Nation Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories

6. Historians Writing Nations: Malaysian Contests

Historians Writing Nations: Malaysian Contests • 117 117 C H A P T E R S I X Historians Writing Nations: Malaysian Contests Anthony Milner AT FIRST glance the ISEAS project on nation-building in Southeast Asia seems dated — a hangover from an earlier scholarly preoccupation. In fact, the reverse is the case. In an era in which the nation-state is under attack from one quarter after another — with books bearing such titles as “The End of the Nation State”1 — it is timely to review the processes which constituted the nation in the first place. Today we are getting the analytic distance to appreciate better the constructedness of the nation-state — to see it (as Wang Gungwu puts it) as an “idea”.2 The nation-state cannot now be seen as a taken-for-granted thing. It is a precarious structure, merely one of several options for organizing human communities, and a venture that has always been vulnerable to contest and subversion. In the early twentyfirst century there seems nothing inevitable about the triumph of the nationstate . Now more than ever there is reason to identify the different elements in promoting the emergence of nation-states, if only to see more clearly the possible way or ways in which they might eventually fragment and perhaps disintegrate. In this nation-building, the element with which I will be concerned — influenced, as I am, by the writings of the ISEAS project — is the work of the national historian. My focus will be on Malaysia, where there has been exceptional interest in nation-building narratives. Examining this interest, and the different ways in which the “Malaysia” story is emplotted, throws light on the character of the Malaysian nation-state, and on the process of nation-building itself. 06 NationBldg Ch 6 16/6/05, 12:21 PM 117 118 • Anthony Milner One of the gains of the ISEAS project has been to remind us of the plurality of forms in which nation states have emerged. This is not to deny the great, uni-directional historical forces that have acted across the globe to foster a nation-state architecture — the impact of European colonialism is one that has been recently reviewed.3 But the differences in nation-state building, and between nations, are at least equally important. It is the specifics in each “national” situation that are likely to determine the shape and fate of one state or another, and that require the attention of political leaderships today, just as they concerned the founding architects in the past. The ISEAS project highlights specifics, drawing attention to the role of such potent phenomena as the national revolution in the Philippines, the plural society of Malaysia, the extraordinary diversity of Indonesia, the different political cultures operating in each Southeast Asian national situation, and the different colonial traditions (British, French, Dutch, United States) that have shaped constitutional, political and legal institutions across the region. The Historian-Ideologue A second gain of the ISEAS project — an endeavour of the historical profession, it should be admitted — is to highlight the role of history itself in the building of states into nations. I mean indigenous or local history, not that written by foreign analysts (who, of course, have their own different agenda).4 To many readers it would seem to be the national historian as ideologue who is being profiled here, though some would consider the historian is always an ideologue. Such nation-builders as Thomas Babington Macaulay or Jules Michelet (or Manning Clark of Australia) would certainly be labelled ideologues. Such writers of national narratives have certainly worked shoulder to shoulder with other ideologues engaged in nationbuilding — an enterprise that engages also the surveyors, soldiers, police and diplomats who define and guard the territorial borders, and the loyalty of the citizen. There are as well the public servants and educationalists who create the state bureaucracies; and then the architects and road and rail engineers who create the physical structures — the monumental state 06 NationBldg Ch 6 16/6/05, 12:21 PM 118 Historians Writing Nations: Malaysian Contests • 119 buildings, the communication networks — which give an appearance of solidity to the state. But the historian-ideologues do not merely add a further dimension to this state creation. They also help to make all these building enterprises intelligible and convincing for people whose loyalty and commitment is vital to the nation project’s success. They are nationbuilders...