Intellectual Origins of the Postcolonial State: Southeast Asia, 1926–1960

Abstract

This dissertation provides a history of political thought in Singapore and Indonesia that explains how democracy came to be conceptualized in ways that justified the rise of strong, centralized postcolonial states, and placed significant constraints on the bounds of legitimate political competition and dissent. It argues that, in elite political thought, democratic theorizing began only after decolonization had made popular sovereignty the basis of legitimate state authority. Postcolonial state actors then theorized the nature and character of the democratic state in response to the challenges of holding new office and governing. The democratic theories that emerged were thus oriented toward the production of political stability and the restraint or the resolution of social conflict. This study contributes the first in-depth history of state theory and democratic thought in twentieth-century Southeast Asia. It examines the role that debates over state theory and democracy played in the history of ideas about the postcolonial state. It also shows how these debates were shaped by broader developments in the history of social, economic, and constitutional theory. The dissertation charts these histories between 1946 and 1960 in Singapore and 1926 and 1959 in Indonesia. Reading speeches, writings, and associated archival materials, it first reconstructs the state theories that elite political actors formulated when they were organizers of popular movements against late colonial rule. It then demonstrates how these state theories were reworked, generating democratic thought, when these actors became office-holders at decolonization. It thus offers a new analysis of the relationship between decolonization and democratic thought.