As a Filipino, I had a shock of recognition when I stayed in Indonesia for the first time in 2001. Indonesians did not just look the same as many of my compatriots. They also seemed to behave and think in similar ways: laughed at the same styles of jokes; slighted by comparable types of insults; and enjoyed or hated, depending mainly on class, comparable tacky ghost stories and mushy telenovelas. Filipinos also seem to share Indonesiansâ propensity for religiosity and fatalism, as well as a laid-back lifestyle. They appeared to me as strikingly tolerant of, or resilient to, inefficiency, poverty, injustice and inequality. Apart from within the religious sphere (I am a Catholic), I hardly felt far from âhome.â
Impressions of difference also stood out. Growing up in a country where nationalism was at best confused or ambivalent, I felt Indonesians were generally more at ease with their nationalism. It seemed as natural and clear-cut to them as it was contrived and ambivalent to me. Despite the much greater geographic and demographic challenges and ethnic diversity, nation-building in Indonesia seemed to me had been more successfully accomplished than it had been in the Philippines. The complex set of explanations for these similarities and differences deserves some scrutiny. âIndonesia and the Philippines are the same enough to be put together, but different enough to make comparison interesting,â as Pringle perceptively observed (1980, 1).
The reference I have made here to my admittedly subjective and personal experience in and of Indonesia is strategic. It flags my subject-position as analyst: a Tagalog Filipino of middle-class background; a Catholic of liberal spirituality; rurally born and raised, but now urban- and overseas-based. I am a transnationally-oriented academic contract worker and a family man of libertarian personal aspirations and liberal publicâpolitical orientation. As an academic, I acknowledge the deeply concealed political nature of scholarsâ aspiration for autonomy or impartiality. Such disclosures are meant to serve the purpose of full transparency, not to excuse or justify my own partialities. My intellectual, political, and personal background are among the sources of my biases. They bear on my analytic proclivities in general, and on my views of Indonesia and the Philippines in particular. Of equal importance, I explicitly waive the right to absolve myself of any responsibility for whatever possible adverse consequences my analysis might have. I undertake this study with full awareness that, despite all my good intentions as a scholar, my interpretations and the empirical supporting data presented here may be appropriated by anyone or any group for their own interests, both self-serving and altruistic.
This chapter seeks to compare the contextual factorsâhistorical, political, institutional and academicâthat are most relevant to the narrative and analysis carried out in this book. No attempt at a comprehensive comparison between Indonesia and the Philippines is offered here. The focus is limited to areas that have a direct bearing on the analyses and arguments being developed in this book. First is the pattern of colonization and the nationalist responses to it; second, the state-formation, stateâsociety relations and the contrasting fate of the anti-state actors, the communist and other left-leaning parties in the two countries; and finally, the patterns of development of the two countriesâ nationalist historiography and historical professions. The main task is to demonstrate that the contrasting colonial experience, processes of state-formation and roles of the left in the two countries reflected or paved the way for a less hegemonic nationalism and less restrictive stateâcivil society relations in the Philippines than in Indonesia in the 1970s and 1980s, the period when the two projects analyzed here took shape. These factors have had important repercussions on the development of historical scholarship and the relationship between state and scholars in the two countries during the period under consideration, and perhaps even beyond.
Patterns of colonization and nationalist responses
While the idea of 300 years of Dutch colonization of Indonesia has long been debunked as a myth (Resink 1968), it is true that parts of what came to be called the Philippines and Indonesia were under the control of Westerners for about three centuries. The first Spanish expedition reached the area in the 1520s, and starting from the 1560s the Spanish presence gradually began to expand and eventually took root in the lowland areas of the Philippines. The Dutch, on the other hand, established themselves in Indonesia on a piecemeal basis, depending initially on the Dutch East India Companyâs economic interests: Maluku and Batavia (Jakarta) regions from the early seventeenth century, the whole of Java in the eighteenth century, a large part of Sumatra in the nineteenth century and the rest of the country by the early twentieth century.
The enormous size of Indonesia, spread out as it is across three time zones, made it so much less manageable or penetrable than the Philippines. With a land area less than one-sixth of Indonesiaâs, the Philippine archipelago was not only considerably smaller but also much more compact. Additionally, Dutch colonial activities, being primarily focused on commerce, at least in the first two centuries, proved less intrusive to the core cultures of the indigenous population. The socio-cultural life of a significant portion of the population in Indonesia began to be more deeply affected only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the intensification of economic activity, and the implementation of the Ethical Policy in the early 1900s. The Ethical Policy was an ambitious socio-economic program designed to promote the welfare of the indigenous population. On the other hand, the missionary zeal of the Spaniards resulted early on in the conversion of the natives in the Philippines, the indigenous lowland cultures being penetrated to their core (Phelan 1959). It must be noted though that the process of conversion cannot be assumed to be straightforward (Rafael 1988). The brand of Christianity that developed in the Philippines had been significantly infused with indigenous elements, as captured by the term âfolk Christianity,â but the foreign contributions, particularly in providing a code of ethics, were truly significant (Macdonald 2004).
Another important difference lies in the number of principal colonizers. The Dutch were the only principal colonizer of Indonesia; whereas the Philippines, along with a few other countries, has experienced being under the rule of two very different colonizers. The length of the period of colonization, as well as the depth and contrasting impacts of these colonizers, made the case of the Philippines quite distinctive. African countries, such as Tanzania, may have changed hands from one colonizer (Germany) to another (Britain), but the impact was nowhere near as sharp or unsettling as it was in the case of the Philippines when it passed from three centuries of Spanish rule into a new era of American control, which then spanned over four decades. An important consequence of this experience was the ambivalent attitude among Filipinos towards colonization and the ambiguous sense of nationalism it spawned. Whereas nationalism in Indonesia were clearly anti-colonial, dominated as they were by negative attitudes towards the Dutch, the anti-colonial nationalism that came out of the âwombâ of the 1896 Philippine Revolution were âabortedâ (Quibuyen 1999) by the mixed blessings, both perceived and real, brought by the new colonizers, the Americans. Called âbi-nationalismâ by Alfred McCoy (1981) and âcolonial nationalismâ by Patricio Abinales (2002), the ambiguous character of Filipino nationalism was clearly displayed in the intensification of the radical anti-colonial nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, while the movement for the Philippines to become the 51st state of the USAâthe Philippine Statehood USAâwas also gaining ground. It was reported as recently as December 2016 that this movement continues to gather signatures for the petition for statehood (Bustos and Cabacungan 2014).
The timing of the two countriesâ national revolutions may have also contributed to such ambivalence. Whereas Indonesia gained full independence after the National Revolution (or War of Independence) of 1945â1949, the Philippines had to contend with the co-opting and disarming policies of yet another colonizer, the United States, soon after declaring independence from Spain in 1898. If, after 50 years, Indonesian scholars talked about the âheartbeat of Indonesian revolutionâ (Abdullah 1997), their Filipino counterparts grieved over an âaborted nationâ (Quibuyen 1999).
Mass education programs served as one of the Americansâ disarming policies (Francisco 2015; Suzuki 1991). Figures show that by the 1920s, nearly one million children in the Philippines received their education in English. By 1938, it was twice as many (Steinberg 1987, 264â265). While such programs created generations of Filipinos forever grateful to the Americans, in stark contrast with the supposedly painful memories of colonial experience under Spain, it also served as a breeding ground for nationalisms of varying shades, such as colonial vs. anti-colonial nationalism. The emergence, for instance, of homegrown historians who were educated during the American period and who had very different nationalist temperaments, as exemplified by Gregorio Zaide and Nicholas Zafra, on the one hand, and Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino, on the other. They illustrate the ambivalent impact of US-sponsored education in the Philippines. The distinction between the two sets of scholars shall be further discussed later in this book.
Indonesian nationalism was by no means monolithic and no less contentious. Just as in the Philippines, competing ânations-of-intent,â borrowing Saniâs (1976) and Shamsulâs (1998) terminology, existed in Indonesia, as evidenced, for example, in the regional revolts in the 1950s; the persistence of the Islamist groups who wished to establish the Islamic state; the rise of communism; as well as the separatism of Papua, Aceh and Timor-Leste. Robert Cribb has identified four competing nations-of-intent: the Islamist; the communist; the developmental nationalist; and that of the indigenous aristocracies and the mestizos, which he calls the âmulti-ethnic nation-of-intentâ (Cribb 2004). The primary difference between the cases of Indonesia and the Philippines lies in the distribution of power among the promoters of the competing visions of the nation. While the coalescing of forces in Indonesia allowed the emergence of dominant elites, particularly upon the mass killings of the communists in 1965â1966, in the Philippines no episodes of comparable nature and scale happened. Various powerful groups of elites struggled for dominance, precluding the formation of an unassailable âexemplary centerâ of nationalism as well as politics. Stalemated, competing nations-of-intent are perpetually locked in a state of conflict, both actual and potential.
In the case of Indonesiaâs nationalist movement, the âidea of unity has quickly acquired crucial symbolic valueâ (Cribb 1999, 16), and âcultural, social and ideological differencesâ did not hinder âenthusiasm for national unityâ (Cribb and Brown 1995, 9). On the other hand, persistent discord has rocked its Philippine counterpart from the 1880s up to the present. In both cases, the need for unity was certainly recognized, but such recognition did not, in the Philippines, translate into a largely unified front against common enemies (such as colonialism), as was the case in Indonesia. No sooner had the Americans taken control of parts of Philippines, for instance, than a number of Filipino elites and erstwhile very high-ranking officials in the turn of the century revolutionary government switched sides. In the succeeding decades, a number of contentious questions arose: who should be the national hero, Rizal or Bonifacio? What should be the medium of instruction, Filipino or English? And should Rizalâs novels be made required reading in Philippine schools and universities? These are just a few examples that illustrate the persistent divisiveness of nationalism in the country. During their formative decades, Indonesian nationalisms were also deeply divided, as seen in the struggle in the decades before the war among various groups to define the future of the nation, with the Islamists pushing to enshrine Islamic law (Syariah) as obligatory for all Muslims, while the nationalists opposed it (Kahin 1952; Shiraishi 1990). In the 1950s and 1960s, the political divide among Islamist, communist, nationalist, and other groups was deepening and sharpening (Feith 1962). Amid these divisions, there emerged a locus of power capable of balancing, neutralizing, or overpowering divisiveness, at least for a period. Examples include Sukarnoâs adept, if ultimately failed, attempt to synthesize the competing ideologies of nationalism, religion and communism into Nasakom; the installation of Pancasila as the national ideology; and the decisive wiping-out of the communists in 1965â1968, which smothered opposition. These ideological moves were not replicated in the Philippines, where the competing interests co-existed in a stalemate, held in tenuous equilibrium by a shifting balance of power among alliances of elite families. The title of an edited volume, An Anarchy of Families (McCoy 1993) evocatively captures the situation. Despite the earlier beginnings of Philippine nationalism, there was nothing comparable to the material and symbolic significance of Sumpah Pemuda (âYouth Pledgeâ), or the national ideology, Pancasila, two important markers of intent to achieve unity in Indonesia (Darmaputera 1988; Foulcher 2000). Ferdinand Marcos made an attempt to propose what amounted to an ideology for the Filipino nation (see Marcos 1979, 1980), but due to his unpopular actions and policies, it was dismissed by many Filipinos as nothing but a self-serving ploy.
Megan Thomas, in her book Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism (Thomas 2012), noted the âpeculiarâ character of the earliest period in the development of Philippine nationalism. She observes that right at its very inception, Philippine nationalism was infused with a high level of cosmopolitanism that was difficult to find in many other colonial societies. Whereas in many other colonial societies, the âmiddle classâ that led the nationalist movement were in between two poles, the colony and the metropole, Filipino nationalist leaders were in between multiple centers, which included Hong Kong, Japan, Germany, Belgium, and France. This was made possible, according to Thomas, by the fairly extensive travelling of these early nationalists (Thomas 2012). This travel exposed them to stimuli beyond Spanish colonialism, and afforded them multiple viewpoints that tamed the parochial tendencies of various anti-colonial nationalisms, including that of Indonesia. The idea of cosmopolitan nationalism highlights the more than superficial roots of the fluid and multiple characters of Philippine nationalism.
Viewed from the perspective of the development of Philippine nationalism, the degree of unity evoked among early Indonesian nationalists by the notion of âIndonesiaâ was quite remarkable (Elson 2008). As obse...
