Abstract
Why do international governance structures in regions with a history of colonization often display contradictions or gaps between formal commitments and actual cooperation? Rather than looking for exogenous causes, this chapter accounts for the purported dysfunctionalities by tracing and contextualizing the contested institutionalization practices of local agents. Drawing on the English School’s distinction between primary and secondary institutions, it sees regional governance structures not simply as the consequence of competing state interests but, more fundamentally, of attempts to translate a complex normative structure into an organizational framework. The emergence of Southeast Asia’s international society illuminates the political nature of these processes: tensions between primary institutions drove the renegotiation of hierarchies and boundaries but also subverted it, resulting in ambiguous governance structures.
The development of history is not a sudden and accidental flash in the pan, but a continuous dynamic process involving several layers of men and women reacting to such given historical conditions extant in life and society; and it is not always a smooth placid one in its course. This then is how we must conceive of our freedom struggle …
Aung San ( 1946 )
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Notes
- 1.
By governance structures, I mean the network of international organizations, regimes and agreements which provide an institutional framework for the transnational and intergovernmental interactions of an international society.
- 2.
- 3.
For a more detailed account, see Spandler (2015).
- 4.
Unlike Keene, who uses a multidimensional framework to analyze the relative importance of different logics of stratification (material, social and legal), I adopt the more simplified view that generally, the power positions constituted by different international institutions, or in different power dimensions, will be more or less aligned. The view is thus rather one of an international society stratified along a single hierarchy.
- 5.
For an early formulation, see Mayall (1990). More recent adoptions include Ahrens (2016), Buzan (2004, 251–252) and Knudsen (2015). These authors provide a more structuralist version of the argument, in the sense that contradictions between primary institutions or fundamental structural ambivalences engrained in international society “in and of themselves […] constitute an important dynamic of change” (Buzan 2004, 252). They are thus less concerned with the agential side of change, which highlights that only the discursive representation of primary institutions as contradictory can induce actual change.
- 6.
The only polity whose independence European states acknowledged at least formally was the Kingdom of Siam.
- 7.
An exception is the case of French colonial administration, under which colonial populations were regarded as French citizens.
- 8.
The preamble describes the parties as acting “with a view to the preservation of the general peace and the maintenance of their rights in relation to their insular possessions and insular dominions in the region of the Pacific Ocean […]” (Four-Power Treaty 1921).
- 9.
Keene (2014) describes this phenomenon for the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it extends in principle to the entire first half of the twentieth century, albeit with a larger and expanding core.
- 10.
Some accounts of the events ascribe the leading role to the Council of the “Big Four” Western powers, but Satow (1922, 190) notes that a Japanese member was included in the proceedings of the Council.
- 11.
The latecomers in this respect are Singapore, which entered the Malayan Federation in 1963 and became a sovereign state in 1965; West Irian, which was annexed from the Netherlands by Indonesia in 1969; East Timor, which gained independence from Portugal in 1975 only to lose it again to Indonesia until 2002; and Brunei, which gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1984.
- 12.
Southeast Asia’s socialists were in fact able to establish some fragile transnational ties, and delegations were sent to the 1927 Conference of the League against Imperialism from Indonesia, Indochina and the Philippines. However, despite a shared rhetoric, national independence was the paramount goal (see, e.g., Indochinese Communist Party 1998). Lenin’s (1977) works on imperialism and colonialism provided the ideological justification for this intersection between and amalgamation of nationalist and socialist thought, which then found its manifestation in united fronts including communists, the bourgeoisie and even the monarchy, as, for example, in the Vietnamese struggle for independence.
- 13.
The conference was organized and hosted by the Indian Council of World Affairs, not the Indian government. What is more, of the nine participating Southeast Asian countries, only the Philippines and Siam enjoyed full independence, and most high-level government representatives were participating as observers only. The other countries represented by unofficial delegations were Burma, Cochinchina, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, the Malayan Union and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
- 14.
The official title of the meeting was “South East Asian Prime Ministers Conference”. It was attended by representatives from Burma, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
- 15.
The most important multilateral of these, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), is briefly discussed below.
- 16.
The other member states were Australia, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
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Spandler, K. (2019). Primary Institutional Dynamics and the Emergence of Regional Governance in Southeast Asia: Constructing Post-Colonial International Societies. In: Brems Knudsen, T., Navari, C. (eds) International Organization in the Anarchical Society. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71622-0_13
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