The elusiveness of regional order: Leifer, the English school and Southeast Asia

Abstract

‘Regional order’ was Michael Leifer's yardstick of choice to assess the international relations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Leifer's recurrent theme was how elusive, and at times how illusory, regional order was for Southeast Asia. The elusiveness of regional order is attributed to ASEAN's lack of a set of genuinely shared assumptions about their interrelationships with each other and external states. This article challenges Leifer's portrait of a Southeast Asia devoid of regional order. I argue that Leifer's notion of order is theoretically underdeveloped and methodologically imprecise, allowing the analyst to see disorder in every minor perturbation in the region. I propose replacing ‘regional order’ with ‘peace and stability’, the preferred terms of the discourse by ASEAN's policy elites. By the latter criteria, ASEAN and the Asia-Pacific, contrary to the skeptics, have made impressive progress in the last forty years.

Keywords:

• Michael Leifer
• regional order
• ASEAN
• shared assumptions
• English school

Acknowledgements

For comments on an earlier draft, I would like to thank the participants of the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies/London School of Economics and Political Science Conference on `The unending search for regional order: essays in memory of Michael Lefier', 13–14 May 2004, Marina Mandarin Hotel, Singapore.

Notes

1. A rough count of how frequently the term ‘regional order’ is used by Leifer in four of his writings used for this article reveals the following: seven times in his eight-page ‘The Asean states: no common outlook’ (1973); eight times in his twelve-page chapter ‘The balance of power and regional order’ (1986); twelve times in the first chapter of ASEAN and the Security of South-East Asia (1989), and eight times in the first chapter of his Adelphi paper on The ASEAN Regional Forum (1996).

2. I will omit discussion of the ARF for reasons of space and my having discussed it elsewhere (Khong 1997b).

3. Alagappa had dated the communist insurgencies as lasting from 1948–81, the latter being the date when China announced its termination of support for the Communist Parties of Southeast Asia. I believe a more accurate end date is the mid-1960s: the communist insurrection in Malaya ended in 1960, while the Communist Party of Indonesia had largely been exterminated by 1966.

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Notes on contributors

Yuen Foong Khong

Yuen Foong Khong is a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford University, and Senior Research Adviser, Institute of Defence & Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological University