Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia, By John T. Sidel

The landmark revolutions that led to the making of “Philippines,” “Indonesia,” and “Vietnam” have been the subject of numerous monographs. Most, if not all, previous studies are framed within the container of nation-states and a dichotomization of religious and secular elements. Republicanism, Communism, Islam initiates a radical shift from the problem of methodical nationalism and religious-secular distinction. This book is not a minefield of new primary data. Nor does it point to previously unexplored archival sources. John Sidel offers a fresh conceptualization that places into sharp relief the interactions and connections between local actors and global forces in the shaping of resistance movements and struggles for liberation in Southeast Asia. Religious and other ideological groups were mutually constitutive in generating revolutionary consciousness. They interfaced with one another, colluded and collided in the quest for freedom. The book’s comparative edge and penetrating reframing of the Philippine, Indonesian, and Vietnamese revolutions set it apart from many of its scholarly peers and closer to the intellectual horizons of the author’s mentor, Benedict Anderson. Sidel shatters the constrictions of nationalist scholarship to advocate a viewpoint that is “denationalized, transnationalized, and internationalized (17).”

Still, viewing major events in Southeast Asia from a supranational angle, as the author duly admits, is not a novel undertaking (9). Yet, the implications of utilizing such a perspective on the study of revolutions raging in three seemingly diverse environments are immense. First, Sidel shows how movements launched against European colonial powers were not necessarily motivated by nationalist intents and local visions of freedom. The mobilizing foundations of these revolutions were highly cosmopolitan in that they were motivated by a host of local and global, religious and secular ideas and developments flowing within and into Southeast Asia. The Filipino revolution, for example, was a product of the roles of intellectuals and activists who were plugged into “a broader field of experience, inspiration encouragement, and interlinkages within a set of transcontinental networks of scientists and scholars, liberals and republicans, Freemasons, and other activists and intellectuals stretching across Germany, Bohemia, Belgium, England, and France, and extending into Spain and its far-flung colony in the Philippines” (21). At the same, we can only appreciate the revolt of the Southeast Asian masses by taking into account the integration of the region “within the world capitalist economy and by a set of major conflicts in international society” (24).

Second, a denationalized, transnationalized, and internationalized stance meant that the origins of these revolutions must be traced further in time into the era when Asia was a hub of world religions. A longue durée examination of Southeast Asians’ oceanic interactions with globalized cities, centres of learning, hubs of piety, and empires since the early modern period, the intermingling between diasporic communities, and the various ruptures and reformations brought about by colonial rule and cataclysmic events such as the World Wars can explain the expansion of revolutionary pulses in Southeast Asia. The Indonesian revolution, which enjoy the lion share of the book, was a remarkable sample of the interplay between centuries-old dynamisms and triggering episodes that involved massive incarceration and great loss of lives. Islamic, communist, and republican groups coalesced around the idea of merdeka (freedom) to gain independence. “Inspired and empowered by cosmopolitan currents of republicanism, communism, and Islam, and enabled by imperial decline, interimperialist competition, and international conflict across the globe, Indonesians across the archipelago eventually mobilized, with diverse hopes and dreams, in Revolusi” (124). Precisely because these collectives had cosmopolitan beginnings and chequered trajectories, the Indonesian revolution was barely a unified movement. Sidel registers the bouts of infighting and polarization “revolutions within the Revolusi” (189–97).

Finally, moving away from the nationalist frame of reference and religious-secular distinction enables analysts to tease out similarities and variations between case studies toward abstracting why revolutionary currents and groups succeeded in some parts of Southeast Asia and less in other places. Traces of Benedict Anderson’s work, The Spectre of Comparisons (1998), are most evident here. Anderson encouraged Southeast Asian scholars to identify strands that bind a highly disparate “imagined reality” (Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World. London: Verso, 1998). In Vietnam, as it was in the Philippines and Indonesia, popular entertainment was a common medium, for example, used to spread cosmopolitan consciousness and thereby pave the way for revolutionary thought (229). Colonial education aided in the creation of an extremely literate and internationally informed elite who became founders and leaders of anti-colonial movements. The Vietnamese revolution, however, slightly differs from the Filipino and Indonesia revolutions in that a powerful coalition of nationalist groups was formed through the backing of an emerging Asian power: the Chinese. “CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and other networks among the Chinese émigré communities across Southeast Asia and in Hainan, Hong Kong, and Macao helped to facilitate maritime smuggling via the small-scale junk trade along the long, snakelike coastline of Vietnam” (271).

Well-written and provocative, this book is, however, inundated with some oversights. The words “against this backdrop” are repeated nearly three dozen times. We may read this as Sidel’s attempts to orient his reader to the importance of understanding the wider contexts spurring the growth of nationalist and revolutionary sentiments. Empirically, the book has an uneven coverage. Divided into three parts, two chapters (1–2) center around the Philippines, five on the Indonesian revolution (3–7), and the remaining three chapters (8–10) historicize the Vietnamese revolution. Sidel adopts a chronological approach to explain in detail the cosmopolitan geneses and eventual outcomes of each revolution. Yet, the weight of his original argument is undercut by the lack of a balanced consideration of these revolutions. Extensive engagements with events, ideas, and personalities that have supercharged the Vietnamese revolution, as a case in point, may unravel how folk religiosity was vital in developing anti-colonial conscience. To be added to this is the dearth of discussions on the politicization of women such as Kartini and the Kaum Ibu in Indonesia and their agency in providing the intellectual and religious stimuli for the outbreak of revolutions. Finally, the book sidesteps literature on comparative revolutions. The theoretical and comparative writings of Theda Skocpol, Jack Goldstone, and Jeff Goodwin, and, more notably, Misagh Parsa’s analysis of the revolutions in the Philippines, Iran, and Nicaragua quickly come to mind. Sidel’s conclusive chapter could have been used to reflect on how the field of comparative revolutions can be made more cosmopolitan and theoretically richer by considering exemplars from lesser known and thinly studied parts of Asia.

These criticisms do not in any way downplay the significance of this book. Sidel has raised some very interesting questions for scholars specializing in each of the three countries to consider. Republicanism, Communism, Islam should be read as a notable effort at balancing between analytical generalizations and empirical observations. The book challenges us to transcend the burdens of nation-states and think of the histories of Southeast Asia as more pietistic, more porous, and more cosmopolitan than most historians have been willing to recognize.