Nation-Building and National Identity in Timor-Leste

Michael Leach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367025243
• eBook ISBN: 9781315311630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Timor-Leste's long journey to nationhood spans 450 years of colonial rule by Portugal, a short-lived independence in 1975, and a 24-year occupation by Indonesia. This book examines the history of nation-building and national identity in Timor-Leste, and the evolution of a collective identity through two consecutive colonial occupations, and into the post-independence era. It charts the evolution of the idea of an East Timorese nation: its origins, its sources, and its competitors in traditional understandings of political community, and the distinct colonial visions imposed by Portugal or Indonesia. The author analyses the evolution of ideas of collective identity under the long era of Portuguese colonial rule, and through the 24-year struggle for independence from Indonesia from 1975 to 1999. Reflecting the contested history of the territory, these include successive attempts to define its members as colonial subjects in a wider 'pluri-racial' Portuguese empire, as citizens in an 'integrated' province of the Republic of Indonesia – and, of course, as a nation that demanded its right to self-determination. Finally, the host of nation-building tensions and fault lines that emerged after the restoration of independence in 2002 are discussed.

Examining the history of debates and conflict over national identity, national history, cultural heritage, language policy, and relationships between distinct regions, generations, and language groups, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian studies, nationalism studies, and international and community development.

1 Introduction

Introduction

This book examines the history of nation-building and national identity in Timor-Leste. It does this by charting the evolution of the idea of an East Timorese nation: its origins, its sources, and its competitors in traditional understandings of political community, and the distinct colonial visions imposed by Portugal or Indonesia. It examines the evolution of ideas of collective identity under the long era of Portuguese colonial rule, and through the 24-year struggle for independence from Indonesia from 1975 to 1999. Reflecting the contested history of the territory, these include successive attempts to define its members as colonial subjects in a wider ‘pluri-racial’ Portuguese empire, as citizens in an ‘integrated’ province of the Republic of Indonesia – and, of course, as a nation that demanded its right to self-determination. Finally, it discusses the host of nation-building tensions and fault lines that emerged after the restoration of independence in 2002.

It does this in two parts. After an overview of key theoretical concepts in the context of Timor-Leste, part one of the book traces the precursor roots of East Timorese nationhood. It charts this history from the precolonial era through to 1999, examining traditional forms of political community, and the influence of Catholic missionaries and Portuguese secular authority on the slow evolution of collective forms of identity over the colonial era. It then examines the intensification of Portuguese colonial power through the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the development of nationalist ideas in the decolonisation era of 1974–75. This era saw the rise of political parties, each with competing conceptions of East Timorese nationhood. Part One concludes with a close examination of the influence of the Indonesian occupation on the evolution of East Timorese nationalism from 1975–99, and the ideological task of constructing a ‘nation-in-waiting’ in the struggle for independence.

Part Two examines nation-building through the era of direct UN governance from 1999, and beyond the restoration of independence in 2002. It analyses the manifold challenges of maintaining national unity after the Indonesian occupation, and how these compounded the difficult tasks of state-building. It traces the evolution of divisions within the East Timorese political elite, tensions between different generations of nationalists, and between modern and traditional visions of political community. In so doing, it analyses a range of national ‘fault lines’ that emerged from 2002–6. Associated with each of these were different constituencies in East Timorese society, contesting particular values of ‘official’ nationalism, and the new constitutional and political settlement of 2002. These protests often took the symbolic form of ‘recognition claims’: seeking acknowledgement of contributions to the independence struggle, or justice for their suffering during the occupation. The book concludes on a special date for East Timorese nationalism, with 2015 celebrated as the 500-year anniversary of contact with Portugal and Catholicism, and 40 years since the unilateral declaration of independence on 28 November 1975.

As such, this book is a history of the idea of an East Timorese ‘national’ community. Though it links the evolution of these ideas to events in East Timorese national history and the structure is broadly chronological, its focus is on the precursors, competitors and competing ideological visions of the nation of Timor-Leste, and the actors that have sought to advance it. Some caveats should be noted. This book is not an attempt to systematically chart the rise of East Timorese nationalist movements (Hill 2002), nor a history of the East Timorese struggle for self-determination (Dunn 1983; Taylor 1999; Fernandes 2011), or a general history of East Timor (Durand 2006). Rather, it examines the history and evolution of ideas of political community, including more recent attempts to form, contest or define a national identity. The name of the nation of Timor-Leste is sometimes a vexing issue in English language scholarship, as the long-established use of East Timor conflicts with the nation’s official name. This book adopts a particular historical convention, using the official name Timor-Leste to refer to the post-2002 nation-state, and the short-lived Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste in 1975. It uses Portuguese Timor or East Timor when referring to the pre-2002 territory, depending on the specific historical context. East Timorese is employed as the demonym throughout.

Historical overview

These nation-building challenges have been substantial in Timor-Leste. Following a long 450-year colonial era in which Portuguese authority progressively became more disruptive of traditional societies, yet left the territory underdeveloped, the first stirrings of nationalism (Hill 2002) arrived at the tail end of the postwar decolonisation era. A short-lived period of independence in 1975 was then dramatically terminated by the Indonesian invasion on 7 December 1975, followed by forced integration into the Republic of Indonesia, and a twenty-four–year occupation. Over this period, in response to the brutalities of the occupation, the East Timorese resistance slowly combined most of the political forces that emerged in 1974–5 into a united front which, with mounting international pressure after the Cold War, ultimately saw Indonesia cornered into initiating a UN referendum on self-determination in 1999 (Kingsbury and Leach 2007).

Following the 1999 violence perpetrated by the Indonesian military and their militia proxies which led to institutional collapse in the territory, East Timor would be described as a ‘nation without a state’ (Aditjondro 1999). East Timor was directly governed by the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) until the restoration of independence in May 2002. By 2005, UNTAET and its successor mission, the United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor (UNMISET) were lauded as one of the most successful examples of international state-building intervention (Chesterman 2004). These assessments did not long survive the withdrawal of most international peacekeeping forces in 2005. Commentators were soon discussing the failures of nation-building evident in the dramatic political-military crisis of April–May 2006, and the rise of ‘east-west’ violence in Dili, triggered by tensions within and between the security forces (Kingsbury and Leach 2007). In the wake of the crisis, which saw some 150,000 East Timorese displaced into camps in Dili, it was clear that Timor-Leste’s sense of national identity, forged in resistance to occupation, was weaker than presumed, and fractured along a variety of generational, regional, linguistic and political lines. The cohesive forms of national community and identity presumed to exist after the 1999 vote on self-determination were under challenge. This was evident not only in the resurgence of older regional stereotypes in the urban area of Dili, but also in trenchant intergenerational debates over the ‘official’ values of national identity embedded in the new constitution.

Following the crisis, a narrow ‘state-building’ agenda was domestically criticised for failing to develop a shared sense of identity and community. As will be argued in this book, the nation-building process in Timor-Leste has been greatly complicated by ‘recognition’ style struggles over the valorisation of different actors in the independence struggle (Leach 2006, 2008). Conflicts over relative contributions to the achievement of independence underpinned both the 2006 conflict, and deep-seated intergenerational tensions. A ‘clash of paradigms’ between traditional and modern norms of political authority in rural areas would add to these nation-building challenges (Trindade and Castro 2007), as would bitter disputes within the East Timorese political elite. After an extended period marked by strong intra-elite tensions from 2006 to 2012, a new form of national unity was emerging by 2013. This trend reached its peak in the formation of what was effectively a government of national unity in early 2015. By the time of the national celebrations in late 2015, there were signs of elite attempts to partly reorient the official values of East Timorese national identity from a core narrative of resistance, to one emphasising the values of national development, and moving on from a past of conflict.

This remainder of this introduction reviews theoretical concepts and debates employed in the book. It also examines the specific challenges relevant to postcolonial nation-building in ethnolingusitically diverse societies such as Timor-Leste, and some limitations in applying European models of nationalism to postcolonial and Asian contexts.

Nations and states

Defining the concept of the nation has proved challenging to social scientists, especially when compared with relatively standardised definitions of the state. Smith (1991: 40) defines the nation as ‘a named human population with shared myths and memories occupying an historic territory or homeland, and possessing a common public culture, a single unified economy and common legal rights and duties’. While useful, this definition appears slanted toward nations which have already achieved self-government. Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as an ‘imagined political community and which is both inherently limited and sovereign’ (1983: 6), more flexibly addresses the distinct phases of nation-building, and highlights the constructive aspect of the process. This definition allows for greater application to ‘nations-in-waiting’. For the purposes of this book, a useful working definition, which draws on others, defines a nation as ‘a political community of people, with shared characteristics, that believes it should govern itself’.¹

This definition signals the elements of a community bound by a widely shared understanding of history, a vision of the future, or by other forms of ‘national’ consciousness. Ideas of shared characteristics may vary greatly, from an ‘ethnic’ nation bound by shared descent, language, culture or religion; to a ‘civic’ nation, based on a shared territory, respect for common institutions and law, common ‘feeling’ or acceptance of national values. In practice, most nation-states contain elements of both traditions, whether elites are entirely honest about them in official discourse or not.

To be considered a nation, this community should also be a political one, in the sense that it shares a common belief in a right to govern itself. In most instances, this takes the form of a desire for self-determination, or the practice of it. As history is littered with stateless nations, a nation does not require self-determination to exist; rather, it requires a belief that it should govern itself. Without this political element, a community may be better understood as an ethnic community.

By contrast, the enduring Weberian definition of the state as an organisation that maintains a ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ seems relatively straighforward, though a working definition as a ‘set of institutions for making and enforcing authoritative decisions in a society’ (O’Neil 2006) makes it clearer. Weber’s notion of the ‘modern’ state refers to its exclusive ability to carry out actions or policies within a territory, independent of external actors or internal rivals, distinguishing it from premodern states where, for example, the Church had taxing powers and their own courts. Today, states in which internal rivals or external actors maintain control of certain territory, or effectively dispute the authority of the state, are known as ‘failing’ states.

Nation- and state-building

Nation-building refers to the processes of forming a cohesive national political community. Studies of nation-building, therefore, focus on the various discourses, programs and policies that seek to foster a national identity. These include state, political party and civil society attempts to construct unity among the various language and ethnic groups in a given polity. In Benedict Anderson’s classic formulation (1983), creating a ‘nation’ requires the articulation of a shared identity, history and heritage that transcends differences of region, ethnicity and language. In the case of anticolonial nationalism, these processes commonly commence before independence, fostered by nationalist elites in opposition to a colonial regime. Nationalist movements may be seeking independence, secession, some form of unification, or the transformation of a dynastic regime to a more recognisably ‘modern’ nation. Importantly, nation-building processes are rarely complete, and remain ongoing activities once independence is attained to reproduce national citizens of each generation.

State-building, by contrast, focuses on the tasks of building ‘functioning and durable states capable of fulfilling the essential attributes of modern statehood’ (Dinnen 2007). These include constructing or strengthening viable state institutions, establishing the rule of law, fostering institutional competence, creating a functional security sector (police and military), and providing essential services and infrastructure. Most international assistance undertaken under the auspices of ‘nation-building’ has, in fact, been directed at state-building, and the two categories are regularly conflated within the literature (Berger 2006: 6). The broader processes of nation-building (community development, identity formation, national integration) have been relatively neglected by post-conflict state-building missions. Yet the challenges facing many emerging states like Timor-Leste derive from both sources. As the 2006 crisis demonstrated, ‘nation-building’ conflicts have serious consequences for state formation. These two agendas, though conceptually distinct, are therefore linked in practice.

Elements of nation-building

Whether seen as a ‘nation-building policy set’ (Borgerhoff 2006: 104) or as ‘stepping stones to national consciousness’ (Dinnen 2007: 4), there are three critical nation-building policy areas for emerging independent states to address. These include: a shared compulsory education curricula (primarily the teaching of civic values and national history); official language policy (to facilitate intergroup communication); and transport and communications policies to ‘bridge the physical and social distance that often separates and isolates people in … geographically fragmented countries’ (Dinnen 2007: 4). These are best seen as the transformative vehicles for the transmission and reception of nation-building ‘content’ to the citizenry. The development of a national media, linking the state and civil society through a literate citizenry, is therefore also important. These policy priorities are closely linked. As Canas Mendes (2005) argues, the sine qua non of nation-building lies in the establishment of a ‘decolonised’ education system with the priority of ending illiteracy, as most forms of active political participation integral to nation-building are contingent on this development. Development of standardised national languages (Dinnen 2007) and literacy programmes for adults and children are therefore essential.

In addition to these conventional ‘cultural nationalist’ areas of official language policy and standard curricula, other important policy areas follow. These include the development of ‘state rituals’ (Canas Mendes 2005: 203–208), which reinforce ideas of a common national community, and perceptions of the state as an expression of popular sovereignty. Examples include flag raising and anthems at school, the common celebration of national days, along with honours lists commemorating past contributions and ongoing commitments to the nation. Sporting leagues and national programs in the arts, drama, music and culture are critical for integrating young citizens into a national cultural life, and sponsoring a national identification. Preservation of national heritage sites is another dimension of nation-buildng, creating the ‘built environment’ of national memory (Leach 2009), especially when used as ‘pilgrimage’ sites in compulsory schooling. Each of these strategies seek to foster and socialise an image of the nation among the populace – its symbols, rituals and values.

Some authors add the requirement of a relatively integrated modern national economy (Foster 1997), facilitating the exchange and interconnection of people and goods across the national territory, and promoting national integration. It is clear from these elements that a functioning state and adequate infrastructure spending are critical to nation-building objectives, highlighting the particular challenges for emerging states. Finally, because nation-building is concerned with the relationship between the state and its citizens, facilitating the political participation of citizens is critical. Although voting – especially in nations emerging from undemocratic pasts – is a vital act of legitimation of the state, policy frameworks should also encourage civil society organisations including NGOs and Churches to participate in the tasks of nation-building.

Nationalism: theoretical debates

Nationalism is a political ideology which holds that the primary loyalty of any individual ought be to the nation, rather than to any alternate political community (Smith 1995: 54–5). Thus, for Gellner (1983: 1), nationalism is ‘a principle which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent’. Theorists of nationalism divide into three broad schools. A key debate is whether nations are seen as simple recognitions of pre-existing ‘organic’ ethnic communities, whether they are constructed by nationalists, or whether they represent a mix of these elements.

Primordialists hold that nations have existed from time immemorial, and that division into ‘national’ communties is an inherent attribute of the human condition. Consequently, they see nations as perennial features of human societies, and the ideology of nationalism as a simple function of these ‘natural’ political communities, deriving from propensities toward tribalism. Out of fashion since the 1940s, this school has few adherents today.

By contrast, ‘modernist’ theorists see nations as the political products of nationalism itself. Nations are ‘modern’ phenomena, in the sense that they are communities ‘of intent’ (Rotberg 1966) which exceed the organic solidarities of smaller traditional communities. Nations are actively constructed by nationalists and require a level of ‘deliberate’ political, economic and linguistic development to transcend localism. For modernist theorists, ideas of national unity and a common history are works of creation and interpretation by nationalist elites, best seen as forms of collective myths, designed to foster a sense of national community for political ends. These may include extending state control over contested territory, promoting or preventing seccessionsim, or securing popular support for elites by invoking them as representatives of ‘folk’ traditions and cultures.

The understanding that a sense of national political community is not a given, and needs to be fostered by states and elites, is a centuries-old concept associated with the decline of absolute monarchies and multi-national empires in Europe. For Anderson, the decline of religious identifications in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Indigenous societies and the early colonial era
• 3 The intensification of colonial power
• 4 Decolonisation and the rise of East Timorese political parties: 1974–1975
• 5 Forced integration and the reorganisation of the nation: 1976–1989
• 6 The 1990s: The CNRT and the clandestine resistance
• 7 UNTAET and the constitutional assembly: 1999–2002
• 8 Nation-building challenges after independence
• 9 The political-military crisis: East and west
• 10 2007–2012: Divisions in the elite
• 11 2012–2015: The return of national unity
• Conclusion: The distinctive character of East Timorese nationalism
• Bibliography
• Index