These contributions challenge existing interpretations of the origins of the southeast Asian Cold War. They employ new evidence gleaned from party archives and memories, and from soviet, British, Australian, Dutch, Indonesian and Vietnamese state archives. they use this evidence to suggest that Southeast Asian communist parties, far from being totally autonomous on the one hand, or pliant tools of larger powers on the other, interacted with changing international communist lines as proactive agents. This interaction is the key to understand why a regional pattern of increasing violence, and of decreasing cooperation with non-communist parties and democratic politics, emerged in 1948; while also allowing us to understand the uniqueness of the individual parties’ road to revolution.
From ARI roundtable on Reassessing the origins of the Cold War in southeast Asia: A Roundtable on the sixtieth Anniversary of 1948, 10-11 July 2008.
