Sovereignty, Intervention and Social Order: The Case of
Cold-War Southeast Asia
Paper presented at a panel on ‘Rethinking Intervention’,
BISA Conference, Manchester, 27-29 April 2011
Lee Jones
School of Politics & International Relations
Queen Mary, University of London
[email protected]
Comments are very welcome, but please do not cite
without prior discussion with the author.
Abstract
The Cold War has been aptly described as an ‘internationalised civil war’. While
national and international politics were still structured around the institution of the
‘nation-state’, transnational forces were engaged in fierce, multifaceted struggles that
overlapped national borders, seeking to determine what sort of political, economic
and social order should prevail within them. In this context, the fundamentally
strategic nature of sovereignty and intervention is particularly clear. Norms of noninterference and practices of intervention are used to limit the scope of socio-political
conflict in ways that benefit the positions of dominant groups in the struggle over
social order. The meaning and application of these terms and practices therefore
flows not from global or local norms but the strategies, interests and ideologies of the
various forces locked in conflict. This argument is illustrated using the case of
Southeast Asia from the period of the Second Indochina War to the end of the Cold
War, focusing on the behaviour of the member-states of the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN). Despite being famed for their supposed cast-iron
commitment to non-intervention, the historical record shows that their adherence to
sovereignty norms was highly flexible and intervention was often used to attack
radical forces abroad in order to maintain capitalist social order at home.
1
Introduction
The Cold War was characterised by a fundamental contradiction between the formal
and practical organisation of political life. Formally, the years after World War II
witnessed a marked shift towards emphasising established states as the basis of
domestic and international political order rather than favouring ‘nations’ as was the
case after World War I.1 Practically, however, the socio-political forces whose
interests and ideologies actually animated political life were scarcely anywhere
confined to the formal territorial boundaries claimed by these states. This was a
particular issue for emerging post-colonial states, where relevant socio-political
forces (e.g., ethno-religious groups) rarely if ever corresponded to the highly artificial
boundaries set at the whim of departing imperial powers. But it was also the case in
the developed West, where the legacy of decades of depression and war had
profoundly undermined the allure of nationalism and the nation-state and
stimulated transnational loyalties. Foremost among these was the appeal of
international communism, which was felt (by capitalist ruling elites, at least) to have
‘fifth columns’ in virtually every Western state. The global economy, too, had also
fostered class formations and interests which overlapped state borders and which the
US hegemon was determined to preserve and entrench.
It was this dislocation between the formal and substantive nature of political
life which made the Cold War into what the late Fred Halliday dubbed an
‘internationalised civil war’.2 Within many states, a range of forces were locked into
struggles over what form of social, political and economic order should prevail. Yet
owing to the transnational nature of these forces, with their ideological, political,
social and economic linkages to forces located elsewhere, this struggle over domestic
order also tended to become internationalised. The ruling elites of states on both
sides of the capitalist/ communist divide entered into political, economic and
military alliances designed to bolster their positions, while their domestic enemies
looked across the divide for inspiration and aid in their attempts to challenge the
prevailing order. Social forces in post-colonial states drew support from both sides
and formed their own transnational alliances like the Bandung and Non-Aligned
Movements, to seek the liberation of colonised peoples elsewhere. As different
societal groups appealed to their ‘external’ allies for assistance, the complexity and
scope of ‘internal’ conflicts was dramatically widened. The hottest (and bloodiest)
conflicts of the Cold War were those where this widening escalated into
internationalised conventional warfare: Korea, Indochina, Angola, Namibia,
Afghanistan.
The fate of different ‘domestic’ struggles was understood by all sides to be
interdependent. On the capitalist side, various presidential doctrines, underpinned
by the ‘domino theory’, posited that a ‘communist’ victory in one state would
undermine capitalist stability in others by inspiring radical forces to intensify their
attacks on the established order and enabling the newly-converted state to provide
1 J. Samuel Barkin and Bruce Cronin, 'The State and the Nation: Changing Rules and the
Norms of Sovereignty in International Relations', International Organization 48:1 (1994).
2 Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (London:
Macmillan, 1999), 209. The Cold War is by no means unique in this designation, as Halliday
pointed out. Similar periods included the Reformation and Wars of Religion (1517-1648) and
the ‘Atlantic Revolution’ (1760-1815), and the Cold War itself can be seen as part of a ‘long
wave’ of revolution from 1905-1991. Arguably the Cold War was merely the most global of
these periods.
2
arms and other assistance to them. On the communist side, the advance of thirdworld anti-imperialist movements was seen as strengthening the cause of
progressive social forces globally and laying the ground for final communist victory.
The Brezhnev doctrine also linked the preservation of world communism to the fate
of ‘socialist’ governments within the Soviet sphere of influence. Both sets of doctrines
demanded, contradictorily, that the sovereignty of states controlled by allied political
forces must be respected, yet also that intervention be used to shore up this control
when it faltered, or to weaken the grip of enemy forces.
The Cold War thus presents a particularly apt period in which to examine the
role that sovereignty and intervention play in modern political life. The basic
argument advanced in this paper is that these phenomena have to be understood
strategically. Fundamentally, they are technologies of rule, used by social forces to
assist themselves and their allies in the struggles for power and control over
resources. The strategic effect of claiming territorial sovereignty is to define the scope
of political and social conflict by containing it geographically and institutionally,
excluding outside influences on domestic struggles for control over state power.
Consequently, sovereignty is deeply implicated in helping to produce and reproduce
particular social, economic and political orders and institutions. As a result, the scope
of sovereignty is constantly subject to contestation by socio-political forces seeking to
further their own interests in the struggle over which sort of order should prevail.
Intervention, from this perspective, is a tool used to assist or hinder the progress of
social forces within the target state, with the goal of stabilising or transforming social,
political and economic order there – and/or potentially elsewhere. Precisely because
social orders are perceived to be interdependent in periods of ‘internationalised civil
war’, intervention may be used in one area to affect the prospects of social forces
struggling somewhere quite different.
This argument is illustrated using empirical data from Southeast Asia from
the 1960s to the 1980s, focusing on the practices of the capitalist member-states of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). This is in many ways a ‘hard’ case,
since ASEAN members are almost universally regarded as constantly adhering to a
cast-iron norm of non-interference in the affairs of other states.3 However, as the
paper will show, the historical record speaks very much to the contrary. ASEAN’s
capitalist elites developed the non-interference principle as a means of taming interstate conflicts among themselves that were undermining social stability and creating
opportunities for left-wing forces to exploit. However, they continued to intervene
across borders – within ASEAN and outside it – against radical forces opposed to
their vision of domestic order. The apparently contradictory practices of noninterference and intervention can thus be explained through a single, coherent
political logic.
Sovereignty and Intervention as Technologies of Power
In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the nature and meaning of
sovereignty. In the 1990s, a great deal of inflated rhetoric circulated about the demise
of sovereignty and the state in the face of ‘globalisation’, while the 2000s have been
dominated by talk of a new ‘empire’. Gradually, however, the realisation appears to
be dawning that sovereignty may not quite be what it used to be, or what we thought
See Lee Jones, 'ASEAN’s Unchanged Melody? The Theory and Practice of "NonInterference" in Southeast Asia', Pacific Review 23:4 (2010), 480-482.
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it used to be, but nor has it vanished entirely, nor it is likely to. This is because
sovereignty plays a fundamentally important role in structuring political life. With
its corollary norm of non-interference, it simultaneously enables and constrains
different political projects. Oppressed secessionist minorities crave sovereignty to
enable them to independently determine their own political future; cosmopolitans
despise sovereignty for its capacity to trump liberal values and prevent the
realisation of a global political community. Sovereignty is thus central yet deeply
contested in political life because it is always implicated in the (re)production of
particular political, economic and social orders. The manipulation of sovereignty,
whether to fend off or enable foreign intervention, needs to be understood in
strategic terms, as a technology of power wielded by social forces for their own
advantage as they struggle against each other for power and control over resources.
The strategic quality of sovereignty can be understood in quite
straightforward practical terms. Although states are recognised as sovereign in
international law, it is governments which actually speak on their behalf and thus
‘wield’ sovereignty in international politics, on behalf of the population they
supposedly represent. This slippage between people, state and government is, of
course, required to enable representative government and self-determination as we
commonly understand it, and to enable the basic procedures of international politics
to function. However, it also enables a range of political strategies which can be used
for highly sectional purposes. Although governments are assumed to be
representative, in practice they may represent the interests of only a very narrow
section of their domestic populations – or even of interests beyond their borders.
They can strategically use their unique position to determine what counts as
sovereignty and intervention in their borders, to help change or uphold particular
social, economic and political institutions and orders.
For example, tens of thousands of American ‘advisors’ and troops were
stationed in South Vietnam’s territory during the 1960s and 1970s. Although this
clearly constrained the state’s sovereign autonomy in many ways, the government in
Saigon did not rush to the United Nations (UN) Security Council to complain about
US intervention, but rather legally sanctioned the American presence while
denouncing the attempts of North Vietnam to interfere in its ‘internal affairs’. The
reason for this is clear enough: the US presence was vital to prevent the collapse of
the country’s capitalist social and economic order, the right-wing Saigon
government, and indeed the entire state of South Vietnam. The many people living in
South Vietnam who were opposed to this particular order naturally identified the US
presence as a malign intervention, but their voices carried no weight in international
law. Conversely, sovereignty can be used to try to ward off influences that the forces
behind a particular government would find destabilising or detrimental to their
interests.
At its most basic, then, sovereignty and non-interference can be understood a
strategic tool to define the scope of political conflict. This is both crucial and
contested since, as Schattschneider argues, ‘the outcome of all conflict is determined
by the scope of its contagion. The number of people involved in any conflict
determines what happens’. Consequently, ‘the most important strategy of politics is
concerned with the scope of conflict’.4 Consider a hypothetical situation wherein a
right-wing military dictatorship has seized power to defend the interests of the
propertied classes against the threat of a communist takeover, and is faced with a
E.E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America (New
York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1960), 2, 3. Original emphasis.
4
4
left-wing, rural insurgency. The counter-revolutionary regime will seek to contain
the scope of the conflict to a level at which it can defeat the insurgents. Domestically,
it will try to prevent the conflict spreading into the cities, and to block potential
alliances between peasants and workers, for example. Internationally, the regime will
also seek to insulate the insurgents from external resources and supporters by
insisting on its sovereignty and demanding that others observe non-interference in
the country’s internal affairs. By contrast, the insurgents are likely to want to
socialise the conflict, both domestically and internationally, to broaden its scope and
draw in new participants who could help tilt the balance against the regime. If the
regime is sufficiently embattled, it too may seek to socialise the conflict by calling on
assistance from fellow counter-revolutionaries. The regime only differs from the
insurgents here in that the forces it represents are in possession of the state apparatus
and can thus manipulate the legal norms of sovereignty as part of its struggle to
control the scope of the conflict in its own interests.
Of course, there is nothing automatic about a government’s definition of
sovereignty and intervention winning out over its opponents’: its chances of success
depend on prevailing constellations of power, interests and ideology at the
international level. Successfully claiming sovereignty depends to some extent on
achieving external recognition, underlining its relational quality. At times of
particularly intense social conflict, rival forces within a country are commonly
supported by different external agents, with respect for the legal niceties of
sovereignty being decidedly secondary to the promotion of particular ideologies and
interests.5 Examples include the Spanish civil war, the Vietnam and Afghanistan
Wars, and indeed most significant Cold War-era conflicts in the third world.6
However, in less intense moments of conflict, well-established procedures of
recognition tend to prevail, underwriting the strategic value of being recognised as a
sovereign state’s government. This in turn partly explains why modern political
conflict is so predominantly oriented towards the capture of the state. As Clapham
observes, for example, post-independence conflicts in Africa have often revolved
around rapid wars of movement designed to capture the capital and state apparatus,
particularly the presidential palace, because of outsiders’ tendency to recognise
whoever occupies it as the legitimate government, a phenomenon he dubs ‘letterbox
sovereignty’.7
The dominant form in which sovereignty is expressed – the territorial nationstate – clearly enables and constrains particular social, economic and political
projects and thus carries significant consequences for the interests and strategies of
different societal groups. To claim territorial sovereignty is to stake a claim to
ultimate authority over a bounded space, all the people within it, and the flows
across the borders implied in the claim. In the modern era such claims can only be
justified with reference to ‘the people’, on whose behalf authority is said to be
exercised. Since the nineteenth century, this justification has most often taken a
nationalist form: the claim that the sovereign state corresponds to some body of
people who share certain politically-relevant characteristics (language, ethnicity,
culture, etc) in common, can be neatly defined from other such groups, and are thus
entitled to self-determination. This can be a progressive development in that the
See Halliday, Revolution.
See, e.g., Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of
our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
7 Christopher Clapham, Africa and the International System: The Politics of State Survival
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20.
5
6
5
state’s remit is clearly defined and since it is subject to no higher authority it can, at
least potentially, be held to account by the population upon which it bases its
legitimacy.8 In this sense, territorial sovereignty enables democratic, representative
government to exist.
However, the decision to establish political authority on a territorial basis
rules out many other possibilities, such as religion, race, class, and so on. As Lawson
and Shilliam point out, political projects appealing to non-territorial bases of political
community have always flourished and sometimes presented a serious challenge to
the sovereign states-system. These include international communism and other
forms of international class solidarity, ‘the Islamic umma, pan-racial movements,
various regional formations (such as the Bandung “moment”), anti-colonial
internationalism including the Tricontinental movement, transnational disaporic
communities, international women’s movements, indigenous groupings, and, of
course, liberal cosmopolitanism’.9 Such challenges have frequently been identified as
a threat to ‘state’ or ‘national’ security and violently suppressed. In reality these
challenges have been to a territorially-based political order in which the interests of
particular social forces are prioritised over others.
The maintenance such order often requires tremendous amounts of violence
and is a highly contested, conflict-ridden process.10 This is not least because relevant
socio-political distinctions rarely, if ever, correspond neatly to state borders. Religion,
class, race and other forms of human solidarity frequently overlap territorial
boundaries and, to the extent that they form the basis of an alternative political
vision, pose a real challenge to the desire to territorialise political authority. This is
particularly the case in periods of ‘internationalised civil war’ like the Cold War, but
can be observed throughout history. As Agnew argues, the nation-state is best
understood as ‘the myth of the nation-hyphen-state’, since in reality there is no ‘clear
“inside” and “outside” to society as such defined by the territorial nation to which
every state has become conjoined’. Historically ‘nations’ have been ‘created after
borders are more or less in place by ethnic cleansing or expulsions, forced
assimilation, and other planned and spontaneous efforts at cultural
homogenisation’.11
Such attempts to establish territorially-based political authority actually
constitute the ‘internal’ and the ‘external’, and give rise to what are typically
described as ‘internal threats’ as some social forces resist incorporation into this statemaking project and the social, economic and political hierarchies it always involves.
By defining the scope of politics in a particular way, territorialisation rules out other
forms of political life that would advance very different interests and ideologies. It
involves delegitimising and violently suppressing, for example, class-based political
struggles and forms of political authority, insisting that solidarity ends at the border,
that politics is only legitimately conducted between people understood as citizens of
a ‘national’ state (rather than members of a religion, race, class, etc), and that and that
all political conflict be oriented towards the national state and mediated through its
institutions.
8 Christopher J. Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe, and Alexander Gourevitch (eds.), Politics Without
Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations (London: UCL Press, 2006).
9 George Lawson and Robbie Shilliam, 'Beyond Hypocrisy? Debating the "Fact" and "Value"
of Sovereignty in Contemporary World Politics', International Politics 46:6 (2010), 664.
10 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 900-1990 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
1990).
11 John Agnew, Globalization and Sovereignty (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 60-61.
6
This point is missed in much of the mainstream literature in International
Relations and Comparative Politics because the sovereign state is treated as the given
‘unit’ of analysis. Scholars like Mohammed Ayoob often seek to defend third-world
state-making efforts from external meddling by invoking sovereignty, but neglect to
ask whose interests are being advanced through specific state projects.12 This
question is neglected even when resistance to these projects is identified and
explicitly related to the invocation of sovereignty. The literature on ASEAN, for
example, often emphasises the importance of non-interference in freeing-up
‘resources to fight communist insurgency’ during the Cold War, but the implication
that it was thereby used to defend a capitalist social order is never explored.13
Instead, the defeat of communist insurgencies is implicitly depicted as a natural,
unobjectionable goal. Scholars thus inadvertently side with the authoritarian regimes
of the day, which sought to present left-wing movements as enemies of the state and
even foreign subversives, rather than as people who simply wished to organise their
society, economy and politics in a way that was threatening to dominant interests.
This uncritical approach leads to the defence of highly specific societal interests being
glossed as the maintenance of ‘internal security’ and ‘stability’. Yet even the
maintenance of ‘stability’ is not neutral since some social groups always benefit
disproportionately from the status quo.
From this perspective, Ayoob’s insistence that third-world elites be left alone
to get on with state-making is far from politically neutral. If one part of society is
essentially creating and using state institutions to suppress another, state sovereignty
is being invoked in order to buy space and time for the social forces occupying the
state to impose their will on other groups. ‘Non-interference’ is invoked to block
enemies of the regime and its state-making project the ability to draw upon external
resources and support that might alter the balance of forces in their struggle. It is a
highly contested technology of political rule used to delimit the scope of political
conflict. Limiting the scope of political conflict to the borders of a territoriallybounded nation-hyphen-state helps to preserves domestic constellations of power
and interest that might otherwise be swept away if the artificial territorial boundaries
in which it is implicated were removed. Again, the likelihood of this occurring is
clearly enhanced during periods of ‘internationalised civil war’ like the Cold War,
when the capacity of national institutions to contain social conflict comes under
particular pressure.
For the sake of completeness, we should note that the disavowal of state
sovereignty has also been used strategically to define the scope of political conflict
and thereby advance specific interests and ideological agendas. For example, in the
early Cold War period, European states signed a European Convention on Human
Rights which bound them to observe certain liberal and democratic principles in
their domestic spheres. This deliberately removed fundamental questions about how
societies and economies should be governed from the realm of domestic political
contestation, insulating the capitalist, liberal-democratic state from challenges from
12 Mohammed Ayoob, The Third World Security Predicament: State Making, Regional Conflict, and
the International System (London: Lynne Rienner, 1995); Mohammed Ayoob, 'Third World
Perspectives on Humanitarian Intervention and International Administration', Global
Governance 10:1 (2004).
13 Shaun Narine, 'Humanitarian Intervention and the Question of Sovereignty: The Case of
ASEAN', Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 4:3-4 (2005), 475.
7
radical political forces.14 More recently, the locus of decision-making on domestic
and global economic governance has increasingly shifted to inter-elite institutions
such as the national central banks, the G8/G20, the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the European Commission and the
European Central Bank. By diminishing the sovereign autonomy of states to
determine their own monetary – and, increasingly, fiscal policies – these institutions
are a form of ‘economic constitutionalism’ which lock in neoliberal policies. Their
ascendancy reflects the dramatic weakening of organised labour in Western states,
which has historically sought expose to economic policy to wider political
contestation at the domestic level.15
Struggles over the scope of conflict have often taken the form of a
fundamental clash between rival principles of political organisation. The Cold War
was in important part a confrontation between one set of forces which preferred to
contain political conflicts within territorially bounded ‘nation-states’, and another
whose political project was premised on a class war that transcended all borders.
There was nothing neutral about either way of organising conflict: ‘every change in
the scope of conflict has a bias; it partisan in nature’ because ‘every change in scope
changes the equation’ between the forces in struggle.16 For this reason, as Halliday
remarked, normative debates about intervention are inescapably partisan:
The presumption in favour of security, i.e., of those already in power, entails one
conception of world order; the presumption against security entails the other –
solidarity with the oppressed, and, where apposite, non-interference by counterrevolution… What appears as a normative debate about international relations,
and the pros and cons of intervention, conceals another, anterior, debate about
the rights and wrongs of states themselves.17
Appreciating the crucial strategic role that sovereignty plays in political life in
turns helps us to understand intervention. Intervention is most commonly
understood as the negation or violation of sovereignty. However, it can also be seen
as an integral part of the arrangements surrounding particular sovereignty regimes.
That is, intervention is often required to help maintain the specific constellations of
power and interest that are implicated within certain arrangements of sovereignty.
Particularly during periods of ‘internationalised civil war’, great power interventions
are frequently implicated in a politics of scope, an attempt to assist embattled ruling
groups to manage local conflicts and prevent their further contagion, or vice-versa.
During the nineteenth century, embattled aristocratic regimes appealed to and were
propped up by the forces of the Holy Alliance, which intervened to prevent liberalSee Andrew Moravcsik, 'The Origins of Human Rights Regimes: Democratic Delegation in
Postwar Europe', International Organization 54:2 (2000). This attempt to ‘lock-in’ liberal
institutions against radical parties partly reflected the experience of fascism but, given the
defeat and discrediting of far-right forces in WWII, the main threat to such institutions after
1945 clearly came from communism.
15 Stephen Gill, 'Structural Change and Global Political Economy: Globalizing Élites and the
Emerging World Order', in Yoshikazu Sakamoto, (ed.), Global Transformation: Challenges to the
State System (Tokyo: UN University Press, 1994). For further discussion of the instrumental
uses of disclaiming sovereignty, see Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen
(eds.), Sovereignty Games: Instrumentalizing State Sovereignty in Europe and Beyond (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
16 Schattschneider, Semisovereign People, 4-5.
17 Halliday, Revolution, 16.
14
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nationalist revolutions from spreading across Europe, while internationallynetworked forces agitating for national self-determination appealed to Britain to
assist their struggles.18 In the Cold War, America’s ‘containment’ policy explicitly
sought to limit the contagion of social conflict across territorial borders, while the
Brezhnev doctrine of ‘limited sovereignty’ in Eastern Europe was always policed by
the threat of Soviet intervention in the event of ‘counter-revolution’. Today’s
economic constitutionalism is policed at the margin through interventions by the
IMF, the European Central Bank, and other agencies which seek to compel target
states to conform to neoliberal economic policies, and through measures like
humanitarian intervention to police the ‘liberal peace’. Sovereignty regimes and
intervention can therefore be seen as organically linked, almost as two sides of the
same coin.
Part of the reason for this intimate relationship between sovereignty regimes
and intervention is that both are used to contain and manage social conflicts in a
particular direction. As mentioned earlier, important socio-political distinctions
frequently overlap state borders. The institutions of territorial sovereignty attempt to
curtail this overlap so as to contain political conflict geographically, and are often
successful in doing so, particularly when supported sympathetically by external
interventions. However, at other times, such measures are simply insufficient. It is
often necessary to police ‘external’ forces that have linkages to ‘internal’ forces which
threaten the interests of dominant socio-political coalitions within the state. For
example, anti-communist interventions during the Cold War were often driven by a
desire to suppress leftist forces which gave inspiration or material support to those in
the intervening state or one its allies.19 As Rosenberg notes,
a counter-revolutionary foreign policy is rarely just a foreign policy. To a degree
which varies with individual cases it is also directed inwards, a nationalist
identification of certain programmes of domestic political change with a foreign
threat… however much states are compelled to prepare against the possible
behaviour of other states, the “international” has also been very much about the
management of change in domestic political orders.20
A similar case can be made about non-revolutionary situations. Israeli interventions
in Lebanon, for example, have partly been about curtailing the external bases and
support provided to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Hamas.
This section has sought to connect the concepts of sovereignty and
intervention, often described in quite arcane and abstract terms, to the concrete
struggles that actually animate political life in practice. It has done so by focusing on
the strategic value of sovereignty and intervention as a means of controlling the
scope of political conflict. Because defining the scope of conflict inherently advances
certain socio-political and economic interests and ideologies over others, the politics
of sovereignty and intervention are subject to constant contestation, sometimes of a
very violent sort. It follows from this discussion that in order to understand
particular historical practices of sovereignty and intervention, we need to analyse
how they express the strategies of different social forces as they struggle for power
and control within specific (geo)political and economic contexts. The following
18 See Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 (London: Cardinal, 1973),
esp. ch. 5-7.
19 See Halliday, Revolution.
20 Justin Rosenberg, The Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International
Relations (London: Verso, 1994), 35.
9
sections illustrate how this might be done, using the case of Southeast Asia from the
1960s to the 1980s.
Social Conflict and Intervention in Cold War Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia was, of course, home to the ‘hottest’ conflict of the Cold War, the
Vietnam War, which was itself only the centrepiece of the second of three wider
‘Indochina Wars’.21 As Cotton rightly observes, coupled with the earlier Korean War
and other conflicts, this history makes Asia ‘the continent of intervention’.22 Despite –
or perhaps because – of this history, Asia is far more often associated with the norm
of non-interference than its violation. China, for example, is still regularly seen as
blocking interventionist resolutions at the UN Security Council, and ASEAN, which
is not only a Southeast Asian sub-regional grouping but also the hub of regional
institution-building for the wider region, is almost uniformly said to express a castiron commitment to non-intervention. However, during the Cold War period alone,
despite this putative commitment, ASEAN states actually engaged in very serious
interventions in their near-abroad. These included the use of proxy forces and other
military interventions in Burma and in the Second and Third Indochinese Wars, and
the invasion and occupation of East Timor in 1975. This section argues that we can
explain this apparent paradox by considering the region’s sovereignty regime and
interventionist practices as technologies of power concerned with the scoping of
socio-political conflict, as described above. It is divided into two sub-sections: the
first lays out in broad terms the nature of ASEAN’s sovereignty regime, while the
second explores ASEAN states’ interventionist behaviour. The basic argument is that
both ASEAN’s non-interference principle and its interventions express a single
political logic: the defence of capitalist social order.
Understanding ASEAN’s Sovereignty Regime
In order to explain the stress which ASEAN placed on sovereignty principles from its
foundation in 1967, we need to appreciate the social conflicts raging at that moment,
and the wider geopolitical and economic context in which these conflicts were
articulated. The original ASEAN member-states were Indonesia, Malaysia, the
Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore. By the mid-1960s, all of these states were
governed by pro-capitalist regimes which were to a greater or lesser extent seen as
imperilled by the danger of communist overthrow. The region’s insurgent
communist parties tended to be ideologically Maoist and led and dominated by
ethnic-Chinese citizens, which exacerbated elites’ (self-serving) belief that they
represented an alien force directed by Beijing to ‘subvert’ ASEAN countries. The
strength of communist insurgency in these states was seen by elites as intimately
bound up with the progress of the war in Vietnam and with the course of
insurgencies in other ASEAN states. The region’s social orders were seen as
21 The first was France’s post-1945 attempt to recolonise Indochina (comprising Cambodia,
Laos and Vietnam); the second began in 1954 when, following French defeat, the US took up
the anti-communist struggle, and lasted until 1975, when Saigon fell to North Vietnam; the
third ran from 1978 to 1991 following Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia.
22 James Cotton, 'Against the Grain: The East Timor Intervention', Survival 43:1 (2001), 127128.
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interdependent because relevant socio-political forces were interlinked and
networked across formal territorial borders. ASEAN’s stress on ‘non-interference’
expressed elites’ attempts to confine ‘domestic’ political conflict within these borders,
and to avoid destabilising intra-mural interventions that might present opportunities
that the left could exploit.
The character of ASEAN’s sovereignty regime was fundamentally
underpinned by the nature of the forces controlling state power in the region. In
Malaysia, the ruling coalition, dominated by a party led by ethnic-Malay aristocrats,
had inherited a long-running communist insurgency from the British. London had
fought a vicious colonial war known as the ‘Emergency’ to suppress the mainly
ethnically-Chinese Malayan Communist Party (MCP), which was still active,
especially in northern Malaysia.23 In Singapore, the virulently anti-communist
People’s Action Party (PAP) government had ridden to power on the back of the
well-organised left, only to turn upon the socialists and impose a de facto
authoritarian, one-party state. The PAP was so fearful of leftist resurgence that it was
still rooting suspected communists out of local government as late as 1995.24 In
Thailand, state power was dominated by a staunchly anti-communist military with
extensive business interests and politico-businessmen. They confronted an insurgent
Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) whose guerrillas and supporters were
effectively ruling over tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Thai citizens,
particularly in the northeast.25 In the Philippines, a state dominated by the interests
of landed oligarchs confronted a serious communist insurgency. 30,000 communist
fighters had seized control of Central Luzon (site of a US air force base) with
American intelligence predicting a ‘major insurgent threat’ and a ‘vast social
upheaval in the near future’.26 In Indonesia, a viciously anti-communist regime
under General Suharto had seized power through a military coup in 1965-1966.
Backed by the middle classes, the bourgeoisie, Islamists and traditional elites,
Suharto launched an anti-leftist pogrom in which up to one million suspected
communists were killed and 750,000 more were rounded up into concentration
camps.27 As in Singapore, despite this dramatic evisceration of the left, the regime
was gripped by a ‘red scare’ for years to come.28
It was this transformation of state power in Indonesia which permitted
ASEAN and its sovereignty regime to form. Earlier regional cooperation efforts had
essentially been destroyed by the policy of ‘confrontation’ pursued by Indonesia
under Suharto’s predecessor, President Sukarno. Before 1965, Indonesia had the
largest communist party of any non-communist state, with three million members
and an additional twelve million in affiliated organisations.29 The Indonesian
Frank Furedi, Colonial Wars and the Politics of Third World Nationalism (London: Taurus,
1994), esp. 88-108.
24 Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First - The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 (Singapore:
Singapore Press Holdings, 2000), 133-40.
25 Robert J. Alexander, International Maoism in the Developing World (London: Praeger, 1999),
304.
26 'The Huk Resurgence in the Philippines', CIA 1967, in FRUS, 1964-1968, vol. XXVI, 771-772;
'Memorandum From Marshal Wright of the National Security Council Staff to the President's
Special Assistant (Rostow)', 1967, in FRUS, 1964-1968, vol. XXVI, 783.
27 Robert Cribb, 'Genocide in Indonesia, 1965-1966', Journal of Genocide Research 3:2 (2001), 2336.
28 Justus M. Van der Kroef, 'Indonesian Communism Since the 1965 Coup', Pacific Affairs 43:1
(1970), 51.
29 Cribb, 'Genocide', 229; Alexander, International Maoism, 253.
23
11
communist party (PKI) had been the principal beneficiary of Sukarno’s efforts to
balance between the country’s various socio-political forces, and by the mid-1960s
exercised considerably influence over the state and its foreign policy. As a result,
Sukarno’s crusading anti-imperialist policy drifted increasingly leftwards, leading
Jakarta into a putative alliance with Beijing. The PKI also opposed the cobbling
together of British colonial holdings in Malaya (originally to include Singapore) and
Borneo to form the Malaysian federation in 1965, as the Malayan government was
seen as an ‘imperialist stooge’ engaged in the repression of fellow leftists. To retain
the PKI’s support, Sukarno had been forced into a direct military conflict with
Malaysia.30 The Philippines supported this attempt to disrupt the Malaysian
federation, fearing that otherwise Singaporean radicals would be able to move freely
into Borneo, through which they could subvert neighbouring Philippine provinces.31
It was not until this conflict was ended by Suharto’s coup in Indonesia, and a
common anti-communist axis was established in the sub-region, that ASEAN and its
sovereignty regime could take shape.
The ASEAN Declaration, signed at Bangkok in 1967, committed member-state
governments to abandoning mutually disruptive policies in favour of ‘strengthening
the economic and social stability of the region’.32 The Declaration was couched in
fairly banal terms, confining ASEAN to economic and cultural cooperation rather
than establishing an explicit anti-communist military alliance. However, as the Thai
foreign minister later recalled, Indonesia had insisted upon an ‘undeclared political
logic’ to guide ‘the development of anti-communist institutions and processes’.33 The
domestic imperative of anti-communist cooperation was reinforced by geopolitical
developments, with Britain scheduled to withdraw all its forces east of Suez by 1971
and the US war effort in Vietnam going increasingly badly. As Singapore’s Prime
Minister Lee Kuan Yew put it:
The unspoken objective was to gain strength through solidarity ahead of the
power vacuum that would come with an impending British and later a possible
US withdrawal… We had a common enemy – the communist threat in guerrilla
insurgencies, backed by North Vietnam, China and the Soviet Union. We needed
stability and growth to counter and deny the communists the social and
economic conditions for revolutions… While ASEAN’s declared objectives were
economic, social and cultural, all knew that progress in economic cooperation
would be slow. We were banding together more for political objectives, stability
and security.34
Based on this underlying logic, the Declaration laid the foundations for
ASEAN’s sovereignty regime. It expressed member-states’ determination ‘to ensure
stability and security from external interference in any form or manifestation in order
François Godement, The New Asian Renaissance: From Colonialism to the Post-Cold War, trans.
Elisabeth J. Parcell (London: Routledge, 1997), 205-7.
31 David Wurfel, 'Philippine Foreign Policy', in David Wurfel and Bruce Burton, (eds.), The
Political Economy of Foreign Policy in Southeast Asia (London: Macmillan, 1990), 160.
32 ASEAN, 'ASEAN Declaration', Bangkok, 8 August 1967, accessed at
http://www.aseansec.org/1212.htm, 27 March 2007.
33 Quoted in Shafiq Sit, 'ASEAN’s Diplomacy vis-à-vis Vietnam: A Study of Foreign Policy
Interaction on the Cambodian Problem, 1978-1990' (DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, 1995),
45.
34 Lee, Singapore Story, 369-370.
30
12
to preserve their national identities’.35 The supposed content of these ‘national
identities’ was made quite clear by Singapore’s foreign minister, who flatly asserted
that ASEAN’s ‘people have made it abundantly clear that communism is not for
them’.36 In reality, as even the brief foregoing discussion makes clear, the spatial
limits of ASEAN ‘nations’ and their political content were being hotly contested by
transnational forces resisting incorporation into a capitalist, territorially-based order.
As Huxley notes, the region’s communist insurgencies were ‘rooted firmly’ in
countries’ ‘internal social, economic, and political contradictions’ and the vast
disparities in wealth and power that state apparatuses were being used to defend.37
However, by presenting the content of ASEAN national identities as fixed and anticommunist, elites deliberately externalised radical politics as an alien, illegitimate
activity. It implied that leftist insurgencies could only be the result of ‘external
intervention’ and foreign ‘subversion’, delegitimising anyone proposing alterations
in the social order – even moderate liberals – while legitimising their violent
suppression and exclusion from state power. It also conveniently implied that those
who ‘benefited from [the] economic, political and social status quo need not
relinquish any of their privileges as part of a solution to the insurgency’.38
Insisting that politics should assume a national form and a non-communist
content also sought to prevent leftist forces from widening the scope of political
conflict beyond ‘national’ borders, where they could draw in aid and support from
their allies. Because ASEAN communist parties were ideologically Maoist and had
predominantly ethnic-Chinese memberships, China was particularly feared as an
external supporter of ‘subversion’. The People’s Republic of China had extended
citizenship to all ‘overseas Chinese’ after 1949. It also gave provided moral and
political support and training to Southeast Asian communist parties, plus some very
limited material assistance, like the provision of broadcast facilities in southern
China.39 ASEAN’s emphasis on ‘non-interference’ was thus a response to the
transnational nature of Asian communism – transnational due to its class- rather than
nation-based ideology and due to its association with a transnationally distributed
ethnic group. It identified support to communist forces as ‘external’ and therefore
illegitimate, while placing no such restrictions on the anti-communist forces
controlling ASEAN states, which continued to receive vastly disproportionate
external assistance from Western states throughout the Cold War.
The non-interference principle thus expressed the attempt of ASEAN state
managers to restrict the scope of socio-political conflict to a national level. Here they
could be contained and managed in a way that suited status quo interests:
geographically, within the artificial borders bequeathed by colonial powers; and
institutionally, within nation-state structures which systematically excluded leftist
forces. ‘Non-interference’ insisted that solidarities and loyalties must end at state
borders and that political life could be oriented only around ASEAN’s nationhyphen-states. The goal here was not to ‘preserve national identities’ but to create
space in order forcibly to manufacture them as part of an authoritarian, capitalist
ASEAN, 'ASEAN Declaration'.
S. Rajaratnam, 'Building Relations with ASEAN’s Communist Neighbours', in Kwa Chong
Guan, (ed.), S. Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality (Singapore: World Scientific
Publishing, 2006), 102.
37 Tim Huxley, Indochina and Insurgency in the ASEAN States, 1975-1981, Strategic and Defence
Studies Centre Working Paper no. 67 (Canberra: ANU, 1983), 7.
38 Ibid., 7-8.
39 See Halliday, Revolution, esp. 111-115, 139-140, 204.
35
36
13
state-making project. This project was described by the head of Thailand’s Internal
Security Operations Command as a process by which ‘we colonised our own
people’.40 This was particularly the case vis-à-vis social groups whose loyalty to the
Thai state was dubious at best and among whom the CPT was heavily based: ethnicLao in the northeast, Malay Muslims in the south, hill-tribes in the north. Likewise,
for Singapore’s foreign minister, nation-building ‘required that we perform some
sort of collective lobotomy’ on the population, to destroy transnational loyalties not
oriented towards the PAP-dominated state.41 To insist on ‘non-interference’ in these
violent and coercive processes was a highly partisan move designed to bolster the
position of dominant social forces and their chance of preserving territorially-based,
non-communist political orders.
In practical terms, ASEAN’s sovereignty regime had two distinct but clearly
related purposes. First, within ASEAN, the non-interference principle sought to
replace the mutually destabilising policies of the past with actions designed to
territorialise and shore up social order in their respective states. As Rajaratnam
explains, this was necessary because the region’s domestic orders were felt to be
‘interdependent’: ‘what happens in one ASEAN country can affect the fate of the rest
for better or worse’.42 Widespread belief in the domino theory led elites to feel that a
communist victory in one ASEAN state would only energise and grant strategic
advantages to radical forces elsewhere while demoralising the forces of the status
quo.43 Therefore, territorial and other disputes among ASEAN states, which had
previously given rise to interventionist practices, were shelved to avoid creating
instability that the left might exploit.44 Instead, ASEAN states began collaborating
militarily, politically and diplomatically against insurgent groups, particularly those
operating transnationally in border regions, and worked to sever external support for
rebel groups.45
The second, external, application of emphasising the non-interference principle
was to try to persuade anti-capitalist states to accept territorially-based politics as
legitimate and to stop sending support to ‘subversive’ elements within ASEAN
societies. This became increasingly important as it became clear that the US was
seeking to extricate itself from Vietnam. ASEAN issued a declaration on a Zone of
Peace, Freedom and Neutrality in 1971 and signed a Treaty of Amity and
Cooperation in 1976, just after the fall of Indochina to communism. Both documents
laid special emphasis on ‘non-interference’ and were ‘designed to conciliate the
victorious communist regimes by announcing a self-denying regional ordinance.
Quoted in John L. S. Girling, Thailand: Society and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1981), 263-264.
41 S. Rajaratnam, 'ASEAN and the Indochina Refugee Problem', in Kwa Chong Guan, (ed.), S.
Rajaratnam on Singapore: From Ideas to Reality (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2006),
165.
42 S. Rajaratnam, 'What is ASEAN About?', in Kwa Chong Guan, (ed.), S. Rajaratnam on
Singapore: From Ideas to Reality (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2006), 93.
43 This is a common and not unfounded concern felt by counter-revolutionary elites in many
historical periods. See Halliday, Revolution.
44 Michael Antolik, ASEAN and the Diplomacy of Accommodation (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1990),
74-76.
45 'National Intelligence Estimate', 1966, in FRUS, 1964-1968, vol. XXVI, 574; Antolik, ASEAN,
78-81, 54-60; Kusuma Snitwongse, 'ASEAN's Security Cooperation: Searching for a Regional
Order', Pacific Review 8:3 (1995), 521; 'Telegram from Secretary of State Rogers to Department
of State', 1969, in FRUS, 1969-1976, vol. XX, 589; 'Memorandum of Conversation', Henry
Kissinger and Adam Malik 1975, accessed at DNSA, CKT01690, 7 March 2007.
40
14
This, it was hoped, would appease these states and persuade them to join ASEAN in
establishing a collaborative regional environment’.46
However, as we shall now turn to explore, this second application was far less
successful. Far from adhering to non-interference themselves, ASEAN states had
intervened in Indochina to prevent communist forces coming to power. These forces
were not prepared to simply forget this fact and help to enhance capitalist stability in
ASEAN countries. ASEAN states thus continued to resort to interventionist practices
abroad to help manage social order at home.
ASEAN’s Cold War Interventions
The highly partisan nature of the region’s sovereignty regime is forcefully
underlined by examining the continued practice of interventions by ASEAN states in
their near abroad. Each intervention was clearly guided by the motive of
‘containment’; they sought to create social, spatial, and military buffers between
radical forces in ASEAN states and elsewhere, in order to insulate leftist and other
rebel groups from support and resources from outside their territories. The following
sub-sections focus on interventions in Burma, the Second Indochina War, East Timor,
and Cambodia.
(i) Burma
Burma was a significant site of Cold War intervention after a precipitate British
withdrawal in 1947, followed by the assassination of most of the country’s nationalist
leadership, left the country in chaos, riven by communist and ethnic insurgency.
Following its defeat in the Chinese civil war, a Guomindang army also retreated into
Burma, establishing a de facto state within Burma’s Shan province. The Guomindang
were actively supported by the US, in league with Thailand, with the Bangkok-based
Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) forging contacts with the nationalist
Chinese remnants and smuggling arms and other materiel.47 The Burmese
government described northern Thailand as ‘a rear base’ for the Guomindang and
other rebel groups, who were manipulated by the Thais into a military ‘buffer’ to
prevent Burmese and Thai communists from joining forces.48
The threat of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) and CPT combining only
intensified as time wore on. With the collapse of Cambodia and Laos’s communist
regimes in 1975, support to the CPT from those countries escalated substantially.
Since CPB victory in Burma could not be ruled out, the Thai state faced the prospect
of encirclement by communist forces. By this time, international outcry had forced
the Guomindang armies to retreat from Burma. While some were removed to
Taiwan, Thailand resettled others in its northern territories. They served as a
‘virulently communist border militia’ to keep the two countries’ communist parties
geographically separate, and helped to police/ terrorise citizens of dubious loyalties
in northern Thailand and to guard development projects designed to regain popular
allegiance. Radical Burmese rebels were expelled from Thailand, while the anticommunist Karen National Union was used in a similar way to the Guomindang, its
46 David M. Jones and Michael L. R. Smith, 'ASEAN, Asian Values and Southeast Asian
Security in the New World Order', Contemporary Security Policy 18:3 (1997), 134-5.
47 Martin Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity (London: Zed Books, 1991), 120,
172, 189, 213-6.
48 Ibid., 153.
15
leader describing it as a ‘foreign legion’ for Thailand. In return, the Thai army
engaged in black market trade and supplied weapons and ammunition to allied rebel
groups.49
This ‘buffer’ policy continued until the collapse of the CPB in 1988. Its clear
intent was to contain the CPB within Burma’s borders in order to prevent it assisting
the CPT in its struggle against the Thai state. Various groups were used as anticommunist gendarmes to create a physical buffer zone between the two communist
parties and to police suspect social groups in Thailand itself. By fomenting instability
in Burma, Thai elites sought to stabilise capitalist social order at home.
(ii) The Second Indochina War
Alongside this intervention in Burma, Thailand and other ASEAN states also
intervened in the Second Indochina War alongside the US to try to prevent
communist forces coming to power and to retain a ‘buffer’ of anti-communist states
between themselves and communist North Vietnam. Thailand and the Philippines,
both SEATO members, sent troops and support units to South Vietnam and hosted
US bases on their territory. Thailand took a particularly active role in covert
operations in Indochina. Bangkok supported right-wing guerrilla movements
fighting the neutral Cambodian and Laotian governments, hosting them on Thai
soil.50 Thailand also sponsored repeated assassination attempts against Cambodia’s
ruler, Prince Sihanouk, whose policy on communism was considered insufficiently
repressive.51 Malaysia also supported the Saigon regime. It provided jungle warfare
training to over 5,000 South Vietnamese officers and counter-insurgency training to
US troops, sent surplus military equipment left over from the ‘Emergency’ (including
641 Armoured Personnel Carriers and 56,000 rifles), and provided civil assistance to
the regime, including transportation equipment, cholera vaccines and flood relief.52
The root of these interventions was the ‘domino theory’ belief that the fall of
non-communist regimes in Indochina would inexorably lead to the communist
overthrow of ASEAN regimes, too, which only heightened as the war dragged on.
Lee Kuan Yew had told the American vice-president in 1966 that if US forces failed in
Vietnam, ‘there would be fighting in Thailand within one-and-a-half to two years, in
Malaysia shortly thereafter, and within three years, “I would be hanging in the
public square”’.53 As US defeat in Indochina loomed ever closer, Southeast Asia’s
communist movements escalated their activities. The 1970 cessation of bombing in
Indochina led to a revolutionary upswing across the region. China and Vietnam
began aiding comrades in Laos and Indochina while a road was build to the Thai
border to facilitate aid to the CPT. Emergency rule in Malaysia from 1969 was
followed by the establishment of dictatorships in Thailand and the Philippines in
Ibid., 293-9.
Huxley, Indochina and Insurgency, 16; Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War After the War
(New York: Macmillan, 1986), 380.
51 David Chandler, A History of Cambodia 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview, 2000), 192. Rather like
US intervention in Indochina and Indonesia, this only served to push Sihanouk leftwards.
52 'Memorandum of Conversation', Senior Indonesian officials, including Malik, and top US
State Department officials, subject: 'Military Assistance for Cambodia' 1970, in FRUS, 19691976, vol. XX, 640-641.
53 'Memorandum from Vice-President Humphrey to President Johnson', 1966, in FRUS, 19641968, vol. XXVI, 636.
49
50
16
1971 and 1972 respectively, both explicitly designed to combat domestic
communism.
While maintaining a thin veneer of non-alignment, Suharto’s New Order
regime now also sought to intervene to contain communism in Indochina.
Indonesian military intelligence encouraged a US-backed coup in Cambodia by
General Lon Nol which overthrew Sihanouk.54 Jakarta sent covert arms shipments to
the new regime and offered to act as an intermediary for further US aid which would
‘otherwise compromise Cambodian neutrality’. Indonesia provided Cambodian
troops with counter-insurgency training, hosted a conference in Jakarta to rally
foreign aid for Lon Nol, and lobbied diplomatically for a ‘peacekeeping’ force to be
deployed in Cambodia.55 Indonesia offered its own ‘peacekeeping’ troops to ‘try to
help South Vietnam develop the ability to resist a Communist takeover’.56 Suharto
explained that these efforts were necessary to prevent Indochina falling to
communism and serving as base to subvert ASEAN countries.57
Suharto had in fact wished to go even further, planning to ‘despatch an
expeditionary force to aid the Lon Nol government’,58 to which he unsuccessfully
sought to recruit ASEAN forces, a suggestion rejected only on pragmatic grounds.59
However, ASEAN nonetheless offered political to Saigon and Phnom Penh’s anticommunist regimes by admitting their representatives to ASEAN meetings from
1971 onwards, making it quite clear which side it was backing. Thailand maintained
a military approach, asking Nixon to bomb Laos from Thai bases and calling for fullscale SEATO intervention to support Lon Nol. Bangkok repeatedly deployed a covert
artillery unit and ‘special guerrilla units’ comprising 20,000 soldiers in Laos to thwart
the advances of the communist Pathet Laos, and also trained Cambodians to fight for
Lon Nol.60 A full-scale invasion of Cambodia and Laos was even contemplated.61
Michael Leifer, Indonesia’s Foreign Policy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 132.
‘Telegram from the Embassy in Indonesia to the Department of State’, 2 April 1970, in
FRUS, 1969-1976, vol. XX, 617; ‘Telegram from the Embassy in Indonesia to the Department of
State’, 15 April 1970, ibid., 619; ‘Memorandum of Conversation’, op. cit., subject: ‘Military
Assistance for Cambodia’, 26 May 1970, ibid., 634-635; ‘Memorandum of Conversation’, op.
cit., subject: ‘Diplomatic Initiatives on Cambodia’, ibid., 640-641; ‘Memorandum of
Conversation’, 640; ‘Memorandum of Conversation’, General Sumitro, Kissinger, 1 July 1970,
ibid., 663-668; ‘Memorandum from the Deputy Assistant to the President for National
Security Affairs (Haig) to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger)’, 7
July 1970, in ibid., 668-669; ‘Memorandum of Conversation’, General Sumitro, Kissinger, 8
July 1970, ibid., 673-674; ‘Indonesian Support to Cambodia’, Top Secret Cable from State
Department to US Embassy in Jakarta, 24 April 1970, accessed at DNSA, CVW00444, 6 March
2007.
56 'Telegram from Secretary of State Rogers to Department of State', 587.
57 ‘Telegram from the Embassy in Indonesia to the Department of State’, 19 April 1970, in
FRUS, 1969-1976, vol. XX, 622; ‘Memorandum of Conversation’, Nixon, Suharto, Kissinger, 26
May 1970, ibid., 634-635.
58 Leifer, Indonesia’s Foreign Policy, 133.
59 Interview with Barry Desker, Singapore, January 2008.
60 ‘Memorandum of Conversation’, Nixon, Kissinger, Thai Prime Minister Thanom and Thai
Foreign Minister Thanat, 29 July 1969, in FRUS, 1969-1976, vol. XX, 39; ‘Memorandum from
the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon’, 20
October 1969, in ibid., 66; ‘Telegram from the Embassy in Thailand to the Department of
State’, 3 March 1970, in ibid., 114; ‘Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National
Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon’, subject: ‘Thai Forces for Laos’, 26 March
1970, in ibid., 122-123; Daniel J. Lawler, ‘Editorial Note’, in ibid., 132; ‘Backchannel Message
from the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (Johnson) to the Ambassador to
54
55
17
None of these efforts were sufficient to prevent communist victory across
Indochina in 1975, which gave a boost to the region’s revolutionary movements
comparable to the impact of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu on anti-colonial
struggles worldwide and caused near hysteria in ASEAN capitals.62 Suharto warned
US President Ford that ‘insurgency has now reached the national capitals in Thailand
and Malaysia’ and constituted ‘a greater danger than an overt physical threat’ since
growing ‘Chinese’ influence in Malaysia could ‘bring the Communists right to our
threshold’.63 This fear of toppling dominoes was the context for the next intervention
we shall consider – Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor.
(iii) East Timor
East Timor, a small half-island in the midst of the Indonesian archipelago, had been a
Portuguese colony for five centuries by 1974, when following a left-wing military
coup in Lisbon, Portugal announced it would rapidly decolonise the territory.
Although the Indonesian government formally pledged support for the
decolonisation process, it immediately began taking steps to absorb East Timor.
Indonesian military intelligence had already ruled out allowing the colony to become
independent in a study in 1972. They feared that impoverished and under-developed
East Timor would seek aid from Moscow or Beijing upon independence, thus
creating a ‘communist’ enclave directly adjacent to Indonesian territory. This would
destabilise Indonesian society by smuggling exiled communists back into Indonesia
and aiding separatist insurgencies.64
This fear was only exacerbated by later events in East Timor, the wider
region, and Indonesia itself. Within the colony, the Frente Revolucionária de TimorLeste Independente (FRETILIN) quickly emerged as the leading pro-independence
political party. FRETILIN was modelled directly on left-wing anti-imperialist
movements in other Portuguese colonies (particularly FRELIMO in Mozambique)
and adopted a radical agenda on land reform and economic redistribution that was
Thailand (Unger)’, 20 May 1970, in ibid., 133-135; ‘Backchannel Message from the
Ambassador to Thailand (Unger) to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs
(Johnson) ‘, 21 May 1970, in ibid., 136-139; ‘Memorandum from John H. Holdridge of the
National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs
(Kissinger)’, 5 June 1970, in ibid., 141-142; ‘Backchannel Message from the Ambassador to
Thailand (Unger) to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (Johnson); subject:
Bangkok 149’, 18 September 1970, in ibid., 183; ‘Letter from the President’s Assistant for
National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to the Ambassador to Thailand (Unger)’, 27 October
1970, in ibid., 197; ‘Memorandum from Secretary of Defense Laird to President Nixon’, 16
September 1972, in ibid., 376-377; ‘Memorandum from the President’s Assistant for National
Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon’, 25 September 1972, in ibid., 382-383; Edward
C. Keefer, ‘Editorial Note’, in FRUS, 1964-1968, vol. XXVI, 117, n. 2.
61 John L. S. Girling, 'Regional Security in Southeast Asia', in K. S. Sandhu, et al., (eds.), The
ASEAN Reader (Singapore: ISEAS, 1992), 369-371.
62 Jerry M. Silverman, 'The Domino Theory: Alternatives to a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy', Asian
Survey 15:11 (1975), 936. For figures on the size and impact of Thai and Philippine communist
movements, for instance, see Girling, Thailand, 257; Richard J. Kessler, Rebellion and Repression
in the Philippines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 56, 82.
63 US State Department, 'Ford-Suharto Meeting', Secret Cable from US Embassy in Jakarta to
State Department, 6 December 1975, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.882004&res_dat=xri:dnsa&rft_dat=xri:dnsa:article:CKT01843, accessed 11 March 2007.
64 Bilveer Singh, East Timor, Indonesia and the World: Myths and Realities, 2nd ed. (Kuala
Lumpur: ADPR Consult, 1996), 23-102.
18
profoundly alarming to the Indonesian establishment.65 Within the region, Suharto
feared that his neighbours were dominoes waiting to be toppled by the tide of
communism sweeping in from Indochina. An independent East Timor could only
deepen the region’s instability. The regime also feared that social order at home
could only be undermined by the inspiration or assistance provided to progressive
and/or separatist forces by the establishment of a socialist democracy on Indonesia’s
own border.66 These anxieties were heightened in 1975 by the worst domestic unrest
the Suharto regime had faced since 1967, as protestors rampaged through Jakarta to
protest authoritarianism and corruption in the wake of the state oil company’s
bankruptcy, apparently with the support of some leading regime figures.67 This
perfect storm of red scares convinced Suharto that East Timor could not be allowed
to become independent.
Jakarta thus moved to absorb the territory into the Republic of Indonesia
where its population could be policed and its left-wing elements crushed in a way
commensurate with territorialised, capitalist social order in the wider archipelago.
Initially, Jakarta sponsored an integrationist political party to cultivate local support
for incorporation into Indonesia. However, this strategy failed miserably. Jakarta
therefore fomented civil conflict in the territory in order to create a pretext for
intervention. This included spreading propaganda that Soviet, Vietnamese and
Chinese forces were operating in East Timor, smuggling arms and training
FRETILIN, which was denounced as a ‘communist’ group plotting to seize power by
force.68 The União Democrática Timorense (UDT), FRETILIN’s conservative, less
popular, rival party, was courted and threatened by Jakarta, and a Malaysian envoy
reinforced the message that ASEAN would not tolerate the emergence of a radical
state in the region.69 In August 1975, UDT attempted to grab control by force to preempt an Indonesian invasion, but was comprehensively defeated in a two-week
struggle by FRETILIN. UDT forces retreated to Indonesian West Timor, where they
were forced to sign a petition for integration with Indonesia.70 Claiming that the civil
war was still raging, Jakarta then invaded the territory, claiming that its forces were
merely ‘volunteers’ crossing the border to stop FRETILIN ‘atrocities’, a fiction that
Malaysia sought to help sustain by providing supplies of small arms that were not
traceable to Indonesia.71 Jakarta was soon bogged down in fierce fighting and
launched a full-scale invasion to annex the territory.
With the brief exception of Singapore, which only abstained from
commenting or voting on the issue for a year, ASEAN states vocally backed this
intervention. Malaysia was particularly supportive, broadcasting its support for
Indonesian actions and covertly supplying arms to Jakarta, including jets that were
Peter Carey, 'The Forging of a Nation: East Timor', in Peter Carey and G. Carter Bentley,
(eds.), East Timor at the Crossroads: The Forging of a Nation (London: Cassell, 1995), 5.
66 Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong, The War Against East Timor (London: Zed Books,
1984), 7; James Dunn, Timor: A People Betrayed (Adelaide: Jacaranda Press, 1983), 110.
67 Benedict R. Anderson, 'East Timor and Indonesia: Some Implications', in Peter Carey and G.
Carter Bentley, (eds.), East Timor at the Crossroads: The Forging of a Nation (London: Cassell,
1995).
68 Dunn, Timor, 88, 118, 166.
69 Budiardjo and Liong, East Timor, 14.
70 José Ramos Horta, Funu: The Unfinished Saga of East Timor (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press,
1987), 187.
71 Dunn, Timor, 219, 228.
65
19
used to bomb FRETILIN positions in the mountains.72 Prime Minister Razak
endorsed Indonesian claims to have acted on behalf of regional stability, arguing that
if Timor stood ‘on its own and becomes a Communist stronghold, it will endanger
the security in the Southeast Asian region’.73 The other ASEAN states felt similarly,
and in response to international outrage they argued that the territory had now
exercised self-determination and was thus an ‘internal’ affair of Indonesia’s, lobbying
to have the issue removed from the agenda at UN and Non-Aligned Movement
meetings. They thus assisted Indonesian efforts to constrain the scope of conflict
within East Timor from an international to a national level, where resistance could be
crushed using military force – efforts that succeeded in 1982 when the issue was
essentially erased from the international agenda.
(iv) Cambodia74
Counter-revolutionary panic subsided in Southeast Asia after 1975, largely because
the communist victors of Indochina quickly began fighting amongst themselves.
Cambodia’s xenophobic Khmer Rouge regime feared that Vietnam was seeking to
establish an Indochinese Federation under Hanoi’s leadership. Backed by China, it
was soon embroiled in bitter relations with Vietnam and, by extension, its close ally
Laos, soon escalating into vicious military raids into Vietnamese territory. ASEAN
was the principal beneficiary of these divisions as the communist states sought to
improve relations with their erstwhile enemies to avoid conflicts on two fronts. It
was even felt that Cambodia might resume its former place as a buffer against
revolutionary Vietnam. The Thai military reached a grisly modus vivendi with Pol Pot
whereby the Khmer Rouge severed their aid to the CPT and Thai forces shot anyone
trying to flee Cambodia. However, in December 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia
alongside an indigenous liberation front, toppling the Khmer Rouge regime and
installing a friendly replacement. This removed any semblance of a buffer between
ASEAN and the vanguard of socialist revolution in Southeast Asia and raised the
spectre of falling dominoes once more.
ASEAN’s response to this latest crisis was to isolate Vietnam diplomatically
to avoid it achieving a fait accompli and to rebuild the Khmer Rouge and other antiVietnamese guerrilla groups as a buffer zone between Thailand and Hanoi’s forces.
ASEAN successfully rallied Western and non-aligned states in the UN to condemn
the invasion and refuse to seat the new Cambodian government, reserving the
country’s UN seat for the deposed Khmer Rouge regime. Meanwhile, ASEAN
worked with China to rebuild the forces of the KR and the anti-communist guerrilla
groups, the remnants of which had fled to Thailand and were now based on Thai
soil. Bangkok shipped arms worth $100m a year to these forces, and Thai forces
covered Khmer Rouge raids into Cambodian territory, allowing the guerrillas to
rebuild and fight the Vietnamese and new Cambodian government. Meanwhile,
ASEAN campaigned for international aid for Cambodian refugees, which was
systematically appropriated by the guerrilla armies. The UN system was essentially
72 Cees Van Dijk, 'East Timor (1)', Review of Indonesian and Malayan Affairs 10:1 (1976); Sonny
Inbaraj, East Timor: Blood and Tears in ASEAN (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1995), ch. 2-4;
Sue Rabbitt Roff, Timor’s Anschluss: Indonesian and Australian Foreign Policy in East Timor, 19741976 (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 54, 61-62, 66; Budiardjo and Liong, East Timor, 14.
73 Roff, Anschluss, 21.
74 For references and a lengthier exposition of the following section, see Lee Jones, 'ASEAN's
Intervention in Cambodia: From Cold War to Conditionality', Pacific Review 20:4 (2007).
20
used to keep the war inside Cambodia going for a decade, thus pinning down
Vietnam’s troops in gruelling counter-insurgency operations and diverting its
resources and energies away from assisting leftist forces within ASEAN states.
In the longer term, ASEAN sought to lever its non-communist allies back to
power in Phnom Penh and secure the perpetual neutralisation of Cambodia in order
to restore its status as a buffer. In league with Washington, ASEAN states armed and
supplied the anti-communist factions of the Cambodian resistance in order to
strengthen their hand when the end of the conflict came. ASEAN also forced the
factions to join together in a new coalition government-in-exile to boost their
collective diplomatic standing and ‘dilute’ the Khmer Rouge. The Association also
issued a raft of peace proposals in the early 1980s, all of which revolved around the
withdrawal of Vietnamese troops and the neutralisation of Cambodia. These
proposals were enshrined in the declaration of the International Conference on
Kampuchea in 1981 and became the basis of the eventual settlement signed in 1991
after more than a decade of civil war fomented by China and ASEAN.
ASEAN’s intervention in Cambodia was largely successful in achieving its
aims. By preventing the stabilisation of the new Cambodian government, pinning
down Vietnamese and Cambodian forces, and reconstituting a buffer along the Thai
border, ASEAN managed to contain revolution in Indochina and insulate its
insurgent groups from external assistance. Without this intervention, Vietnam, Laos
and Cambodia would have been free to resume their friendly and supportive
relations with the CPT, which had only been disrupted by intramural tensions within
Indochina. Perhaps even more importantly, in exchange for ASEAN’s support, China
terminated its support for ASEAN’s communist insurgencies, and supplied
hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Thai government. Coupled with
renewed US aid, this helped the Thai military to defeat the CPT by 1986. The
stabilisation of capitalist social order in Thailand, a crucial ‘domino’ that did not fall,
in turn stabilised the rest of ASEAN.
Conclusion
This paper has argued that we should view sovereignty and intervention as
technologies of power, as tools wielded by specific social forces to help define the
scope of political conflicts. Sovereignty can be invoked to insist upon a national scale
of conflict, closing down and delegitimising transnational conflicts and linkages and
thereby affecting the balance between social forces struggling against one another for
power and control over resources. It is often invoked flexibly by dominant forces, to
exclude assistance to their enemies while granting it to themselves. Intervention is
used in an opposite fashion, to shift the balance of forces by expanding the scope of
conflict, bringing in new actors and resources that may tilt the struggle one way or
another. Because the line where sovereignty is drawn is intimately tied up with the
fate of various forces in struggle, it is inherently partisan, and needs to be analysed in
relation to the interests, ideologies and strategies of these forces within concrete
historical, political and economic contexts.
As the ASEAN case studies showed, sovereignty and intervention have
particularly important roles to play in the management of social, political and
economic order during periods of ‘internationalised civil war’ like the Cold War.
Perhaps more than at any other time, at these moments, sovereignty and intervention
appear as two sides of the same coin, as two complementary strategies used in a
coherent fashion to support a particular political project. ASEAN’s principle of non21
interference in states’ internal affairs, and the apparently contradictory practice of
intervention in the Association’s near abroad, both aimed at a singular goal: the
maintenance of capitalist social order in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia.
The patterns revealed from these case studies illustrate why a historicalsociological approach to intervention is more revealing than the most-cited
mainstream alternative in International Relations theory, Stephen Krasner’s realist
treatment of sovereignty as ‘organized hypocrisy’. At first glance, the material
discussed above seems to confirm Krasner’s argument that sovereignty is discarded
whenever the ‘utility’ to states of doing so outweigh the costs.75 However, the
historical-sociological approach offers at least two important, related advances over
realist theory. The first is that it can identify historical patterns of sovereignty/
intervention (sovereignty regimes), rather than merely chronicling an endless litany
of violations of sovereignty. Krasner’s cost-benefit analysis approach gives the
unrealistic impression of a ‘free for all’ in which international norms and practices
fluctuate wildly depending on the immediate benefits to policymakers. Historical
analysis reveals that, in reality, sovereignty regimes, while historically variable and
evolving, are relatively stable.
The second advance helps explain this stability. Krasner argues that
intervention occurs when it serves state interests, but his realist ontology is such that
he provides no explanation of what these interests are beyond vague, unspecific
references to states’ ‘constituents’.76 The approach outlined here, by contrast, traces
interventions to the interests, ideology and strategies of specific social forces
operating through states, and makes it clear that the operation of sovereignty and
intervention has highly partisan implications for different domestic groups. It can
therefore provide a more concrete explanation of specific interventions. Furthermore,
it can explain why regimes of sovereignty and intervention are historically patterned:
they relate to social structures that are relatively durable and to social interests and
ideologies that are often deeply entrenched.
Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999), 223, 24, 7, 64.
76 Ibid., 7.
75
22
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