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Liberalism, Communism, Islam Transnational Motors of ‘Nationalist’ Struggles in Southeast Asia

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Liberalism, Communism, Islam Transnational Motors of ‘Nationalist’ Struggles in Southeast Asia > Research & Reports Liberalism, Communism, Islam Transnational Motors of ‘Nationalist’ Struggles in Southeast Asia In my reading and teaching on Southeast Asia over the past several years, I have come to Philippines. Far beyond any other attractive energies remained powerful believe that existing scholarship has underestimated the role of crucial transnational forces colony in Southeast Asia, Vietnamese for years to come. Indeed, the national- Research > – most notably nineteenth-century Liberalism, twentieth-century Communism, and intellectuals were exposed and attract- ist cause championed by Sukarno ral- South Asia ‘modernist’ Islam – in favour of more narrowly national, and nationalist, narratives. ed to powerful transnational currents lied Indonesians around his slogan of Therefore, in the course of two years of research and writing, I shall be working to elaborate emanating both from China and from NASAKOM – Nasionalisme, Agama and substantiate a revisionist account of what scholars have described as nationalist Europe, even as the proximity of China, (Religion), Komunisme – and, under cir- struggles in Southeast Asia, one which shows how the driving forces behind these struggles the networks of Vietnamese migrants cumstances decisively different from were profoundly transnational in nature. in neighbouring Laos, Cambodia, and, those facing Vietnamese revolutionar- beyond French Indochina, independ- ies, both Communist and Islamic net- By John Sidel fates of the immigrant ‘Chinese’ (and its of these transnational horizons soon ent Siam, and the unique circum- works resurfaced in the Revolusi of ‘Arab’ and ‘Indian’) merchant commu- became apparent, both in the tensions stances of a Vichy French-Japanese 1945-49 that followed the Japanese he intellectual backdrop to this proj- nities. As commercial and financial within the Revolution itself, and in the condominium in 1941-45 offered interlude. Even as nationalist leaders Tect is, of course, the influential intermediaries they played crucial roles aftermath of US occupation and colo- additional room for revolutionary like Soekarno engaged in diplomatic account of nationalism provided by in colonial Southeast Asia and have nization of the archipelago at the turn of manoeuvre. negotiations with the Dutch, popular Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Commu- dominated its business classes since the century. With the United States as resistance persisted, especially where nities: Reflections on the Origins and independence. The second and most its colonial master and as the ascendant Nasionalisme, Agama, the ideals and organizations associated Spread of Nationalism, which draws on original thread entails the three most global hegemon, and with colonial Komunisme with transnational Communism and Southeast Asian history and has power- important transnational ideologies, net- democracy and Filipinization entrench- If we take Indonesia as a final exam- Islam enjoyed greatest strength. fully shaped its subsequent historiogra- works, and horizons which captivated ing the Chinese mestizo elite in the seats ple, yet another point of transnational Thus the first 50 years of independ- phy. Anderson’s arguments about the the hearts and minds of Southeast of state power, European cosmopoli- influence comes into view. As else- ence have been dominated by tension role of colonial administrative bound- Asians in the nineteenth and twentieth tanism and Liberalism ceased to provide where in Southeast Asia, the ferment between the residues of these two very aries, bureaucratic and educational pil- centuries – Liberalism, Communism, a subversive vantage point from beyond in China culminating in the Revolution different transnational currents of mobi- grimages, and languages of state in gen- and Islam – in the lived experiences and the metropole or a horizon for struggle of 1911 inspired and emboldened the lization and by the domesticating erating modern national consciousness activities of both the urban intelli- in the colony. Hence the striking weak- small ‘Chinese’ mercantile minority in impulses and imperatives of successive indeed tell us much about the once gentsia(s) and broader mass publics. ness of ‘nationalist’ movements in the the Dutch East Indies, spurring inno- national state leaders. Today, the alleged seemingly arbitrary, but strikingly The third thread concerns colonial and American colonial Philippines in the vations in associational activity and members of the shadowy Jemaah enduring, boundaries of national iden- post-colonial responses of state author- twentieth century. demands for greater freedoms in the Islamiyah network emerged out of tity in Southeast Asia. These arguments ities, as they worked with varying suc- colony. These trends, in turn, stimulat- Islamic schools affiliated with conser- allow us to trace and explain much of the cess, and with diverse (and often unin- From Republicanism to ed a ‘native’ reaction, most notably the vative modernist groups – Al-Irsyad and variation in the trajectories and forms of tended) consequences, to create Communism founding of the Sarekat Islam in 1912, Persatuan Islam – founded in the 1910s nationalism in the region. boundaries of various kinds to contain In the starkly contrasting case of the first as a mutual aid society for batik and 1920s. With the demise of global Yet Anderson’s and other scholars’ and domesticate these transnational Vietnamese Revolution much that has traders in Java, and by the end of the Communism and the triumph of glob- subsequent writings suggest alternative forces. Combined with the broader con- long been attributed to extraordinary decade as a vehicle for broader popular al Liberalism, the school networks, pil- accounts, in which the boundaries of text of international conflicts, most patriotic fervour can likewise be recast radical mobilization. grimages, and intellectual circuitries national identity and sovereignty are notably World War II, these threads in terms of Vietnam’s unparalleled Within the Sarekat Islam, two ideo- associated with Islam in Indonesia, understood as externally imposed lim- combine to weave a tapestry of modern exposure to and immersion within logical strains merged, intermingled, Malaysia, the southern Philippines, and its and domesticating constraints on Southeast Asian history and politics that transnational currents and interna- and competed for supremacy, each with Thailand constitute the one remaining other, profoundly transnational impuls- refutes existing scholarly literature, tional conflicts. After all, China was not its own source of origins and inspiration potentially counter-hegemonic transna- es and aspirations, rather than as the which has long stressed the peculiarities only the origin of an immigrant mer- far from the Indonesian Archipelago. tional force in the region. engines or goals of nationalist struggle. of individual countries and the process- chant minority but a huge, dynamic On the one hand, the currents of Islam- A revisionist account of the formative These accounts show that so-called es of ‘localization’. neighbour whose historical influences ic reformism emanating from the Mid- struggles of modern Southeast Asian ‘nationalist struggles’ – as they are usu- on Vietnamese culture and its own dle East had begun to wash up on the history contests the existing scholarly ally glossed – are driven by transnation- Liberalism and Freemasonry internal transformations exposed intel- shores of Java, Sumatra, and Sulawesi, literature, which has tended to focus on al networks, movements, and horizons. In this context, for example, the Rev- lectuals to sources of inspiration and carried by Arab immigrants from the individual nationalist narratives and to Arising out of Southeast Asians’ olution in the Spanish colonial Philip- forces of change far beyond colonial Hadramaut, returning pilgrims from stress processes of cultural translation, encounters with capitalist modernity pines at the end of the nineteenth cen- control. Schooled in Chinese language the Hajj, and scholars returning from indigenization, and localization. The and their exposure to and incorporation tury might be understood not as Asia’s and literature and steeped in the Con- Al-Azhar in Cairo and other major cen- guiding influences of Liberalism, Com- within international ideological currents first nationalist revolution, but as a fucian classics, Vietnamese intellectu- tres of Islamic learning. Thus the early munism, and Islam in the modes of and institutional networks, these cur- product of the rising tide of Liberalism als were unique in Southeast Asia in decades of the twentieth century saw expression and forms of political asso- rents and networks extended beyond the in the archipelago. The opening of their unmediated access to the enor- considerable expansion and innovation ciation and activity of the urban intelli- boundaries of the colony and even of the Philippine ports in the mid-nineteenth mous intellectual and political energy in the realm of Islamic schooling in the gentia, who occupy centre stage in most colonial metropoles. As such, they pro- century, after all, brought the ascendant and ferment in China in the late nine- Dutch East Indies, with the founding of accounts of ‘nationalist movements’ in vided an especially subversive vantage class of assimilated Chinese mestizo teenth and early twentieth centuries modernist madrasah and the formation Southeast Asia, must be demonstrated point from which Southeast Asians merchants, moneylenders, and (and to Chinese logistical support
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