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Michelle Ann Miller
Abstract
This special issue, devoted to ethnic minorities in Asia, originated with the International Symposium on Ethnic Minorities in Asia: Subjects or Citizens, held at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. As one of the most ethnically-diverse regions in the world, Asia is the site of large indigenous minority populations as well as non-indigenous minorities through ever-growing legal and illegal migrant flows. This article maps out some of the key themes explored by the contributors to this special issue in the processes and structures of accommodation for Asia’s minorities. These themes revolve around the changing meaning of citizenship in Asian contexts, state models of accommodation, constructions and representations of identity and belonging, post-colonial legacies and nation-building, the legitimacy of minority rights claims, and questions of human security. This article provides an overview of the theoretical and empirical contributions that the essays in this special issue bring to the study of ethnic minority issues in increasingly heterogeneous and divided Asian societies.
The engagement by nation-states with their ethnic minority populations normatively involves notions of citizenship and the applicability of universal human rights norms and values in addressing minority concerns. In Asia, growing ethnic diversity and racial conflict over recent years has prompted national governments in the region to rethink their programmes and priorities in dealing with minority issues. Across Southeast Asia in particular, the initiation of national democratization processes since the 1990s has ushered in new regimes and political leaders who have begun to look beyond repressive and coercive strategies to manage minority assertions of difference and towards more inclusive forms of democratic accommodation. Such democratic reforms have typically emphasized the conferral of more equal or greater rights and freedoms to ethnic minorities, including -in some cases – increased possibilities for the attainment of full and equal citizenship.
At the same time, other Asian states have resisted pressure by liberal democratic civil society forces and sections of the international community to adopt more inclusive policies towards their ethnic minorities by pursuing exclusionary nation-building projects based on uniform, majoritarian forms of citizenship. For authoritarian regimes and military dictatorships, the denial or confinement of ethnic diversity to the symbolic realm has often served to legitimize their continued rule by discrediting institutions and agendas not ratified by the state. Undemocratic governments in Asia and elsewhere have also benefitted from ethnic and racial conflict by using the pretext of social disharmony to impose rigid forms of nationalism that privilege and reinforce the hegemony of the ethnic majority (see, for example, Robison 1993, p. 42; Santamaria 2004, p. 8; Miller 2009, pp. 43–4; Thio 2010, p. 100).
The contributors to this special issue came together at the International Symposium on Ethnic Minorities in Asia: Subjects or Citizens?, convened at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore on 25–26 June 2009. They considered important questions about the rights and responsibilities of Asian governments in dealing with their ethnic minority populations. What does the status of ‘citizen’ mean for Asia’s ethnic minorities, and to what extent do minorities become ‘subjects’ when their civil and political rights may be implied but are subverted, or lack the legal certainty that citizens tend to experience? How are ethnic minorities in Asia transformed from subjects into citizens? What are the duties and obligations of states to accommodate their ethnic minorities as citizens? Under what conditions are ethnic minority rights claims justifiable? How have the post-colonial ideologies of multi-ethnic Asian states, which were often constructed as political entities along arbitrary colonial borders, influenced their conferral of citizenship to ethnic minorities? And how have the philosophies that Asian states and their ethnic minorities attach to citizenship changed over time, and in their interactions with each other?
For the authors of the essays in this special issue, an intellectual inquiry into the nature of the relationship between ethnic minority rights and citizenship is timely and relevant. The strong Southeast Asian geographical focus reflects rapidly unfolding developments in the region that have led to fundamental realignments in the nature of majority-minority relations. The forceful resurgence of ethnic minority grievances in the 1990s was brought about, in the first instance, by the fallout from the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which hit Southeast Asian countries the hardest and triggered the start of national democratization processes across much of the region. These events created multiple fissures and weak points in the authority of national governments in Southeast Asia, which generated space for different viewpoints to be heard, including the voices of marginalized minority groups (Acharya 2003; Miller 2009; Heiduk 2009).
This article canvasses the key issues in this special issue about the practices and structures of inclusion and exclusion of ethnic minorities in contemporary Asian contexts. The approaches to minority issues are highly variegated, encompassing as they do questions pertaining to citizenship, identity and belonging, minority rights, modes and models of accommodation, and human and territorial security. Taken together, however, this collection of essays shares a primary concern with the shifting meanings of citizenship and the rights and responsibilities that such a status confers to ethnic minority populations in rapidly changing Asian societies.
Because of tremendous differences in the localized contextual conditions within and between states in the region, the contributors to this special issue do not propose a ‘one size fits all’ model for the accommodation of Asia’s ethnic minorities. Rather, they explore through theoretical and empirical studies the conditions under which minority accommodation does or does not work, with success being measured by the extent to which ethnic minorities are granted rights and freedoms commensurable to those enjoyed by the ethnic majority population within a given nation-state. The essays assembled in this special issue do not purport to be wholly representative of the viewpoints of the Asian minority stakeholders and ethnic majority groups described herein, and the authors are cognizant of the dangers of casting minorities as homogenous and undifferentiated entities. Recognizing, then, that conversations about minorities normatively take into account individual as well as collective perspectives, this special issue aims to give voice to a range of views for furthering our understanding of how ethnic minorities are positioned in modern Asian societies.
The democratic principle
If there is one unifying principle upon which the contributors to this special issue broadly agree then this is the desirability of forms of minority accommodation modelled on liberal democratic principles. This general consensus mirrors mainstream perspectives among the international community and donor and lending agencies (such as The World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], the International Monetary Fund [IMF], and the Development Assistance Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD]) which promote rights-based approaches to minority accommodation within a liberal democratic framework. The underlying logic of this approach is that if the rights to freedom of expression and association are central to any meaningful definition of democracy, then it follows that liberal democracies are, or should be, more capable of achieving peaceful and inclusive forms of minority accommodation due to their tendency towards the processes of negotiation and compromise (Miller 2009, p. 7).
Among liberal democrats themselves, however, there is considerable variation in the motivations for supporting rights-based minority accommodation. For the liberal democratic left, the conferral of minority rights is often associated with a process of deepening critical aspects of democratic procedure and good governance, accompanied by the flowering of opportunities for ethnic minorities to constructively engage in state nation-building projects. For the neo-liberal right, granting additional rights and responsibilities to ethnic minorities involves a rolling back of certain state powers in order to rectify failed or failing areas of existing state authority, often via structural adjustment programmes aimed at improving economic efficiency in the provision of community services and public facilities (Crawford and Hartmann 2008, p. 12). Such economic rationalism certainly fuelled the push towards democratization (and in many cases, national decentralization processes) in Southeast Asia following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, especially in Indonesia and the Philippines, and, to a lesser extent, in Thailand. Yet many donors and lending agencies, along with reform-minded civil society actors, also saw the opportunity presented by weakened national governments to strengthen good governance at the local level and reduce social fragmentation by bringing government closer to the people. Such discourses about improving the responsiveness of governments to minority needs and expectations tend to revolve around terms like ‘empowerment’ and increasing the ‘voice’ and ‘participation’ of minorities in public life. In Asia, however, like elsewhere in the world where similar pro-minority projects have taken place, these discourses have often created the illusion of a shared language and common set of priorities when in practice there has been a mismatch between agendas that privilege the subjectivities of the ethnic majority on the one hand, and the aspirations of ethnic minorities on the other hand.
Colonial legacies
The idea of minority accommodation centred on liberal democratic principles has not always been considered desirable by the post-colonial Asian states into which ethnic minorities have found themselves incorporated. Although all of the societies in the states described within this special issue are multi-ethnic in make-up, the circumstances involved in state-formation have tended towards identification with a mono-ethnic national character. Unlike older nation-states in Europe, Asia is awash with states that inherited national borders from former colonial masters in the post-World War Two period of decolonization. Even in Thailand, where no formal colonization took place, the borders of Siam (as Thailand was called until 1939, and from 1945 to 1949) were to some extent determined by independence settlements between British and French colonial powers and the newly independent nation-states of neighbouring Malaysia, Burma/Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. The integration of ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic minority groups into these reconfigured post-colonial Southeast Asian states was neither a process of natural assimilation nor a clear catalyst for the production of a common national identity. Partly in recognition of this, and partly out of fear of a return to colonial rule, nascent post-colonial governments in the region tended to impose a homogenizing interpretation of national identity in a bid to strengthen internal cohesion while confining alternative constructions of belonging to the symbolic realm. These were the same practices that had been used in the past by colonial rulers to manage opposition and contain assertions of difference (Brown 1988, p. 55; Thio 2010, p. 100). Many post-colonial governments in the region also perpetuated, to varying degrees, the racial stereotypes, racialized divisions of labour, and racially demarcated zones of spatial settlement that had been put in place by the colonial powers before them. These ‘colonially constructed communities – and the way in which different “racial” groups were governed in differentiated ways through differentiated spaces’ provided a ‘taken-for-granted “container” of society’ that allowed for the easy reproduction of ethnic or racial distinctions by the dominant ethnic group in the post-colonial era (Bunnell and Coe 2005, pp. 844–5).
The essays in this special issue acknowledge the influence of colonialism in shaping identification to the post-colonial state and nation with the hegemonic ethnic group. In his article, Damien Kingsbury describes how the end of colonial rule in Asian countries rarely resulted in the more equitable realignment of wealth and power relations, fuelling disappointment and disaffection among ethnic minorities. This in turn led weak post-colonial governments to err towards authoritarianism in the channelling of limited state resources to the ethnic majority as a means of retaining control over state institutions, often by nurturing networks of patronage along cultural lines that excluded or suppressed minority voices.
The mono-ethnic character of particular post-colonial Southeast Asian state nation-building projects is illustrated in the country studies in this special issue. In the case of Cambodia, Stefan Ehrentraut shows how ethnic Vietnamese minorities have been marginalized by the racially-exclusionary policies and practices of the Khmer ethnic majority, despite having resided in Cambodia for several generations. Vietnamese immigrants who were once easily incorporated into Cambodia under French colonial rule have been denied citizenship and assigned the status of ‘foreign residents’ in the post-colonial era. The ongoing disenfranchisement of ethnic Vietnamese in contemporary Cambodia bears testimony to an enduring French colonial legacy in Khmer nationalist circles that plays to local fears of Vietnamese expansionism while reifying a glorious pre-colonial Khmer past. Such mono-ethnic nationalist discourses reinforce the claims to political legitimacy by Khmer ruling elites who portray themselves as protectors of Khmer culture and defenders of Cambodian territorial integrity against insidious forms of ‘Vietnameseness’.
As with the Cambodian case, various types of ethnic chauvinism remain alive and well in the state machinery in Thailand. Though Thailand is unique in having retained its absolute monarchy and independence since the thirteenth century, its modern borders were shaped by expansionist colonial powers including French Indochina and British Malaya and Burma. Thailand’s centralized system and accusations of ‘internal colonialism’ by its ethnic minorities can also be traced back to the nineteenth century when Siam negotiated treaties with Western powers and subsequently underwent centralizing structural reforms within a unitary system to consolidate the kingdom’s control over its peripheral territories. In his contribution to this special issue, Duncan McCargo explains how Malay Muslims in the southern Thai province of Pattani have sought to physically remove themselves from Thailand via secession following protracted periods of ethnic and racial ‘othering’ by their fellow Thai Buddhist citizens and state agencies. While Malay Muslims in the south hold formal citizenship, a dominant Thai national identity embodied in the shibboleth ‘Nation, Religion, King’ has created a strong political culture of opposition to their democratic accommodation at the national level.
For Indonesia and the Philippines, intensive periods of nation-building followed the end of colonial rule in order to strengthen internal unity and manage large populations of indigenous minorities. As Jacques Bertrand explains in his contribution to this special issue, both Indonesia and the Philippines were built out of ethnically-diverse and geographically-dispersed populations that became administratively integrated under colonial rule. While Indonesia’s nationalist struggle against the Dutch was waged more spectacularly than the independence revolution (first against the Spanish and then against the Americans) in the Philippines, the nationalist movements in the two countries were at least as much influenced by cooperation with colonialism as by resistance to it (Reid 2004, p. 303). After the formal transfer of sovereignty, however, both fledgling post-colonial states sought to prevent the reassertion of colonial control by adopting models of national integration that institutionally rejected ethnic diversity while symbolically celebrating it. In Indonesia, the state apparatus grew to be dominated by the country’s largest indigenous ethnic group, the Javanese, who are also mainly located on the island of Java that is home to the national administrative capital of Jakarta. In the Philippines, too, Muslim indigenous minorities in the south became marginalized by an ‘overwhelmingly Christian Philippines state system’ (Enloe 1980, pp. 155–6; see also Tuminez 2007, p. 77; Taya 2010).
An unintended consequence of the anti-colonialist movements and subsequent mono-ethnic nation-building projects in the Philippines and Indonesia was the gradual alienation of indigenous minorities from the state. Indigenous minority voices that were silenced for decades under authoritarian post-colonial governments loudly resurfaced in the 1990s with the initiation of national democratization movements and state processes of decentralization. At the heart of indigenous minority demands was the desire for greater autonomy to determine separately those functions that would enable them to protect and maintain their d...
