Of the security concepts in use in Asia-Pacific security discourse, this is one of the most popular and ambiguous. While the origins of the concept are unclear and the term is used in very different ways around the region, this has not stopped numerous scholars and various government officials from claiming to have coined or “introduced” the concept. An early reference to cooperative security in the Asia-Pacific region appeared in the title of the 1988 Pacific Basin Symposium. It used the term as more or less synonymous with security cooperation.

In a 1988 article, John Steinbruner offered a more substantive discussion of the concept. He consciously used the term cooperative security to differentiate it from common security. His article focuses on the need to create strategic stability between the Soviet Union and the United States, and looks almost exclusively at Europe. It does not shed much light on cooperative security as a concept, but instead prescribes security policies to promote stability. The most important of these include the adoption of essentially defensive military postures. Steinbruner claims that the United States has “long promoted abstract ideas of cooperative security” although he provides no specific examples. He went on to develop his ideas in a series of workshops and a conference with other leading American academics and senior officials (see below), leading to the publication of the monograph, A New Concept of Cooperative Security, in 1992. Yet cooperative security was not immediately picked up by Asia-Pacific scholars in the United States.

Instead, it was a Canadian Government-sponsored project, the North Pacific Cooperative Security Dialogue (NPCSD) which made most of the early running developing the substance of the concept. The NPCSD, which ran from 1990 until 1993, was one of the first “Track Two” unofficial security dialogues in the region. It brought together scholars and officials from across the Asia- Pacific to discuss a wide range of traditional and non-conventional security issues.

In this chapter we now turn our attention to the telecommunication industry's liberalisation and the ensuing outcomes. The narrative identifies the market entry beneficiaries, discusses how they obtained their licenses, and identifies their political linkages. The section also assesses the types of rent outcomes and their impact on the industry and economy.

Although the privatisation policy was well planned and deliberations with various stakeholders were held during a series of conferences and seminars, the liberalisation of the sector was largely unplanned. Decisions to allow the entry of competition were made in an ad-hoc and secretive manner. The way in which licenses were issued suggests that the government favoured politically well-connected businessmen. Senior UMNO leaders presided over the distribution of the much sought after market entry licenses.

The opening of the industry commenced in the early 1980s, with the liberalisation of customer equipment terminals and the award of turnkey contracts. As was discussed in Chapter 4, these contracts were exclusively conferred to bumiputera-owned firms. Other methods used for liberalisation were public pay phones and radio paging licensing. However, the most profitable sectors of the industry were basic network, mobile telephony, and international gateway services. The liberalisation of these segments marked the introduction of real competition in telecommunication services.

An examination of the introduction of competition in these three segments indicates the political nature of awarding licenses. The Minister of Energy, Telecommunications, and Posts had the authority to award licenses. Yet, Samy Vellu, who held the portfolio from 1989 to 1995, and under whom the proliferation of licensees took place, declared in 1993 that it was the Cabinet that decided on these matters. This statement confirmed the widely held belief that the power to allocate licenses or contracts lay not with the Minister, but with someone higher than him.

From 1993 to 1995, the liberalisation of mobile telephony, international gateway, and basic network facilities took place rapidly. By 1995 there were seven basic network providers, seven cellular mobile phone systems, and five international gateway facilities. The lack of planning and the absence of a policy for liberalisation were made obvious when a National Telecommunications Plan (NTP) was released in 1994, after all but one of the licenses had been awarded.

Walter Benjamin's angel of history is turned towards the past out of sympathy for time's victims, but the storm of progress drives him into the future. This image embodies the place of war in the life of a people. So it is with World War II and Singapore.

The main line of descent from then to now lies in the realm of defence. Total Defence Day falls on 15 February, marking the anniversary of the catastrophe in 1942 when Singapore faced a rout that was military, civil, economic, social and psychological: the five aspects of Total Defence. The date 15 February is a metaphorical re-enactment of the truth that a colony remains dispensable even in the mightiest of empires, that what is tactical for the imperial metropole is strategic for the colonized periphery. London lived, but Singapore fell. The motif of betrayal in turn structures a message both simple and powerful: the message being that those who do not take personal responsibility for their common security will soon have nothing left to secure. In making this point, Total Defence Day underscores the particular meaning of World War II for Singapore. It was a classic imperialist war, a gang-fight over turf between an empire that was relatively liberal and comfortable, but over-confident and overstretched; and a revisionist empire whose outriders bicycled down Malaya in the eager faith that their emperor was divine. But for the people of Singapore, caught between two imperia neither of which they were responsible for, their war began when the fighting stopped with the British surrender of 15 February 1942. For the next three-and-a-half years, the people of this island witnessed something that they had never known: the capricious sadism of a military dictatorship. The experience of being a part of Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was so brutal that it shed almost divine light on the free-market policies of life and death that Britain had brought to Singapore.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORLD WAR II IN MODERN HISTORY

This chapter assesses the impact of World War II through the following lenses: (1) World War II as a fight between democracy and Fascism; (2) winning World War II meant independence from colonial powers for many countries; and (3) World War II as another fight by democracy against tyranny. The chapter assesses the legacies of World War II especially as they relate to East and Southeast Asia. Lastly, it attempts to make a combined assessment from all these three lenses.

THREE FACES OF WORLD WAR II

Democracy against Fascism

That the United States played a leading role in defeating Fascist allies in World War II is the standard narrative about the significance of World War II (Butow 1954, 1961; Gaddis 1987; Leffler 1992; Ikenberry 2000). According to this version, World War II was the war of democracy against Fascism embodied by Germany and Japan. All the Allied Powers fought against them, and the Soviet Union ruled by the Communist Party contributed no less immensely to the defeat of Fascism. Hence democracy was taken in a broad sense of the word. In other words, any kind of anti-Fascism was democracy, including anti-Fascism by people's democracy, which was actually totalitarian rule. That was the broad understanding on the basis of which the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France and China were convened at Yalta in 1945 (Yergin, 1978). They were all also victors in World War II. France and China were not as strong as they wished in fighting this war in the first place. Yet to bring the semblance of unity and solidarity of all Allied Powers to the fore, the United States wanted to include all these five as parties to the Yalta accord. All five became the permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations, which was founded in 1945.

INTRODUCTION

The war fought in China against Japan during World War II has never been forgotten by the Chinese people. Voluminous writings, memorial shrines, museum exhibitions and annual commemorations on the war are the staple diet in this nation of historically-conscious people. However, memories of the Sino-Japanese War had for a substantive period of time faded in the international arena outside of China because of a number of closely related events. There was the founding of the Communist People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the descend of the bamboo curtain after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, as well as the reversing of American occupation policy in Japan soon after. The hegemonic rhetoric of the Cold War and the corresponding self-isolation of a Chinese Communist regime had resulted in an essentially Anglo-Saxon remembrance of World War II, with the Sino-Japanese War relegated to the fringe of mainstream commemorative events around the world. This relegation lessened only after China's re-entry into the international community in 1972 and even more so after the opening and reform of the Chinese economy from 1978.

Consequently, one significant fragment of neglect at the international level is that not many people are sufficiently conscious that World War II has a fractured timeline, and China was actually the earliest of all nations to be caught up in a full-scale war, beginning with the outbreak of fighting in 1937 near the Marco Polo Bridge located just outside of the city of Beijing. China was alone in its war with Japan for nearly two full years before the German invasion of Poland had the unintended effect of meshing the Sino-Japanese War together with the outbreak of fighting in continental Europe, making this a much more global war than the Eurocentric World War I of 1914–18.

On behalf of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies let me welcome all of you to this very interesting conference, for us to reflect on sixty years of change since the end of World War II.

ISEAS is one of my favourite institutes because it is one of those institutes that has a memory and we historians like that. I recalled that about ten years ago ISEAS had a conference on “War and Memory” to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in Southeast Asia. I was at that conference and I remember how memorable and interesting it was — it stimulated us to think about the past but also to relate it to the present. This conference is an even more conscious effort to relate it to the present, about the impact on us today.

Let me say that there are two very important different aspects of this conference compared to the previous one. This one talks about World War II, while the previous one was really more about war and memory in Malaysia and Singapore. Second, this is about World War II in a much larger region. Both are very large concepts. World War II was a global war, and East and Southeast Asia put together is a much larger area than our previous conference topic. By broadening it, this larger perspective can help us think through some of our more local concerns as well.

World War II, of course, is understood quite differently in a number of places. I was struck by that long time ago. But for most people, World War II represented the war that was fought largely in Europe to begin with, and then enlarged to cover the rest of the world. For our region, it is a little bit less clear. There had been a war that had started earlier between China and Japan.

The year 1945 saw the end of the greatest and most devastating conflict mankind has ever known. World War II was waged as a total war: a global conflict fought without restraints. In the upshot, the human and economic costs of almost six years of fighting were staggering: the war was believed to have cost over US$2 trillion; an estimated 50 million people (roughly 35 million civilians and 15 million soldiers) were killed; cities and industries completely demolished and laid waste; and millions of people uprooted by massive population movements.

The changes that came in the wake of the war were as dramatic. The European continent underwent a major transformation in the aftermath of the war. The end of war in Europe was quickly followed by the Cold War, which in very profound ways provided the framework of the economic and political reconstruction following the dismantling of the German New Order. The Cold War was to influence international politics for more than forty years.

The end of the war triggered the beginning of the end of the European empires in Asia and Africa. Political independence and the departure of the erstwhile colonial powers marked for the new sovereign states of Asia the first successful stage of nationalism. What followed were the more formidable tasks of constructing the post-colonial state and meeting the related challenges of economic and social development. In many ways, the post-war history of the new states of Asia were chronicles of the strategies and methods adopted by these new states to cope with the problems they had inherited from their individual colonial past and wartime experiences. For many individuals and states across Asia, “deeply layered” memories of the war continue to dwell in their current consciousness. Some are orchestrated, but many are spontaneous and even cathartic.

INTRODUCTION

On 19 November 2006, the Asian Women's Fund (AWF) convened a symposium in Tokyo to mark its own demise. Established in 1995 on the initiative of the Japanese government to compensate women who had been recruited to provide sexual services for Japanese soldiers during World War II, the AWF's mandate ended on 31 March 2007. Dogged by controversy from its inception, the organization was able to provide compensation to 285 former ianfu (comfort women) in eleven years. Right wing politicians and critics in Japan, who had long insisted that all comfort women had been “voluntary paid prostitutes”, denounced the AWF for attempting to address a non-existent issue. As for the Asian feminist and nationalist women's organizations who had embraced the ianfu as symbols of their various causes, virtually all had pressured the elderly women they supported not to accept funds from the AWF. To the ianfu support groups, the AWF was an attempt on the part of Japanese government to avoid taking full legal responsibility for state-sanctioned sexual enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Asian women.

Throughout its short existence, the AWF represented in a microcosm the failure of Northeast Asian nations to forge a shared perception of a negative past in spite of the passage of more than half a century since the end of World War II. Perhaps it was fitting that the farewell symposium should end with a heated exchange between a representative of a Japanese women's NGO and a Korean academic, one of very few to have come to the AWF's aid. Just as the moderator was about to declare the final session of the symposium closed, Nishino Rumiko, representative of the Japanese NGO VAWW-Net (Violence Against Women in War Network) stated: “This summing up session has been carried out without regard for the victims. The victims don't want money. Their sufferings cannot be settled with financial compensation.”

INTRODUCTION

In Malaysia there is no let-up in the people's interest on the World War II. The ghosts (read: memories) of the war are very much alive. Suffering, hardships, resistance, torture, horror and terror — these are the evergreen memories that the war calls up in the public imagination. But this is in sharp contrast to the official view, which emphasizes remembering only the positive rather than the negative aspects of the war. In fact, the Malaysian government is determined to exorcise the ghosts of the war, especially the dark and ugly aspects within the public consciousness relating to the anti-Japanese movement, the inter-racial clashes and the massacres and atrocities committed by Japanese troops during the Japanese Occupation. One Malay historian has detected what he calls a “black-out” syndrome relating to the war. This chapter examines the psychological dimensions of the war. This is important to the understanding of why the war has still left such deep psychological scars in the public mind, after having ended sixty years ago.

While every ethnic community in Malaysia suffered during the war, none would deny that the war was Japan's greatest hour. It militarily defeated a European imperial power, Britain, conquered and occupied Britain's colonial territories of Malaya, Sarawak and Sabah for three-anda-half years. In its immediate impact, the war triggered off a series of events and changes. It represented an important turning point in Malaysia's postwar social and political history. It exacerbated inter-ethnic tensions and conflicts, awakened the peoples' national consciousness, and expedited their struggle and march towards self-government and national independence.

OFFICIAL POLICY TOWARDS THE WAR

Local views on the war within popular culture differ, however, from that of the official history of the war, which is tied up with Malaysia's internal and international politics. The Malaysian government's present policy of “Looking East” is to be friendly with Japan and with other East Asian countries like China, Taiwan and North and South Korea.

The Indonesian islands were overrun by the Japanese military forces in March 1942. The defence of the Netherlands of Indonesia Army was very poor since it was not prepared for an international war. Its commander-in-chief immediately capitulated, the governor-general detained and later sent to a concentration camp in Manchuria. Almost all Dutch government officials were detained and placed in various concentration camps.1 Only a few of them succeeded in escaping to Australia. The Japanese divided Netherlands Indonesia into three administrative units. Java and Madura were placed under the control of the 16th Army and Sumatra under the 25th Army, and Kalimantan and Eastern Indonesia under the Second South Seas Fleet.

In one stroke the economic and political institutions of Netherlands Indonesia, built step-by-step in about 300 years, were wiped out. Supervised by Japanese military and government officials, the second and third echelons in those institutions consisting mostly of Indonesians were given opportunities to replace their former Dutch bosses. One of the main objectives of the Japanese occupational forces was to prepare the Indonesians in facing an invasion by the Allies forces. Their main strategy to accomplish this was by systematically eliminating every Western element in Indonesian society and culture. The existence of widespread Western elements was the reason Netherlands Indonesia was known by some scholars as “a dual society”.2 Some of the main characteristics of the dual society are as follows. The inhabitants of Indonesia were legally divided into “Europeans” with a higher social status and indigenous (inlanders) with a lower status. “Inlanders” with certain characteristics could obtain the legal status of “European”. Especially since the beginning of the twentieth century a dual school system was created, one for the majority of Indonesians and another for the “Europeans”. The occupational and the remuneration systems were also mainly dualistic, increasing the gap in social status between the two races. The Japanese eliminated the “Europeans” school system, the Dutch language, and the Dutch salary system. Indonesia is one of the countries in Southeast Asia where the imprints of the Japanese Occupation is still a reality.

The components of French Indochina (Cambodia, the protected kingdoms that constituted Laos, and France's three possessions in Vietnam — Tonkin, Annam and Cochin-China) shared an anomalous experience in World War II, and for this reason the impact of the war was different there from elsewhere in the region.

To highlight the anomalies: no Indochinese soldiers (or very few) fought the Japanese in World War II. France, unlike the Netherlands, Great Britain, China and the United States, was never at war with Japan. Japanese troops came into Indochina in September 1940 with French permission and stayed on until the end of the war, while the French continued to administer the region right up to the Japanese coup de force of 9 March 1945, as discussed below. Finally, although Indochinese shipping suffered from Allied attacks, and some Allied bombardments of Indochinese cities occurred in 1945, Indochina emerged from the war with its population — except for massive deaths in northern Vietnam due to famine in the summer of 1945, discussed below — and landscape relatively unscathed.

The Japanese behaved differently in French Indochina during the war from the way they did in other colonized parts of Southeast Asia. They made little or no effort to arm and empower Indochinese youth. They recruited no labour forces and bankrolled no nationalist figures. Indochina's large ethnic Chinese minority, protected by France, suffered none of the indignities that their counterparts experienced elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In Indochina, World War II produced no resistance heroes, no collaborators with the Japanese and no outright villains. There are no World War II museums or memorials in Indochina, no dominant narratives for school texts, no problems connected with collective memory and no bestsellers dealing with the war.

On 15 August 1945, as rumours of the Japanese surrender filtered through to the people of Asia, the coerced collaborator and Malay nationalist, Mustapha Hussain, wept bitterly: the collapse of Japan had forestalled the declaration of independence for Malaya by just forty-eight hours. At a stroke, the political promise that the war had seemed to bring was swept away. Yet, a little later, he was to reflect that “although the Japanese Occupation was described as one of severe hardship and brutality, it left something positive, a sweet fruit to be plucked and enjoyed only after the surrender.” The rest of Mustapha's life would be consumed by his need to reconcile himself to these events; by a regret for the lost opportunity and the vindication of his own role. This kind of debate would be played out, privately and publicly, across the region for a generation or more. It largely dictated the terms of historical writing, which has evolved as a pursuit of some kind of balance sheet, or moral reckoning. For example, the dilemma between resistance and collaboration has been presented most often in stark terms, and the question still troubles national historical memory two generations on. Above all, writing has focused on the immediate issue of war: the extent to which the war acted as a defining watershed of modern 8 Tim Harper Asian history. Historians are too easily seduced by idea of watersheds, and ought to be suspicious of them. It is only more recently that historians have begun to view these epochal events through a longer lens, and this has allowed new themes to emerge: of slower, more ambiguous shifts in society, state and region, in the making of identity and memory. It is the aim of this collection to explore these continuing, substantive legacies, and this essay attempts to suggest some areas in which they might lie. It begins with a brief synopsis of the war within the longer duration of Asian history, and then moves to survey its more ephemeral and enduring legacies.

The legacies of the World War II for Myanmar have been hugely significant. Indeed, evidence of the war are still observable as one travels across the country. It is a significant factor in the politics and economy of the country today as well. Until just fifteen years ago, men who had their formative political and military experiences in the midst of the war still dominated the country's government. The lessons they drew from the war continue to shape the views of their heirs, the present military government. The multiple armed nationalist movements, the ethnically designed separatist insurgencies that have dominated Myanmar's politics since independence less than three years after the end of the war, all had their origins in the war years. The rhetoric of day-to-day politics still owes much to the legacy of the war. As Bayly and Harper wrote of the period of Japanese Occupation, “Nationalism was now more than an aspiration. It became a routine which long outlasted the departure of Nippon's armies.” Not only did unbridled nationalism overwhelm the institutions of government, but guns came to replace words as an acceptable means of settling major, and sometimes minor, disputes.

Visibly, the war legacy can still today be seen in Yangon and Mandalay as well as other towns and cities in the chassis and grills of the Myanmarmade wooden buses that ply the streets.

INTRODUCTION: TWO PASTS IN THE PRESENT

The question of wartime legacies is particularly relevant to the Philippines because a key protagonist of the war in the Pacific was the United States, and the Philippines was its sole colony. Because of this forty-year colonial relationship, coupled with the experience of fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Americans against the Japanese enemy, it seems a foregone conclusion that the Filipinos would continue to be fixated with the United States ever since. In contrast to the subjects of Britain, France and Holland, who managed to shrug off any special relationship with the former mother country, the Philippines is seen to be very much tied, still, to Mother America. World War II, if anything, would have cemented this relationship.

This image is partly true. As America's colony, the Philippines was inevitably a focal point of World War II in the Asia-Pacific. General Douglas MacArthur had been Field Marshall of the Philippine armed forces at the outbreak of the war. With the surrender of the Filipino-American forces to the Japanese in the Bataan Peninsula, MacArthur left in humiliation, vowing to return. For him, to retake or “redeem” the islands was almost a messianic endeavour. Remembering this promise, a great number of Filipinos, unlike their neighbours in Southeast Asia, continued to thumb their noses at the Japanese administration. Of all the Southeast Asian countries, the Philippines consequently suffered the most in terms of the destruction of life and property and the dislocation of millions of its inhabitants.

A brief rundown is in order for those unfamiliar with what the Philippines experienced in World War II. Political events certainly moved swiftly through the war years: the Japanese takeover, the dogged “last stand” of the defenders at Bataan and Corregidor, the establishment of a new colonial order with its own language, Nihongo, and its own visions of Asian co-prosperity. Then in October 1943 came the granting of independence, three years in advance of the American timetable, a move designed to win the Filipinos over to Japan and jointly defend the country against the imminent return of the United States.