On the political and foreign policy fronts, the last decade in the Philippines has shown powerful continuities nationally and in relation to ASEAN with the preceding decade and the ones before that. These reinforce the widespread view that little changes in the Philippines and hence it is not worthy of as much attention as the more dynamic ‘core states’ of ASEAN and Southeast Asia.

Yet economically, the last decade has been one of significant and positive discontinuity nationally and in relation to Southeast Asia that challenges this engrained and often dismissive view of the region's second most populous country. This mixture of continuities and discontinuities is likely to persist in the coming decade, reaffirming the growing separation of the internationalizing Philippine private sector from national political travails and the need to revise the comfortable conventional wisdom about the Philippines.

POLITICAL CONTINUITIES

Despite an article in the 1987 Constitution requiring a law ending political dynasties in the country, the Philippines remains the regional pinnacle of dynastic democracy. As noted in the letter introducing the 2013 House and Senate anti-political dynasty bills aiming to satisfy this constitutional requirement, the 2010 election saw 18 of the 23 senators elected hailing from political dynasties and three-quarters of those elected to the House of Representatives being of similar political lineage. All post-Marcos presidents have come from political dynasties, as have all elected vice-presidents except for the popular newscaster Noli de Castro.

The last fifteen years has seen the rise and quick entrenchment of new national dynasties based in Metro Manila and Luzon, including the Estradas, Binays, Poes, Villars and Revillas. Vice President Binay is the clear front-runner for the presidency in 2016 while the neophyte senator and top vote-getter in 2013, Grace Poe, the daughter of failed presidential candidate and movie superstar Fernando Poe Jr., is the clear front-runner for the vice-presidency. Their closest rivals also all come from new or long-established dynasties.

Despite early signs that the Aquino administration would break the pattern of scandal, legislative lethargy and the early onset of lame-duck presidencies, this oft-repeated pattern that characterized the nine-year term of President Macapagal-Arroyo is proving resilient.

If there is anything consistent about Southeast Asia it must certainly be its diversity. The varied levels of economic development, differing systems of governance and politics, and the myriad of demographic and cultural complexions ensure that any comparative analysis must be performed and presented in a modest and heavily nuanced manner. With approximately 620 million people covering 4.5 million square kilometres, not to mention the multitude of languages, and the layers of historical kingdoms, the scope for comparative analysis beyond national boundaries is wide indeed.

This is because much of Southeast Asia has been studied through the lens of area studies. Area studies is broadly premised on the understanding that: firstly, regions with common characteristics can be identified and examined collectively; and, secondly, that regions should be studied in situ on the basis of detailed local knowledge. In truth, the concepts of the nation, state boundaries, ethnic and religious communities are essentially problematic.

However, while diversity must always remain a defining feature, there are several ideological and political experiences shared by many states in the region. Colonialization, whether by the British, Dutch, French or Spanish, is a deeply ingrained experience across many Southeast Asian countries. The region has been argued to be a construction by the colonial British as a specific area of military operations against the Japanese, while others have demonstrated that historical events like the Japanese invasion and the later nationalist-separatist movements during the period of decolonialization were markers of national and intra-regional identification.

This section, divided into three parts, offers excerpts from leading experts to demonstrate the multi-dimensional nature of the region. Clearly the division is arbitrary not least because it is impossible to untangle societies from the economy and politics, and the dynamics of one must surely impact the others. However, for the sake of easy reference, comparative work on civil society, contestation of citizenship, national education, religion and the middle class come under the sub-section Southeast Asian Societies. Comparative work on urbanization, development and tourism come under The Southeast Asian Economy. Finally, the sub-section Southeast Asian Politics carries comparative work on democracy, ideology and accountability, and regional geopolitics.

Southeast Asia has secured over the past half century both a large measure of interstate peace and cooperation and a degree of autonomy from great powers outside the region that few observers had hoped for and scarcely any anticipated. Those have been coupled with a measure of economic and social development that, though far from equitable in its coverage and set back by a major crisis in the late 1990s, also indicated a remarkable transformation. A region of revolt had become a region that invited investment, though also speculation. To that the work of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) has made a substantial contribution. Many were disappointed with its slow progress towards the cooperative economic projects that it set out as its priority. What was achieved was what that vaunted priority in fact, by design or otherwise, tended to conceal, a practice of political collaboration that in the event was to open up much wider economic prospects.

By contrast to the European regional project, ASEAN was avowedly based on the nation-state. That was the prime source of its success, though some would also say its ultimate limitation. The region had come almost entirely under the formal rule of Western powers and been segmented into parts of their empires. Within the frontiers they had created or affirmed, however, their rule had come to be contested by a nationalism that they had also helped to create. Within the colonial states they built up, an alternative leadership offered the way to modernity. The destruction of the Western empires by the Japanese gave it, rather unwittingly, an opportunity it would not otherwise have had so soon or perhaps so amply. But its achievement, the winning of independence, was won piece-by-piece, colony by colony, and the new states, though claiming as modern states now did, to be nation-states, inherited the colonial frontiers. Just as the colonial states had little in common but their colonialism, those that replaced them had little in common but their nationalism. Any attempt to build regionalism had to take that into account.

Politically, the outside powers rather stood back from the region-building of the 1960s and 1970s, though the Soviet Union (SU) thought ASEAN was a US plot and it was indeed often presented as anti-communist, to some extent another piece of its own camouflage.

Verawaty FADJRIN. See FADJRIN, Verawaty

Verawaty WIHARJO. See FADJRIN, Verawaty

Visakha Gunadharma. See TJOA Hin Hoey (Mrs)