Negotiating better governance: Jurisdictional arbitrage within ASEAN

Abstract

The notion that business people should serve the national interests of their country of origin is widely held but also ahistorical, nowhere more so than in Southeast Asia. From the myriad ports of the archipelago, traders have always done business with the wider world and mingled with ‘foreigners’ from more far-flung places with other languages and religions. The internationalism of commerce was epitomized in the great entrepot of Malacca, whose role eventually passed to Singapore. The European powers seized territories that they consolidated into colonies: in due course these became nation-states in their own right with inherited colonial systems of law and administration and fairly arbitra..