John T. Sidel's Republicanism, Communism, Islam is an academic endeavor to reinterpret the national revolutions and independence of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam by “rescuing” history from the nation or official nationalism of these three countries. Scholars of Southeast Asia have conducted many studies that are critical of nation-centered history, but they have focused mainly on the pre-nationalist era. Little attention has been paid to answering the question of how nation-states were born out of ideological, political, social, and economic transnationalism, as Caroline S. Hau and Kasian Tejapira have pointed out.Footnote 1 Sidel aims to fill that gap by focusing on the cosmopolitan and transnational character of the revolutions and independence in these three countries, with republicanism, communism, and Islam as the vital transnational drivers of their national revolutions.
The book's main argument is twofold. First, it emphasizes the commonality of the commercial and cosmopolitan drives that enabled these revolutions to achieve the independence of nation-states. Second, it attributes the differences observed between these revolutions to the varying ways of integrating these societies into the world capitalist economy and the diverse forms of cosmopolitan connectedness in and beyond Southeast Asia.
The Spanish-American War led to the Philippine revolution, which was the earliest in Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth century. The revolution was liberal and republican rather than radically egalitarian because the revolution's leadership was in the hands of the cosmopolitan liberal elite of assimilated Chinese immigrants.
In Indonesia, liberal and republican revolutionists were hegemonic, but their numbers were limited. Islam and communism provided mass mobilization for the revolution. The transoceanic Islamic network gave birth to Islamic education institutions that were autonomous from the state. Such institutions harbored Islamic revolutionary discourses different from the republican ones, and successfully mobilized the Muslim masses. Another transnational and cosmopolitan ideology of communism was rooted among wage laborers in foreign capital plantations, which enabled revolutionary socialist mobilizations. World War II and its aftermath emancipated these three revolutionary groups, and their conflict-ridden coexistence led to national revolution and independence.
In Vietnam, the influence of the classical Chinese literati waned with the expansion of the French modern bureaucratic state. Moreover, the emergence of the Vietnamese commercial and landowning elite was squeezed by Chinese and European capital. They were ill-equipped to promote a republican form of revolution. The communists filled this void. The Communist Party succeeded in assuming a monopolistic position within the revolution. Furthermore, the transborder network to Kuomintang in southern China strengthened the party's power. The end of World War II opened up a massive communist mobilization, leading to the withdrawal of the French army and, ultimately, Vietnam's independence.
Sidel constructs these arguments based on an encyclopedic reading of previous studies of Southeast Asian history. One of the book's most fascinating aspects is the exotic places where Sidel begins his description of each revolution. The chapter on the Philippine revolution starts with the Bohemian city of Litoměřice, the chapter on the Indonesian revolution from the Caucasian town of Baku, and the chapter on the Vietnamese revolution from the southern Chinese coastal city of Guangzhou. It seems, however, that the connection between Baku and the Indonesian revolution is a bit different from other two connections. José Rizal in the Philippines and Nguyễn Ái Quốc in Vietnam had footprints in Litoměřice and Guangzhou, suggesting the actual transnational and cosmopolitan nature of nationalism. In contrast, Baku had not received any Indonesian revolutionists. The situation in Baku in the early aftermath of World War I was a precursor to Indonesia's early to mid-twentieth-century Islamic communist revolution from below, but the connection between Baku and Indonesia was an imagined one, not concrete.
Another point of discussion is Sidel's sympathy for the egalitarian and emancipatory aspects of the revolutions. The book shows the importance of these movements within Islam and communism in addition to the less radical traditions of liberalism and republicanism. Such understandings of revolution miss another ideology—totalitarianism or fascism, as held by imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Japanese nationalist figures such as Okawa Shumei and Kita Ikki rejected Western ideas of republicanism, liberalism, and Marxism. Instead, they advocated for the Japanese cultural organic state. This perspective came from the German-born idea of Volksgeist. Nazi Germany was seen as the typical state model. These totalitarian views had certain intellectual repercussions among nationalists in Southeast Asia, such as Supomo and Suwardi Suryaningrat in the Indonesian nationalist movement and Benigno Ramos in the Philippines’ Sakadalist movement. More attention could be paid to their fascination with totalitarianism.
The last chapter compares the three countries that experienced revolutions with the countries that did not. The book posits that the lack of available and appealing cosmopolitan discourses and organizational infrastructures within a particular international conjuncture failed to give birth to revolutions in Thailand, Malaysia, and Burma. The lack of revolution in Thailand was caused by the smooth assimilation of Chinese mestizos and their alliance with the monarchy and military. The lack of revolution in Malaysia was caused by the absence of an autonomous Islamic network and the limited mobilizational capacity of communism to the Chinese. The lack of revolution in Burma was due to the absence of radical communism and the strength of a less extreme form of socialism.
The lack of revolution in an independent state like Thailand, however, cannot simply be discussed in the same vein as the existence of revolution and independence in the colonized Philippines. Furthermore, the book does not analyze much the concrete relationship between the colonial metropole and the colonized state as an international conjuncture leading to the birth or lack of a national revolution. As far as Malaysia and Burma were concerned, one of the most critical international factors explaining their lack of revolution was the political will of the weakening British Empire toward the colonized state. The empire had no intention or power to forestall the colonies’ independence and showed its willingness from an early stage to give it to them in a way that was favorable to Britain's interests.
This is an enjoyable book that is sure to stir exciting academic discussion on the reinterpretation of Southeast Asian history, nationalism, and revolution. In that sense, this book should be read not only by students and researchers on Southeast Asia but also by those interested in modern history, nationalism, and revolution in other parts of the world.
