Southeast Asia is an 'imagined' region, its physical, political, social and cultural diversity being too immense to qualify it as having a distinctive personality. Yet, what gives it coherence must count as one of the finest acts of collective self-imagination undertaken by a region's nationalist political elite in the wake of their liberation from European and American colonialism. As with nationalism and nation-states, regions may be 'imagined', designed, constructed and defended.
This approach to the study of regions and regionalism shares many elements of the political scientist Benedict Anderson's approach to the study of nationalism and the nation-state, as set out in his work Imagined Communities (Verso, London,1991). There are many parallels between 'imagining the nation' and 'imagining the region'. Particularly, Anderson's focus on the collective imagining of the nation by a nationalist elite is mirrored in the Southeast Asian region-building as a process of elite socialisation. But drawing upon the work of some other scholars, it is also important to highlight the role of traditional political-cultural frameworks and pre-capitalist commerce in building modern social identities.
Indeed, the term 'proximities' more accurately reflects the degree of socialisation and bonding evident in the case of Southeast Asia than 'communities', which is used to describe nations. Although a certain sense of community can develop within a region, as has been the case with Southeast Asia, the continued salience of state sovereignty (despite claims about its alleged obsolescence and erosion) makes regional communities fundamentally different from nation-states. Southeast Asia is still a region inhabited by highly sovereignty-conscious actors.
In the light of the tumultuous events of the past two years, it becomes additionally important to investigate the historical, material and social foundations of Southeast Asia as a region. These foundations are not tectonic plates, although they do sometimes collide and work at cross-purposes. However, none of these foundations are complete by themselves; and in the absence of an active and continuing process of social imagination and construction, the regional personality of Southeast Asia runs considerable risk of unravelling, notwithstanding strategic, economic and political imperatives to the contrary. As Donald Emerson once suggested: "nations come and go, why not regions".