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The application of law in South East Asia frustrates many scholars due to its subliminal character. I call this subliminal form of law 'legalism'. This article adopts the method of historical sociology to trace three evolutionary phases in South East Asia's international history of legalism to illuminate the cumulative mixture of informality beneath formality in the practice of legalism via 'social morality'. In pre-colonial times, divinely-guided moral censure and the ethical reputation of particular rulers passed for proto-intersocietal law. In colonial times, international law was foisted by Western powers onto the informal social morality of the region, resulting in power politics operating behind legal manoeuvres. The advent of ASEAN saw a reversion to a preference for even greater informality and soft law. Finally, the post-colonial era witnessed experimentation with Westphalian international law. This has resulted nowadays in a cumulative halfway house of soft legalism operated through diplomatic social morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary research on the international relations of Southeast Asia has neglected the latent possibilities of reading non-western indigenous forms of international relations as a contribution to worldwide debates on the nature of international politics. Drawing on one precolonial account of Southeast Asian political practices in the Malay Archipelago, the Sejarah Melayu, this article proposes that Southeast Asians have previously philosophized about “intersocietal relations” in ways that privilege noble prowess, knowledge quests, and hierarchical justice through the interdependence of trade and culture within the region, and with India, China, and the Arab world. These features can still speak to contemporary relations between peoples rather than states and to security issues within borderless regions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]