An antidote against narrow nationalism? Why regional history matters

By Farish A Noor
Dr Farish A Noor is Associate Professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies RSIS and School of History SoH, Nanyang Technological University NTU.

Republished in the Straits Times: https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/a-shared-history-of-south-east-asia-as-antidote-against-narrow-nationalism

APRIL, 19, 2021

One of the courses that I teach at my university is the course on states, society and history of Southeast Asia. Every time I begin teaching this course I have an exercise for all my students – most of whom happen to come from the various countries of Southeast Asia. I ask them to turn off their laptops and phones, then take out a blank sheet of paper. When they are ready I ask them all to draw me a map of Southeast Asia – from Myanmar all the way to Vietnam and also all of maritime Southeast Asia. After twelve years of teaching the same course, not once has any student been able to draw me a map of Southeast Asia that can pass as a map of the region that is reasonably accurate. And yet it has to be remembered that most of my students happen to be Southeast Asians too. So the question inevitably arises: How can we claim to be Southeast Asians when we don’t even know what our region looks like, and where we are in the world?

This is a question that has troubled me for decades. I live and work in Singapore, but have also lectured in other ASEAN countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. In the course of my work as a roving academic and historian of colonial Southeast Asia, I have marvelled at how so many young Southeast Asians today know so very little about the region they live in, and assume that they know their neighbouring counties simply because they share a common border. This assumption is a dangerous one for it is premised upon the notion that proximity equals knowledge, and nothing could be more distant from the truth at ground level.

Over the past two decades we have witnessed instances of hyper-nationalism across the region, with some vocal elements in some countries going as far as suggesting that ASEAN has outlived its usefulness or that their country no longer needs to be part of ASEAN. And yet these strident calls for a politics of exclusion and difference are being made by a generation of ASEAN citizens who have no idea of how much they owe to ASEAN: Without doubt, ASEAN’s greatest success to date has been its ability to ensure peace, stability and cooperation between the states of the region. We owe so much to the work of thousands of unseen ASEAN bureaucrats and technocrats who have been labouring for years, to bring about an ASEAN community where there is now freedom of movement for all ASEAN citizens, and for preventing conflict between the member states. Few parts of the world have experienced such a long period of peace and continuity, yet this peace dividend is something that we are rarely thankful for.

To make things worse we now live in a world that is marked by the workings of social media, shallow populism and sectarian identity politics that multiplies the power of centrifugal forces within us. Despite our long and common shared history, ASEAN states and societies can still bicker and feud over things such as material culture, songs, cuisine, etc. – notwithstanding the fact that all forms of social phenomena in Southeast Asia – from the food we eat to the clothes that we wear to the songs we listen to – emerged from a fluid region where social mobility was the norm and where ideas, values, lifestyles and material culture were in constant common circulation.

Why do we still not understand this? The answer perhaps lies in something that has yet to emerge: A common understanding of our shared Southeast Asian history. Across the ASEAN region school children are taught the respective national histories of their own countries, but rarely the longer, older and broader history of Southeast Asia as a whole. This anomaly is the result of the manner in which postcolonial history in and across Southeast Asia was first written by nationalist historians who privileged their national histories first, but in the course of doing so neglected the wider regional context from which our present-day nation-states have emerged. Singapore is a child of Southeast Asia, as is Malaysia, as is Indonesia, as is the Philippines, and Thailand, and Vietnam, and so on. It was the longer and older history of commercial and cultural interaction between the precolonial polities of Southeast Asia that laid the linguistic, cultural and economic framework upon which our present-day societies are based; and yet we have forgotten all this. Our failure to connect with our wider Southeast Asian history also repeats the act of colonial separation that divided the region during the colonial era, where almost all of Southeast Asia was colonised and subsequently broken up and parcelled into different (and competing) European empires. That colonial divorce has not been mended until today, and we remain as disconnected a region as we were in the 19^th century.

All things being equal, Southeast Asia will undoubtedly face a myriad of challenges in the decade to come. At a time when the region is once again being imposed upon by external variable factors – not least of which is the constant power-play between larger and more powerful states beyond the region’s borders – there is an even greater need for Southeast Asians to see themselves, know themselves and feel themselves to be Southeast Asians. This can only happen if Southeast Asians are taught from an early age that they are all part of a wider fluid continuum, and that Southeast Asia is the common home for all of them. But how are we ever to foster a sense of Southeast Asian identity among our young if we do not even have a common Southeast Asian history textbook for them to draw their inspiration from? This is why I have been calling for such a pan-ASEAN effort to get off the ground over the past few years.

Knowledge of a common shared history may not be the balm of Gilead that will soothe all our anxieties or prevent instances of conflict in the future. But if such a common knowledge and awareness can be generated in time it would at least lay the groundwork for an authentic politics of inclusiveness and accommodation among Southeast Asians in the years to come, and that may well be the best antidote for the wave of hyper-nationalism that we are seeing on the rise today.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.