WSNers,
I am reposting this from ASDP [Asian Studies Development Program]
listserv, with Marc permission.
Marc Gilbert is world historian whose first specialty is South Asia, but
who has done work on Vietnam. We met last summer at an ASDP/East-West
Center institute on Southeast Asia. He is somewhat familiar with WST,
but has some of the usual misgivings historians have about our
enterprise, but still talks and listens across the disciplines. His
comments on SEAsia I thought are worthy of consideration. I am still
thinking out my own reactions.
If anyone wants my article I can post it. Basically, it is a 2 page
discussion about how use of WST might help in understanding SEAsian
history, and conversely how aspects of SEAsian history can contribute to
empirical and theoretical developments, especially in comparative,
ancient world-systems [no surprise to anyone who has seen the type of
thing Chris Chase-Dunn and I have been doing].
tom
Thomas D. [tom] Hall
thall@depauw.edu
Department of Sociology
DePauw University
100 Center Street
Greencastle, IN 46135
765-658-4519
HOME PAGE:
http://www.depauw.edu/~thall/hp1.htm
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 1997 09:03:32 -0500
From: Kenneth Harris <kenneth.harris@sru.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list ASDP-L <ASDP-L@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Subject: Southeast Asia and the World: Doctrine Free!
From: "Marc J. Gilbert" <MGILBERT@nugget.ngc.peachnet.edu>
Organization: North Georgia College
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 13:58:32 EDT
Subject: Southeast Asia and the World: Doctrine Free!
Thinking Large About Southeast Asia for Teachers and Scholars,
Tom Hall has produced a really great article in the ASDP newsletter
entitled "World Systems Theory and Southeast Asia . . ." In that
article, Tom correctly identifies a theoretical construct called
"contested perihery," a term just Wallersteinian enough to turn
people off world systems theory forever, though Tom does a good job
helping people avoid that fate.
However, I have been working on a similar idea related to world
history analysis that is gentle, benign and both jargon and doctrine
free! Whether it is true or not, you tell me, but to me it opens the
door to TEACHING about, as well as understanding Southeast Asia.
Pardon the security angle: this started out two years ago as a
briefing for the defense and foreign policy establishment with a view
to hammer home the idea that culture does matter: it should work
regardless of speciality (and defense is not mine, anyway!) It is
also mercifully short. By the second page you will know if it works
for you!
Tigers in the Shatterbelt
The decade between 1986 and 1996 witnessed a sea change in
Southeast Asia's security and defense concerns. At the beginning
of this era, the politics of the Cold War still shaped the agenda
and membership of the its most significant regional organization,
the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. ASEAN's primary
security interests were focussed on keeping the Cold War's great
powers at bay and preventing them and their clients from further
enveloping the entire region in war. Later, ASEAN was preoccupied
with addressing the Cold War's chief legacy in Southeast Asia, the
Vietnam-Cambodian debacle. Yet, while the Cold War divided
Southeast Asia, it provided ASEAN with a clear mandate to develop
an indigenous regional response to regional and international
conflict. With the waning of the Cold War, the concomitant
lessening of Russian and American competition in the area and the
end of the Cold War dimensions of the Cambodian issue, ASEAN's
mandate on questions of security and defense remained clear, but
the nature of its security mosaic became far more complex. ASEAN
now faced the daunting task of encouraging intra-regional
cooperation among nations long at odds while at the same time
preserving their collective security interests--economic as well as
military--in the face of resurgent Asian powers, such as China and
Japan. Ultimately, ASEAN chose to address these "new"
circumstances in a manner consistent with traditional patterns of
Southeast Asian geo-political realities. The imperatives behind
the informality, flexibility and gradualism that characterizes
ASEAN's approach to security and defense issues in the 80s and 90s
are little understood in the West. These imperatives are, however,
illuminated by the "shatterbelt" paradigm familiar to students of
world history. This paradigm makes ASEAN's current defense posture
more intelligible. It also reveals the architecture upon which all
security issues in the region have and, for the foreseeable future,
will depend.
The shatterbelt is a region of the earth that stretches from
Southeast Asia across the Himalayas and Hindu Kush to Afghanistan,
then across to the Caucuses on to Anatolia and the Balkans. The
human terrain of this belt is complex, as it encompasses land which
has served both as corridor for human migration and a terminus.
Waves of ethnic groups have settled there without wholly displacing
their predecessors, thus insuring that between each there will be
legacies of both prolonged conflict and co-existence. This pattern
of settlement is further complicated by the belt's positioning
along fracture lines separating the world's most powerful and
dynamic urban civilizations. Each of the belt's human populations
owe much to these civilizations, but their identities depend on
defining themselves as unique from them. Experience has taught
that shatterbelt states are too internally divided and too geo-
politically or economically weak for each alone to sustain their
absolute independence at all times against the hegemonic ambitions
of these civilizations. As a result, the art of survival in the
shatterbelt has most often depended upon not proud defiance, but
artful compromise, not on bold initiatives, but measured "small
steps," not sustained unilateral action, but bilateral or
multilateral agreements brokered between internal factions,
regional partners and/or extra-regional powers. States in the
shatterbelt have experienced periods of great achievement when
observing these imperatives and utter misery when they have not, as
the recent histories of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Vietnam make
clear.
ASEAN's birth, indeed its raison d'etre, was dictated by a
global bipolarism that divided the nations of the region into camps
joined to opposing external powers. This bipolar world also
stimulated rivalries within and between mainland
and island Southeast Asia. ASEAN also had to contend with
struggles for dominance between and within each of these
geographical divisions, and interstate rivalries recasting ancient
enmities in terms of modern ideologies or critiques of the
international economic order. Further, ASEAN had to confront
regional leadership structures which favored authoritarian and
militarist political orders that had little use for transparency,
was naturally suspicious of its neighbors and doubly suspicious of
the loyalty of their own minority populations whose lands of origin
lay directly across their borders or sea lanes each sought to
dominate. Yet, ASEAN actually benefitted from this turmoil as it
forced its members to confront the immutability of the region's
common traditional security concerns: fear of the loss of national
sovereignty--from command over its fractionated populations to
command of its economic resources--fear of bilateral interstate
relations with untrustworthy allies, and the fear of international
alliances that held out the promise of collective security but
fomented regional competition and led to subordination to great
extra-regional powers that could guarantee only an inferior place
in the global division of power and labor.
Using the Cold War experience as a base line, ASEAN was
disinclined to adopt a binding multilateral regional security
structure of the type broached by Leonid Breshnev in the 1970s or
the more inclusive plan suggested later by Michael Gorbachev. Nor
did ASEAN intend to ride the coat-tails of a coalition of Asian
powers either linked to or independent of the United States. The
drawdown of Russian and the United States forces in Asia, China's
unstable economic condition and its objections to multilateralism
(and its record of opportunistic bilateralism in Southeast Asia),
together with Japan's history and its poor short term military
capacity to deter Chinese aggression left the ASEAN nations with no
acceptable partners in any "concert of Asia." Though the very
weakness of the post-Cold War US presence in Southeast Asia made
its role as a possible regional power broker more widely desirable
among ASEAN states than at any previous time, the propensity of
China, Japan and the United States to juggle power amongst
themselves and relegate Southeast Asia to the status of a junior
partner in a Asian Pacific economic and security zone deterred and
continues to deter ASEAN from such a course.
Additionally, a powerful internal logic acted, and continues
to act, to forestall ASEAN's evolution into a formal defense
community like NATO. NATO, like most alliances, owes its existence
to sustained external threats. Yet, ASEAN matured at a time where
the emphasis was not on deterring aggression, but removing the
grounds for aggression by eliminating conditions in which threats
to local and regional security could emerge. ASEAN's search for
appropriate preventative diplomacy led naturally to the development
of confidence-building measures and patterns of constructive
engagement which now characterize its approach to security issues.
Determined to avoid the Cold War era propensity to employ
multilateral defense umbrellas as the means to define and separate
nations rather than bring them together, ASEAN sought to build
regional consensus for peace upon a foundation of trust arising
from a multitude of successful bilateral arrangements. These were
expected to form an inclusive security web, rather than a wall or
line in the sand. The benefits of ASEAN's defense posture were
many. Its lack of singular definition precluded battles over
protocol and fruitless debates over terminology. It stimulated
contacts between the region's political and military establishments
and surrounded potential enemies with a comforting cocoon of
institutional contacts, economic ties and transparent low-level
military accords. While promoting inclusive and expandable
strategic protocols, such as ZOPFHAN and SEANFZ, it sought to avoid
formal defense agreements and preferred caucuses and even state
dinners to treaties and official meetings.
A signal recent example of the success of the ASEAN approach
is reflected in its current effort at facilitating Thai-Vietnamese
rapproachment, which has long been seen as the key to peace and
stability in the region. Prior to 1986, only Indonesia's relations
with China may have been as dark as those between Thailand and
Vietnam. Each saw the other as an aggressive, hegemonic power with
diametrically opposed economic interests, to say nothing of
ideological orientation. Between 1986 and 1991, changes in the
world economic and political order, not the least of which was
Vietnam's increasing need to import capital and Thailand's need to
export capital, favored improved relations, but differences over
the role and influence of China in the development of the Mekong
Basin, complicated by the legacy of Cold War antagonisms, helped
keep both nations apart even as the chief issue driving Thai-
Vietnamese foreign policy discord--the Cambodian embroligo--wound
down. Eager to promote the success of doi moi--upon which the
survival of both the nation and its leadership depended--Vietnam
hoped that the ability of the "China Card" to divide former
communist and non-communist states in the region would soon fade
with economic liberalization and that with the waning of bipolar
ideological differences would come the inevitable realization among
the region's states that improved relations between ASEAN, Vietnam
and Laos allow the region to present a strong united front in
defense of the region's interests.
The problem for Vietnam was the absence of trust between
itself and Thailand, which was aided and abetted by the almost
complete lack of personal knowledge of each other's leadership.
This lack of knowledge acted to prevent Vietnam and Thailand from
recognizing that a new wave of pragmatic outward-looking
technocrats who were coming to the fore in both states. Vietnamese
Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet sought to break through the clouds of
mistrust and ignorance making a tour of ASEAN member states in
1991. Had ASEAN itself stood solidly behind the perceived
ideological difference between Vietnam and Laos and its own
membership, had it viewed its security needs as riding along this
traditional axis, had it not been committed to developing consensus
and bilateral relationships among its members and neighbors as the
foundation for multilateral agreements, it is possible that Vo Van
Kiet's 1991 tour and those that were to follow in successive years
would have led to nothing. However, ASEAN's policy of inclusion
turned Vietnam's overture into a prelude for Vietnam and Laos'
signing in 1992 of ASEAN's 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation.
This, in turn, paved the way for both countries being granted
observer status at the ASEAN Annual Ministerial Meeting. By 1994,
the foreign ministers of both nations were added to the new ASEAN
Regional Forum, the latest and fullest expression of ASEAN's
security regime. As a result of these confidence-building efforts,
Thailand joined other ASEAN states in sending high level
delegations to Hanoi, breaking decades of political and isolation.
By this gradual process, ASEAN not only helped provide the
necessary political space for improvements in Thai-Vietnamese
relations, but did so without angering China which also had been
welcomed into ARF at the same ministerial level. In fact, ASEAN's
receptivity to Vietnam's initial overtures may have played a role
in facilitating the ground-breaking Sino-Vietnamese dialogue that
culminated in ministerial and summit meetings between Vietnamese
and Chinese leaders in 1993.
Successful efforts to help defuse the Cambodian crisis, the
creation of ARF and the bridging the communist-non-communist divide
were but among the more dramatic of ASEAN's achievements since
1990. Others included lessening or deflecting occasional Thai and
Indonesian posturing as regional kingpins and working with the US
to downgrade Malaysian efforts at creating what has been
characterized as "an East Asian economic Zone without Caucasians"
to something less exclusive (EAEG to EAEC). ASEAN has also
encouraged the spread of a variety of schemes to promote
intelligence exchange and joint military training and exercises.
It may soon develop a coast guard capacity to address piracy,
smuggling and illegal immigration problems that have long plagued
the region. Other plans mooted include a regional center for
security studies, a regional register of arms holdings or transfers
and a code to govern arms sales so as to reduce fears of an arms
race raised by the modernization and expansion of virtually all
armies and navies in the region. However, ASEAN's actions will
remain as a facilitator rather than an agent, as the following
anecdote reveals. A little more than a year ago, after signing a
defense accord with the Philippines, Malaysian Defense Minister
Njaib Abdul Razak declared that Southeastern Asian states were
working to form "a network of defense ties that will enable them to
act as military allies." However, he rejected the idea that ASEAN
might turn into a formal defense alliance, arguing that this "would
only heighten regional tension." ASEAN seems determined to act on
the principle that by even mentioning the word "security" in its
Regional Forum, that body has been freer to promote it. The
Clinton administration has noted how wide ASEAN and its member
states have spread this Taoist web of collective bilateral threads,
which now stretches from Beijing to Papua-New Guinea. The US may
have even facilitated the formation of the ASEAN Regional Forum by
removing its traditional objection to multilateral arrangements in
Asia. Urged by ASEAN leaders to adopt a posture more in tune with
Asian realities as they saw it, President Clinton has expressed the
hope that the ASEAN technique of building multilateral agreements
on the basis of bilateral agreements "can function like overlapping
plates of armor, covering the full body of our common security
concerns."
The measure of ASEAN's ability to contribute to the
realization of such a goal, as well as the basic strengths and
weaknesses of ASEAN's approach, have been taken by ASEAN's recent
response to China's effort to increase its influence and military
presence in Myanmar. That state's leaders, as is so often the case
in the shatterbelt, have sought to strengthen themselves against
domestic turmoil and political isolation by opening their doors to
a stronger neighbor. China's building of a base on Hainggi Island
and its massive military assistance to Myanmar's government over
the past three years has been of great concern in the United
States and in India, both of whose governments have urged ASEAN to
join with them in opposing China's projection of its power into the
Indian Ocean and in condemning Myanmar's human rights record. For
its part, India also sought to advance its desiderata of a military
alliance between itself, ASEAN and Japan to contain future Chinese
expansionism, or at the very least, discourage China from arming
insurgents on the India side of the China-Burma-India frontier.
ASEAN member states did bridle when the Myanmar government, buoyed
by Chinese assistance, resumed the persecution and deportation of
its Muslim population, but ASEAN itself remained true to its
nature. Much to the chagrin of the United States and, at least
initially India, ASEAN employed its tried and true instrument of
constructive engagement in an attempt to wean Myanmar away from
dependence on China and into the ASEAN fold. The accomplishment of
this task would finally bring all the states of the region within
the ASEAN umbrella. It would also send a typically soft, but
important message to China: there is far more profit to be made
with ASEAN by respecting its influence as a geo-political balance
wheel and its value as a friendly trading block than as a speed
bump on the highway to a confrontation with India. As economics,
and not global military reach, seems at present to be driving
China's Myanmar policy, ASEAN may once again be able to finesse its
way toward a more stable security environment. However, in the
event of a Chinese economic collapse or political crisis, the
Middle Kingdom might exercise its traditional territorial ambitions
in this direction, or, given its shifting position on the
Sprately's, in any direction. Whither then, ASEAN?
This question is paramount to those who doubt the viability of
ASEAN as a guarantor of regional security and stability. How, they
ask, can ASEAN nations defend even their own region adequately
without becoming a part of a larger, more formal defense scheme
involving some combination of Asian and Western Powers? Some admit
that ASEAN's current defense architecture may be the only means of
sustaining ASEAN interests in a world fundamentally hostile to
smaller or weak regional national groupings, but they nonetheless
argue that the time for such regional groupings to secure their
place in the emerging new world order (and its viability within it)
may be limited. ASEAN might answer that the more formal
arrangements its critics favor offer no panacea. It could argue
that the EC and NATO proved unable to apply any early salve to the
open wound that was Yugoslavia in crisis, and only now, when merely
gangrene stumps of that nation remain, is NATO adopting the type of
"confidence building" approach ASEAN has for so long favored.
Similarly, ASEAN could argue that Desert Shield/Desert demonstrates
that coalition-building and interoperablity--further ASEAN
strengths--are the wave of the future. Robert B. Oxnam, writing in
Foreign Affairs, observes that ASEAN as a region "raises one of the
most difficult problems confronting U.S. diplomacy.
How does the United States deal sensitively with a region that
poses no immediate crises? That is, in fact, precisely where
the professionalism of the U.S. Foreign Service is most
tested--in its ability to sustain sufficient attention, to
prompt intelligent decisions, to muster appropriate resources
in handling non-crisis situations. Treating headaches before
they become migraine crises--that is a central challenge in
the future of America's Asia policy.
Is it not "treating headaches before they become migraine crises"
what the ASEAN approach is all about? If so, it would seem that in
the post-Cold War era the ASEAN model for conflict resolution and
security management bears closer study and no possesses no little
utility as a model for the West.
That many Western observers recommend a different course for
ASEAN than that which follows traditional regional verities may be
the product of a misunderstanding of what an Asian tiger
represents. Some Asian leaders seek to flatter themselves and
their Western colleagues by employing the term to mean a rising and
worthy competitor. In the shatterbelt, however, the tiger is often
viewed as the vehicle for a wandering spirit that defends dharma
and preys upon the unrighteous. ASEAN has kept that tiger at bay
by seeking "acceptable understandings" with the great powers,
equitable relations among member states and an gradual but
increasingly equitable global and regional distribution of wealth.
The pacific, informal and consensus-seeking strategic posture ASEAN
has thus far pursued has kept ASEAN safe from wide beasts, vengeful
or otherwise and its successes--from avoiding U.S-North Korea type
confrontations to promoting the regions economic growth as the best
medicine for its security problems--prompts ASEAN to stay the
course. This course may be the only one available given ASEAN's
relative weakness, but its achievements to date, or more
accurately, the unpleasantness of available alternatives, is also
a warning to those, like the Chinese, who might be tempted to
exploit their growing military and economic advantage over the
region. The sources and pattern of ASEAN's security regime reminds
us of what Russian Special Forces in Chechnya and the combatants in
Bosnia already know: it profiteth little anyone who looses the
tiger in the shatterbelt.
*******************************************
PROF. MARC JASON GILBERT
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY
NORTH GEORGIA COLLEGE AND STATE UNIVERSITY
DAHLONEGA, GEORGIA 30597
PHONE: 706-864-1911
FAX: 706-864-1873
E-MAIL MGILBERT@NUGGET.NGC.PEACHNET.EDU