The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

THE EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Series Editor:

Editorial Committee:

Ideology and sense of mission are, as reflections of the military mindset, fundamental to the shaping of military organization and behaviour—as that behaviour is directed either to guarding existing power structures or to changing them. The military mindset is a crucial element in gauging armed forces’ collective perception of their preferences and goals, especially vis-à-vis notions of democracy and civilian control. Military mindset informs and is informed by ideology, which itself then shapes the sense of mission.

This study examines Thailand's military through reference to its ideology, the historical context in which it has evolved, and its contemporary sense of mission. The study stresses the degree to which ideological legacies have shaped and socialized the Thai armed forces and thus informed officers’ understandings of their duties and roles in national life. These legacies have also served to clarify to military officers and to Thais more generally the fact that the country's military has a unique and serious political vision. The study argues that Thai military ideology has over time been constructed to rationalize the legitimacy of interventionism to rescue, defend and develop the nation, though variations in dogma relating to the prevailing cultural hegemony at different times in Thai history have also influenced this mindset (Gramsci 1971, p. 526). With an eye to maintaining its control over Thailand's hegemonic bloc, the monarchy has succeeded in dominating the armed forces by manipulating the values, beliefs and perceptions of soldiers and officers so that a monarchized worldview has become the socially accepted military ideology.

Thai military ideology, especially since 1980, has been a function of two related but sometimes countervailing conceptualizations. First, the armed forces are a “monarchised military” which acts as a guardian of and mechanism serving palace interests. Second, the military sees itself as the nationalistic arbitrator of Thai politics. It is in that role responsible for ousting or installing governments as it deems such intervention necessary to protect Thai national security and development, correlating with an identity centred on Buddhism, monarchy and “Thai-ness”.

But how has Thai military ideology evolved across time and to what extent has it become more cohesive?

From a relatively small number of troops at the time of the country's independence in 1948, the Tatmadaw, or Myanmar Armed Forces, has grown into one of Southeast Asia's formidable militaries, even while details on the total number of troops and units are difficult to ascertain. Indeed, they remain a matter of secrecy. Undoubtedly, the Tatmadaw is today far better equipped than it was when it took over the state three decades ago, in September 1988, in the name of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC)—to become the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) in 1997. The cash-strapped socialist regime of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP), which ran the country from 1974 to 1988, had, despite its best effort to look after the military, done little to modernize the Tatmadaw. The latter thus remained a poorly equipped force, relative to its peers in the region. It was essentially a counter-insurgency force with almost no capability to engage in conventional warfare.

Since the early 1990s, the Tatmadaw has pursued a force modernization programme, procured military hardware from various foreign sources, and expanded Myanmar's defence-industrial bases. In the last five years, Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has repeatedly confirmed his commitment to build the Tatmadaw into a “Standard Army”, although the concept has never been properly defined. In recent years, the Tatmadaw has received some of the advanced weapon systems, fighter aircraft and warships available on the international arms market. In addition, it has improved troops’ combat gear and equipment. All of this has required an injection of large amount of money into defence spending.

Throughout 1990s and 2000s, the Tatmadaw leadership repeatedly reminded its commanders that the force had to be built by four means: administration, training, welfare, and morale. Troops’ welfare is thus an essential part of building a “modern, strong and highly capable” Tatmadaw. In his address at the fifty-fourth Armed Forces Day Parade on 27 March 1999, Commander-in-Chief Senior General Than Shwe explained what he meant by building the Tatmadaw by means of welfare.

Since the replacement of Thailand's absolute monarchy with a constitutional regime in 1932, the country's armed forces have attempted coups d’état at the rate of one every four years. Two thirds of these attempts have been successful. The resultant military juntas have typically promulgated new regulations, laws and constitutions before holding elections or themselves falling victim to coups. These new rules and the changes that they have introduced suggest the role of the Thai military as a significant economic-policy maker. At the same time, the military is also a consumer and a producer of goods and services. In fact, the Thai military produces both services related to security and services with no relation to security.

The goal of this chapter is to document the role of the Thai military as producer of the latter, services with no relation to security. The chapter draws on publicly available information from the Bank of Thailand, the Department of Business Development of the Ministry of Commerce, the Royal Gazette (Ratchakitchanubeksa), the Stock Exchange of Thailand, and the country's Securities and Exchange Commission (Khanakammakan kamkap laksap lae talat laksap).

The chapter makes three arguments. First, the Thai military has produced a wide range of services unrelated to security for six decades. It directly provides services through, or holds shares in, companies in banking and asset management, facilities for banquets and recreation, real estate and hotels, and radio and television broadcasting. Second, banking, radio broadcasting and television broadcasting have been regulated by laws enacted during military regimes to maintain strict barriers to entry. The roles of the Thai military as both producer of services and policymaker are in this sense complementary. Finally, besides the military budget, the factors of production crucial to the military's involvement in services unrelated to security include bank deposits; capital raised on the Stock Exchange of Thailand, including that from foreign sources; substantial land holdings; and conscripts. The military has thus benefitted not only from financial globalization but also from access to effectively subsidized low-wage labour.

The chapter sheds light both on the production activities of the Thai military in service sectors unrelated to security and on its success in shaping regulations to favour its own businesses.

To whom or what does an army—as the primary force of the sole legitimate yielder of violence on behalf of a community with its own internationally recognized territory, the state—owe its loyalty? To representations of the state—the constitution, the head of state, the nation, a noble ideal, its own professional éclat? Or to the government—the president or prime minister, the legislature, the ruling party of the day? This dilemma is at the heart of all discussions of civil-military relations. Those who believe that armies are not faced with this dilemma live in fantasyland. The army, as a central pillar of the modern state, is inevitably a political institution, and the answer to the opening question above is quintessentially a political one. The answers given to this question at various times have determined the role of the armies of Thailand and Myanmar, and of most of the other countries in Southeast Asia if not the world, since the formation of the modern, professional militaries of independent states. Both of those armies, since 1911 in the case of Thailand and since 1948 in the case of Myanmar, have been deeply involved in politics, but to different degrees at different times. The devil, as always, is in the detail, as the contributions to this volume make amply clear.

The extensive theoretical literature on the political role of the military has provided a variety of taxonomies for the degree of military involvement in politics during the course of the past century and more. For example, Samuel Finer, in his classic The Man on Horseback, set out six levels of involvement—from normal constitutional mechanisms through to intimidation and threats, and to failure to protect or outright violence against civilian authorities (Finer 2005, p. 140). Like Finer, other analysts lay out various continua of degrees to which the military directly involves itself in politics, up to and including direct military rule such as that in Myanmar between 1988 and 2011 and in Thailand between—most recently—2015 and 2019.

“New” and “old” are appropriate words to capture the democratic transition in Myanmar.

In the years after the British left Burma on 4 January 1948, the newly independent nation seemed to number among those with the greatest potential for rapid development. Parliamentary democracy was functioning, and the country's democratic institutions, while still young, were gradually growing stronger. But the period of stability did not last long. On 2 March 1962, the army staged a coup d’état on the pretext of saving the country from disintegration. Repressive rule replaced democracy, and, with first the “Burmese Way to Socialism” and then crony capitalism, the country became an economic backwater. Self-imposed isolation from the 1960s to the 1980s, coupled with international sanctions in subsequent decades, made matters worse. The once promising country lagged far behind many of its Asian neighbours. Today Myanmar is one of the least developed countries in the world.

It took almost half a century for Myanmar to explore democracy again and to rethink the governance structure that had left it impoverished. The military junta designed a new constitution, the third one since independence, which was approved in a nationwide referendum on 29 May 2008. A general election, albeit a rigged one, was held two years later, in November 2010; the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) won. As a result, a quasi-civilian administration came to power in March 2011. A new political system with separation of powers among the executive branch, the legislature and the judiciary emerged. At last, Myanmar had become free of military dictatorship.

However, old institutions from Myanmar's troubled history were still present. The bureaucracy, run by civil servants of uncertain competence and with former military officers occupying many senior positions, was inefficient. The rule of law remained fragile, as political influence and money continued to influence court decisions. Corruption was rampant. Myanmar was trying to find a new future, but the shadow of the past lingered.

This “new-and-old” and “somewhere-in-between” situation also applies to the country's military. Like other institutions in Myanmar, the armed forces, known as the Tatmadaw, are going through a transformation.

In 1959, Aguedo F. Agbayani of Pangasinan introduced to the Philippine Congress a bill “designed to prevent the growth of the power and influence of the military in this country, in order to spare our country from the tragic experiences of our Asian neighbors, recently in Burma and Thailand, where military dictatorship has marred their beautiful history” (Republic of the Philippines, House Bill 2220 [1959], quoted in Berlin 2008, p. 97).

Congressman Agbayani evidently had the keen sense of connections between the Philippines and the rest of Asia not uncommon among his countrymen in the post-war period. His reference to Burma, today's Myanmar, concerned the military's non-violent assumption of power in the country in October of the preceding year and to Chief of the General Staff Ne Win's consequent service as premier at the head of a “caretaker government” (Nakanishi 2013, pp. 84–88). In Thailand, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat had staged coups d’état in September 1957 and again in October 1958 (Thak 2007, pp. 78–80). Of course, Agbayani could not know that, following elections in early 1960, Ne Win would return power to a civilian government in Rangoon, only to mount a coup of his own in March 1962 and thus to initiate long-term military control of Burma, or that military rule in Bangkok was destined to last another fourteen years, until October 1973. These developments and their legacies account for the publication of the present volume, treating the same two states whose examples troubled Aguedo Agbayani sixty years ago.

The late Donald Berlin called attention to the congressman's 1959 bill in his landmark study of civil-military relations in the Philippines during the decades preceding President Ferdinand E. Marcos's declaration of martial law in September 1972 (Berlin 2008). It was the contention of that study that—contrary to received wisdom, despite the absence of direct military control of the government in Manila, but very much as in other Southeast Asian states and societies—“military influence in Philippine state and society historically ha[d] been substantial” (Berlin 2008, p. 140). At the same time, the specific forms of that influence during the 1946–72 period proved varied.

The topical relevance of this subject for contemporary Malaysian politics is underscored by the bizarre end of the Mahathir Mohamad-led Pakatan Harapan (Harapan, or Pact of Hope) government in late February 2020. As an opposition coalition Harapan had taken power at the 14th General Election (GE14) of 9 May 2018 when Barisan Nasional (BN, or National Front) suffered its first ever defeat at the national level after sixty-one years of rule. Mahathir, who had retired in October 2003, returned as the “7th Prime Minister”. By Harapan's pre-GE14 agreement he would remain in office up to the mid-point of the government's five-year term. Then Anwar Ibrahim, released from prison on 16 August 2020, would become the “8th Prime Minister”.

Towards the end of February 2020, Mahathir abruptly resigned. He expected to be reappointed by the King, in which case he could form a new government without abiding by the Harapan succession plan. But Mahathir was not reappointed. The unravelling of the Harapan government left its parties (Amanah, DAP and PKR) in disarray, and scuttled its leadership transition. Anwar then sought but did not receive the King's invitation to form a new government. Amidst the confusion, defectors from Mahathir's party, Bersatu, and from Anwar's party, PKR, were joined by UMNO and PAS, the two losers in GE14, to form a “backdoor government” ruled by an ad hoc Perikatan Nasional (PN, or National Alliance). Muhyiddin Yassin, who led the Bersatu defectors, became the new prime minister; he was in fact the deputy prime minister before he was dismissed by Najib Razak in 2016.

Instead of replicating the many commentaries on this fluid situation, or predicting the fortunes of the PN regime or whatever replaces it, this essay will explore a neglected issue raised by the continuing crisis. The protagonists in PN are political parties and politicians who portray themselves as Malay parties and Malay politicians on a mission to preserve Malay dominance. Casting themselves as a “Malay-Muslim front” combatting the multiethnic Harapan that won GE14, they subverted Malaysia's first experience of democratically determined change of government.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • In late February 2020, the Mahathir Mohamad-led Pakatan Harapan (Harapan, or Pact of Hope) government ended abruptly. Amidst ensuing confusion, Muhyiddin Yassin led defecting Harapan Members of Parliament, joined by UMNO and PAS, in an ad hoc Perikatan Nasional (PN, or National Alliance) coalition to form a “backdoor government”.

• • The PN protagonists cast themselves as a “Malay-Muslim front” for preserving Malay dominance. Yet they unwittingly exposed the parlous state of their “Malay politics”, as shown by an absence of “Malay unity”, strongly contested claims to represent the Malays, intense party factionalism, and subverted leadership transitions.

• • The parlousness of Malay politics emerged from the failure of the Malay political class to meet many challenges between 1997 and 2018. As the New Economic Policy and Vision 2020 political orders shed their combined twenty-five-year hegemony, Malay politics could not recover its declining popular support and legitimacy, or craft a fresh, broadly supported settlement.

• • The present is an unsettled conjuncture: the old order is passing while Harapan's experimental regime has been subverted. Yet Malay politics is unable to reform or tackle current issues authoritatively. Instead Malay politics has turned inwards and precipitated a disorder of the political system.

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

THE EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Series Editor:

Editorial Committee:

INTRODUCTION

In contemporary diplomacy, the governments are not the sole actors in bilateral ties; the business sector and people to people contacts are indispensable to the process. Where Indonesia and China are concerned, much progress has been demonstrated in the managing of relations over the last seventy years.

Beijing perceives Indonesia as a resource-rich nation with considerable regional clout. On the other hand, Jakarta considers China an economic juggernaut with global and regional power which offers plenty of opportunities for cooperation. Beijing is aiming for collaboration that benefits its strategic interests. It is now the leading player in the steel industry. This also means that it is the world's largest stainless steel producer and top importer of nickel ore. Meanwhile, Indonesia has the world's largest reserves of nickel, a key component in stainless steel. In August 2020, China's nickel ore import from Indonesia surged 26.5 per cent year-on-year. This mutual interest does not however necessarily lead to smooth cooperation. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Indonesian people's reservations about China presented obstructions.

In the Natuna waters, shortly, before the identification of the first case of the coronavirus by Chinese authorities in Wuhan, both countries were involved in a stand-off following the violation of the Indonesian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) by Chinese fishing vessels escorted by the Chinese Coast Guard. This unfortunate incident deepened grassroots perception of China as a hegemonic power that threatens the territorial rights of Indonesia.

During the pandemic, however, both countries have been standing shoulder-to-shoulder in battling the novel coronavirus. The cooperation in this area involves many stakeholders ranging from the government to the business sector to people-to-people contacts. It remains to be seen if this close cooperation in the fight against the coronavirus—which has become both governments’ priorities—will foster better bilateral ties in the long term.

On 29 August 2020, Median, a Jakarta-based survey institution published a study demonstrating the that Indonesian people see China as the biggest threat (31.5 per cent), followed by the US (10.8 per cent) and Malaysia (4.3 per cent).

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • The 70th anniversary of Sino-Indonesia bilateral relations is marked by issues alongside the coronavirus pandemic, such as medical cooperation, the import of Chinese workers, and confrontation in the Natuna waters.

• • Since the first case of coronavirus was identified in Wuhan in late December 2019, Indonesia has been generously assisting China in coping with the pandemic. In return, when the outbreak occurred in Indonesia, China also rendered support to its strategic partner.

• • The collaboration occurred at government-to-government (G-to-G) level (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Defence), business-to-business (B-to-B) level (state-owned companies and private companies), and people-to-people (P-to-P) level (ethnic Chinese associations, philanthropic institution). However, both Indonesia and China have not optimized on the P-to-P or grassroots interaction.

• • China's “vaccine diplomacy” is not unconditional, and Beijing may use its vaccine donations to advance its regional agenda, particularly on sensitive issues such as its claims in the South China Sea.

• • The import of Chinese workers into certain Indonesian regions has met with local opposition. This has been resolved with the central and the regional governments reaching an understanding that the Chinese projects will eventually benefit the local economy.

• • In the Natuna waters, Jakarta shows a shift in tone from confrontation (during Jokowi's first term) to moderation. Although Chinese fishing vessels are likely to continue fishing there, the Jokowi administration is likely to deliver business-as-usual responses in order to maintain cordial relations with China while not compromising on its own territorial claims.

• • Overall, bilateral relations on the G-to-G level are amicable and even facilitate B-to-B contacts. However, on the P-to-P level, Indonesians remain suspicious of China. Both governments need to make the common Indonesians key beneficiaries of bilateral cooperation, for example, by providing reliable vaccines to them.

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

THE EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Choi Shing Kwok

Series Editor:

Editorial Committee: