Tacit Understandings: Explaining Maritime Southeast Asia's Restraint towards China in the Post-Cold War Period

Abstract

This thesis investigates the enduring restraint of maritime Southeast Asian states towards China during the post-Cold War era, despite China's increased assertiveness in the South China Sea. 'Restraint' refers to the conscious decision of national leaders to limit their nation's hostile actions. This thesis posits that tacit understandings play a crucial role in influencing these restraint decisions. Tacit understandings are implicit agreements that enable stable relationships to persist without resolving disputes. To pinpoint critical moments at which tacit understandings are most observable, this thesis introduces an original assessment tool, termed the Tacit Understanding Framework, that categorises their development into three stages: antecedents (circumstances shaping the urgency of establishing tacit understandings); formation (the negotiation of these understandings); and maintenance (the application of tacit understandings to facilitate restraint and the renegotiation of prior tacit understandings as relationships evolve). These three stages serve as the foundation for analysing the persistent restraint exercised by Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines towards China in the post-Cold War period. This thesis emphasises the perspectives of the three maritime Southeast Asian states, allowing a deeper analysis of how each of them persuaded domestic constituencies to adopt tacit understandings with China. China's perspective is triangulated through consideration of the viewpoints of these states. This thesis begins its investigation during the regional order transition from the Cold War to the post-Cold War period in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This thesis argues that during this period of acute uncertainty, Southeast Asian states and China developed tacit understandings as vital means of communicating intentions and limits without formal agreements. These tacit understandings allowed Southeast Asian states and China to de-emphasise South China Sea disputes and focus on opportunities to collaborate to bolster the relevance of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as an indigenous regional forum, thereby reducing dependence on Western-led institutions. For various reasons explored in each empirical chapter of this thesis, Southeast Asian states continued to maintain these tacit understandings with China throughout the post-Cold War period because such understandings continued to prove useful in facilitating restraint and keeping the South China Sea disputes under control. This thesis offers a dual narrative to show how the negotiation of restraint can demonstrate the mutually constitutive nature of power and legitimacy. A mutually constitutive relationship means that, for a power-aspiring actor to be perceived as powerful, it must gain legitimacy by earning the acceptance of others, particularly from other regional powers. The first narrative delves into how, in response to the structural uncertainty brought about by the Cold War's end, Southeast Asian states --particularly Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines--decided to de-emphasise disputes in the South China Sea and offer the opportunity for China to be integrated into regional processes, despite their antagonism towards China's rising power throughout the Cold War period (to varying degrees and at different paces). They did so on the condition that China met their demands. Focusing on these three Southeast Asian states' perspectives towards China enables me to investigate across cases and across time why and how Beijing reciprocated the demands of its Southeast Asian neighbours. As a result, a second narrative emerges, focusing on the exploration of how China, as an aspiring power, recruited and empowered local partners to support its rise, starting by ensuring the success of its integration into the growing East Asian post-Cold War regional network centred around ASEAN. Show more