The PaciŽc Review, Vol. 15 No.

4 2002: 555–570

Why might constructed nationalist

and ethnic ideologies come into
confrontation with each other?1

David Brown

Abstract The paper develops a model for examining ethnic conict in

Southeast Asia, using Indonesia as an illustrative case. Ethnic conict is
explained as arising not out of the facts of ethno-cultural pluralism, but rather
out of the disentwining of the three visions of the nation: as civic community,
as ethno-cultural community and as multicultural community. This disentwin-
ing occurs particularly in the context of pressures for democratization. Three
aspects of politics are identiŽed as promoting the disentwining so as to engen-
der the weakening of the civic nationalist vision, and thence the confrontation
between a majoritarian ethno-cultural nationalism and a minority-focused
multicultural nationalism. First, the spread of ideas related to democracy gen-
erates the spread of liberal forms of the three nationalist visions, alongside the
authoritarian forms, and puts the spotlight on the divergences between these
visions. Ideas of democracy are then highjacked by ethnic majorities claiming
majority rights, and by ethnic minorities claiming minority rights. Second, the
patrimonial basis for politics in much of Southeast Asia means that ethnic
majorities and minorities alike perceive democratization as the search for
responsive patrons, rather than as the search for civic equality. Third, civic
nationalism is further weakened by the erosion of faith in the social justice
promises of state elites. While these features of politics promote ethnic ten-
sions, they also generate countervailing factors that ensure the political dis-
unity of ethnic minorities, and thereby inhibit the extent of ethnic conict.

Keywords Ethnic; Southeast Asia; nationalism; patrimonialism; democra-

tization.

David Brown is Senior Lecturer and Head of the School of Politics and International Studies,
Murdoch University, Western Australia. His books include The State and Ethnic Politics
in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 1994 and 1996) and Contemporary Nationalism: Civic,
Ethnocultural and Multicultural Politics (Routledge, 2000). He is currently working on a
book on the impact of globalization upon national identities in Southeast Asia.

Address: School of Politics and International Studies, Murdoch University, Murdoch, WA

6150, Australia. E-mail: dbrown@central.murdoch.edu.au

The PaciŽc Review

ISSN 0951–2748 print/ISSN 1470–1332 online © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/095127402100002943 1
556 The PaciŽc Review

Introduction
The aim of this paper is to outline one possible framework within which
to examine the incidence of ethnic minority movements for autonomy or
secession in Southeast Asia.2 This framework suggests that separatist
ethnic nationalism develops as a result of tensions between three diver-
gent ideological perceptions of the existing nation-state: the ethno-cultural
nation, the civic nation and the multicultural nation.3
There seem to be two main ways of posing the question about ethnic
conicts such as those in Aceh in Indonesia, Mindanau in the Philippines,
and in the Karen, Shan, Chin and other regions of Burma. Either we ask
‘Why are ethnic minority movements against nation-states so strong?’ Or
we ask ‘Why are contemporary nation-states sometimes so weak?’ The
Žrst approach is probably the most frequently adopted, but it has tended
to generate arguments implying that ethnic attachments built on myths of
common ancestry are in some way necessarily more powerful than are
attachments to other forms of community, including the nation-state (as
in Connor 1994). Such arguments are problematic not because of any
conceptual incoherence, but rather because they make it more difŽcult to
explain the remarkable cohesion of many multi-ethnic nation-states. So
the approach adopted here is that of seeking to explain why nation-states
are sometimes successful in attracting the afŽliation of their citizens; and
why they might sometimes fail in this respect so as to generate the alien-
ation of their ethnic minorities and the mobilization of ethnic minority
separatist nationalisms.
The model begins by suggesting that the strength or weakness of nation-
states does not depend upon the facts of their linguistic, religious or racial
composition, and is not determined by the facts of their earlier history;
but rather depends upon the visions of community which comprise the
core element in the contemporary political consciousness of their citizens.
These visions of community refer to the objective historical, territorial
and cultural facts, but they are not in any direct sense derived from or
determined by such facts. Rather it is the ambiguities and complexities of
the diverse potential identity markers in each country that serve to sustain
the development of differing ideological interpretations of nationhood.
These visions of national community derive in part from the nationalist
ideologies that are promoted by state elites, and in part from the construc-
tions of identity that emerge in civil society interactions. This diversity in
their sites of origin helps to account for the emergence of divergent visions
of community within each country.

The construction of contemporary nation-states

The idea that a group of people might constitute a ‘nation’, who on that
basis could have some right to political autonomy, sometimes rests mainly
on their claim to common ethnic ancestry and similar ethno-cultural attrib-
 D. Brown: Constructed nationalist and ethnic ideologies 557

utes, and sometimes mainly on the claim that they share a particular terri-
tory and a common pride in its public institutions and public way of life.
These two bases for national identity are usually referred to, respectively,
as Cultural (or ethno-cultural) Nationalism and Civic Nationalism. Ethno-
cultural nationalism depicts the nation as a community of (ethno-) cultural
sameness, while civic nationalism depicts the nation as a community of
equal citizens. Until recently, it had been assumed that claims to nation-
hood would employ one or both of these ideas, but in the last few decades
the tensioned relationship between the two has generated a further basis
for national identity, that of Multiculturalism. Multicultural Nationalism
depicts the nation as a community made up of diverse ethnic segments,
all united by their common commitment to the public institutions of the
state that guarantee their equal status.
The countries of Southeast Asia vary as to which of the three forms of
national identity (civic, ethno-cultural or multicultural) is dominant. Most
of them can point to a linguistic, religious or racial community, which is
sometimes portrayed as the core of the nation (Burman or Buddhist in
Burma, Javanese or Islamic in Indonesia, Malay or Muslim in Malaysia,
Chinese or Confucianist in Singapore, Tagalog or Christian in the
Philippines, etc.). However, all of them also chose at various times both
to celebrate their ethnic diversity, and to proclaim the territorial basis of
their equal and ethnically-blind constitutional citizenship rights. State elites
and civil society activists employ these differing constructions of the nation
in different contexts, and the distinctions frequently remain implicit and
opaque. Indeed, it is the blurring and interweaving of these potentially
incompatible visions of community that sustains national cohesion and
state legitimacy.
Nationalism is particularly useful as a legitimatory ideology for author-
itarian regimes, since it allows them to depict the diverse individuals and
groups within their society as comprising one community with one will.
The deŽning feature of authoritarian regimes is not so much their reliance
on coercion, as their concern to justify coercion by the claim that they
constitute the sole legitimate articulator and defender of the common
interest or will of the people as a whole.4 They vary markedly in the way
they deŽne that will – to restore order, to promote religious virtue, to
pursue economic development, etc. – but in each case they depict them-
selves as the experts who can deliver what the singular entity, ‘the people’,
want or need. They thereby identify the interests of the whole commu-
nity with their own elite interests. But Žrst they must reconstruct the
socially fragmented society as the ideologically cohesive society.
This can be illustrated in the Indonesian case. Disunity, which accom-
panied Indonesian agitation against Dutch and Japanese colonialism,
meant that those political leaders who sought to lead the emergent nation
were unable to portray themselves as merely reecting an established
consensual national will, which arose from the common Islamic culture of
558 The PaciŽc Review

the overwhelming majority.5 They therefore promoted a version of

Indonesian national identity that did not depict it is as cohering around
a majority core. Instead they stressed its social fragmentation. They empha-
sized that Indonesia consisted of diverse Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist,
Catholic and Protestant communities, and that it also consisted of hundreds
of different language communities. Once the nation had been deŽned as
fragmented in this way, it followed that it could only be uniŽed from above
by an authoritarian regime, which could reconcile the conicting demands
and interests by rising above them. Power was depicted in Javanese terms
as the ability to transform disunity into oneness (Anderson 1972; Jones
1995). The nationalist leaders therefore asserted a Pancasila vision of
national identity, which superimposed an ideological unity on social and
political diversity and marginalized Islam.6 This policy of stressing the
centrifugal fragmentation of the country, rather than pointing to its
centripetal core, was undoubtedly successful in legitimating an increas-
ingly authoritarian Sukarno regime, and subsequently the Suharto regime,
both of which lacked close ties to their mass constituencies. Pancasila was
interpreted and employed by these regimes to reinvent Indonesia, so that
the ethnically fragmented society could be depicted in monistic terms.
Indonesia’s authoritarian regimes portrayed this collectivism in three over-
lapping ways: Žrst, as a unitary civic nation whose common good
demanded limitations on individual citizenship rights; second, as an ethno-
cultural nation built historically around its status core (the secular, aris-
tocratic ( priyayi), Javanese elites); and third, as a multicultural nation
whose very diversity demanded corporatist management, so that ‘unity in
diversity’ (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika) became the ideological slogan that justi-
Žed administrative centralization.
But nationalism is not inherently collectivist in this way. Indeed, as Liah
Greenfeld has argued, nationalism began as a doctrine that rejected the
idea that there was a mass of people within the society who deserved
lesser status and rights than those accorded to an elite (Greenfeld 1992).
In her examination of civic nationalism, she shows how it developed as
the novel idea that each and every individual member of the community
deserved the superior status that had hitherto been granted only to the
elite. The nation was deŽned as the community of equal individuals, each
having the same status, liberties, rights and duties of citizenship by virtue
of their membership of the nation. Thus, rather than legitimating author-
itarian rule, this individualist civic nationalism provides the basis for liberal
democracy. Moreover, the distinction applies equally to ethno-cultural
nationalism and to multicultural nationalism, in that they can each be
articulated in either an authoritarian–collectivist form, or a demo-
cratic–pluralistic form.
Ethno-cultural nationalism indicates that full status and membership of
the national community be given only to those possessing the required
ethnic attributes. In its authoritarian form, this is interpreted to mean that
 D. Brown: Constructed nationalist and ethnic ideologies 559

the state treats the other residents of its territory as second-class citizens,
either excluding them from the full rights and status of citizenship, or
employing the state machinery to enforce assimilation. In the Indonesian
case, authoritarian ethno-cultural nationalism employed mythologizations
of history to depict the Javanese as the ethnic core, while recruitment into
elite positions came, to some degree, to be conditional on ‘Javanization’.7
In the democratic version of ethno-cultural nationalism, the nation is still
deŽned in terms of the culture of its ethnic core, but that culture is itself
now deŽned in such a way as to make assimilation voluntary, attractive
and feasible. Thus racial deŽnitions of the ethnic core tend to give way
to linguistic, religious and cultural deŽnitions, which are more open to
assimilation; and minority deŽnitions of the ethnic core begin to give way
to majority deŽnitions. Moreover, instead of relying on the state machinery
to force the pace of assimilation, the state relies more on the self-inter-
ests of ethnic minorities to acquire the high-status values of the ethnic
majority, or on the assimilationist implications of intermarriage.
In the Indonesian case, the democratic form of ethno-cultural nationalism
involves the depiction of the nation as identiŽed by an Islamic majority,
which is portrayed as a diverse religio-cultural core able to accommodate
the heterogeneity of Islam and to respect the rights of non-Muslims. But the
pluralism of the majority-based ethno-culture means that democratization
involves the articulation of both tolerant and intolerant strands of Islam, and
there is no inevitability that democratic pluralistic tolerance will be victori-
ous. The only inevitability is that contentions develop between the tolerant
and intolerant strands of Islam: ‘all of Indonesian politics is in ux
now . . . and Islamic factions are shifting and rolling as they seek a new place
in a political order’ (Mydans 1999).8 The contentions arise because democ-
ratization generates rising expectations among the Islamic majority that the
government will at last give full recognition and status to Islamic values and
interests as the core ingredient of the country’s national identity.
In the case of multicultural nationalism, the authoritarian version is that
in which the state creates institutions that legitimate each of the diverse
ethnic identities within the country, but doing so in order to facilitate their
centralized corporatist control, and to emasculate and co-opt ethnic
minority elites.9 In its democratic version, by contrast, multicultural nation-
alism involves the state seeking to reect the ethnic diversity of the society
in its own institutional structures, precisely so that the distribution of
power and resources are organized on a decentralized and fair ‘ethnic
arithmetic’ basis. In contemporary Indonesia, this was reected in Wahid’s
devolution of powers to the provinces; in the reopening of debate
concerning the possibility of federalism and of further forms of autonomy
for Papua and Aceh; and in the concerns to reassure Christian minorities
that their rights would be respected under the new regime.
Finally, the civic nationalist vision stresses that all citizens are granted
equal status irrespective of ethnic attributes, on the sole condition that they
560 The PaciŽc Review

grant loyalty to the public institutions of the territorial community. Civic

nationalism is sometimes depicted as being merely a camouage for the
promotion of the interests and values of ethno-cultural majorities. But this
seems to be mistaken in that it takes for granted that the majority, which
is mobilized in democracy, is necessarily mobilized on an ethnic basis; or
that the language adopted for public affairs necessarily promotes ethnic
domination. It is certainly true that the civic ideal of ethnic neutrality may
be as rarely achieved as is the ethno-cultural ideal of ethnic exclusivity, but
that does not prevent it from offering a powerful and distinct vision, and
from engendering public policies that have the potential to inhibit ethnic
discrimination and enhance trans-ethnic civic integration.
In its authoritarian version, civic nationalism is interpreted by state elites
to claim that they themselves are the object of patriotic loyalty, and that
it is they who articulate the true will of the collective nation.10 In its demo-
cratic version, civic nationalism celebrates the autonomy of the pluralistic
civil society, and calls for the equal rights of each citizen to be protected
by the state, through universalistic, ethnically colour-blind laws and insti-
tutions. It was, for example, the call by students for such civic rights that
triggered the Indonesian transition.11

The tensions between competing nationalist visions, and the

crucial role of civic nationalism
This mapping of the three ways in which citizens might envision the nation-
state, and the potential for such visions to be articulated both in author-
itarian–collectivist and in democratic–pluralist forms, begins to offer one
way of understanding ethnic conict. Instead of seeing it simply as a
confrontation between distinct ethno-cultural groups having potentially
incompatible values and goals – or between Staatsvolk and ethnic minori-
ties – ethnic conict can begin to be seen as a manifestation of the tensions
arising from the articulation of divergent, and potentially incompatible,
visions of national community.
The multicultural vision of a nation that celebrates its ethnic diversity,
the ethno-cultural vision of a nation assimilating into its ethnic core, and
the civic vision of an ethnically-blind community, differ markedly from
each other in their diagnoses of contemporary problems and in their ethical
prescriptions for solutions. This means they also differ as to whom they
consider as members of the nation. Multicultural nationalism frequently
grants members of ethnic minorities higher status than that given to ethnic
majorities, in the sense of advocating the group rights of the former, so
as to rectify and compensate for the prior dominance of the latter. For
ethno-cultural nationalism, it is clear that those who have assimilated or
inherited the dominant ethnically-based culture deserve higher status than
those who have not. For civic nationalism, it is those who have transferred
their political loyalties from ethnic minority and majority communities,
 D. Brown: Constructed nationalist and ethnic ideologies 561

and given them to the state, who deserve the full rights and status of citi-
zens. Clearly, if a situation arises in which each of these three distinct
visions are articulated strongly by different individuals within the same
country, with this ideological confrontation being highlighted by the public
institutions of state and civil society, the resultant tensions have the
capacity to engender political confrontation, violent or otherwise.
But there is no inevitability about such confrontation, since it is by no
means certain that the three nationalist visions will become disentwined
so as to come into confrontation with each other, nor that the tensions
between them will be prioritized and made explicit in public fora. Even
then, the political consequences would seem to depend signiŽcantly upon
how the state responds.
The entwining of the different nationalist visions was until recently most
widespread and successful in those developed nation-states whose nation-
hood had, at least in part, evolved over several centuries. There was often
no clear distinction, in the understanding of most citizens, between visions
of progress towards civic integration, cultural assimilation and inter-ethnic
tolerance. In Britain, for example, citizens of Wales could in the past portray
themselves, interchangeably or concurrently, as Welsh, English and British.
Even in some countries constructed by colonialism, potential tensions
between the divergent visions have been defused by widespread ambiguities
and confusions as to communities of identity. In Singapore, for example,
political tensions over national identity have been constrained by the blur-
ring of the distinctions between the different portrayals of the nation; its
depiction as united by a common Asian culture, as segmented by its distinct
racial cultures, and as distinguished by its ethnically-blind meritocratic
norms. State elites can frequently promote such ambiguities, and thus inhibit
the development of political confrontations over national identity, by mix-
ing the visions in their rhetoric and propaganda, and by articulating goals of
‘equality’, ‘fairness’ or ‘justice’ to which proponents of each nationalist
vision can adhere by interpreting their meanings differently.
It is unlikely, however, that governments can do anything to prevent
some degree of disentwining of the three visions (for reasons, and in ways,
which are discussed below). The danger is clear: that an ethnic majority
begins to be mobilized around an ethno-cultural vision of the nation-state
which grants that majority higher status than its ethnic minorities; while
ethnic minorities, for their part, begin to mobilize around a multicultural
nationalist vision that prioritizes ethnic minority rights. This is indeed a
widespread phenomenon; but political stability and national unity might
not be threatened in those cases where the third vision, that of civic nation-
alism, has sufŽcient currency and resonance to act as a buffer between
ethnic majoritarian and ethnic minority visions. Where civic nationalism
is strong, the tensions between ethnic majority expectations embodied in
ethno-cultural nationalism, and ethnic minority expectations embodied in
multicultural nationalism, can be to some extent ameliorated and absorbed
562 The PaciŽc Review

by civic norms and structures. In other words, where state institutions are
built primarily on civic norms of citizenship equality or individual rights,
then the ethno-cultural claims to enhanced ethnic majority status, and the
multicultural claims to enhanced ethnic minority status, can both be
directed towards seeking reforms in those civic institutions, rather than
being aimed directly at each other. But if the civic nationalist vision is
weak, then there is little to prevent the trend towards confrontation
between majority rights expectations and minority rights expectations.
Once ethnic minorities lose faith that the state can promote civic nation-
alism, they come to perceive the state as the agency of the ethnic majority,
and therefore lose faith in its multiculturalist promises of status or
autonomy to ethnic minorities. The weakening of civic nationalism thus
leads in turn to the erosion of multicultural nationalism. Loss of faith in
the state means that calls for ethnic autonomy become radicalized. Thus
what begins as ethnic minority support for a multicultural nationalist vision
can easily become rearticulated by radical activists as ethnic minority
support for a separatist ethno-cultural nationalist goal.12
It is this possibility that determines the way in which this paper poses
the question as to the incidence of ethnic conict. Why, in the Southeast
Asian context, have ideas of ethno-cultural nationalism and multicultural
nationalism frequently become counterposed, and why has civic nation-
alism become weakened so that it fails to act as an effective buffer?
The answer is in three parts: Žrst, the impact of ideas of democracy;
second, the impact of the patrimonial element in politics; and third, the
impact of the failure of state elites to fulŽl their various social justice
promises.

The problem of democracy

While the norms, institutions and practices associated with democracy have
failed to attain dominance in any of the Southeast Asian states, the various
processes of globalization have nevertheless ensured that democratic ideas
are readily available as political resources both to civil society activists and
to state elites; and are indeed deeply embedded as elements of the ethical
ideals by which politics and politicians are critically evaluated. In so far as
democracy promises the politics of tolerant debate and ordered competi-
tion, it would seem that it might function to reduce inter-ethnic confronta-
tion and violence. But democracy can also exacerbate ethnic tensions.
First, civil society demands for the democratization of relatively author-
itarian regimes involves the articulation of new democratic forms of
civic, ethno-cultural and multicultural nationalist visions. These demo-
cratic visions are likely to be articulated in different ways in various civil
society sites, and during the transition process they exist alongside the
authoritarian–collectivist articulations of nationalism through which the
 D. Brown: Constructed nationalist and ethnic ideologies 563

authoritarian regimes seek legitimacy. It thus becomes clearer why the

democratization process is so politically fragile. Even if an authoritarian
regime had been able to articulate and promote a national ideology that
interwove civic, ethno-cultural and multicultural threads (as was attempted
in the Pancasila ideology in Indonesia), attempts at democratization are
liable to see the unravelling of those threads as different political actors
begin articulating differing conceptualizations of the democratic nation.
Thus proponents of civic nationalism advocate a politics that disregards
ethnic difference, those proposing ethno-cultural nationalism stress the
need to give higher priority to the cultural values of the majority ethnic
community, and those putting forward a model of multicultural national-
ism advocate the rights of ethnic minorities. The articulation of democra-
tic norms and goals thus begins to focus attention on the incompatibilities,
or at least the diverging priorities, of these political programmes.
Second, once political activists begin to appeal to democratic ideals, it
becomes clear that these ideals provide useful weapons that ethnic majori-
ties and ethnic minorities can use in their attempts to dominate each other.
In liberal-democratic discourse, democracy’s promise to ensure government
that is responsive to the wishes of the majority, while protecting the rights of
minorities, does not refer to ascriptive ethnic majorities and minorities, but
rather to the uid majorities and minorities of opinion and interest, which
shift in the course of democratic debate and from issue to issue. The likeli-
hood that democratic politics would engender the mobilization of such shift-
ing majorities and minorities was promoted by the strength of liberal values,
which empowered individuals to change their opinions and allegiances in
pursuit of their individual autonomy and development.
But most Asian cultures and governments have promoted communi-
tarian ideals that serve to inhibit such individualism. One result has been
the prioritizing of ascriptive attachments over individual autonomy, so that
the political mobilization of ethnic communities has been facilitated. Once
this has happened, it is merely a short step to attaching the political ideas
of democratic majority and minorities to the sociological fact of ethnic
majority and minorities. This allows majoritarian democracy to be articu-
lated as an argument by ethnic majorities that their political dominance
is legitimate. Further manipulation of democratic ideas occurs when ethnic
majorities are depicted as embodying a ‘Rousseauean’ general national
will, so that assertions of ethnic minorities can be depicted as subversive
of both national unity and democracy, as is frequently the case, for
example, in depictions of the Moro rebellions in the Philippines. Ethnic
minorities, for their part, can respond not only with the claim that democ-
racy demands the recognition of minority rights, but further that these
rights include the right of secession, quoting the slogan, which elides
democracy, liberalism and nationalism, that ‘every people has the right to
self-determination’.
564 The PaciŽc Review

Third, numerous academics (including Clifford Geertz and Walker

Conner) and governments have argued that the ethnic diversity of a
country inhibits the development of the consensual cultural values that
underpin national integration and unity. It can then be argued further that
since the attainment of democracy presupposes such national integration,
it is the fact of ethnic pluralism that necessitates and justiŽes authoritarian
rule. Mahathir, Suharto and Lee Kuan Yew, for example, each made exten-
sive use of this claim. But this widespread assertion of the incompatibility
of an ethnically plural society and the attainment of stable democracy
ourishes alongside the countervailing argument. It is now widely asserted
that the politicization of ethnic pluralism (reconceptualized as multicul-
turalism) actually promotes democracy because it serves to weaken the
inherently authoritarian and monistic tendencies of the assimilationist
ethno-cultural vision of the nation-state. Both arguments are problematic,
but they are each nevertheless examples of powerful political rhetoric,
and their confrontation during attempts at democratization serves to
further exacerbate the prospects for inter-ethnic conict; ethnic minori-
ties employing the ‘multiculturalist’ variant, while state-elites or ethnic
majorities employ the ‘plural society’ variant.
Thus the problem of democracy is that it frequently empowers ethnic
majorities and ethnic minorities to confront each other, by enabling each
group to promote the belief that their interests, preferences and goals are
inalienable democratic rights. The potentiality for it to enable individuals
in a similar manner, and thereby to foster a liberal civic nationalism which
might resist ethnic communitarian claims, is inhibited by the strength of
communitarian cultures promoted in ideologies of ‘Asian values’.

The problem of patrimonialism

It has frequently been noted that the communitarian norms of Southeast
Asian cultures coexist with the personalization of political practice. Even
in those countries where the forms of institutionalized democracy have
become established, the patrimonial politics of patron–client linkages
remains a central feature of political life. Patrimonial elites do indeed vary
signiŽcantly in their responsiveness to their clienteles,13 but in all variants,
the politics of patrimonialism involve and promote inequalities of status
and power, and offer a congenial environment to ethnic entrepreneurs
seeking advantage through the mobilization of communal clienteles. If
members of ethnic minority communities seek access to state resources,
then they can best do so by developing alliances with state-elites; if state-
elites seek control of ethnic minority communities, then they can do so
by co-opting ethnic minority elites. Similarly, if state-elites seek to enhance
their links with civil society so as to reduce the ‘isolation of power’, they
may do so by demonstrating responsiveness to ethnic majority expecta-
tions. Patrimonial politics is thus fully compatible with, and in some
 D. Brown: Constructed nationalist and ethnic ideologies 565

circumstances conducive to, the mobilization of both a majoritarian ethno-

cultural nationalism and a minority-focused multicultural nationalism.
However, the patrimonial element in politics is fundamentally incompat-
ible with civic nationalism in that it is unable to promote the norms of
equality of citizenship upon which civic nationalism is based.
Patrimonialism is inhospitable to civic nationalism in various ways. First,
the universalistic norms of civic nationalism are unlikely to be articulated
by patrons seeking the personal loyalty of clients, or by clients seeking
access to beneŽts through personal obligations to patrons. Inequalities of
status are inherent in any form of patron–client relationship, so that all
parties to such relationships have an interest in avoiding norms of status
equality, which might erode access to beneŽcial patronage. Thus even
though ideas of equal individual citizenship rights might well be one of
the sparks that initiate the democratization process, such ideas are less
likely to be taken up by the various patrons who dominate politics and
government, since these patrons are themselves embedded in the partic-
ularisms and status inequalities of patrimonialism. In the Indonesian case,
the students who have been most articulate in espousing liberal civic
visions, pride themselves on being a moral force ‘above the self-interest
and inŽghting of politics’ (Schwarz 1999: 375). But it might be precisely
this refusal to involve themselves with political networks that inhibits mass
support for reformasi and ‘blunts their effectiveness and threatens the
prospects for popular, sweeping reforms’ (Cohen 1998: 26). The result is
that those who most strongly articulate civic norms are precisely those
who lack access to political inuence.
Second, civil society and constitutional institutions, which might be
expected (especially in avowedly democratic countries) to embody civic
norms, are themselves seen to function in patrimonial ways, so that the
capacity of these institutions to symbolize civic ideals becomes eroded.
This tendency was symbolized, in the case of Indonesia, by Wahid’s
apparent nepotism in appointing his brother to head the new bank-restruc-
turing agency (Economist, 20 May 2000, p. 23).
Third, the resilience of patrimonialism derives from the fact that in most
of Southeast Asia it has become a core feature of the social structure and
culture, so that individuals see themselves as members of communal clien-
teles of various types, seeking responsive patrons who can provide the
resources they seek. Ideas of minority rights, or majority rights, can thus
easily resonate in such a society as individuals seek status and resource ben-
eŽts by identifying with majority or minority clientele communities of var-
ious types. By contrast, ideas of the nation as a community of individuals
with equal access to civic rights are less likely to resonate and be widely
adopted. It is primarily in situations of rapid economic growth, which offer
ordinary citizens grounds for belief in a future of upward socio-economic
mobility, that visions of progress towards a community of equal-status indi-
vidual citizens can gain widespread credence. In situations of economic
566 The PaciŽc Review

fragility or decline (as with Burma and the Philippines, and with contem-
porary Indonesia) visions of equal individual civic rights are liable to carry
less weight than are visions of new access to a more responsive patron.
Fourth, the restructuring of patrimonialism, which characterizes attempts
at democratization, involves the fracturing and restructuring of authoritar-
ian patrimonial linkages as new patrons seek new alliances. But this tran-
sitional disruption of the patrimonial structures pervades state institutions,
and can lead to central elites losing effective control over subordinate
ofŽcials. Faith in the possibility of progress towards civic rights is thus
eroded, either because the errant behaviour of subordinate ofŽcials is
blamed on new governmental elites, or as the efŽciency of state institutions
is seen to decline.
If it is indeed the case that the persistence of patrimonial politics inhibits
the development of a civic nationalist vision, then there is little to amelio-
rate the tensions between an ethnic majority and ethnic minorities. Once
ethnic minorities lose faith that the state can promote civic nationalism,
they come to perceive the state as the agency of the ethnic majority, and
therefore cease to believe that its multiculturalist promises of status or
autonomy to ethnic minorities will be delivered. The weakening of civic
nationalism thus leads in turn to the erosion of multicultural nationalism.
Loss of faith in the state means that calls for ethnic autonomy become
radicalized, and might shift to become calls for full independence.

Disillusionment with the social justice vision of civic

nationalism
During the period of decolonization, most of the nationalist political
leaders sought to promote the legitimacy of their state, and their regimes,
by promising that the end of colonial rule would bring with it a land of milk
and honey – an era of development characterized by social justice. It is this
promise of a just community located in the future that constitutes the core
myth of civic nationalism. The nation is depicted as a community in the
process of formation, so that contemporary inequities of development,
which might otherwise detract from claims to national unity, can be por-
trayed as the sacriŽces necessary for the achievement of the future socially
just nation. By contrast, the depiction of the nation in ethno-cultural terms
rests upon myths of the past, which see the seeds of national unity and pride
as deriving from histories of an ancestral homeland and ethnic conquest.
Since ethno-cultural nationalism engenders national pride and commitment
by employing nostalgia, it can remain strong, and indeed ourish, in peri-
ods of socio-economic stagnation or decline. But this is not obviously the
case with civic nationalism. So long as state-elites could sustain a develop-
mental optimism, so that present generations believed that things might be
better for their children, they could hope to sustain civic nationalism as a
basis for their political legitimacy.
 D. Brown: Constructed nationalist and ethnic ideologies 567

But once faith in the social justice promises of state elites began to
erode, civic nationalism was weakened. As evidence mounted, particularly
from the end of the 1960s onwards, that peripheral regions of the country
(for example, Shan, Mindanau and Aceh) were being exploited as internal
colonies rather than being subsidized – or that education and welfare
provisions to subordinate class groups were being cut back – those being
marginalized began to lose faith in the state-elites’ promises of social
justice and to seek alternative political visions. They frequently found them
in the promises of counter-elites that minority ethnic nationalism offered
better hope of social justice. This is of course one basis for the emergence
of the multicultural nationalist vision of the nation-state, but where dis-
illusionment with the broken promises of state-elites is strong it provides
the basis for the development of minority ethno-cultural nationalisms. It
is the weakness of civic nationalism that lies behind this development, and
this in turn derives from the loss of faith in the social justice promises of
state elites that underpinned the civic vision of the nation.

Countervailing factors
The argument that the weakening of civic nationalism promotes tensions
between the ethno-cultural and multicultural visions of the nation-state
should not be taken as implying that ethnic majorities and ethnic minori-
ties will necessarily engage in political confrontation. In practice, all
minority ethnic nationalist movements are divided, and frequently they
mobilize only a minority of the minority. Similarly, members of ethnic
majority communities frequently come to reject an ethno-cultural vision
in favour of ideas of multicultural democracy that can accommodate ideas
of ethnic minority rights. There are several reasons why ethnic majorities
divide politically on this issue, and why ethnic rebellions tend to be frag-
mented. The most obvious is the clear cost of ethnic rebellion in terms
of disruption, disunity and death. But it should also be noted here that
the three factors already cited as weakening civic nationalism and there-
fore promoting ethno-cultural–multicultural tensions also play a signiŽ-
cant role in fragmenting, and therefore potentially weakening, ethnic
autonomy movements.
The prospect of the democratization of the nation-state clearly serves
to inhibit the political alienation of at least some members of ethnic
minority communities to the extent that it seems to open the door to the
increased political decentralization of the nation-state and decreased
discrimination against minorities. Similarly, the patrimonial features of
politics that weaken civic nationalism also serve to promote the factional
rivalries dividing and weakening ethnic nationalist movements. Moreover,
to the extent that the political alienation of ethnic minorities derives from
their disillusionment with the exploitative behaviour of an incumbent
central government regime, ethnic minorities will divide between those
568 The PaciŽc Review

putting most faith in demands for a change of regime, and those putting
most faith in a call for separatism. All of these factors are at work, for
example, in the present Acehnese rebellion in Indonesia. The Free Aceh
Movement (GAM) is divided both by patrimonial rivalries and by the
differing views, amongst Acehnese, of whether to aim for stronger
autonomy with the potential to enhance social justice within a democra-
tized Indonesia, or whether to Žght for full secession. The tensions between
the two can for the moment be partially camouaged by calls for ‘self-
determination’, but they are nevertheless increasingly visible in the
disunity of the Acehnese elites (Brown 2000b; Aspinall 2000). In the case
of Aceh, as elsewhere, ideological cleavages between the three visions of
national community – ethno-cultural, civic and multicultural – occur just
as much within ethnic minority communities, as within the nation-state.

Conclusion
The paper has indicated, in rather schematic terms, a model within which
the cases of ethnic separatism in Southeast Asia might be examined.
Instead of seeing such ethnic conict as a cause of the weakening of the
nation-state, the reverse is argued. It is the weakening of the nation-state
that generates ethnic minority separatism. Nation-states remain strong to
the extent that their state-elites can promote visions of civic nationalism,
ethno-cultural nationalism and multicultural nationalism, which employ
overlapping myths and symbols so that they intertwine with each other
and resonate with civil society. The civic nationalist element is particu-
larly crucial in this, since it provides the cement that holds the nation
together, and the buffer that prevents confrontation between ethno-
cultural nationalism and multicultural nationalism. It is the weakening of
civic nationalism that explains the development of ethnic separatist
conict. Civic nationalism might weaken for various reasons and in various
ways, but the factors examined here, and which seem to be most salient
to the Southeast Asian case, have been the currency of democratic ideas,
the incidence of patrimonial politics, and the loss of faith in the social
justice promises of state elites.

Notes
1 This paper was presented at the Panel on ‘Political Faultlines in Southeast Asia:
Pre-Modernist Atavisms in Post-Colonial Nation-States’ (22–25 March 2001,
Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago). It was dis-
tributed for discussion at the Symposium on ‘Political Faultlines in Southeast
Asia: Movements for Ethnic Autonomy in Nation-State Structures’ (15–16
October 2001, Southeast Asia Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong).
2 For purposes of illustration, this paper makes brief references to the case of
Indonesia, but it is intended to be of wider relevance so as to also be applic-
able, for example, to discussions of the various ethnic rebellions in Burma and
the Philippines.
 D. Brown: Constructed nationalist and ethnic ideologies 569

3 The present discussion of a model of contending nationalisms builds upon

previous studies (Brown 1994, 2000a). Some sections of this paper are also
adapted from Brown (2000b).
4 This means, as Liah Greenfeld has argued, that collectivist nationalism neces-
sarily implies authoritarian rule, since ‘someone is bound to be its interpreter’
(Greenfeld 1992: 11).
5 About 90 per cent of Indonesia’s population are Muslim. There are indeed
several distinctions within this category, most notably between the santri
(devout) and the abangan (nominal) Muslims. But the political and social
salience of such distinctions is variable.
6 The Pancasila are the Žve principles of Indonesia’s national ideology, namely,
belief in one God, nationalism, humanism, democracy and social justice. Since
at least 1953, state-elites have employed the Pancasila principles to counter-
pose the idea of national unity to that of an Islamic state.
7 The depiction of the Javanese Majapahit Empire as the pre-colonial basis for
modern Indonesia has been crucial in this ethno-cultural construction of the
nation. The status dominance of Javanese is reected in the fact that in the
1980s, ‘well over 70%’ of armed forces ofŽcers were Javanese, whereas they
formed only about 45 per cent of the population (Anderson 1988). The policy
of ‘transmigrasi’, which encouraged Javanese to migrate to the outer islands,
was also widely interpreted as a policy of ‘Javanization’.
8 The corollary of this rise in Islamic expectations was the intensiŽcation of
rivalries between the differing Islamic groups for political inuence, as Islamic
factions in search of inuential patrons sought patrons in search of support
bases.
9 In New Order Indonesia, such corporatist management was facilitated by
ethnic minority recruitment into the three sanctioned political parties, the
Islamic intellectuals’ group ICMI (Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals’
Association), and the centralized institutions of provincial and district admin-
istration.
10 In the Indonesian case, this relationship was sometimes depicted overtly in
patron–client terms, with Suharto portrayed as the father (bapak) to the
Indonesian children-clients (anak buah).
11 The student movement made ten main demands: (i) reform of the political,
legal, economic and educational systems; (ii) repeal of laws restricting polit-
ical freedoms; (iii) abolition of the army’s ‘dual function’; (iv) reduction in
the price of basic foodstuffs; (v) reduction in the cost of education; (vi) rejec-
tion of the plan to raise fuel prices; (vii) elimination of corruption, collusion
and nepotism; (viii) an end to kidnapping of activists; (ix) an end to unfair
and unofŽcial charges at universities; and (x) speedy attention to unemploy-
ment. The main additional demand was that Suharto be brought to justice
(Stanley 1998).
12 It should not be inferred from this that the outcome is necessarily secessionism.
It is signiŽcant that most leaders of the ethnic rebellions in Burma have
continued to campaign (e.g. through the Democratic Alliance of Burma) for
an ethnically just Burma, rather than for secession from Burma.
13 For analytical purposes, we can therefore suggest a distinction between three
types of patrimonialism. (i) Exclusionary patrimonialism in which a patrimonial
leader appoints subordinate patrons who owe their positions to him, and who
are thus unresponsive to mass demands and indeed seek to ensure the removal
of the masses from political participation and from resource beneŽts.
(ii) Petitionary patrimonialism in which patrons rely for their position partly on
the patrimonial leader, but also partly upon the support of a mass clientele. They
thus promote a petitionary political culture, whereby dependent clienteles who
570 The PaciŽc Review

display political support for their patrons, are rewarded with resource beneŽts.
(iii) Mobilizational patrimonialism, in which politics takes the form of rival
patrons competing for mass support. In this proto-democratic form of patrimo-
nial politics, the power-balance shifts so that communal clienteles have some
choice as to their patronage linkage with central government, and can choose the
patron who is most responsive to their claims.

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