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| AsiaViews, Edition: 45/VI/February2010 |
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| Border Fictions and Realities |
| How border fictions in Southeast Asia undermine ASEAN cohesion and border realities can help. |
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| Boats at Surgei Golok wait to transport goods to Malaysia's border town of Rantau Panjang in Malaysia's northeast state of Kelantan. REUTERS/ZAINAL ABD HALIM |
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Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia set up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as a means of resolving what were then high levels of interstate tension (during the Vietnam War and various communist insurgencies, and in the wake of konfrontasi) without resorting to violent conflict or interference in the affairs of other member states. Those goals have been achieved inasmuch as Southeast Asian countries have so far avoided engaging in any shooting wars with each other, but that is a low standard – few multilateral organizations envision their member states bombing other member states – and even regions without such organizations are not necessarily plagued by non-stop interstate war.
Moving to the next stage of cohesion – where political and economic interests begin to align, and where a regional identity forms (even if only among elites) – requires more than simply not fighting.
Here ASEAN has run into problems, and it is not simply because ASEAN’s guiding principles of informality, consensus, and non-interference do not jibe well with institutionalized political and economic integration. Rather, one surprising hindrance to integration is the conflict between what goes on at the local level at the borders of many ASEAN member states and what the national governments want to see happen.
The main issue is that many of the international borders of Southeast Asia are a fiction: they often do not reflect the actual territorial extent of governments’ control, nor do they serve as logical dividing lines for ethnic groups or local economies. To the extent that national governments pretend that borders do work as intended, they are hindering opportunities for integration.
This is not a particularly new insight. The historian Eric Tagliacozzo argues that prior to the nineteenth century much of Southeast Asia consisted of small coastal states (or colonies) which derived their income from trading goods and taxing the ships that passed by. With the exception of extremely rich and relatively narrow islands like Java, controlling large, clearly delimited tracts of land was largely irrelevant for those rulers who wanted wealth and power.
Clinging to the coasts, for centuries the European colonizers made little effort to control the island interiors or even mark the borders between their colonies. The British, Dutch, and Spanish only began to create formal borders when the informal commerce that had always moved between the coastal states of the region began to cut into their own power and profits from monopolizing trade in their colonies. That informal commerce came to be labeled as smuggling.
When post-colonial governments took over from the Europeans in the twentieth century, they struggled to create states that would actually control all the territory within the recently drawn and somewhat arbitrary borders. Such aspirations were ill-suited to how the region’s economy was actually set up. The result was areas with little governmental control, and borders that, if actually enforced, would hamper trade on which many local people had depended for generations.
The Philippine state, for example, barely exists in many areas of Mindanao, having been replaced by fractious insurgent groups. Likewise, the border between Myanmar and northwestern Thailand is crossed nearly with impunity by drug mules coming from an area of Myanmar that has never been under the effective control of the central government.
Even areas where the state is not virtually absent see substantial amounts of movement outside of legal channels, while the cross-border trade that the British, Dutch, and Spanish labeled as smuggling continues today in large part because numerous ethnic
groups, even down to the family level, span borders and ignore attempts by states to limit their activities.
Although Entikong in Kalimantan is the only legal land crossing between Indonesia and East Malaysia, for instance, there are a number of other points where local residents cross back and forth almost without reference to the government of wherever they happen to be at the time. Likewise, Singaporeans have many relatives in Johor and the Riau archipelago from a time when there were no formal borders; southern Thai Muslims are essentially the same ethnically as the Malays across the border; and thousands of Indonesians live in the southern Philippines, while people from ethnic groups traditionally considered to be Filipinos live in Indonesia’s Sangihe-Talaud islands.
Not surprisingly, the Sangihe-Talaud islands see large amounts of cross-border traffic, legal and illegal.
One typical governmental response to illegal cross-border traffic is to ignore it officially, with occasional crackdowns. Sabah, Malaysia, for example, needs illegal low-wage Indonesian workers and, according to interviews, allows them to cross by boat into Tawau without documents during times of economic growth. During economic downturns, the government sends the workers back, causing tensions with Indonesia and creating uncertainty about the precise policy of the government towards informal cross-border trade.
Southeast Asian governments also continue to cling to border disputes in an effort to solidify the borders left to them by the European colonial powers. Land and sea border disputes abound: Thailand and Cambodia have clashed over an ancient Khmer temple, Indonesia and Malaysia continue to deal with tensions over their sea border east of Borneo, and a number of ASEAN member states are jockeying for control of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. While natural resources are at stake in many of these border disputes, what is remarkable is that many of the countries involved in these disputes do not exercise particularly strong control over activities in the territory adjacent
to the disputed borders.
In essence, the efforts of governments in the region to apply a model of territorial control and border enforcement, without official regard for local political and economic realities, have heightened tensions among ASEAN members states while stretching governmental resources in directions that not are necessarily very useful for integration.
It is not realistic to expect Southeast Asian countries’ borders to change all that much. With a shift in how they think about borders, however, ASEAN member states could turn what until now has been a hindrance to further integration into a catalyst for development.
A first step would be to pragmatically de-emphasize territorial disputes, particularly in areas where one or both countries involved do not have a particularly firm grasp of that territory. A second step would be to encourage economic development and even political organization that align more tightly with how cross-border social and economic networks actually work on the ground. This would involve difficult choices for some countries, inasmuch as it would invariably mean free trade and political autonomy for border regions. But allowing local political control could decrease the need for limited central government resources to be devoted to trying to change pre-existing political and economic conditions. Official policies of encouraging trade and political ties that straddle borders, even disputed ones, could be used as a means of building multinational networks and even multinational identity from the ground up.
If the project is successful, ASEAN cohesion would then come not only from elites, but also from the peoples of Southeast Asia.
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| By Justin Hastings, Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology, who was recently in Indonesia for research on transnational networks in Southeast Asia |
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| Asiaviews, Vol.III No.9 January-February 2010 |
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