After the war the British were unable to persuade the ethnic Malays of the virtues of a projected Malayan Union with equal citizenship for Chinese and Indians, despite excluding the Chinese-dominated city of Singapore. It was rejected by the newly formed United Malays National Organization (UMNO) which dominated the alternative Federation of Malaya established in 1948. The Malayan Communist Party (MCP) with its constituencies among the Chinese communities found that its political effectiveness within the trade unions was being curtailed and it turned to armed struggle in June 1948. That insurrection also reflected the changing international circumstances associated with the beginnings of the Cold War and the inspiration of the pending victory of the communists in the civil war in China and of the armed struggle begun by the communist-led Vietminh against the French.
The British declared a state of emergency in June 1948. The Emergency lasted officially until 1960; a rump insurgency force continued to operate in the jungles of the Thai-Malay borders until the late 1980s. But the back of the insurgency was broken in the early 1950s. after the resettlement of some half a million (Chinese) squatters on whose support the insurgents depended. The costs to the victorious side were nevertheless enormous. Against guerrillas, who at no stage numbered more than 8,000 men, were deployed 40,000 regular British and Commonwealth troops, 70,000 Malay police and some 200,000 home guards. But the Emergency itself led to the establishment of the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) in February 1949, made up of anti-communist Chinese Chambers of Commerce and educated professionals. A pact between the two communal organizations UMNO and MCA at municipal elections in 1952 at the expense of a multiracial rival eventually paved the way to independence in 1957.
The only country in Southeast Asia that did not experience colonialism,Thailand, nevertheless had to make difficult adjustments in order to adapt to post-war conditions. It chose a path of adhering closely to the United States, primarily because it was the dominant power and also because Thailand’s regional interests coincided with the Cold War objectives of the United States in the area.
The military government, which came to power following a coup in 1932 that overthrew the absolute monarchy, accommodate to the power of Japan and allowed its armies transit to British-help Burma and Malaya. Immediately after the Japanese surrender a new Thai government, headed by a civilian member of the 1932 coup group who had led a wartime resistance to Japan, nullified the arrangements made with Japan and promised to return with compensation the territories the Japanese had granted the Thais from Burma and Malaya. The United States helped the Thai government, which was now headed by its former minister to Washington, to resist pressure for further concessions from Britain. At the end of complex diplomacy Thailand also gave up territories in Laos and Cambodia, and it was admitted to the United Nations at the end of 1946. Thailand has enjoyed a continuity of diplomatic style that goes back a long time in history.
Though it is often wrongly construed as one of neutrality, in fact it has always been a diplomacy which has been ‘hard’ towards small neighbours and ‘soft’ towards the dominant regional power: China before the Opium wars, then Britain, then Japan, and, particularly evident ever since 1954, the United States.
Interestingly, even earlier Thailand had sent a contingent to participate in the Korean War, which contributed to securing benefaction from the United States Thailand became party to the 1954 Manila Pact with the US that secured a formal American commitment to come to the defence of the country, and Bangkok became the headquarters of SEATO.
Burma, one of the historic political centres in Southeast Asia, became a province of British India in the nineteenth century, which led to an inflow of immigrants from India. Burmese nationalism before the Pacific War had a distinctive anti-Indian flavour. In 1937 Burma was separated from India and given considerable control over domestic affairs. During the Japanese occupation it was granted nominal independence in 1943, but this proved to be illusory, and although the British return was welcomed in 1945 there was now impatience for independence. The leader of the nationalist movement, Aung San, was a former student leader w2ho had been commander of the Japanese-sponsored Burmese National Army. The British offered independence within dominion status that in the end was rejected. Aung San, along with six of his colleagues in the cabinet, was assassinated in July 1947 before the formal transfer of power had been completed. Association with the Commonwealth had already been rejected and the Republic of the Union of Burma became formally independent in January 1948. But faced with ethnic rebellions and opposition from China’s communist leaders, combined with a lack of interest in its security from Britain and the United States, the new Burmese government opted for a policy of what Michael Leifer has called ‘non-offence’, especially towards its giant neighbor to the north. By the early 1950s it became active in voicing the concerns of a Asian neutralism (in the Cold War) and it was one of the key Asian powers that met bin Colombo to help convene the first Asian-African summit conference in Bandung in 1955.
Vietnam was the most important country in Indo-China and its history after 1945 was dominated by the armed struggle for independence from France, led by the communist Vietminh, that began in 1946 and culminated in the Geneva Agreements on Indo-China of July 1954 that resulted in the recognition of the independence of Laos and Cambodia an of a communist North Vietnam and a non-communist South. These eight years of armed struggle, later known as the First Indo-China War, brought together the three main dimensions of conflict: the global, the regional and the local. It also began a process of international and regional conflict that was not to be concluded before the end of the Cold War itself. At this stage the conflict initially involved the intensely nationalistic and fervently commumistic Vietminh against the returning French forces who had desperately and largely unavailingly sought to recruit a credible Vietnamese nationalistic alternative to the Vietminh. The two warring parties were soon to be backed by the victorious Chinese communists on the one side and by the Americans on the other. American support became possible only after the Elysee Agreements of March 1949, which gave the Indo-Chinese states nominal independence.
Once the Vietminh in the North had secured access to Chinese communist support after the latter’s domestic victory in 1949, the terms of the war turned remorselessly against the French.Up to that point the French forces had been in possession of most of the cities and towns in Vietnam, but had difficulty in controlling the rural areas. Thereafter the Vietminh were able to escalate their fighting capabilities from guerrilla to positional warfare. The French finally conceded that they should withdraw after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. That surrender has been called ‘the worst defeat any Western colonial power ever suffered on the battlefield at the4 hands of an Asian people’. The war which drew in the external powers became the primary agency that led to what has been called the internationalization of the problems of Southeast Asia. Within the context of the Cold War, it highlighted an American concern with the domestic conditions of the states of the area. It provided a framework for placing the domestic developments and the contending elites of the countries of the region within a Cold War syndrome that at tis height joined them with the axis of international as well as regional conflict.