Anti-imperial nationalism

Yet anti-imperial nationalism was absolutely crucial as the key ingredient for the alchemy that sought to turn empires into nations in the middle of the twentieth century. It can be categorised by the following features ... 

More than the other two forms, anti-imperial nationalism was the child of very specific conditions in the first half of the twentieth century. Imperialism changed its nature profoundly in the decades before and after 1900, as colonial governments extended their sovereignty to internationally agreed boundaries and assumed most of the unitary functions of nation-states elsewhere. The twentieth century imperial combination of creating a structure that looked like a modern nation state but lacked... 

Five case studies follow, examining particular identities and their evolution into different forms of nationalism. The first, paradoxically, is Chinese identity in Southeast Asia, in chapter 3. This is prioritised in part because overseas Chinese nationalism slightly preceded the anti-imperial nationalism of Indonesia and Malaysia (though not the Philippines), so that the different forms of nationalism emerging from the Malay category of chapter 4 emerged in critical dialectic with... 

Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei each incorporated strong elements of Malayness into their post-independence state nationalism, and even the Philippines flirted with it. Chapter 4 argues that in Malaysia this label was so powerfully fashioned into ethnie nationalism as to constantly endanger the state nationalist project. In Indonesia elements of Malayness were embedded in anti-imperial nationalism, which in turn laid the basis for state nationalism, delegitimising any distinct Malay ethnie. In Brunei nationalism of any kind is stunted by monarchy, and Malayness remains at the level of an official construct. 

The effect of this type of imperial interaction was to create expectations in the nationalisms they produced which would be very difficult to fulfil. The colonial boundaries were of course sacralised as the correct boundaries for anti-imperial nationalism. But in Burma, Burman ethnie nationalism became fatally entangled with state nationalism after independence, with a constant state of unwinnable war against minority ethnie nationalisms. Vietnam was very fortunate that the anti-imperial nationalism of the Indo-Chinese communist party was unable to take control of the whole colony in 1945, and eventually renamed itself the Vietnamese Workers Party in 1951. The French were able to steer Laos and Cambodia to a fragile independence in 1954 (Goscha 1999). The wars of Indo-China up until 1980 were nevertheless bedevilled by Vietnamese attempts to lead the anti-imperial nationalisms of Laos and Cambodia in the Indo-Chinese Revolution of which they had dreamed since 1930, and problems remain between these variants of nationalism. 

The growing ethnie nationalism of the Toba Batak, in other words, was emphatically not shared by the Mandailing of this period, who made religion the decisive criterion of identification , as Castles puts it, and unlike the Muslims of Angkola and Sipirok, let Islam rob them of their ancestors (Castles 1972 280). Besides religion, the emotive power of anti-imperial nationalism also played a role in defining Batak identity, less in competition with ethnie nationalism than in a layered merging with it. 

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