Hegemonic Instability in the Evolving Geopolitics of Southeast Asia

Since the Vietnam War (1955–1975), Western dominance in Southeast Asian geopolitics has seen a steady decline. Coupled with the post-Cold War period, there continued to be a system of watered-down American-led arrangements aimed at maintaining regional stability among Southeast Asian states. This was tempered further by the emergence of Association of Southeast Asia (ASEAN) regionalism in the late 1960s and the progressive fashioning of ASEAN constructs for regional stability. ASEAN over time evinced its own agency in crafting regional institutions and norms to leverage on the notion of “ASEAN centrality” in stabilising regional politics into the twenty-first century. Hitherto, the notion of hegemonic stability in the international relations literature implied that a major hegemon, such a European power like Britain or the United States, would undergird regional stability. Analysts have noted that a multipolar world has emerged in the post-Cold War era when the United States failed to seize the so-called “unipolar moment”. With the apparent decline of American hegemony, a new historic moment is in the offing. The changing character of global politics has allowed for a large measure of agency and flexibility in the foreign policy of small and medium states in the ASEAN formation. Hedging and balancing, as opposed to bandwagoning, have become new strategies in the foreign policy arsenal of Southeast Asian states. A constructivist perspective to the understanding of the emerging Southeast Asian geopolitics suggests that hegemonic stability underpinning a particular politico-economic structural neoliberal order may have been be disrupted by a period of “hegemonic instability” which is posited to be an historic moment currently articulating within the Southeast Asian region circa 2020.