I first knew Des Ball at the very start of the 1980s, when I was a doctoral student in the Australian National University's Department of International Relations that then, as now, enjoyed close relations with the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC), where Des was a Fellow. In those days the SDSC was a much smaller set-up than now, being effectively a subset of the International Relations Department: it had a handful of staff led by my supervisor Robert (Bob) O'Neill — and no students, even at postgraduate level. Des was effectively doing the bulk of the Centre's research and writing on contemporary strategic and defence issues.

The most important focus of Des’ research in the early 1980s was the central strategic balance: around the time I first knew him, he had just returned from a sojourn as a Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. He was a cutting-edge expert on issues that were close to the centre of key strategic debates, and it is unsurprising that in the context of the Cold War — or ‘second Cold War’ as many termed it at the time — he was not taking a close interest in regional security and defence issues. As he told me in late 2011 when we met at a conference in Hanoi, with some sense of irony, Asia was in the early years of his research activity for him essentially a region that he flew over en route Europe or North America and in which he took little direct interest. In his original lack of intense interest in Asian security affairs, Des was hardly alone among Australian International Relations and Strategic Studies scholars at the time. While Australia had been closely involved militarily in Asia since the Second World War, perhaps at least partly in reaction to Canberra's commitment to the unpopular Vietnam War (against which Des had been an activist) he and many others in the field in Australia looked beyond the region to what they saw as the larger and — then at least — more important strategic game.

Des was a friendly and (importantly, from the perspective of a newlyarrived and very young postgraduate student) youngish presence in the Centre, to which I was effectively if not formally attached.

I first came across Des Ball's name in 2001 while interviewing Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) soldiers at a sniper camp in eastern Burma. It seemed like an unlikely setting to bump up against an esteemed academic — the hot jungle clearing was a long way from the Australian National University professor's book-lined office in Canberra. At the time, reporting on Burma was difficult. Its isolation and a ban on international journalists made it hard to verify stories in time for news bulletins. By the time footage and witness reports were smuggled out the story had usually moved on to another international hot spot. Closed off and isolated from much of the outside world, the military regime had at the time stepped up its attacks on who it perceived as “enemies of the state” — its own citizens, ethnic minorities and the political opposition. I was in the sniper camp at the invitation of a KNLA officer and was on my way to interview Karen villagers recently displaced by the Burmese Army and now taking shelter in jungle hideouts.

A group of KNLA soldiers had just completed a series of morning drills and were making their way back to their small bamboo platforms to take rest and clean up before lunch. The hurried sound of food being readied could be heard above the soldiers’ banter. Work-hardened men in singlets and shorts chopped meat and vegetables into tidy piles, their bare arms mapped with hand-etched tattoos. A blackened aluminium rice pot steamed over dull red coals. A group of young men milled around. They wore an assortment of ragged T-shirts and sarongs hiked up around their thighs. Black-ink tattoos trailed up their legs, arms and naked shoulders. Some smoked and puffed on green-leafed cheroots. The camp had about forty soldiers in it. Some of the men carried weapons, others towels and soap as they walked down the steep slope to the river to wash. Shallow foxholes dotted the edge of the camp.

I asked permission from the camp leader to interview soldiers, wanting to talk mainly about their backgrounds and motivations for fighting. I noticed a small hut built more solidly than the soldiers’ basic bamboo platforms. An antenna and wires ran from the roof through a hole cut in an exterior wall. Inside the hut three KNLA soldiers were busy chatting and scribbling.

Introducing a change of direction

After devoting the first half of his academic career to the specifics of missiles, antennae and targeting protocols Professor Des Ball shifted his research in what might appear an unlikely direction. Inspired by many years as a regular traveller to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, and with a growing stable of Southeast Asia-focussed students, Des began a momentous pivot to this region. His earlier devotion to uncovering the details of sensitive strategic-level defence activities provided the analytical tools and mindset necessary for researching defence, security and political topics in mainland Southeast Asia. In this shift, which began in the early 1990s, Des de-emphasised his earlier academic interests in nuclear targeting, signals intelligence and Australian defence policy to focus, sometimes exclusively, on regional security issues. After beginning with analysis of Burmese military affairs, most notably the Tatmadaw's signals intelligence capabilities, he grew to become the foremost expert on Thai security forces, especially its mind-boggling array of paramilitaries. From the 1990s, the strategist, long accustomed to global-level threat analysis, became a regional tactician seeking to clarify the smallest details of deployments, configurations and tasking in a wide-ranging effort to deliver insights about what is commonly described as “human security”. Increasingly he has seen his role as offering “broader perspectives on security…to try and come up with greater balance in looking at the whole spectrum of threats to human security”.

During these years, Des has taken the study of security in mainland Southeast Asia in new directions. His close working relationships with officials from regional military and police forces have provided access that remains, in key respects, unique. These networks are reinforced and fertilised by his dogmatic commitment to regular field research.3 With a tempo of travel and field research that shames many other scholars, Des keeps up a heavy schedule of visits, especially to Thailand where he travels the length and breadth of the country to accumulate the obscure information that infuses the narrative of his books. Those books are packed with details not mastered by other scholars; they have become reservoirs of facts and analysis that serve to re-frame standard impressions of regional security dynamics. Lavishly illustrated with maps, photographs and tables they are encyclopaedias for interested students, scholars and journalists.

There are assorted ways to describe the writings of Desmond Ball with respect to signals intelligence. One is to note the volume or types of publications. Even without including working papers, many of which became the basis for articles or book chapters, an examination of Ball's vita yields evidence of over thirty books, monographs, articles, and book chapters explicitly focusing on signals intelligence. In addition, there are a number of works — for example, A Suitable Piece of Real Estate, The Ties that Bind, or The Intelligence War in the Gulf — in which a discussion of signals intelligence activities is a key element.

An alternative, somewhat hybrid approach, is to focus on the targets of his research as well as some other common aspects of his output. One can identify a number of works that might be grouped under “SIGINT History” — that is, signals intelligence activities during World War II or during the early Cold War. A second group is the one in which Soviet/ Russian intelligence activities were the focus. In addition, there is his work concerning various aspects of UKUSA SIGINT operations. Then there are two variants of what might be called the “SIGINT in…” effort — one of which focuses solely on the signals intelligence organisations and activities of the target nation, and another which concerns both allied and host country SIGINT efforts.

Those do not exhaust the categories that can be used to describe his SIGINT research. Another group of writings reflect the expansion of the SIGINT field to include information warfare and, now, cyberwar. Finally, there are those works concerning relatively contemporary events that might be grouped under the heading “SIGINT in Action”. The books, articles, and other publications that fall in that category involve the collection of SIGINT (usually, communications intelligence) in support of specific military activities or to provide intelligence to political leaders.

SIGINT History

Among Ball's major works in the “SIGINT History” category is one that he co-authored with David Horner. Published in 1998, Breaking the Codes: Australia's KGB Network, 1944–1950 is a significant addition to the literature on Soviet World War and early Cold War espionage networks stimulated by the VENONA declassification.

Desmond Ball made his name as an internationally recognised scholar with an impressive body of work on aspects of American nuclear strategy. This had its origins in his graduate studies at the Australian National University (ANU) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He had first undertaken a study of ballistic missile defence for his Honours thesis in the Faculty of Arts, drafts of which he had shown to a recently arrived Professor of International Relations, Hedley Bull, who had come to the ANU from the London School of Economics via a two years stint as Director of the Wilson government's Arms Control and Disarmament Research Unit (ACDRU) at the Foreign Office. With his impeccable contacts in the United States strategic studies community, Bull was a demanding but ideal lead supervisor for Ball's subsequent Ph.D. thesis on the Kennedy administration's strategic missile program. Geoffrey Jukes, an authority on Soviet forces and a former ACDRU colleague of Bull's, and Arthur Lee Burns, one of the only Australians to have published work on nuclear strategy in American journals, were also on Ball's panel in the Research School of Pacific Studies.

That this research was the platform for Ball's outstanding career in strategic studies is confirmed by the content of the academic works he was writing at the very height of his career. For me that apex comes in 1980 and 1981, some eight years after the completion of Ball's Ph.D., a period of intense intellectual productivity represented by three significant pieces of writing. While these only represent a small fraction in numerical terms of Des Ball's mountainous output, they are clear demonstrations of his scholarship at its most powerful and influential. The first was the extensively revised and extended version of Ball's Ph.D. thesis, which was published by the University of California Press in 1980 under the title Politics and Force Levels. The second was a short but significant article on counterforce which first appeared in the journal of the American arms control community, Arms Control Today and reprinted elsewhere in the 1980s. And the third is a very widely cited Adelphi Paper on the dismal prospects of controlling a nuclear war once it had begun, published in London by the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in 1981.

Temper democratic, bias human

Desmond Ball's labours through four decades to elucidate the character of United States defence and intelligence facilities in Australia, to document the evidence, test the balance of benefits and dangers to both national security and human security, and then tell the story to his fellow Australians is unparalleled in Australian intellectual and political life, and I suspect on an international scale. The dedication, often neglected, to the most famous and influential part of this work, A Suitable Piece of Real Estate: American Installations in Australia, was the call “for a sovereign Australia”. We might best sum up the character of Ball's work of a lifetime — or more precisely, this one, brightly coloured, thread of a multi-stranded body of work — by recalling the enduring watchwords of an earlier Australian nationalist, Joseph Furphy: “temper democratic, bias Australian”. Both elements are keys to understanding the animating force behind Ball's work on the American installations in Australia — the concern for a fully and properly informed public as a prerequisite to democratic debate about the American bases, and the concern that Australians identify their country's specific interests concerning the bases, citing Malcolm Fraser's prescient but often ignored 1976 warning that the interests of the United States and the interests of Australia are not necessarily identical”.

And yet, this is not enough, on either count. One might more properly say of Ball on the bases that the work is characterised by “temper offensively democratic, bias human”. Ball's anger is clear for those Australian officials and politicians who would hide the true nature of these military and intelligence bases behind unwarranted secrecy, unjustified discounting of risk, and willingness to traduce the fundamental civil rights of citizens in a democracy. At root, Ball was not only sure that truths hidden or obfuscated by government would always be revealed in the end, but he was confident that a properly informed Australian public would be able to make judicious assessments on the merits of a case that a reasonable government committed to both genuine national security and a viable democratic polity could live with.

Defining Regionness

What are regions? What and who make them? How do they emerge and perish? These questions remain heavily contested in the literature on international relations. There are a variety of ways in which the concept of region has been studied. But no single attempt has proven, or is likely to prove, definitive and universally acceptable.

What is clear, however, is that the study of regions has evolved considerably in the scholarly literature on international relations. Regions are no longer viewed as “natural” or “physical constants”. Traditional conceptions of regions focus on relatively fixed variables, such as geographic proximity, shared cultural and linguistic features, and a common heritage. They seek to determine what is common among the peoples and political units that inhabit a given geographical and geopolitical space. In the 1960s, there emerged behavioural perspectives in which regions were “not to be identified by the traditional geopolitical criteria, but to be discovered by inductive, quantitative methods”. A classic study published in 1970 by Cantori and Spiegel on “regional sub-systems” (a code word for regions among international relations scholars of that period) identified geographical proximity, international interaction, common bonds (including ethnic, cultural, social and historical) and a sense of regional identity that may be enhanced by attitude and the role of external actors. Another wellknown study by Russett suggested five criteria: social and cultural homogeneity, political attitudes or external behaviour, political institutions, economic interdependence, and geographical proximity. A survey of the work of twenty-two scholars on regions by William Thompson found three clusters of necessary and sufficient attributes of “regional sub-systems”: general geographical proximity, regularity and intensity of interactions, and shared perceptions of the regional subsystem as a distinct theatre of operations. But none of these studies laid to rest the ambiguities surrounding the concept of region. Nor did they resolve tensions between the geographical and the perceptual, the fixed and the dynamic, and the rationalistic and the discursive elements that shape regionness.

The aftermath of World War II was a period of profound change in Southeast Asia. The main historical forces shaping Southeast Asia's destiny were nationalism and decolonization, and the struggle of the newly independent states to create stable political systems and viable national economies. In the international arena, Southeast Asia became progressively drawn into the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. A key feature of this period was the close nexus between domestic politics (including nationalism, national integration and democracy), prospects for regionalism and international relations. The Cold War helped to polarize the region, and influenced the domestic politics of Southeast Asian states. It contributed to the rise of authoritarianism in the non-communist states of Southeast Asia. At the same time, domestic problems, including weak national integration and regime survival concerns, had major consequences for the foreign policy orientation of the non-communist Southeast Asian states, especially their attitude toward regionalism. The early post-war period saw the first articulation of ideas about regional unity by Southeast Asia's nationalist leaders. Yet most of these were not concerned with a Southeast Asian identity, but instead focused on larger pan-Asian or Afro-Asian unity. And a range of domestic and international factors ensured the nonfulfilment of these aspirations.

The Nationalist Vision of Regionalism

In her diplomatic history of post-war Southeast Asia, C.M. Turnbull points out that “the two most important factors affecting regionalism and international relations in the immediate postwar years were the decolonization process itself, and the problems of creating national identity within the (often artificial) former colonial boundaries.” Nationalism was the major political force in Southeast Asia during the first two decades of the post-war era. But it had a mixed impact on regionalism. On the one hand, Southeast Asian nationalists recognized regionalism as an inevitable trend; something that was “bound to come” as a way of undoing the artificial divisions and separations among Southeast Asian peoples and territories brought about by colonial rule. Nationalist leaders such as Aung San of Myanmar and Elpidio Quirino of the Philippines were among the first people to lament that Southeast Asian countries maintained much closer economic, cultural and political links with their metropolitan powers than with each other.

The period from 1979 to 1991 may be regarded as a distinctive phase in modern Southeast Asian history. It began with the most serious challenge to peace and stability in the region since the end of the Vietnam War — the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978. The ensuing crisis saw the polarization of Southeast Asia into two antagonistic political groups, one represented by ASEAN, the other by the three Indochinese states led by Vietnam. As the rivalry between the two groups intensified, ASEAN's concept of regionalism was opposed by that of Vietnam, which held Indochina to be a single strategic unit. The regional conflict in Southeast Asia reflected changes in the international security environment, especially the collapse of the superpower détente and the advent of the “second Cold War”. Renewed superpower tensions fuelled the stalemate in the Cambodian conflict and were manifested in heightened U.S.-Soviet strategic rivalry, part of which was played out in the form of naval competition in the Pacific. Sino-Soviet and Sino-Vietnamese ties too plunged to new lows during the period, with China putting military pressure on Vietnam on their common border and providing military support to the Cambodian rebels so as to impose a heavy cost on Hanoi's occupation of Cambodia.

But the crisis in regional relations was also in many respects a blessing in disguise, not only for ASEAN, but also arguably for the whole region of Southeast Asia. For it provided the ASEAN grouping with a new sense of unity and purpose, brought international recognition and support for its diplomatic and political role in finding a solution to the Third Indochina War, and strengthened the recognition among ASEAN regimes that economic development was the best guarantee of their political legitimacy and national stability. While the accelerated pace of economic liberalization and globalization in the non-communist part of Southeast Asia was due to a variety of factors, such as the southward movement of Japanese capital in the wake of the 1985 Plaza Accord and the spread of post-Fordist transnational production, it was also a response by ASEAN governments to the sense of insecurity and vulnerability in the wake of the ideological polarization of the region.

The end of the Cold War brought fundamental changes to the international relations and regional identity of Southeast Asia. The image of a region divided, fuelled by the ASEAN-Vietnam conflict, was coming to an end, in parallel with breakthroughs in the Cambodian peace process in the late 1980s. ASEAN's vigorous diplomacy on Cambodia had not only earned it positive international recognition, but also contributed to the impression of Southeast Asia as a region able to provide indigenous solutions to its own problems. Regional cohesion and unity had been bolstered by the easing of intramural disputes within ASEAN. The ASEAN model or “ASEAN Way” was presented by leaders and commentators both inside and outside the region as an example of how a region can manage its problems and develop a positive identity in international relations. Both in terms of intraregional interactions and extraregional perceptions, Southeast Asia had become the symbol of a dynamic and largely peaceful region.

Yet, looking at the period from Southeast Asia's emergence from the Cold War until the period of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, it becomes clear the elements of integration and cohesion went hand in hand with the forces of conflict and fragmentation. Much of the latter stemmed from the need to adapt to external developments, such as the changing global economic and security order, including globalization and strategic multipolarity. There also emerged fresh challenges to intraregional relations, including territorial and political disputes, which had been dormant or sidelined during the Cold War years. ASEAN, which had been widely praised for its contribution to stability and prosperity, was presented with a host of new problems, including those stemming from the expansion of its membership to realize the aspirations of its founders towards a united Southeast Asia. Buoyed by its Cambodian success, ASEAN also felt confident enough to assume a major role in developing cooperative security frameworks for the larger Asia- Pacific region, partly in response to a perceived strategic void caused by superpower retrenchment and anxieties linked to the rise of China. Finally, Southeast Asia's integration into the wider regional (East Asian) economy, which accelerated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, created its own host of problems.

A central concern of this book is to explore the issue of “identity” in the international relations of Southeast Asia. The term “identity” is understood here as “regional identity”, and is examined with specific reference to two basic propositions. The first holds that the international relations of Southeast Asia have much to do with conscious attempts by the region's leaders (with some help from outside scholars and policy-makers) to “imagine”, delineate, and organize its political, economic, social and strategic space. In this sense, politics among the states of Southeast Asia may be understood as a quest for common identity in the face of the region's immense diversity and myriad countervailing forces, including the ever-present danger of intraregional conflict and the divisive impact of extraregional actors and events. The second proposition holds that regional cooperation, in various conceptions and guises, has played a central role in shaping the modern Southeast Asian identity. By seeking to limit external influences and by developing a regulatory framework for managing interstate relations, regional cooperation has made the crucial difference between the forces of conflict and harmony that lie at the core of the international relations of Southeast Asia.

By emphasizing the idea of “region”, this book seeks to overcome what John Legge once described as “the almost universal tendency of historians to focus on the constituent parts of Southeast Asia rather than to develop a perception of the region as a whole as a suitable object of study.” While some historians have now overcome this tendency (notably Anthony Reid in his two-volume Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce and Nicholas Tarling in his Nations and States in Southeast Asia), regional perspectives on Southeast Asian politics and international relations remain scarce. Scholarly works on the foreign policies of individual Southeast Asian states, as well as studies of regional security and regional political economy, are often undertaken without regard to the question of what constitutes the region and its identity. Through the analysis of the international relations of Southeast Asia, this book seeks to ascertain whether there are regional patterns and characteristics that could validate or negate Southeast Asia's claim to be a region.

A key question about regions is their permanence and transience. Regional identity can be altered or undermined by a variety of forces, external and internal to the region. In modern times, the forces that are especially likely to affect regional identity are globalization, the rise of new power centres within or in proximity to a region, altered political interactions with countries outside the region, and regional social forces that compete with state-sponsored national and regional identities. In this chapter, I discuss four key challenges to Southeast Asia that have arisen since the turn of the last century: (1) the perils of globalization, including the “Asian financial crisis” of 1997 and the “global financial crisis” of 2008, and new transnational dangers, such as pandemics, environmental degradation, natural disasters and terrorism; (2) the emergence of a civil society regionalism; (3) the rise of China and India; and (4) the emergence of the idea of an East Asian Community (EAC). These challenges have raised serious questions about whether the regional idea of Southeast Asia can endure into the future.

The Perils of Globalization

Southeast Asia's exposure to the forces of globalization, such as financial downturns, terrorism, pandemics and environmental degradation, was amply evident throughout the post-Cold War period. The Asian financial crisis (or the Asian economic crisis, as it is also called) began in mid-1997, underscoring the pitfalls of economic development strategies that were based on an emphasis on foreign investment and exportoriented industrialization without adequate regulatory mechanisms. Commenting on the seriousness of the crisis for Southeast Asia, Rodolfo Severino, then Secretary-General of ASEAN, commented: “Since ASEAN's founding thirty-one years ago, no disaster has hit the countries of Southeast Asia with such widespread impact as the financial crisis.” While the crisis was not “Southeast Asian” in scope (apart from South Korea, it acquired the attributes of a global crisis affecting countries as far apart as Russia and Brazil), the “contagion” effect of the crisis was most seriously felt in Southeast Asia. Moreover, the crisis was peculiarly Southeast Asian in the way it threatened to unravel and reshape intraregional politics, and created the impetus for a broader East Asian Community.