Southeast Asia: The evolution of a regional concept

We can trace the contingent emergence of the regional concept of Southeast Asia to WWII. WWII turned Southeast Asia from a collection of colonial names into a distinct region. It was created to give Dickie Mountbatten nothing to do (see The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography by Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen). Too well connected to the British royal family and too self-aggrandising to be sidelined, Dickie – the ‘Master of Disaster’ to his colleagues – was given the Southeast Asia Command (SAC) on the understanding that it would mark the absent presence of Britain in the Pacific. The war against Japan would essentially be fought by the USA, China, Australia, and New Zealand.

After the war, the concept took on a life of its own – it was a convenient term for a region that had once been called the East Indies, Indochina, and other names, all of which underlined the influence of surrounding civilisations but implicitly denied Southeast Asia an identity of its own. A geographer concluded: ‘Southeast Asia turned out to be an aggregate of nations – individually distinct and collectively a battleground in, first, the Pacific War, then the Cold War, including two Indochina wars, and finally, in Cambodia, a Sino-Soviet “proxy war”’ (see Donald K. Emmerson, “South East Asia” – What’s in a Name. Journal of South Asian Studies xv, pp. 1–21).

Southeast Asia’s boundaries are somewhat arbitrary. Sri Lanka shares deep cultural roots with the region but is excluded. The Philippines are included, though this country has been mainly influenced by Western civilisations since the Spanish conquest and culturally shares only a small Islamic presence with the rest of Southeast Asia (Ancient migrations have left cultural traces everywhere. Yet, as a first-order approximation, one might argue that commonalities have been overridden by extraneous differences (see Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power and Belief by Anthony Reid). The division between South Asia and Southeast Asia runs directly through the territories of numerous small-scale societies. As a result, liberation movements have kept the regions in upheaval. Anthropologists have argued that above the 300m line, one encounters peoples who have developed ‘the art of not being governed’. The territory associated with them – it has been called Zomia – is probably larger than Europe (see The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by James C. Scott).

Admittedly, Southeast Asia is an extreme case of a ‘region’ that has historically been interstitial to other civilisations. I’ve put ‘region’ in quote marks because it is not an objective geographical term, but a mental construct – a meta-geography.

We continuously create meta-geographies. Lewis and Wigen define it as ‘a set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world: the often unconscious frameworks [that] organise studies of history, anthropology, economics, political sciences’ and yes, diplomacy. Nevertheless, these writers show quite clearly how the concepts have evolved over time to suit various political agendas. The clustering of human activity into ‘regions’ – by continent, by religion, by civilisation, by nation-state – is an attempt to compress an often chaotic wealth of information about societies and human activities by neatly ordering it through nesting (akin to Russian matrioska dolls)¹. Examples include ‘the West and the Rest’ or ‘the (democratic) West and the (autocratic) Orient’ (this ‘Orient’ includes Morocco and thus begins west of Great Britain; such is the plasticity of meta-geographies). Asia’s boundaries have mutated continuously, and the world of ‘China’ was meant to include Korea and Japan at times – a sort of derivative imperialism; and Tartary was once the land of Gog and Magog.

Once accepted, such meta-geographies are difficult to dislodge or undo. They are myths that beget myths (I’ve always been a contrarian: when my boss wanted to propagate the slogan ‘Europe, the Continent of Technology’, I returned the proposal to him after having scratched out the term ‘continent’ and replaced it with ‘peninsula’; it killed the proposal). They may linger on and create acrimonious disputes like ‘where are the boundaries of Europe?’ which can be eternal, because there is no unique criterion for decision. At the UN, membership in regional groupings will reflect conventions (and political expediency), rather than logic, and create disputes.

Lewis and Wigen conclude: ‘It is no accident that the global geographical framework in use today is essentially a cartographic celebration of European power. After centuries of imperialism, the presumptuous worldview of a once-dominant metropole has become part of the intellectual furniture of the world’. This statement is not to be read as polemic, but as fact – the past informs our thinking, particularly our visual thinking, in many subtle and subconscious ways.

What’s more ‘unchanging’ than a mountain or the location of a city?² Conflating physical geography and meta-geographies on the same map suggests notions of a stable, hierarchical world order; the net of boundaries that have emerged with nation-states – and often hug physical features at variance with history – reinforces this sense of permanence. Such projections onto geographical maps give meta-geographies an aura of permanence and unassailability they lack, for they are meant to reflect the ever-changing evolution of human activity: ‘World regions are artefacts of human history’.

So far, meta-geographies were merely a means to an end; what mattered was to put in place a workable structure around which to organise policy. Or put another way: it suited the political intent of the ‘organiser’. When using old regional maps or their terminologies, diplomats may be unwittingly accepting and promoting policies long vanished or implicitly projecting environmental and geographical determinisms long discredited.

Whether ‘objective’ meta-geographies will ever emerge is a question I need not decide. One comment may be appropriate, though. In an ever more globalised and mobile world, the cultural, political, and economic are increasingly disjoined. ‘Rather than perpetuating straightforward Western hegemony, late-twentieth-century capitalism appears to be characterised by both multi-centric growth and fractioned economic differentiation.’ Indeed, the realm of the multinational company and that of the nation-state are diverging, and a map of the ‘financial world’ would ignore nation-state borders altogether. Meta-geographies should reflect this dynamic, not constrain it.

As tools, meta-geographies are useful, as long as they faithfully follow human activities. Always check the use-by date.

1. A recent example is Samuel Huntington’s division of the world into ‘civilisations’, which are supposed to clash. His ‘civilisations’ are based on ‘religion’. This meta-geographical ordering of the world has now entered the public discourse: though few have read the book or verified the concepts, many unthinkingly and uncritically use his ordering.

2. Not even a geographical map is innocent. Since the world is a sphere and the map is flat, projections inevitably imply distortions. Current maps grossly distort the relative size of continents by stretching high latitudes. Whether to place Eurasia or the Americas in the centre of the map is not innocent, nor is relegating Australia to the bottom right (after all, why should north be on top?).

The post was first published on DeepDip.