The Strange Bedfellows of Nationalism

In this essay, I address a question that has preoccupied recent writers on nationalism: does nationalism repeat itself? Is every assertion of national identity, no matter how intimately singular each may seem, merely the recurrence of a general form? Scholars have criticized Benedict Anderson for conceptualizing nationalism as a "modular" phenomenon, a mode of consciousness born in the eighteenth century and repeated identically, without remainder, across time and space.¹ Some have focused on the role of such factors as decolonization and the cold war in shaping, relatively late in the game, what is taken as the national norm. My aim in this essay is somewhat different. I want to rethink the very notion of modularity by way of an investigation that focuses on a subtle aspect of national discourse: its pronouns. Instead of tracking deployments of the first-person plural — the nation as we — I explore the significance of references to the nation made in the third person — the nation as he, she, they, or even it. These references appear in the utterances of would-be citizens — in particular, elite would-be citizens — who adopt the voice of outside commentators to describe their people's legitimate and legitimating desires. I undertake this inquiry in a setting where the stakes of pronominal usage are particularly high: West Papua, a would-be breakaway region of Indonesia, whose inhabitants have long sought, but rarely enjoyed, a voice in their own fate.

When it comes to nationalism, I shall argue, Kierkegaard's dictum holds: there simply is no repetition, yet nationalisms verify this discovery by repeating it in every possible way. This is because nationalisms always speak to a plurality of audiences: audiences presupposed and entailed in nationalist texts and practices, audiences that multiply, merge, absorb each other, and fragment. Over the centuries, nationalist discourse has mobilized an array of expressive genres and registers, old and new, linked to historically specific institutions, viewpoints, and landscapes of power. Shifts between genres and registers leave their mark wherever the nation appears in the third person to an extranational we that looks back from beyond the nation's pale. When one heeds the proliferation of audiences, subjectivities, genres, and registers signaled by the play of pronouns, nationalism stops looking like an abstract ideal endlessly expressing itself across an infinity of cases; instead, it becomes the focus of a different kind of repetition, one "forcibly assigned a place in space and time."² Variably conceived and addressed, transcendently extranational interlocutors have played a constitutive role in nationalist documents everywhere. There simply would be no nationalism without strange bedfellows of a historically particular sort.

In the case I consider, that of West Papuan nationalism, these strange bedfellows play a particularly dominant role. Outsiders have tended to view the West Papuans as far too primitive to act as the mature, rights-bearing subjects of popular sovereignty that liberal thinkers placed at the heart of the modern nation form. As a result, West Papuan nationalists have gone to especially great lengths to conjure up extranational agents to endorse their claims. Consider the following scene from my fieldwork on the movement that seeks independence for an administrative region of Indonesia that was once, like Indonesia, a Dutch colony.³ The date was October 12, 2002, and I was seated in a conference room at a sports complex south of the Dutch city of Utrecht. It was an odd moment to be hearing a Javanese accent. In the chairs around me were nearly a hundred Papuan men and women, members of an Indonesian minority who generally have little good to say about the Javanese majority that dominates Indonesian political and cultural life. PaVo, the Papuan People's Organization, was holding a meeting to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the New York Agreement, the U.S.-brokered deal of October 1962 that led to the transfer of the western half of New Guinea from the Netherlands to the United Nations, and then to Indonesia in early 1963. Some in the audience belonged to the Papuan elite that the Dutch had groomed for selfrule in the 1950s, when the Netherlands retained the territory as a freestanding colony after the rest of the Netherlands Indies gained independence. Many had gone into exile during the years leading up to the so-called Act of Free Choice, an event held in 1969 that was carefully orchestrated to result in a unanimous confirmation of the territory's integration into the Indonesian Republic. Others on hand included Dutch veterans, the children of Dutch missionaries, and scholars with an interest in West Papua, as the Dutch had dubbed the nation-to-be, before Indonesia renamed the territory West Irian, and then Irian Jaya, only recently settling on Papua in the spirit of "reform."

There was no shortage of languages and dialects at the meeting. The organizers provided a running Dutch translation of speeches delivered in the Papuan dialect of Indonesian by guests, including Agus Alua, secretary of the Papuan Presidium Council, the executive branch of the latest edition of the movement for West Papuan independence. This latest movement arose in the late 1990s following the fall of Indonesia's authoritarian New Order regime, led by President Suharto, a Javanese general who ousted Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, in 1965.⁴ But despite this linguistic cacophony, Why Papua Wants Freedom (Mengapa Papua Ingin Merdeka), the video shown at the start of the meeting, still came as a bit of a surprise. The lights dimmed and an opening credit appeared on the television: "The Papuan Presidium Council Presents." After a long title sequence featuring racialized images of "Stone Age" Papuans, a narrator began to speak. "Papua," he intoned gravely, "often known as the land of birds of paradise, spirits, and orchids." I was sitting with a fellow anthropologist, and she whispered to me, "That narrator is Javanese."

At the time I disagreed. But later, when I interviewed Willy Mandowen, the Presidium moderator who assisted in the video's production, I learned that my friend had been right. Not only was the narrator Javanese, but so was the entire production crew. All were acquaintances of Yorrys Raweyai, friend of Suharto and leader of a notorious gang–cum–"youth organization," a man with a Papuan mother and Sino-Indonesian father who, somewhat implausibly, had reinvented himself as a loyal supporter of Papuan nationalism.⁵ The Presidium had chosen the Javanese production team on purpose, to make the video seem more "neutral." The narrator had never even been to Papua. His was an extranational voice referring to Papua in the third person. According to my consultant, this was not a weakness; it was a strength.

Unexpected alliances and affinities have pervaded the recent resurgence of West Papuan nationalism. The movement has unfolded in a rugged and impoverished region inhabited by 2.3 million people, roughly 35 percent of whom are settlers from outside western New Guinea.⁶ Papua is a predominantly Christian corner of the world's largest Muslim-majority nation-state. Home to the largest gold and copper mine in the world, operated by New Orleans – based Freeport McMoran, Papua faces a host of social problems, from urban unemployment to high rates of infant-maternal mortality to an emerging AIDS epidemic.⁷ Human rights abuses have recurred throughout the period of Indonesian rule, with the most extreme violence occurring in the context of counterinsurgency campaigns against the Free Papua Organization, or OPM, a scattered yet tenacious guerrilla army founded in 1965.⁸ Many Papuans have suffered under Indonesian rule; at the same time, Indonesian institutions and social networks have shaped the fortunes of members of the Papuan elite. At the time of the Second Papuan National Congress, the mass gathering that gave birth to the Presidium in 2000, the movement's two most prominent figures were Theys Eluay, a Sentani chief based in the provincial capital, Jayapura, who was one of the thousand-odd representatives bribed and threatened to vote for integration in 1969, and Tom Beanal, an Amungme leader from the main tribe displaced by the Freeport mine, who was a long time critic but is now a commissioner of Freeport Indonesia, a subsidiary of Freeport McMoran. Equally striking as these institutional and personal ties is the movement's apparent compulsion to repeat Indonesian nationalist documents and discourses. Presidium resolutions generally begin with long lists of supporting documents, including not only U.N. resolutions, but also the Indonesian constitution.⁹ Well before the Papuans began their struggle for independence, merdeka (freedom) was an Indonesian revolutionary call to arms.¹⁰