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Beginning my six-month fellowship here at CSEAS on July 20, I am still doing an intensive reading of important references, particularly on Japan and American political and/or democratic histories, before embarking in early September on writing the first draft of a journal article for publication in English concerning a hypothetical genealogy of democracy from the perspective of a Third World, former deeply colonial, country--Indonesia.

Convinced that it is now high time to try to venture balancing the theoretical domination of Western scholars in this area without the slightest presumption to question either the robustness of Western experience in the making of democracy or its establishment in the studies of democracies whose richness and vivacity continuously nourish my own venture in the field, I have for more than five years now been preoccupied by what I conceive as the tangled relationship between four major factors in demo- cratic genealogy. They are nation (not nationalism), democracy, what I call autocentricity, and checks-and- balances political rationality. Autocentricity constitutes the working mode of a nation, just as political rationality the working mode of democracy. A nation, therefore, must be measured by (its) autocentricity, just as democracy by (its) rationality. Simultaneously, any intention to build a democracy must first of all consider the state of the nation upon which it is to stand, especially regarding the sufficiency or insufficiency of its autocentricity. Only with sufficient autocentricity the door is widely open for a people to deliberate voluntarily in earnest sincerity to come up with a commanding constitution having effective checks-and-balances political rationality. Of course, the nation remains the central axis that makes the autocentric rationality possible−hence democracy.

Put differently, the tangledness of the four factors implies a clear circularity between them as well as the supremacy of law that results above all from the voluntary, sincerity, and visionary intelligence in constitutional deliberation. This also implies that by no means can democracy be implanted or forced from without the nation concerned, let alone done with utter arrogance that is totally void of respect not only to the targeted nation per se, but also to the moral sanity of the international communities and/or to the salutary international conventions.

Now, the tangledness of these factors have been in general either taken for granted, confused, glossed over, or largely ignored by Western scholars --an intellectual mistake followed unquestioningly by the majority of students of democracy the world over. The principal thesis I am proposing here is that unlike other political systems, democracy is virtually impossible without the support of a preexisting nation or protonation and that political rationality results from the autocentric mode of that nation. To me, it is an unfortunate reality with precarious and far-reaching implications in Westernoriented academia that nation has been so ubiquitously taken for granted and/or confused with nationalism. Over time, there is a symbiotic relationship between nation and democracy just as it is between autocentricity and political rationality. This might be called “the two-by-two democratic genealogy.” The symbiosis occurs because of the cognitive affinities between the inherent characteristics of nation and of democracy. A nation is characterized by the principles of solidarity, inclusivism, mutual trust, and civility. All these fits well with the principles characterizing democracy, i.e., freedom iberty or independence, equality egalitarianism, justice, rationality, and the supremacy of law.

The widespread failures of democratic experiments in the Third World is largely a function of the equally widespread absence of nations as we under stand it, and with it, of political autocentricity and rationality. Perhaps we could well propound that nearly half of what we call “nations” in existing “nation-states” today pass at best only as proto- or even pseudo-nations. It is in the taken-for-grantedness of the existence nation as nation and hence the oblivion regarding autocentricity that lies the failures of most Western accounts in explaining the causes of the ostensible impossibility of establishing genuine democracies in the Third World. I deliberately pick up America and Japan for Indonesians in particular to learn politics from due to their outstanding mode of political autocentricities on whose mode both democracies developed. 4This taken-for-grantedness, I think, has largely eventuated from the divergent unfolding of nations in the West vis-a-vis that of the Third World. The majority of genuine nations, i.e., autocentric nations, we now witness burgeoned in the West as from the 17th or the 18th Centuries. Both ironically and paradoxically, it was the global reach of this common burgeoning of nations in the West that suppressed the evolvement of a similar phenomenon in the Third World. Probably Western theorizing of democracy has not fully liberated itself from the epistemic fog of mission civilatrice? the kind of fog betrayed also by the flood of civil society thesis or studies again throughout the world in the last twenty years or so. Hence, for instance, the listing of dozens of indicators hoisting proximity to, or relations with, Great Britain as the origin and prerequisites of democracy as upraised by Samuel Huntington in The Third Wave, which are concurred to by most Western scholars, and is quickly parroted in the Third World. I only hope that this or that unawareness has nothing to do with the possibility of a subconscious evasion of the developed democracies in the West to confront their initial or recurrent contribution to the entire gamut of political miseries that keep lashing at the peoples in the Third World.

Quite contrary to the experience of America and Japan, autocentricity has been hampered and thus virtually absent in Indonesia (or Nusantara) as of the early 16th Century all the way to the present. Mainly harking back to that time when the Dutch East Indies began to puncture roughly for two centuries its stealthy and cunning claws and eventually gained a full econo-political monopoly in the archipelago to establish the Netherlands India and thereby held in check the growth of the people’s protonation into a nation that had been in course through the ongoing economic integration in the whole land during the preceding centuries. The stronger the intensity of the will of the colonial rulers to make profit or profiteer, the wider and the deeper political othercentricity are exacted upon their colonies. And the more othercentric a polity is, the wider and deeper it has to practice political irrationalities. A far grimmer picture emerged by mid-19 Century in the African continent subsequent to the rapacity of the Partition of Africa. Without implying something fateful or insurmountable, it has been my contention that the protracted and seemingly intractable backwardness of politics in Indonesia just as it is in many other countries in Asian, African, and Latin American continents, has very little to do with the alleged cultural or intellectual deficiencies--let alone potentialities--of the peoples concerned, but overwhelmingly due to the systemic and structural preclusion of the growth of their protonations into their own nations. Only with such a growth and only with the capitalization of such an awareness can a people nurture its political autocentricity and, hence, political rationality and translate them in their top-down political contracts.

With this thesis, it is my desire to be able to contribute to the literature of democratic theorizing by somehow correcting or shedding light onto the “black holes” of the ruling Graeco-Roman or Anglo-American explanations of democratic genealogy; to the rather direct and superfluous preoccupation in democratic institutions, indispensable though they would always be; and to what I see as a misleading, if influential, thesis of “transition from authoritarian rules” by Guillermo O’Donnell et al. Last, not least, I think it is important to recover here and there sparks of earlier arguments once kindled by our venerable predecessors--also, thankfully, from the West--over the ages in the literature of democracy that are not rekindled any more or that are lost or abandoned along the way.

1. The concept “autocentricity” used here is reversely inspired by Samir Amin’s “autocentric accumulation” and, rightly, by Michael Shapiro’s reading of “the centeredness of most of our political practices.” But if both Amin and Shapiro are using the “center” derivatives in singular terms for wanting to expose the stark inequality within the global and discursive economies, I am using “autocentricity” in the plural: that centricities actually exist in relative proportion to distinct polities, irrespective of continuous struggles--and winning, losing, and the numerous acts of mutual blurring of boundaries --among them. All polities are by definition autocentric; otherwise there is no need for them to exist in the first place With “autocentricity” I do not mean the privileging of a center in acircle. Seen in the midst of other centers, “the center,” that is, the one that gets persistent care and respect, is the circle in its entirety. It thus signifies inclusivism. For analytical purpose, I am introducing two other attendant derivatives of the same root in order to make the meaning of the former clearer, i.e., acentricity (in which a polity privileges no particular center due to the rapacity of personal self-aggrandizement of political actors within the three branches of government and in the private sectors, at the expense of the nation’s well being) and othercentricity (in which a polity privileges another polity or polities outside itself as is common among colonies of old and dependent or satellite nationstates nowadays). For Amin’s and Shapiro’s usage of the “center” derivatives, see Samir Amin, Unequal Development. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976, pp. 191 and 381, and Michael Shapiro, “The Constitution of the Central American Other,” in The Politics of Representation. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, p. 103. For instances of contemporary satellite nations with different gradations, see Chalmers Johnsons, The Sorrows of Empire, 2004.

2. By no means do I deny the existence of a continuum between nation and nationalism, just as nobody can deny the continuum between night and day. And yet noontime and midnight are bluntly different. It is with the parallel to this noontime-midnight differ ence that I draw the nation-nationalism antagonisms. Agreeing with the seminal defi nition of Ernest Renan (1889) of “nation,” in spite of the excess of his metaphoric narrative, which remains unchallenged in its foresightedness, “nation” is distinct from “nationalism” in quite a number of consequential respects.

To cite a few, nationalism by and large takes an a priori worldview whereas nation stands on an a posteriori conception in facing the world. Nationalism is addicted to in citing people with its purism and exclusivism whereas nation gears itself toward flour ishing with an open, liberal, and inclusivistic mindset. If nationalism tends to freeze culture and/or national traits into a homogeneous identity, nation would always keep that culture ever conducive for creativity and inventiveness and is therefore receptive to any positive elements from without in order to keep buttressing, enriching, and sus taining its resilience and to be ever prepared to face the present and future challenges. Also, if nationalism mostly depart from, and, as a result, gets plunged into, irrational or chauvinistic behavior, nation thrives upon the principles of political equality and non discriminative solidarity that makes it always compatible with contractual and, as such, consensual politics.

3. This symbiosis is first noticed and analyzed in the classic of Rupert Emerson, From Empire to Nation (Cambridge: Harvand University Press, 1962)--a thick work with exceptionally rich and rigorous analysis from line to line and remains worthy of reading even today. But if he correctly grasps, just like Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm decades later, the palpable modernity of the political collectivity we call “nation,” he, re grettably, follows the shaky understanding of nation like that of Hans Kohn who incog nizantly confuses nation with nationalism?a confusion unmistakably echoed in 1983 by the celebrated work of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, whose influence still lingers on. This renders Emerson’s final chapters that try to deal with the anomaly of the divergence of nationalism and democratic ideals and/or practices in the newly independent countries in Asia and Africa of the 1950s go astray.

4. We do not have to read dozens of pages concerning the thirteen colonies of early Ame rica in volume one of Tocqueville’s masterpiece Democracy in America to uncover count less indicators of the sturdiness of America’s autocentricity. One needs only to read the first paragraph of the country’s Federal Constitution. In Japan, awareness of the imper ative of autocentricity already surged in late 19th Century among others in the heated and protracted debate, occasionally bedecked by harsh exchanges, between Ukichi Taguchi and Inoue Tetsujiro, two magnificent Japanese scholars over the highly contro versial choice between mixed residence with, or right of extraterritoriality for, the banging Westerners. For a sharp narrative of this historical debate in Japan, see Eiji Oguma, A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’ . (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2002), Ch. 2, pp.16-30).

5. “Nusantara” is the appellation both Indonesians and Indonesianists, domestic or foreign, used to refer to the bulk of country prior to the birth of Indonesia as a republic.

In the course of the near future, I would very much like to develop this thesis on democratic genealogy whose   final draft I expect to finish at CSEAS by the end of November into a readable book also in English hopefully within two years from now, if the work goes uninterrupted. For this to materialize, I certainly need to look for another fellowship after this one to substantiate or put flesh into the thesis by tracing in turn the sinews or the frailties of nation, democracy, autocentricity (or their virtual absence due to rampant acentricity or othercentricity), and political rationality or irrationality in the American, the Japanese, and the young yet potential Indonesian democracy as I cast them into a comparative analysis. The way to trace their sinews or frailties is to grasp first of all the making up or the nations’ political histories as well as the political (ir)rationality and autocentricity (or it alternatives) in their constitutions. A similar effort must be deployed down to their laws concerning parties, elections, and/or along with the procedural formations--and some procedural changes over time--of their highest executive, legislative, and judicial bodies. All this must be further verified, for instance, along the national policies and practices in their public educations, in their public services, in big econo-political disputes, and in the relative strength or (im)partiality of their respective law enforcement. In other words, we are talking here about finding the extent of integration achievable or not between the different moments or layers of political autocentricity or rationality. Fully conscious of the laden imperfections of human mind and the gravity of the subject matter, I would heartily welcome any suggestions or criticisms from colleagues at CSEAS and elsewhere so that I could narrow as close as possible the gap between the project’s desired objective and my capacity to bear the burden of intellectual struggle and hardships that lay ahead.

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