Mong Palatino of Global Voices Online gives an excellent, if not very indepth, holistic analysis of the “quiet conflicts” in Southeast Asia in his piece titled ‘Unfriendly neighbors in Southeast Asia’. It’s time Southeast Asians wake up and realize what is at stake.

Daly City, CA, United States, — There are numerous border disputes in Southeast Asia. The most well-known case today involves the historic Preah Vihear temple and the four square kilometers of territory around it, which are claimed by both Thailand and Cambodia. Last month, Thai and Cambodian soldiers violently clashed near the controversial temple.

Fortunately the clash produced few deaths and injuries. But unfortunately, it generated ultranationalist and racist sentiments in both countries. Many Thais, including politicians, accused Cambodians of betraying Thailand in the past.

On the other hand, some Cambodians criticized their neighbor for being arrogant. Thailand and Cambodia do not only share borders, they also have a common political and economic history.

The border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia is just one of the many quiet conflicts in Southeast Asia, especially in the Indochina region. There are still unsettled border feuds between Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia today. Recently, a maritime dispute in the Bay of Bengal was reported between Myanmar and Bangladesh.

In other parts of the region, the Philippines has not renounced its claim over Sabah, which is part of Malaysia today. Some Filipino scholars believe Malaysia has been secretly supporting the Muslim insurgents in the southern Philippines to protect its interests in Sabah.

This year Singapore was recognized by the World Court as the owner of a tiny but important island in the Singapore Strait, which is also claimed by Malaysia.

These border disputes are partly colonial legacies. Western powers created artificial boundaries in the past which inflamed ethnic rivalries.

It is also understandable why governments today are asserting their geopolitical interests. Each country has to protect its sovereignty and more importantly, it has to secure the territories with abundant resources. But the aggressive behavior of many leaders in the region may also be a tactic to gather domestic support for their unpopular administrations. Nationalism is being invoked for the wrong reasons.

The border disputes in the region signify the lack of camaraderie among Southeast Asians. Every country believes its people are superior over their neighbors. This form of racism seems to be endorsed by social and cultural institutions of many countries in the region. An editor of the Bangkok Post raised this point when he exposed what Thai schools are teaching his daughter:

“Like most Thais, she feels Burma is fierce and heartless, Cambodia cannot be trusted and Laos is inferior to Thailand – because the history textbooks teach her so.”

Many people in Thailand believe they once owned parts of their neighboring countries, making them feel they are the greatest in the region. In a similar way, almost all Filipinos think that other Southeast Asians have learned agriculture by studying in the Philippines.

Last month, homeowners in a village in Singapore protested the construction of a dormitory for migrant workers, citing security concerns, the migrants’ poor hygiene and the negative impact of the building on real estate prices in the area. They have forgotten that many of their ancestors were also migrants and that most of the migrant workers today in Singapore have come from neighboring countries in the region.

The unfriendliness of Southeast Asians to each other is really disappointing. But this condescending behavior toward fellow Southeast Asians is almost no different to what the people in the region are showing to their fellow citizens in their home countries.

The dominant Buddhist Thais are not on good terms with many ethnic Malay Muslims who are living in southern Thailand. The Catholic majority in the Philippines is denying Muslim Filipinos in the southern Philippines their right to self-determination. Many residents of West Papua are asserting their independence from Indonesia. Racism is again a very serious, if not the most important, political issue in multi-ethnic Malaysia.

The unspoken hostility between Southeast Asians makes it difficult and almost impossible to implement region-wide initiatives. For example, there have been proposals for sending a unified team to the Olympics, the use of a single currency like the euro for Europe, and the issuance of a single visa for the whole region.

A divided Southeast Asia does not benefit the interests of each country in the region. It makes it easy for big countries like China, Japan and the United States to obtain advantageous deals from Southeast Asian countries.

The United States has clinched military basing agreements with several Southeast Asian countries; Japan has been successful in acquiring one-sided bilateral economic agreements in the region; and China is acting like the big brother of Southeast Asian nations.

Things could be different if Southeast Asia were united. Powerful countries would rethink their negotiating tactics if they were dealing with a united Southeast Asia, instead of a small country with little economic and political bargaining power.

But many Southeast Asians do not realize this need for unity. They have overlooked the advantages of creating a united regional bloc since they are distracted by trivial conflicts. It seems they prefer to convince themselves that their neighbors are inferior instead of reaching out to their fellow Southeast Asians.

China, Japan and India are among the big powers in Asia. A united Southeast Asia could alter the balance of power in this part of the world.

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(Mong Palatino is an activist and regional editor for Southeast Asia of Global Voices Online. He can be reached at mongpalatino@gmail.com and his website is www.mongpalatino.motime.com. ©Copyright Mong Palatino.)

Joshua Kurlantzick has reminded us Asians of the ‘backward’ steps we have been taken recently that has greatly slowed the progress of regional integration.

So Far, It Just Isn’t Looking Like Asia’s Century

By Joshua Kurlantzick
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Washington Post

So much for the Asian century. The Thais are bickering with themselves, and when they’re done doing that, they’ll bicker with the Cambodians — again. China may be Japan’s biggest trading partner, but they hate each other anyway. Malaysia and Indonesia? Two countries divided by the same language.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Asia over the past decade, as an expat and a traveler. From where I stand, the place is a geopolitical mess. Hogtied by nationalism and narrow self-interest, the countries of the East won’t be banding together to replace the West as the seat of global power — at least not anytime soon.

Asia’s troubles have been on prominent display in recent weeks as anti-government demonstrations, fueled in part by anti-Cambodian nationalism, rocked Bangkok. Earlier this summer, Thailand and Cambodia moved onto war footing because of a dispute over a mountaintop temple — not exactly a living example of the Beijing Olympics’ motto: “One World, One Dream.”

Of course, an Asian version of the European Union isn’t out of reach, as many Asian leaders know. But today, the continent battles a kind of split personality. On the one hand, many cultural, economic and political trends suggest that Asian nations are becoming more integrated than ever before. But on the other, a virulent nationalism is spreading in the region, one that feeds on reinterpreted — or even imaginary — history to gin up hatred and push small-minded agendas.

Elites in Asia clearly understand the benefits of integration, and businesses and officials together are promoting the trend. In 2004, China replaced the United States as Japan’s biggest trading partner. Chinese yearly trade with the ten Southeast Asian nations will likely surpass $200 billion by 2010.With the expansion of satellite television, Asian airlines and regional hiring by Asian conglomerates, businesspeople watch the same news, cool their heels together in a slew of space-age international airports and mingle at cocktail parties and pan-Asian business summits. Fads that start in Tokyo or Seoul, such as drinking red wine or dying hair blond, sweep through the region. At summits of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), I’ve seen packs of diplomats gathered at bars swapping stories in fluent English about their hijinks during graduate school at Johns Hopkins University.

Despite all that love, most of the region’s multilateral institutions do little more than meet for the sake of meeting. In Cambodia and Laos, local officials and fishermen despair that dams built by China on the upper portion of the Mekong River are blocking water flow — and ravaging fishing in the southern stretch of that river that snakes through their countries. “But when we . . . try to bring this up at ASEAN meetings,” Sokhem Pech, a leading Cambodian Mekong expert, told me, “no one even wants to talk about it.” The committee officially monitoring the Mekong, which doesn’t include China, is so feeble that it rarely speaks out on the issue.

The problem: Calls to nationalism and an obsession with sovereignty are drowning out calls for cooperation. The passage of time since World War II, when nationalism led to catastrophe, has allowed politicians to wield it more freely for short-term gain. “The Chinese are ignorant, so they are overjoyed,” Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara quipped after China launched a manned spaceship in 2003. “That [spacecraft] was an outdated one. If Japan wanted to do it, we could do it in one year.”

This sort of nationalism isn’t the stuff of a few firebrands. Across the continent, populist politicians have scrubbed school textbooks, whether to minimize Japan’s atrocities in South Korea and China during World War II or to erase the memory of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia — perhaps because Prime Minister Hun Sen was an officer in the genocidal regime before he turned against it. Traveling to Cambodia, I meet teenagers who know practically nothing about what happened in their country in the 1970s. China, too, has whitewashed the memory of the Tiananmen Square crackdown of June 4, 1989. When a “Frontline” documentary crew went to Beijing University a few years ago and showed students the iconic 1989 photograph of the man who stopped a tank in its tracks, no one recognized it.

Politicians aren’t the only ones embracing nationalism. In 2002, when Thailand was still recovering from its financial meltdown, government-backed filmmakers produced “The Legend of Suriyothai” to restore their country’s wounded pride. One of the most expensive pictures in Thai history, it told the story of an ancient Thai queen who died fighting Burmese invaders — and compounded Thais’ hostility toward Burma, their neighbor to the west.

The Internet has further empowered Asian nationalists, allowing them to air their vitriol unchecked. On Chinese online bulletin boards such as the “Strong Nation Forum,” which is run by the People’s Daily, respondents compete for the most aggressive stance and ridicule Chinese leaders for compromising on issues such as relations with neighboring countries or Tibet or Taiwan. In Japan, the blogosphere helped spark sales of the manga comic book “Hating the Korean Wave.” And in Indonesia, online writers helped fuel anger at neighboring Malaysia for the use of a supposedly Indonesian jingle in a tourism campaign and for the mistreatment of an Indonesian karate referee. These are petty grievances, but the Internet amplifies even the smallest outbursts, and reactions can be fierce. Just last week, Vietnam’s foreign ministry called in China’s ambassador to protest the appearance on Chinese Web sites of “invasion plans” that purported to detail the occupation of Vietnam by the People’s Liberation Army.

Whenever I visit Asia, I meet young people who detest neighbors they barely know. “The Thais, all they care about is money. Nothing else,” one Burmese acquaintance told me in Rangoon, despite the fact that he’d never actually been to Thailand. In one study taken last year by a leading Japanese nongovernmental organization, two-thirds of the Chinese polled said they had either a “very bad” or “relatively bad” impression of Japan.

As any politician can tell you, public opinion counts. In an open society such as the Philippines, rising anti-Chinese sentiment helped force the government in September 2007 to suspend China-funded projects valued at $4 billion. Even countries that have little history of animosity toward each other can be swept into a rage by the new nationalists. In 2006, after Singaporean state investment fund Temasek Holdings purchased Thai telecommunications giant Shin Corporation, Thai bloggers and online columnists condemned the deal, arguing that a Singaporean company would have control over sensitive Thai communications infrastructure. Thousands of Thais marched to Singapore’s embassy in Bangkok — a move that left urbane Singaporean diplomats, more accustomed to managing business deals than bullhorns, a bit flat-footed.

All these problems don’t seem to have resonated in the United States, where an entire industry has developed around predictions that the Asian century will replace the American one. And maybe it will — a few centuries from now.

Joshua Kurlantzick is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090502657.html (September 7, 2008)

Regional integration for mainland Southeast Asia? Think again!

Maps like this one would easily puzzle integrationists, not least those who can’t read the different scripts.