Assalamualaikum.. ganasnye tajuk.. huhu.. ok.. yang di bawah ini adalah artikel yang perlu saya dan kawan-kawan sekumpulan ulas dan kritik serta bentangkan di dalam kelas tutorial pada minggu selepas cuti midsem nanti.. saje nak share.. setelah membaca artikel ini beberapa kali imbas.. (tak berapa nak baca/tak berapa nak imbas), saya dah boleh nampak apa yang akan saya ulas dan komen pada hari pembentangan nanti.. ianya adalah seperti yang berikut :
me : saya mendapati ''benda'' ini sangat membahayakan kesihatan dan mengancam nyawa manusia.. kenapa saya berkata sedemikian rupa??!! (nada tegas) semasa membaca ''benda'' ini, kepala otak saya punyalah berdenyut sehingga hampir putus urat2 saraf tunjang saya.. peluh menjadi begitu hyperactive sekali.. aliran darah pula dapat saya rasakan dah tak mengalir dengan selari.. otot-otot terasa kejang.. jangka hayat saya pun akan menjadi lebih pendek dari yang sebenar.. berdasarkan kajian, ''benda'' ini mungkin akan memakan usia saya selama 50 tahun.. oh memang scary.. berat badan saya pun dah turun 10 kg ( wow nice !) jadi untuk keselamatan semua jangan baca artikel ini.. tetapi bagi sesiapa yang nak kurus boleh baca.. ok sekian.. lepas ni saya nak pergi apply insurans.. dan....
En Lecture : ermmmm.. tunggu sejekap Jannah.. maaf mencelah.. Jannah pernah rasa tak flying side kick hantaran lintang terus ke dahi daripada orang Sabah..? mesti belum pernah rasa kan..? kalau Jannah nak rasa saya boleh bagi rasa then Jannah komenlah lepas tu.. ok?
errrrr.. itu hanya sekilas proses merapu yang saya alami.. ( tak ada kena mengena langsung dengan sesiapa.. ) macam tak pernah ulas artikel pulak sebelum2 ni kan.. yang lebih dahsyat dari ni pun ada.. tak mengapa.. saya akan baca juga.. saya akan buat juga.. kerana Allah.. kerana Allah.. yeeaa yeaahhh ! dan! sesiapa yang rajin jom baca artikel di bawah bersama-sama dengan saya, dan muntah bersama saya.. haha.. ok stop.. till then.. wassalam ~
~ huuu.. muntah pelangi pun ada? nice >_< ~
THE YEARS OF ILLUSION: SOUTHEAST ASIA BETWEEN THE WARS, 1918–1941
Until recently, and for those who gave Southeast Asia more than passing thought, the years between the First and Second World Wars presented a striking paradox. On the one hand these were the years that have provided the basis for some of the most widely held views of the nature of Southeast Asia in the period of colonial rule—'British Malaya', the 'Netherlands Indies', 'French Indochina', were seen by many observers as having been at the height of their success during these years. This was often a judgment present in descriptions of the late colonial period written by the alien men and women who had lived and worked in the colonies. To some extent, of course, this estimation reflected the sense of nostalgia felt by those who had believed in their colonial role. And it is not too cynical to suggest, additionally, that at times this nostalgia also reflected the fact that many had found life in the colonies a great deal more comfortable than in the homelands to which they had retired.
Yet even for a later generation, at least some of our sense of Southeast Asia reflects an awareness of the interwar period. It is an awareness gained through novels and travel books and in some cases still, through family association. It is a period captured in the writings of such popular authors as Somerset Maugham, and it is striking how often hotels in modern Southeast Asia choose to make photographs from this late colonial period a feature of their decor. So the image of the European planter or official, his white tropical suit spotless or stained and shabby according to his personal character has become more than a figure in a short story and, instead, an historically significant and representative reflection of an age. In the same way, the 1920s and 1930s have, in the imperfectly formed image of popular memory, been seen as a period when Southeast Asians, 'natives' in the terminology of the times, were stereotypes: self-effacing and industrious peasants, faithful servants, courtly but ineffective princes, rare and occasionally heroic rebels against modern colonial rule and the values that went with it.
On the other hand, and here is the paradox, knowledge of the interwar period at a deeper level, a level that penetrates below the easy generalisations of popular literature and travellers' tales, suggests a very different world from the images that still have widespread currency. For all that we may think of the 1920s and 1930s as the heyday of colonialism, a time when, with the exception of Thailand, all the countries of Southeast Asia were under foreign European or American rule, these were years when the foundations of colonial rule in Southeast Asia were under very considerable strain. Sometimes this was recognised by those who exercised colonial rule. For others the threats to the colonial position were hardly realised. Whatever the degree of awareness that was present, however, the interwar years were marked by two notably contradictory characteristics: at the very time when external powers held their most extensive presence in the region, new and essentially internal forces were beginning to operate that would help ensure the end of all the colonial regimes.
By the end of the second decade of the twentieth century Southeast Asia possessed a pattern of boundaries that has changed little up to the present. Various territorial adjustments in the early years of the century brought to an end some long-standing disputes, and colonial expansion had virtually reached its limits. On the mainland there was a British colonial government in Burma; France ruled over Vietnam, Cambodia, and the Lao states, with the sum of these possessions being described as French Indochina; and Thailand, alone, preserved a tenuous independence. The modern states that exist in the Southeast Asian mainland have, with only limited change, inherited the boundaries observed in the colonial years. The same is true for the maritime regions, though rather more qualification is required when discussing their case. The territories of the Netherlands Indies were to become Indonesia. In the same way the boundaries of the Philippines under Spanish and then American colonial control became the boundaries of the independent Philippine state, and Portuguese Timor was, eventually, to become the independent state of East Timor. But in modern Malaysia's case there was no single predecessor state uniting the territories that now constitute that country. True, Britain ruled over the Malayan Peninsula and Singapore, but in Borneo there were two of the more unusual examples of European control to be found in Southeast Asia. In what has become the Malaysian state of Sarawak, rule by the Brooke family lasted until the Second World War. And in modern Sabah, a chartered trading company provided the apparatus of government, following in the pattern, if on a much smaller scale, of the British East India Company. Yet even if Sarawak and Sabah were administrative oddities, their links to Britain were clear and the eventual foundation of an independent Malaysia between 1956 and 1963 provided another example of a modern state assuming the boundaries laid down and stabilised during the period of colonial rule.
With stable borders and the conclusion of the First World War, the most terrible war in history, the European powers that controlled the colonised states in Southeast Asia looked forward to a period of governmental calm and economic expansion. So far as the second of these hopes was concerned, the experience of the early 1920s seemed to match and even exceed their expectations. The economic expansion of Southeast Asia that had begun in the closing decades of the nineteenth century had transformed the region and left it ready to meet the demands of the peace-time boom that followed on the heels of the war. With Southeast Asia as a prime source for rubber, rice and tin, the export earnings of those who controlled the plantations, mines and paddy fields rose rapidly. Southeast Asian rubber made the tyres for a Western world that had come increasingly to depend on motor transport. Southeast Asian tin played a vital part in manufacturing, both in end products, such as those involving tinplate, and as a component in specialist industrial equipment. The rice grown in Southeast Asian countries fed populations from India to Europe. And in this period of widespread economic expansion the other export products of Southeast Asia enjoyed a comparable expansion.
If colonial officials hoped that a period of increased economic activity would be matched by a lack of overt resentment of or reaction to their alien rule by the populations they governed, these hopes also seemed justified initially. In the early 1920s calm did seem to be the general, though not absolutely complete, order of the day. Whether this calm grew out of a period of expanding economic activity is, at the very least, open to argument. Just as much weight would have to be given to the proposition that it was not until the mid-1920s that modern political movements began to develop in Southeast Asia that looked beyond the basic goal of regaining independence from foreign control and towards the eventual establishment of a new state governed in accordance with new, even revolutionary political theory.
This development, so often discounted and dismissed as insignificant at the time, was what made the 1920s so important. Colonial governments had encountered resistance before. The Dutch had fought bitter colonial wars as they expanded their hold over the Indonesian islands in the nineteenth century. In Burma the so-called program of 'pacification', pursued by the British for many years, had been a testimony to the reluctance of large numbers of the population to submit to foreign rule; while in Vietnam the record of resistance to the French was almost continuous, ebbing and flowing according to circumstances, but never absent for a significant period. Before the First World War, however, all the movements that had resisted foreign rule in Southeast Asia had been essentially traditional in character. And not only traditional, but in many cases linked in one way or another to religious and millenarian movements. This fact, of course, made it all the easier for sceptical colonial powers to dismiss these resistance movements as lacking in real significance.
The change from traditional resistance to modern anti-colonial challenge has usually been described as the growth of nationalism. Such a description, however accurate it may be from some points of view, is unsatisfactory as an explanation in itself because it begs too many questions. If one talks about nationalism, what is being described? And was the rise of Southeast Asian nationalism a process similar to or significantly different from the rise of nationalism in Europe or Latin America?
Rather than giving a detailed account of the controversies that this issue has generated, a more positive approach is to look at the areas of general agreement that have been reached among those who study Southeast Asia—always accepting that there is no absolute identity of view concerning such a complex and, on occasion, emotion-charged subject. Most scholars now agree that the political movements that emerged to challenge the existing colonial order after the First World War were different, in important ways, from those that had existed in the nineteenth century. To see the fact of difference does not mean that those who sought independence from their colonial rulers in the 1920s and 1930s disregarded the more traditional opposition to colonial rule of other centuries. Rather, the modern generation of Southeast Asians who opposed colonial rule saw themselves building upon the traditions already established by their countrymen, but doing so in a way that took account of changed social, economic and political factors.
The development of the modern Indonesian independence movement provides a particularly instructive example of an awareness of the past being joined to a new political program that was directed both at ending colonial rule and towards creating a new Indonesian state. The men who emerged into prominence as advocates of Indonesian independence in the 1920s were very much aware of the efforts of the men and women who had fought against the Dutch expansion of control in such campaigns as the Java War (1825–30), the Paderi Wars in Sumatra (1820s and 1830s), and the Aceh War, again in Sumatra (1872–1908). But for a man such as Sukarno, who was to become the first President of Indonesia, the campaign waged against the Dutch had new elements that had not been dreamed of by the earlier anti-colonial leaders. First and foremost, for Sukarno and the other leaders of his generation who emerged into prominence in the 1920s, a clear link was now proclaimed between independence from foreign rule and the establishment of a new Indonesian nation where none had previously existed. This new nation, incorporating all the peoples and territories ruled over by the Dutch, was acknowledged to be a diverse entity—the Indonesian national motto is 'Unity in Diversity'—but it was to be united by more than a rejection of colonialism. Unity was to be forged through an acceptance of new political values, some from Indonesia's own past, some from Europe, where the ferment of the nineteenth century had brought forth a host of new political theories and immense practical change in the disposition of actual political power.
In a loose but accurate sense, the new nationalism that emerged in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia did combine the old and the new, something of the values of the West as well as the values of Southeast Asia itself. Nationalism asserted that populations and territories ruled as colonial possessions had their own independent right to existence, to the pursuit of national goals that were the preserve of one particular group of peoples living in one particular area. The colonial powers, unsurprisingly in terms of the values of the times, opposed these demands for basic change in political control. Moreover, the obstacles that lay in the way of achieving the nationalists' goals often seemed formidable and frequently led the colonial administrators to dismiss the force of the new movements. For the nationalists themselves, a faith in their ideals enabled them to believe that political power could be gained and that apparently unfavourable and even impossible odds would be overcome.
Still the question remains: why did the growth of this new national spirit take place in the 1920s and 1930s and not before? Some historians would reject the basis for this question, preferring to stress the way that old forms of anti-colonial resistance were transformed into new nationalist efforts. For most observers, however, there seems not only to have been a significant difference between traditional and more modern anti-colonial movements, but also some readily identifiable explanations for why change came when it did. Central to most explanations is the fact of awareness. By the 1920s, and increasingly thereafter, there was a new sense of awareness among an ever-growing number of Southeast Asians that the colonial relationship that dominated their lives was not beyond question but, rather, open to challenge.
In a country such as Vietnam, where a sense of national identity had a long history, this sense of awareness was particularly marked by an embrace of new political theories that were seen as offering a program for ending their country's colonial status. In other countries, perhaps most particularly Indonesia, where a new sense of national identity developed very much as a consequence of the colonial experience, it may be argued that it was the awakening of a national awareness, more than the adoption of one rather than another political theory, that was most important. Throughout Southeast Asia, including Thailand, which never experienced a formal colonial relationship, the 1920s and 1930s saw an awakening of interest concerning the nature and purpose of government.
In stressing the growth of this sense of awareness, with all the different paths that were followed by the new nationalist leaders in the different countries of the region, attention is again focused on Southeast Asia's role as a receiver and adaptor of external theories and concepts. Political ideas relating to Socialism, Communism, Democracy and a host of other theories and concepts, did not develop in Southeast Asia, however much of these theories came to be used and adapted. And here, moving beyond the global explanation of awareness, the importance of the 1920s and 1930s is more readily understood.
Europe achieved its modern political configuration—the delineation of state boundaries and the consolidation of national units—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This process was accompanied and followed by an outpouring of writing on political theory. By the early twentieth century debates that continue today were already joined between those in favour of revolutionary solutions to political problems and issues and those who sought a variety of evolutionary approaches. Not surprisingly, Southeast Asians who resented or had become dissatisfied with their colonial status looked to the great body of Western political thought to see whether it contained answers to their political dilemmas.
It was an unsurprising decision since one important result of the major political changes that took place in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the growth of a body of opinion—never particularly large but always significant—that insisted that opportunities for education should be extended to the populations in the colonised states. With education, for a few at least, came the opportunity to read of the momentous political changes that had taken place in Europe and of the political forces that had brought those changes. No exaggeration is involved when it is observed that once a significant number of Southeast Asians were exposed to Western education the development of a new nationalist spirit received one of its most powerful boosts. Moreover, education and changing administrative and social patterns led, by the beginning of the twentieth century, to the development of a new and significant class, the intelligentsia. Although arguments may be developed to suggest that such a class had long existed in Vietnam, both in that country and elsewhere in the Southeast Asian region, the new class that now emerged was distinguished from its predecessors or precursors by a political as well as an intellectual commitment. For the first time there was a significant group of educated Southeast Asians who questioned the position of their rulers—the colonial powers—in terms of political theory, and who were able to see themselves as part of a wider intellectual community concerned to debate, discuss and act in the hope of attaining their nationalist goals.
Exposure to Western education and through it to new political concepts took many forms. For some the exposure came in a formal sense, through schooling and study, sometimes culminating in years spent in Europe. For others an understanding of Western political ideas came through less formal, but no less important, contacts with the West. The careers of Mohammad Hatta of Indonesia and Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam provide examples of the very different ways that Southeast Asians came to know Western political theories and to see in them a way to end colonial rule in their countries. Hatta, seen by the Dutch as a model Indonesian student, spent nearly ten years of his early adult life studying economics in Holland. He was an outstanding student. He was also a man who increasingly found it impossible to reconcile the political ideas that prevailed in Holland, not least the opportunity for an individual to cast a vote to change the government, with those existing in Indonesia. When he returned to Indonesia in 1932 his advocacy of independence for his countrymen led to his imprisonment by the Dutch colonial authorities, an imprisonment that lasted until his release by the Japanese during the Second World War.
Ho Chi Minh's acquaintance with the West came in a very different fashion. Unlike Hatta, the French never saw Ho as a model student. Instead he was the troublesome son of a minor but scholarly official who had refused to cooperate with the colonial government. He left Vietnam at an early age to work as a member of a ship's crew and found his way to Europe and to a changing series of low-paid jobs in London and Paris, and for a short period of time in New York and Boston. It was in Paris that he slowly became acquainted with the revolutionary literature of those who had adopted Marx, Engels and Lenin as their guides to political philosophy and action. Convinced that Communism offered the answer to the problems of the world, and most particularly those of colonised peoples, Ho became one of the founder members of the French Communist Party. This fateful step was to lead him along an extraordinary path of personal hardship, imprisonment and eventual partial triumph in his battle against French rule in Vietnam.
For those in the colonised regions of Southeast Asia who came to learn of the nature of government in the West, whether through personal experience or from books and the accounts of their fellow countrymen, the most striking realisation was how contradictory were the patterns of life and behaviour that applied in Europe and the United States and those that applied in the colonies. In this regard a well-known saying about the British in India could equally be applied to the Europeans and Americans who lived their lives in Southeast Asia in the 1920s and 1930s. All Englishmen, the saying went, were sahibs east of the Suez Canal. The very fact of being a white man, in other words, transformed individuals who in their own countries might have been of very humble status into 'lords' or 'masters'. There is abundant evidence to show the ease with which Europeans in the colonies of Southeast Asia readily slipped into a pattern that presumed their moral elevation above the 'native' masses and ensured their conditions of existence were fitting for such elevated status. Dutchmen and Englishmen, to take two examples, found no more difficulty in regarding themselves as tuans (tuan is the word for 'lord' or master' in Indonesian and Malay) than did their counterparts in India. This was a situation that more and more came to cause resentment. And this resentment was further fuelled by the growing realisation that the economic benefits of the colonies accrued overwhelmingly to the distant metropolitan states and to the alien members of the colonial community and those who had joined their interests to them. Awareness of the inequities of colonialism was, for the bulk of those active in the developing nationalist movements, increasingly focused on these two features: the social and political dominance of the alien colonists over the indigenous population and the economic dominance of those colonists.
When the obvious link between the various colonial political systems and the economic situation in the colonies was discerned, thoughtful Southeast Asian nationalists asked whether Western political and economic theory might offer an answer to the problems they confronted. There should be no surprise that for some an apparent answer to the problem of how to gain independence was seen in Communism. Nearly ninety years after the event it is difficult to sense the profound international concern and excitement that accompanied the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia. What was seen by the conservative politicians of the West as a terrible illustration of what could happen if too much power fell into the hands of the workers was, of course, viewed very differently by underprivileged and disadvantaged groups throughout the world. For some men and women in Asia—not just in Southeast Asia—the Russian Revolution offered not merely the spectacle of a corrupt, authoritarian monarchy being overthrown by a political group that acted in the name of the workers of Russia. It was seen as an event that signalled much more: the imminence of revolution throughout the world, but most particularly in their own colonised situation.
How inaccurate that view was is apparent many years later. For some Southeast Asians, however, the promise of independence through Communist revolution seemed very real in the 1920s and 1930s. The force and appeal of the revolutionary philosophy of Communism in Vietnam provides the best-known example. But Communism had an important following in Indonesia and played a small but significant role in the Philippines also. In British Malaya, Communist organisers were active in the Chinese community, but developments in that colony were very different from elsewhere in the Southeast Asian region. The Chinese community in British Malaya in the 1920s and 1930s still saw its interest as inextricably linked with the Chinese homeland. Since this was so, those who supported Communism did so not in terms of challenging British authority but rather in terms of raising funds and providing support for their Communist countrymen in China.
Why was it then that only in Vietnam did a Communist party emerge as the leader of a nationalist independence movement? There is no simple answer to this question, but an attempt to provide some of the answers has much to tell us about the development of modern Southeast Asia. Of all the countries of Southeast Asia only Vietnam and Indonesia were forced to fight a protracted war in order to achieve independence from their colonial rulers. These wars, fought after the Second World War had ended, may be seen as a reflection of the determination of France and Holland to maintain their colonial empires at a time when other European powers had accepted that the age of colonies either was passing or had passed. The wars of independence fought in Vietnam and Indonesia after the Second World War may also be regarded as the logical extension of the situation that had existed in those countries during the 1920s and 1930s. For in both Indonesia and Vietnam the colonial governments had made very clear their position that independence was simply not a possibility that would be considered, despite the growing and insistent demands that independence should be granted.
But what was different about the Vietnamese experience when it is compared with the events in Indonesia? Why did the Communists become the leaders of the nationalist resistance to the French while in Indonesia the Communist Party was only one of the various groups that combined to form the anti-Dutch nationalist movement? Part of the answer may be given in terms of leadership and personalities. The leaders of the small but determined Vietnamese Communist Party—Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap, to name but two in addition to Ho Chi Minh—were men of exceptional talent. There were able and dedicated Indonesian Communists also—men such as Semaun and Tan Malaka—but the talent of non-Communist Indonesian nationalist leaders was at least equal to that of their Communist allies. Another contrast between the Vietnamese and Indonesian situations lay in the nature of their respective colonial regimes. Both the French and the Dutch colonial regimes were repressive, but it is arguable that the repression in Vietnam was fiercer than in Indonesia. Although the Dutch did not hesitate to exile such men as Sukarno, Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, and to imprison hundreds of other less eminent nationalists, it seems correct to note that repression in Indonesia was never so complete, or indeed as brutal, as in Vietnam under the French.
To argue that because of the severe political repression that operated in Vietnam only the Communist Party could survive and eventually succeed because of its clandestine nature and organisational capacities would fall far short of a satisfactory explanation. Repression in Vietnam during the 1920s and 1930s did eliminate or render impotent other political groupings. And the Vietnamese Communist Party was aided in its efforts to survive by its secret character—a bitter complaint of the French security services was of their failure to penetrate the inner ranks of the party's leadership. But there was more to the party's slow progress to power than this. For the party leaders and their followers Communism seemed to provide both a political theory and a program for action that was particularly appropriate for the conditions that existed in Vietnam. The colonial economic system seemed to fit quite remarkably well into the exploitative pattern described in the writings of Marx and even more particularly Lenin, a fact seized on by Ho Chi Minh. Nonetheless, it is as well to remember that, although the Communists had established themselves as the leading nationalist group in Vietnam by the end of the 1930s, they were still far from being in a position to seize power.
The Indonesian nationalist opponents of the Dutch were not close to power either, at the end of the 1930s. But if they shared this experience with the Vietnamese, there was much else that was profoundly different. The Vietnamese Communists had emerged as the leading political force in a country that had a long tradition of national identity and in which the old absolutist values of a Confucian society had first been under threat and then shown to be inadequate to meeting the challenges of colonialism and the changing nature of the modern world. By contrast, the development of a sense of Indonesian identity was essentially a modern phenomenon in a society marked by all manner of pluralist tendencies. Moreover, if it is possible by simplifying greatly to speak of twentieth-century Communist political theory and practice filling the void left by the collapse of traditional Confucian values in Vietnam, no such parallel could be found in Indonesia. As Indonesian nationalists formulated their plans for the future they did so in a situation in which traditional cultural values and both traditional and modern religious values had not proved to be failures. A Vietnamese might mourn the passing of a society in which Confucian values had had their place but he had to seek something to replace them, most particularly because even those who regretted the passing of the old order would usually admit its inadequacies. Most Indonesians, on the other hand, did not see their varied and rich cultural heritage or their Islamic religion as the cause of Dutch colonialism, or as the reason for the failure of their countrymen to expel the Dutch. Instead, and not even excluding the Communists so far as cultural values were concerned, Indonesia's nationalists drew strength from their heritage and saw it as having at least as much importance as Western political theory.
Consider Sukarno. He embodied so many of the characteristics of his countrymen, and particularly of his fellow Javanese, that one begins to understand why a man who could be seen by unsympathetic outside observers as a caricature was, to his fellow Indonesians, a reassuring figure in whom an almost endless range of personal, cultural and political traits were harmoniously combined. Sukarno's defence of his nationalist position when the Dutch put him on trial in 1930 is a remarkable testimony not only to his energy in reading a vast and varied range of political writings but also to his readiness to look for a path to Indonesian independence incorporating the widest scope of ideas on the state and its character. In Indonesia, for the most part, those who opposed the Dutch did not feel the need for an absolute set of political principles of the kind associated with Communism. Nationalism in Indonesia accommodated a range of political beliefs rather than becoming, as in Vietnam, a movement that was, essentially, synonymous with Communism.
The very considerable contrasts between Indonesia and Vietnam serve as a timely reminder of the slow progress of Communism elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, for instance, the gradual transformation of the traditional Thai state that owed so much to the energies of two remarkable kings, Mongkut (1851–68) and Chulalongkorn (1868–1910), reached its culmination in the 'Revolution' of 1932. This 'Revolution' did indeed represent a major change in the system of governing Thailand, for from that date onward the Thai king was to occupy the position of a constitutional monarch rather than be, in theory at least, an absolute ruler. The aims of the 'revolutionaries' who insisted on this new state of affairs—they were mostly younger men in the civil service and military, many with experience abroad—were far removed from Communism. Instead, with the various European models as guides to follow, they looked for a means to end a situation in which the nature of the Thai political system depended so much upon one man, the king. What followed the 1932 'Revolution' in Thailand could hardly be described as the implementation of democracy. It was, however, an important shift in power and this shift was sufficient to meet the interests of those who, in the late 1920s, had feared that the ruler, King Prajadhipok, would not take account of the political aspirations of those outside his tight royal circle. The political changes that took place in Thailand, however, were achieved within a society in which a prevailing sense of unity about the throne and within the Buddhist religion provided a basis for stability very different from some other parts of Southeast Asia.
The limited success of Communism elsewhere in Southeast Asia need not, however, be seen only in terms of the capacity of some nationalists to achieve change peacefully while others sought change through violent means. Just as the monarchy and the Buddhist religion were a unifying factor in Thailand, so were other 'models' seen as offering alternative answers to the dilemmas of the emerging nationalists. Long before the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Southeast Asians had been struck by the success of the Japanese in challenging and defeating the power of Tsarist Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. In a similar way the Chinese Revolution of 1911 presented an example of revolutionaries in an Asian country successfully achieving great political changes. For some the success of the Japanese state and of the Chinese revolutionaries were models to be followed closely. For others the success had a more general importance. Japan's defeat of Russia showed that Asians could triumph over Europeans just as the Chinese Revolution showed that major political change could be achieved by those seeking to institute revolutionary goals even in the most traditional of circumstances.
Beyond these general examples provided by particular events, there were longer-term influences that played a significant role in stimulating the development of nationalist policies and which might also be seen as having provided alternative rallying points to Communism. To write in these terms is not to suggest that the role of Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia, or of Buddhism in Burma, was something consciously developed during the 1920s and 1930s in opposition to the challenge of Communism. Rather, the existence of Islamic and Buddhist movements in these countries meant that there were already important rallying points about which nationalist thought could develop before consideration was ever given to the possibility of finding an answer to the problems of a colonial existence through the adoption of Communism as a guide for both theory and action.
More than usual difficulty attaches to writing about the history of religious movements in Southeast Asia. Religious experience is such a personal matter that an historian often finds it hard to do much more than emphasise the barest outlines of developments. Accepting that this difficulty exists, it is nonetheless possible for an outsider to sense something of the force and impact of the Islamic movements that were important in Indonesia and Malaya during the first four decades of the twentieth century and to see their significance for the development of nationalist politics. Islam, particularly Reformed Islam that stressed the basic teachings of the Koran, gave an impetus to the growing awareness of community felt by certain groups in Indonesia. Finding spiritual comfort and support from their religion, these Indonesian followers of Islam also found that shared belief formed a basis for shared political and economic aims. The first truly important national organisation in Indonesia was the Sarekat Islam, established in 1912, originally an association of Indonesian batik cloth merchants who first came together in 1908 (with a slightly different name) to advance their interests in the face of competition from Chinese dealers and who found a basis for unity in a shared religious faith. For many Indonesians who joined Sarekat Islam in its early, essentially economic phase, and for others who through the 1920s and 1930s associated themselves with one or other of the various Islamic organisations that emerged in those years, their religion became more than a statement of personal faith and belief. The fact of being a follower of Islam became a political statement as well. To be a follower of Islam was to be identified with all the other members of an Indonesian community whose interests were separate from, and indeed opposed to, both the Dutch with their political power and the Chinese merchants who controlled so much commerce in the islands.
In Malaya, from the beginning of the twentieth century, Islam played a similar, if less significant, role in emphasising the common interests of followers of this faith throughout the Peninsula. Although those who had experienced the impact of Reformed Islam, often in the course of study in the Middle East, argued for its importance in efforts to bring a social renovation to Malaya, religious organisations did not have the same impact in the slowly developing course of Malay (not Malayan) politics in the 1920s and 1930s. In the face of British Malaya's development as a multiracial society in which there were major Chinese and Indian immigrant communities, adherence to Islam was only one of the factors that made up the sharply increasing sense of Malay identity that set politically conscious Malays apart from the Chinese and Indians. The realities of economic life as much as membership of the Islamic faith spurred men to find some way of matching a sense of Malay identity to the need for gaining some significant share of economic progress. Nonetheless, if Islamic movements did not have the same impact in Malaya in the 1920s and 1930s as was the case in Indonesia, they probably should be judged to have had a longer-term effect than was realised at the time. In contemporary Malaysia, with Malay political dominance firmly established, Islam plays a major role as a factor defining political and social interests of the Malay community, though it should be noted that there are two competing political parties that claim to speak for the Malay Islamic community.
Among those for whom nationalist politics were important in Burma during the years between the World Wars, Buddhism provided a central rallying point. While it would be misleading to paint a picture of Burma in the 1920s and 1930s that suggested the level of agitation for independence from colonial rule was of the same order as that found in Vietnam and Indonesia, there was an active nationalist movement and no account of it could neglect the Buddhist element present. Buddhism not only was seen as setting Burmans apart from alien non-Buddhists, including nonBuddhist Asians such as the Indians who had flocked to Burma once British colonial rule was established, the religion also provided an administrative framework for the nationalists to spread their ideas. Propaganda in favour of independence could be circulated within the monkhood and anti-colonial strategy could be discussed at Buddhist councils. Just as was the case for dedicated followers of Islam in Indonesia, the Burmese Buddhist activists found in their religion an affirmation of national identity as well as a basis for spiritual comfort.
So far in this chapter the overwhelming emphasis has been on the emergence of nationalist movements in Vietnam and Indonesia, with only a limited amount of attention paid to developments in other parts of Southeast Asia. The reason for this apparently lopsided approach is very simple. In the rest of Southeast Asia the nature of nationalist movements was either very different from those found in Vietnam and Indonesia, or, as was the case in some countries, nationalist movements simply did not exist in any significant fashion. Cambodia and the Lao states in the 1920s and 1930s could accurately be described as barely affected by nationalist activity. In both these countries, in very considerable contrast to Vietnam, the other French colony in Indochina, traditional society and the traditional ruling class were preserved under the control of a French administration. French rule brought changes to Cambodia and Laos, but these were not of a kind to bring forth the nationalist reaction found elsewhere.
Consider the contrast between Cambodia and Indonesia. In the former the real impact of French colonialism was not felt until the beginning of the twentieth century. The King of Cambodia continued to reign and to remain for the overwhelming majority of his subjects the almost divine centre of their world. Western ideas and Western education had only barely penetrated Cambodia before the Second World War, and the impact of the Frenchcontrolled colonial economy had little clear effect on the bulk of the population. In Indonesia things were very different. Although much of what was traditional in Indonesian society survived in the 1920s and 1930s, the impact of the Dutch colonial regime, particularly in Java, was profoundly greater than the French impact in Cambodia. It was certainly the case that royal courts also remained important in Indonesia in the inter-war period, but whatever their significance the alternative focus of a modern outward-looking city existed in Batavia (modern Jakarta). Western education had had an impact in Indonesia by the end of the 1930s that was of an order that simply could not be compared with the situation in Cambodia, where by 1939 fewer than a dozen Cambodians had completed the equivalent of a French secondary school education.
Cambodia, Laos, and to some extent Malaya, showed the degree to which an alliance of interest between members of the traditional ruling class and the colonial power could act to inhibit the development of nationalist activity. The alliance involved did not just relate to personal concerns such as a measure of power and wealth. In the political and social climate of the 1920s and 1930s it was possible for Cambodian and Lao kings and princes, and for Malay sultans, to feel that their countrymen were benefiting from the operation of the colonial system. Who else but the French, a Cambodian or Lao prince might well have argued, would ensure that the Vietnamese did not expand to subjugate Cambodia? Who else but the British, in the view of Malay royalty, could be relied upon to bolster Malay interests in the face of the energetic and resourceful economic competition of the Chinese?
The Philippines presents a very different case. Like parts of Indonesia the Philippines, particularly the northern islands of the country, had experienced a long-term colonial impact. Of all the countries of Southeast Asia the Philippines can lay claim to having developed the earliest modern nationalist movement, for the attempted revolution against Spain at the beginning of the twentieth century possessed distinctly modern characteristics in its aims. Nonetheless, the Philippines remained in a colonial relationship with the United States until the end of the 1930s with remarkably little manifestation of nationalist resentment of this position. The explanation for this state of affairs may be found in the following two broad sets of facts. On the one hand the United States government, however much some of its citizens may have acted like the colonisers of other nations, made clear from the start of its rule over the Philippines its firm intention to grant independence to the country. There were periods of hesitation as to eventual timing and various individuals pursued the policy with greater and lesser enthusiasm. But the basic commitment to granting independence was always there. On the other hand the Filipino elite, the group most likely to furnish the nucleus of a nationalist movement should there have been any doubt as to the eventual intentions of the United States, not only believed that independence would come, but just as importantly found that their personal economic interests were served perfectly well by the system that evolved under American control. In 1936, the inauguration of the Commonwealth of the Philippines reflected the shared interests of the Americans and the Filipino politicians. The United States retained control over matters of foreign relations and defence while almost all domestic matters were the preserve of the Philippines congress. Most importantly of all, independence was to take place in 1946. Once again, though in very different circumstances from those existing in Cambodia and Laos, there was an alliance of interest between the colonised and the coloniser.
To what extent, throughout the Southeast Asia region, did the prospect of independence for the colonised countries seem near or far off towards the end of the 1930s? Not only does the answer to this question vary from country to country; equally obviously the answer varies whether one looks at the problem from the point of view of Southeast Asians or colonisers. From some points of view it is, perhaps, easier to attempt to recreate the assessments of the colonisers rather than the Southeast Asians, though even in this case the fact of very considerable variation from colony to colony and from individual to individual must be stressed.
One of the chief factors that helped to convince many Europeans that the age of colonial rule still had many years to run was the nature of the challenges that were mounted against colonial governments during the years between the two world wars. With the exception of a period of sustained Communist-led resistance to French rule in Vietnam in 1930–31, all the other challenges posed to colonial governments were essentially short term in character and relatively easily overcome. Not only that, the various challenges that did emerge, including the Communist-led risings against Dutch rule in the Netherlands Indies, had a sufficient number of traditional overtones, sometimes including reliance on magic and adherence to millenarian expectations, for the colonial powers to dismiss them as having little modern political, let alone nationalist, significance. The Saya San rising in Burma in 1930–31 appears to have been stimulated in part by economic conditions that owed their existence to the fact of British colonial rule over Burma, in particular a deep resentment of the taxes imposed by the colonial power. But although the British-controlled administration became the target for Saya San's followers, they tried to achieve a traditional aim through traditional methods. The former Buddhist monk, Saya San, was to be installed as a new 'king' of Burma by peasants who were ready to confront the firearms of the police with antique weaponry and a belief in magic amulets that would protect them from bullets.
The protesters against Dutch rule who followed the lead of second-echelon Communist activists in Java and Sumatra in 1926 and 1927, and briefly succeeded in convincing the colonial authorities that there might indeed be a serious threat to Dutch control, were only a little more attuned to the realities of the modern world. As in Burma the case can be convincingly made that colonial rule had brought about the general conditions that had led to a sense of distress and disorientation being felt by sections of the Indonesian population. But the hopes held for the success of these risings in Java and Sumatra by the followers, if not the leaders, were far removed from the expectations of those thoughtful nationalists who recognised that eventual independence would entail costs as well as benefits. Men such as Hatta, Sukarno and Sjahrir thought about the theory and practice of government in the new state that would be instituted after independence. The participants in the 1926–27 risings in Indonesia thought of the abolition of all taxes, of free taxi rides in the urban areas, and of Kemal Ataturk, the reforming Turkish dictator, suddenly appearing in Indonesia to lead the movement for independence after descending from a great aircraft.
These developments in Indonesia and Burma, as well as such affairs as the rare instances of Malay protest against British administration in Malaya and the Sakdalist peasant movement in the Philippines in the 1930s, could not be seen by the alien colonial administrators as posing any true threat to their rule, however troublesome such events might be at the time. The same observation could not be made about the Communist-led challenge to French rule in Vietnam in 1930–31 that has come to be known as the Nghe-Tinh Soviets. For nearly a year French control over sections of two poverty-ridden provinces in north-central Vietnam was resisted by peasants led by adherents of the Vietnamese Communist Party who succeeded for a time in setting up their own soviet-style administration. Only after the French Foreign Legion was sent to the area and given an almost completely free hand to subdue this challenge to French authority by any means, including the routine execution of nine out of ten prisoners, were the NgheTinh Soviets brought to an end. Even in this instance there were some French officials who fell prey to their own propaganda. They chose to believe that the challenge that had confronted them was more reflective of the supposed 'debased' character of 'Asiatics' than of any true spirit of nationalism or a desire for the establishment of a more modern society, let alone a protest by peasants against their desperate economic circumstances.
Despite the unwillingness of colonial officials to believe that early independence was a real possibility for the populations of the various colonised regions of Southeast Asia, the 1930s seem, nonetheless, to have been a period of considerable unease or at least uncertainty for these alien administrators. For all the insistence of a man such as Governor-General de Jonge in the Netherlands Indies that the Dutch would still be ruling over their colonial subjects for another three hundred years, there were other more hesitant estimates about the future. In British Malaya the remarkable failure of the colonial administration to think about the future was slowly changing by the end of the 1930s, and with this change came the first tentative thoughts about possible independence at some undefined date. In Burma the British administration, conscious of developments in nearby India and confronting a slowly increasing demand for an end to the colonial regime from Burmese nationalist groups, was also no longer able to pretend that independence was not an eventual possibility. Nonetheless, no clear timetable for independence was considered. In the countries of French Indochina attitudes towards the future were very different according to location. In Cambodia and Laos the French saw little to suggest that nationalism would undermine their rule. Vietnam was a different matter, but opinions vary on the extent to which there was a French awareness of the size and force of the Communist-led opposition to their rule. Possibly, in a brief survey, no better summary can be provided than the observation that there were significant sections of the French colonial administration in Vietnam—most notably the security services—and certainly a range of individuals who doubted the public official stance that French rule in Vietnam was likely to last for the indefinite future.
Only in the Philippines, with little if any serious consideration being given to the possibility of Japan's armed expansion southwards, were the 1930s a time when Southeast Asian politicians could look forward confidently to an independent future and plan and bargain for that future with the colonial power. Unlike the other colonial administrations in Southeast Asia, the United States officials in the Philippines in the 1930s were working within a structure that had accepted the inevitability of independence.
The other side of the story is more difficult to describe. In particular it is hard for an outsider to strike a balance between an awareness of the burning conviction that drove Southeast Asian nationalists on towards their goal of independence and the effect upon their aims of the often tremendous obstacles placed in their way by the colonial authorities. How close to independence and national emancipation could the Indonesian political prisoners languishing in exile feel during the 1930s? And what were the inner estimations of Vietnamese held in the harsh jails and prison colonies of Indochina? Despite the memoirs that some of these prisoners have published after their release there must be real uncertainty as to their actual judgments of the likely progress of efforts to achieve freedom from colonial rule. Whatever doubts or difficulties of remain, however, the fact of these nationalists' conviction in the rightness of their cause and in the eventual inevitability of their success must be recorded. They may have been uncertain about the speed with which they would obtain their goals, but they never doubted their ultimate attainment of success.
The suggestion has already been made that the 1920s, and more particularly the 1930s, were years of uncertainty. There was uncertainty of various kinds, political, social and economic, and this atmosphere of doubt and indecision must be remembered when the inter-war years are considered and put against the still widespread picture of this period before the outbreak of the Second World War being a time of colonial calm and untroubled European dominance. To the extent that uncertainty did reign, this state of affairs might help to explain why so many Southeast Asian nationalists could look to the future with confidence even if the colonial powers still appeared to have a monopoly of physical power.
Southeast Asia did not escape the effects of the Great Depression that burst upon the Western industrialised world at the beginning of the 1930s. The dramatic slow-down of the economies of the Western nations had an equally dramatic effect on the countries of Southeast Asia with their export industries that were so dependent on Western demand. The Great Depression may often be thought of in terms of Wall Street brokers plunging to their deaths as the market collapsed, or of men, both skilled and unskilled, forming huge dole queues in the cities of the industrialised world. But it should also be thought of as a time when the markets for tin and rubber and rice collapsed so that the export economies of Southeast Asia were temporarily crippled and employment opportunities for hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asians were also eclipsed.
Political uncertainty and economic difficulty were not the only deeply unsettling factors at work in Southeast Asia before the Second World War. The problem of overpopulation in certain areas of Southeast Asia, notably in Java and in parts of Vietnam, was already apparent. And with overpopulation came the threat of famine. Eyewitness accounts of areas of north-central Vietnam at a time of famine in the early 1930s still make harrowing reading today. Skeletal figures fought each other for a handful of potatoes in the provinces of Nghe-An and Ha-Tinh when famine ravaged that area in 1930.
Social inequalities had been sharpened by the period of colonial rule and an awareness of this situation was a further cause for unease and uncertainty. Southeast Asian nationalists were aware not only of the dominance of their alien rulers in economic matters, they were aware also of the growing inequalities that existed between the small numbers of their own countrymen who did profit from the presence of colonial rule and the vast mass that did not. Convincing arguments have been put forward, moreover, to suggest that at least some of the public signs of discontent that emerged in parts of Southeast Asia in the inter-war years were a reflection of the sense of frustration that existed among sections of the population which believed they were prevented from participating in an economic advancement that was rightfully theirs.
The changes that took place during the 1920s and 1930s are not always easy to summarise. Nor were these changes always recognised as taking place, either by the people of Southeast Asia or by the outsiders from Europe or America who had come to live in and rule over the region. But changes of very great importance did take place. The growth of nationalism may have been unequal throughout the region but, however uneven, the subsequent events of the war years themselves were to show that in every colonised country of Southeast Asia the force of nationalism was such that in no case was it possible to put back the clock, to return to how things had been before the war began.
The population of Southeast Asia was, by the end of the 1930s, one that knew more of the outside world, of the extent to which the colonial powers depended on their distant possessions for prosperity, and of the inequalities present in a colonial situation. To write in these terms should not be regarded as meaning that we should have a view of all Southeast Asians straining for independence and poised for revolution just before the Second World War began. Quite clearly this was not the case. But the numbers who had come to believe change must take place had grown substantially. And even among those, such as the peasantry, for whom modern political issues remained outside their knowledge, an awareness that change had occurred was present. The slow but important extension of education, the expansion of the modern economic sector into wider and wider areas of each country, the dim but definite awareness of developments elsewhere in the world, whether the momentous events taking place in China or the constitutional developments in India, all of these and many others were factors making for change or the desire for change.
How much of this was clear to the colonisers as they reviewed their position over a 'sundowner' at the end of the day may remain a matter of debate. Did the Dutch with their genever or the English with their whisky and soda sense what was happening, sitting in their clubs or on their bungalow verandahs as the sharp tropical change from day to night took place? Perhaps only a perceptive minority ever did. For the others, who believed change was far away, the illusion of continuity blinded them to the great changes that had taken place in just over twenty years.
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