Ethnie nationalism

In twentieth century Asia and Africa, this facet of nationalism became so dominant that it was popularly thought to be the only valid variant. Most of the literature on South and Southeast Asia labels it nationalism without further need for questioning. The uncolonised variants of nationalism, Chinese, Japanese and Thai, were wholly different in nature, combining state and ethnie nationalisms in different degrees. Yet because they were contemporary with the anti-imperial phenomena of southern Asia, they have been considered part of Asian nationalism... 

Further confusion is caused by the popular and political use of nationalist as the label for anti-communist governments and parties in China, Korea and Vietnam. This obscures the way in which communist movements mobilised anti-imperial and ethnie nationalism against the state nationalism of the governments they opposed. 

Dutch, British and French empires with modern ideas of sovereignty and bureaucracy. All Southeast Asians became aware of the claims and functions of modern statehood aristocrats were deprived of their arms and their slaves all were subjected to the monopoly of a single state system of laws, with origins far distant from them. This imposition of a new order was resisted passionately by some, in the name of dynastic pride (Burmese, Vietnamese, Acehnese, Balinese), nascent ethnie nationalism (Vietnamese, Acehnese, Batak, Javanese), or OSH-flavoured Islam (Tausug, Magindanao, Acehnese). Most however adapted quickly to the modern opportunities offered by the broader worlds they now entered. The new states were useful, and above all they were identified as modern by the new educated groups, but they remained for the most part alien and remote—as indeed they were intended to. 

Three of the types are further exemplified in the subsequent case studies dealing with the Archipelago. The fourth, labelled Expanding an ethnie core , is discussed only in general terms in chapter 2. It needs specific analysis because it has often been thought to be the classic or normative form of nationalism. In these cases, Burma, Siam and Vietnam, ethnie nationalism, pre-colonial state nationalism and antiimperial nationalism, have reinforced each other to such an extent that few analysts have seen the need to separate them conceptually. The brief discussion in chapter 2 is intended to show that the factors do need to be kept separate, and that conflating them has been at the root of the problems which Burma in particular has faced since independence. 

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. 

Aceh follows as the ethnie nationalism most threatening to the Indonesian state. Chapter 5 demonstrates that the strength of this ethnie nationalism, by contrast with the stateless examples that follow, is precisely its memory of state. Acehnese may be less distinctive as a minority than Indonesia s Bataks or Malaysia s Kadazan, but they inherit an unusually strong sense of state resistance to outside control. The Batak and Kadazan cases, in chapters 6 and 7, reveal the different paths of political identity formation and assertion of previously stateless peoples that were possible in Indonesia and Malaysia respectively. The different outcomes are largely set by the gulf between the two state nationalisms with which they contended post-revolutionary, centralising civic nationalism in Indonesia evolutionary, federal and ethno-nationalist Malaysia. 

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. 

In Malaya and British Borneo Chinese ethnie nationalism focussed on China was the only serious political movement until the very last years of the pre-war old order. Arnold Toynbee was profoundly wrong but symptomatic of the times when he declared When I touched at the Straits Settlements on my way out east I realized that British Malaya... 

Malay ethnie nationalism, of the protective type analysed in chapter 2, had had an exceptionally long innings in Malaysia. In its UMNO form it had, however, been unable to expand its agenda to become an inclusive type of state nationalism of civic kind. By 2008 there were claims that this was a kind of failed nation (Sani 2008). On the other hand, the sense of threat that had given rise to this brand of ethnie nationalism in the 1940s, when there were very few Malays in the modern economy, was unconvincing to a new generation who had seen the Malay population increase to some 60 per cent of the... 

The negatives of the Malay category became particularly important in the protective colonial environment of Malaya, however. There British influence ensured Melayu would be turned into race despite its quite contrary origins, and would become the base of a defensive type of ethnie nationalism. 

The ethnie nationalism of Aceh, sustained by a strong memory of state and of resistance to the intrusion of outsiders, had come to terms with the state nationalism of Indonesia, sustained by post-revolutionary centralism built on anti-imperial rhetoric. As Michael Keating (2001 viii, 102-33) has argued persuasively, when communities come together with different nationalist expectations and experiences, providing for differential claims on the state can be the strategy most compatible with justice and democracy. Aceh has had a very different memory of state and tradition of nationalism than have most Indonesians. Its relationship to Indonesian state nationalism is clear but distinctive. 

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. 

Both the Dutch and British colonial constructs remained extraordinarily plural, in language, religion and political formation. Few in the 1930s (except the Indonesian nationalists) believed that they could or should ever become single nation-states. Yet the pluralism was so pervasive at every level that lesser ethnie nationalisms had even more difficulty... 

It is time to return to the question asked at the beginning of this book whether nationalism is at a different stage in Asia than in Europe, or of a different type. If the former, should we consider the real challenge of ethnie nationalism to imperial borders to lie still in the future, when democratisation and mass education are further advanced If the latter, do we need new models ... 

The globalising economy and trans-national legal regimes raised in chapter 1 are also part of the answer to the future of ethnie nationalism. The more Southeast Asian countries become locked into transnational modes of production and exchange, and subscribe to international... 

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