ABSTRACT
International Relations (IR) scholars reading the other chapters in this volume may well be struck by the stark difference between the way that they conceptualize state behaviour and the methods that scholars of domestic politics and political economy use to understand state power, regimes, violence, authority and governance. In much of the mainstream IR theory applied to Southeast Asia, the anarchic international system constitutes a sufficiently autonomous realm for the external behaviour of states to be analysed quite separately from the internal power relations that actually constitute those states. It thus becomes possible to explain, say, the security policy of Southeast Asian states in terms of their pursuit of ‘national interests’, or with reference to their ‘identity’ and interstate norms. While occasional references to domestic politics might be unavoidable, for many IR theorists, ‘states’ are simply the pre-given units of international politics and we do not need to probe their origins, evolution or underpinnings particularly deeply.1 While the agenda of international security may have broadened elsewhere to encompass actors and referent objects beyond the state, in Southeast Asia scholars argue that ‘the state remains the critical actor’ (Caballero-Anthony 2008: 195) and ‘securitisation has largely been a state-centric project’ (Emmers and Caballero-Anthony 2006: 32). This chapter argues that state-centric approaches of international security policies are rarely
sustainable in practice and offer a very limiting perspective on the behaviour of Southeast Asian states. IR theories too often neglect the specific nature of state power revealed by scholars of domestic politics and political economy. Rather than adopting a ‘top-down’ view of security policy as being determined by anarchy, abstract ‘national interests’ or interstate norms, this chapter advocates a ‘bottom-up’ approach, showing how specific policies are shaped by the particular constellations of power and interests that underpin states. From this perspective, there are multiple contending sources of foreign and security policy. While the geopolitical and strategic agendas identified by IR scholars certainly do exist, they represent the ideas and interests of very
specific groups, notably the technocracies of foreign ministries which are embedded within global community of foreign policy apparatchiks. To the extent that their ideas become state policy, however, this reflects their interests and not some general, immutable, ‘national’ interest. More to the point, there are other socio-political forces – classes, class fractions, business groups, ethnic and religious groups, other parts of the state apparatus, and so on – whose ideas and interests frequently clash with and may override those of foreign policy officials. What actually emerges in practice, therefore, reflects conflicts among these different forces as they struggle to impose their interests as raison d’état. From this perspective, security policies can only be understood as ‘the products of historical
structures and processes, of struggles for power within states, of conflicts between the societal groupings that inhabit states and the interests that besiege them’ (Lipschutz 1995: 8). As the other chapters in this volume show, Southeast Asia’s late capitalist development has produced highly distinctive forms of state and regime, modes of social control, institutions, interests and alliances. If we accept that states are not simply ‘ideal types’, always and everywhere the same, but are necessarily shaped by the concrete conditions in which they develop, the distinctive nature of state power in Southeast Asia must logically find expression at the international level. Indeed, domestic social conflict is a vital explanatory factor for the forms taken by regional conflicts and cooperation. The argument proceeds in three sections. The first briefly critiques the statism and metho-
dological nationalism of existing IR theory before discussing the ways in which domestic struggles over state power condition foreign and security policies. The second section uses this approach to analyse the policies of states within the region towards Burma. The country’s military dictatorship is frequently said to be generating serious security threats, yet neighbouring states seem curiously resistant to taking action against the regime. This only makes sense if we understand their policies as being shaped and influenced by various social and economic interests and agendas. The third section more briefly applies the same approach to analyse Southeast Asian states’ policies on environmental degradation and border conflicts.
