East Asian and Southeast Asian countries have enjoyed peaceful international relations for decades, especially after 1979. Although there has been some turmoil, intra- and interstate wars during the 1960s and 1970s, there is an academic consensus that East Asia and Southeast Asia generally have become a very peaceful region since the end of the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1979, in terms of the lack of interstate violence and the
exceptionally low levels of battle deaths (Leifer, 1989; Tønnesson, 2009; Kivimäki, 2011; Goldsmith, 2014). However, even though scholars have consensus to East Asian and Southeast Asian peace, what contributes to the peaceful situation remains a puzzle
because the main theories of international relations have different explanations to account for it, while all of them confront with limitations (Solingen, 2007; Tønnesson 2009).
Specifically for Southeast Asia, the literature provides at least three competing perspectives to explain how the peaceful situation could be achieved. First, the liberal peace theory emphasizes the pacifying effects of democracy, interdependence, and intergovernmental-organizations, the so-called Kantian peace (Oneal & Russett, 1999, 2001; Goldsmith, 2007). Second, the constructivist theory of peace underlines the
successful security management of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) due to the mutually-reinforced effects between commonly shared identity, interests,
values, and norms that form a well-functioned security community through a process of social construction (Acharya, 2001, 2004; Kivimäki, 2001; Ba, 2009). Third, Southeast Asian peace may result from the countries that adopt a capitalist development strategy. In his article which aims to refute the previous two perspectives, Tang (2012) argues that Southeast Asian peace should be understood as a capitalist trajectory. Because of Southeast Asian countries’ common interests and preferences of adopting economic liberalization policy for economic development exert a strong conflict-constraining effect. In his non-directed dyad-year analysis from 1950 to 2001, he uses a dummy variable (JntELP) denoting whether both countries in the dyad-year t jointly adopt economic liberalization policy as his independent variable,21 and this independent variable (JntELP) is negative with the probability of militarized interstate conflict (MID) and highly
significant across various models and robustness checks. As Tang (2012) had demonstrated, there are few democratic dyads in the region, there is a low degree of interdependence between those countries, and interstate conflict does happen between the ASEAN members, Southeast Asian stability may be maintained neither by the liberal peace components nor by the ASEAN security management, but by the capitalist concern as Tang’s argument.
However, even Southeast Asian peace is not caused by either the liberal peace components or the ASEAN security management, whether it is achieved by a capitalist
21 Tang (2012) adopts Sachs and Warner’s (1995) binary category to define whether both states in a dyad- year t are jointly open trade regime, coded as 1 if yes and 0 otherwise. According to Sachs and Warner (1995), a country is coded as a closed trade regime if any one of the following criteria is true: non-tariff barriers cover 40% or more of trade, average tariff rates are 40% or more, the black market exchange rate depreciated by 20% or more relative to the official exchange rate during the 1970s or 1980s, a socialist economy is in place, or a state monopoly on exports exists. The Sachs and Warner data spans from 1950 to 1992, and it is lately expanded by Wacziarg and Welch (2008) through 1999.
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trajectory does not go without question. After a scrutinization of the Southeast Asia states who adopted economic liberalization, I find two problems that cast Tang’s argument in doubt. First, observations of JntELP dyads are few. Second, most of the JntELP dyads are those that never have any conflict record before they become JntELP; and among the JntELP dyads who have experienced conflict before they adopt economic liberalization policy, they had resolved the conflict before they switched to economic liberalization policy. Therefore, I posit that Southeast Asian peace may not be maintained by this capitalist trajectory. Instead, according to the suggestion of previous research and
empirical evidences, I argue that the ASEAN security management has its contribution to the Southeast Asian peace, but its ability of conflict-constraining in the region is
conditioned by the economic performance of Southeast Asia states. Unlike the European countries, most of Southeast Asian countries were colonies of European countries which suffered from low level of development and the lack of national autonomy before the end of World War II. Given such a background, when they were independent after World War II, national building and economic development became the most important goals of those countries. Besides, as newly-independent national states where the political elites of various standpoints are still struggling under their unstable political regimes, leaders and their ruling coalitions must strive to fulfill these goals to keep incumbent. This is also the reason that these countries want to form and join ASEAN, to achieve these two goals through international cooperation with their regional partners with similar backgrounds. When the leaders are able to provide economic growth under the ASEAN cooperation and security management, they do not have to consolidate their ruling legitimacy through emphasizing national building issues such as old grudges and territorial disputes with
each other. However, if the leaders are not able to maintain economic performance, they not only lose their confidence in ASEAN but also face the pressure to result to national building issues in order to keep their ruling legitimacy, which compromises ASEAN’s ability of security management and so increase the probability of conflict. These entangled economic development and national building issues are leaders’ most
important concern for political survival, which distinguish Southeast Asia from the other regions in the world, and we cannot know the whole picture of Southeast Asia if failure to take this regional characteristic into concern.
I proceed this argument as following. In the next section I re-appraise Tang’s (2012) argument by investigating the Southeast Asian countries who adopt economic liberalization policy, showing that Southeast Asian peace may not be well-explained by the capitalist trajectory. Then, I present my argument that the security management of ASEAN does play an important role in the maintenance of Southeast Asian peace,
however, ASEAN’s influence on conflict-constraining in the region is conditioned on the economic performance of Southeast Asian states. Next, I explain my research design and present the statistical results using data from 1950 to 2001 of all the 11 Southeast Asian countries22 along with the substantive effects and various sensitivity checks. In the last
section I summarize this article and discuss my finding with previous literature as a concluding remark.
22 The 11 Southeast Asian countries in my sample from 1950 to 2001 include Brunei (1984~), Cambodia (1953~), Indonesia, Laos (1953~), Malaysia (1957~), Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore (1965~), Thailand, North Vietnam (1954~), and South Vietnam (1954~1975), and all of them became ASEAN members by 1999 when Cambodia finally got the admission.
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