Ethnogeographic Integration and Exclusion in Anticolonial Nationalism: Indonesia and Indochina

Abstract

In one chapter ofImagined Communities, Benedict Anderson draws attention to an obvious, yet seldom remarked, contrast between the anticolonial nationalist movements in the prewar Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. This contrast concerns not class, ideology, or politics but ethnicity and geography. In the Dutch colony, the Indonesian nationalist movement sought to unite all of the scattered islands and diverse ethnic groups into a single Indonesian nation based upon the ambiguous principle of unity in diversity. In Indochina, by contrast, existing ethnogeographic divisions were not abridged by the common reaction against French colonialism; and the colony ultimately disintegrated into the separate nations of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The Indonesian and Indochinese responses to colonialism represent examples of what I will call integrative and exclusive nationalism, respectively.