South-East Asian government, politics and policy

Summary

On 20 May 2002, the República Democrática de Timor-Leste/Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste became the first sovereign state established in the twenty-first century. International recognition of its sovereignty was confirmed when it became the 191st member of the United Nations (UN) in September 2002. This meant that a new, small, fragile state had entered the “international community”. For newly constituted states, such as Timor-Leste, sovereignty is the social status that provides political, economic and social freedom and confers upon them decision-making rights and capacities to pursue interests within the sphere of international relations. New states become holders of governmental authority with a status equal to the great powers of international politics. Timor-Leste's movement from occupied territory to sovereign state reflects a monumental shift in identity entailing new goals and interests, and necessitating new patterns of engagement with the international community.

The political history of the territory now known as “Timor- Leste” has been largely shaped by experiences with various forms of foreign intervention. For around 400 years, the eastern half of the island of Timor was subject to Portuguese colonialism. In 1960, Portuguese Timor was granted self-determination rights under international law as a non-self-governing territory. By 1975, a shift in policy allowed other Portuguese colonies to exercise self-determination, however, Portuguese Timor's decolonization process was halted when its neighbour, Indonesia, annexed its territory in 1975, leading to a twenty-four year struggle for independence. Indonesia's occupation delayed decolonization until 1999, when an internationally-sanctioned ballot resulted in Timor-Leste's separation.

Since 1999, Timor-Leste has been the subject of five UN peacebuilding missions and two international stabilization missions. While international state-building is not new, international recognition of Timor-Leste's sovereignty followed the most extensive period of state-building ever conducted by the UN. The most significant of these missions operated under the auspice of the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). Present in Timor-Leste from 1999 until 2002, it was endowed with responsibility for the administration of the territory and possessed exclusive legislative and executive authority. It was also mandated to provide immediate humanitarian and security assistance, build state institutions and public administration, restore the judicial system and promote “capacity-building” among local actors. The UNTAET's temporary role as de facto sovereign reflects a distinctive transition to independence. Not only was this mission unprecedented in its size, scope and mandate, it was also the high-water mark of UN state-building.

Summary

Australia and Timor-Leste signed the Timor Sea Maritime Boundary Treaty on 6 March 2018 in New York City. While the treaty resolved the symbolic issue of maritime boundary delimitation, no agreement was reached on a development concept for the shared resource, Greater Sunrise. In February, a leaked letter from Timor-Leste's lead negotiator Xanana Gusmão signalled his discontent with these negotiations as he blasted the independent oil and gas expert who had raised significant concerns around the commercial viability of Timor- Leste's pipeline plan and the assumptions built into Timor-Leste's economic modelling. Gusmão publicly declared that the pipeline was “non-negotiable”. The United Nations Compulsory Conciliation report released in April also confirmed that it had been unable to facilitate an agreement on the development concept for Greater Sunrise. The report outlined that Timor-Leste's proposal could only occur with a direct subsidy of US$5.6 billion by the government of Timor-Leste (or another funder), and it would only provide a mere 7 per cent return on a capital investment of US$15.6 billion.

By August 2018, a development deal for Greater Sunrise — the most critical resource for Timor-Leste's mid-term economic viability and functional sovereignty, and the centrepiece of its development agenda — remained elusive.

Summary

This chapter examines the period of international state-building that Timor-Leste underwent prior to achieving political independence. While Indonesia had provided some education, schools and roads over the twenty-four years of occupation — which it sought to contrast with the neglectful Portuguese administration — the ability of East Timor to function as an autonomous state after the popular consultation was severely limited. Political, economic and social realities would render it impossible for Timor-Leste to establish governance structures and rule of law across the territory without extensive international assistance. While East Timor was not necessarily a “blank slate”, it faced significant challenges: the legal system had to be rebuilt virtually from scratch, there was an absence of administrative experience as the public service had consisted of mainly Indonesian personnel who fled after the 1999 ballot and the formal economy was underdeveloped.

While previous chapters discussed international processes of recognition, this chapter examines the ways in which East Timor's sovereignty became contingent upon developing a functional liberaldemocratic state. It examines the role of international state-building in East Timor from 1999–2002, focusing on the International Force for East Timor (INTERFET) and the United Nations Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). East Timor's experiences with international state-building reflected a desire on behalf of key members in the international community to shape the identity of the new state and develop effective governance structures and capacities. There were several state-building goals in East Timor. The first was to establish “empirical sovereignty”, which, as mentioned in the introduction, entails the capacities of states to establish political order and security within a territorial jurisdiction and provide their population “civil and socio-economic goods”. The second was to transform East Timor into a liberal-democratic state. These two goals are not necessarily compatible as liberal peace-building interventions have often struggled to build the conditions for democracy to take hold in societies unused to democratic rule. Nevertheless, the international state-building demonstrates that political recognition of East Timor's state sovereignty was conditional on the establishment of liberaldemocratic institutions.

New states enter an international community with pre-existing normative frameworks with which they are expected to conform. The preferences of industrially-dominant developed states shape the norms that structure behaviours within the international community and influence the expectations of new states regarding the nature of legitimate statehood.

Summary

While the previous chapter demonstrated the centrality of cooperation within diverse multilateral forums as part of Timor-Leste's foreign policy, political rhetoric and policies tend to straddle the line between contest and cooperation. This chapter identifies how Timor-Leste perceives its external security challenges and the steps it has taken to address them. Engaging with “security” requires considering what security and for whom. The conventional sovereignty-security nexus focuses on the defence capabilities of the state in protecting its territory and population from aggression by other states. This chapter argues that this conventional approach to “national security” is viewed by dominant political elites as integral to the independence of the Timorese state. This sovereignty-security conception is shaped by Timor-Leste's historical experiences with colonialism under Portugal and Indonesia, and the collusion of Western and ASEAN states in permitting illegal occupation. Timor-Leste's leaders have presented an image of the international environment as insecure and competitive in some contexts. They suggest Timor-Leste should devote more resources to building military capacities to guarantee its sovereignty. Like many states, however, defence self-reliance is an unattainable goal.

Small states have been viewed as particularly vulnerable to the power politics because their limited assets make it difficult to repel foreign combatants. Timor-Leste's external security threats, however, are mostly low-level and non-traditional (e.g. non-military), including transnational crimes such as the illegal movement of goods and people across porous sections of the borders between Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Maritime security has also been identified as a priority by multiple sources, with Timor-Leste government arguing that a naval force is required to protect against illegal fishing, destruction of maritime fauna, piracy and other violations of Timor-Leste's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). East Timorese leaders, such as Xanana Gusmão, have targeted global security issues such as terrorism, trafficking of people, humans and weapons and international crime as potential threats to Timor-Leste's national security.

While realist approaches to external national security may be relevant for great power politics and material security interests among long-established, “Westphalian” states, they are generally less useful for explaining the post-colonial security dilemmas of new states in which threats generally emerge from within borders rather than beyond. Generally speaking, new states such as Timor-Leste are more likely to experience internal conflict and disorder than established, industrialized states. As the introduction outlined, the security dilemma for many developing states “arises in meeting internal rather than external threats”.

Summary

Since becoming a new state in 2002, Timor-Leste's foreign policy approach has been driven by the twin demands of guaranteeing survival and asserting political independence. Particular insecurities and constraints arise from being a small power. The “post-colonial security dilemma” reflects the need for small, new, weak states to diminish their reliance upon other states by pursuing a concept of absolute external state sovereignty as “real” independence. The tensions between dependence and independence are reflected in Timor-Leste's efforts to secure state sovereignty through its international relations, national defence policy and development strategy. This book argues that the historical experiences of the denial of self-determination and international state-building outlined in the previous chapters helped shape Timor-Leste's foreign policy approach, threat perceptions and subsequent engagements with the international community. Perhaps the greatest limitation is its inability to independently guarantee its own security. Small states are limited by what they can achieve in their international relations and have few opportunities to shape the international structures they inhabit. Like most small, new states, Timor-Leste's core national interest is survival, and it must use foreign policy as a way of negotiating its vulnerabilities and insecurities. Yet, even the smallest and weakest states have options in pursuing core national interests. The question is how small states can maximize their capacity for strategic manoeuvring and decrease reliance on relationships that give rise to imperatives rather than choices.

This chapter examines the formation of Timor-Leste's foreign policy. The initial challenges were determining its place in the world and defining its strategic national interests. Three key objectives have driven Timor-Leste's international relations:

Summary

Sovereignty is an identity status that is bestowed upon political entities by sovereign states. The last chapter examined East Timor's rights to self-determination under international law. Whether individual states decide to recognize these claims to political independence is often motivated by political factors rather than legal principles. This chapter examines the reactions of states and members of the broader international community to the sovereign claims of the East Timorese independence movement. It examines some of the key states that contributed to denying — and then ultimately permitting — Timorese sovereignty. These include Australia, the ASEAN states, the United States and China, as well as the less influential but culturally significant groupings of Portuguese-speaking countries and Pacific Island States. For decades, East Timor's right to self-determination was denied as powerful states interpreted its claims within the context of their own national interests. At a system-level, Cold War power dynamics contributed to how states assessed their own geostrategic interests vis-à-vis Indonesia and East Timor. While many states refused to provide Indonesia de jure recognition of sovereignty over East Timor — a notable exception was Australia — Indonesia possessed de facto recognition as it was, in all practical senses, the administering power in East Timor. While East Timor's claims were legitimated by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), it was not provided the material support from the international community to make those rights meaningful.

There were two key challenges for East Timor achieving political legitimacy. The first related to convincing the international community that self-determination was a human rights issue. This entailed two elements: the first was the use of international liberal discourses to persuade Western states that East Timor's independence would be necessary to protect people from human rights violations by Indonesia. The second element involved constructing a vision of the type of state that East Timor would become — namely, a liberal democratic state that would defend the social, economic and civic rights of citizens according to international law. These normative appeals to liberal rights were ultimately successful in eroding the collective realpolitik that had sustained Indonesia's rule. At a system-level, the end of the Cold War compelled an increase in international pressure against human rights abuses during the 1990s.

Summary

The first section of this book examines the roles of states and the international community in establishing East Timor's sovereign identity. This chapter develops an understanding of how East Timor became “imagined” as a bounded political unit within the international community. The 1933 Montevideo Convention defined a state as an entity that possesses a permanent population, defined territory, government and capacity to enter into relations with other states. “Territorialization” is the act of organizing territory, a process that is integral to the absolute external sovereignty concept. While it is contested in international relations, territorial sovereignty continues to provide the conceptual framework for demarcating those groups that possess rights to political authority in the international community from those that do not. The first stage of East Timor's statehood involved the creation of an internationally recognized territory through the partition of the island of Timor by regional European powers, Portugal and the Netherlands in the nineteenth century. East Timor's status as a bounded territory with a population was established externally; its identity was dependent upon the international community rather than developing through national consciousness shared by the people inhabiting the territory. The territorialization of East Timor is key to understanding how it achieved state sovereignty.

Timor-Leste is part of the Lesser Sundas (Nusatenggara) group of islands situated on the Eastern tip of the Indonesian archipelago. Territorially, it shares the island of Timor with the Indonesian province of West Timor. East Timor's colonial history and borders are relevant to the international recognition of the right of self-determination. The border that splits “East” from “West” Timor is not an organic demarcation, but one driven by international forces, most notably the introduction of European colonialism in the region in the seventeenth century. The East Timorese exclave Oecussi in the Indonesian province of West Timor, for example, reflects historical colonial settlement. This chapter examines the processes by which the territory of East Timor became “imagined” during the era of Portuguese colonialism. It does so by examining the border arrangements and international legal negotiations between the Portuguese and Dutch to divide the island of Timor into “East” and “West”. The contemporary state and national identity of Timor-Leste owes its existence to European colonialism and international law. Bounded territory provided the physical and social space for “imagining” the East Timorese political community.

Summary

As previous chapters have argued, the two most significant bilateral relationships for guaranteeing Timor-Leste's sovereign independence are Australia and Indonesia. Timor-Leste's “post-colonial security dilemma” reflects its attempts as a new state to achieve and sustain “real” independence while grappling with its ongoing dependence upon other states in the international community. The emphasis on its bilateral relationship with Indonesia reflects dependence upon Indonesia's assistance in achieving socio-economic development and foreign affairs objectives, including gaining membership into ASEAN. It also highlights Timor-Leste's post-colonial insecurities arising from its limited military and defence capabilities and past experiences of resistance against Indonesian rule. As chapter seven outlined, the key military planning document, Forcas 2020, saw key external threats emerging from Indonesia in terms of boundary security and the perceived fragility of its democratization processes. Timor-Leste's foreign policy has recognized the need for a pragmatic realist orientation when it comes to its foreign policy towards Indonesia. Successive Timorese governments have privileged good relations with Indonesia ahead of international norms and values relating to transitional justice. This pragmatic realist approach sits in contrast with the “activist foreign policy” displayed in its negotiations with Australia over Timor Sea oil and gas detailed in the previous chapter.

Timor-Leste has sought to address security fears arising from its close proximity to Indonesia through a process of “international reconciliation”. Timor-Leste's national identity was largely formed through the independence movement, and was driven by an anticolonial nationalism, with Indonesia positioned as the “common enemy”. The movement from enemy to friend through the processes of political reconciliation required reorienting Indonesia's relationship with the East Timorese and vice versa following Timor-Leste's attainment of sovereignty. This entailed developing new relationships between Timorese and Indonesian political leaders, and recasting the relationship between the two states within Timor-Leste's foreign policy narrative. Timor-Leste has sought international reconciliation with Indonesia to benefit border security, trade relations and development projects across a range of sectors.

Timor-Leste's political reconciliation with Indonesia is most prevalent when examining issues of transitional justice. Since attaining sovereignty in 2002 Timor-Leste has been responsible for establishing legitimate democratic institutions that possess widespread public support and encourage socio-political order through respect for rule of law. Following the independence referendum, Timor-Leste faced a number of divergent challenges in implementing post-conflict, transitional justice mechanisms to promote democratization, rule of law and a human rights culture.

Summary

Now into its second decade as a sovereign state, Timor-Leste is ready to take its place in the community of nations.

– Agio Pereira

This book has argued that Timor-Leste's security interests have been shaped by conceptions of sovereignty, self-determination and independence that reflect its historical and ongoing struggle for recognition. In its international relations, Timor-Leste's leaders have progressively pursued a more confident and outward-looking foreign policy as it defines and asserts its place within the community of states. This book has employed the term “aspirational foreign policy” to encapsulate Timor-Leste's ambitious and expansive approach to bilateral and multilateral relations, its desire to transform into an upper-middle income country by 2030 and the narrative of fragile state exceptionalism. Its approach to international affairs is syncretic: realist and idealist orientations have been observed across a range of different issue areas that affect national security as perspectives on the international political environment oscillate between conflictual and cooperative. Timor-Leste's leaders abandoned pragmatism in the Timor Sea dispute in favour of an “activist” strategy, however, realism remains central to understanding the ways in which international normative principles of justice were sacrificed in favour of good relations with Indonesia. The theories of international relations provide useful tools for understanding how states work to secure the state, however, not one theory alone can help us understand the range of policy options, behaviours and interactions that a small state such as Timor-Leste draws upon in its international relations.

This complexity of how states perceive and address security threats is thrown into sharp relief when considering the future challenges of small states such as Timor-Leste in the Asia-Pacific region. This final chapter looks forward to the two most pressing security challenges for Timor-Leste in the twenty-first century: one that reflects conventional geopolitical thinking in International Relations, and the other that undermines it. The first section examines Timor-Leste's position in the Asia-Pacific region, currently the epicentre of great power competition between the United States and China. Power dynamics in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific are relevant to Timor-Leste as it is located in the “transition zone” between these regions.

Summary

As a small new state, one of Timor-Leste's initial foreign policy priorities was to strategically position itself within the international community. The term “hedging” typically refers to ways small and medium states employ policies of balancing and engagement in their relations with powerful states. Hedging acts as an “insurance policy” as states “cultivate a middle position that forestalls or avoids having to choose one side… at the obvious expense of another”. In its engagements with multilateral regional and cultural associations, Timor-Leste has employed a form of “identity hedging” as it has diversified its relationships and sought to avoid dependence on any one state or bloc. Small states, such as Timor-Leste, use multilateral engagements as a way of maximizing their strategic options in international relations. According to declaratory policy, Timor-Leste considers its geographical position as “highly strategic” and views the protection of its natural resource wealth and security as dependent upon “maintaining good relationships with our neighbours and friends”. This chapter focuses on Timor-Leste's engagements with intergovernmental regional and cultural associations. Upon independence, Timor-Leste aspired to join as many multilateral organizations as possible.

As highlighted in chapter two, Timor-Leste's leaders have emphasized its cultural distinctiveness arising from centuries of migration and occupation, and its geographical location in the “transition zone” between Southeast Asia to the west and Oceania to the east. During his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, José Ramos-Horta argued that, “East Timor is at the crossroads of three major cultures: Melanesian, which binds us to our brothers and sisters of the South Pacific Region; Malay-Polynesian binding us to Southeast Asia; and the Latin Catholic influence, a legacy of almost 500 years of Portuguese colonisation.” He argued that Timor-Leste would retain close ties with Portugal and seek membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and South Pacific Forum “within days” of independence because Timorese leaders were conscious of the need to “co-exist” with its eastern and western neighbours. In a 2014 speech, Xanana Gusmão also emphasized the importance of Timor-Leste's geopolitical positioning in “creating bridges with Europe, Africa and Latin America”. This cultural distinctiveness is viewed by leaders as providing Timor-Leste opportunities to facilitate unique relationships between and across different states and regional associations. It also reflects the ways in which collective identity formation is not “organic” but a consequence of choices made by leaders as they interpret the best interests of the state.

Summary

The central contention of this book is that Timor-Leste's leaders promote an absolute external sovereignty concept that views selfdetermination and a lack of reliance upon other actors in the international community as central to effective statehood. As the previous chapter examined, the “security-development nexus” reflects the mutually-reinforcing relationship between conflict management, and economic and institutional development. According to José Ramos-Horta, Timor-Leste is “keenly aware of the link between security, stability and poverty reduction”. The capacities of state governments to deliver key services to citizens are “essential” for managing conflict, and internal security conditions influence the capacities of states to promote economic development. While the previous chapter highlighted the security dimensions of effective statehood, this chapter examines the use of foreign policy by Timorese governments to advance their economic ambitions to secure empirical sovereignty by consolidating their governmental capacities.

As a self-identified fragile state, Timor-Leste's ability to enact its vision of sovereignty relies upon its medium- and long-term development and resource allocation plans, and its economic relations with other actors in the global economy. Timor-Leste's leaders recognized during the independence movement that Timor-Leste's economic independence would rely upon the oil and gas reserves in the Timor Sea, a body of water separating the coastlines of the island of Timor and Australia by less than 400 nautical miles. Since 2007, Timor-Leste has experienced high rates of economic growth and associated gains in socioeconomic development indicators due to joint oil and gas development with Australia. This has enabled Timor-Leste's political leaders to present the state as a fragile state “success story” (see chapter four). Timor- Leste's representatives, including Xanana Gusmão, promote these finite resources as the centrepiece of its ambitious economic plans. The 2011 Strategic Development Plan (SDP) articulated aspirations of turning Timor-Leste into an upper-middle income state by 2030. This goal forms an important part of its aspirational foreign policy.

Timor-Leste's biggest economic challenge has also constituted its biggest foreign policy challenge: since 2002, the issue of who “owns” the resources in the Timor Sea has complicated bilateral relations between Timor-Leste and Australia. Maritime resources are inherently tied up with Timor-Leste's economic viability and internal sovereign capabilities as oil revenues have provided over 90 per cent of government revenue, rendering the state as central to wealth production and the allocation of scarce economic resources.

Why has ASEAN endured and why do members, many of whom remain comparatively weak and poor, continue to invest in the regional project? Existing answers, either that ASEAN is meaningless or that it has transformed regional affairs through the creation of shared values are both misplaced. Neither argument is empirically plausible. Instead, this Element argues that ASEAN has and continues to serve state interest through the creation of a shared ritual and symbolic framework. This framework has mitigated regional tension through the performance of regionalism, but has not fundamentally addressed the sources of that tension.

Civil-Military Relations in Southeast Asia reviews the historical origins, contemporary patterns, and emerging changes in civil–military relations in Southeast Asia from colonial times until today. It analyzes what types of military organizations emerged in the late colonial period and the impact of colonial legacies and the Japanese occupation in World War II on the formation of national armies and their role in processes of achieving independence. It analyzes the long term trajectories and recent changes of professional, revolutionary, praetorian and neo-patrimonial civil-military relations in the region. Finally, it analyzes military roles in state- and nation-building; political domination; revolutions and regime transitions; and military entrepreneurship.

Contemporary Singapore is simultaneously a small postcolonial multicultural nation state and a cosmopolitan global city. To manage fundamental contradictions, the state takes the lead in authoring the national narrative. This is partly an internal process of nation building, but it is also achieved through more commercially motivated and outward facing efforts at nation and city branding. Both sets of processes contribute to Singapore's capacity to influence foreign affairs, if only for national self-preservation. For a small state with resource limitations, this is mainly through the exercise of smart power, or the ability to strategically combine soft and hard power resources.

South-East Asian government, politics and policy

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1 - Introduction

Summary

Postscript

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4 - Establishing Legitimacy: International State-building in East Timor

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7 - Timor-Leste's National Security Agenda

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5 - Timor-Leste's Aspirational Foreign Policy

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3 - The Politics of Recognition: East Timor and the International Community

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List of Tables

About the Author

2 - The Struggle for Recognition: Territorialization, Self-determination and the Imagining of “East Timor”

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9 - International Reconciliation and Transitional Justice

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Contents

Bibliography

10 - Conclusion: Timor-Leste in the Changing Regional Order

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Frontmatter

6 - Identity Hedging: Timor-Leste's Engagement with Intergovernmental Organizations

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8 - Securing Economic Sovereignty

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Index

Ritual and Region

Civil-Military Relations in Southeast Asia

Singapore

South-East Asian government, politics and policy

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Ritual and Region

Civil-Military Relations in Southeast Asia

Singapore