Spectres of Leifer: insights on regional order and security for Southeast Asia today.

• Author: Tan, See Seng
• Position: Report

Southeast Asia today faces a number of daunting security challenges. Among other things, the steady rise of China's power and influence in the region, and the lack of cohesion and unity among the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that it appears to have caused, has clearly unsettled the region. (1) The United States' intention to "rebalance" its strategic priorities towards Asia in the wake of its drawdown from the conflict in Afghanistan, which involves a relocation of its military assets to the region, has notably upset Beijing and, crucially, reoriented the security strategies of some ASEAN countries militarily in ways that has angered China even more. (2) Moreover, there are signs that the regional consensus on the centrality of ASEAN in East Asian regionalism, which assumes ASEAN should be the hub and building block for Asia's evolving regional architecture, is threatening to break down as evidenced by the growing impatience of non-ASEAN states and the Great Powers over the perceived inefficacy and irrelevance of ASEAN-led regional arrangements for delivering the peace and prosperity dividends desired by all concerned. (3)

None of the aforesaid challenges would likely have surprised the late Michael Leifer, acknowledged by peers and successors alike as the unparalleled doyen of Southeast Asian security studies. (4) However, it probably would have concerned him that the prospects for regional order and security in Southeast Asia, according to his standards and terms of reference, have arguably worsened since the fin de siecle. A number of significant developments have taken place since Leifer's passing on 3 April 2001. The era of US unipolarity, on the ascendant during his final years, has more or less given place to an emerging multipolarity, provoking yet another debate on whether US power is in retrenchment. (5) The rise of religious millenarianism and militancy in Southeast Asia, and the domestic and international terrorism that it has inspired, (6) are trends that occurred largely after his time. The ASEAN states have resolved to build--hitherto with great difficulty, it has to be said--a regional economic and security community in Southeast Asia by 2015. Defence ministerial forums at the ASEAN level and among ASEAN and eight of its dialogue partner countries, christened the ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting (ADMM) and the ADMM-Plus respectively, have been institutionalized since 2006 for the ADMM and 2010 for the ADMM-Plus. Furthermore, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), on which Leifer contributed quite possibly the first authoritative scholarly account, (7) has for all intents and purposes abandoned its unrealized design for conventional security cooperation and has refocused its energies on improving national and regional capacities for addressing a select number of non-conventional or non-traditional security challenges, such as disaster relief, maritime security and anti-piracy, military medicine and counter-terrorism. (8)

How might have Michael Leifer viewed the regional security milieu of present-day Southeast Asia in the light of those and other recent developments? What insights might contemporary security studies on the Southeast Asian region gain from his ruminations over a distinguished academic career spanning four decades? Needless to say, Leifer never got everything about Southeast Asian security right, certainly not all of the time as the following discussion will show. However, it is probably safe to say, thanks to the meticulous attention to detail for which he was known, (9) that he was correct more often than not. Even then, there are obvious difficulties in any effort to apply wisdom distilled from a scholar's observations of a region over a particular time period to a later one, and Leifer's astute analyses are by no means timeless. That being said, in comparison to, say, the first decade of the post-Cold War period--during which Leifer contributed prodigiously to regional intellectual and policy debates both as an academician and as an active participant in Track 2 or non-official diplomacy (10)--the security environment of Southeast Asia has been defined by continuity as much as by change.

Another complication that deserves mention at the outset involves this present effort's potentially idiosyncratic reading of Leifer's reading of Southeast Asian security. As a collection of retrospective essays on Leifer and his contributions (published in 2006) would attest, there is room for debate and disagreement over the man's ideas even among his devotees, never mind his detractors. (11) This is probably as much Leifer's "fault" (used advisedly here) as that of his reporters and redactors, in that his writings tended to invite varying interpretations because of their occasional proclivity towards ambiguity and antinomy. (12) Indeed, it is precisely for this reason that his writings have often been criticized as lacking in theoretical sophistication, conceptual precision and analytical rigour. (13) Yet here too his commitment to producing accurate portraits of Southeast Asia's ground realities is such that his observations reflect the paradoxes and ironies inherent in regional affairs. Crucially, Leifer was no international theorist concerned with achieving conceptual elegance and analytical parsimony (where, in many an unfortunate instance, theory and method have been treated with greater reverence than the social and political realities they are ostensibly designed to explain). That being said, order and regional order in Leifer's hands, as derivatives of ideas associated with the English School of International Relations, arguably found their way into the study of the international politics of Southeast Asia thanks largely to his seminal contributions. (14) But while he employed regional order and the balance of power--as benchmark and hallmark, respectively--for and of the international politics of Southeast Asia, he did so in a conceptually underdeveloped and methodologically vague fashion, at least according to current standards of Anglo-American social science. As the French social thinker Raymond Aron once mused, ambiguity in international relations "is not to be imputed to the inadequacy of our concepts, but is an integral part of reality itself". (15) In much the same way, Leifer's ambiguous treatment of concepts had little to do with analytical sloppiness on his part than with his commitment to trace the historical complexities in the region's political life. To be sure, any invoking of Leifer could potentially invite premature conclusions about his ideas. For instance, Leifer, or at least his writings, have off been characterized (and caricaturized) as Realist, whether of the Classical or Neorealist variety. (16) Yet it is also for this reason that his ideas continue to speak to other ideas that enjoy intellectual currency today. No discussion of regional order and security in Southeast Asia can escape the spectre of Leifer, as it were.

Against that backdrop, the following discussion reviews four noteworthy insights arising from Leifer's reflections on regional order, the balance of power and other ancillary ideas. At the risk of oversimplifying his ideas--granted, all exercises in distillation involve some aspect of that--the insights are as follows: (1)regional order in Southeast Asia is elusive; (2) an embryonic or limited form of regional order exists--or at least has occasionally existed--in Southeast Asia; (3) the balance of power is a core institution in the creation and maintenance of regional order; and, (4) in view of ASEAN's preferred security model, conservation has proved more vital than innovation in the management of regional order in Southeast Asia. The paper concludes with an analysis of the broader implications of these insights for regionalism in Southeast Asia.

Regional Order in Southeast Asia is Elusive, Even Illusory

"Regional order" was the outcome that Michael Leifer wanted for Southeast Asia: it was also his yardstick of choice to assess the international relations of Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. The recurrent theme in all of Leifer's writings on Southeast Asia was how elusive, and at times how illusory, regional order was. (17) More often than not, Leifer seemed inclined to underscore what he felt was Southeast Asia's evident inability to realize the express regional aspiration, not least ASEAN's, to establish regional order. As Leifer noted regarding ASEAN's founding document, the ASEAN (or Bangkok) Declaration of 1967: "if that Declaration is read as a whole, including its preamble, it should be evident that inherent in the document is also an expression of greater ambition. That ambition is the establishment of a system of regional order." (18) Elsewhere, he observed that the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) "was the means adopted to try to create a wider structure of ordered interstate relations". (19) He saw regional order as "a structure of regional relationships that are widely accepted" (20)--not just by the countries of the region, but equally by outside powers with stakes in Southeast Asia. In this regard, despite Leifer's purportedly materialistic accounts of regional relations in the view of some, (21) it is nonetheless a social (or inter-subjective) basis--a "widely accepted" structure of regional relations--upon which his understanding of regional order was equally premised. This is not to deny the significance, much less existence, of pure power considerations in his interpretation; military balances clearly have their place in his assessments, as do things such as US strategic preponderance in the region (as we shall see below). Yet nowhere do we find in Leifer any attempt to treat material and ideational factors as separate considerations. What regional order entailed was "the existence of a stable structure of regional intergovernmental relationships informed by...