Theories of External·internal Political Relationships: a Case Study of Indonesia and the Philippines

ONE OF THE CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF the upheaval in Indonesian politics that began late in 1965 has been the termination of former President Sukarno's policy of Konfrontasi aimed at the Federation of Malaysia. Most analyses of the repercussions of that policy have concentrated, understandably, on Indonesia and Malaysia and on those major powers with interests in Southeast Asia. There has been relatively little attention, scholarly or otherwise, to the implications of Konfrontasi either for Southeast Asia as a whole, or for individual countries in that region. A study of the latter kind, aside from helping to fill that gap, could also be designed to contribute to the investigation of a more general problem that of developing and testing conceptual schemes for the systematic exploration of the relationships between the external and internal political behavior of states. These are the major objectives of this paper, which examines the impact of Konfrontasi on a third party, the Republic of the Philippines.1 The primary purpose of this essay is to ascertain the validity and utility of certain theoretical frameworks formulated to handle the external-internal dichotomy mentioned above. This will be attempted in Sections IV-V. To achieve this end, however, will require first a case study, which is presented in Sections I-III. Its goals are to describe Philippine political developments during the "era of Konfrontasi," and to assess the nature and extent of that policy's influence on those developments. In addition, the case study should reveal whether the perspective it employs the· added dimension provided by a "two-level" analysis results in a more satisfactory explanation of Philippine politics than does the usual single-level approach.2