http://newleftreview.org/I/28/robert-curtis-malaysia-and-indonesia

ROBERT CURTIS

MALAYSIA AND INDONESIA

Malaysia itself is a new and largely factitious creation, but the Malaysian ‘affair’ has deep historical roots. It has arisen because of profoundly complex and interrelated social, economic, cultural and political developments in Malaya and Indonesia. It is far less interesting in itself than for the light it sheds on the contrasts between the two nations and the bonds that unite them. This essay is an attempt to put Malaysia into a wider context, neither simply as a disagreeable episode in the benevolent dissolution of empire, nor as a struggle between reaction and progress in South East Asia, nor as a radical step forward in the anti-colonial struggle. These are perspectives which have been abundantly elaborated in the press of the First, Second and Third Worlds and advance our real understanding very little, since they are based on abstract slogans, not on the rich densities of Asian sociology and history.

Geography, language and religion—origins of ‘Greater Indonesia’

The western part of the Indonesian archipelago and the Malayan peninsula have for at least 1500 years been an important cultural and economic communications centre for Eastern Asia. Trade between India and China was mostly carried on through the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea. From the earliest times the great cities of the archipelago have lain along this trade route, on the shores of East Sumatra, Western Malaya and North Java. In the pre-colonial and early colonial period, the main centres of wealth and power were Malacca, Banten, Batavia, Djepara, Gresik and Surabaja. Later Medan, Palembang and Singapore came into their own. For centuries there have been constant and extensive migrations between Malaya and Sumatra, Sumatra and Java, Java and Malaya, Java and Borneo. In present day Malaya there are large communities counting Javanese and Sumatran descent. Such migrations were, so far as one can tell, non-political, part of the unrecorded flow of populations all over the world.

Dense jungles and high mountain ranges have meant that the easiest form of communication in the archipelago has been the boat. The calm and shallow Java Sea has for generations been the main link between the islands of Indonesia and the Malay peninsula. Control of the seas has therefore always been the key to empire, both indigenous and European, in this part of South East Asia. Until the 19th century rise of capitalist estate agriculture and mining, the political role of the Dutch, Portuguese and British in the archipelago was not qualitatively different from that of the great Hindu-Buddhist states of Sriwijaya and Modjopahit, and the Islamic kingdoms of Malacca and Atjeh. Rivalries between these coastal powers were the dominating political facts of almost 1,000 years of history, with supremacy shifting from Sriwijaya (8th–10th century), to Modjopahit and its forerunners (12th–15th centuries), Malacca and Banten (16th century), Atjeh, Banten and Batavia (17th century), Batavia (18th century), Batavia and Singapore (19th century), and finally Singapore alone (20th century). The rivalry between Dutch and British imperialism, expressed in the competition between Batavia and Singapore, was in many ways a response to traditional economic and geographic factors. These factors operate to the present day and undoubtedly lie behind the contemporary Indonesian-Malayan confrontation. It is also worth noting that until the 19th century, the political centre of gravity usually lay within the borders of what is now Indonesia, so that the myths of Malay (Indonesian) racial greatness are associated with Java (Modjopahit) and Sumatra (Sriwijaya and Atjeh), rather than with contemporary Malaya. [1]

The unity of the area is not based simply on geographic and political factors. Most of the important ethnic groups in the area, the Malays, Atjehnese, Javanese, Sundanese, Minangkabao, Buginese and Makassarese belong to the so-called Deutero-Malay racial group and have obvious physiological and cultural traits in common. Each ethnic group has its distinct language, but all are more or less based on a Malayo-Polynesian foundation, and for centuries a flexible and simple form of market Malay has served as the area’s lingua franca. Symbolically enough, this Malay stems from the Riau Islands which form a steppingstone between Singapore and Sumatra, the heart of the economic network stretching round the western archipelago.

Religion is also a unifying factor. Malaya and Indonesia are the only Islamic countries in the Far East. The degree of ‘real’ Islam of course varies sharply from a largely traditionalist orthodoxy in Malaya, Sumatra and West Java to a subtle mélange of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam in Central and East Java.

In addition to all this there is the typical South East Asian pattern of peasant wet-rice cultivation which provides the common cultural humus on which the regional ‘civilizations’ form a brilliant, variegated effloration.

Cartography and capitalism—colonialism in Greater Indonesia

It is obvious to the historian of South East Asia that the most serious differences between contemporary Malaya and Indonesia stem from the haphazard predatoriness of Dutch and British imperialism. At one period during the Napoleonic Wars Britain even ruled Java and Sumatra, and there are still parts of south-west Sumatra near Bengkulen where the inhabitants boast English names and ancestry. [2] A glance at the division of Borneo between the British and Dutch colonial empires reveals only the most abstract cartographic partition, in no way based on the complicated pattern of trade, language and culture in that gigantic island. The heavily Chinese area of Pontianak in West Borneo has far more economic and social contact with the Chinese over the border in Sarawak and across the sea in Singapore than with the immigrant Javanese population of Bandjermassin in South Borneo. It goes without saying that the same applies to the partition of Timor (half held to this day by the Portuguese), Irian or New Guinea (divided until recently between Australia and Holland) and the Sulu Islands (a bone of contention between the Spanish-American Philippines and British North Borneo).

Though these cartographic divisions at first represented merely the ‘reach’ of colonial power and acquisitiveness, the penetration and consolidation of colonial administration gradually gave them a certain ambiguous reality. The most important divergences in the histories and cultures of the Maphilindo [3] countries are certainly to be attributed to the different types of colonial rule to which they were subjected.

Nevertheless, particularly for Indonesia with its relatively high political consciousness, the idea of a great pre-colonial past and ambitions for a greater post-colonial future do not permit an easy acceptance of these divergences. For many Indonesians these divisions do not represent a ‘natural’ variegation through historical evolution, but a sign of violation and humiliation. Hence the strong instinctive hostility in large sections of the Indonesian political public to any ‘remnant’ or symbol of that violation.

In the development of Indonesia and Malaya during the colonial period two kinds of important distinction must be made: (a) a general contrast between British and Dutch colonialism and (b) a narrower comparison between different types of Dutch rule. The most important distinction between Dutch and British colonialism, apart from striking metropolitan cultural differences, is to be found in the British policy of indirect rule, and, relatively speaking, mild interference with the rural Malay population. The British exercised their power almost wholly through local rulers, coastal sultans and up-river chieftains, most of whom previous to British intervention held precarious sway within limited territorial enclaves. These were now built up over the decades into dynasties with increasingly centralized powers and articulated administrations. In this policy the British were to some extent simply improving on the work of earlier Chinese immigrants who, in the process of pioneering the tin-mining industry, had developed their power to a point where, prior to British ascendancy, they played an important role in Malay politics. By judiciously siding with and financing rival aristocratic factions, the Chinese were able, on occasion, to exert great influence. [4] But they were never able (perhaps never willing) to assume general hegemony outside the sphere of their own immediate economic interests. Nor were the structures they supported of more than temporary solidity. For this they lacked articulated political organization and military power. The most striking innovation brought about by British intervention—we shall see the same thing happening in parts of Sumatra and Borneo—was the application of modern administration and modern armed force to Malayan politics. This form of hegemony solidified and structured the ephemeral ascendancies of local notables in a new way. Once turned into reliable vassals of the European colonial power, these notables could be sure of military support against any threats to their power from rivals or subjects.

The second key aspect of British rule, in which it outstripped the Dutch, was the massive importation of foreign labour: Chinese peasants, mainly from Fukien and Kwantung, to perform the hard menial tasks required by the tin-mining industry, and Tamils from Southern India to work the new capitalist rubber estates. Under British rule the older class of mainland Chinese capitalists continued to prosper and, in Singapore, a vigorous new class of merchant entrepreneurs rapidly sprang up. This was one of the main reasons, aside from geographical advantages and the late Dutch conversion tolaissez-faire, for Batavia’s (Djakarta’s) relative eclipse by Singapore in the 20th century.

Dutch capitalism in Indonesia was a very varied and complex organization, involving extensive estate agriculture in sugar, coffee, tea, rubber and tobacco, and mineral extraction (chiefly oil, but also tin, bauxite, gold, etc.) In the early 19th century the Dutch set up the so-called Culture System in Java. Under this system the Javanese peasantry were forced to cultivate certain export crops on their rice-land, and sell these crops at nominal prices to a royal monopoly, which then resold them at huge profit in Europe. This intensive type of agricultural exploitation not only opened the enclosed villages of Java to a modern money economy, but also involved the creation of a highly organized system of direct administration. This powerful bureaucratic structure was not seriously weakened in the era of Liberal free enterprise which followed the opening of the Suez Canal and the abolition of the royal monopoly. The general trend by which a traditional aristocracy (down to the village headmen) was turned into a salaried appendage of the colonial bureaucracy steadily continued. In this way the real social basis for Javanese feudalism was quietly undermined and destroyed. The ‘renting’ of huge areas of rice-land for commercial crop cultivation in the Liberal period heightened the disruption of Javanese rural life and increased the numbers of landless peasants. The internal security brought by Dutch rule and extensive pest control contributed to a steep rise in population in an already land-scarce island. Furthermore the system of direct rule brought the Europeans into much more immediate contact with their subjects, thus sharpening their own ‘social visibility’ to the Javanese peasantry and townspeople.

This Javanese pattern was not however followed on Sumatra, which was in fact not entirely subjugated till the eve of the First World War. Dutch economic activity was also confined to three important areas. 1) On the islands of Bangka and Billiton off the coast of east Sumatra, an important centre of tin-mining grew up. Here there developed a pattern of social and economic organization very similar to that in the Malayan tin industry. Great numbers of Chinese immigrants were employed in the lower levels of administration and in the mines under European management. 2) In north-east and south-east Sumatra major oil-fields were exploited by great international combines like Shell, Caltex, etc. Not being labour-intensive, this industry had a relatively small immediate impact on the Sumatran population. 3) The vast estate area around Medan, which had been opened up by pioneering Dutch capitalists at the turn of the century, employed huge numbers of ‘imported’ Javanese coolies. These coolies lived under conditions of near slave labour, ruthlessly exploited by the plantation elite.

The crucial factors in Sumatra’s development, which make it a bridge between the Javanese and Malayan experiences, were the relatively late date of its exploitation (virtually only in the 20th century), its mediation through immigrant groups (Chinese and Javanese), and the pattern of indirect rule maintained by the Dutch long after it had been abandoned in Java. In the pattern of this indirect rule one can detect many similarities with British policy in Malaya. In Malaya, as in Sumatra, there was originally no highly articulated feudal hierarchy as existed in the plains of Central and East Java. In the north-western and central highlands of Sumatra there were extensive areas inhabited by small, clan-bonded independent cultivators, sometimes under the nominal authority of petty notables. The swampy coastal flatlands of the north east were peopled mainly by Malay fishermen and traders under minor princelings, often of Arabic descent. As in Malaya these petty rulers were built up into pseudo-feudal institutions through military support, financial subsidy and an elaborate mystificatory ritual. The significant difference with Malaya, which made the whole East Coast Residency of Sumatra social dynamite, was that the local sultans had no genuine bonds with or authority over their subjects, who were mostly immigrants from Java or the remote central highlands. In Malaya, ruler and subject were at least ethnically and linguistically one. And British interference was fairly mild. In East Sumatra commercial tropical agriculture was pursued with an efficient ruthlessness which made the Dutch admired and envied by their rivals everywhere. In spite of these economic and social differences however, the ruling families of East Sumatra and peninsular Malaya were closely linked by marriage—indeed still are. [5]

The severe impact of Dutch colonialism on Indonesia and the depth of its economic and cultural penetration created a nationalist reaction, which, in modern organizational form, can be traced back to the largely Javanese and aristocratic Budi Utomo (1908), but which assumed significant proportions in the founding of the mainly Islamic Sarekat Islam (1912) and the Communist Party of Indonesia [PKI] (1920). Communist uprisings in 1926 and 1927 were put down with considerable ruthlessness and the party virtually liquidated. But nationalist agitation continued under the leadership of the new intelligentsia. This intelligentsia was pitifully small, formed from the children ofdélassé nobility and lower officials in the colonial bureaucracy who managed to get an education in the highly provincial Dutch school-system. Most of them earned their living in the pre-war years as journalists, professional men or in the service of the colonial government.

By 1942, when the Japanese conquered South East Asia, Indonesia had thus progressed considerably further than Malaya in economic and cultural ‘modernization’ and in social disruption and atomization. In Malaya there were no towns of any importance outside Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Penang. In Medan, Palembang, Batavia, Bandung, Semarang, Surakarta, Surabaja and Makassar, Indonesia had already an uncomfortable number of large modern cities with considerable proletarian and lumpen-proletarian populations, swelled by rural ‘enclosures’, overpopulation and the illusory promise of urban life.

Birth of a new Asia—the Japanese occupation

The Japanese occupation was the most important political event in modern South East Asian history. The ruthless deposition and humiliation of the previous feudal-colonial elite, the unscrupulous and wasteful pillaging of the South East Asian economies, the creation of elaborate modern propaganda organizations and the unavoidable promotion of local nationalist leaders to unexpectedly high political positions had immense consequences, particularly in Indonesia.

For our purposes, however, three Japanese policies are of particular significance.

1) At the beginning of the occupation the Japanese divided Indonesia and Malaya into three sections: a Malaya-Sumatra command (HQ Singapore), a Java command (HQ Batavia) both under the Japanese Army, and an Eastern Islands command (HQ Makassar) under the Japanese Navy. The three commands were ruled as virtually autonomous empires. So the political boundaries created and hallowed by Dutch and British colonialism were at a stroke of the sword abolished. Conventional ideas about ‘natural’ frontiers were sharply shaken. At the same time there was a distinct possibility that these divisions might become permanent. The Japanese clearly did not regard the old Dutch East Indies as a sacred territorial entity; but there were sufficient indications that they contemplated creating regional satellites or protectorates on the lines of Manchukuo. Then, in the middle of the occupation, Sumatra was separated from Malaya and given its own army government, sitting in Bukittinggi. Indonesia-Malaya was now split into four separate political units.

2) Because the Japanese did not understand Dutch at all, and English very little, while the Malayans and Indonesians did not understand Japanese, some common and neutral language had to be adopted and developed for administrative purposes. With Japanese encouragement, market Malay was rapidly developed into an all-purpose modern language. It is from the Japanese period, with the immense strides the language made in the politically advanced island of Java, that the Indonesian version of Malay began to dominate the older ‘Malayan’ style. [6] In the Sturm und Drang of the occupation and the subsequent turbulence of the revolution a flexible, pungent language grew up, expressed in a literary flowering of high quality and a Malayanization of popular education. The effects of this were profound, not only on Indonesia, but still more on the politically placid peninsula. The Malay language (Indonesian-style) had become a national language, symbolizing the national struggle against imperialism (the Dutch language) and regional particularism (elaborate feudal languages like Javanese and Sundanese). It is for this reason that the Indonesian language still has a very special emotional affect. It is a conquest of the liberation struggle.

3) Through the incredibly elaborate structure of political, social, youth and women’s organizations and intensive propaganda which they set up, in Java especially, the Japanese gave the new Indonesian intelligentsia invaluable experience in the mobilization of the masses. Though Japanese propaganda was strongly nativist, reactionary and often opportunist, it bore unexpected fruit. As commonly happens with propaganda produced by alien rulers, the ideas it proclaimed were absorbed in a highly selective way. Cynical slogans of Pan-Asian unity were eventually to be transformed into Afro-Asian solidarity and the mission of the Third World. The duty of ‘advanced’ Asian nations to ‘help’ their less advanced brethren reappeared unexpectedly in the strong ‘elder brother’ feelings which Indonesians in general, but Javanese in particular, were to feel after the revolution towards less activist Asian peoples.

The combined results of intensive Dutch exploitation and the special political mobilization organized by the Japanese on Java created in that island a degree of political awareness and energy which inspired the other islands in the ensuing liberation struggle against the returning British and Dutch—and which did not fail to have its resonances in the peninsula.

In the last months of the occupation the Japanese Army formed a special committee of senior Indonesian politicians on Java to make preparations for ‘independence’— `la Japan. Among other questions the members were asked their views as to the territorial extent of the new state. It is significant that at this meeting the great majority of nationalists outlined a future Indonesia which included Malaya as a normal constituent unit.

On August 14th, 1945 the two top Indonesian nationalists, Sukarno and Hatta, returned from Saigon where they had been summoned by Field-Marshal Count Terauchi. From him they received Tokyo’s final go-ahead for independence. Passing through Singapore on their way home to Djakarta, they met a number of Malayan nationalist leaders who asked them to make sure that Malaya was included in the new nation. But with their eyes on a rapidly approaching Allied victory, this request was, no doubt regretfully, turned down. The Indonesian leaders would have enough on their hands organizing their resistance to the Dutch without taking on the advancing British as well. The hope of a Greater Indonesia had to be set aside for the time being.

Malaya and the Indonesian revolution

The Indonesian Revolution was a complicated and contradictory affair. It was an extraordinarily complex phenomenon of social restratification within the larger framework of a struggle for independence and international recognition. The decayed structures maintained by the military power of the Dutch, and later the Japanese, largely disintegrated in the revolutionary maelstrom that boiled up after their departure. Everywhere the feudal class suffered.

But if there was one area where the feudal rulers suffered total annihilation rather than eclipse and obscurity, it was in the specifically Malay Sultanates of East Sumatra—precisely the group most closely attached by family ties to the Malayan ruling class. Early in 1946 a social revolution broke out around Medan among the brutalized Javanese coolie population and radical youth. A number of Medan intellectuals tried to moderate, guide or exploit this jacquerie, but it rapidly moved beyond their control. The sultanate families were decimated. Many were butchered, others tortured. A few were lucky enough to flee, either across the straits to Malaya or to other parts of Indonesia, notably Djakarta. The Dutch were quick to exploit this sanguinary affair in their anti-Republic propaganda. To this day it remains an obscure and obscured episode in the revolution. But it set up heavy shock waves all over the archipelago, especially in feudal circles. A jacquerie of this sort was something new and ominous in South East Asian history. It revealed to the feudal aristocracy the real weakness of their position, without effective outside backing, in the face of a mass-based social upheaval.

Further portents of disintegration and disaster were provided by the curious social revolution which took place north of Medan in the fanatically Islamic province of Atjeh. Here again a petty nobility was physically decimated by a popular movement, led this time by strongly orthodox traditionalistulamas (Islamic elders and savants). The hostility between the nobility and the ulamas was an old one, rooted in the history of Atjeh. The Dutch had successfully used the nobility to help put down the last ultra ulama resistance in the colonial war of conquest. This had been neither forgotten nor forgiven. Moreover the nobility had assumed rights and privileges, partly originating from pre-Islamic customary law and partly from Dutch support, which the ulamas regarded as a standing challenge to Islam (this was especially in the field of inheritance and marriage). Though the nobility itself was completely Islamic it steadily resisted any ‘Islamization’ which would narrow its prerogatives.

The resonances of this revolution were also felt across the water. The Malayan sultanate families were in some respects comparable to the Atjehnese nobility. As in pre-war Atjeh, in Malaya the feudal families exerted both political and religious authority. They effectively controlled the religious patronage in their territories, and were recognized formally as the highest Islamic spiritual authorities. However the example of Atjeh now showed that in the nationalist age the feudal ruling class could by no means rely for ever on a politically neutral ulama class to bolster their continued supremacy. Indeed at the present moment the only significant opposition in Malaya to Tungku Abdul Rahman’s régime consists not of a left-wing socialist organization, but of the strongly Islamic and nativist Pan-Malayan Islamic Party. This of course is understandable in view of the overwhelmingly rural character of Malay society.

In spite of these ominous events in Atjeh and Medan, there was inevitably a good deal of largely racial sympathy in the Malay States for the Indonesian struggle for independence. This was considerably heightened by the fact that on the national level the leadership of the independence struggle was maintained, with some precariousness, by a ‘moderate’ pro-Western intellectual clique from whom the feudal nobility had little to fear. The dominant element in the Indonesian national elite in the years 1948–53 had an outlook not very dissimilar to that embraced by ‘progressive’ Malayans: more or less sympathy with Western European culture and values, more or less dependence on America and Western Europe for ‘economic progress’, and the hope of a rapid stabilization of social disorder and unrest by the absorption of the younger generation into a mildly reformist and dirigiste bureaucracy—or the army. For this reason a good deal of help was given to Indonesia during the revolution by various Malayan and Chinese groups, the Malayans usually contributing propaganda and the Chinese goods. Extensive smuggling of arms, medicine and luxury goods was carried on, through the Dutch blockade, between Singapore and the smaller ports on Sumatra’s east coast.

During this period the Malays in the peninsula remained, however, relatively quiescent. Malaya was still a colony in which the effective polarities were represented by the British colonial bureaucracy and army and the Chinese communist guerillas. The success of the British in this encounter undoubtedly lay as much as anything in the narrowly ethnic character of the anti-colonial opposition. This allowed them to gain control of the predominantly Malay-populated rural areas. But it was during the Emergency that the British began to bring forward and offer opportunities to the UMNO(United Malays National Organization) and the MCA (Malayan Chinese Association), representing in Malaya a conservative alliance of Chinese bourgeoisie (industrialists, merchants and professional men), the traditional Malay ruling class and bureaucratic elements strongly under British influence. To this alliance in-dependence passed, without much of a nationalist struggle, in 1957. The strategists of imperial ‘withdrawal’ had foreseen that it would be easier to maintain what was important to them (Malayan sterling earnings, military bases and a cultural outpost) with a supple tactic of military alliance, economic ‘aid’ and political and cultural association, than with the cruder and more expensive forms of direct rule.

Euphoria in Thermidor: Malayan-Indonesian relations 1950–54

In these years the trajectories of Malayan and Indonesian history seemed to pass closely by one another, and relations between the two nations were at their warmest. In the light of later events this period provides some ironic reflections on the volatility of international solidarity. Two factors principally brought about the friendly atmosphere between Kuala Lumpur and Djakarta. Indonesia’s armed struggle had won her considerable prestige in South East Asia (all the greater for a general ignorance of the real nature and effectiveness of this struggle). Aside from China and Vietnam, Indonesia was the only East Asian state which could make a reasonable claim to have extracted its freedom from the unwilling hands of its former European colonial rulers. The other more important states, such as India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma, the Philippines and Cambodia all have something ambiguous in their independence histories. The prestige of the new republic was particularly marked in Malaya where, until the onset of the present crisis, it was possible to find photographs of Indonesia’s national duumvirate, Sukarno and Hatta, in many small rural homes where the name of Tungku Abdul Rahman might be something less than a household word. This was not simply in the Indonesianized coastal towns, or in the largely Minangkabao-colonized state of Negri Sembilan. It was a much more general sign of growing Malayan ethnic and racial pride. This is not to say that any serious segment of the politically conscious Malay population ever contemplated an Indonesian type of struggle against the British. But as culture heroes the two Indonesian leaders helped to crystallize impatience with the daily facts of subordination to Chinese and European power.

Secondly the special character of the Indonesian governments in this period helped to enhance the favourable Malayan image of Indonesia. The dominant fact of Indonesian politics during these post-revolutionary years was the political ascendancy of the friends and adherents of Vice-President Hatta. The rise of this group is a phenomenon too complex to enter into here. It is perhaps enough to say that its internal strength rested on four basic factors: Hatta’s personal prestige as architect of the final independence settlement with the Dutch; American support for his definitely pro-Western group; the Korean War boom which inflated world prices for rubber, oil and tin—allowing Indonesia a degree of economic stability and relative affluence which she was never thereafter to enjoy; and last but not least, effective control (until late 1952) over the highly heterogeneous and politicized Indonesian army. The Indonesian left was also very weak after the bloody suppression of the Communist Party and its allies in the so-called Madiun Affair (1948).

The ‘Hatta group’ within the Indonesian political elite did a good deal to extend Indonesian prestige and influence in Malaya. It did, discreetly, what it could to rescue the victims of the social revolutions of Sumatra and Java. It was sympathetic, if faintly patronizing, towards Malayan nationalism, which it regarded as genuine and valuable, if as yet largely infantile and far too strongly subservient to British and Chinese interests. Within the limits set by the radical changes brought about by war and revolution, and by unpleasant recollections of intense capitalist exploitation in the past, it was ‘favourable’ to West European and American ‘investment’. In Malayan eyes, the figures of Hatta and of Natsir, head of the powerful Islamic Masjumi party, expressed sym-pathetically a respectable, tropicalized Islam. Sukarno, then at the nadir of his political power and influence, was sufficiently remote and legendary to arouse nothing but complaisant sentiments. The most influential politicians in Djakarta were largely north and west Sumatrans, whose local traditions and histories made them more attractive and comprehensible to the Malayan political public than the largely Javanese opposition.

The most important links between the two countries were in fact educational and cultural. With the end of the war of independence in 1949, a steady expansion of Indonesian cultural influence in Malaya could be observed. It was not simply that a considerable number of Malayan intellectuals made the pilgrimage to Djakarta. Through a flood of Indonesian books, magazines, broadcasts, personal communications and contacts, the modern Indonesian consciousness burst into the stagnant traditionalist Malayan world—which had hitherto been dominated by a placid Islamic pietism in the villages, and in the clerkly class by the ersatz modernism of British colonial education. For the first time the modern world was mediated through the Malay language, not simply in textbooks, but through the whole apparatus of modern communications. Everything seeped through: the growing militancy of official Indonesian nationalism on the world scene; the multifarious propaganda of a vast national drive for mass education; the violent personal conflicts of the new Indonesian writers, working out in their writings the upheavals of the revolutionary years; and the ebullient burgeoning philistinism of Djakarta’s new ruling class, expressed in countless ‘Hawaiian-style’ or ‘Latin-American’ pop-songs (often with a genuine folk-Indonesian base), sentimental film comedies, and popular romances and journalism.

It was less the quality of this highly heterogeneous invasion from Djakarta and Medan that was important, than the fact that an alternative consciousness was being offered to an alien British culture and an atrophied Islamic tradition. Until very recently the great majority of Malay-language books in Malayan bookshops were Indonesian in origin or inspiration. So were most of the popular songs. One bizarre consequence of this is that the Malaysian national anthem is (with altered words of course) the long-established Indonesian popular song Terang Bulan or Full Moon, which has long beguiled the romantic bourgeoisie of Djakarta. [7] The obverse, and less attractive side of this cultural development has been a certain complacency on the part of Indonesian intellectuals towards their Malayan colleagues, who tend to be regarded as rather dim country cousins, or, more recently, as unscrupulous looters of Indonesia’s cultural heritage.

The revolution in paralysis: Malayan-Indonesian relations during the Indonesian political crisis

During this period the whole character of relations between the two countries underwent radical changes and an understanding of these changes is essential to a full comprehension of the present situation. As always, the dynamic factor was Indonesia’s internal political struggle. This struggle was and is immensely complicated, and can only be sketched here. But it is essential for any but the most conventional conception of the Malaysian affair.

1. The intelligentsia: dilemmas of nationalism

In some ways the most important single fact about Indonesian politics is that it is predominantly a matter of cliques. Partly because this type of politics, though it exists in Europe and America, is far less important and obsessive there, and partly because of our experience of 50 years of ideological politics with highly organized parties in highly articulated capitalist societies, the concrete consequences of clique-ism in Indonesia are seldom appreciated. Virtually all Indonesian parties, with the partial exception of the PKI, were created as the personal appendages of certain influential and respected individuals. The strength of the parties has generally varied to a large degree with the fortunes (in every sense of the word) and personalities of their leaders. The special atmosphere of clique politics is difficult to convey to those who have not experienced it at first hand.

One needs, to comprehend it, a thorough knowledge of the complex linguistic, educational, marital and career backgrounds of half a hundred major political figures. In Indonesia a man’s Javanism, his wife’s relations, the type of Dutch school he was in (even the year he was admitted), the town in which he worked during the revolution, may all, on occasion, be more important than his working ideology or party. It is possible to point to great numbers of Indonesians whose careers in any ideological perspective are totally incomprehensible, but who yet cannot be dismissed as more opportunistic than the run of politicians the world over.

As a result of extreme Dutch conservatism and parsimony in expanding education in the Indies, the modern Indonesian intelligentsia of prewar years was extremely small, to be numbered in the hundreds rather than the hundreds of thousands, as in India. In 1940 altogether 37 Indonesians graduated from institutions of higher learning—this from a population estimated at about 70,000,000. Nor were these chosen few really well educated. Few had any satisfactory mastery of the methods and ideas they had acquired. Their learning was more accumulated than integrated. Nevertheless the small size of this intelligentsia, and its overwhelming importance, faute de mieux, in an Indonesia emerging into the modern world, gave it a power and freedom of manoeuvre vis-`-vis the rest of the population, which, though paralleled in many countries of the Third World, can rarely have been exceeded. This ‘freedom’ permitted the Indonesian elite rapid shifts in policy and violent ideological recrimination without really endangering its position or seriously affecting the society. Nor should one forget that most of these leaders came from feudal or clerkly families. Even the most radical ideological attitudes usually lie thinly over a strong feudal substratum. This feudal element is one very important factor in explaining the curious cohesiveness of the elite in spite of its deep ideological dissensions; it also sheds light on its shared, if usually unspoken attitude towards the masses, which is paternalist to say the least. [8]

The older generation of the nationalist intelligentsia still has a strong esprit de corps, which is further strengthened by a common attendance at certain privileged Dutch schools, and by the fact that many still think in Dutch or a Dutchified Indonesian. This cuts them off from the rest of the nation, but enhances their own solidarity. Furthermore a great deal of intermarriage links politicians of very different political persuasions. This partly arises from common membership in a very self-conscious elite. [9] But historically it was a pattern which developed when young nationalist intellectuals, looking for wives who could accompany them without discredit into the modern world, inevitably found them among the sisters of their class-mates.

From the start the Indonesian intelligentsia suffered from ambiguous apperceptions of the relationship between their own regional cultural heritage and personality, and their nationalism. ‘Indonesian-ness’ being largely a ‘project’ rather than a fact, the possibilities for its concrete manifestation were numerous and varied. The spectrum of ‘solutions’ ranged from a complete Open Door to ‘Western influence’ through various vague mélanges of Western ideas and ‘Indonesian folk’ attributes to a strongly nativist regionalism. In other words the virtually blank Indonesian personality-of-the-future could be filled out on a number of different philosophical and linguistic bases. This formulation seems highly abstract until one key sociological fact is added. This is that the only region with a powerfully articulated cultural complex capable in any way of being opposed to the Outside is Central and East Java, the home of the ethnic Javanese, who also constitute almost 50 per cent of the Indonesian population. Accordingly the ‘Indonesian project’ has always turned on the Javanese question. The actual political power of the Javanese at any one moment regulated (or disturbed) the entire national consciousness-of-itself. In the early revolutionary period when spokesmen for the Outer Islands were politically ascendant, the projected Indonesian personality was generally Western-oriented. Regional and ethnic conflicts were at a minimum outside Java. [10]The great majority of Sumatran intellectuals were thus able to feel at home in and competent to contribute to the developing Indo-nesian personality. But when about 1954 the strength of the Javanese in Djakarta began steadily to rise, the whole concept of National Individuality underwent corresponding shifts, stressing Javanese traditional or pseudo-traditional elements. Inevitably the non-Javanese intellectuals (mainly Sumatrans) felt increasingly ‘provincial’, both as a result of being removed from the seats of cultural power, and as their own contribution to the creation of a national personality grew more ambiguous. Put crudely, in Indonesia the concept of nationalism is intimately bound up with the balance of power among the ethnic groups represented within the elite. This in turn means that Indonesia, as an idea, may depend less on the difficult mélange of many regional traditions with ‘modernism’ (which would tend to inhibit cultural and political expansion) than on the development of a modern Javanism (whose reach would be limited only by military and political factors).

2. The political public: Indonesian society in impasse

The internal conflicts of the elite reflect deeper divisions within Indonesian society—ethnic, religious, ideological, educational, even familial. So great are the divisions, so new and fragile the political unity, that decisive social or political action is rare, and ambiguous when it occurs. [11] Indonesian society is in many respects a dozen different societies with autonomous lives of their own, linked by the great metropolitan centres (mainly on Java). Sociological and economic divisions follow the great contours left by geography and ethnology. Sumatra is Indonesia’s great exporting area. The immense needs of a poverty-stricken rural and avid, affluent urban population make Java the great importer. Everything that Sumatra earns tends to be swallowed in annually increasing subventions of foreign rice and luxuries to Djakarta, Semarang and Surabaja. Religious demarcation also follows geography. The Christian areas lie in North Sumatra, North Celebes and the Eastern islands of Ambon, Flores and Timor. Orthodox Islam has its strongholds in the egalitarian, sparsely populated rural communities of Sumatra, Borneo and West (Sundanese) Java. [12] The Javanese, while nominally Islamic, in fact hold tenaciously to a highly syncretistic and mystical Hindu-Buddhist tradition with a strong animist foundation. The density of the wet-rice cultivating populations of Java helps to create a communal, collectivist style of life. In the Outer Islands a (till recently) flourishing commercial peasant agriculture in rubber and copra encouraged an individualistic and acquisitive ‘capitalist’ psychology.

What industry exists is virtually all concentrated in Java, except for the great mining centres of Sumatra and Borneo. Even there the working proletariat is largely of Javanese origin. But generally speaking the Indonesian proletariat is relatively small, with strong ties to its village origins. The role of an entrepreneurial middle-class is almost entirely filled by Chinese. Such non-Chinese bourgeoisie as Indonesia boasts is largely confined to parasitic groups on the margin of the state apparatus within which probably 70 per cent of Indonesia’s educated make their living. In Indonesia power creates wealth, not wealth power. It is this that makes the internal politics of Indonesia at once so violent and obsessive in tone, and yet so un-radical in practice. Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose.

The class struggle as such has very little meaning. Bourgeois roles are filled by Chinese, and anti-Chinese feeling is deep and widespread. But the hatred is traditional, racial and far too diffuse to be termed a class antagonism pure and simple. Above the Chinese, the new intelligentsia live the luxurious and philistine lives typical of Third World elites. But their numbers are few, and if they exploit anyone directly it is the officious aid-givers of America, Russia, the Chinese People’s Republic and Japan. Little is extracted from the masses, and little is given them. This would not be so disastrous a situation if Java’s inexorable self-asphyxiation were not proceeding at so rapid a pace.

3. Sources of power

As in most Third World States, effective power lies, more nakedly than in the West, on bureaucratic advantage, arms and the charisma of public personalities. This means that the bureaucracy, the political parties, the armed forces and two or three individuals are the significant factors in the political game. Leaving aside the last category for the moment, it is worth saying something about the three others. All power-groups in Indonesia face one fundamental dilemma. Only two possible roads to power lie open in the profusion of religious, economic, ethnic, and other divisions. 1) A serious ideological attempt to bridge these divisions. 2) An exploitation of these divisions, with the objective of power on a particularistic basis.

The first course was attempted in various ways by the political parties and by the Army with its ‘military as the soul of the nation’ doctrines. But since in Indonesia ideology has rarely or ever been able to compete with more traditional and sociologically-rooted loyalties, such attempts have usually ended in paralysis. ‘National’ organizations have gradually either become paralyzed by internal conflict or have disintegrated into smaller, more ‘real’ units. For example the Indonesian Nationalist Party has virtually abandoned any effective claims to being anything but a Javanese party. To a lesser degree the same is true of the PKI. Before it was banned, the Moslem Masjumi party was being reduced to a precarious anti-Javanese coalition. This narrowing of the bases of power certainly helped to consolidate the various organizations’ effective power over their own members and vis-`-vis their rivals. But with dangerous consequences. Increasingly the battle was foughtnot between rival national organizations, but between ‘real’ political power-groupings, the PNI and PKI becoming openly Java-parties, and the Masjumi and its allies retiring to the Outer Islands. The Army too was riven by regional conflict.

The reasons for the slow rise of Javanese power in the years 1952–57 are many and complex. Perhaps the most important was that President Sukarno threw his weight behind the Java-parties.

4. Sukarno

As in many Third World states, politics in Indonesia developed under the shadow of a great charismatic leader. But whereas in more socially and ethnically homogeneous nations the power of the charismatic leader unfolds unambiguously as the personalized embodiment of that homogeneity (and its mobilizer), in Indonesia the power of Sukarno has always rested on the heterogeneity of his country, the stalemate between conflicting interests and sections, parties and factions. Until about 1952 Sukarno represented the ‘project’ Indonesia as did no other Indonesian. This was partly due to his own oratorical powers, political acumen, extraordinary energy and long nationalist record, but also to the fact that he consciously and successfully presented himself as a figure above the political battle, symbolizing the wholeness of the Indonesian nation, not its parts. While this position won him immense prestige and affection, it deprived him of effective power. By exercising choices, by trying to utilize his position and authority, he was bound to bring himself increasingly into the fray, and align himself with a group of interests. This was in effect what happened from 1952 onwards. The President’s weight was thrown decisively against Islamic, Outer Island, and pro-Western interests (both idealistic and parasitic). This intervention tipped the internal balance of power and directly contributed to the anti-Java rebellions of 1957–58 in Sumatra and the Celebes.

The Malayan-Indonesian conflict 1956–1964

It is here that we can pick up the threads of Malayan-Indonesian relations. Political developments in Indonesia did not pass unnoticed. The new trend was inevitably distasteful to the Malayan political elite. Those elements most congenial to them—for religious, economic, ideological and familial reasons—were gradually being removed from their once dominating positions. While in Malaya the local Communist party was being hunted down in the jungles, in Indonesia it was steadily rising in power and influence.

1. The regional rebellion 1957–58

When the ‘regional crisis’ began to develop in 1956 its most typical symptom was the creation of regional governments virtually independent of Djakarta by local army commanders in various parts of Sumatra, Celebes and South Borneo. These commanders were in most cases local men, backed by local politicians and to a lesser extent the local population. Virtually all these rebel strongholds were export-surplus areas, and having now made themselves autonomous of the central government, proceeded to carry out extensive trading operations with Malaya and Singapore. Since this deprived Djakarta and Java of large quantities of much needed foreign exchange and imported goods, it was naturally regarded as treason. The Malayan political elite made little secret of its sympathy with the rebels and did nothing to stop what Djakarta regarded as subversive activities. Quite the reverse. By early 1958 the situation had become intolerable. The Central Government accordingly undertook military action against Sumatra and the Celebes, with gratifyingly successful results. However there was little doubt that the rebels had been aided, not only by Taiwan and the American Central Intelligence Agency, but also by Malaya. The rebels found not only physical sanctuary, but also financial and military aid across the Straits of Malacca. [13] A dangerous situation had arisen in which Sumatra, formerly firmly in the Java-Djakarta orbit, threatened to move into that of Malaya-Singapore. There was no lack of Sumatran voices to declare openly that Sumatra would be far better off in partnership with Malaya than with the Indonesian Central Government.

The military success of the campaigns of March-April 1958 settled this question for the time being. The Javanese troops which were landed to quell the rebellion proved able to confine enemy operations to minor guerilla activities in the interior of Sumatra, and, after rather bloodier fighting, a similar success was attained in the Celebes. The great oil-fields at Pakanbaru, Pangkalan Brandan and Palembang were restored intact to government control, and the immediate goal of military operations was secured. The Straits of Malacca were more or less successfully sealed off from the interior, so that smuggling was drastically reduced.

But the affair certainly did not endear the Malayan Government to Indonesia.

2. Irian Barat 1961–63

The Malayan role in Indonesia’s conflict with Holland over Irian Barat (West New Guinea) was also hardly one to endear Kuala Lumpur to Djakarta. By any reasonably dispassionate assessment the Indonesian case in the dispute was a very strong one. Indeed this is now tacitly admitted by the Dutch. But the rights and wrongs of the matter concern us less than the curious role of the Malayan Government in the affair. It is an indication of the mental gulf that separated their thinking from that of the Indonesians that Tungku Abdul Rahman should have offered, on his own initiative, to mediate the Indonesian-Dutch dispute. The substance of his proposals (a moderately lengthy period of UN control of the disputed territory) was in itself highly offensive to the Indonesians, who considered that Irian should have been surrendered together with the rest of the Netherlands East Indies at the time of the transfer of Sovereignty. The very proposition of such terms implied that the Malayans were more concerned with a bloodless compromise between the two parties than with any genuine conviction of the rightness of Indonesia’s case. That Tungku Abdul Rahman, as a fellow Malay and Asian, should have made such proposals at all, ‘arbitrating’ or mediating between the colonial power and its former victim added insult to injury. It does not follow that the Tungku’s intervention was not sincere. That is possible—and unimportant. What is important is that it was stupid. He had no effective purchase on either Dutch or Indonesians. It revealed sharply the limits of his political imagination and experience. It helped further to forfeit whatever remaining sympathy and confidence the Indonesian government might still have harboured towards him.

3. Malaysia: dilemmas of Indonesian foreign policy

We have already seen that relations between Malaya and Indonesia were at a low point by the time Irian Barat was finally handed over to Indonesia in May 1963. Indonesian suspicions of Malaya had in any case long been aroused by the terms of the British-Malayan military agreement, which, while technically allowing Malaya to remain outside SEATO, yet, in the case of an ill-defined ‘threat’ to Malayan or Common-wealth interests, permitted ill-defined use of Malayan bases.

Then in December 1962 a revolt in Brunei broke out under the leadership of Azahari. Many aspects of this revolt remain obscure, particularly Indonesia’s role. But the importance of the affair lies less in the actual course of events (the revolt was rapidly suppressed), than in the fact that the revolt brought into sharp relief the ambiguity of the colonial boundaries of post-colonial Asia. The charge has been made with some justice that Indonesia, before the revolt, had never really had much to say against British control over North Borneo. Only when it was to be joined to Malaysia did the protests begin. This argument has a certain force. One can of course argue that since Indonesia was previously fully engaged with the Dutch, she was unwilling to antagonize the British unnecessarily. But I think this misses the point. As long as North Borneo remained a British colony its future continued to be problematical. Since ‘direct’ colonialism was everywhere becoming a thing of the past, the situation and position of North Borneo was neither permanent nor strong. But when the project of Malaysia was brought forward, the time for a ‘definitive’ solution appeared to have come. The territorial boundaries of British North Borneo which had been established [14] by the vagaries of European imperialist expansion were now called into urgent question. The accession of North Borneo to Malaysia implied the permanent settlement of this question along colonial lines.

We do not need, I think, to take very seriously the claims that have diplomatically been made in Djakarta that ‘all’ that Indonesia wants is a free expression of opinion in North Borneo, between joining Malaysia and remaining independent. It is common talk in Indonesia that the real aim is for Djakarta not Kuala Lumpur to control North Borneo. And certainly it is hard to see North Borneo as a genuinely independent state. Everything points to its eventual incorporation into some larger South East Asian unit. In the contemporary situation the only realistic alternatives are Malaysia or Indonesia. The disingenuousness of the Indonesian government on this point is perhaps to be regretted, but only because the language of diplomatic propaganda is by convention so remote from political realities. In complementary fashion no one seriously believes British propaganda about the formation of the Malaysian Federation. In the referendum of September 1963 the population of Singapore was offered the choice between different types of Malaysian Federation, not between accepting or rejecting a federation at all. [15] A fortiori, any ‘official’ expression of public opinion in North Borneo was bound to be a little suspect. a) No open statement of the real alternatives has ever been presented, and Djakarta has been prevented from demanding these for the reasons outlined above. b) It is very doubtful if the inhabitants are at the moment remotely capable of grasping what these real alternatives would involve. c) It was and is completely unlikely that the British and Malayans would ever permit the kind of Indonesian propaganda campaign which would be necessary for a ‘free fight’ for ‘the minds and hearts’ of the local population. This, of course, is readily understandable from the British and Malayan, but hardly from the Indonesian, point of view.

To understand the Indonesian perspective more fully, one must recognize the following key elements in it. 1) A strong feeling that the present boundaries of Indonesia are colonially determined and that the ‘Malaysia deal’ reinforces this. 2) The historical memory and legend of a Java-based Greater Malay Empire in South East Asia. 3) An image of the Malaysian government as a cynical alliance of feudal aristocracy and Chinese bourgeoisie. 4) A natural desire for revenge on the Malayan Government which it regards as having, on at least two occasions, actively conspired against Indonesia’s interests. 5) A belief, held especially in Army circles, that only Indonesian control over North Borneo and Malaya will keep Chinese power in South East Asia to a minimum. 6) The determination to remove Western power and influence, especially in its neo-colonialist form, from South East Asia. 7) A definite fear of encirclement.

Much play has been made in the British press of the ludicrous disin-genuousness of this claim, since Indonesia has over 100 million people as compared to Malaysia’s 10 million. This play in itself is somewhat ludicrous and disingenuous. No Indonesian in his right mind is afraid of Malaysia. What Indonesians do fear and resent is their encirclement by global Anglo-Saxon power. American fleets control much of Indonesia’s waters. British and American submarines patrol Indonesia’s coasts. American, and to a lesser extent British, airpower dominates the skies of South East Asia in spite of a growing Indonesian airforce. British power is still entrenched in Malaya and North Borneo. American influence is still dominant in the Philippines. To the south, Anglo-Saxon Australia regularly exhibits its blustering dislike of Indonesia. Furthermore Indonesia is completely vulnerable to outside penetration. Communications are extremely slow and poorly developed. There are virtually no natural defences. [16]

These are the perspectives which govern much of Indonesia’s foreign policy. Ever since the Bandung Conference of unaligned nations in 1955 Indonesia has been among the most active members of the Third World, organizing countless conferences, games, festivals and rallies, and assuming an energetic role at the UN. Largely because the whole tone of Third World ideas was set in the late forties and early fifties by India, who moreover had given Indonesia considerable support in her struggle for independence, Indonesia’s foreign policy was until late in the fifties dominated by the specifically Indian style of international diplomacy. This style was compounded of covert ‘intellectual’ sympathy with the West, admiration for Russian economic progress and radical propaganda, and a calculated attempt to mediate the tensions and polarities of the Cold War, thereby winning political and economic advantages which the supremacy of either Great Power would have forfeited. The most important aspect of this perspective was its triangularity—the Third World as mediator and alternative to the capitalist West and socialist or communist East.

But late in the fifties and increasingly in the sixties, primarily through the formulations of President Sukarno, the emphasis in Indonesian foreign policy has shifted to a bipolar view: a conception of the world divided between what Sukarno calls the ‘old established’ and ‘new emerging’ forces, and our sagacious realists ‘the haves’ and ‘the have-nots’. In some respects this change has resolved certain psychological difficulties. It does much to clarify the hitherto ambiguous position of the Soviet Union—at once European and ‘new emerging’. Though for diplomatic reasons Indonesia has never gone so far as openly to say so, most elite Indonesians effectively regard the Russians as conservative and established. This shift, of course, largely corresponds to historical realities, the decline of the Cold War in its old terms, and the growing Russo-American Entente. This development has undermined the respectability of the Indian Third World policy. Russia and the US no longer, if they ever did, require Third World mediation of their disagreements. The Third World’s freedom to play off the competing Great Powers threatens to be sharply reduced. This in turn promises a decline in military and economic subventions. And in a UN dominated by the new Entente Cordiale, from which China is excluded, the importance of the new emerging forces could be seriously diminished.

The new two-way polarity not only better explains the realities of Indonesia’s world position to many Indonesians, but it expresses very well the ambitions of at least two of the most powerful political forces in the country—the President and the Communist Party. Something has already been said about the personality of Sukarno, but a brief sketch of his biography may help to fill in the outlines of this remarkable figure. He was born in 1899 [17] , went to the best Dutch school in Surabaja, and graduated from the Bandung Technical Institute in the middle twenties. In 1929 he was arrested and later tried for seditious political activities, and from then till 1942 was mostly in prison or exile in remote parts of the archipelago. During the Japanese period he was the powerless, if somewhat complaisant prisoner of the Japanese propaganda organization. From 1945 to 1964, nearly two decades, he has been the dominating figure of Indonesian politics, and the moulder of the Indonesian nationalist consciousness. A man of intense energy and ambition, he was kept from his mid-twenties till his mid-forties in virtual inactivity and silence. He is a man obsessed with youth, with the wasted years. He is also one of the few older nationalists who never underwent the softening experience of residence in Europe. The ‘Thermidorean’ phase of the Indonesian revolution, the period of stabilization and reorganization, was psychologically frustrating to him, except in so far as it permitted him the luxuries of petty bourgeois display, seigneurial sexuality, and pseudo-feudal ceremony, to which previously only the Dutch had had access. Observers in Djakarta can testify to the frenetic energy with which these prizes of youthful ambition are still pursued. In no disciplined intellectual sense is Sukarno a revolutionary. He has no understanding of the radical transformationof a society or an economy. He is obsessed with the revolutionary élan in itself, the intoxication of headlong activity, the excitement of living dangerously—the thrill of a political surf-ride. The apocalyptic polarities of the ‘new emerging’ and ‘old established’ [18] forces fit the President’s personality far better than the cautious moralizing arbitrations implied by the Indian world view.

With the success of the campaign for Irian Barat some new target for Indonesia’s revolutionary energies was necessary. Undoubtedly there is also a personal dream of a Greater Indonesia, [19]which, added to bitter feelings about the role of Malaya in the regional rebellion, has contributed to President Sukarno’s willingness to take on the ‘toothless lion’ of British imperialism.

The Indonesian Communist Party has strongly supported the anti-Malaysia policy from the start. The party has long been divided between ‘doves’ and ‘hawks’, [20] those who are more or less prepared to work within the present radical nationalist ambience and those for whom the present régime is intolerable and must be utterly transformed. Because the general intellectual calibre of middle and lower party officials is not high, nor its organization very compact, the party is peculiarly liable to fissiparous tendencies. This stems less from factionalism within its elite, than from its contamination by and absorption into provincial and local ruling circles, and the undermining of its ideological unity by regional and ethnic animosities. The internal economic situation in Indonesia has for long been extremely bad. Nor has the complacent self-enrichment of sections of the intelligentsia aroused much affection among the urban masses. The political dilemma which has strained the PKI’s internal cohesion has been how to face this situation. The party is certainly not strong enough to rebel against the régime over which Sukarno and the Army preside. It has been tempted and flattered by the positions, mainly of honour rather than power, which Sukarno has given it. Nevertheless there has been a high degree of frustration in the party at what is virtually acquiescence in a steady social and economic disintegration. The Malaysian issue has provided a revolutionary focus for the party and has been warmly welcomed. Not only is the whole Malayan régime the perfect and detestable image of comprador neo-colonialism in Communist eyes, but it enables the party both to co-operate with the Sukarno government and express its own authentic radicalism.

It is its radical external posture that coincides with Chinese foreign policy interests. There is no reason to suppose that the Chinese particularly approve of the internal policy stance of the PKI. The Russians on the other hand, who must approve of the PKI’s internal conformity to bourgeois nationalism, are sufficiently irritated by the PKI’s strong criticism of their international policies to have no hesitation in arming the strongly anti-PKI Indonesian Army with every conceivable form of modern weaponry. [21] But enough has perhaps been said to show that the anti-Malaysian policy of the PKI is not only ideologically sound but responds to the serious internal conflicts with which it is faced, and its impotence vis-`-vis the Indonesian government.

The Indonesian army, after a very chequered career, assumed in March 1957, following President Sukarno’s declaration of Martial Law, a dominant position in Indonesian politics, which its successful operations against the rebels in 1958 considerably enhanced. Its power was further increased by its virtual monopoly of the economic institutions nationalized from the Dutch in December 1957. This huge source of patronage did much to buttress and maintain central authority in the crucial period of the rebellion when many powerful army officers wavered as to which side they would support. However, the experience of virtual army dictatorship, especially in the Outer Islands, from 1957 to May 1963 (when martial law was lifted) did little to encourage popular esteem for the army or increase the army’s self-confidence in its ability to fulfil its ‘save the nation’ role. Though it controlled the entire economy, through inexperience, factionalism, corruption and what Mao aptly terms ‘commandism’, the army only helped to accelerate an already alarming inflation, decline in exports and breakdown in basic communications. The whole claim of the army to a decisive position in Indonesian politics was threatened by this catastrophic development.

To some extent the prestige of the army was, of course, raised by its role in the Irian Barat campaign. But the purely diplomatic dénouement to this campaign rapidly deflated military pretensions. The army was now faced with a serious political and psychological crisis. President Sukarno’s revocation of martial law undermined the legal basis for army dictatorship. The end of the rebellion and the absorption of Irian Barat offered the army no active revolutionary role to play, and allowed the detested parties to re-assert their claims to political predominance. Moreover the end of the emergency and the appalling economic situation inevitably created demands for drastic cuts in the army share of the budget (some 75 per cent). The internal army balance of power, which depends as much as anything else on the distribution of patronage, was naturally called into question by these developments. Further-more, mobilization for the Irian Barat campaign had created a new cluster of military units who were psychologically keyed up for action. If funds were to be saved for important non-military projects, these units would have to be demobilized. The history of the Republic, however, shows that almost every major political crisis has been touched off by the issue of ‘demobilization’ in one form or another. The army has long since learned that it is much safer to keep superfluous military units on the pay-roll than to let them loose and dissatisfied on the outside world.

The conclusion that most observers draw is that here again Malaysia answered to profound internal problems which the army faced and faces—and to which Malaysia itself is largely incidental. Malaysia gave the army a new raison d’etre, permitted something like Martial Law to be re-established, maintained the military share of the budget at a high level, siphoned off the Irian Barat trainees to Borneo, kept the heroic role of the army to the fore, and allowed this essentially conservative organization to compete in radical terms with the President and the PKI. Of course in the long run the economic drain imposed by the struggle against British power in Malaya will create even more difficult internal economic conditions in Indonesia, which will in turn make the Army’s long-term hope of ‘stabilization’ still more remote. But armies rarely ponder their own long-term futures and the Indonesian army is no exception. It may be added that the experience of expelling the Dutch was by no means wasted on the army, and the prospect of patronage becoming available by the expropriation of fairly considerable British interests in Indonesia was doubtless not ungratifying.

The point of this summary analysis should perhaps be stressed once again. Indonesian attitudes and actions in the Malaysian crisis are the resultant of a complex interaction of historical and social forces, internal political considerations, personality factors and ideological dilemmas within a certain international framework. There is no need to be astonished or censorious about what after all is the stuff of politics. The fact that all major Indonesian political groups stand to gain (in the short run) from the present policy towards Malaysia says nothing about its justice or rationality. It simply helps to explain its existence.

On the other side of the Straits of Malacca the same sort of considerations have operated. No serious observer doubts that the main reason for the creation of the Federation of Malaysia was the need to neutralize the threat of a radical Chinese Singapore, dominating the peninsula and the waterways of South East Asia. The inclusion of the North Borneo territories, exclusive of Brunei, provides the non-Chinese with a thin numerical majority, which the markedly higher Malay birthrate should stabilize satisfactorily within the next 20 years. [22] Through the Federation the Malay ruling class, and the established Chinese bourgeoisie, expected to gain control of South East Asia’s greatest seaport and trading centre, and contain the radical Chinese threat. From the British point of view, Malaysia ‘solved’ the awkward problem of Singapore’s political future without jeopardizing British economic interests or military power.

Singapore and the Chinese Question

It is now perhaps the moment to look more closely at the role of Singapore in the whole development of Malayan-Indonesian relations. Singapore is, of course, the largest and richest Chinese city outside China. Unlike the Chinese, say, of Java, the population of Singapore is hardly assimilated at all to local culture. Only a small minority is deeply influenced by British education. Chinese cultural stamina is here, as everywhere else, astonishing. As in other parts of South East Asia, the Chinese in Singapore regard the indigenous Malay population with contempt, more or less good-humoured, according to their own fortunes. Indeed the pursuit of personal and familial advancement, together with a certain sentimental nativism, are the characteristic political traits of the South East Asian Chinese. It is true, of course, that in Singapore there has long been a significant radical element, and that the Malayan Communist Party has been almost exclusively Chinese in membership. But the fact remains that Singapore presents an image of ‘free-fight’ capitalism of a remarkably pure lustre, and since the Chinese form 75 per cent of the city’s population that capitalism is predominantly Chinese. Certainly the capitalist ethic has penetrated city life to an astonishing degree.

Vis-`-vis Malaya, Singapore is in an ambiguous position. It does and will dominate it strategically, and to a lesser extent economically. But it depends on it almost completely for its water supply and for certain foodstuffs and raw materials. The new men of power in Singapore, managers, lawyers, party professionals, etc, are basically out of sympathy with the conservative alliance of Malay feudalism and long-entrenched Chinese inland capitalism that holds power in Kuala Lumpur.

Vis-`-vis Indonesia, Singapore’s position is still more ambiguous. For years now Singapore has acted as international ‘receiver’ for smugglers from all over the archipelago. From Singapore all kinds of goods from guns to cosmetics have flowed to the Indonesian Government and its adversaries—for a price. Often a very high one. Indonesians of almost every political hue unite in suspicion and dislike of the grip which the Singapore Chinese held on the Indonesian economy till September 1963. A very high percentage of all Indonesian exports were shipped to Singapore and there sorted, graded, even processed before being sent elsewhere. Virtually all Indonesian imports also passed through Singapore. This monopoly was accentuated after the Dutch were removed as the main agents of Indonesia’s foreign trade. The inexperience (and often venality) of Indonesia’s entrepreneurs and government purchasers brought untold fortunes to their Chinese agents in Singapore. Great numbers of high and middle-rank Indonesians in and out of government had until quite recently their Chinese contacts across the Straits—to handle concealed accounts, help evade currency restrictions, offer short-term loans at very high rates, etc. No one who has not lived in Djakarta can conceive the degree of Singapore’s power in that metropolis. This dominance tended to increase with the general decline of Indonesia’s economic position in the last few years.

Although the complete break with Singapore in September 1963 was probably largely impulsive, it has long been pressed by certain key politicians in Djakarta as the only way to break the Chinese-British grip on Indonesia’s economy, and to shock the embryo Indonesian managerial and merchant class into breaking their parasitic dependence on superior Chinese expertise and business acumen.[23]

It is in the light of Indonesia’s real reasons for hostility to Singapore that the irony of subsequent events becomes clear. Chinese capitalism in Singapore is a permanent threat to Indonesian ambitions, even now that trade relations have been broken off, and even if Singapore should one day become part of a Greater Indonesia. In Indonesia itself the power of the Chinese has never been greater than today, though its operations are confined to the maintenance and expansion of immediate Chinese interests. There is probably not a single Indonesian (or, for that matter, Malayan) politician who does not in some way depend on Chinese financial backing. The great state enterprises are run in name by Indonesians in the interests of the nation. In fact they are run by Chinese, mainly in the interests of the Chinese bourgeoisie and the Djakarta ruling elite. The bad faith and complicity of this arrangement, however, has if anything accentuated the traditional hostility between high-level Indonesians and Chinese. Each despises the other’s venality. And in the small towns and larger villages the Chinese traders also control economic life. Here too hatred is endemic, based on fear and contempt on both sides. The antagonism is an old one, but it has increased in virulence in this century. In Java alone there have been major anti-Chinese movements in 1942, 1945, 1946, 1956, 1960, and 1963. At any moment they may occur again. The more serious the internal situation, the more ‘visible’ Chinese wealth and alien-ness become. There are of course many groups, particularly in the Indonesian Army, who are only too willing to exploit anti-Chinese feeling for their own ends.

Thus both in Indonesia and Malaya (as recent riots have shown) the Chinese face serious racial hostility. This the local régime may temporarily encourage or discourage according to its conception of its own interests. In neither country are the prospects of the Chinese very favourable in the long run, unless they receive solid support from their motherland. Everywhere in South East Asia the collapse of colonial rule has both profited and endangered the position of the Chinese. The complete political security provided by the colonial Dutch, French, American and British governments has now been removed. For the first time a politically inexperienced, arriviste Chinese bourgeoisie has had to fend for itself in the bewildering maze of post-war nationalist politics. On the other hand, especially in Indonesia, the withdrawal of European capital in many sectors left a vacuum which local nationalists were unable adequately to fill. This is turn afforded the Chinese wide opportunities for expanding and consolidating their economic strength. The great need has been for political power to back and protect this new position. Since it could no longer come from Europe, and could be bought from the local regime only on a temporary basis, it had to be sought permanently in Peking. It is primarily for this reason (though racial sentiment is also very important) that the great majority of South East Asian Chinese are psychologically tied to Peking. Whatever ideological outlook a particular Chinese in South East Asia may have, the necessity of Mainland backing is essential. Thus even the most haut bourgeois Chinese contribute funds to Peking’s foreign exchange reserves, may send their children to be educated in China, and assume a certain interest in the motherland’s cultural drives and overseas propaganda.

Yet at the same time the conservative capitalist Chinese groups in Malaya and Singapore support the strongly pro-Western Tungku Abdul Rahman and look to the British for support, though they know very well that the Tungku hopes to see the Malays supplant them as masters of the economy, and that British power in Malaya is a very shaky reed to rely upon. Leftist Chinese groups call for support for Sukarno, though Indonesia has a far more violent anti-Chinese record than Malaya, and the regime in Djakarta could by no stretch of the imagination be called socialist. The position of the Chinese in South East Asia depends on its balkanization, which a strong Greater Indonesia would gravely threaten.

Peking faces an even more curious dilemma. To protect its overseas ‘nationals’, to maintain the flow of valuable foreign exchange which they provide, everything must be done to support the bourgeoisies of Djakarta and Singapore alike. To do this, however, Peking would have to discourage Greater Indonesia ambitions, and local attempts to destroy Chinese economic power. On the other hand her immediate foreign policy requirements—resistance to Russo-American encirclement—compel her to cultivate Indonesia’s friendship. This means swallowing endemic anti-Chinese activities and propaganda, and the threat of periodic pogroms.

The Malayan elite is in the uneasy position of disliking and fearing the Chinese, yet trying to maintain good relations internally for fear of economic and political collapse should a really anti-Chinese popular movement start. At the same time it is at loggerheads with Indonesia, whose attitudes towards the Chinese are virtually identical. Indonesia, on the international level very close to Peking, because both desire the elimination of Anglo-Saxon influence in South East Asia, understands its basic geopolitical interests very well. Not only does it harass its local Chinese, but it has no intention of allowing China to pre-empt its position in the archipelago—if it can help it. The catalogue of such conflicts and dilemmas could be continued indefinitely. It would show once again the immense delicacy of the whole political situation. One serious change (like for example the creation of Malaysia) may upset the whole balance, and put a complex chain reaction into motion, whose ultimate consequences are almost totally unpredictable.

Conclusions

In this essay I have deliberately avoided giving any chronological résumé of the day-to-day developments of the Malaysian crisis, partly because this has been done in many academic and journalistic publications, but also because my main purpose has been to put the conflict as a whole into historical and sociological perspective. At this moment, it is impossible to predict its outcome. While the origins and genesis of the Malayan-Indonesian imbroglio lie within the histories, politics and sociologies of the two states, the final dénouement of the present confrontation will depend not only on these factors but on international developments which lie largely outside any one nation’s control. Enough has been said, however, to suggest that there are certain fundamental aspects of the conflict which no serious appraisal of it can overlook.

Firstly, the present crisis has deep roots in a long and complex relationship between Malaya and Indonesia. It is not simply a capricious product of Indonesian aggression; Malaya has itself in the recent past assisted armed subversion against the Indonesian government. The antagonism between the two states has a solid historical, political and economic foundation. Secondly, present Indonesian policy towards Malaysia is not a purely personal whim of Sukarno’s. It reflects pressures from almost every section, whether Right or Left, of the political spectrum in Djakarta. I have tried to show that there is practically no important political group in Indonesia which, for reasons of its own, does not support the anti-Malaysian campaign. This does not mean that there is any wide mass support for the policy—or opposition to it. Nor is there likely to be. Thirdly, time stands on Indonesia’s side. Unless there is a settlement, no regime after Sukarno is likely to be strong enough to resist for long the pressures for continuing the confrontation in something like its present form. The North Bornean frontier is virtually indefensible. Malaya is extremely unlikely to be able to stand on her own feet militarily. At the same time Britain’s real power in South East Asia is severely limited and depends fundamentally on American goodwill. A British attack on Indonesia would not only not eliminate the military threat posed by Indonesia, but would certainly generate a strong reaction in Indonesia in support of Sukarno and against the West. Both in the UN and in the Third World at large the consequences would be calamitous. Suez stands as a lesson and a warning.

[1] This, of course, does not mean that in Malaya as everywhere else in the archipelago there are not strong local loyalties. But Malaya, as such, has no historical claims to greatness, aside from the Sultanate of Malacca.

[2] Traffic in Indonesia travels on the left-hand side of the road, in Holland on the right. The reason for this seems to be Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles’ brief rule in Batavia during the Napoleonic era.

[3] Ma=Malaya, Phil=the Philippines, Indo=Indonesia.

[4] In these ad hoc arrangements one can perhaps detect the seeds of the contemporary alliance between Malay feudalism and Chinese capital in Malaysia.

[5] For example a daughter of the ex-Sultan of Langkat (just north of Medan) is married to the present Sultan of Johore.

[6] The difference between the two languages is roughly comparable to that between English and American.

[7] A favourite Indonesian taunt to Malaysia has thus become the constant singing of Terang Bulan on public occasions.

[8] G. McT. Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y., 1952, p. 32.

[9] It also helps to explain the indefinable ‘out-ness’ of the PKI in the closed world of Djakarta politics. Most of the present PKI leaders do not fall into this half-feudal ‘in-group’.

[10] The ‘absorption’ of Western-ism wholesale posed severe cultural and psychological problems mainly for the Javanese.

[11] Significantly the most ruthless political action in the Republic’s history was the suppression of the PKIand its allies in the 1948 Madiun Affair, in which the PKI’s ambiguous relationship to the old nationalist ‘club’ was clearly an important factor.

[12] West Java, of course, is an exception, being much more densely populated than Sumatra but less so than East and Central Java.

[13] British aid to the rebels was more discreet than that of the CIA, but was nevertheless widely known in Malaya and Indonesia. See James Mossman, Rebels in Paradise, Jonathan Cape, London, 1961, p. 230.

[14] And accepted, de facto, for a long time.

[15] It should be noted that there has been no referendum of any kind either in Malaya or in the Borneo territories. In Borneo public opinion was ‘sampled’ by the British Cobbold Commission, whose findings, hardly surprisingly, indicated warm support for the new Federation. On the Singapore referendum see Milton E. Osborne, Singapore and Malaysia, Data Paper No. 53, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. 1964, pp. 23–28.

[16] This is not to say that Indonesia has no ‘aggressive’ intentions. It is clear that she has, though whether one chooses to speak of aggression or liberation depends on one’s perspectives. What one should try to imagine is a situation where, say, Japanese fleets patrolled the Channel, and the Irish and North Seas; Japanese airbases stood on the shores of Holland, Denmark, Iceland and France; and Southern Ireland was ruled by anti-British Okinawan settlers. With the best will in the world, one suspects the British would be mildly uneasy.

[17] Officially in 1901.

[18] Note the significant adjectives.

[19] Perhaps the fact that Azahari fought for Indonesia during the revolution contributed to a certain sentimental touch. But one should remember that in spite of Indonesian support for Azahari, it is two years since his revolt broke out, and his government has still to be recognized by Djakarta—an indication that he is not taken seriously.

[20] This, of course, does not mean ‘pro-Moscow’ and ‘pro-Peking’ factions.

[21] In passing one might detect here a long-term Russian aim: a powerful anti-Chinese quadrilateral, with Russia containing China in the North, India to the West, Japan to the East and Indonesia in the South.

[22] It should be noted that the operative word is non-Chinese. There is good reason to believe that among the local Dayak populations the Malays are as much resented as the Chinese, if not more so. This anti-Malay feeling has apparently increased since the formation of Malaysia, with an influx of Malay officials and attempts to tighten Kuala Lumpur’s grip on the area. It is evident from some of Tungku Abdul Rahman’s remarks that he had for a long time very little idea of these feelings, and offended Dayak leaders by saying e.g. that Malays and Dyaks are the same race. See Osborne, op. cit. p. 65.

[23] Of course it was also intended as a blow to the whole prosperity of Singapore and thus of the new Federation which Indonesia hoped to destroy.

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