Nation-Building - Five Southeast Asian Histories

The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) was established as an

autonomous organization in 1968. It is a regional centre dedicated to the study of

socio-political, security and economic trends and developments in Southeast Asia

and its wider geostrategic and economic environment.

The Institute’s research programmes are the Regional Economic Studies (RES,

including ASEAN and APEC), Regional Strategic and Political Studies (RSPS),

and Regional Social and Cultural Studies (RSCS).

ISEAS Publications, an established academic press, has issued more than

1,000 books and journals. It is the largest scholarly publisher of research about

Southeast Asia from within the region. ISEAS Publications works with many other

academic and trade publishers and distributors to disseminate important research

and analyses from and about Southeast Asia to the rest of the world.

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History of Nation-Building Series

INSTITUTE OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES

Singapore

First published in Singapore in 2005 by

ISEAS Publications

Institute of Southeast Asian Studies

30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace

Pasir Panjang

Singapore 119614

<http://www.iseas.edu.sg/pub.html>

The series of Nation-Building Histories was made possible

with the generous support of the Lee Foundation, Singapore and the

Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, Taipei.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Institute

of Southeast Asian Studies.

© 2005 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

The responsibility for facts and opinions in this publication rests exclusively

with the authors and their interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views

or the policy of the Institute or its supports.

ISEAS Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Nation-Building: five Southeast Asian histories / edited by Wang Gungwu.

1. Asia, Southeastern—History—1945–

2. Asia, Southeastern—Historiography.

I. Wang, Gungwu, 1930–

DS526.7 S725 2005

ISBN 981-230-317-0 (soft cover)

ISBN 981-230-320-0 (hard cover)

Typeset by Superskill Graphics Pte Ltd

Printed in Singapore by Oxford Graphic Printers Pte Ltd

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Contents

Preface by Wang Gungwu vii

The Contributors ix

Chapter One Contemporary and National History: 1

A Double Challenge

Wang Gungwu

Chapter Two Nation and State in Histories of Nation-Building, 21

with Special Reference to Thailand

Craig J. Reynolds

Chapter Three Rethinking History and “Nation-Building” 39

in the Philippines

Caroline S. Hau

Chapter Four Writing the History of Independent Indonesia 69

Anthony Reid

Chapter Five Ethnicity in the Making of Malaysia 91

Cheah Boon Kheng

Chapter Six Historians Writing Nations: Malaysian Contests 117

Anthony Milner

Chapter Seven Writing Malaysia’s Contemporary History 163

Lee Kam Hing

Chapter Eight Forging Malaysia and Singapore: Colonialism, 191

Decolonization and Nation-Building

Tony Stockwell

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vi

vi • Contemporary Nations: Five Southast Asian Histories

Chapter Nine Nation-Building and the Singapore Story: 221

Some Issues in the Study of Contemporary

Singapore History

Albert Lau

Chapter Ten Nation and Heritage 251

Wang Gungwu

Index 279

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vii

Preface

The essays in this volume are the product of a conference organized in

Singapore by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in September 2002:

“Nation-building Histories: Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and

Singapore”. Altogether sixteen scholars were invited to take part in a two￾day meeting that focused on these five countries, the founder members of

the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). One volume, that on

Malaysia by Cheah Boon Kheng, had already been published. Some of the

draft chapters of the other four volumes were circulated for the discussants

to read and offer comments. All the participants were invited to write up

their thoughts, either on the work they had already done or read, or on the

general problems of writing nation-building histories, especially of countries

recently committed to the tasks of nation-building and issues of writing

contemporary history in Southeast Asia. In the end, Cheah Boon Kheng and

seven of the discussants agreed to reflect on the questions that the conference

had raised. As editor, I included an essay on “Nation and Heritage” I had

published earlier and wrote an introduction to place on record some of the

broader issues that the whole exercise had helped to illuminate.

After the conference, I had summarized those questions that attracted

most comments as follows: When does nation-building begin and how does

it fit into the writing of contemporary history? How should historians treat

the earlier pasts of each country and the nationalism that guided the nation￾building task? Where did political culture come in, especially when dealing

with modern challenges of class, secularism and ethnicity? What part does

external or regional pressure play when the nations are still being built?

When archival sources are not available, how should narrative, social science

analyses and personal experience be handled? Each of the ten essays in this

volume includes efforts to pose such questions with reference to one of the

five countries. It is hoped that their efforts will stimulate interest in the

writing of similar histories for the other five members of ASEAN as well as

arouse interest in an emerging regional consciousness that will be more

than the sum of the ten national experiences themselves.

15 May 2005 Wang Gungwu

East Asian Institute

National University of Singapore

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The Contributors

Cheah Boon Kheng was Professor of History, Universiti Sains Malaysia.

Carol Hau is Associate Professor, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto

University, Japan.

Albert Lau is Associate Professor, Department of History, National University

of Singapore.

Lee Kam Hing was Professor of History, University of Malaysia and is now

Research Editor, Star Publications (M) Bhd, Malaysia.

Anthony Milner is Professor and Dean, Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian

National University.

Anthony J.S. Reid is Director, Asia Research Institute, National University

of Singapore.

Craig J. Reynolds is Reader, Centre for Asian Societies and Histories,

Australian National University.

Anthony Stockwell is Professor of Imperial and Commonwealth History,

Royal Holloway, University of London.

Wang Gungwu is Director, East Asian Institute, National University of

Singapore.

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Contemporary and National History • 1

1

CHAPTER ONE

Contemporary and National History:

A Double Challenge

Wang Gungwu

AT THE International Conference of Historians of Asia (IAHA) in Bangkok

(1996), there was a panel on nation-building at which it was debated

whether it was time for historians to write nation-building histories for

Southeast Asia. This appeared rather unadventurous because in 1996 there

was much more debate about globalization and transnational developments,

even speculation about the end of nation-states. It was pointed out that the

break-up of colonial empires in Asia had happened a long while back.

Unlike the new nations after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and

Ottoman empires, those that were established after World War II faced a

world that was changing much faster than it has ever done. Since the 1950s,

new global markets have flourished, new technologies have reached out in

all directions and new social forces have been released. It was surely more

important to examine the new emerging factors in society that were

transforming human lives beyond recognition. In many countries, these

had begun to render the idea of nation-states increasingly irrelevant.

On the other hand, only a few years earlier, German reunification and

the dissolution of the Soviet Empire had led to a new wave of nation￾building in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Central Asia. And what

a dramatic challenge that has been to the Western European experiment in

crossing national borders to build new kinds of communities. Since then,

the tension between a European Union seeking to double its size and the

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2 • Wang Gungwu

murderous struggles of the new ethnic nationalisms has barely abated.

This has certainly led to fresh interest in the idea and practice of nation￾building. Of course, how to understand what that process now means

may have to change. The Southeast Asian efforts of the past half-century

show that the region’s new nations are not the same as those carved out

of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Turkey and Egypt, Austria

and Yugoslavia, to take a few examples, are distinct from each other and

even more different from the kinds of states that began to “nation-build”

with what was left behind in the British, French, Dutch and American

colonies. Historians would be the first to admit that there is much that we

do not know about how this “building” has been going on. Particularly

for Southeast Asia, the historians have so far been hesitant, if not passive,

in tackling this issue.

At the end of our discussions in Bangkok, it was clear that there were also

other dimensions in Southeast Asia that called for attention. For one thing,

most Southeast Asian nations were still struggling in their attempts to build

their nations. Even for the five members who first established their own

regional organization, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),

national sovereignty was always uppermost even while they tried to embrace

regionalism and sought ultimately to include the remaining five nations. Indeed,

most of the ten had been “building” their new nations for nearly half a century

and their job was far from done. Following these discussions, I became convinced

that it was time the story of these fifty years was told. There have been many

books about the nationalism that led to de-colonization and guided the

establishment of each of these nations. What was still not well studied was

what the various national leaders actually did after independence to ensure

that their countries would become the fully-fledged nation-states they wanted.

I also thought that a most interesting challenge was to ask historians of each of

the states to write that story.

Since the Bangkok conference, five historians have agreed to take up

the challenge to write the nation-building histories of the five original

members of ASEAN (Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia and

Singapore), and they would do this under the auspices of the Institute of

Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.1

Afterwards, one group of them

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Contemporary and National History • 3

presented their initial thoughts at the International Association of Historians

of Asia (IAHA) conference held in Jakarta in 1999, and then one international

workshop was held in Singapore in 2002 to examine more broadly the

questions that the project had raised. From the contributions of the historians

at the latter meeting have come this group of essays on the problems of

writing contemporary and national histories. It has been a most challenging

enterprise and I owe my colleagues a great debt for the critical ways they

tackled the questions and resolved their doubts. Eight of the following

essays were produced at that meeting.

One important point was agreed to by all concerned soon after the

project was first launched. While we all knew that Southeast Asia has

always been extraordinarily varied, we were struck by the fact that the

common experience of anti-colonialism and the nationalist movements of

the first half of the twentieth century did not reduce the original variations.

On the contrary, the different colonial powers, British, Dutch, French and

American, introduced varying policies of state-building and each had

particular notions of what a nation meant. In this way, they diversified the

conditions for nation-building even further. In addition, the metropolitan

powers introduced new demographic and technological ingredients into

their colonies, and also their respective national templates that reflected

their own historical experiences and stages of development at home in

Europe and the new world of North America. Under the circumstances,

attempts to find common ground for Southeast Asian new nations were

limited to broad generalizations about overcoming colonialism and building

nation-states on more or less Western models. Whenever the specifics of

each country were examined more closely, what stood out were the sharp

differences in the basic elements that each new nation had to work with

from the start. This was partly because we are historians who do not see our

primary task as finding common patterns but tend to be drawn by the

unique and the particular that face us everywhere. But, in the end, the fact

that the basic ingredients of history like political culture, population, terrain,

and natural resources varied so much was undeniable. We agreed that it

would be a mistake to simplify and only highlight the commonalties. It is

the very distinctive nature of each of the nation-building stories that was

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4 • Wang Gungwu

most worth telling. It was with that in mind that the 2002 workshop explored

those differences while tackling the more general issues of writing

contemporary and national history.

Each of the essays has something different to emphasize and readers

will note how the authors underline the issues that strike each of them most

about each country. Craig Reynolds, writing on Thailand, has focused on

the way the state designed and decorated the kind of nation it wanted. He

takes the long view and suggests that “the nation is a building that will

never be finished”. Caroline Hau, taking the experience of the Philippines,

is inclined to agree, and stresses the underlying contradictions that have

been inherited and the importance of competitive interpretations in shaping

attitudes towards the nation. On Indonesia, Anthony Reid emphasizes the

discontinuities that have challenged historians again and again to capture

the whole picture whether of state or nation. This was already true for the

very beginning of national history, not to say the traumatic events of 1965

and the more recent uncertainties after 1998. Taming these discontinuities is

likely to be the key task for the young generation of historians the country

is producing.

There is perhaps some significance in having five essays on Malaysia

and Singapore in this volume. This may be because the workshop was held

in Singapore, but there are other reasons. Both countries have inherited

strong administrative structures that have been creatively adapted to serve

as the backbone of the new national states. Together with that was a sense

of continuity among scholars of what British Malaya had been, and the

willingness among the historians of each of its several parts to dig deeper

into what evolved from that common past. All five authors have worked

closely with systematically archived materials. Cheah Boon Kheng has

actually finished his task to write the nation-building history of Malaysia.

Here he seeks to encapsulate the issue of ethnicity in his book and explore

the political balancing that ethno-nationalism seems to demand. Anthony

Milner looks for a deeper continuity behind that apparent balance and

probes for the more popular sources of contested “nations” within the

equilibrium that has been maintained so far. Lee Kam Hing confronts

directly the difficulties in writing contemporary history in Malaysia today,

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Contemporary and National History • 5

given the sensitivities that surface with every initiative, every attempt to

change and reform. Tony Stockwell brings us back to the colonial roots of

the modern governance that paradoxically has ensured continuity for both

Malaysia and Singapore but also played the deus ex machina that had planted

the seeds for the political tussles between the two. From Singapore, Albert

Lau shows a keen sense of the historiographical dilemma for a country with

“short cultures” in a short history. When everything is seen as contemporary,

where is the historian to find the objectivity he so wishes to have?

I have only briefly outlined what has led to the genesis of these essays

and also what I have found most interesting in them. I shall now also offer

a few past-oriented thoughts on Southeast Asia and the art of history

writing. Some have been presented before and I have decided to include at

the end of the volume an essay I had published in the Journal of the Malaysian

Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (2000). They reflect some of the thinking

generated by the experiences shared with my colleagues. But I shall add

some further notes in the rest of this introduction.

The Historian’s Dilemma

It is widely acknowledged that the work of professional historians is not

getting any easier. On the one hand, historians have to face the challenge

mounted by those social scientists who try to ask different questions of

similar data. Trying to turn history into a social science in its own right is

not the answer. History has a distinguished lineage and historians have a

different job to do. On the other hand, such historians are also challenged

by the work of those outside academia who write well. And many of these

historians do so with literary flair, verve and imagination. The academic

historian today is often discouraged from venturing into such writing by

some universities that are narrowly focused on work published in highly

specialized journals and read only by other professionals. By the time

young scholars have passed through that barrier, many are no longer able

to write for a wider audience to read.

For many countries in Asia, historians today are further taxed by at

least two other demands: the need to contribute to nation-building efforts

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6 • Wang Gungwu

by writing national history, and the urge to use their skills to record and

explain contemporary events. Altogether thirteen historians have agreed to

write for this ISEAS project. There are the five authors who committed

themselves to write the nation-building history for the five new nations.

They have taken on the double challenge of writing contemporary and

national history. The other eight (with a reflective Cheah Boon Kheng

adding his own essay) in this volume too are conscious of the twin burdens

that the historian of nation-building today must carry on their shoulders.

Their essays also throw light on the countries of the region where historians

are struggling with the national and the contemporary simultaneously.

These eight were all asked to read the writing plans of the five nation￾building historians and comment and raise questions about their various

approaches. They have put their thoughts down here for the consideration

of all those interested in the larger question of writing nation-building

history in Southeast Asia.

Let me emphasize again what I mentioned earlier. The historians who

agreed to write about the five countries all recognize that the five could

hardly be more different from one another in their earlier histories and

cultures as well as in their modern transformations. Thailand could be

said to have begun its modern phase of nation-building in 1932 following

the coup that ended the absolute monarchy, but the post-1945 phase

under King Bhumipol Adulyadej has had a distinct trajectory that few

could have predicted.2

The Philippines had its first chance at independence

aborted at the turn of the twentieth century and was given a second

chance in 1945 for which its leaders were better prepared, partly by

American tutelage and partly through the baptism of the Pacific War.3

The pioneer generation of nationalists in the Netherlands East Indies

seized their opportunity to revolt decisively against Dutch colonial rule in

1945–50 and took on the immense and tortuous task of building a new

Indonesian nation.4

As for Malaysia and Singapore, they were the products

of a failure to gather together all the untidy remains of British colonies

and protectorates in the heart of Southeast Asia. The leaders of the two

countries, however, have been surprisingly successful in making their

two potential nations credible and hopeful against all expectations.5

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