T H E FAT E O F N AT I O N A L I S M I N T H E N E W S TAT E S
139
independence and establishment of a national party-state from 1975 entailed
entrenchment of decidedly “Mainland” Southeast Asian forms of official
nationalism, with essentialized notions of Khmer, Lao, and Vietnamese
ethnic identities promoted at the expense of diverse hybridities and connections
across Indochina’s historically porous borders. Only the opening of the Cambodian, Lao, and Vietnamese economies and a loosening of party-state
control from the 1990s have brought greater tolerance for the rich diversity
of cultural, ethnic, and religious life within and across the three nation-states.
Even so, there remains a strong discourse of protecting Khmer, Lao, and Vietnamese identities against the ravages of globalization.
This pattern of nation-state formation in former French Indochina differs
markedly from the fate of nationalism across the various British colonial
territories that developed as the Federation of Malaysia (and Singapore)
from the 1950s into the early to mid-1960s. As elsewhere across “Island”
Southeast Asia, the Malay Peninsula and the northern shelf of Borneo had,
since the fall of Malacca to the Portuguese in 1511, seen fragmentation of
political authority into petty sultanates, and over the next three centuries
neither conversion of coastal rulers and their subjects to Islam nor the establishment of successive Portuguese, Dutch, and British trading forts created
any overarching framework for centralized state formation or identity construction. The consolidation of British power from the late eighteenth
century onwards was accomplished in a piecemeal fashion, with directly
ruled Straits Settlements in Malacca, Penang, and Singapore, with Residents
later imposed over the states of the Malay Peninsula. The Sultanate of
Brunei, the British North Borneo Company’s territory in Sabah, and the
Brooke dynasty’s empire in Sarawak were not under direct British colonial
rule; all three retained separate, protected status instead. This pattern of precolonial and colonial-era state formation across the sprawling hodgepodge of
territories that became Malaysia provided a fragile historical basis for a new
nation-state, arguably much weaker than the Indochinese prospects of what
would become Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.78
In addition, the unparalleled extent of immigration into the Malay Peninsula, northern Borneo, Penang, and Singapore problematized the articulation of
“Mainland”-style nationalism(s) based on essentialized notions of authentic,
indigenous ethnic core population(s) there. From the late eighteenth century,
migration from southern China had created sizeable mining communities in
the Malay Peninsula and northern Borneo. Over the subsequent century and
a half of deepening integration into the British imperial economy the
harbors, mills, and sweatshops of various port towns and cities swelled with