Nation Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories

1. Contemporary and National History: A Double Challenge

Contemporary and National History • 1 1 C H A P T E R O N E Contemporary and National History: A Double Challenge Wang Gungwu AT THE International Conference of Historians ofAsia (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 nationbuilding 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 01 NationBldg Ch 1 16/6/05, 12:19 PM 1 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 nationbuilding . 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 regionalismandsoughtultimatelytoincludetheremainingfivenations.Indeed, most of the ten had been “building” their new nations for nearly half a century andtheirjobwasfarfromdone.Followingthesediscussions,Ibecameconvinced 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 01 NationBldg Ch 1 16/6/05, 12:19 PM 2 Contemporary and National History • 3 presented their initial thoughts at the International Association of Historians ofAsia (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...