Introduction: Southeast Asia and the Cold War

Abstract

Whereas scholars have debated the origins of the Cold War in Southeast Asia – when it started and how it spread – and its key defining moments, less attention has been paid to its impact and legacy on the various countries in the region, and on the region itself – or to its intrinsic texture in relation to other theatres of conflict.1 To what extent were the changes that Southeast Asia underwent during the Cold War unique to the temper of its regional milieu and a direct or indirect result of the conflict itself as opposed to being a continuation of indigenous processes set in motion earlier? Indeed, indigenous actors had been depicted as little more than ‘pawns’ or ‘victims’ of the superpowers during the Cold War,2 and an examination of the latter’s impact was considered largely within the confines of the nation-state, with less discussion of its bearing on intra-regional linkages, the relations between Southeast Asian countries, and its contributions to regional organization and Southeast Asian regionalism. Research on the Cold War in Southeast Asia has also tended to focus on the conflict in Indochina, particularly Vietnam and, to a lesser extent, Laos and Cambodia, to the ‘relative scholarly neglect of nearly all parts of the region outside Indochina’.3 The southernmost states in the region have not received as much attention. This volume of papers from the inaugural Nicholas Tarling conference on Southeast Asian studies held in Singapore in November 2009 seeks to contribute to the historiography of the Cold War in Southeast Asia by examining not only how the conflict shaped the milieu in which national and regional change unfolded but also how the context influenced the course and tenor of the Cold War in the region, and the usefulness or limitations of using the Cold War as an interpretative framework for understanding change in Southeast Asia. Taken together the papers showed that the Cold War had a varied but notable impact on the countries in Southeast Asia – not primarily, as was commonly presumed, on only the mainland countries belonging to what the British Foreign Office called the ‘upper arc’, especially Indochina, but also on those situated on its maritime ‘lower arc’ – and showed clearly that what happened in the north affected what happened in the south.4