Given the 'tragic abundance" the country has been throughout its existence and given the recurring national comedies of errors and fatal tragedies, what is the underlying factor that has united Indonesians together? With no particular light at the end of our tunnel, when the powers that be are only interested power in wealth accumulation for their own families, to what extent can this factor last?
I cannot answer them, yet. But I have sensed they are strongly related to what I feel about the country and what I know of nationalism. But what is nationalism? What does Indonesian nationalism mean to us these days? Is it still relevant a thing?
No sooner than I asked myself these questions was I surprised to learn how very little I did know about it. What does nationalism mean to me? I felt it had to do it with my feelings about and attitudes toward my country, government, and fellow Indonesians.
Virtual diggers of the concept of nationalism would benefit enormously as I did from two excellent essays on the issue: Epistemologi Nasionalisme by Sulfikar Amir and Diskursus Nasionalisme by Kurniawan. They are in Bahasa Indonesia; another useful and quite comprehensive account on the issue, in English, I got from Wikipedia.
The first writer Sulfikar writes at a great length of its historical development, citing that nationalism has been one of the most wonderful social discovery at least in the last one hundred years of human history. Kurniawan concurs that the end of the cold war and the globalism and internasionalism in the 1990s to date, with the advancement of communiation and information technology, did not and will not put an end to the importance of nationalism.
Interestingly Sulfikar argues that the spiritual domain within Indonesian nationalism is filled with elements that has clung dearly to and was born out of a dialectic process with colonialism. It is thus not sufficiently satisfactory to claim, he argues, that Indonesia's nationalism has its roots in local cultures since we have no strong historical foundation. What supported Indonesia as a nation as well as a nationalism ideology was the colonialism that had entirely been inspired by modernism, of which the western culture was its major source. If this entails something, it perhaps warrants another essay; at this moment I just wanted to say that my appreciation to the founding fathers has renewed.
While some of us today tend to view nationalism as a finished product, the two great essays would help us understand that nationalism is never final, if at all. Likewise Indonesia's nationalism will perenially develop in search of its form and essence along its dynamic history, which is not always linear. In other words, the questions about nationalism will stay relevant at any time of age. They are only becoming more complex. Nationalism needs to be revisited and reinterpreted from time to time, more so at a time when we are groping in the dark. Likened to a construction, or an imagined construction to borrow Benedict Anderson's term, nationalism is not physical, let alone a finished building. It is more a spirit with which a nation strives to realize what the nation wants to achieve with its existence. Is Indonesia any closer to what it has always wanted to achieve with its Independence?
As Sulfikar aptly puts it, nationalism exists as a relation between the state and the people, but to some nationalist elites it stops being public goods, rather their exclusive priviledge with which they, coupled with their gigantic authorites, dominate the discourse on nationalism. To them nationalism has revolved into an instrument for manufacturing consent in order to legitimize socioeconomic and political interest of political groups.
By doing this they are only jeopardizing it. In this perspective, the pertinence of the hauting questions becomes obvious: what is the underlying factor that has united Indonesians? To what extent can it last? Is it our love for this nation or is it that most of us go about with no choice?
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