Cornell Studies in Political Economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2013. xviii, 350 pp. (Tables, B&W illus., maps.) US$26.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8014-7736-2.
Second editions, like film sequels, rarely equal their predecessors. The Making of Southeast Asiais a significant exception. Acharya’s 2000 book, The Quest for Identity: International Relations of Southeast Asia was regarded as a landmark by many of the leading figures in Southeast Asian studies, not all of whom agreed with its argument or perspective. This second edition is almost twice its length and updates the narrative through 2011. It covers a wider swathe of issues and writers and elaborates a more refined theoretical framework. This time it will attract attention among scholars and practitioners of international relations as well as area studies experts.
Elegantly written in accessible prose, Making is a compelling cross-over volume at a moment when inter-disciplinary, theoretically innovative, imaginatively researched, and policy relevant scholarship is proliferating. Intellectually challenging and politically important, it is a double-spanned bridge across rivers that separate international relations from Southeast Asia area studies and, in addition, that separate the study of international relations from its practice. Part historical and ideational narrative, part summary and reflexive assessment of the academic interpreters of the developments he analyzes, the main argument remains the radically simple one that Southeast Asia can only be understood as something greater than the sum of its national parts. It is anything but a term of convenience or an empty slogan like “unity in diversity.” Acharya takes the ideas of region, regionalism, regional interactions and regional identity seriously and with precision. Simultaneously a region-in-being and a region-in-the-making, Southeast Asia is the product of a centuries-long, conscious and unfinished effort to create a regional identity that in Acharya’s words must be understood from a “holistic regional perspective” (29).
The empirical chapters start with the pre-colonial period and ideas like mandala, galactic polity, solar polity and theatre state that differentiate the state systems and norms of interaction in Europe and Southeast Asia. His story continues through the periods of colonialism then postwar nationalism, decolonization, the Cold War and great power rivalry, the failure of multiple regional and extra-regional institutions, the birth and evolution of ASEAN, the Vietnam and Indo-China wars, a changing regional production system and political economy, the reemergence of the idea of “One Southeast Asia as a matter of faith” (215), and the multi-pronged effort to move beyond collaboration to community building.
The sections on ASEAN focus on its origins and evolution, its successes and failures, the recurring problems of difference and internal tensions, and the new challenges it faces in the rise of China and India, other regional formations, and new transnational challenges related to pandemics, haze, climate change and democratization and the need for “post-sovereignty” norms. Portions of the story are well known but what distinguishes this account is the singularity of focus, the pattern he sees, and the nuanced treatment of ideas, material conditions, key individuals and their dreams, institutional and normative flux, and the interaction of internal and external forces.
As both an observer and player in much of the recent ASEAN and ASEAN-centred diplomacy and debate, Acharya has had the benefit of a front row seat and multiple intellectual homes in think tanks and universities in Australia, Singapore, Canada, the UK and the United States. The sparkle in the book is not only the originality of the argument; it is the creative use and synthesis of the best scholarship by writers inside and outside Southeast Asia, historians, anthropologists, geographers, political economists, political scientists, and international relations specialists among them. As synopsis, Making is of similar character to the multiple editions of John Fairbank’s The United States and China.
Acharya is a measured advocate for a Southeast Asian identity and institutions even as he sees their fragile and evolving nature and the recurrent possibility of their unraveling. While much of his account focuses on state-centred actors, only a few of them enlightened democrats, this is more than billiard-ball realism. Recognizing that ASEAN is largely an elite-driven process, his heart and hope lies equally with the new forces of civil society and democratization—the foundations of what he calls “participatory regionalism”—and an agenda that includes collaborative efforts to deal with traditional and human security concerns in the face of rising trans-national pressures.
Acharya is also passionate about the twin processes of indigenization. First, over the broad haul, Southeast Asian regionalism is “indigenously constructed rather than exogenously determined” through socialization processes distinctive to the region (294). Second, he emphasizes the indigenization of knowledge, taking seriously ideas and experience that have developed within the region and how they connect with policy makers and scholars outside it, all in the attempt “to remedy the essentially Euro- and Americanocentric nature of contemporary international relations theories and concepts” (52).
The debates that the book will engender promise to be fierce and constructive. Making is quickly becoming required reading for graduate courses around the Pacific. It can also be used in undergraduate teaching, especially chapters 3 through 8. The photographs are superb and bring to mind the next pedagogical frontier: connecting text and video archives as an integrated whole. And it is just the libretto that often-puzzled Western diplomats and political leaders need for understanding the history, players, and motives they encounter in a frenetic world of ASEAN diplomacy, of which they are a welcome but peripheral part.
Paul Evans
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 176-178