In March, the immigration department granted temporary protection visas to 42 West Papuans, some of them independence activists, fleeing from persecution by the Indonesian state. The Indonesian government stated its strong disapproval and the Australian government subsequently announced that it wants to use "national interest" criteria in assessing refugee status.
The incident has highlighted both the very limited extent of democratic change in Indonesia, and Australia's neo-colonial role in the region. West Papua could prove to be as explosive an issue in Indonesian and Australian politics as East Timor has been.
The plight of the West Papuan people has also brought to the fore how, in many nation-states today, particular ethnic and cultural groups suffer systematic oppression and are fighting against that oppression.
In everyday language, both Australia and Indonesia are often referred to as "nations", as well as political states. The "nation" is generally seen as a natural, self-evident category — groups that have gradually evolved through history and, bar a few odd injustices, formed themselves into states.
However, nations are complex, contradictory social formations with a quite recent history. In pre-capitalist times economies, cultures and languages were, for most people, very localised, even in large empires. Members of a very small elite might see themselves as part of a wide-ranging culture (such as that based on Latin in medieval Europe), which they identified with much more than the peasants in their local area did.
Capitalism and the nation
With the development of capitalism from around the 14th century in North-western Europe, very different social imperatives arose. An emerging class of traders, and then increasingly manufacturers, needed an expanded and consolidated market and this drove interrelated pressures to break down local trade barriers, standardise languages, formalise laws and develop new forms of communication and technologies, like the printing press.
By the time capitalism had become dominant throughout Europe in the 19th century, what were once vaguely related ethnic groups were becoming distinct social formations sharing a common territory, economy, language and culture. This was not a peaceful, gradual process, but one shaped by dramatic conflicts and revolutions, especially when the formation of new states and political institutions was involved.
While capitalism has spurred the development of nations, as a social system that requires constant expansion it has also, in a contradictory way, created international trade and interactions that tend to break down national barriers. Karl Marx, in mid-19th century works such as The Communist Manifesto, tended to argue that due to this process nations would become less important under capitalism.
However, by the end of that century it was becoming clear to socialists that, due to the rapid expansion of European imperialism (and a little later, the US, Japanese and Australian varieties) across the globe, the "national question" was gaining a new importance in different forms. Imperialism was justified by new, and often quite rabid and racist, forms of nationalist ideology in the dominant countries, and the process of imperialist expansion tended to create new nations, through both the expansion of markets and the very process of resisting foreign oppression and exploitation.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks, faced with overthrowing a Russian empire that oppressed numerous nations, clearly distinguished between the nationalism of oppressor and oppressed nations, and argued that oppressed nations should have the right to self-determination, to determine their own political future. Separation might not necessarily be the best option in all cases, especially in a socialist state, but self-determination should be seen as a basic democratic right.
The Bolsheviks saw national liberation as closely tied to social liberation, both because imperialists directly exploited local workers and farmers and had many ties to local elites in oppressed countries, and because national oppression tended to get in the way of workers and the oppressed focusing on their class interests and uniting internationally.
Imperialism has created nations in an uneven and messy way. The imperialist rulers created arbitrary boundaries that cut across existing social groups, and they often exacerbated ethnic and cultural differences for their own purposes. While virtually all former colonies have gained political independence, they have remained economically exploited, distorting their development.
West Papua
West Papua is a case in point. The disparate if ethnically related groups brought together in the Dutch East Indies became the Indonesian nation through capitalist development and the struggle against colonialism. West Papua, always ethnically distinct from the rest of the colony, had a period of separate development from the time of Indonesian independence in 1949 to the phony "Act of Free Choice" that incorporated West Papua into Indonesia in 1969, and has been particularly badly exploited by the Indonesian state and western resource corporations since. However, it consists of numerous language and cultural groups, only partly drawn together in a common economy.
Whether West Papua is an "actual" nation, and whether or not it is most advantageous for the West Papuan people to separate from Indonesia, are not the most important political questions for the Australian left. We should focus on the right of any West Papuans to obtain asylum in Australia, and on the right of West Papuans to choose their own political future and to be free of oppression and exploitation by the Indonesian military and imperialist corporations.
Nick Fredman
From Green Left Weekly, May 10, 2006.
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