Introduction

In 1950, Southeast Asia was still an exotic place for New Zealanders. It was to the north of Australia and was not on either of the two major routes of passenger ships between New Zealand and the United Kingdom. It had played a role in the war against Japan, not one to be remembered with great pride since there were no major New Zealand victories but only the rapid fall of the Singapore fortress and the loss of the battleships which were at the core of the naval guarantee. Young New Zealanders had played a minor role in the land and air battles through which territory was recovered in the Pacific, but they had been overshadowed by the United States. Southeast Asia had not been central anyway. It did subsequently emerge as one of the borderlands between the opposed camps in the Cold War. Southeast Asia was therefore at mid-century on the agenda of security concerns, but it was somewhat hidden, almost disreputable.

By 2000, Southeast Asia was at the heart of an institution, the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) community, which was once described by a New Zealand Foreign Minister as New Zealand's most important economic relationship. (He spoke rather loosely, and probably intended to exclude genuinely multilateral institutions like the World Trade Organization.) The gloss of East Asian economic success and the participation in it of Southeast Asia, had been somewhat reduced by the Asian crisis of 1997, and the confident rhetoric of the “Pacific century” which had been so prominent a few years earlier was muted. New Zealand was engaged in continual debate about its relationship with “Asia”, and participants often looked past Southeast Asia to the giants of China, Korea, and Japan. Some even looked to the potentially emerging India which still benefited from an old habit inherited from Britain of being identified with “Asia” even though it was marginal to the concept of “Asia Pacific” which had emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, there was an enormous change in the half century. New Zealand's economic relationship with Southeast Asia had changed from “insignificant” to “significant, albeit over-shadowed”.