The Making of Southeast Asia: International Relations of a Region

Abstract

This insightful book focuses on Southeast Asia and has broader conceptual relevance for the examination of regionalism and international relations generally. Published in 2012 by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and reprinted in 2013 by Cornell University Press, this is the second and substantially revised edition of The Quest for Identity: International Relations of Southeast Asia, which first appeared in 2000. It addresses the major social, cultural, and economic forces at work in the region, but also presents Southeast Asian regionalism as an ongoing political project to accommodate strong and/or weak national and sub-national forms of identity (and the nation-states to which they are connected) to notions of a wider regional identity. Building on Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (London: Verso, second revised edition, 1991; first published, 1983) Amitav Acharya argues at the outset that regions, “as with nation-states” are “imagined” and “socially constructed.” He notes that “regional coherence and identity are not givens” but flow from the ongoing articulation of an “imagined community” by elites and/or the population of the region (pp. 21–23). The author also emphasizes that the pre-colonial past is often used selectively to strengthen a contemporary sense of regional identity (pp. 35, 42–43). He notes critically that in the context of decolonization after 1945, some elites viewed “post-colonial region-building as a matter of restoring the pre-colonial integrity of the region” (pp. 81–82).