Developing countries prefer to form “limited alignments,” steering between strong defense pacts and outright neutrality in their security relations with the great powers, such as the United States and China, new U-M research shows.

Using Southeast Asia as an example, researcher John Ciorciari found that developing countries usually seek limited forms of security cooperation to reap the rewards of great-power protection while minimizing risks that come from inflexible defense pacts.

The rewards of alignments, he said, included military, economic and political support, while dependency and domination were among the risks of an alignment — and especially a formal military alliance — with a great power.

Ciorciari, an assistant professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, says developing countries also are concerned about the effects of external security relationships on their regime legitimacy, internal security and economic growth. For example, in the past, joining the Soviet or American camps often set developing countries on different paths, connecting them to capitalist or communist economic networks and affecting the evolution of domestic policies. Limited alignments are designed to preserve policy autonomy, he says.

In addition to their great-power ties, developing countries usually seek cooperation with other small states or middle powers to reduce the need for support from great powers.

“In Southeast Asia, it was not easy for states in the region to set aside territorial and political disputes or to develop stronger regional cooperation,” he says.

A shared desire to become independent of the great powers was a major reason why five Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) formed the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967.

The same interest in reducing neighborly threats and lessening reliance on great power security guarantees contributed to the expansion of ASEAN, which includes 10 members today. The other countries are Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. ASEAN members sometimes refer to the need to either “hang together” or “hang separately,” Ciorciari says.

Ciorciari says he chose Southeast Asia for its diversity. It contains large Buddhist, Christian, Muslim and Hindu populations; large and small states; rich and poor ones; free markets and state-dominated economies; and democracies and dictatorships.