The State and Ethnic Politics in SouthEast Asia

David Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415049931
• eBook ISBN: 9781134797059
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Ethnic tensions in Southeast Asia represent a clear threat to the future stability of the region. David Brown's clear and systematic study outlines the patterns of ethnic politics in: * Burma * Singapore * Indonesia * Malaysia * Thailand The study considers the influence of the State on the formation of ethnic groups and investigates why some countries are more successful in 'managing' their ethnic politics than others.

Chapter 1
Ethnicity and the state

One of the most widespread features of the Third World since the Second World War has been the expansion of the state in both its spatial and policy realms. Régimes which hitherto had displayed only spasmodic and limited capacity outside their core regions and their capital cities, have sought increasingly systematic control over peripheral regions through the expansion of their administrative bureaucracies, their armies and their educational systems. At the same time, the range of governmental interference has expanded beyond a concern with raising revenue and maintaining order, as the need to direct, train and motivate labour has increased. The effectiveness of such state interventions has varied greatly, however. The expansion of the state has not implied its strengthening; and the various agents of the state have only rarely managed to bring about the intended structural or cultural changes. Nevertheless, they have frequently had sufficient impact to impinge on social groups, sometimes disruptively and unintentionally, so as to modify societal consciousness and behaviour. There has thus developed a close relationship between ethnic consciousness and relationships on the one hand, and the activities of the state on the other. The purpose here is to examine that relationship by explaining how ethnicity functions as an ideology whose cultural focus and political implications are crucially influenced by the character of the state.

Ethnicity is interpreted here as an ideology which individuals employ to resolve the insecurities arising from the power structure within which they are located. Accordingly, the explanation of ethnic politics must begin with the examination of the state’s influence upon that power structure.¹ It is clear that the state plays a major role in influencing the distribution of power, status and wealth in society, and hence in the type of situational insecurities and threats with which individuals and groups are faced. This role involves not only the state’s influence on socioeconomic disparities, but also its influence upon the advantages which accrue to those possessing a particular language, religioculture or racial identity. The state also provides legitimation for the power structure in the form of a more or less explicit nationalist ideology, and this state-promulgated national identity defines the ideological parameters within which ethnic consciousness develops and operates.² Since both cultural state nationalism and ethnic ideology employ the same type of cultural markers (race, language, religion and territory) in depicting the respective communities, then ethnic ideology must necessarily define itself as a reaction to, or a constituent of, the state-national ideology.

The concept of the state refers to the governmental and administrative institutions of a society, and to the ideological claim as to the sovereignty of those institutions. A ‘statist’ analysis of politics is thus one which assumes coherent organizing principles connecting the disparate administrative agencies in any particular state system, and assumes also that the state functions as an independent actor in politics, rather than simply as an arena for societal contention. The danger of such a state-centred approach is that it ceases to be simply a heuristic device, and leads to an overestimation of the co-ordination between discrete governmental agencies and their boundedness from society—and an overestimation of the capacity of those agencies for controlling social change.³

It is clear, however, from the extent of state-ethnic conflict in the contemporary world, that no states are able to fully control the ethnic consciousness and behaviour of those they purport to govern. In developing a ‘statist’ explanation of ethnicity—one which focuses on the impact of the state upon ethnic politics—it is necessary, therefore, to recognize the limitations upon the state’s ability to control ethnicity; also to indicate the varying degrees of its resilience to ethnic pressures. The limitations on the state’s ability to control ethnicity relate in part to the intrinsic character of ethnic consciousness, which makes it inherently resilient to attempts by state élites to transform or control it, and in part to the relative weakness of the state, in terms of the varying degrees of its resilience to societal pressures.

States diverge greatly in terms of their legitimacy, autonomy, capacity, and organizing principles. The autonomous state would be one where the policies and preferences of state élites were determined by their professional interests as state officials, rather than by the demands of any societal segments. In terms of ethnicity then, the autonomous state would either be ethnically impartial, proclaiming ethnically colour-blind national values and depoliticizing ethnicity, or it would employ ethnicity as a resource for the promotion of a state-initiated formula for state development and national integration.⁴ This would contrast with the non-autonomous state, where the state élites act in response to societal ethnic pressures. Politics in such a state would revolve around assertions of, and questions of access to, the benefits of membership of the various ethnic communities.

Such variations in state autonomy in relation to ethnic interests are not necessarily connected with the capacity of the state to dominate and control society.⁵ Variations in state capacity may be indicated by the broad distinction between reactive, responsive and manipulative patterns of state impact upon ethnicity. The more radical the social restructuring attempted by the state, and the less effective its administrative capabilities, the more likely it becomes that its interventions in society fail to produce the intended effects, with the state having sufficient capacity to influence and perhaps to disrupt the social structure, but insufficient capacity to control the impact of its interventions. In such a case, attempts to modify ethnic consciousness would have the effect merely of disrupting the cohesion of target communities, thence promoting the possibility of a defensive assertion of ethnic solidarity directed specifically against state interventions. The classic example of such a reactive impact would be the incidence of ethnic separatist rebellion amongst ethnic minorities faced with assimilationist state policies.

In some cases, however, the state may indeed be in a position to achieve a responsive impact, so as to implement its policies on ethnicity effectively and to promote the type of changes in consciousness and behaviour intended. The intermediate situation is that where state interventions on ethnicity generate a manipulative politics. Target communities cannot escape the interventions of the state, but they might be able to treat such interventions as resources to be employed for their own advantage, so that the outcome differs significantly from that intended by the state. In the case of the Indonesian Chinese for example, it appears likely that assimilationist state policies have been utilized in such a way as to generate a modified peranakan Chinese ethnic consciousness, rather than to achieve an assimilationist outcome.⁶

These distinctions concerning state autonomy and capacity are important for two reasons. Firstly, they mean that an explanation of ethnicity in terms of the character of the state does not imply that it is the state which determines ethnicity. The state may impact in a variety of ways upon ethnicity, not necessarily or solely in ways intended by the state élites. Secondly, the state may function as a causal agent in politics irrespective of whether it is autonomous of societal groupings. Thus a state which is the agency of one particular ethnic segment in the society, or of a class, is one which lacks autonomy; but it may at the same time be a strong state with a high capacity to influence the consciousness and behaviour of its citizens.

The tendency towards the weakness of the state has been particularly well documented in the case of developing countries.⁷ Some Southeast Asian states have indeed displayed the symptoms of the ‘weak state’, but, with the exception of Burma, it is noticeable that they have not been overwhelmed by the forces of ethnic disintegration, as has been the case in several African, and more recently Eastern European, countries. While they have not managed to exert full control over ethnic consciousness and ethnic politics in their countries, neither have they failed completely in their efforts to influence, manipulate, and contain ethnicity. Ethnic politics has indeed been problematic, but the Southeast Asian states have displayed a resilience in the face of ethnic disintegration tendencies.

We need therefore to explain the extent of the Southeast Asian states’ successes in managing ethnicity, while also showing the limitations of such management efforts. The discussion must therefore be in two sections. The first task is to examine the relative resilience of ethnicity in the face of state control. This is explained here as arising from its character as a psychological and political ideology. Secondly, the relative resilience of the state in Southeast Asia is examined. This is explained here as arising in part out of the ‘soft authoritarian’ features of several of the states, and in part also out of the type of ethnic strategies which have been adopted. Thereafter, the extent and limitations of each state’s ethnic management strategies will be examined by exploring several distinct characterizations of the state.

THE RELATIVE RESILIENCE OF ETHNICITY

Ethnicity is not simply a response to external stimuli such that it is fully determined and shaped by situational factors. Individuals are indeed influenced, in terms of their communal affiliations and relationships, by the external societal and political agencies which exert power over them, but they do not adopt a new ethnic consciousness in response to every new ‘them’ which they encounter. Such situational influences serve rather to modify the boundaries or strength or political salience of a prior communal consciousness, rather than creating it anew.

The simplest way of asserting this resilience of ethnicity would be to explain it as a primordial given, providing the individual with a primary and permanent sense of identity. But such a position would overstate the immutability of ethnicity and understate the influence of situational factors such as the state. The alternative position adopted here, therefore, is one which seeks to explain both the situational malleability of ethnicity and also its resilience. Such a perspective is offered by the depiction of ethnicity as an ideology.

The general argument which will be developed is that the resilience of the ethnic attachment derives from its ability to provide, for the individual, a simple psychological formula which resolves the ambiguities and uncertainties as to the relationship with society and with the state.⁸ The psychological formula employed is that of the kinship myth: the endowment of the ‘imagined’ cultural community with the attributes of the real family. This myth may attach to any cultural community available to the individual, depending upon situational factors, but thereafter it functions both as a psychological ideology and as a political ideology in the form of the ethnic nationalist claim. The power and resilience of this kinship myth is explained here in psychoanalytic terms.

The notion of ethnicity as ideology is not completely absent from either the situationalist or the primordialist perspectives. For the primordialist, the ethnic community employs ideology in the form of the rights claim which the nationalist argument embodies. In the situationalist position the ethnic community is depicted as a particular type of interest group which employs ideology as a resource whereby élites can mobilize the communal group solidarity necessary for political action. But while both the justification of entitlement claims and the mobilization of group cohesion are important functions of ideology, they do not form the core of the concept.

The term ‘ideology’ is contested in the sense that there is disagreement as to its relationship to objective truth; whether it refers to a rational distillation of reality, a distorted, irrational view of the world, or a hermeneutic interpretation. But common to each of these approaches is the view of ideology as a mental construct offering an apparently coherent formula which makes sense of that of which the individual is least certain. Ideology provides certainty in that it defines the location of the individual in the wider society and in that it provides a diagnosis of contemporary ills and a prescription for their remedy. Ideology then, refers both to a psychological belief system, and also to the articulation of that belief system in the form of a programme for political action. Thus, the ethnic ideology will be depicted here as offering certainty to the individual by locating him or her within a defined ethnic community and then further locating that community within the nation-state system. Political problems are then diagnosed in terms of a dislocated relationship between the ‘kinship’ community and the nation-state.

The ethnic ideology is made concrete for the individual in the form of the specific myths and symbols which are attached to a particular cultural group. The myth of kinship thus grants the individual his own specific name, history and destiny. It is:

a device men adopt in order to come to grips with reality…. A political myth is always the myth of a particular group…. It renders their experience more coherent; it helps them understand the world in which they live. And it does so by enabling them to see their present condition as an episode in an ongoing drama. A political myth may explain how the group came into existence and what its objectives are; it may explain what constitutes membership of the group and why the group finds itself in its present predicament; and, as often as not, it identifies the enemy of the group and promises eventual victory.⁹

The kinship myth, then, is a foundation myth of common ancestry, origin, migration or history, which gives specific and dramatic meaning to the ethnic ideology.

Ideological consciousness is frequently contrasted with ‘pragmatism’, so as to distinguish between the adaptability and responsiveness of the latter way of thinking as compared to the relative inflexibility of the former. The argument is that once an individual employs an ideological formula as a means of comprehending the world, there develops a concern to retain the integrity of that formula such that new information is filtered, perhaps distorted, so as to accord with the formula, rather than being responded to ‘realistically’. Thus, once a particular cultural aggregate has come to be perceived as a ‘kinship myth’ community, the resultant ethnic consciousness will continue for some time after the situation which generated it has ceased to exist. Even when new situations generate a new pattern of ethnic identity, it will probably be internalized as an ethnic consciousness which modifies rather than replaces the earlier ethnic identities; employing the same historical myths but for amended purposes. For example, while the boundaries of the Hmong of Northern Thailand have shifted over time, and the term Hmong clearly does not refer to one ‘consistent geneticlinguistic grouping’, it is nevertheless the case that the Hmong kinship myth, originally generated to distinguish the Hmong from the Chinese, is retained and employed in markedly different situations, to distinguish them both from the Lao and the Thai.¹⁰ Hmong consciousness displays situational fluidity, but also historical resilience; it has developed as a response to external pressures, but also as an independent political factor to which the Thai state has had to respond.

Ethnicity as a psychological ideology

Although the history of psychoanalysis lies in the study of repression and alienation in the bourgeois capitalist societies of the West, it claims also to offer insights as to the psychic mechanisms by which individuals relate to other social conditions: to the strains of the decolonized Third World experiencing early capitalism and westernization in its various forms, just as much as to those of the bourgeois environment of the developed states.¹¹ Nevertheless, any explanation which rests on psychoanalysis must contend with the doubts as to its scientific status, and the inconsistencies in its formulation. There is certainly no consensus within the various strands of psychoanalysis as to the basis for ethnic affiliation, but there is a significant convergence of the contending formulations in that they each illuminate how the relationship between the adult individual and the group affiliation is explainable in terms of, and derived from, the relationship between the infant and the family. The theme is that ‘the individual and the group perform functions for each other that replicate the early life functions of child and parents’.¹²

The appeal of the psychoanalytic explanation of ethnicity is that it allows us to go beyond the oft-stated but unspecified assertion that ethnicity satisfies the ‘natural’ individual needs for identity or security. Psychoanalysis has been directly concerned with explaining how the unconscious mind develops out of the interweaving of the instincts with the social environment, so that: ‘what appears to be natural and inescapable is in fact socially constructed’.¹³

The central propositions may be initially summarized. The conscious, rational individual (the ego) is depicted as inherently fragile and in danger of being overwhelmed by the demands of the complex external world on the one hand, and by the demands of the unconscious instinctual drives (the id) and the conscience (approximating the superego) on the other. The fragile ego seeks support and reinforcement, therefore, in the attempt to gain a strong sense of individual identity, emotional security, and moral authority. Communal affiliation provides one possible avenue for reinforcement, and this occurs at three ‘levels’. First, at the ego level: the sense of individual identity is strengthened when we seek a sense of our individual uniqueness by the belief that we ...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• The state and ethnic politics in Southeast Asia
• Politics in Asia Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Ethnicity and the state
• Chapter 2: The ethnocratic state and ethnic separatism in Burma
• Chapter 3: Ethnicity and corporatism in Singapore
• Chapter 4: Neo-patrimonialism and national integration in Indonesia
• Chapter 5: Internal colonialism and ethnic rebellion in Thailand
• Chapter 6: Class, state and ethnic politics in Peninsular Malaysia
• Chapter 7: Ethnicity, nationalism and democracy
• Notes
• Bibliography