A Diplomatic Image and Its Afterlife: Bangkok 1967 and ASEAN’s Creation Myth

Diplomatic images are not mere visual archives of past encounters, they are complicit in how the past is framed, memorialized, and reproduced in the service of contemporary raison d’etat. This chapter is about one such instance of complicity. It tracks the afterlife of an image of five ministers from Cold War Southeast Asia – all male, in western lounge suits, and bespectacled – signing ASEAN into existing in Bangkok in 1967. More than any other, this image has been reproduced and disseminated to symbolize ASEAN: from book covers and commemorative stamps, to television reports, and even a commissioned painting. This image gives contemporary ASEAN a satisfying origin myth – of five “founding fathers” forging diplomatic reconciliation in the aftermath of militarized inter-state conflict in a region marked as exceptionally diverse along racial, religious, cultural, and linguistic registers. But the image – and the props and performance it captures –contains within it the seeds of an alternative reading that puts this origin myth to lie. Nair argues that far from embodying such exceptional and heroic diversity, the image tells us what was profoundly (and problematically) similar among these diplomatic performers than what the contemporary discourse on ASEAN reveals.