For Southeast Asia the immediate postwar years (1945–8) were a time of change and turmoil. Dominating this era were problems of rehabilitation and aspirations for independence in the face of returning colonial régimes. The Philippines and Burma, along with India, Pakistan and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), parted from their paramount powers in a comparatively amicable way, and guidelines were laid down for an orderly advance to independence by Malaya and British Borneo; but there was little prospect for a peaceful transfer of power in Indonesia and Vietnam, and decolonization was to come to those countries through violence.

Between 1949 and 1959, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Malaya attained independence, while Singapore acquired internal self-government, but these years coincided with the Cold War’s spillover into Asia. While this was cold war between the superpowers, there were active war and revolution in many parts of Southeast Asia, where countries were often aligned with Western or communist blocs and faced internal struggles which moulded them according to rival ideological models. Intense power-bloc rivalry in Southeast Asia added to the strains of newly won independence. This contest led to the formation of the South-East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), backed by the United States, on the one hand and to Russo-Chinese support for left-wing movements on the other. Superpower competition accentuated internal divisions between radicals and traditionalists, subversives and constitutionalists. It also deepened rifts between states: communist and anti-communist, ‘non-aligned’ and ‘neo-colonialist’. While the 1955 Afro-Asian Bandung conference was a significant step in the emergence of the non-aligned movement, in which Third World nations attempted to develop an independent stance in international affairs, this failed to spread harmony in Southeast Asia.