Southeast Asia in the Early 21st Century

Southeast Asia after the Third World War is a highly fragmented region; but then, it always has been. In the early 1980's, for instance, four major faiths -- Islam in Indonesia; Hinayana Buddhism in Burma, Thailand, and western Indochina; Mahayana Buddhism in Vietnam; and Catholicism in the Philippines -- predominated. Yet, each country had its own substantial religious minorities -- in south Vietnam, the minority Cochinese professed Catholicism, while many of the residents of the southernmost Filipino island of Mindanao were Muslims, ethnic Chinese in Thailand and Indonesia practiced Confucian ethics along with either Mahayana Buddhism or Christianity, and the non-Burmese populations of eastern and northern Burma were mostly Protestant Christians. This extreme religious heterogeneity was manifested elsewhere in Southeast Asia, in areas as diverse as economic development (Thailand and Indonesia more than the rest of the region), political systems (Thailand standing out in a region dominated by ethnic or military dictatorships as the sole pluralist state), and alliance systems (Thailand, again unique, being the only member of the League of Nations).

By shattering the bureaucracies, modern economies, and urban mass cultures that united so many of the states of Southeast Asia, the Third World War managed to increase the region's heterogeneity. For instance, the division of former Indonesia into mandates -- from west to east, Sumatra, Malaya, West Java, East Java and Madura, and Borneo -- allowed the shattered non-Javanese remnants of greater Indonesia to eventually emerge as nations. Much the same can be said for the former Filipino territories (now mandates) of the Visayas and Mindanao, and for the mandate of Burma, now reduced to the drainage basin of the Irrawaddy River. Even the rump of Indochina has found itself divided into three portions, as the northern province of Tonkin and the southern province of Cochin have found themselves repopulated by ethnic Cantonese from China and Thai nationals, respectively, leaving only Annam and its three million Vietnamese and Montagnards as the possible nuclei of a restored Vietnamese states.

All of these mandates, of course -- along with the Japanese island of Luzon -- have been decimated. Of the 90 million people who lived on Java prior to the Third World War, only three million have survived to the present day. In Sumatra and Burma, the extermination of the indigenous populations has allowed immigrants from the North Indian and Bengali mandates to repopulate the blasted territories and reduce indigenes to a minority. Even in the East Indian Federation -- a neutral in the Third World War -- population has yet to recover its pre-war levels. In all, the Southeast Asian population has declined from 380 million in 1981 to just under 90 million in 2000.

The Kingdom of Thailand is an exception to the depopulation of Southeast Asia. Alone among its neighbours, Thailand spurned the anti-Chinese alliances and extreme xenophobic nationalism that precipitated the Third World War and the decimation of the rest of the region. Though 40% of the Thai population died in the famines of 1982-3, Thailand was still in much better shape than any of its decimated neighbours, and could embark on a slow-motion campaign of territorial acquisitions from its prostrate neighbours. When this expansion stopped in 1986, Thailand had acquired the western Indochinese provinces of Cambodia and Laos, the Thai-populated Shan and Mon provinces of Burma, and the south of the Chinese province of Yunnan. Since that time, the satiated Thai government has sought to repopulate the new Thai territories with peasant-colonists from central Thailand, and to embark -- in conjunction with League, Japanese, and Korean development aid programs -- upon the gradual establishment of effective nation-wide educational and medical systems, and the modernization of Thailand's infrastructure. By world standards, Thailand is still a poor country; by the standards of Southeast Asia, though, Thailand is wealthy. Indeed, it is the only country in Southeast Asia that might, within the next generation, begin to follow Korea in rapidly industrializing and and achieving First World status.