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Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
Research School of Pacic and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
Abstract
The locations of international borders reect political aspirations as well as power politics and attempts to bring state boundaries in line with nations. The
expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia and the exclusion of the Philippines from the United States indicate the power of narrowly dened borders to
govern national identity. The concept nations-of-intent allows us to explore counterfactual borders as a way of examining how political aspirations
translate into national borders. The paper explores three Asian cases Malaysia, Mongolia and Vietnam and makes reference to Indonesia in considering
how different senses of what was possible and desirable in the context of decolonization generated different ideas about where borders should lie. This
approach also allows us to interrogate losing forces retrospectively about the policies they would have followed within different border congurations.
2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Counterfactualism; Nations-of-intent; Borders; Mongolia; Malaysia; Vietnam
Since at least the Second World War, one of the most important
trends in history writing has been the effort to give voice to those
whose aspirations were not fullled in the working out of history.1
If we regard counterfactualism as a tool for conceptualizing and
reconstructing unfullled aspirations, then the tension between
the real and imagined locations of borders ought to be a central
concern of both counterfactual history and counterfactual geography. Borders are amongst the most contested geographical
phenomena and their precise location very often conjures up
strong feelings and strong hopes on all sides.
In this paper we examine the political implications of borders
that might have been. We explore the kinds of nations which
might have emerged in three Asian countries Mongolia, Vietnam
and Malaysia if their borders had been located differently. The
borders we imagine are not arbitrary, but rather reect rival ideas
of nation (nations-of-intent) that were present in these three
regions at the time when national borders were being set. This
concept gives us a tool for interrogating the bearers of these
unfullled aspirations about the policies they would have implemented and the constraints they would have faced if those borders
had been reality.
Nations-of-intent
Addressing the relations between borders and aspirations requires
us to step beyond the two dominant approaches to borders which
focus simply on power and identity. According to the rst of these
conventional views, the location of any border reects and
reinforces the relative power of the two states on either side. In
other words, states aim to set their borders as widely as they can, so
as to encompass as many resources (human, natural, strategic) as
possible. As relative power changes, so too does the location of the
border (within the constraints of international law, as far as it is
respected). This view underpins the geopolitical view of the world
pioneered by Haushofer and Kjellen,2 and it provides a valuable
perspective in understanding, for instance, the change in the
historical frontier between Vietnam and Cambodia, or between
Russians and the Japanese in Northeast Asia from late nineteenth
century to mid twentieth century.3 In each of these cases, the
changing balance of power between rival states led to a series of
shifts in the border between them. This approach, however, does
not pay attention to the internal political consequences of including
or excluding certain territories.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: li.narangoa@anu.edu.au (L. Narangoa), robert.cribb@anu.edu.au (R. Cribb).
1
E.R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley, 1982.
2
R. Kjellen, Staten som Lifsform, Stockholm, 1916; P. Scholler, Die Rolle Karl Haushofers fur die Entwicklung und Ideologie nationalsozialistischer Geopolitik, Erdkunde 36
(1982) 160167.
3
en Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth
G.A. Lensen, The Russian Push Toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 16971875, Princeton, N.J., 1959; Li Tana, Nguy
and Eighteenth Centuries, Ithaca NY, 1998, 1924.
0305-7488/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.12.004
277
privileged indigenous Muslim Malays (and by extension nonindigenous Muslim immigrants) over Chinese and Indians who
were seen as foreign settlers and whose culture, religion and
identity received a kind of secondary recognition.6 In the case of
Malaysia, he identied three unfullled nations-of-intent that
were, and still are, in competition with the dominant denition of
the soul of the nation. These unrequited nations-of-intent are:
a non-Muslim, non-indigenous (mainly Chinese) nation-ofintent based on ethnic and religious equality,
a non-Muslim, indigenous nation-of-intent asserting the rights
of the non-Muslim natives of Borneo, and
a radical Muslim Malay nation-of-intent which rejects all
recognition of other ethnicities and religions.
Shamsuls argument is that these different, rival conceptions of
the Malaysian nation are not just competing political programs.
Rather, because they go to the very heart of what constitutes
Malaysia, they represent different national ideas within the same
geographical framework. He calls them nations-of-intent because
they are conceptual nations at least as well formed in the minds of
those who imagine them as is the dominant nation-of-intent and
because each of them remains a plausible intention or aspiration
for the future.7
Shamsuls idea is novel because it conceives the nation in an
instrumentalist way as a tool for the achievement of a particular
kind of society. This conception differs from the mainstream
interpretations of national identity that regard national identity as
a characteristic imposed on people either by their ethnicity or by
their common historical experience, especially their experience of
a powerful modern state.8 Conventional theories give people
agency in seeking to full their national aspirations, but give them
little or no agency in choosing the national identity that drives
those aspirations. Shamsul, by contrast, recognizes that many
people are potentially capable of living with more than one national
identity and that they may choose between them not necessarily
because of some emotional t but rather on the basis of a rational
calculation of risks and benets.9
In our current work, we extend Shamsuls ideas to the analysis of
borders and nation formation. Rather than limiting the idea of
nations-of-intent to competing political agendas within a single set
of borders, we see the setting of borders as a major element in the
conception of nations-of-intent. Shamsuls own Malaysia offers
a powerful example of what we mean. In the aftermath of the
Second World War, the British rulers of Malaya planned a new
Malayan Union to encompass most of their territories in the Malay
Peninsula.10 The Union gave approximately equal citizenship rights
4
This approach implies, but does not absolutely require, a concept of the nation as existing independently of the state, presumably as a manifestation of ethnic identity. See
A. D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Oxford, 1986.
5
J. Simensen, Counterfactual arguments in historical analysis: from the debate on the partition of Africa and the effect of colonial rule, History in Africa 5 (1978) 172,
180183.
6
A.B. Shamsul, Nations-of-intent in Malaysia, in: S. Tnnesson and H. Antlov (Eds), Asian Forms of the Nation, Richmond, 1996, 323347; to our knowledge, the term
nation-of-intent rst appears in R.I. Rotberg, African nationalism: concept or confusion?, Journal of Modern African Studies 4 (1966) 37, but Rotberg uses the term as a synonym
for nation in the making and does not raise the possibility that rival nations-of-intent may compete over the same territory. Shamsul (p. 328, n 6) acknowledges a further
intellectual debt to an unpublished MA thesis (1975) by Rustam A. Sani. The concept of nations-of-intent is mentioned without elaboration in N. Owen et al., The Emergence of
Modern Southeast Asia: a New History, Honolulu, 2005, 252. Sani himself recently returned to the idea in Merdeka! But are we a nation yet?, in Rustam A. Sani, Failed Nation?
Concerns of a Malaysian Nationalist, Petaling Jaya, 2008, 60.
7
Dragojevic argues similarly that the dening characteristic of a national identity may change over time, emphasising, for instance, rst religion and later language. See M.
Dragojevic, Competing institutions in national identity construction: the Croatian case, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 11 (2005) 6187.
8
E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge, 1992; E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, 1983; B. Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London, 1991; Smith, Ethnic Origin (note 4).
9
The issue of choosing national identity arises acutely in the case of migrants. For some, the act of migration is the deliberate choice of a different nationality; for others,
migration changes the place of residence but has little impact on identity. This issue, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.
10
British territory consisted of the three Straits Settlements (Singapore, Malacca and Penang), four Federated Malay States (Selangor, Perak, Pahang and Negri Sembilan)
and ve Unfederated Malay States (Trengganu, Kelantan, Kedah, Perlis and Johor). The Straits Settlements, Selangor and Perak had strong Chinese majorities, whereas Malays
were dominant to varying degrees in the other states.
278
to indigenous Malays and immigrant Chinese and Indian residents.11 Malay protest over the loss of the special status that they
had enjoyed during the pre-war period persuaded the British to
abolish the Union in 1948 and to create a Federation of Malaya
which gave a privileged status to Malays in contrast with the nonindigenous Chinese and Indians, recognizing them as bumiputra
(indigenes), giving them special rights over land, and entrenching
their sultans as sovereigns within the constituent states and as
rotating head of state of the Federation. Informally, the Federation
was committed to leaving the main keys of political power
including the prime ministership and control of the armed forces
in Malay hands. In 1957, the Federation became independent.
Britains support for Malay interests was based on their calculation
that Malay dominance would better serve continuing British
economic and strategic interests in the Peninsula.12 This juggling of
communal rights to favour the Malays produced the situation
described by Shamsul in which Chinese and Indian had only
a second-rank standing within the Federation after that of the
Malays.
Six years later, however, the location of Malayas borders
became a crucial element in preserving this Malay-dominated
nation-of-intent. Predominantly Chinese Singapore, which had
remained a British colony, had become a source of concern for the
British. There was a strong left-wing socialist movement in the
colony, and the British were afraid that it would become even
stronger if they did not give the colony independence. But they
were afraid, too, that the leftists might come to power in an independent Singapore. The solution seemed to be to incorporate
Singapore into neighbouring Malaya, but to do so would risk
upsetting the ethnic balance within the Federation. To balance
Singapores Chinese numbers with territories that had an indigenous majority, the North Borneo territories of Sabah and Sarawak
were therefore brought into the expanded Federation as well.13 This
new Federation, created in 1963, was given the name Malaysia. The
borders of the main successor state to the British colonial order in
Southeast Asia, therefore, were thus adjusted to support the
nation-of-intent that the British and their Malay elite allies
intended.
Border changes for the sake of a specic nation-of-intent did not
stop in 1963. Even though Singapores presence in the Federation
was balanced by that of Sabah and Sarawak, the Malay elite also
insisted on quarantining it to some extent from federal politics.
Singapore citizenship did not necessarily confer Malaysian citizenship and there was an agreement that the dynamic and
successful Peoples Action Party (PAP) of Lee Kuan Yew would not
extend its activities beyond Singapore. The PAP, however, came to
support a sister organization, the Democratic Action Party (DAP),
which began to promote ideas of ethnic equality within Malaysia.
On this platform, the DAP soon made inroads into the support of the
Malayan Chinese Association, which had accepted the subordinate
role for Chinese Malaysians that the Malay elite had marked out.
These developments were so unpalatable to the Malay elite that in
1965 they expelled Singapore from the Federation. In other words,
the Malay elite again adjusted the borders of the nation to create
11
The terms indigenous and immigrant are problematic in the Malayan case. Indigenous Malays include the descendents of recent immigrants from other parts of the
Indonesian archipelago, whereas signicant Chinese communities have been present in the Malay Peninsula since at least the fteenth century.
12
T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, Cambridge, 1999, 8993.
13
These territories had had completely different historical experience from the Malay Peninsula. Sarawak had been ruled by semi-independent white rajas from the Brooke
family while Sabah had been under the charter of the British North Borneo Company. A third territory in northern Borneo, the oil-rich Sultanate of Brunei, was a British
protectorate and was never part of Malaysia. It became independent in 1984.
14
We might note that this form of ethnic cleansing was rather more humane than that which was practiced in the former Yugoslavia.
15
Y. Khan, The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan, New Haven, 2007; P.J. Drooglever, Een daad van vrije keuze: de Papoeas van westelijk Nieuw-Guinea en de
grenzen van het zelfbeschikkingsrecht, Amsterdam, 2005.
16
J. Silverstein, Burma: Military Rule and the Politics of Stagnation, Ithaca NY, 1977, 59.
279
Fig. 1. British Malaya in 1947, showing districts with a non-Malay (mainly Chinese) majority.
17
18
19
G. Daws, Shoal of Time: a History of the Hawaiian Islands, Toronto, 1968, 285292.
P.A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines, Chapel Hill, 2006, 160165.
T.D. Musgrave, Self-determination and National Minorities, Oxford, 1997, 94.
280
20
process meant not only that they themselves would learn selectively from the modern world, but also that they would be the
agents of Cambodian and Lao modernization. This view was
particularly strong on the Vietnamese left, inuenced by ideas of
the international proletarian revolution the Cominterns rst
organization in the French colony was the Indo-Chinese Communist Party (ICP) and its slogan was Complete Indo-Chinese Independence! but Vietnamese condence in the Indo-China
framework stretched well beyond the communists. Many Vietnamese saw themselves as the bearers of a mission civilisatrice
within French Indo-China. In the minds of some Vietnamese, this
mission came close to implying the erasure of Cambodian and Lao
identity (Fig. 2).20
At the same time, there were signicant voices calling for the
separate recognition of the three main ethnic groups in the colony.
Cambodian elites were increasingly concerned about Vietnamese
migration into their traditional lands and Vietnamese domination
of the colonial bureaucracy and the modern economy in Cambodia.
Some Vietnamese, however, also had misgivings about the IndoChina framework. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNQDD),
founded in 1928, drew exclusively on ethnic Vietnamese imagery.
Still more important, the Vietnamese left began to feel misgivings
about the practicalities of carrying out a proletarian revolution in
Cambodia or Laos where there was virtually no proletariat. By 1941,
the Vietnamese Communists had agreed to sponsor separate
Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian independence leagues, even
C.E. Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? Contesting Concepts of Space in Vietnamese Nationalism, 18871954, Copenhagen, 1995, 50, 63, 70.
21
281
282
Fig. 3. The Mongol lands of Inner Asia in 1935, showing main areas of Chinese settlement.
29
30
283
31
O. Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria: Their Tribal Divisions, Geographical Distribution, Historical Relations with Manchus and Chinese and Present Political Problems,
London, 1935; S. Yamamuro, Manchuria under Japanese Dominion, Philadelphia, 2006.
32
L. Narangoa, Mokyo seiken ron Kairai seiken no rekishiteki imi [The Historical Meaning of Puppet State], Iwanami Koza Ajia Taiheiyo senso [Series on the Asia-Pacic
War] Vol. 7 Tokyo, 2006; S. Jagchid, The Last Mongol Prince: the Life and Times of Demchugdongrob, 19021966, Bellingham, 1999.
33
X. Liu, Reins of Liberation: an Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hegemony, 19111950, Washington, D.C., 2006. The IMAR
was created before the Chinese Communist Party came to power in Beijing in 1949.
34
Bawden, Modern History of Mongolia (note 29), 201221.
284
35
S. Tsai, Chinese settlement of Mongolian lands: Manchu policy in Inner Mongolia/a case study of Chinese migration in Jerim League (PhD dissertation, Brigham Young
University, 1983).
36
B.W. Andaya and L.Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia, Basingstoke, 2001.
natural and desirable. But what implications would have owed for
Vietnam if the independence that Ho declared had encompassed
these additional territories? Again, we are entitled to ask hard
questions of those in the past who aspired to different borders and
different futures.
The central question is whether the Vietnamese Communist
revolution would have spread at once to the rest of Indo-China,
drawing Cambodia and Laos both into hostilities and into programs
of radical social reform long before the escalation of the American
War had this effect in 1960s. Or would Cambodia and Laos have
been a drag on the Vietnamese revolution? Would the risk of
secession by Cambodia and Laos have led the Vietnamese
Communist leadership to moderate its revolutionary spirit as the
radicals had indeed feared in 1945? Although there was social
injustice aplenty in Cambodia and Laos, its contours were very
different from those that sustained the Vietnamese revolution.
Whereas the organized structure of the Indo-Chinese Communist
Party in many respects mirrored the bureaucratic patterns of
traditional Vietnam, the politics of Cambodia and Laos was much
more personalist, revolving around individuals whose power came
from their personalities or their social status. The template of the
Vietnamese revolution was not one that could be applied in
a straightforward way to Cambodia and Laos. All these considerations suggest that an Indo-Chinese nationalist revolution in 1945
might have been a good deal more cautious than the Vietnamese
revolution which actually began. We can imagine, at very least,
a more ramshackle, decentralized revolution, in which leaders
would have been willing to compromise for the sake of international recognition, as in Indonesia.
If we can imagine a Malaysia somewhat more like Mongolia, we
can also imagine an Indonesia more like Vietnam. In apparent
contrast with Vietnam, the idea of an Indonesia encompassing the
whole of the former Netherlands Indies had been attractive to
nationalists because it provided a framework for marginalizing the
unpopular local aristocracies that had collaborated with Dutch
colonial rule. In this respect, a larger, more inclusive state in
Indonesia could be a vehicle for social change in a way that a larger
more inclusive Indo-China could not. The radical vision of the
Vietnamese Communists, however, had its parallel amongst radical
nationalists on the island of Java in the late 1940s, who hoped to
install a seriously socialist political order.37 These radicals in Java
faced a dilemma similar to that of the Vietnamese Communists.
Having declared independence on behalf of the whole of the former
Netherlands Indies, they felt constrained in the extent to which
they could pursue the social revolution that many people on Java
37
285
Conclusion
Analysing nations-of-intent is a special kind of exercise in counterfactualism. It does not demand that we move into a world of
imaginative ction. Rather, it gives us a tool for investigating the
vast amounts of human energy that have been invested in lost
causes, and it helps us to see the shadows of those efforts on the
landscape of that history which actually took place. These shadows
are an important part of understanding real history and geography
for two reasons. First, whereas historians once had little interest in
losers traditional Indonesian historians, for instance, dismissed
lost causes as kalah dan salah (losing and wrong) we now
understand that lost causes warrant attention as part of the overall
human experience. Second, we can better understand historical
outcomes by understanding the alternatives that people had in
mind at the time. Especially important is asking hard, practical
questions of the proponents of alternative nations-of-intent,
because these questions help to expose the enduring constraints
that all nations-of-intent would have faced if they had become
reality. Whatever mix we choose between voluntarist and determinist elements in historical and geographical analysis, we need to
recognize and identify the importance of human aspiration in the
shaping of history and geography.
B.R. OG. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance, 19441946, Ithaca NY, 1972.