Ethno-nationalism

One of the greatest benefits of the formation of Malaysia in 1963 was that it at last created a neutral and artificial name for the country distinct from that of any ethnie. It thereby could in principle, like Indonesia and the Philippines but unlike Thailand, Burma and Vietnam, emphasise the national identity without necessarily marginalising minorities. But there were still profound tensions between the concepts of core ethnie and of neutral citizenship. Lee Kuan Yew s Singapore was expelled from the new country after less than two years because his vigorous campaign for a civic or territorial nationalism— Malaysian Malaysia the assertion that We are here as of right —was considered by Alliance leaders as certain to lead to violent conflict with Malay ethno-nationalism (Mahathir 1970 122). 

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. 

Caldwell, Melissa L. 2002. The Taste of Nationalism Food Politics in Postsocialist Moscow. Ethnos 67(3) 295-319. 

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has discussed the concept of a nation at length based on a report of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights. The result is, in short, that it is impossible to find a common definition of nation . Sometimes, nation depicts the citizenship while at other times the term describes an ethno-cultural community. Its link to political ideologies also remains problematic. The rapporteur concludes that the definition of nation should be flexible. I disagree in so far as this term muddies the waters and complicates the relations between minorities and peoples. While I recognize that is may be extremely difficult to find a common definition, 1 think it is the more important to precisely map the uses of nation in order to reach a better tmderstanding. 

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