SOUTHEAST ASIA ON THE PERIPHERY

OKB: Let's talk about Southeast Asia as a phenomenon. Modern nation building in the region can to an extent be seen as a defence strategy inherited by the region's peoples as a postcolonial contingency. ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations founded in 1967, would then be understood as a collective attempt in that direction. Elsewhere, you have drawn some parallels between the Mediterranean and archipelagic Southeast Asia. Can we continue our discussion in that direction?

WGW: One must acknowledge that Southeast Asia was very much peripheral to the main action in world history for a long, long time. And one of the reasons for this was because the main action was between powers that were essentially continental ones, land powers.

To what extent the peculiar features of the Mediterranean acted as a trigger for civilization is arguable. Egypt's civilization or the Babylonian civilization didn't actually depend on the Mediterranean. They were riverine civilizations, and the urban conditions that rose out of the two great river systems of the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates didn't have much directly to do with the Mediterranean, although they — the Egyptian one particularly — had an impact on the Mediterranean development later on. The entire struggle to define themselves as peoples, as economies, ultimately as states, was done mainly on land, except for the Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean story is fascinating to me because that was the only place in ancient times where they fought at sea. Everywhere else the fighting was on land. In the Indian Ocean there was virtually no fighting at sea. No naval warfare, or at least no record of such. And on the China side, very little as well; just some minor conflicts along the coast with Japan and Korea, but all quite negligible. So the only real fighting on water was in the Mediterranean, and it has a special resonance for me because the creation of modern civilization really came out of the fact that land and water conditions were combined for a particular system of political governance.