Southeast Asia as a Region.

The range of phenomena that can be applied to the region of the world known as Southeast Asia can be used in arguments both for and against the concept of Southeast Asia as a unity - hence the difficulty in establishing which factors support the argument for a distinct regional entity and which factors preclude it. For this reason it becomes necessary to single out the phenomena that create disunity in a region, so that I can discern what it is about the region that defines it as a separate and unique entity.

So what are the parameters for defining the boundaries of a region? Aside from being a cartographic convenience, Southeast Asia has evolved along mixed ethnic and sociocultural lines. Southeast Asia is a melting pot in so far as it has by virtue of geographical features, drawn people inward from the north - the Chines and from the east - Indians into territories largely occupied by an Australoid race of people indigenous to those territories.

Rather than viewing Southeast Asia as a section of the world that has been subdivided into the smaller sections that we recognise today as nation states it can be seen - from a historical perspective - that nation states are arbitrary and fleeting and that Southeast Asia is a region that has an always will be in a state of continual cultural and ethnic flux and as such is better perceived as a series of overlapping circles within circles in which there exists a central core that is centered on the Straits of Malacca - body of water separating the Malaysian Peninsula from the Island of Sumatra and widely considered to have provided the region of Suutheast Asia with a common heritage based on commerce and trade.

Circles within circles can also be regions with their own unique characteristics. It is a framework largely applicable to those areas that have history of movement with regard to people, currency, culture and religion across borders - such as one would find in Southeast Asia, Europe or the Middle East. It does not apply to those communities that exist on the very fringes of a geographic region and that are isolated from the rest of the world either by land or sea or by an inhospitable climate or interior.

Regionalism, like globalism, is a very general term. Not all the ASEAN states, for example, can be contained within the circle radiating out from the Straits of Malacca. The Norther parts of Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and Burma fall within orbits that radiate out from countries that are not technically part of Southeast Asia. On that note it might be useful to consider this question of which circle a community is part of - in terms of what it is not as opposed to what it is.

Regionalism like globalisation is in some ways an oversimplification of historical processes. On the subject of globalisation Dirlik ( 2001) makes the point that 'not only are large parts of the world left out in the process, the processes appear as pathways in networks of one kind or another that leave untouched or reduce to marginality significant surfaces of what is implied by a terms such as global. The global is by no means descriptive of the whole - at its most abstractly discursive, it may refer to anything other than local.

The phenomena that support the the view that Southeast Asia is a unity are geographical factors and by extension, ethnic and commercial. The phenomena that sets communities apart in the region - in the circles within circles are those that divide people and hinder the flow of communication - religion, language and politics.

With regard to the religious traditions found in Southeast Asia, the fact that there are four of them make it impossible to consider Southeast Asia in terms of a unified entity. While Islam is the dominant religion in Indonesia and Malaysia it is also prevalent in the Southern Philippines, which is dominated by Christianity. Theravada Buddhism prevails in mainland southeast Asia where Islam - with the exception of Southern Thailand - is almost non existent. Hinduism continues to flourish in some parts of Southeast Asia, which further adds to the eclectic mix of religious life among the peoples of the region. In the light of this religious diversity there is absolutely no way that religion can be considered as a unifying force for the peoples of Southeast Asia.

On the subject of language, there are hundreds of different languages spoken in Southeast Asia. Many of the states that make up ASEAN - Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia and the Philippines have their own languages. Indonesia and Malay, for example, belong to the Austronesian language family which extends across the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific and includes Malagasy, Javanese, Balinese, Tagalog and Maori. ( Quinn 2001)

For centuries Malay has been the language spoken by the people who live on either side of the Straits of Malacca. Malay, as a consequence, became the language of commerce in Southeast Asia. It also functioned as a court language and it was evidently the language of the Sumatran empire of Sriwija that flourished between the 9th and 14th centuries.

With regard to the phenomena that support the argument for the unity of Southeast Asia I find myself confronting a paradox of perplexing proportions. A very good case can be made in support for the idea that Southeast Asia is a cohesive region on the basis of geography and by extension trade and commerce. The Straits of Malacca has been a crossroads and a trading center for people from the north ( China) and the South (India). It is located in the middle of the region which we recognize today as being Southeast Asia and as such has drawn people, wealth and knowledge into it, as opposed to out of it, for millennia.

It must be remembered that Southeast Asia for most of its history was sparsely populated. Today the region has a population in excess of 500 million. Less that one hundred years ago, the population was about 80 million. Hirschman(2001) Hence it can be deduced that on the basis of population growth alone the region has undergone a rapid period of acculturation given that much of its growth has been due to the continued influx of people from China and India. Likewise the emergence of nation states is a very recent development so in a sense it seems a bit short sighted to view these states as separate entities with their own cultural identities. It makes far more sense to view the region as a whole, albeit one without clear borders. Emmerson ( 1984) argues 'the crystallization of Southeast Asia into a set of nation states enabled agreement on the terms of the boundaries but inhibited the holism needed to change a cartographic convenience into an entity with an identity internal to itself'.

I would argue that the modern nation state in Southeast Asia is just as amorphous and ill defined as the region as a a whole and therefore for practical purposes, it is more expedient to look at the bigger picture from a broad historical, geographic and ethnic framework to get an idea of what it is about Southeast Asia that gives it an identity 'internal to itself'.

In conclusion it is my contention that Southeast Asia is a region with distinctive characteristics that will persist as an entity regardless of what happens to national and international boundaries and regional and global politics. As Emmerson states so succinctly "Southeast Asia is a reality that exists independently of its name".

Bibliography

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