Malaysia and Its Impact on the International Relations of Southeast Asia

Abstract

The international relations of Southeast Asia in modern times have involved primarily either the relations between powers external to the region or between these powers and the governments of such Southeast Asian countries as were then independent. So it was that the British fought three wars in the nineteenth century with Burma, while Thai foreign policy sixty and seventy years ago concentrated on playing off Englishman against Frenchman in order to preserve a precariously sustained independence. Although they established self-governing nation-states in the years which followed the Second World War, the political elites of Southeast Asia did not immediately succeed in altering the pattern of externally oriented international relations that had so long characterized the region. In 1954, for example, the conference that brought an end to the eight-year FrancoVietnamese war included no representatives from any Southeast Asian state other than those which comprised formerly French Indochina. That same year eight nations, meeting in Manila in the Philippines, signed a collective defense treaty that inaugurated the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), but only two of the signatories, Thailand and the host country, were of Southeast Asia. The international relations of Southeast Asia in 1961 seemed to be little different from the situation that had prevailed in 1954-the year 1961 being singled out because it was in May of that year that Malayan Premier Tengku Abdul Rahman made the unexpected suggestion that Singapore, which wanted union with Malaya, might be able to attain this end within a federal framework that also included the British governed or protected northern Borneo territories of Sarawak, Sabah, and Brunei. The most threatening problem in Southeast Asia in 1961 was the war in Laos, which had brought SEATO to the brink of intervention and which was to be the subject of a second Geneva Conference in which a larger number of Southeast Asian states would participate. The other chief trouble spot, the war in Vietnam, mounting even in 1961, also seemed to fit the previous pattern of extraregional forces fighting over, and in, parts of Southeast Asia-the Americans encouraging and aiding the so-called South Vietnamese and the Chinese and the Russians supporting the allegedly sharply differentiated North Vietnamese. But was the old pattern as much intact as this line of description seems to suggest? Was the war in Vietnam primarily, let alone exclusively, part of a world-wide conspiracy to extend the embrace of communism over as