Asian Studies Series. Canberra: ANU Press, 2022. xvi, 349 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$44.00, paper; free ebook. ISBN 9781760465292.
Bringing together country experts specializing in the historiography of Cold War Southeast Asia, Matthew Galway and Marc Opper’s edited volume engages with and contributes to a burgeoning historical literature on individual political actors’ agency in shaping the trajectories of the Cold War in the region.
Thematically, this volume explores the diverse forms and processes of the indigenization of communist revolutionary ideologies in Cold War Southeast Asia. Specifically, it examines how political actors across the region—including communists and left-wing nationalists—creatively adapted orthodox communist doctrines to suit local conditions, in theory and practice. Drawing on existing definitions of ideology, this volume proposes a process-oriented explanation of the sociological origins of the indigenization of communist ideologies in Cold War Southeast Asia, in which Marxism-Leninism and Maoism—through active and innovative adaptions by political actors—served as critical tools for local anti-colonial struggles and nation-building programs.
In analyzing the indigenization of communist ideologies, the authors employ what the editors refer to as a “sociology of intellectuals” (18) approach to unravel the complicated processes through which intellectuals “turned into radical nationalists, hardened communists and, in the most excessive cases, brutal killers of not only their nation, but also their comrades once they had state power in hand” (20). In doing so, this volume underscores the importance of the “social milieu” in shaping political actors’ engagements with communist ideologies across the region (10). To achieve their analytical goals, the authors use various local language primary sources, including newspaper articles, party documents, personal political writings, speeches, memoirs, and interviews to tease out “local norms, modes, resources and ways of seeing the world in dialogic engagement with thoughts and practices that entered Southeast Asian leftists’ life trajectories” (14).
Structurally, this volume is meticulously designed, and individual chapters are connected following two logics. On the surface, it is thematically organized into two sections addressing the indigenization of communist ideologies in Cold War Southeast Asia in theory and practice, respectively. Chapters in the first section investigate intellectuals’ theoretical engagements with communist ideologies in Indonesia (chapters 1, 5), Cambodia (chapter 2), Burma (chapter 3), and the Philippines (chapter 4) across various historical periods. The second section shifts attention to how localized communist ideologies were implemented in practice. Countries under analysis here include Malaysia (chapter 6), Vietnam (chapters 7, 9), Laos (chapter 8), and Thailand (chapter 10). Another deeper thread running through this volume is how political actors coped with three significant challenges when indigenizing communist ideologies in local contexts. These challenges include how to reconcile communist theoretical frameworks with local circumstances (chapters 2, 4, 6, 8), how to frame communist ideologies to suit local conditions (chapters 1, 3, 10), and how to manage the influences of old theoretical paradigms (chapters 5, 7, 9). Through detailed discourse analysis of primary sources, the authors collectively illustrate how intellectuals selectively adapted communist ideologies in ways that reflected local political, social, and cultural conditions.
Overall, this volume’s major contributions to the existing scholarship on the Cold War history in Southeast Asia are threefold. First, as the editors clearly point out, what sets this volume apart from the extant literature includes its broader research scope (both geographically and temporally), its choice of individual political actors as the basic unit of analysis, and its use of local language primary sources. Second, and more importantly, the authors challenge the conventional narratives depicting Southeast Asian states as passive respondents to great power rivalries during the Cold War and thus shed new light on individual political actors’ agency in shaping the contours of Cold War history in the region. It is also worth noting that despite its primary focus on the role of agency, this volume presents relatively balanced views with regard to the relationship between structure and agency, as evidenced by its emphasis on how regional and international contexts conditioned the indigenization of communist ideologies in local contexts. Third, the two-dimensional treatment of communist ideologies in this volume differs from previous studies on leftist ideologies in Southeast Asia that place primacy on the practice of communism. Rather than take the origin and dissemination of communist ideologies in the region as given, this volume unpacks the processes through which communist ideologies were indigenized in both theory and practice. The use of local language primary sources further serves to eschew normative biases in previous studies portraying communism as “readily available blueprints for ‘organizational weapons’” (3–4).
Nevertheless, this volume could benefit from adding a concluding chapter where the authors identify the long-lasting legacies of the indigenization of communist ideologies, main limits of the volume, and potential directions for future research. In addition, despite its broad research scope, what is missing is the analysis of the indigenization of communist ideologies by other prominent political actors, such as the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). The two chapters dedicated to Indonesia detail how major nationalist organizations, including the Pendidikan Nasional Indonesia, the Persatuan Muslim Indonesia, and the Partai Republik Indonesia, adapted communist ideologies in the Dutch East Indies; it would be intriguing to see how the PKI indigenized communist ideologies in post-independence Indonesia given its close affinity with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its critical role in domestic politics before its demise in 1965. Lastly, as suggested in several chapters, future research could further explore the rationale behind variations in the forms and processes of the indigenization of communist ideologies across national contexts. Indeed, this volume has laid solid groundwork for such comparative studies.
Despite the minor shortcomings analyzed above, this volume is a welcome addition to the historiography of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. It is highly recommended to students and scholars who seek to delve more deeply into the Cold War history in Southeast Asia and, specifically, to gain local perspectives regarding individual political actors’ agency in developing indigenized revolutionary ideologies in the region.
Zheng Wang
State University of New York, Albany