THE arrival, in March 2006, of boat people / refugees / asylum seekers — nomenclature depending on one’s (geo)political outlook — does more than highlight the potential for instability in Indonesian-Australian relations, great though that is. It is yet another example of one of the besetting weaknesses of modern nation-states: their borders fail a 1:1 correlation test with their nationalities.

Nation-states have gone through at least three historical phases.

They first emerged as the late mediaeval nations of France, Spain, Portugal and, in a quite distinctly idiosyncratic way, England; these were joined during the Reformation by the Netherlands. Historians don’t find it surprising that these four kingdoms and the Dutch republic were at the forefront of European economic advancement and colonial expansion — which leads indirectly to a later 20th century development of the nation-state. More of that later.

The second phase was the 19th century call of “One People — One Nation” among the submerged nationalities, or, perhaps, ethnicities, of central Europe, as well as in British-ruled Ireland. These calls were not easy to satisfy, with the Irish longing to be “a nation once again” being the least complicated, even with the one million Ulster Protestant Loyalist claiming that “Home Rule is Rome Rule !”

Take “Italy” — famously dismissed by the Hapsburg Empire’s Count von Metternich as merely a “geographical expression” in a conversation with British foreign secretary Lord Palmerston in 1847. He was right in one sense: there was no Italian “nation” in the way there was a French or a Spanish or a Dutch nation. But in that geographical region comprising the Italian peninsula, the cis-Alpine foothills and the Lombard plains, there were Italian peoples becoming ever more aware under the influence of nationalism of sharing a common culture and language, and wanting to recover the unity that the emperor Augustus had made official two millennia distant.

Or “Poland” — cruelly partitioned between 1772 and 1795 into Prussian, Austrian and Russian areas, and kept so after the post-Napoleonic era Congress of Vienna in 1815, with the hated Russian Czar being given the title “King of Poland”.

Or the ethnic patchwork of the Balkans, where, as the suzerainty of the Ottoman Turks was being replaced by the imperial power of the Austrian Hapsburgs, the southern Slavs looked to a pan-(southern) Slavonic nationalism to bring peace, prosperity and justice.

Three dynastic empires

On a map of central Europe at the start of the 20th century, before the Great War, look at the area bounded in the east by the westernmost borders of the Russian empire, to the north by the Baltic Sea, in the west by the borders of the Low Countries and France, and to the south by the Alps, the Adriatic and the borders of Albania, Greece and Bulgaria. Look how straight-forward and uncomplicated it was: apart from Serbia and “tiny” Montenegro, there were NO SMALL STATES — instead, there were the three dynastic empires of the Prussian Hohenzollerns, the Austrian Hapsburgs and the Russian Romanovs, with all three meeting in what used be the SW of the kingdom of Poland.

Fast-forward 100 years, and look at an up-to-date map: central Europe’s imperial marcher lands have become 15 small nation-states.

Some of these emerged from the sturm und drang of the Great War and the 1919 peace treaties: moving south from the Arctic Circle, there are Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; then Poland, a “nation once again”, and Czechoslovakia; and in the Balkans, a creation of pan-Slavic nationalism, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which eventually became Yugoslavia, incorporating formerly independent and separate Montenegro and Serbia.

At last the submerged nationalities had their seven new nations, and, according to the ideology of nationalism, everything in their gardens would be rosier.

But, as Janice Joplin was to sing in a different context, roses have thorns, and each of the new nations gardens’ had weeds: ethnic minorities — sullen, embittered, frustrated, and equally nationalistic — who might need weeding out. Without ethnic purity, no nation-state felt secure and entire.

Dead hand of the USSR

There were millions of Germans left over in central Europe’s new nations, waiting for, if not a traditional kaiser, then a thoroughly modern fuehrer; formerly imperial Hungarians in Romania’s newly-acquired Transylvania were cut off from rump-Hungary. Finland had a powerful and wealthy Swedish minority, and once down-trodden Poland embarked on a belated neo-imperial march eastwards to regain millions of western Ukrainians. Serbs and Croats, who’d once seen each other as fellow Slavs, began to suspect that the other did not belong to “their” nation.

This European development was renewed after the liberation from the dead hand of USSR-backed Marxism at the end of the Cold War.

There was the re-emergence of the three Baltic states from the nightmare of being SSRs, the “velvet divorce” of the Czechs and the Slovaks, and the bloodier break-up of post-communist Yugoslavia into Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia & Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, with Montenegro odds-on to become a nation once again [it was the only area that had remained outside the empire of the Ottoman Turks] and Kosovo likely to split from Serbia (and probably steer clear of joining its fellows in Albania). From the USSR itself we have three new nations, Belarus, the Ukraine, and Moldova (from the former Moldavian SSR) which has so far declined to join its ethnic fellows in Romania, and which has its own breakaway Ukrainian-inhabited area of Transnistria.

[And just how long Vlad old-KGB-hand Putin can keep the umpteen minorities (and the minorities within minorities) of the Russian Federation down on the ex-collective farm is anyone’s guess. If they ultimately all get their way, the Russian “Federation” will make a map of the 16th century Holy Roman Empire look as simple as a chess-board. Or it’ll have to be a giga-version of the arrangements of enclaves and exclaves on the Dutch-Belgian border.1]

Which gives Europe an additional eight new states for the loss of one, the former walled-in DDR, to join the post-WWI seven.

The next phase in the development of the modern nation-state began soon after World War II, when those five western European imperial powers mentioned above retreated from or were forced out of their overseas empires, creating inside the old colonial borders 40 or 50 new states, few of which, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, could be termed “nations” in the customary sense, because most of these post-colonial entities failed the basic test of the nation-state: few had a single predominant ‘nationality’ within the given borders agreed among themselves and ratified by the UN as inviolable, according to the international law principle of “uti possidetis juris”.2 (See Supriyadi below.)

Stubbornness of the Dutch

Now the point here is neither to suggest that ending colonial rule in Africa was a Bad Thing, nor to reckon that a continent-wide argy-bargy over boundaries would have been a Good Thing. The point is that few post-colonial ‘nations’ are real nations in any sense but that of cartographical continuity, a concept which Soekarno, Indonesia’s founding president, with the overwhelming support of the Indonesian people, applied to Netherlands East Indies, which had included the western half of the island of New Guinea.

Which brings us back to Australia’s most recent arrivals.

Decolonisation in SE Asia had been relatively uncomplicated compared with Africa’s, despite the stubbornness of the Dutch and the French in trying to pretend that the 1941-45 Pacific War had never occurred, and the tactical, if not strategic, disaster of the US involvement in Vietnam’s post-colonial struggles. The three main ethnic groups in ex-French Indo-China, the Vietnamese, the Cambodians and the Laotians, have a sort of nation-state each (but each includes significant and often reluctant minorities); the British Malayan and Bornean territories have largely coalesced into the Kingdom of Malaysia, with Singapore and Brunei as separate nations; from the ex-US / ex-Spanish Philippines has emerged a new archipelagic nation distinctive for being the only Christian state in Asia; and the NEI morphed into the unitary Republic of Indonesia, in two stages: the 1945-49 war for independence and the 1962-69 campaign for the western New Guinean remnant of the NEI, finishing with the UN-arranged Act of (un)Free (non)Choice.

An additional geopolitical aspect working here is the notion of the ‘successor state’, whereby a new political entity is internationally recognised as inheriting some or all of the legal obligations of a defunct one: the Russian Federation, for instance, is recognised as the successor state to the Soviet Union, including the inheriting of the USSR’s UN Security Council permanent seat-cum-veto and responsibility for the USSR’s nuclear arsenal. Indonesia is universally recognised as the NEI’s successor, including legal ownership of former Dutch New Guinea.

But that doubly irritant fly of the nation-state — the inassimilable minority inside the arbitrary border — is present everywhere, just as it was in inter-war Europe, and just as it has re-emerged, chrysalis-like, in post-communist Europe.

Favouring ethnic Malays

Consider the following in our neighbourhood: predominantly Buddhist Thailand has several Muslim provinces in its far south — Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat3 — with their Malay peoples largely indistinguishable from those of the northern Malaysian provinces of Kedah, Perak and Kelantan. The Muslim Moros in the southern islands of the Philippines may, with all the good will in the world, never be content with citizenship in a Roman Catholic nation.4 Malaysia’s bumiputra policy of favouring ethnic Malays is at odds with the rights and potentially the loyalty of its significant Chinese and Indian minorities.

The same insouciant 19th century attitude to line-drawing gave Australia a nonsensical Torres Strait border just a good fisherman’s cast from the southern coast of the island of New Guinea and thereby included several islands (such as Boigu and Saibai) whose Melanesian inhabitants have arguably as much “right” to be in a Melanesian state as do Indonesia’s. To add to the complexity, colonial-era mapping gave PNG a group of islands in its eastern reaches that culturally ought to have been part of the independent state of the Solomon Islands — the actual name of the PNG province, the North Solomons, even acknowledges this.

So there you have it: enough difficulties to keep corps of diplomats shuffling to and fro for the rest of this century, our equivalent of 19th century Europe’s “Eastern Question”.

Three factors — nationalism, an apparently unstoppable historical development, successor-state5 status, a universally acknowledged principle in international relations, and boundary anomalies, a seemingly irremediable cartographical inheritance — combine to ensure that the West New Guinea “issue” will neither be resolved by an Aceh-type autonomy deal nor disposed of by an East Timor-type secession. At least, neither easily nor quickly.

Following are some early media items relevant to this matter:

From Peter King, convener of the West Papua Project at Sydney University and author of West Papua and Indonesia since Soeharto: Independence, Autonomy or Chaos? (UNSW Press):

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/both-sides-must-face-it–the-papua-problem-is-not-going-away/2006/04/04/1143916523971.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

From Duncan Campbell, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,18712236%255E7583,00.html

From M Wahid Supriyadi, consul-general for Indonesia:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/west-papuans-are-happy-to-be-indonesians/2006/04/09/1144521206369.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

And some early vox pop, the first two from The Age, Wed 5 Apr 06:

Indonesia’s unity is vital – but so are human rights

Indonesian needs to recognise and accept that people are not chattels at the behest of their leaders, notwithstanding that former president Soeharto acted so in presiding over the deaths of some half a million people in the mid-1960s.

The difference between East Timor and West Papua is that the former was wrongfully incorporated into Indonesia when it was never part of the Dutch East Indies, whereas West Papua was. The Act of Free Choice conducted by the UN in 1969 was a fait accompli in accordance with the post-colonial doctrine that the colonial boundaries of new states are inviolable. Therefore, Australia, along with the rest of the international community, must accept West Papua’s status within Indonesia.

However, other considerations involving the status and fate of individuals are equally inviolate. The various international treaties Australia has entered into to protect the rights of individuals, whether refugees, asylum seekers or whatever, entail just as high an obligation to respect and observe as respecting Indonesia’s sovereignty in the case of West Papua.

If the Indonesian Government cannot respect us for observing and honouring these treaty obligations affecting individuals of whatever nationality, then there would seem little scope at this time for building a sound basis for our future relationship.

Andrew Farran (former first secretary at the Australian embassy in Jakarta and private secretary to Australian foreign minister Gordon Freeth at the time of the 1969 UN Act of Free Choice in West Irian), South Yarra

The Papuans are not like other Indonesians

IT IS time for Australians and our Government to look afresh at the problem of Indonesian rule over West Papua.

In 1975 I was one of those who saw the Indonesian takeover of East Timor as inevitable: the former Portuguese colony was geographically and ethnically an integral part of the Indonesian archipelago, which encompassed many diverse cultures; its viability as a separate entity seemed unlikely and the best outlook for its future seemed to be under the constitutional rule of Indonesia. The criminal behaviour of the Indonesian forces changed all that.

West Irian was a different matter entirely: a big mistake on the part of president Soekarno to demand Indonesian succession to the colonial rule of the Dutch over a people who had neither ethnic nor geographic links to Indonesia. In their undeveloped and unsophisticated condition, they were without the capacity to appreciate the implications for their future, and Australia’s complacency in the takeover was a betrayal of justice.

Now that their country is being swamped by Javanese immigrants, and American miners are excavating the entire central mountain range for Javanese profit, can we not appreciate the despair of the Papuan people and intercede on their behalf?

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is a democratic and progressive leader who will surely see that the present situation can only lead to continuing conflict, with his great country in the anomalous position of a colonial power. It is not too late to work out a constitutional change that will give the West Papuans more control over their destiny and a greater sense of belonging in their own land. Australian diplomacy can help to bring about peaceful agreement in this direction.

Jack Bradstreet, Hawthorn

Relations with Indonesia face a long period of tension
The Australian, Fri 7 Apr 06

GEOFFREY Luck (Letters, 6/4) is correct in claiming that, in West Papua, Australia is reaping the results of a failed policy 40 years ago. The problem now is not so much to open up an old ulcer but to cure it in the light of today’s realities.

There are plenty of people in Australia who will provide moral and material support for a tiny Papuan independence movement which has no more legitimacy in West Papua than the Indonesia government, whatever the failings of that government.

There are plenty of people in Australian government instrumentalities who will use their authority indirectly to give aid and comfort to the independence movement.
None appear to be concerned with the consequences. To be sure, many are more concerned with thumbing their noses at Indonesia than they are with Papuan independence.

Australia’s relations with Indonesia are in for a perhaps long period of tension, if not hostility.

The one sure consequence of Papuan independence would be a de facto Australian responsibility for yet another mendicant and unstable state on our doorstep. Adding to the cost of mounting a Timor-like – but incomparably more costly – peace enforcement task would be an indefinite period of expensive aid to a government incapable of governing effectively and of supporting its independence.

Still, one supposes that plenty of idealistic activists within and without government would get to feel good about it.

Michael O’Connor, East Doncaster, Vic

1 These were discovered after entering ‘enclaves’ into Wikipedia and ending up at the municipality of Baarle-Hertog, a group of 22 Belgian enclaves within the Netherlands; and of the Dutch municipality of Baarle-Nassau, which itself has 3 enclaves in Belgian soil and a small one inside one of the Belgian enclaves; there seem to be about 50 “-claves” in all.

2 Thinking of following up “uti possidetis juris” ? Google’s got about 15900 sites waiting for you.

3 Wikipedia has a quite detailed treatment of this matter at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattani_Separatism

4 Apropos of religion as a national bonding force, it is interesting that in what was East Pakistan [now Bangladesh] the ties of Islam to (West) Pakistan were eventually trumped by Bengali nationalism. It is not impossible – though very improbable – that pan-Bengali nationalism may one day re-unite Indian West Bengal with Bangladesh; another, and different, case is that of the “language wars” in Belgium, where an endemic French-speakers v Dutch-speakers conflict may lead to the Belgian Flemings re-joining the Netherlands, thus reversing the Catholic v Protestant-based establishment of the separate Catholic Belgian state in 1831.

5 Were devolution in Great Britain to continue to a ‘logical’ conclusion, i.e., independence for Scotland and Wales, England would be the successor state to the UK.

Leonard Colquhoun
For www.oldtt.pixelkey.biz
April 2006

First published April 15, republished with revisions, April 17.