Research & Article

To free themselves of their colonial past and create a unity within the framework created by Western occupiers, or merely to galvanize their countrymen, South-East Asian nationalists rewrote their pre-colonial history and that related to their attaining independence. They have created ‘golden ages’ and ‘glorious models’ to legitimize their authority, not only over current national territory, but also over some which today belongs to neighouring states. In a period marked by the creation of regional entities, history has to be revised to replace the idea of domination with that of unity. Using Indonesian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Thai examples, this article considers how the nationalist discourse of the past, and the events it gave rise to, have become a handicap to regional groupings which are seen as symbols of political modernity.