Southeast Asia’s Cold War

Southeast Asia’s Cold War
Author: Ang Cheng Guan
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2018-02-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824873467

The historiography of the Cold War has long been dominated by American motivations and concerns, with Southeast Asian perspectives largely confined to the Indochina wars and Indonesia under Sukarno. Southeast Asia’s Cold War corrects this situation by examining the international politics of the region from within rather than without. It provides an up-to-date, coherent narrative of the Cold War as it played out in Southeast Asia against a backdrop of superpower rivalry. When viewed through a Southeast Asian lens, the Cold War can be traced back to the interwar years and antagonisms between indigenous communists and their opponents, the colonial governments and their later successors. Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Philippines join Vietnam and Indonesia as key regional players with their own agendas, as evidenced by the formation of SEATO and the Bandung conference. The threat of global Communism orchestrated from Moscow, which had such a powerful hold in the West, passed largely unnoticed in Southeast Asia, where ideology took a back seat to regime preservation. China and its evolving attitude toward the region proved far more compelling: the emergence of the communist government there in 1949 helped further the development of communist networks in the Southeast Asian region. Except in Vietnam, the Soviet Union’s role was peripheral: managing relationships with the United States and China was what preoccupied Southeast Asia’s leaders. The impact of the Sino-Soviet split is visible in the decade-long Cambodian conflict and the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979. This succinct volume not only demonstrates the complexity of the region, but for the first time provides a narrative that places decolonization and nation-building alongside the usual geopolitical conflicts. It focuses on local actors and marshals a wide range of literature in support of its argument. Most importantly, it tells us how and why the Cold War in Southeast Asia evolved the way it did and offers a deeper understanding of the Southeast Asia we know today.

Soviet Foreign Policy and Southeast Asia (Routledge Revivals)

Soviet Foreign Policy and Southeast Asia (Routledge Revivals)
Author: Leszek Buszynski
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2013-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134480857

This book focuses on the activity of the Soviet Union in Southeast Asia and the effects of Soviet policy on the region from 1969 to the time of first publication in 1986. In particular, Leszek Buszynski examines the rivalry between the Soviet Union and China, Soviet presence in Vietnam, and the responsive efforts of surrounding regions towards collective security. U.S. policy in the region is a key consideration, particularly in terms of American attempts to placate China and encourage Japan to assist in the defence of the region. With a concluding assessment of regional trends and possible outcomes, this is an important and valuable work for students and scholars with an interest in the history and politics of international diplomacy in Southeast Asia.

Soviet Strategies in Southeast Asia

Soviet Strategies in Southeast Asia
Author: Charles B. McLane
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 584
Release: 2015-12-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400879663

This study's main concern is with the growth of Communism within Burma, Thailand, Malaya, Indonesia, Indochina, and the Philippines. The author explores the origin and fate of these indigenous movements, their role in domestic politics and relationship to the metropolitan parties (in the case of colonial dependencies) and to the Soviet Union, and their success or failure under the conditions of independence. He also assesses the influence of Communist experience in China, the formation of Russian policy in Southeast Asia, and the policies of the domestic Communist parties. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Cultures at War

Cultures at War
Author: Tony Day
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501721208

The Cold War in Southeast Asia was a many-faceted conflict, driven by regional historical imperatives as much as by the contest between global superpowers. The essays in this book offer the most detailed and probing examination to date of the cultural dimension of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian culture from the late 1940s to the late 1970s was primarily shaped by a long-standing search for national identity and independence, which took place in the context of intense rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, with the Peoples' Republic of China emerging in 1949 as another major international competitor for influence in Southeast Asia. Based on fieldwork in Burma, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, the essays in this collection analyze the ways in which art, literature, film, theater, spectacle, physical culture, and the popular press represented Southeast Asian responses to the Cold War and commemorated that era's violent conflicts long after tensions had subsided. Southeast Asian cultural reactions to the Cold War involved various solutions to the dilemmas of the newly independent nation-states of the region. What is common to all of the perspectives and works examined in this book is that they expressed social and aesthetic concerns that both antedated and outlasted the Cold War, ones that never became simply aligned with the ideologies of either bloc. Contributors:Francisco B. Benitez, University of Washington; Bo Bo, Burmese writer (SOAS, University of London); Michael Bodden, University of Victoria; Simon Creak, Australian National University; Gaik Cheng Khoo, Australian National University; Rachel Harrison, SOAS, University of London; Barbara Hatley, University of Tasmania; Boitran Huynh-Beattie, Asiarta Foundation; Jennifer Lindsay, Australian National University

The Making of Southeast Asia

The Making of Southeast Asia
Author: Amitav Acharya
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2013-02-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0801466342

Developing a framework to study "what makes a region," Amitav Acharya investigates the origins and evolution of Southeast Asian regionalism and international relations. He views the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) "from the bottom up" as not only a U.S.-inspired ally in the Cold War struggle against communism but also an organization that reflects indigenous traditions. Although Acharya deploys the notion of "imagined community" to examine the changes, especially since the Cold War, in the significance of ASEAN dealings for a regional identity, he insists that "imagination" is itself not a neutral but rather a culturally variable concept. The regional imagination in Southeast Asia imagines a community of nations different from NAFTA or NATO, the OAU, or the European Union. In this new edition of a book first published as The Quest for Identity in 2000, Acharya updates developments in the region through the first decade of the new century: the aftermath of the financial crisis of 1997, security affairs after September 2001, the long-term impact of the 2004 tsunami, and the substantial changes wrought by the rise of China as a regional and global actor. Acharya argues in this important book for the crucial importance of regionalism in a different part of the world.

Southeast Asia After the Cold War

Southeast Asia After the Cold War
Author: Cheng Guan Ang
Publisher: National University of Singapore Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Southeast Asia
ISBN: 9789813250789

"International politics in Southeast Asia since end of the Cold War in 1990 can be understood within the frames of order and an emerging regionalism embodied in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). But order and regionalism are now under siege, with a new global strategic rebalancing under way. The region is now forced to contemplate new risks, even the emergence of new sorts of cold war, rivalry and conflict. Ang Cheng Guan, author of Southeast Asia's Cold War, writes here in the mode of contemporary history, presenting a complete, analytically informed narrative that covers the region, highlighting change, continuity and context. Crucial as a tool to make sense of the dynamics of the region, this account of Southeast Asia's international relations will also be of immediate relevance to those in China, the USA and elsewhere who engage with the region, with its young, dynamic population, and its strategic position across the world's key choke-points of trade. This is essential reading for decision-makers who wish to understand our current situation, looking back to the end of the Cold War thirty years ago, and forward to an uncertain future."--Page 4 de la couverture.

The Cold War in East Asia, 1945-1991

The Cold War in East Asia, 1945-1991
Author: Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
Publisher: Cold War International History
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780804773317

This work examines Asia as a second front in the Cold War, looking at how the six powers, the US, China, the USSR and North and South Korea, interacted with one another and forged conditions that were distinct from the Cold War in the West.

Confronting Vietnam

Confronting Vietnam
Author: Ilya V. Gaiduk
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780804747127

Based on extensive research in the Russian archives, this book examines the Soviet approach to the Vietnam conflict between the 1954 Geneva conference on Indochina and late 1963, when the overthrow of the South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and the assassination of John F. Kennedy radically transformed the conflict. The author finds that the USSR attributed no geostrategic importance to Indochina and did not want the crisis there to disrupt détente. The Russians had high hopes that the Geneva accords would bring years of peace in the region. Gradually disillusioned, they tried to strengthen North Vietnam, but would not support unification of North and South. By the early 1960s, however, they felt obliged to counter the American embrace of an aggressively anti-Communist regime in South Vietnam and the hostility of its former ally, the People's Republic of China. Finally, Moscow decided to disengage from Vietnam, disappointed that its efforts to avert an international crisis there had failed.

The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War

The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War
Author: Ilʹi︠a︡ V. Gaĭduk
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
Total Pages: 326
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN:

Despite hundreds of studies and analyses of the Vietnam War, we still have scant knowledge of deliberations and actions on the other side of the lines - in North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union. In this pioneering book, a Russian historian with exclusive access to newly opened Soviet archives on the war offers a compelling account of the Kremlin's role in Vietnam. His eye-opening study will force a rethinking of many Western assumptions. Privy to formerly secret documents in archives that were only briefly opened to scholars, Mr. Gaiduk focuses on the trends and motives that influenced the Kremlin's decision-making process. He analyzes the USSR's position on Vietnam in light of its complex relations with the Communist world and the West. His carefully documented account is also based on research in U.S. archives that permits him a full understanding of exchanges between Washington and Moscow. The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War carries the story from the Johnson administration's involvement in 1964 through the Nixon and Kissinger years to the signing of the Paris peace agreement in January 1973.