Australia’s policy towards Britain’s end of empire in Southeast Asia influenced the course of this decolonization in the region. In this book, Andrea Benvenuti discusses the development of Australia’s foreign and defence policies towards Malaya and Singapore in light of the redefinition of Britain’s imperial role in Southeast Asia and the formation of new post-colonial states. Placed within the emerging literature on the global impact of the Cold War, the book sheds new light on the choices made – by Australia, by Britain and the new emerging states – in these crucial years.
Arc of Containment recasts the history of American empire in Southeast and East Asia from World War II through the end of American intervention in Vietnam. Setting aside the classic story of anxiety about falling dominoes, Wen-Qing Ngoei articulates a new regional history premised on strong security and sure containment guaranteed by Anglo-American cooperation. Ngoei argues that anticommunist nationalism in Southeast Asia intersected with preexisting local antipathy toward China and the Chinese diaspora to usher the region from European-dominated colonialism to US hegemony. Central to this revisionary strategic assessment is the place of British power and the effects of direct neocolonial military might and less overt cultural influences based on decades of colonial rule, as well as the considerable influence of Southeast Asian actors upon Anglo-American imperial strategy throughout the post-war period. Arc of Containment demonstrates that American failure in Vietnam had less long-term consequences than widely believed because British pro-West nationalism had been firmly entrenched twenty-plus years earlier. In effect, Ngoei argues, the Cold War in Southeast Asia was but one violent chapter in the continuous history of western imperialism in the region in the twentieth century.
This detailed study throws light on the evolution of British policy in South-east Asia in the turbulent post-war period. Through extensive archival research and insightful analysis of the British mindset and official policy, Tarling demonstrates that South-east Asia was perceived as a region consisting of mutually co-operating new states, rather than a fragmented mass. The book covers the immediate post-war period until the Colombo plan and the outbreak of hostilities in Korea. A companion volume to Tarling's Britain, Southeast Asia and the Onset of the Pacific War, it finds parallels between Britain's approach to the threat of Japan and its approach to the threat of communism. It also shows that the British sought to shape US involvement, in part by involving other Commonwealth countries, especially India. This is a major contribution to the diplomatic and political history of South-east Asia.
The origins and the key defining moments of the Cold War in Southeast Asia have been widely debated. This book focuses on an area that has received less attention, the impact and legacy of the Cold War on the various countries in the region, as well as on the region itself. The book contributes 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. It goes on to look at the usefulness or limitations of using the Cold War as an interpretative framework for understanding change in Southeast Asia. Chapters discuss how the Cold War had a varied but notable impact on the countries in Southeast Asia, not only on the mainland countries belonging to what the British Foreign Office called the "upper arc", but also on those situated on its maritime "lower arc". The book is an important contribution to the fields of Asian Studies and International Relations.
As World War II came to an end, a period of distrust settled over the world. Southeast Asia was no different. The spectre of Communism stalked the stage. The threat of a global nuclear war hung thick in the air. The struggle for domination between the Americans and the Russians came up against the burgeoning nationalism of the liberated states. In this highly combustible climate, what was to emerge? This book reveals in fascinating detail, country by country, how the Cold War shaped the destiny of Southeast Asia. The competition among the world powers – the USA, USSR, Britain, China – led to dramatically differing fates for the region. Vietnam was to be the worst affected, effectively destroyed in the clash between superpowers, at tremendous cost to all sides. In Malaya and Singapore, the British fought a long-drawn-out Communist insurgency that broke out in 1948 – an insurgency they saw as part of a consolidated Cold War movement inspired by Moscow or Beijing. But was it? As this volume shows, the states of Southeast Asia were never mere pawns in an international war of ideology. Many local players in fact strategically manipulated Cold War doctrines to their own political advantage – chief among them Indonesia’s Suharto, who played the anti-Communist card with aplomb. Till now, no book has examined this watershed era across the entire region. Cold War Southeast Asia in doing so not only offers a panoramic account of a turning point in SEA history, but also illuminates the global ramifications of the Cold War, and the makings of the world order as we know it today.
Connecting Histories: Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia draws on newly available archival documentation from both Western and Asian countries to explore decolonization, the Cold War, and the establishment of a new international order in post-World War II Southeast Asia. Major historical forces intersected here--of power, politics, economics, and culture--on trajectories East to West, North to South, across the South itself, and along less defined tracks. Especially important, democratic-communist competitions sought the loyalties of Southeast Asian nationalists, even as some colonial powers sought to resume their prewar dominance. These intersections are the focus of the contributions to this book, which use new sources and approaches to examine some of the most important historical trajectories of the twentieth century in Burma, Vietnam, Malaysia, and a number of other countries.
The historiography of the Cold War has long been dominated by American motivations and concerns, with Southeast Asian perspectives largely confined to the Indochina wars and Indonesia under Sukarno. Southeast Asia’s Cold War corrects this situation by examining the international politics of the region from within rather than without. It provides an up-to-date, coherent narrative of the Cold War as it played out in Southeast Asia against a backdrop of superpower rivalry. When viewed through a Southeast Asian lens, the Cold War can be traced back to the interwar years and antagonisms between indigenous communists and their opponents, the colonial governments and their later successors. Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Philippines join Vietnam and Indonesia as key regional players with their own agendas, as evidenced by the formation of SEATO and the Bandung conference. The threat of global Communism orchestrated from Moscow, which had such a powerful hold in the West, passed largely unnoticed in Southeast Asia, where ideology took a back seat to regime preservation. China and its evolving attitude toward the region proved far more compelling: the emergence of the communist government there in 1949 helped further the development of communist networks in the Southeast Asian region. Except in Vietnam, the Soviet Union’s role was peripheral: managing relationships with the United States and China was what preoccupied Southeast Asia’s leaders. The impact of the Sino-Soviet split is visible in the decade-long Cambodian conflict and the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. This succinct volume not only demonstrates the complexity of the region, but for the first time provides a narrative that places decolonization and nation-building alongside the usual geopolitical conflicts. It focuses on local actors and marshals a wide range of literature in support of its argument. Most importantly, it tells us how and why the Cold War in Southeast Asia evolved the way it did and offers a deeper understanding of the Southeast Asia we know today.
The Cold War in Southeast Asia was a many-faceted conflict, driven by regional historical imperatives as much as by the contest between global superpowers. The essays in this book offer the most detailed and probing examination to date of the cultural dimension of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian culture from the late 1940s to the late 1970s was primarily shaped by a long-standing search for national identity and independence, which took place in the context of intense rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the Peoples' Republic of China emerging in 1949 as another major international competitor for influence in Southeast Asia. Based on fieldwork in Burma, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, the essays in this collection analyze the ways in which art, literature, film, theater, spectacle, physical culture, and the popular press represented Southeast Asian responses to the Cold War and commemorated that era's violent conflicts long after tensions had subsided. Southeast Asian cultural reactions to the Cold War involved various solutions to the dilemmas of the newly independent nation-states of the region. What is common to all of the perspectives and works examined in this book is that they expressed social and aesthetic concerns that both antedated and outlasted the Cold War, ones that never became simply aligned with the ideologies of either bloc. Contributors:Francisco B. Benitez, University of Washington; Bo Bo, Burmese writer (SOAS, University of London); Michael Bodden, University of Victoria; Simon Creak, Australian National University; Gaik Cheng Khoo, Australian National University; Rachel Harrison, SOAS, University of London; Barbara Hatley, University of Tasmania; Boitran Huynh-Beattie, Asiarta Foundation; Jennifer Lindsay, Australian National University
This history covers mainland and island Southeast Asia from Burma to Indonesia. Volume I is from prehistory to c1500. Volume II discusses the area's interaction with foreign countries from c1500-c1800. Volume III charts the colonial regimes of 1800-1930 and Volume IV is from World War II to 1999.
