Rethinking Sovereignty and Stateness in Southeast Asia: A Comparative Historical Perspective

The incisive arguments and instructive examples offered with regard to sovereignty and stateness in South Asia in the introduction and other essays of this special section are amply relevant to—and reminiscent of—the history and historiography of Southeast Asia in at least five ways. First, as in South Asia, the broad pattern of historical change in Southeast Asia has seemingly followed a linear trajectory of "state formation" in which loosely structured polities are seen to have "evolved" in the direction of centralized, bureaucratized forms of sovereign power located within—and monopolized by—modern territorial states. The basis of power, every student of Southeast Asian history is taught, has shifted from control over people—through charismatic authority, coercion, and chains of dependency—to control over territory, with forms of territorial control established and enforced by states.¹ In the place of ephemeral and unstable dynastic realms whose authority was inherently parcelized and partial and grew increasingly attenuated in line with geographical distance from the courts of the rulers, over time district officers and provincial governors regularly rotated in and out by the Ministry of the Interior in Bangkok, or army commanders regularly rotated in and out by armed forces headquarters in Jakarta, or cadres regularly rotated in and out by the Communist Party in Hanoi, came to epitomize the uniformity and ubiquity of centralized state power and sovereignty in the region.

Second, more or less the same as in South Asia, in Southeast Asia the broad pattern of historical change is one in which the decisive conjuncture and catalyst for "state formation" has been identified as the Forward Movement of European colonization, peaking during the period that Eric Hobsbawm termed "the Age of Empire" (1875–1914).² From 1874, riverine sultanates of the Malay Peninsula were reconfigured under the Federated Malay States, with British residents overseeing the codification of laws and elaboration of bureaucratic institutions and procedures, even as their counterparts in much of the Netherlands East Indies were more or less simultaneously engaged in similar processes.³ Parallel developments likewise unfolded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in British ("Ministerial") Burma, in different ways in various parts of French Indochina, and, under an absolutizing monarchy rather than a colonial state, in Siam. But even here the story involved Europeans, with Prussian military instructors, Italian architects, French engineers, and British investment houses and industrial firms enabling the elaboration and consolidation of modern state power across the full breadth of what became Siam and later Thailand.⁴ This was the period that the British colonial civil servant—and critic of colonialism—memorably described (and hilariously derided) as that of "the fashioning of Leviathan."⁵

Third, as in South Asia, the transformation of stateness and the triumph of the modern territorial form of state sovereignty have come to be intertwined with the telos of nationalist historiography. Here, what Benedict Anderson calls "official nationalism" has been at work, whether in conservative royalist accounts of the making of Thailand, or in the Communist Party of Vietnam's version of the reunification of the Vietnamese nation-state.⁶ But non-Southeast Asian scholars sympathetic to Southeast Asian nationalism have also played a crucial role in crafting a state-centered master narrative of modern Southeast Asian history around the emergence of nationalist consciousness, the unfolding of nationalist mobilization, the transition to national independence, and the onset of state-led nation-building and national development. Indeed, Anderson's account in Imagined Communities drew together disparate strands in this scholarly literature into a coherent template, in which the new kinds of administrative (and ancillary educational) circuitries and linguistic communications introduced by (colonial) states produced the bases for national(ist) imaginings.⁷ Even the as yet unfulfilled aspirations of today's secessionist—or rather national liberation—movements in the region have been similarly contextualized in terms of idiosyncratic "wrinkles" in otherwise uniformly Andersonian patterns of colonial-era (proto-)national state formation. The makings of Igorot, Kachin, Moro, and Papuan identities (and demands for autonomy or independence) in the postcolonial era, for example, have been traced back to the different...