"Southeast Asia" is typically used to refer to the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus Timor-Leste. But did the concept of Southeast Asia as a single region exist before that? If so, what tied the Southeast Asian states together?
It wasn't necessarily the mere fact that the states shared common security interests by virtue only of proximity. ASEAN began as a security organisation with limited membership; if the security interests had been common, then states like Cambodia and Laos would have joined right from the start instead of only later when ASEAN had taken on economic goals as well. And, even then, ASEAN isn't presently a security strategic bloc (security talks tend to take place bilaterally on the sidelines of ASEAN meetings).
It wasn't necessarily shared economic interests: some of the less developed ASEAN countries do much less trade than the others.
Could it have been the fact that they were all the objects, or attempted objects, of Japanese military occupation? The difficulty with this view is that Japan's vision of a 'Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere' included parts of China and Korea.
Southeast Asia is a geographical term which came into use during WWII, ASEAN was only formed in 1967.
The term “South-East Asia” is credited to the Indian historian K.M. Pannikar who used it in the title of his book “Future of Southeast Asia” published in 1943. Due to military and strategic considerations during the Second World War, the region came to be regarded as a separate geographic entity and the Allied Supreme Command adopted the term “South-East Asia”. By the end of the war, the term was well established and was used as a collective for the peninsula between India and China. http://w3.whosea.org/history/
Hi, Southeast Asianist here!
Although the words "Southeast Asia" did not exist until recently, it has been recognized as a region under different names for a long time before that.
The Chinese referred to it as Nanyang, or "the Southern Seas".
The Portuguese, the first Europeans to visit the area, called it "Farther India", or "India extra Gangem".
More recently, it was referred to as "Indochina" - in other words, all the land that's not India and China. We often count this to mean the French colony which was eventually called Indochina, but it can refer to the entire region, and particularly the mainland (including Thailand and Burma as well as Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos).
If I'm not mistaken, some German writers referred to it as Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century. I'm forgetting who, but I could probably find the primary source if anyone wanted to see it. Note that the Germans didn't have any colonies in Southeast Asia, but were often hired by local governments (especially the independent Siamese) to work on infrastructure projects.
The term really entered the public conscious in World War 2, with Louis Montbatten's South East Asia Command (SEAC). Of course, the SEAC included India as well as Southeast Asia.
The definition of the region has only recently become stable, and scholars still can't always agree about what's in and outside the region. As recently as the 1950s, when D.G.E. Hall published his seminal history of the region, he didn't include the Philippines in his analysis.
Although most will agree on which countries constitute the region (10 ASEAN countries plus East Timor), there's still the question of cultural and geographic borders. For instance, do we include Northeast India? Far southern China? Taiwan? Papua New Guinea? There's a case to be made for all of them.