Understanding Melayu (Malay) as a source of diverse modern identities.

Anthony Reid (*) This article attempts to bring together recent literature about the typology of nationalism, with the ways in which 'Malay' or 'Melayu' have been used as the core of an ethnie or a nationalist project. Different meanings of 'Melayu' were salient at different times in Sumatra, in the Peninsula and in the eastern Archipelago, and the Dutch and British used their respective translations of it very differently Modern ethno-nationalist projects in Malaysia and Brunei made 'Melayu' a contested and often divisive concept, whereas its translation into the hitherto empty term 'Indonesia' might have provided an easier basis for territorial, or even ultimately civic, nationalism in that country. As the world stumbles hesitantly towards post-nationalist ways of understanding identity, it has at last become possible to discern what nationalism is, and the roles it has played in dominating the last century of our common history. (1) It no longer seems as 'natural' and uncontroversial as it did at its height before 1945. Yet the plethora of fine analyses which began to appear in the 1980s (2) has barely begun to be integrated into the study of Southeast or indeed East Asia, where nationalism is still new enough to arouse more excitement and sympathy than concern or serious analysis. The work of Benedict Anderson, global in reach but drawing more heavily than most on anti-colonial examples in the New World, is much the most influential of these theoretical models among writers on Southeast Asia. I wish to draw attention here however to a different strain of analysis well established in the European-focused writing -- the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalisms. Hans Kohn, writing at the depth of Germany's disastrous experiment with extreme nationalism, was the first to point out how differently nationalism developed east of the Rhine. 'French nationalism was born (as English and American had [been] before it) in a wave of generous enthusiasm for the cause of mankind; the opposing nationalisms ... were directed to laudable but narrower goals, self-centred but antagonistic.' (3) He showed how territorial nationalism developed earlier, gradually admitting more and more groups within the borders in question into citizenship in the nation, which was always territorially defined. Anthony Smith makes this disti0nction crucial to his discussion in The Ethnic Origins of Nations. (4) Where in the older territorial model the geographically bounded state eventually created the culturally coherent nation, the ethnic model was the other way around: an ethnic group with unclear borders attempted to acquire appropriate borders and political status. Liah Greenfeld's Nationalism is so far the most careful historical analysis of the relationship between these two models in the context of European history. She sees the concept of nation developing in sixteenth-century England in the sense of a sovereign people, entitled to representation in the body politic. It was thus a concept closely wedded to the emergence of democracy in early modern Europe. As it spread eastwards through Europe in the eighteenth century, however, the unique quality of the nation became more marked than its sovereign or democratic character. The sovereignty of this type of nation was held to lie in its distinctiveness, not its participatory civic character. While in the civic variant 'nationality is at least in principle open and voluntaristic', in the ethnic variant 'it is believed to be inherent - one can neither acquire it if one does not have it, nor change it if one does'. (5) Although the distinction on the ground cannot be as sharp as the one in abstract analysis, her study of 'five roads' shows Germany and Russia more influenced by this ethnic path, while England and the United States (in common with most anti-colonial New World nationalisms) can be characterised more by the civic path, and France by an ambivalent path eventually veering towards the civic. …