Southeast Asia And The Enemy Beyond

Asean Perceptions Of External Threats

Robert O. Tilman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000312317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores elite perceptions of the external threats facing the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), drawing on Dr. Tilman's interviews with senior political, military, and intellectual leaders in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. He supplements his interviews with an examination of their writings, speeches, and other public statements, which he examines in the context of the history, geography, culture, and governmental structures of each country. He addresses the fundamental questions of the extent to which these perceptions differ and why. His focus throughout is on subjective reality--the world as it is perceived by the leadership of the ASEAN nations.

1
The Tiger at the Door: Threats and Threat Perceptions

O, wad some pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!

Robert Burns

Vietnam is . . . a tiger squatting on our doorstep.

Thanat Khoman Deputy Prime Minister of Thailand Honolulu, February 1982

Some countries said that Vietnam is a danger to Southeast Asia, but the Indonesian Army and people do not believe it.

General Benny Murdani Indonesian Armed Forces Chief of Staff Hanoi, February 1984

With respect to policy-making . . . what matters is how the policy-maker imagines the milieu to be, not how it actually is.

Harold and Margaret Sprout, 1957

By common convention a particular animal is called a tiger, and most of us will recognize a tiger whether we have ever seen one or not. In most circumstances uncaged tigers should be respected, feared, and avoided. Our cognitive experiences have taught us about tigers--albeit thankfully secondhand in most cases--and when we see a tiger we perceive a threat to our physical well-being. Dealing with the animal called a tiger is simple because most who know the tiger agree that it constitutes a threat. Very few perceive it otherwise.

When we deal with figurative rather than literal tigers there is much greater latitude for disagreement. When the former deputy prime minister of Thailand said that he saw Vietnam as a tiger squatting on Thailand's doorstep, he meant that Thailand was facing an external threat from its new next-door neighbor, Vietnam.¹ Many Indonesian leaders, however, would not agree that Vietnam is a tiger. For many-Indonesian leaders there are many tigers in the world, but Vietnam is not one.² The Thai leader's identification of a figurative tiger differed from the perceptions of his Indonesian colleagues.

This is a study of figurative tigers as they are perceived by the leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).³ The different perceptions held by leaders in each of the ASEAN states are examined,⁴ and attempts are made to shed light on the origins of these differences. This is not a subject that lends itself easily to objective inquiry and systematic analysis, but it is important and relatively unstudied.

An author's temptation in an opening chapter is to construct a new "theoretical framework." The land-scape is littered with such models of decision making and foreign-policy formulation, most of which were touted as having broad applicability, but in reality end up as theoretical skeletons without empirical flesh or as one-event case studies that prove to be of questionable applicability to other settings.⁵ This study breaks no new theoretical ground and claims to "explain" no foreign policies other than those of the five ASEAN states with which this research was concerned.

Like all authors, I have approached my tasks here with certain intellectual and philosophical orientations, of which the reader should be made aware. First, my work is influenced by the "givens" of my own mind-set, or what I have called my "perspectives." Second, I have used a consistent framework to formulate questions and analyze collected material. Although the organization of this book does not follow this framework, as an earlier working paper did,⁶ the influence of the framework is clear in each of the subsequent chapters.⁷

Perspectives

Individuals Matter

Foreign-policy elites operate under various constraints, some of which can be very severe. The international system itself often sets the agenda, defines the options, imposes constraints on the freedom of national policy makers, and forces them to choose options with which they might not feel entirely comfortable. In most states the bureaucracy that undergirds the work of the policy makers is also a constraining influence. Bureaucracies and bureaucrats also set agendas, identify options, and selectively filter or emphasize the information that flows into the hands of the decision makers. Furthermore, both the decision makers and the bureaucrats are products of the society in which they live; in many ways foreign policy is but an external manifestation of the domestic social and political system.⁸ Finally, when an individual finds himself in the role of the policy maker, his perception of the role he has assumed may serve to impose constraints on his policy choices.⁹

Although structural and cultural constraints on the latitude of policy makers are real and must be taken into account, individuals are also important, and are often a key factor in the policy-making process.¹⁰ Holsti has suggested seven situations in which the use of the cognitive approach to decision making can be significant, and these are applicable to my argument that individuals matter. In brief, Holsti's situations involve circumstances that require more than the application of standard operating procedures and established decision-making rules; top leaders who define their leadership roles broadly; long-range planning; conditions of great ambiguity with little "reliable" information; information over-load requiring discretionary filtering; unanticipated events; and leaders under unusual stress.¹¹

To Holsti's catalogue may be added some further circumstances of a more specific nature applicable to the ASEAN countries. Most foreign policy issues are simply not important to most Southeast Asians. For most citizens, foreign policy is precisely what the term conveys--it is foreign. As previous Thai governments have found, they are likely to be more vulnerable to the prices of kerosene or charcoal than to rapprochement with the People's Republic of China. Only when foreign policy touches a domestic nerve, as is the case with the bases issue in the Philippines, is foreign policy likely to get on the agenda of most citizens. Even in the Philippine case a Jeepney drivers' strike in Manila over the high cost of gasoline can cripple the city and put far more pressure on the government than an anti-bases demonstration on Roxas Boulevard.

When foreign policy is largely foreign, individual policy makers are freed from many of the domestic political constraints imposed on First World policy makers. In addition, most Third World policy makers, including those in the ASEAN region, do not have their policies scrutinized daily by a highly competitive, inquisitive, or crusading "media. The press tends to be "disciplined," and foreign affairs is not an important topic to much of the public anyway. Finally, the typical foreign affairs bureaucracy is relatively small, and the personal imprint of the top policy maker is frequently apparent.¹² Taken together, at least in the ASEAN countries, individuals matter in the formulation of foreign policy, probably more than they do in First World countries.

Facts Are Ambiguous

In the early days of black-and-white television Sergeant Joe Friday of "Dragnet" would implore his witnesses to give him "the facts, ma'm, just the facts," but at about the same time a distinguished scholar of international relations was telling us that "for any individual . . . or organization, there are no such things as 'facts,' There are only messages filtered through a changeable value system."¹³ In spite of his best efforts, Joe Friday frequently discovered that facts are ambiguous.

Are all "facts" relative? Of course not, but only because of commonly accepted conventions that they are facts. Universally, two plus two is accepted as four, twenty divided by ten is two. Beyond these easy examples, however, lie many facts that are subject to widely varying interpretations, just as two witnesses to a murder may have given Sergeant Friday two different set of "facts." Sergeant Friday's task was to discover "reality," but it was of course his reality, which some of the witnesses may never have been able to reconcile with their own realities.¹⁴ The problem of dealing with reality leads to the third perspective from which this study has been approached.

Perception Is Reality

Concern for "what seems to be" in contrast to "what is" is not new. In the "Allegory of the Cave" Plato has his subjects watch shadows cast on the wall of the cave by actual figures they never see. For his subjects, the shadows become reality because for them the figures never existed. But for Plato the subjects are misinformed, and therefore capable of being mislead, because they are ignorant of the true nature of the shadows. Today many of us tend to be less certain of the true nature of phenomena, and more inclined to accept that one man's shadows may be as reliable as another's.

Much attention in recent years has been devoted to investigations of the origins, meanings, and interpretations of these shadows. In the cognitive process information is processed through a set of existing beliefs and from this emerges one's perceptions of the phenomena observed. Cognitive theory concerns itself "with the structure of beliefs. . . and with the manner in which information is processed in reference to existing beliefs."¹⁵ To understand the landscape of beliefs through which information is processed, some scholars, principally from the discipline of psychology, have turned to "mapping."

Psychological, cognitive, social, and cultural mapping is not new; indeed, although it was not called by this term the cognitive map was one of Plato's concerns in the cave. An ambitious project launched by the United Nations not long after its creation sought to map national groups throughout the world on the assumption that wars might be avoided if nations realized that they were following different and sometimes contradictory psychological maps.¹⁶ Recently, cognitive mapping has taken on some very specific connotations, and the process of drawing, interpreting, and utilizing such maps has become much more rigorous and conceptually sophisticated.¹⁷

Although there is vast disagreement on the makeup, structure, and application of such maps--which is really a more basic disagreement on beliefs and how they affect perceptions and actions--few scholars disagree on the practical significance of the end result. The early observations of Harold and Margaret Sprout, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, have lost none of their validity. To this the Sprouts add: "[There is a] simple and familiar principle that a person reacts to his milieu as he apperceives it--that is, he perceives and interprets it in the light of past experience."¹⁸

Cognitive theorists generally agree that information filtered through an individual's belief system (cognitive map, pyschological environment, or other such terms) produces perceptions, and that individuals are guided by subjective perceptions and not by objective reality, whatever it may be. They also agree that belief systems are constructed on past experiences. However, what constitutes significant past experiences, precisely how these influence perceptions, and how blatant conflicts between facts and beliefs are reconciled are matters of dispute.

Past experiences may serve to create an individual's belief system, but the range of past experiences can cover an almost limitless span of phenomena. Every individual is a member of countless social and cultural networks: most are family members; most were born into or converted to a particular religion; and most grew up speaking a single language and were thus limited in their access to information to those sharing this language. The catalogue can be continued almost indefinitely.

In addition to past experiences that link individuals to groups there are more specific individual experiences that must be taken into account in mapping the cognitive process. A high official in one of the ministries of foreign affairs recounted to me on several occasions how he as a boy witnessed the death of his father, a medical assistant, who was machine-gunned outside a hospital tent by a Japanese soldier for no apparent reason. The attention he gave to the details of the murder made it apparent that it remained a vivid and significant memory. More than forty years later in his position in the ministry he dealt almost daily with matters of state involving Japan. One is left to speculate about how this very personal experience had influenced his cognitive map, altered his perceptions of the motives and behavior of all Japanese, and eventually affected the course of relations between the two countries.

Not all messages that we receive are consistent with our belief system; some are so strange and unexpected that there is no pigeonhole in which they may be filed. We can infer from previous experiences and interpret the unexpected accordingly, or we may suffer selective blindness in what we see and fail to see, accepting information that fits and rejecting information that does not. The mind has an immense capacity to produce consistency between perceptions and beliefs even when the information received may seem highly inconsistent.¹⁹

Thus, whatever the complexities of the cognitive processes, reality is often relative. Although perceptions alone do not structure policy, they influence policy choices, and this is the subject of this study.

From the Perspective of the Grass

According to a well-known proverb in South and Southeast Asia, "when elephants fight it is the grass that suffers." A modern-day skeptic might amend this to "whether elephants fight or make love, it is still the grass that suffers."

As far as the ASEAN states are concerned, my sympathies lean toward the grass, and I write from this perspective. Elephants are highly visi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Book and Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• TABLES
• Preface
• 1 THE TIGER AT THE DOOR: THREATS AND THREAT PERCEPTIONS
• 2 SOUTHEAST ASIA AND ASEAN: THE SETTING AND THE CONTEXT
• 3 POLICY FORMULATION: THE POLICY MAKERS AND THE POLICY SETTING
• 4 THE USSR AND VIETNAM: PERCEPTIONS OF THE PARTNERS AND THE PARTNERSHIP
• 5 CHINA: ALLY OR ADVERSARY?
• 6 JAPAN: AMBIVALENCE TOWARD A PARTNERSHIP
• 7 THE UNITED STATES: THE RISKS OF FRIENDSHIP
• 8 TIGERS AT THE DOOR AND TIGERS IN THE KITCHEN: EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL THREATS IN PERSPECTIVE
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index