Nationalism, communism and the modern state
The first half of the twentieth century radically transformed the region as modern states were crafted. Accompanying the decline of European empires, new ideologies of political organization emerged. Nationalism inspired groups to organize against colonial occupation and to claim their own state as new, modern nations. Communism was also spreading as a radically new form of political organization based on The empowerment of the working classes, the elimination of wealth inequalities , and the collective ownership of property. Its revolutionary creed appealed to many groups seeking to overthrow colonial powers, displace elites who monopolized local power, and gain access to lant and better living standards. Together, these two ideological forces shaped the imaginary thrust of anti-colonial movements. Their success was conditioned in party by global power shifts, including the erosion of imperial power and the cold war (1945-89) that divided the world into communist and non-communist camps.
Nationalism is a modern ideological from. Its roots lie in the Americas and Europe when group began to reject imperial and dynastic rulers. Instead, it claimed legitimacy of rule for populations with shared experience and common identity, based on principles of equal membership and participation in new political groupings that we call “nation”. As Benedict Anderson has argued, they are “imagined communities” whereby certain populations with a common language and shared experiences on a given territory aspire to rule themselves (Anderson, 1983). It was a powerful idea that inspired populations not only to rid themselves of colonial subjugation but also of forms of rule that reinforced inequality and legitimacy based on dynastic rule.
Nationalism fed some of the early movements against dynastic and imperial rule in Asia. By 1911, nationalists guided by Sun Yat-sen’s ideas challenged the long-time dominance of the Qing dynasty and rejected its legitimacy of rule. In Southeast Asia, Jose Rizal in the late nineteenth century advocated for self-rule by Filipinos. His ideas drove the formation of a nationalist Filipino movement that launched a revolutionary struggle against the Spanish. In Indonesia, Muslim merchants and intellectuals had begun to articulate nationalist ideas in the first decade of the twentieth century but the nationalist movement formally crystallized around the Youth Pledge and the formation of the Nationalist Party of Indonesia in 1982. Young nationalists had by then defined a new Indonesia nation built around a common language, Bahasa Indonesia (a dialect of Malay that had used as a lingua france).