From Peripheral Communities to Ethnic Nations: Separatism in Southeast Asia

Abstract

T HERE ARE SEVERAL CASES of ethnic separatism in Southeast Asia, but the concern here is with the most protracted and best documented: the separatist movements of the Moro in the Philippines, of the Pattani Malays in southern Thailand, and of the Shan and Karen in Burma.' The confrontational and protracted nature of these disputes can be traced in part to the development of military stalemate. But there is also a more fundamental reason. They have come to be perceived by all parties not as negotiable political issues but rather as clashes between absolutist ideologies, admitting of no compromise: the imperative of state nationalism confronting the imperative of ethnic nationalism. If it is indeed this absolutist perception of the issues which inhibits their resolution, then it becomes crucial to examine how the communal consciousness of the separatist communities came to be ideologised as ethnic nationalism, and how elite groups emerged to articulate this ideology and use it to mobilise ethnic nationalist movements. Since ethnic separatism is but one branch of ethnic conflict, attempts to explain the phenomenon have tended to reflect the wider debates between those who stress the ascriptive and primordial features of ethnic identities and those who focus on the impact of socio-economic and power disparities. Theories of ethnic separatism, however, have had to pay particular attention to the question of why the conflict is not between ethnic groups but rather between ethnic group and state. They have also had to explain why the conflicts have come to focus on the issue of territorial ownership. We can discern six broad perspectives which have been employed in the literature on ethnic separatism. The first and least developed, but most popular, argument, is that multi-ethnic new states, especially those with