Since the foundation of Thailand’s nation-state in the late 19th century, two traditions have evolved over its primary purpose.

The first of these began from the original formulation in the reign of King Chulalongkorn. The need for a strong absolutist state was justified to overcome external threats (colonialism) and internal disorder so that Siam could achieve ‘progress’ and become a significant country in the world. The right of the existing royal elite to rule this strong state was explained by history (the continuity of monarchy since Sukhothai), and by the elite’s selflessness, professionalism, and monopoly of siwilai. The role of the nation was to be unified, passive, and obedient.

The formula was revived and updated by military dictators in the mid- 20th century. Phibun and Wichit removed the monarchy from its central place, but kept the main elements of the formula intact. The need for a strong dictatorial state was justified to overcome external threats (communism) and internal threats (the Chinese) so that Siam could achieve progress/development and survive in a world of competing nations and ideologies. The right of the military elite to rule was explained by history (the Thai as a martial race), and by its selflessness, professionalism, and monopoly of force. Sarit, with help from the USA, reunited the royal and military strands of the tradition.

The nation-state was new. So too were its citizens, as a result of two sweeping social changes. Beginning in the early 19th century, the landscape and society of the lower Chao Phraya basin was transformed by a frontier movement of peasant colonization. Uniquely in Asia, new land was being opened up faster than population growth from the mid-19th century right through to the 1970s. As a result of political decisions in the late 19th century, this frontier society was characterized not by landlords but by peasant smallholders. Until urbanization accelerated in the last quarter of the 20th century, this smallholder peasant society represented four-fifths of the population and was the main driving force of the economy.

Much of the urban population was also new, especially in the capital city of Bangkok. Continuous immigration from southern China made Chinese a dominant element in the city’s economic life. Western merchants and advisers formed a new semicolonial segment of the elite. A fledgling commoner middle class began to form around the city’s new role as capital of a nation-state.

TRANSFORMING THE RURAL LANDSCAPE AND SOCIETY

Europeans who visited Siam in the 1820s thought much of the Chao Phraya delta was a ‘wilderness’. Plains of scrub forest inhabited by wild elephants merged near the coasts and rivers into marshes dense with reeds and teeming with crocodiles. Settlements clung to the banks of the main rivers. Even along the Chao Phraya River from its estuary past Bangkok and into the upper delta, most of these banks looked ‘deserted’ and densely wooded (Figure 6). In the Ayutthaya era, the only extensive tract of rice cultivation had been the narrow corridor of floodplain running south from Chainat in the centre of the delta. Here farmers grew floating rice on the annual monsoon flooding.

When political detainee number 641, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, was struggling in 1973 to survive on the harsh and remote island of Buru – ‘Happy Land’ – he received a letter suggesting that he should reform: ‘For every person a mistake in judgment is common, but that must of course be followed by its logical consequence, that being: “honesty, courage and the ability to rediscover the true and accepted road”.’ The indirect Javanese style of the letter belonged to President Suharto, and showed the remarkable combination of threat and solicitation that was the hallmark of Suharto's rule. Pramoedya replied simply that he would ‘cherish truth, justice and beauty’, that he hoped ‘the strong’ would ‘extend their hand to the weak’ and that he would continue to ‘strive and pray’. The obliqueness of this response was not just characteristic of the Javanese culture he shared with Suharto; it also reflected the fact that his guards were supervising his reply.

During his imprisonment on Buru, Pramoedya wrote his tetralogy, This Earth of Mankind, retelling the story of the origins of Indonesian nationalism based on the endeavours of Tirto Adhi Suryo. Initially, Pramoedya was not allowed pen and paper, and composed his novels orally, recalling his research in the National Library during the early 1960s. He told fellow prisoners the story so that they might find ‘truth, justice and beauty’ in order to survive. The tetralogy made the claim that Indonesia had lost sight of its true national identity and, under Suharto, was drifting back towards the government of the colonial era. The books, together with Pramoedya's letters and published reminiscences of the time, provide a moving insight into the brutality of a regime based on military force.

Indonesia is the fourth-largest country in the world, with a population its government estimates at 240 million. It consists of 19,000 islands strung across the equator, some of these no more than sand spits, others, like Java and Sumatra, large and densely populated. Two of the world's largest islands, Borneo and New Guinea, are partly within Indonesia: Kalimantan is the Indonesian name for its part of Borneo, while Indonesia's half of New Guinea is now called Papua – formerly Irian Jaya. As a country joined by water, Indonesia covers an area as wide as Europe or the United States.

There are more than 200 major cultural and language groups on the islands. Java is the most populous island, with over 130 million people packed together on its 132,000 square kilometres. Jakarta, the national capital with a population of 15 million, is located on the island of Java. Javanese culture dominates the other cultures of Indonesia, but the main language of the nation is a form of Malay called Bahasa Indonesia or Indonesian.

Indonesia is generally featured in the world’s media for its political violence and involvement in international terrorism. It has been rated at the top of international corruption watch lists, and its president between 1967 and 1998, Suharto, was named the head of state who extorted the most personal wealth from his country.

Openness and the Fall of Suharto

The 1980s was an exceptional period in Indonesia's history. The near monopoly on violence by the government meant that it could maintain an image of quiescence that ensured international support. Western countries built up close relations with Indonesia, particularly with the military, to whom Britain sold arms, the US provided intelligence training and Australia co-sponsored exercises with the Special Forces Command, the elite troops responsible for maintaining control in the rebellious provinces. Inside and outside Indonesia, authoritarianism was seen as the price the country paid for development, a view that served the interests of Western governments keen to support the operations of multinational oil and mineral companies in Indonesia.

The 1990s saw that stability come under question, and finally and belatedly the end of the regime came. The legacy of Suharto's rule has hung over the regimes of his successors. Both the New Order mindset and New Order corruption have continued to pervade Indonesian political culture. The attempts to suppress Islam have also come back to haunt the Indonesian state, as the nation has taken on an increasingly Muslim face.

For Indonesians World War Two and their subsequent national revolution started optimistically, kicked off by the enthusiasm of being liberated from the Dutch by the Japanese. Pramoedya Ananta Toer recalled the arrival of the emperor's forces in Blora in 1942. The Japanese had swept rapidly through the Indies early in March, and people came to meet their army, waving flags and shouting their support for their liberators from the Dutch. ‘With the arrival of the Japanese just about everyone in town was full of hope, except for those who had worked in the service of the Dutch.’

But looking back on his experience as a teenager witnessing the arrival of the Japanese, Pramoedya added, with acrimony arising from his subsequent experiences, ‘There was a bad smell about the whole thing, a stench that rose from the bodies of the Japanese soldiers.’ The shouts of ‘Japan is our older brother’ and ‘banzai Dai Nippon’ would soon be replaced by bitterness. Tens of thousands of Indonesians were to starve, work as slave labourers, be forced from their homes or die in brutal hand-to-hand conflict before Indonesian sovereignty could be achieved. It took more than four years after independence was proclaimed in 1945 for the Dutch to transfer sovereignty to the Indonesians, and even then many Indonesians like Pramoedya were not satisfied with the result.

Travelling to cities broadens the mind, or it did in the Netherlands East Indies. One Balinese prince, Anak Agung Made Djelantik, could recall the experience in 1931 of being sent to junior high school in the town of Malang, in East Java, leaving behind his primary school days in Bali's largest town, Denpasar. Djelantik had grown up in East Bali, in a palace that was an extended set of house yards, around which were clustered some of the dwellings of his father's subjects. He spent his early years in a society that was rigidly hierarchical and where life revolved around farming. For his preliminary schooling he had to travel five hours from the family palace to Denpasar, then a town of 15,000 people, just over a hundred of whom were Europeans.

In 1931, after a six-hour drive to Singaraja in North Bali, the young Djelantik caught a KPM steamer en route from Ambon and Makasar, for an exciting journey to Surabaya. From Surabaya he took another car 80 kilometres south to Malang – population 87,000 – where he met not only local Javanese, but people from all over the Indies. He boarded with a Dutch teacher's family, where he learned new kinds of behaviour. He had to learn to wear pyjamas, say wel te resten (sleep well) and turn off the lights at night, to eat breakfast of chocolate granules sprinkled on bread spread with Palm Tree brand margarine, to do the opposite of Balinese politeness and comment on a meal, as well as converse during it, and to like cheese, cauliflower and brussels sprouts.

Before 1945 there was no Indonesia, but rather a collection of islands spread across the equator that the Dutch made into the Netherlands East Indies. In 1898 a new queen, Wilhelmina, ascended the throne of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Wilhelmina's tropical empire, known simply as the Indies, numbered more than 28 million subjects on the prime island of Java and some 7 million others on what were referred to as the Outer Islands, although not all of these as yet were under Dutch rule. Although she ruled for the rest of the colonial period, Wilhelmina never visited her colony. She never experienced the sudden monsoonal downpours, the green landscapes dominated by volcanoes or the spicy heat, but every year her birthday was celebrated there, with night markets and festive arches.

What was it like for the Dutch, ruling that vast archipelago of Indonesia? The Dutch made up a special, upper social class of the Indies – soldiers, administrators, managers, teachers, pioneers. They lived linked to, and yet separate from, their native subjects. From 1900 to 1942 these colonial rulers worked to make the islands a single, prosperous colony, and for that they expected gratitude. In 1945, when the Pacific War ended and the Dutch attempted to reassert their control over the islands of Indonesia, they were genuinely shocked that some of the peoples of their islands would fight to the death to keep them out. There was a vast gap between Dutch perceptions of their rule and the views of their Indonesian subjects, but it is important to understand the Dutch views, because they have shaped modern Indonesia.

In the early 1970s Pak Sumitra, a local leader in a poor suburb of Jakarta, described for an American sociologist how political control was exercised on a local level. He described how Indonesia shifted from a society polarised between Communists and non-Communists to one in which a distant military government was able to pacify and manage the country. The new government's aim was to create the appearance of order and control.

Pak Sumitra was a veteran of the Revolution, like most political leaders of the times. During the struggle in Tegal, coastal Java, he had come across a magical stone that had protected him from harm when all his comrades were being killed. He attributed to this stone his ability to gain a following when he moved to Jakarta to work in the railway yards, where he became a foreman. The community of which he became the leader consisted almost entirely of railway workers, many of whom were Communists. This man had an antipathy to Communists because members of his family had been killed by them during the conflict in Madiun in 1948. When, around 1955, he became aware that Communists were taking control of the main railway union in the yards, he gravitated to an alternative union linked to the Socialist Party. He voted for that party in the 1957 regional elections and became a main union organiser in 1962, using his social networks to sign up hundreds of workers. By this stage the yards were split down the middle into one or the other faction, and each group of workers became increasingly dependent on their unions to supply them with basic benefits. These benefits included a gamelan musical ensemble that the Communist union obtained for its members and extra rice rations. By 1964 rampant inflation and national political division turned verbal sparring between the two unions into open hostilities. The leader and some of his faction were stoned by Communist union members outside a movie theatre.