controlled by former colonial masters, and the new Southeast Asian states sought to industrialize and diversify their markets. On the one hand, this meant a far greater role for Japan in Southeast Asia; that country is by far the most important trading partner of most Southeast Asian nations. On the other, it meant that many countries began to rediscover commonalities and to examine the possibilities within the region for support and markets.

In 1967 the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was formed by Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore (Brunei joined in 1985). This group’s initial interest was in security, but it moved cautiously into other fields. It played an important role, for example, in seeking an end to the Vietnam-Cambodia conflict and sought a solution to the civil strife in Cambodia. In economic affairs it worked quietly to discuss such matters as duplication of large industrial projects. Only since the mid-1980s has ASEAN been taken seriously by major powers or even sometimes by Southeast Asians themselves. The formerly Soviet-dominated states of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia became part of ASEAN during the 1990s, as did Myanmar. Such circumstances opened up greater regional markets and gave the region as a whole a more imposing world profile. In July 1994 the inaugural ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) was convened to facilitate talks between ASEAN and its “dialogue partners” across the globe.

At the turn of the 21st century, ASEAN was a major force for promoting regional trade and resolving security issues. In 2015 the ASEAN Economic Community was established to encourage economic integration and liberalization of economic policy among member states. ASEAN worked to end violence in East Timor and advocated on behalf of its members in the dispute with China over the Spratly Islands. It also took a leading role in the response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed at least 225,000 people throughout South and Southeast Asia. In 2017 ASEAN members and China formally endorsed a framework agreement that would govern the conduct of all signatories in the South China Sea.