ASEAN in the Indo-Pacific

Southeast Asia's fast-changing dynamics have a bearing on great power contestations in the larger theatre of the Indo-Pacific, according to Amitav Acharya, a distinguished professor of international relations at the American University, Washington DC.

- DAMMU RAVI

Dr Acharya's book invigorates an informed debate about Southeast Asia's future, which is home to eight per cent of the world's population and accounts for 21 per cent of global trade, with 30 per cent of the world's crude oil transiting through the Strait of Malacca.

Southeast Asia's initial journey after World War II was inward-looking, with their economies tied to their former colonial masters. Through the decades, economic nationalism and self-reliance gave way to regional interdependence and integration into the global economy. Dr Acharya says the Bandung Conference in 1955 decisively shaped the trajectory of regionalism within these economies, whose collective identity as a distinct social and political entity derived from the creation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967. The ASEAN-centric view is defined as an informal, interpersonal and consensus-driven dialogue.

The author goes on to explain that the idea of Southeast Asia as a region in its own right involved rejecting Southeast Asia as a cultural appendage of China or India. Their view as active borrowers and modifiers of the two influences that came via maritime trade, not conquest or colonisation, contradicts historian R.C. Majumdar's claim that India established its political authority in the region.