ABSTRACT This article introduces the pieces collected in this special issue on the legacies of the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia. Linking to the Journal of Contemporary Asia’s 50th Anniversary volume, it examines the origins and conflicts associated with the Cold War in Asia. In this special issue, the authors collectively examine the enduring legacies for the region of US engagements that established a set of politically authoritarian regimes trumpeting anti-communism while promoting American-style capitalism. While the path-dependence of this historical moment has not by itself bequeathed Asia’s current crop of authoritarian governments, the authors argue that the current situation cannot be fully understood without reference to Cold War legacies. This introductory article contextualises the pieces in the special issue by providing a broad overview of the variety of Cold War political and economic legacies for the region. It concludes by noting the importance of the kinds of detailed, critical, theoretically informed and empirically rich research that Journal of Contemporary Asia has encouraged since its inception. The beginning of the Cold War is most often considered an outcome of the end of World War II and is seen to have been formally “announced” in March 1947 when US President Harry S. Truman addressed a joint session of Congress, seeking massive assistance to Greece and Turkey. Arguing that these countries faced communist aggression, Truman (1947) declared that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Known as the Truman Doctrine, this statement underpinned a social, political, economic and military contest with the Soviet Union that lasted more than 40 years. In fact, though, the Cold War had important antecedents in the West’s anti-communist ideology and political actions that followed the Russian Revolution in 1917 (Haslam 2011). In several of the world’s regions, the Cold War was marked by internal and inter-state conflicts, civil wars and genocides that left deep scars on the societies involved (Kwon 2010). The “hot” wars in Korea and the Indochina countries were extended and bloody. In other countries in the region, strident anti-communism led to atrocities and human suffering on an almost unimaginable scale. In Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, it is estimated that 1.5 to three million were killed between 1954 and 1975. In Indonesia, hundreds of thousands of supposed leftists were murdered in 1965–1966 (Robinson 2018; Törnquist 2020). Local insurgencies mushroomed in Thailand, the Philippines and Malaya and authoritarian politics was embedded throughout the region. Given these levels of violence, the notion of a Cold War in Asia is a misnomer. The onset of the Cold War came in the midst of popular anti-colonial struggles and movements (Hewison and Rodan 2012, 29–31). The new nation-states displayed various political regime types with a bewildering array of internal and external actors and pressures, intent on shaping politics and institutions. For Marxists, anti-colonialism and nationalism provided opportunities. For example, Lenin had acknowledged the potential for revolution in Asia and his Imperialism was a powerful document in the struggle against colonialism (see Gafurov and Kim 1978, 385). Initially the USA supported some decolonisations but as anti-communism regained its predominant place in US foreign policy, particularly after the communist victory in China and war in Korea, anti-colonial movements came to be viewed more suspiciously (Kolko 1988, Chs 6–7).1 Interestingly, Stalin’s Soviet Union was less involved in Asia than the Americans believed (Singh 1987; Radchenko 2012). The new China was more enthusiastic about national liberation and socialist internationalism, and engaged its troops in Korea, yet its capacity and willingness to “export revolution” was more limited than the US feared (Chen 2005). In the early 1950s, the Mutual Security Agency (n.d., 1) displayed the urgency accorded anti-communism in the region: [S]outh of the ominous mass that is Red China, Thailand, along with her embattled but still free neighbors, shares a peninsula. The Communists want it. They covet its riches: rubber, tin, rice and teak. They consider it a prize base, for like an oriental scimitar, the peninsula’s tip is pointed at the throat of Indonesia … In Malaya, Burma and Indo-China, Communist-led rebels plunder, kill and burn. Thailand is surrounded by these countries, each a smouldering bomb … The fuses are short. Regimes like those in Cambodia and Burma were considered insufficiently anti-communist and thus suspect, especially if they were not open to “free enterprise” or proposed alternative regional arrangements.2 * * * * In its 50th anniversary volume, a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Asia that assesses some of the legacies of the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia is fitting. As explained in the journal’s anniversary editorial, it was born in opposition to the American wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos and in support of liberation movements (Hewison 2020a, 5). The journal’s founding also reflected considerable dissatisfaction with mainstream academic studies of Asia and with the academy’s support for the USA’s imperial forays in the region. Indeed, the first issue included important articles that illustrated key Cold War contests and highlighted anti-imperial resistance. For example, Kolko (1970, 13), in examining the war in Vietnam, sets this conflict in the context of the US military machine facing a guerrilla army, noting that the Vietnamese resistance, “with its unshakable roots everywhere in that tortured nation, would survive and ultimately prevail rather than be destroyed by the most intense rain of fire ever inflicted on men and women. For the history of America’s role in Vietnam is not one of accident but rather of the failure of policy.” This point was also taken up by Jacoby (1970) who writes of the failures of interventions that oppose nationalist risings, while Bell and Resnick (1970) argued that the economics of modernisation had, by the end of the 1960s, produced uneven development and the exploitation of the majority in the interests of small domestic ruling classes and transnational capital. They observed that war, revolution, exploitation and inequality resulted from Cold War political and economic arrangements.3 In this special issue, the authors collectively examine the enduring legacies for the region of US engagements that established a set of politically authoritarian regimes trumpeting anti-communism while promoting American-style capitalism.4 That the Cold War was played out in domestic politics is obvious, with impacts for regimes, business elites and civil society. International and transnational actors combined with internal actors to push their various agendas in domestic politics. In those countries that allied with the USA the fear of communism gave birth to notions of a “domino theory” growing from the communist victory in China. This fear soon translated into a broad repression of political dissent, with unions and political movements especially targeted. For the anti-communist alliance, one political mantra was that resisting communism required stable and strong states, justifying repression and authoritarianism. This often translated into US support for military regimes. At the same time, anti-communism meant support for modernisation underpinned by market-friendly capitalism (Glassman 2020). Cold War anti-communism was ideologically sustained by versions of modernisation theory (Baber 2001; Westad 2005, 32–38). For example, Rostow (1960) made clear the competition between communist and capitalist economic systems when he provided a “non-communist manifesto” for capitalist development, while Huntington (1968) expounded on the need for “political order.” Both men easily flitted between academia and state service in Washington (see Halberstam 2001; Gawthorpe 2018). * * * * The development of the Cold War in Asia converged and combined with anti-colonial struggles and the formation of states and political regimes in the newly independent but still poor countries. In most of these new states, agriculture remained the major economic activity.5 As noted above, while US agencies were initially supportive of decolonisation, intelligence services were soon alarmed. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) considered that the Second Congress of the Indian Communist Party, and a World Federation of Democratic Youth meeting in Calcutta, both in 1948, represented a turning point for Asia. It asserted that these meetings led to Soviet-inspired and “near-simultaneous Communist-inspired uprisings in Burma, Indonesia, and Malaya” (cited in Haslam 2011, 117; see also Radchenko 2012). Following Mao Zedong’s 1949 proclamation of the People’s Republic of China, Viet Minh gains in Indochina and the outbreak of the Korean War, the US became more fully engaged in East and Southeast Asia. In an ironic parallel, while Soviet propaganda was supportive of anti-colonialism, national liberation and anti-imperialism, the USSR also became more involved. Yet despite the USA’s fears, Stalin’s regime was not particularly engaged in Asia until the Korean War and remained suspicious of Mao’s China (Haslam 2011, 112–119). It was under Khrushchev that Soviet interest in the region increased and assistance began to flow. Radchenko (2012, 111) suggests that Khrushchev intuitively made the connection between national liberation movements and the “struggle against imperialism” and felt “that the Soviet Union had natural allies among the poor and destitute nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America.” Khrushchev’s approach remained haphazard and opportunistic and it was Mao who sought to make China “the true carrier of the anti-imperialist banner” and promoted “revolutionary struggle” (Radchenko 2012, 112). Trumpeting its anti-communism, the USA became active throughout the region, with Japan central to its regional strategy. Enormous efforts were expended in rehabilitating the Japanese economy, with assistance totalling some US$2.2 billion between 1946 and 1952, with about 40% of this directed to infrastructure and economic reconstruction (Serafino, Tarnoff, and Nanto 2006, 5). As Dower (1990, 54) explains, economics and politics were intertwined, with Japan “ … a favored client of the United States, rewarded for acquiescence in the ‘containment’ of communism … ”. With the Cold War intensifying, Japanese bureaucrats and rightist politicians allied with US counterparts in defeating domestic leftists, including actions to delegitimise unions (Dower 1990, 64). In its anti-leftism, the US administration tolerated “all sorts of unsavory Japanese politicians who had conveniently become rabid anticommunists … ” (Johnson 1990, 77; see also Williams 2020). Throughout the region, right-wing domestic elites dominated politics. Often this resulted in a devastating political polarisation, aggressive political repression and savage wars. Political arrests and murders crippled political oppositions, while wars, insurgency and counterinsurgency, and massive US bombing in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia caused widespread fear and socio-economic disruption together with deaths and other casualties. Counterinsurgency was regionalised. For example, Edward Lansdale, who migrated from the US Office for Strategic Services to the army, air force and then to the CIA, developed counterinsurgency tactics in the Philippines against the Hukbalahap movement – as well as manipulating elections there – that were later transferred to South Vietnam (Gravel 1972a, 573–583). Also, lessons learned from the British colonial regime in the Malayan Emergency involving the forced deportation of half a million people to “New Villages” were also used in South Vietnam’s strategic hamlet programme (Gravel 1972b, 128–159).6 In South Vietnam, between 1961 and 1963, more than eight million people were relocated to such hamlets (Osborne 1965, 33). In his excellent studies of surveillance and torture, McCoy (2009; 2012) explains that some of these techniques were developed during the US colonial period in the Philippines. These were further enhanced and used widely throughout the region, with domestic police and military forces being trained in such coercive methods. Except for the trial of some of those responsible for Khmer Rouge killings between 1975 and 1979, there have been few judicial processes that have dealt with the politically motivated killings in Cold War Asia nor for the inhumane bombing of the Indochina countries.7 State terror and atrocities during the Cold War era have regularly resurfaced in public discourse during periods of political liberalisation including calls for investigation of the murder of students at Thailand’s Thammasat University in 1976 and of the 1965–1966 mass killings in Indonesia. Cold War political elites – domestic and international – justified state violence in terms of anti-communism, political order and regime stability. Such violence was possible because of the demonisation of those deemed political opponents. Following the Chinese Revolution, elements of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia were treated as “aliens” and – despite Nationalist claims on these “overseas Chinese” – were considered a potential “fifth column” for Chinese communism.8 CIA reports to Washington in the 1950s featured accounts of “dangerous minorities” and especially of local Chinese communities, demonstrating the considerable surveillance efforts expended on the Chinese in Southeast Asia. At times, the Chinese were thought of as a minority that could be won over to anti-communism (see Oyen 2010). In general, though, the result was state suspicion and anti-Chinese propaganda that, in the worst cases, led to massacres. Thus, the mass killings in Indonesia in 1965–1966 targeted the twin fears over ethnic Chinese and alleged communists (Mackie 1976, 111–128). US concerns about the loyalty of the Chinese to Thailand knitted with the Thai military regime’s post-1949 fears and was also reflected in academic publications, with Wilson (1959, 86) identifying communism with the Chinese. He also mentioned Vietnamese communists operating in Thailand, with Poole (1970) expounding on this “minority problem.” Such perspectives were taken up in counterinsurgency with, for example, Thai counterinsurgency specialist General Saiyud Kerdphol speaking on “The Minority Question” in 1975. He expressed a commonly-held view that minorities needed to be repressed or incorporated into the war against communism (Saiyud 1986, 97–112). Much of counter-insurgency warfare in mainland Southeast Asia was directed to areas dominated by minority groups. The turmoil that resulted from these multiple contests under the rubric of the Cold War had marked social, political, economic and environmental impacts (see Levy and Sidel 2000; McNeill and Unger 2010). In Korea and Indochina, the Cold War saw states made (see Cumings 2005; Vatthana 2012). And, in South Korea and Vietnam, wars had significant health, environmental and socio-economic impacts (Westing 1971; Le Thi Nham Tuyet and Johansson 2001; Lee 2014). In the following section – and in the special issue – the emphasis is on the enduring political and economic impacts of the Cold War. While the Cold War produced death and destruction in Asia, it also stimulated various, sometimes remarkable, trajectories of capitalist production. Japan’s economy led the way in stimulating regional capitalist development, in no small measure because of the spur given to it during and immediately after the US Occupation (1945–1952). The massive damage caused by fire-bombing and atomic devastation reduced millions of Japanese to a desperate survival mode for a number of years, but the combination of US-led economic assistance packages and, especially, opportunities for offshore procurement (OSP) from the US military during the Korean War, quickly rekindled the kind of industrial growth that had turned Japan into an imperial capitalist behemoth before the war (see, for example, Borden 1984; Schaller 1985; Nakamura 1995; Dower 1999). While Japanese militarism was repressed and the older zaibatsu structure of hierarchical holdings was transformed, a vibrant network of bank-centred keiretsu emerged that quickly turned Japan once again into an industrial powerhouse, one that would begin to challenge US industrial firms, especially in electronics and automotive production (Schaller 1997). This phenomenon was heavily conditioned by Japan’s position as a regional sub-hegemon and appointed “economic animal,” operating under US protection to spur capitalist development throughout the region (Cumings 1984; Bernard and Ravenhill 1995; Glassman 2018, 503–511). The Korean War also created reasons for US Cold War leaders to funnel funds into the coffers of regional allies like the Nationalists in Taiwan (after 1949). But it devastated Korea and led to the partition of the peninsula (Cumings 2011). Here too, however, geo-political economic cycles of Cold War conflict generated growth. For several decades after the armistice, the North Korean economy actually revived fairly quickly under a Soviet- and Chinese-backed system of war communism, and as late as the early 1970s its industrial capacity and overall economic performance outstripped that of the South (Cumings 2005, 352; Lankov 2013, 69–71). A series of US-brokered deals in the 1960s, however, helped set South Korea on a remarkable industrial trajectory that not only turned it into one of the world’s leading industrial producers but shaped the dictatorship in the country and, in many ways, helped pro-capitalist forces to win the Cold War in Asia (Cumings 2005, 325). The major deals were a normalisation treaty with Japan and a more secretive deal for South Korea to send troops to Vietnam (eventually 300,000) in exchange for privileged OSP opportunities (Woo 1991; Lie 1998). Major beneficiaries of this included the giant chaebol conglomerates that were to dominate the South Korean economy from the 1970s onward, such as Hyundai and Hanjin (Glassman and Choi 2014). Taiwan also benefitted from Vietnam War US OSP, but to a much lesser extent than South Korea. At the same time, though, its economic actors benefitted from increasing transnational tie-ups with both Japanese and US firms, including in fields such as electronics production (Gold 1986). This led to Taiwanese firms playing central roles in the development of East Asia-centred global production networks which eventually resulted in post-Cold War networks connecting Taiwan to mainland China and beyond (Hsu, Gimm, and Glassman 2018). Southeast Asian actors also benefitted from this capitalist development, though few experienced the dramatic transitions seen in South Korea and Taiwan until late in the Cold War period. Thailand received a huge amount of US Vietnam War-era largesse, contributing to development of the national road network and, with this, intensified commercialisation of agriculture (Chairat 1988). Thailand’s economic growth throughout the Cold War period was prodigious, leading to the formation of large economic fortunes (Hewison 1989). This came with tremendous economic inequality (Pasuk 2016). It did not, however, generate the same kind of industrial transformation that occurred in Northeast Asia, with Thai producers remaining further down the regional hierarchy of economic power and technological capacity (Doner 2009). As Glassman (2020) argues in his article for this special issue, Cold War authoritarianism promoted “lazy” forms of capitalism based heavily on absolute value strategies, shaping development and the structure of the labour force in ways that contribute to enduring authoritarian tendencies. The Philippines did even less well in this Cold War-era economic expansion, despite receiving US economic and military assistance throughout the Vietnam War (Bello et al. 2004). Moreover, it is clear that while Cold War-era military and economic spending unquestionably shaped and spurred the growth of capitalism in the region, many countries that were not central to war efforts in Vietnam were able to position themselves in such a way as to generate rapid economic growth as a result of the Cold War context. Singapore, for example, launched a dramatic project of technological upgrading and export-promotion by the 1970s, building in part from industries that US Cold War planners had helped develop through OSP in the aftermath of Great Britain’s departure and the failure of the Federation of Malaya (Rodan 1989, 100–103, 114; Glassman 2018, 489–493). The rapid growth of Singapore as a regional hub for the management of various kinds of production speaks to the relatively autonomous and post-Cold War-oriented evolution of a developmental state; but the Cold War origins of this state have remained evident in phenomena such as the limits on Singaporean democracy and the highly subordinated position of Singaporean labour (Rodan 2018; Ye 2016). Similar to Singapore, pro-capitalist Malaysia and Indonesia have experienced a growth dynamic that owes something to the Cold War environment in which it was birthed, including the anti-democratic measures and repression of labour that the Cold War helped rationalise (Rodan 2018). In Malaysia, this led by the 1970s to a dramatic export-oriented growth dynamic, triggered in part by investment from Japan (Jomo et al. 1997). Indonesia’s growth has been somewhat more punctuated by changes in international oil prices, as well as by enormous domestic repression and (in recent decades) some degree of political rebellion (Robison 1986; Robison and Hadiz 2017). Yet this has been consistent with enough GDP growth to make Indonesia, before the 1997 economic meltdown, one of the world’s most rapidly growing economies. Economists obsessed with GDP growth have been impressed by this regional phenomenon of Cold War-era growth among the pro-capitalist and US-allied countries. Such growth serves as their proof of the superiority of capitalist over socialist development. For example, modernisation theorists like Vogel (1991, 8) see the Cold War as having provided opportunities for pro-capitalist countries to obtain access to productive technologies on advantageous terms, given the US Cold War state’s interest in promoting development as a means to combat the spread of communism. While there is considerable truth in this, it also misses the fact that the US also rationed access to opportunities based on the degree to which different countries signed up to provide troops and other amenities in support of the US war effort in Vietnam. South Korea, for example, by committing a large number of ground forces, gained highly preferential OSP opportunities, these including opportunities to engage in upgrading of the engineering skills of firms such as Hyundai under the direct supervision of the US Army Corps of Engineers. In contrast, the Philippines, which sent only 12,000 troops to Vietnam, was largely cut out of OSP opportunities, even when the Marcos government implored US leaders to provide them (Glassman and Choi 2014). In no small part because of this, South Korea, which in 1960 had a much smaller manufacturing sector than the Philippines, had already overtaken it in manufacturing output by the mid-1970s and had vaulted into a league of capitalist production well above the one in which most Philippine firms could play (Glassman 2018, 426). In short, while the Cold War undoubtedly spurred considerable capitalist development in Asia, it did so unevenly, in differential patterns that were themselves shaped by the Cold War, as well as by other pre-existing differences in the political and class structures. This image of variation, rather than uniformity, in Cold War-era development is made all the more obvious if we include the varied pictures emerging from the usually short-lived experiments in socialist development in the region. North Korea, of course, might be seen as having continued along that path, a path on which successes have been difficult to come by since the 1970s (Lankov 2013, 71). Among the Southeast Asian socialist states, there has been considerable variation as well. Vietnam’s effort at a form of socialist reconstruction was largely aborted in a process begun in 1979 – known as doi moi – that developed in fits and starts through the 1980s (Beresford 2008), with the abandonment of socialist reconstruction and subsequent conversion to a capitalist path also being seized on by Western critics as evidence of the superiority of unfettered capitalism (see, for example, Riedel and Comer 1997). As Kolko (1997, Ch. 1) observes, the enormous challenges of post-Vietnam War reconstruction meant that Vietnam would have great difficulty launching a successful project of socialist development.9 Its conversion to more pro-market policies has thus helped capitalist forces win the Cold War not just in material terms but through forms of academic and intellectual opportunism that routinely expunge the war from historical memory as a factor in either the successes of US allies or the enormous difficulties of the countries militarily destroyed by war (Glassman 2018, 64–67). Other socialist experiments in Southeast Asia were tremendously variegated, with enormous differences marking efforts, from the Khmer Rouge regime’s murderous efforts at autarky, the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party’s heavy reliance on Vietnam and later its turn toward economic integration into the Thai and Chinese economies and the Ne Win regime’s idiosyncratic policies in Burma/Myanmar.10 Conditioning all of these were the often-remarkable torsions and shifts in development policies within the People’s Republic of China, both in the Maoist era and during the transitions to capitalism in Eastern Europe that marked the end of the Cold War. Thus, while it is clear that the Cold War provided considerable long-term momentum for capitalist development in Asia, it did so in very different ways within different sites of capitalism, these ranging from Japan’s industrial capitalist re-emergence as a regional powerhouse to Laos’, Vietnam’s and Cambodia’s late and comparatively disempowered entry into export-oriented production, from South Korea’s heavy industry and “construction state” boom after the 1960s to the Philippines’ stagnation and “anti-developmental state” difficulties in the same time period.11 There is thus no one, modal capitalist outcome of the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia, World Bank (1993) models of “East Asian miracles” and neo-Weberian models of ideal-type developmental states notwithstanding (Amsden 1995). What is evident in the nations of the region that worked in Cold War alliance with the USA is that capitalist development and anti-communism swung political and economic power in favour of capitalist classes and their states. Like economic development patterns, the political regimes of contemporary East and Southeast Asia show considerable variation from state socialist party-states, to military-backed authoritarianism, to electoral democracies. This range of post-Cold War regimes would seem to confound ideologues like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew who have claimed that “Asian Values” are naturally conservative and antithetical to democracy (Zakaria 1994). A more scholarly assessment by Moore (1966) argued that, in particular historical circumstances, the kinds of social contests and class alliances around lords and peasants at the end of feudalism accounted for the emergence of dictatorship and democracy. In examining the dominance of authoritarianism in some of the countries of contemporary Southeast Asia, Slater (2010, 45), like others, observes that Moore ignored the role of emerging working classes. His response is to argue that “contentious politics,” borne of “extraordinary times,” has seen elite collective action maintain authoritarian politics and defeat subaltern challenges (Slater 2010, 275). Slater’s approach downplays the class struggles associated with the emergence and consolidation of capitalism as expounded by Rueschemeyer, Huber Stephens, and Stephens (1992). Yet there can be little doubt that the Cold War represented “extraordinary times,” and the political legacies have been substantial. Conservative commentators like Mahbubani (2009) have claimed that democracy was “exported” by the post-Cold War West as a way of continuing its dominance while Levitsky and Way (2002, 60) view Western proximity and links – “cultural and media influence, elite networks, demonstration effects, and direct pressure” – as contributing to democratic politics. In fact, Cold War politics suggest a quite different pattern, with the USA and its allies exerting both linkage and leverage to buttress reliable anti-communist regimes, both democratic and authoritarian, but always embedding conservative ruling classes. As Brad Williams (2020) shows in his article in this special issue, in Japan, US covert action during the early Cold War period was directed to establishing and perpetuating the political dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The most intense phase of US intervention in Japan’s political process was during the first decade after the US-led occupation (see Dower 1971). Responding to events in China and Korea, the Treaty of Mutual Co-operation and Security between the USA and Japan was signed in 1951. It maintained the USA’s political primacy and permitted it to maintain bases in Japan and committed it to the defence of Japan and advanced economic co-operation (see Selden 1974). Contentious politics, including struggles between labour and capital, prompted the US administration to work to ensure conservative political dominance. Conservative elites eagerly engaged with US operatives in pursuit of their own political and economic interests in establishing and stabilising LDP rule and in overcoming unions and (legal) communists. The legacies of such conservative alliances are seen elsewhere in the region where they buttressed authoritarianism and repressed civil society to such an extent that post-Cold War politics has limited human rights initiatives and stunted electoral and progressive politics. The persistence of authoritarian and one-party rule in the Southeast Asia is particularly noticeable, with Laos and Vietnam having state socialist regimes, while Singapore, Cambodia and Malaysia have had long-standing one-party domination. Each of these dominant parties was forged in early post-colonial politics and shaped by the Cold War. Only the Philippines since 1986 and Indonesia after 1998 have experienced extended periods of competitive electoral politics, although both face respective challenges of populist authoritarianism and religious conservatism. Burma, now Myanmar, has moved from military domination to a weak parliamentary system where the military still wields considerable political and economic power. Thailand has flip-flopped between electoral politics and military authoritarianism. In several of these cases, modernisation theory’s postulated correlation between capitalism, democratisation and the expansion of a middle class has been shown to be flawed. In Thailand, for example, middle classes have campaigned against electoral politics and aligned with a powerful and deeply conservative elite in support of royalist and military authoritarianism (Veerayooth and Hewison 2016, 372–376). Much of the political development literature on Asia and more broadly has explained the travails of electoral politics and tenacious authoritarianism in terms of domestic factors, with international dimensions and historical pathways largely ignored. This seems somewhat odd given the huge inflow of Cold War aid and investment to the capitalist countries of East and Southeast Asia and the involvement of foreign actors in the political engineering of the Cold War political arena. Clearly, there was a converging of interests between domestic elites and those of US anti-communism.12 This pattern is also demonstrated for Thailand in Kevin Hewison’s (2020b) article for this special issue. He shows that the country’s Cold War alliance with the USA saw Thailand’s leadership’s desperate seeking for the capacity to defeat its political opponents and access arms for its military and police coalesce with the USA’s need for a regime that would “stand up” to communism. This anti-communist relationship had far-reaching impacts for Thailand’s political institutions, including the destruction of a nascent parliamentary democracy and the embedding of military authoritarianism. The training of the Thai military, bureaucrats and technocrats was an important element of the USA’s intervention (see Surachart 1988). As already noted, the military continues to dominate the country’s politics. In the Philippines, as Teresa Tadem (2020) shows in this special issue, the training of Filipino technocrats was crucial for promoting and embedding policies of free market liberalism to defeat communism. Local training and education and graduate study in US colleges provided the state with reliable managers and provided the technocrats with the expertise to serve the state and corporations. While emerging guerrilla wars saw attention to counterinsurgency, support for capitalist development also meant concerted efforts to limit labour organisation. New regimes and US and British intelligence operations targeted organised labour in Japan, South Korea, Malaya and Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia. In Taiwan, unions were banned. Clearly, domestic regimes and international cold warriors saw trade unions as a site of, at best, contests for loyalty, and more often, as needing strict control to prevent communist “infiltration.” When they existed, unions in the region were riven by Cold War divisions.13 In Malaysia, as Meredith Weiss (2020) explains in her article in this special issue, a vigorous and militant union movement was more or less banned with the declaration of the Emergency. Radical labour leaders were arrested or killed and Special Branch and other police exercised constant supervision and restriction of union activities (Fong 1992, 61–66). Such ruthless methods were common in East and Southeast Asia, with Deyo (1989) concluding that this historical experience means that labour has been made politically weak and dependent, subordinate to states and capital. While workers have been drawn out of poverty by capitalist economic growth, nowhere have they been able to influence the political and economic decisions that have shaped their lives. More broadly, civil society organisations tended to remain weak and, in some cases, infiltrated, divided and shaped by Cold War protagonists, with the US government funding scores of non-governmental organisations through US non-profits and cultural foundations (see Paget 2015; Best 2017). For example, Cold War divisions acted to limit post-Cold War possibilities for class coalitions between labour and the middle classes. The Cold War efforts were directed to undermining progressive movements of, for example, youth, writers and peace activists, which were assumed to have been infiltrated by communists supported by the Soviet Union and China (see, for example, Sacks 1950; Sutton 2016). As rightist regimes coerced and controlled civil society, often using anti-communist laws, political space was sharply limited, not just for communists and other leftists but for students, writers and other activists (Hewison and Rodan 2012, 31–32). The result was that civil society remained stunted in many countries in the region throughout the Cold War period. Even after the end of that contest, its impacts have continued. All of the articles in this special issue note these long-term legacies, with Weiss (2020), for example, observing that Malaya’s anti-communist Emergency left a complex and enduring legacy for politics and civil society in political ideologies, settlement patterns, restrictive legislation and more. Anti-communism delegitimised ideological alternatives and bolstered a centralised, communal and capitalist state, within a society that in important ways was depoliticised. In Indonesia, as Olle Törnquist (2020) shows in his review article, the terrible blood-letting of the counter-revolution of the mid-1960s has left real scars. Hewison (2020b) and Glassman (2020) demonstrate important legacies for Thailand’s political economy. To reiterate the point that the legacies of the Cold War are variable and embedded in path-dependent political and economic contexts, the institutions and practices devised for marginalising popular forces could be maintained – as in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand – or rolled back. In examining the unwinding of Cold War practices in Taiwan, as Erik Mobrand (2020) shows in his contribution to this special issue, the underpinnings of democratic change lay in limited but meaningful local-level elections that produced a new group within the political elite who eventually negotiated a more open electoral terrain. The Cold War had important political, social and economic consequences for East and Southeast Asian development. Yet it is simplistic to expect to find easy correlations that, for example, assert that authoritarianism today is born of Cold War dictatorship or that successful capitalist development brings democracy later. Such correlations need to be tempered, considered and contextualised so as not to miss the deeper textures of political, social and economic legacies. In other words, the kinds of detailed, case-study scholarship that the Journal of Contemporary Asia has long published is vital for prising out Cold War legacies. This journal was founded in the midst of the Cold War and the US hot war in Vietnam. Like its “sister” publication, the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (now Critical Asian Studies), it was established by radical intellectuals critical not only of US policies in Asia but of the ways mainstream media and scholarship were portraying this region of the world (see, for example, Chomsky 1970; Friedman and Selden 1971). Since that time, it has continued to promote critical scholarship that challenges simplistic representations put forward by the powerful, basing this challenge on careful political economic, geo-political, and social research. The detailed scholarship on the legacies of the Cold War in this special issue seek to continue that critical tradition. Collectively, these pieces suggest the importance of theoretically-informed, original research in the details of historical social processes that have shaped Asia into a complex unity-in-diversity, where Cold War legacies are manifested in varied and specific ways in different places. Following the end of the Cold War, a triumphalist Western political science focused on “transitions” to democracy in the region, following Huntington’s (1991) claim for a “Third Wave” of democratisation and the trumpeting of new middle classes and civil society in fostering globalisation (Diamond 1997, xxxii–xxxiv). For those enamoured of this approach, it appeared that capitalism and democratisation could take root anywhere in almost any context (see Diamond 2012). Yet this view did not account for the complexities of political struggle, the internal heterogeneity of middle classes or the paths taken in developing capitalism (see Koo 1991). In Asia, this approach also failed to adequately consider the political and economic pathways established during the Cold War and associated historical patterns of state power, repression, participation and dissent that shaped political regimes. As authoritarian governance appears to move from strength to strength around the world today, learning lessons from these kinds of East and Southeast Asian cases, through attention to their complexities, is all the more urgent. No place in the world today is immune from the mutual encroachments of capitalist development and authoritarianism. Studying why and how these sometimes coalesce, as well as when and why they sometimes do not, is an important aspect of struggles to maintain spaces of anti-authoritarianism and economic egalitarianism against the increasingly aggressive encroachments of authoritarians – including those who habitually trumpet the notion that Asia’s economic success stories required an authoritarianism that will now, conveniently and mechanically, give way to democracy. Eva Hansson is grateful to the Forum for Asian Studies at Stockholm University for its support of the Workshop “The Cold War in East and Southeast Asia,” held on May 25–26, 2018. Kevin Hewison acknowledges the support of visiting fellowships with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University in 2017 and with the Forum for Asian Studies and the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University in 2018. Jim Glassman acknowledges the support of a visiting fellowship in the Department of Geography at National Taiwan University in 2018. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Notes1. Caldwell (1966, 294) recognised that those struggling for independence were drawn to socialism and communism: “Colonialism was identified with the Western capitalist countries; to be anti-colonialist was to be anti-capitalist.” 2. An early form of regional alliance – the 1955 Bandung Conference – caused the US administration considerable angst. As a meeting of Asian and African states, most of them newly independent, it was organised by Indonesia, India, Burma, Pakistan and Ceylon. While the US position wavered, there was an underlying fear that the promotion of Afro-Asian co-operation and opposition to colonialism and neo-colonialism was a potentially dangerous mix (see Ampiah 2005, Ch. 2). On the legacies of Afro-Asian solidarity, see Lewis and Stolte (2019) and the papers in their special issue of Journal of World History. 3. Others have examined the legacies of the Cold War for the region. As recent exampes, see Lau (2012) and Glassman (2018). 4. While this special issue focuses on the states that allied with the USA, nations and movements that supported national liberation and anti-imperialism also engaged in authoritarian politics (see Miliband 1989). 5. In his classic Asian Drama, Myrdal (1968, 494) estimates that, in the mid-1950s, 57–82% of Southeast Asia’s active population was in agriculture. 6. As Catton (1999, 935) observes, other ideas also transferred, with the same leaders promoting strategic hamlets in South Vietnam also taking up Rostow’s version of modernisation theory. 7. Secret wars in Laos and Cambodia and the devastating bombing of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia by the USA have not been the subject of official sanctions. The International War Crimes Tribunal founded by Bertrand Russell, which met in Sweden and Denmark, was a non-governmental effort to draw attention to war crimes in Vietnam and discussed the bombing of Laos (Limqueco, Weiss, and Coates 1971). Henry Kissinger’s role in these events as President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State were reprehensible. In whitewashing Kissinger’s pivotal role, conservative historian Niall Ferguson (2015) does little more than reprise Kissinger’s memoir (1979). For a more convincing and damning assessment, see Milne (2015, Ch. 7). On the bombing of Laos, see Branfman (2013), Channapha and Russell (2009), and McCoy (2002); on Cambodia, Hersh (1983, Ch. 7) and Owen and Kiernan (2006) are useful; on Vietnam, see Young (2010). 8. For an account of Beijing’s policies in dealing with Chinese outside China in the Cold War period, see Fitzgerald (1972). 9. Kolko (1997, 10, 116) was cognisant of the political and economic errors made by the Communist Party of Vietnam. He refers to mushrooming rural protest in the 1980s, the working class acting against official repression and the “oppressive shadow over the Vietnamese party” (Kolko 1997, 149). 10. There is debate regarding the nature of socialism in Ne Win’s Burma and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge declared itself a Marxist regime that looked especially to North Korea and Maoism for its Marxist inspiration. In power, this translated into autarkic economic policies and authoritarian notions of collectivism that owed little to Marxism in theory and practice (see McCormack 1980, 79–81; Hewison 1990). Before Ne Win’s 1962 military coup, Burma was “an intellectual hotbed for Afro-Asian socialism and anti-colonial solidarity” (Lewis 2019, 55). The coup leaders proclaimed their “socialism,” but as Butwell (1972) observed, “Ne Win’s Burma in its first decade has been nowhere near the successful experiment in socialism and socialist democracy that its soldier-leader and his lieutenants have proclaimed it to be.” A decade later, Fenichel and Khan (1981, 813) concluded that “Burma does not have a socialist economy nor does the leadership have the ability or will necessary to build a socialist society.” 11. These capitalisms also emerged and developed when different ideological underpinnings were dominant. For example, when Vietnam embarked on its market reforms, global supply chains and ideas regarding the Washington Consensus/Post-Washington Consensus and neo-liberalism economic and social policy were de rigeur, whereas Japan’s development was in an era marked by national capitalisms and Fordist production (see Yokokawa 2020). 12. On the other side, in seeking to free their nation, Vietnamese Marxists were driven by both anti-colonial sentiment and by an anti-imperialist ideology. They sought to emulate Leninist state-building and received support from fraternal socialist states and parties (see Vu 2016). 13. Of course, local and international communists had long considered workers as their natural political allies. The Chinese Communist Party considered the “masses” to include “the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie …” (Mao 1948). To counter this, US and British-aligned regimes, created anti-communist federations and unions and local unions affiliated with either the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) or the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, with the latter being formed in 1949 after a number of non-communist national trade union federations alleged the WFTU was communist dominated (CIA 1948). In some places, the CIA created and supported unions and federations (see Wehrle 2005).
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What were the causes and effects of war in southeast asia and what was the american role in region
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