Sovereignty : an institutional nexus between Southeast Asia and international society

Abstract

Sovereignty is commonly regarded as the quintessential principle of pluralism within international society, allowing states to co-exist despite their different domestic political systems. Thus, the institution of sovereignty is central to explanations of non-Western states' membership of an expanding international society that originated among European states with a shared history and culture. A precondition for membership of international society, the institutionalisation of sovereignty displaced existing political structures and transformed local conceptions of the polity. Therefore, even as a 'pluralist' institution, sovereignty has had far reaching normative implications for the development of these 'new' states. Yet research on non-Western approaches to sovereignty is usually confined to a survey of post{u00AD}colonial states' enthusiastic embrace of this institution. There is little discussion of either how sovereignty was institutionalised within these states or how non-Western actors may have contributed to the development of understandings of sovereignty within international society. In light of these lacunae, I investigate the institutionalisation of sovereignty within a specific non-Western region, namely Southeast Asia, and explore sovereignty as an institution constitutive of, and yet also constituted by, Southeast Asian polities as they entered international society. In doing so, I ask the following research questions: How is sovereignty understood in Southeast Asia? How did processes of international socialisation and local conceptions of political authority interact to condition the construction of postcolonial understandings and practices of sovereignty in Southeast Asia? I argue that sovereignty has formed an institutional nexus between Southeast Asian polities and the contemporary international society of states. In case studies of Burma, Malaysia and Thailand, I illustrate how sovereignty has continuously structured regional polities' international relations, from the height of imperialism in the 19th Century through to the present day post-colonial period. The institutionalisation of sovereignty in Southeast Asia commenced in the19th Century with European states' recognition of regional rulers as sovereigns, who incurred obligations, as well as rights, on behalf of their respective realms. The process proved reconstitutive of Southeast Asian polities, recasting their identities as well as regulating their interactions within international society. Regional elites not only advanced sovereignty claims in their international diplomacy, but they also began to modify their understandings of local political authority in response to these European expectations. However, European states often regarded Southeast Asian rulers as failing to meet their sovereign obligations. Consequently, European states undertook varying degrees of intervention, on the premise that while sovereignty constituted a universal principle by which territory ought to be governed, the bearer of sovereignty need not be coterminous with the territory in which sovereignty was exercised. The emergence of the principle of self-determination in the 20th Century shifted states' conceptions of sovereignty within international society, such that the state was to be representative of the political community over which it exercised sovereignty. While the growth of claims to self-determination in Southeast Asia delegitimised European empires in the region, the shape that regional political communities would take was by no means self-evident. Different groups presented competing visions of the political community after independence and post-colonial states in the region faced the challenge of reconciling their sovereignty with different, pre-existing conceptions of legitimate political authority. Therefore, rather than simply transplanting this 'Western' institution into the region, Southeast Asian elites have localised their sovereignty claims in response to existing understandings of political authority. The resulting differences in the scope of states' sovereignty illustrate how regional elites have reinterpreted this institution in light of local understandings of legitimacy, thereby 'adding' their own normative content to this institution. Show more