Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276285

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Journal of Historical Geography

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg

Nations-of-intent: from counterfactual history to counterfactual geography

Li Narangoa a, * and Robert Cribb b
a
b

Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
Research School of Pacic and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia

Abstract
The locations of international borders reect political aspirations as well as power politics and attempts to bring state boundaries in line with nations. The
expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia and the exclusion of the Philippines from the United States indicate the power of narrowly dened borders to
govern national identity. The concept nations-of-intent allows us to explore counterfactual borders as a way of examining how political aspirations
translate into national borders. The paper explores three Asian cases Malaysia, Mongolia and Vietnam and makes reference to Indonesia in considering
how different senses of what was possible and desirable in the context of decolonization generated different ideas about where borders should lie. This
approach also allows us to interrogate losing forces retrospectively about the policies they would have followed within different border congurations.
2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Counterfactualism; Nations-of-intent; Borders; Mongolia; Malaysia; Vietnam

Since at least the Second World War, one of the most important
trends in history writing has been the effort to give voice to those
whose aspirations were not fullled in the working out of history.1
If we regard counterfactualism as a tool for conceptualizing and
reconstructing unfullled aspirations, then the tension between
the real and imagined locations of borders ought to be a central
concern of both counterfactual history and counterfactual geography. Borders are amongst the most contested geographical
phenomena and their precise location very often conjures up
strong feelings and strong hopes on all sides.
In this paper we examine the political implications of borders
that might have been. We explore the kinds of nations which
might have emerged in three Asian countries Mongolia, Vietnam
and Malaysia if their borders had been located differently. The
borders we imagine are not arbitrary, but rather reect rival ideas
of nation (nations-of-intent) that were present in these three
regions at the time when national borders were being set. This
concept gives us a tool for interrogating the bearers of these
unfullled aspirations about the policies they would have implemented and the constraints they would have faced if those borders
had been reality.

Nations-of-intent
Addressing the relations between borders and aspirations requires
us to step beyond the two dominant approaches to borders which
focus simply on power and identity. According to the rst of these
conventional views, the location of any border reects and
reinforces the relative power of the two states on either side. In
other words, states aim to set their borders as widely as they can, so
as to encompass as many resources (human, natural, strategic) as
possible. As relative power changes, so too does the location of the
border (within the constraints of international law, as far as it is
respected). This view underpins the geopolitical view of the world
pioneered by Haushofer and Kjellen,2 and it provides a valuable
perspective in understanding, for instance, the change in the
historical frontier between Vietnam and Cambodia, or between
Russians and the Japanese in Northeast Asia from late nineteenth
century to mid twentieth century.3 In each of these cases, the
changing balance of power between rival states led to a series of
shifts in the border between them. This approach, however, does
not pay attention to the internal political consequences of including
or excluding certain territories.

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: li.narangoa@anu.edu.au (L. Narangoa), robert.cribb@anu.edu.au (R. Cribb).
1
E.R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley, 1982.
2
R. Kjellen, Staten som Lifsform, Stockholm, 1916; P. Scholler, Die Rolle Karl Haushofers fur die Entwicklung und Ideologie nationalsozialistischer Geopolitik, Erdkunde 36
(1982) 160167.
3
en Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth
G.A. Lensen, The Russian Push Toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 16971875, Princeton, N.J., 1959; Li Tana, Nguy
and Eighteenth Centuries, Ithaca NY, 1998, 1924.
0305-7488/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.12.004

L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276285

The second, but still conventional, approach presumes that

borders are an imperfect attempt to do justice to the principle of
national self-determination. According to this conception, borders
are, or rather ought to be, primarily a reection of national identities, which have been created by some combination of ethnicity
and shared historical experience.4 Borders which fail to coincide
with national identities, whether because they divide one nation
between two or more states or because they include more than one
nation within the same state, are imperfect and in an ideal world
would be subject to correction. In broad political terms, the tension
between power and identity corresponds to the tension between
empire and nation.
Applying counterfactualism to the study of borders opens up
a third analytical possibility. It allows us to view borders not (just)
as the arbitrary outcome of power relations, and not (just) as the
manifestation of uncomplicated national identities. Rather, we can
also see the existing borders of each state as marking out only one
of a number of imagined national congurations. Counterfactualism commonly explores the long term effects of individual
events in the past. It tends to assume that a different outcome in
a single decisive event can send history hurtling down an entirely
different trajectory.5 Thus, the course of human history is made
dependent on the outcome of the battle, the result of a conference, the survival or death of a leader. In other words, it implies
historical determinism, the determining effect of past events on
what came after. Our approach by contrast focuses on human
intention. We do not suggest that different starting conditions
would have led necessarily to different outcomes, but rather we
explore the ways in which people imagined different borders and
the ways in which they might have responded to the different
opportunities that those borders presented. We try to reconstruct
their sense of what opportunities there might have been and we
attempt to suggest what people might have chosen to do. We
know that borders have changed many times in the past, and that
some borders remain contested. It does not take great imagination
therefore to conceive of todays borders in different locations and
to explore the implications of those locations, but we try to ask
how people of the time might have experienced those
implications.
Our interest in counterfactual historical geography lies in its
capacity to bring to life other congurations of borders which in
turn reect other national conceptions. Our starting point is the
work of Shamsul, who developed the term nation-of-intent to
draw attention to the fact that unfullled political aspirations could
be pictured as proposing a different kind of nation from the one
that actually came into existence. His focus was on Malaysia and on
the dominant denition of Malaysian national identity that

277

privileged indigenous Muslim Malays (and by extension nonindigenous Muslim immigrants) over Chinese and Indians who
were seen as foreign settlers and whose culture, religion and
identity received a kind of secondary recognition.6 In the case of
Malaysia, he identied three unfullled nations-of-intent that
were, and still are, in competition with the dominant denition of
the soul of the nation. These unrequited nations-of-intent are:
 a non-Muslim, non-indigenous (mainly Chinese) nation-ofintent based on ethnic and religious equality,
 a non-Muslim, indigenous nation-of-intent asserting the rights
of the non-Muslim natives of Borneo, and
 a radical Muslim Malay nation-of-intent which rejects all
recognition of other ethnicities and religions.
Shamsuls argument is that these different, rival conceptions of
the Malaysian nation are not just competing political programs.
Rather, because they go to the very heart of what constitutes
Malaysia, they represent different national ideas within the same
geographical framework. He calls them nations-of-intent because
they are conceptual nations at least as well formed in the minds of
those who imagine them as is the dominant nation-of-intent and
because each of them remains a plausible intention or aspiration
for the future.7
Shamsuls idea is novel because it conceives the nation in an
instrumentalist way as a tool for the achievement of a particular
kind of society. This conception differs from the mainstream
interpretations of national identity that regard national identity as
a characteristic imposed on people either by their ethnicity or by
their common historical experience, especially their experience of
a powerful modern state.8 Conventional theories give people
agency in seeking to full their national aspirations, but give them
little or no agency in choosing the national identity that drives
those aspirations. Shamsul, by contrast, recognizes that many
people are potentially capable of living with more than one national
identity and that they may choose between them not necessarily
because of some emotional t but rather on the basis of a rational
calculation of risks and benets.9
In our current work, we extend Shamsuls ideas to the analysis of
borders and nation formation. Rather than limiting the idea of
nations-of-intent to competing political agendas within a single set
of borders, we see the setting of borders as a major element in the
conception of nations-of-intent. Shamsuls own Malaysia offers
a powerful example of what we mean. In the aftermath of the
Second World War, the British rulers of Malaya planned a new
Malayan Union to encompass most of their territories in the Malay
Peninsula.10 The Union gave approximately equal citizenship rights

4
This approach implies, but does not absolutely require, a concept of the nation as existing independently of the state, presumably as a manifestation of ethnic identity. See
A. D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Oxford, 1986.
5
J. Simensen, Counterfactual arguments in historical analysis: from the debate on the partition of Africa and the effect of colonial rule, History in Africa 5 (1978) 172,
180183.
6
A.B. Shamsul, Nations-of-intent in Malaysia, in: S. Tnnesson and H. Antlov (Eds), Asian Forms of the Nation, Richmond, 1996, 323347; to our knowledge, the term
nation-of-intent rst appears in R.I. Rotberg, African nationalism: concept or confusion?, Journal of Modern African Studies 4 (1966) 37, but Rotberg uses the term as a synonym
for nation in the making and does not raise the possibility that rival nations-of-intent may compete over the same territory. Shamsul (p. 328, n 6) acknowledges a further
intellectual debt to an unpublished MA thesis (1975) by Rustam A. Sani. The concept of nations-of-intent is mentioned without elaboration in N. Owen et al., The Emergence of
Modern Southeast Asia: a New History, Honolulu, 2005, 252. Sani himself recently returned to the idea in Merdeka! But are we a nation yet?, in Rustam A. Sani, Failed Nation?
Concerns of a Malaysian Nationalist, Petaling Jaya, 2008, 60.
7
Dragojevic argues similarly that the dening characteristic of a national identity may change over time, emphasising, for instance, rst religion and later language. See M.
Dragojevic, Competing institutions in national identity construction: the Croatian case, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 11 (2005) 6187.
8
E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge, 1992; E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, 1983; B. Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London, 1991; Smith, Ethnic Origin (note 4).
9
The issue of choosing national identity arises acutely in the case of migrants. For some, the act of migration is the deliberate choice of a different nationality; for others,
migration changes the place of residence but has little impact on identity. This issue, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.
10
British territory consisted of the three Straits Settlements (Singapore, Malacca and Penang), four Federated Malay States (Selangor, Perak, Pahang and Negri Sembilan)
and ve Unfederated Malay States (Trengganu, Kelantan, Kedah, Perlis and Johor). The Straits Settlements, Selangor and Perak had strong Chinese majorities, whereas Malays
were dominant to varying degrees in the other states.

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L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276285

to indigenous Malays and immigrant Chinese and Indian residents.11 Malay protest over the loss of the special status that they
had enjoyed during the pre-war period persuaded the British to
abolish the Union in 1948 and to create a Federation of Malaya
which gave a privileged status to Malays in contrast with the nonindigenous Chinese and Indians, recognizing them as bumiputra
(indigenes), giving them special rights over land, and entrenching
their sultans as sovereigns within the constituent states and as
rotating head of state of the Federation. Informally, the Federation
was committed to leaving the main keys of political power
including the prime ministership and control of the armed forces
in Malay hands. In 1957, the Federation became independent.
Britains support for Malay interests was based on their calculation
that Malay dominance would better serve continuing British
economic and strategic interests in the Peninsula.12 This juggling of
communal rights to favour the Malays produced the situation
described by Shamsul in which Chinese and Indian had only
a second-rank standing within the Federation after that of the
Malays.
Six years later, however, the location of Malayas borders
became a crucial element in preserving this Malay-dominated
nation-of-intent. Predominantly Chinese Singapore, which had
remained a British colony, had become a source of concern for the
British. There was a strong left-wing socialist movement in the
colony, and the British were afraid that it would become even
stronger if they did not give the colony independence. But they
were afraid, too, that the leftists might come to power in an independent Singapore. The solution seemed to be to incorporate
Singapore into neighbouring Malaya, but to do so would risk
upsetting the ethnic balance within the Federation. To balance
Singapores Chinese numbers with territories that had an indigenous majority, the North Borneo territories of Sabah and Sarawak
were therefore brought into the expanded Federation as well.13 This
new Federation, created in 1963, was given the name Malaysia. The
borders of the main successor state to the British colonial order in
Southeast Asia, therefore, were thus adjusted to support the
nation-of-intent that the British and their Malay elite allies
intended.
Border changes for the sake of a specic nation-of-intent did not
stop in 1963. Even though Singapores presence in the Federation
was balanced by that of Sabah and Sarawak, the Malay elite also
insisted on quarantining it to some extent from federal politics.
Singapore citizenship did not necessarily confer Malaysian citizenship and there was an agreement that the dynamic and
successful Peoples Action Party (PAP) of Lee Kuan Yew would not
extend its activities beyond Singapore. The PAP, however, came to
support a sister organization, the Democratic Action Party (DAP),
which began to promote ideas of ethnic equality within Malaysia.
On this platform, the DAP soon made inroads into the support of the
Malayan Chinese Association, which had accepted the subordinate
role for Chinese Malaysians that the Malay elite had marked out.
These developments were so unpalatable to the Malay elite that in
1965 they expelled Singapore from the Federation. In other words,
the Malay elite again adjusted the borders of the nation to create

a state that would be conducive to a nation-of-intent privileging

Malay Muslim culture while giving some recognition to other
ethnicities and religions and that would tip the balance against
a key alternative, a non-Muslim, non-indigenous (mainly Chinese)
nation-of-intent based on ethnic and religious equality.14
The case of Malaysia indicates that different nations-of-intent
can lead to different border congurations. Singapore had been as
much a part of the history of the Malay Peninsula as the other
territories in the Malayan Federation (and a good deal more so than
the two northern Borneo states), and it was the regions main port
and main metropolis. Malaysia continued to include other regions
that were demographically dominated by Chinese to much the
same degree as Singapore. History, emotion and economics spoke
in favour of Singapore remaining within Malaysia. But the inclusion
of Singapore would have made the Malay elites preferred nationof-intent more difcult to achieve, and so Singapore was excluded.
The example demonstrates that, given the opportunity, people do
not always choose to set the borders of their nations as widely as
possible. They will sometimes choose a particular nation and
particular borders for that nation not because they objectively
belong to a particular identity, or because borders are historically
determined, but because they are aware of the political implications of different border locations (Fig. 1).
Borders and the end of empire
During the last two centuries, the opportunity to make such
a choice has been bound up, as it was in Malaysia, primarily with
the end of empire. Although the international borders created by
colonial rule have tended to be resilient, most decolonization
processes have been marked by contestation over whether and
where to draw new international boundaries within the former
imperial territory. The political classes in British India struggled
over the plan to partition the subcontinent between India and
Pakistan. Indonesians and Dutch struggled over whether to include
West New Guinea in the independent Indonesian Republic.15
Where new international borders were not contemplated, there
was often a question of constitutionally guaranteed special status
for particular territories; the Shan and Kayah states in Burma, for
instance, were given the constitutional right to secede 10 years
after independence if they so chose.16 National pride and resource
or strategic implications were often important in these contests,
but they sometimes reected a deeper conict between rival
nations-of-intent.
Sometimes the decolonization process itself reected this
choice. In its expansion across the Pacic in the nineteenth century,
the United States had taken possession of both Hawaii and the
Philippines. Initially, both were imperial or colonial possessions,
but their eventual fates were very different. Whereas Hawaii was
integrated into the United States, eventually becoming a state of the
Union, the Philippines was excluded, becoming rst a self-governing commonwealth in 1935 and then an independent state after
the Second World War. These differing outcomes had nothing to do
with cultural differences or with the different aspirations of local

11
The terms indigenous and immigrant are problematic in the Malayan case. Indigenous Malays include the descendents of recent immigrants from other parts of the
Indonesian archipelago, whereas signicant Chinese communities have been present in the Malay Peninsula since at least the fteenth century.
12
T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, Cambridge, 1999, 8993.
13
These territories had had completely different historical experience from the Malay Peninsula. Sarawak had been ruled by semi-independent white rajas from the Brooke
family while Sabah had been under the charter of the British North Borneo Company. A third territory in northern Borneo, the oil-rich Sultanate of Brunei, was a British
protectorate and was never part of Malaysia. It became independent in 1984.
14
We might note that this form of ethnic cleansing was rather more humane than that which was practiced in the former Yugoslavia.
15
Y. Khan, The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan, New Haven, 2007; P.J. Drooglever, Een daad van vrije keuze: de Papoeas van westelijk Nieuw-Guinea en de
grenzen van het zelfbeschikkingsrecht, Amsterdam, 2005.
16
J. Silverstein, Burma: Military Rule and the Politics of Stagnation, Ithaca NY, 1977, 59.

L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276285

279

Fig. 1. British Malaya in 1947, showing districts with a non-Malay (mainly Chinese) majority.

people. The Hawaiians were as different from the Americans in

culture as were the Filipinos and they had just as strong an
aspiration for independence. But the Americans were aware that
the relatively small population of Hawaii meant both that they
could assimilate it by migration and that the presence of indigenous Hawaiians in the American polity made little difference to any
balance of power.17 By contrast, the far more numerous Filipinos,
inhabiting an archipelago that was less attractive for western
settlement, could not so easily be assimilated, and so, like the
Singaporeans, they were excluded from the polity to which they
had briey belonged.18 For most colonial powers, losing an empire
was preferable to the political and social consequences of bringing
colonized peoples into the national polity as citizens. Signicantly,
the only colonial power to attempt this road was Portugal which
sought to avoid decolonization by declaring its African and Asian
colonies to be part of the metropolitan territory. It did so, however,
during the semi-fascist Estado Novo period (19331974), when

17
18
19

granting citizenship to far more numerous African and Asian

subjects had no democratic implications.19
Vietnam
One of the most telling examples of the choice between nations-ofintent in the decolonization process was French Indo-China. The
French colony in Southeast Asia was created in a series of military
expeditions between 1859 and 1893. Its people comprised three
main ethno-linguistic groups, the Vietnamese, the Cambodians and
the Lao, of whom the Vietnamese were the most numerous. The
cultural gap between the Vietnamese and their more westerly
neighbours was great. Vietnam was strongly inuenced by Chinese
traditions; it had been governed by a Chinese-style bureaucracy
under an emperor who drew heavily on the political forms of
Chinese tradition. Laos and Cambodia, by contrast, had been little
inuenced by China and their traditions were those of the ancient

G. Daws, Shoal of Time: a History of the Hawaiian Islands, Toronto, 1968, 285292.
P.A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines, Chapel Hill, 2006, 160165.
T.D. Musgrave, Self-determination and National Minorities, Oxford, 1997, 94.

280

L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276285

Fig. 2. Southeast Asia in 1940: the regional context.

Southeast Asian kingship with strong roots in traditional Indian

culture. Royal power was anked by a uid aristocracy, rather than
by a Mandarin bureaucracy. Administratively, the French colony
consisted of ve pays, the Vietnamese territories of Cochinchina,
Annam and Tonkin, together with Cambodia and Laos. For much of
the colonial period, there was a signicant degree of integration
between the ve pays. In particular, Vietnamese spread out over the
whole colony as administrators, professionals, traders, labourers
and farmers. As modern anti-French nationalism began to develop,
there was a tension in Vietnamese thinking between imagining
only the Vietnamese territories of Cochinchina, Annam and Tonkin
as the framework for independence and imagining an independent
Indo-china which would also encompass Cambodia and Laos.
The rst Vietnamese resistance to the French emphasised
restoring power to the Vietnamese emperor, and thus implicitly to
Vietnam, rather than to a multi-ethnic Indo-China. Vietnamese
geopolitical ideas, however, were shaped by pre-colonial Vietnams
claims to suzerainty over what is now Cambodia and Laos, claims
that had always been contested by Siam. As French rule became
more entrenched, the term Indo-China came to stand not just for
French hegemony but also for the colonial modernization project.
Writings in the early twentieth century described Indo-China as
a modern stage which transcended the traditional (implicitly
backward) cultures of the colony. Indo-China stood for a kind of
civic nationalism whose essence was modernity, rather than
history or culture. For many Vietnamese, the modernization

20

process meant not only that they themselves would learn selectively from the modern world, but also that they would be the
agents of Cambodian and Lao modernization. This view was
particularly strong on the Vietnamese left, inuenced by ideas of
the international proletarian revolution the Cominterns rst
organization in the French colony was the Indo-Chinese Communist Party (ICP) and its slogan was Complete Indo-Chinese Independence! but Vietnamese condence in the Indo-China
framework stretched well beyond the communists. Many Vietnamese saw themselves as the bearers of a mission civilisatrice
within French Indo-China. In the minds of some Vietnamese, this
mission came close to implying the erasure of Cambodian and Lao
identity (Fig. 2).20
At the same time, there were signicant voices calling for the
separate recognition of the three main ethnic groups in the colony.
Cambodian elites were increasingly concerned about Vietnamese
migration into their traditional lands and Vietnamese domination
of the colonial bureaucracy and the modern economy in Cambodia.
Some Vietnamese, however, also had misgivings about the IndoChina framework. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNQDD),
founded in 1928, drew exclusively on ethnic Vietnamese imagery.
Still more important, the Vietnamese left began to feel misgivings
about the practicalities of carrying out a proletarian revolution in
Cambodia or Laos where there was virtually no proletariat. By 1941,
the Vietnamese Communists had agreed to sponsor separate
Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian independence leagues, even

C.E. Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? Contesting Concepts of Space in Vietnamese Nationalism, 18871954, Copenhagen, 1995, 50, 63, 70.

L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276285

though these national movements were formerly gathered under

the Indo-Chinese Independence League umbrella.21
The separate trajectories of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao
nationalism were reinforced by the Japanese occupation forces
close to the end of the Second World War, when they conferred
separate nominal independence on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in
March 1945. Nonetheless, the idea of Indo-Chinese independence
remained strong on the left, in June 1945, the ICP general secretary
Truong Chinh wrote in the partys journal foreshadowing a post
war Indo-Chinese Democratic Republic and in August he called for
an Indo-Chinese uprising. Only in the days after the Japanese
surrender on 15 August 1945 did the communist line change
denitively from Indo-China to Vietnam. The declaration of independence by the communist leader Ho Chi Minh on 9 September
1945 proclaimed an independent Vietnam, not an independent
Indo-china.22 The key element in this decision was the communists
belief that thoroughgoing revolution would be easier to carry out in
the socially advanced Vietnamese lands than in a larger Indo-china
where reckoning would have to be made with the conservative,
monarchist societies of Cambodia and Laos.23 In other words, the
Vietnamese Communist elite resembled the Malay elite discussed
earlier in rejecting territorial aggrandizement in favour of a more
compact territory within which they would better be able to achieve their political goals. The more expansive nation-of-intent in
both cases was trumped by a more narrowly dened alternative.
A similar dynamic but with a very different outcome was at
work in neighbouring Indonesia.24 The Dutch colonial presence in
the Indonesian archipelago long predated the French colonization
of Indo-China, but the Dutch empire took its modern form in
Southeast Asia at roughly the same time as the French. Like Indochina, the Netherlands East Indies was ethnically diverse, but with
one especially dominant ethnic group, in this case the Javanese.
Also like Indo-China, the Indies was administratively fragmented,
with a multitude of internal administrative borders along which
the colony might have been divided in the transition to independence. After a brief initial period of ethnically-dened nationalist
groups in the early twentieth century, however, there was almost
no talk of separate independence for the different regions because
virtually all nationalists saw a large state as the most effective
framework for achieving social change. The administrative diversity of the archipelago reected the Dutch dependence on conservative aristocracies and the nationalists were conscious that
fragmentation would both strengthen the local power of these
elites and make the country more vulnerable to outside interference. Indonesia later came to be a concept of deep emotional
signicance to Indonesians but in the beginning it was a calculated
choice of a political framework that would favour modernist over
traditionalist-aristocratic nations-of-intent in the Dutch colony.25
Mongolia
During the dismantling of the Chinese empire in the early twentieth century, Mongols faced an even more complex set of possibilities which required choosing between different potential

21

281

borders. The political entity that we routinely call the Chinese

empire was until 1911 an empire ruled by a non-Chinese dynasty,
the Manchu. Although the Manchu were highly Sinicized in some
respects, they had retained a separate identity and maintained
a system of ethnic discrimination against their Chinese subjects.
The Chinese revolution of 1911 was therefore partly a class-based
revolution against an imperial elite and partly a Chinese nationalist
rising against foreign rulers, accompanied in some regions by
genocidal pogroms against Manchus.26 The Manchu empire had
extended well beyond China proper to encompass Mongolia,
Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang), Tibet and of course the Manchus
native Manchuria. Until the closing decades of the Manchu dynasty,
these regions, around half of the total area of the empire, were
ruled separately from China proper, local elites having a direct
relationship with the imperial court separate from the Chinese
provincial system. In areas such as Inner Mongolia and Southern
Manchuria where there was signicant Chinese settlement, indigenous people and Chinese settlers were governed under separate
administrative arrangements (Fig. 3).27
Aside from the Manchus and Chinese, the principal national
communities in the Manchu empire had been the Mongols, the
Uighurs and the Tibetans. For all these groups, the fall of the
Manchus was an opportunity to reassert the national independence that they had enjoyed to varying degrees before the
Manchu conquest. As in former British Malaya and former French
Indo-China, however, the question was whether and where
international borders might be drawn within the former colonial
empire. To many Mongols, it seemed natural that the Manchu
empire would fall apart in favour of its constituent ethnic
components. In 1911, Mongol monks, nobles and intellectuals
declared Mongolian independence with the words, Because our
Mongolia was originally an independent nation, we have now
decided, after consultation to establish a new independent nation,
based on our old tradition, without the interference of others in
our own rights.28 This nation by implication covered all the
historical territory of the Mongols that had been under the
Manchus, a vast swathe of territory stretching from the Russian
frontier to the Great Wall. An independent Mongolia, however,
was not the only nation-of-intent on the agenda. The simple claim
of all land north of the Great Wall built by successive Chinese
governments of course to keep the Mongols and other nomads out
of China Proper was complicated by two facts. First, by 1911,
there was extensive Chinese settlement north of the wall, greatly
outnumbering the Mongols in some districts. These Chinese were
most unlikely to accept the rule of a Mongol state. Second, most
Chinese, even those well outside the Mongol lands, refused to
accept the legitimacy of any Mongol state at all. They believed that
the new Chinese Republic should simply inherit the borders of the
old empire and that Mongols, Uighurs and Tibetans should
submerge themselves in a modern Chinese ethnic identity. They
saw the Chinese as the natural leaders of all the former subjects of
the Manchus, with a mandate to lead lesser peoples to (Chinese)
modernity. In this respect, their attitude resembled that of the
Vietnamese toward the Cambodians and Lao.

Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? (note 20), 69, 7374.

Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? (note 20), 9193.
23
This decision was made despite the obvious model of the Soviet Union as a multi-ethnic socialist state dominated by Russians and despite the general Marxist doctrine
that oppressed peoples had the best chance of the liberation when they united.
24
Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? (note 20), makes some reference to the Indonesia comparison, but the issue is developed more fully in D. Henley, Ethnogeographic
integration and exclusion in anticolonial nationalism: Indonesia and Indochina, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995) 286324.
25
R. Cribb, Nation: making Indonesia, in: D.K. Emmerson (Ed.), Indonesia beyond Suharto: Polity, Economy, Society, Transition, Armonk, NY, 1999, 338.
26
E.J.M. Rhoads, Manchus & Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 18611928, Seattle, 2000, 197199.
27
Still the classic source on this relationship is O. Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, Boston, 1967.
28
U. Onon and D. Pritchatt, Asias First Modern Revolution: Mongolia Proclaims Its Independence in 1911, Leiden, 1989, 15.
22

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Fig. 3. The Mongol lands of Inner Asia in 1935, showing main areas of Chinese settlement.

The Mongolian and Chinese leaders set out their ideological

positions in a public exchange of telegrams in 1911 and 1912, but
the conict was resolved in part simply by force of arms. By the end
of 1913, Mongolian forces had been driven out of Inner Mongolia,
the area of most Chinese settlement, and in 1919 Urga (called by the
Mongols Niislel Khuree) itself fell to a Chinese army. In 1921
a Mongolian national revolution supported by Soviet Russia
recovered the independence of Outer Mongolia from the resurgent
Chinese Republic, but Inner Mongolia remained uneasily within the
Chinese Republic.29
The outcome of these armed struggles was also shaped by the
choices of Inner Mongols between different nations-of-intent. In
1911, the sense of Mongol national identity made little distinction
between Inner and Outer Mongols. Inner Mongolia the Mongol
lands south and east of the Gobi Desert, a region roughly corresponding to todays Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of the
Peoples Republic of China had been dominated more closely by
the Manchu court in Beijing than the Outer Mongolia north of the
Gobi. There were also minor differences in dialect and culture
between the two regions, but they shared a common Mongol
identity and there had been no suggestion at all that they might
have different political futures. The declaration of Mongol independence in Urga therefore included Inner Mongolia, and Inner
Mongols played a prominent role in the rst independent
Mongolian government.
Nonetheless, the Inner Mongols had a number of reasons to be
doubtful about the new state. The Mongol elite of Inner Mongolia
had in many respects been co-rulers with the Manchus in imperial
China. They held relatively high administrative and political
positions, and the Mongol and Manchu elites became closely
intertwined by marriage. They did not expect to rule China again,

29
30

but many of them were supremely condent that their aristocratic

qualities, especially as descendents of Chinggis Khan, would
ensure continued prominence and respect in the new political
order. Feeling themselves to be more sophisticated than the more
remote tribesmen of Outer Mongolia, they had misgivings about
taking a subordinate role in a state centred on distant Urga. Their
doubt strengthened as the Urga government came increasingly
under Outer Mongol domination. For other Inner Mongols, by
contrast, Chinese republicanism was attractive because it seemed
to promise them allies in a struggle against the power of these
same old Mongol aristocracies. The long alliance with the
Manchus had entrenched the dominance of hereditary princes,
most of them descended from Chinggis Khan, and only a few of
them were interested in bringing modernity to Mongolian society.
In this respect, China was attractive to some Mongols in precisely
the same way as Indonesia was attractive to Balinese and Javanese:
it was a large, progressive political formation in which old elites
who had been complicit in the colonial order could be marginalized. Although there was strong support amongst Inner Mongols,
especially at rst, for an independent Greater Mongolia, these
misgivings undermined Inner Mongol support for the Outer
Mongol government and contributed to the emergence of
a different nation-of-intent, an Inner Mongolia located within the
Republic of China but enjoying a high degree of cultural, political
and economic autonomy.30 In 1921, Soviet Russia gave qualied
support to Mongol nationalists in Outer Mongolia and so sealed
Outer Mongolias independence, but part of the price for this
support was that independent Mongolia give up its claim to Inner
Mongolia. For the moment, the Inner-Mongolia-within-China
nation-of-intent was left by default as the only plausible option for
the Inner Mongols.

C.R. Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia, London, 1968.

C.P. Atwood, Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolias Interregnum Decades, 19111931, Leiden, 2002.

L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276285

In the 1930s, however, the ambitious presence of Japan in the

region opened new possibilities to the Inner Mongols. As part of
its strategy to extend its inuence on the Asian mainland, Japan
established a nominally independent state in Manchuria, giving it
the name Manchukuo. Although the population of Manchukuo
was predominantly Chinese, about one third of the territory of the
new state comprised the eastern part of Inner Mongolia and
Mongols were a signicant minority (possibly 5%) of the total
population. At the outset, the Japanese publicly recognized the
Mongols as indigenous people and gave the Mongol communities
a greater degree of autonomy than they had within the Chinese
Republic. As Manchukuo consolidated, moreover, the new state
became a model of prosperity and economic development that
contrasted sharply with the chaos in China Proper. For the
Mongols, Manchukuo opened the possibility of a modern, prosperous society, free of Chinese intrusion, and allied to the rising
great power in East Asia.31
Later, as the Japanese extended their inuence into central Inner
Mongolia, they appeared to open a further possibility to the Inner
Mongols. The Japanese had begun to envisage an Asian empire
which they portrayed as a constellation of independent Asian
peoples under Japanese leadership. Not only did they talk to Inner
Mongol leaders about the idea of an independent Inner Mongolia
but from 1936 they sponsored a series of governments in central
Inner Mongolia which gradually acquired the trappings of political
independence, including their own army, currency, postage stamps,
ag and government departments. It seemed to the Inner Mongols
that Japanese assistance might help them to recover the independence that they had been unable to secure as part of Greater
Mongolia two decades earlier.32
During these years therefore the Inner Mongols had spread
before them a smorgasbord of political possibilities: independence
in their own right, absorption into Outer Mongolia, autonomy
within China and special status within the neighbouring Japanese
sponsored state of Manchukuo. Each of the possibilities located its
borders in different places. None of these possibilities was truer
than the others in any objective sense to the Mongol national
identity. Each of them could nd precedents and justication
within Mongol history and culture. They represented, rather,
different aspirations within Mongol society, as well as different
judgments of what might be possible in the circumstances. In the
event, none of them proved to be possible. Independent Outer
Mongolia never seriously resumed any program to recover the lost
Mongols in Inner Mongolia. The Chinese Republic bitterly disappointed the Inner Mongols by failing to defend their interests
against Chinese migrants and by failing to deliver social reform.
Manchukuos promises of greater Mongol autonomy evaporated as
the wartime economy faltered and central government control
tightened. And Japanese support for an independent central Inner
Mongolia receded as the Japanese increasingly wooed Chinese
support for the war effort by promising to preserve Chinas former
borders. In the end, a new option prevailed relatively late (1947) in
the form of an Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region within
Communist-ruled China.33 Nonetheless, the fact that each of these
aspirations required a different set of borders enables us to extend
Shamsuls concept of nations-of-intent beyond its original reference to contending political visions within a single state border and

283

to make it a tool for conceptualizing unfullled national ideas

which depend on imagining new or different borders.
The political implications of alternative borders
Taking these alternative visions of national futures seriously means
recognizing the importance of unfullled aspirations amongst the
Mongols and the Vietnamese. It also sharpens, however, the
questions that we ask, as researchers, of the proponents of these
unfullled aspirations. Rather than simply acknowledging that
these were serious aspirations which embodied noble hopes for the
future, we are entitled to ask what the proponents of these aspirations would, and could, have done if they had been in a position
to implement their dreams.
Mongolia claimed its fragile independence under the leadership
of the eighth incarnation of the Jebtsundamba Khutugtu, spiritual
leader of Mongolias Tibetan Buddhism, who then became known
as the Bogd Khan (holy emperor). The new governments authority
rested generally on a widespread Mongol aspiration for independence, but its main political base lay amongst Buddhist monastic
hierarchy and the Mongol princes. As the selection of the title khan
suggested, the new political order looked back to the imperial
traditions of Chinggis Khan rather than forward to a more democratic political order. The new states territorial claim to all the
traditional Mongol lands, moreover, took in important regions in
the south and east, where Chinese settlements were well established and the Mongols were in a small minority.
In taking seriously the aspirations of Mongols for a Greater
Mongolia, we are entitled to ask questions about how the aspiring
leaders of this larger state would have dealt with two pressing
issues: rst, when and to what extent would political power shift
from monks and princes to technocrats and a voting public? And
second, how would the new state manage the presence of a large
Chinese community?
Actual historical developments help us to answer the rst
question. In 1919, Chinese Republican troops occupied Urga and
subordinated the somewhat inert government of the Bogd Khan.
The Chinese were then displaced by the White Russian bloody
Baron, Roman Fyodorovich Ungern von Sternberg, but the Baron
was in turn driven out by a popular revolution under the leadership
of the Mongolian communist Sukhbaatar.34 In short, we can see
within Mongol society internal forces that would have led to
change in the political order, whatever the external circumstances.
These changes, it has to be said, had little to do with where Mongolias borders lay, though the inclusion of Inner Mongolia in
a Greater Mongolia would probably have accelerated rather than
delayed them because the modern non-clerical, non-princely elite
was stronger in the south than in the north.
By contrast, the issue of a large Chinese presence within the
borders of independent Mongolia arises only if we imagine those
borders running far to the south and east of the current border
between the Mongolian Republic and the Peoples Republic of
China. There are no reliable gures on the overall population of
Inner Mongolia in the early twentieth century, or on the relative
proportion of Mongols and Chinese in the region, but we know that
there was extensive Chinese settlement east of the Hingan Mountain and in a band of territory north of the Great Wall. It is possible

31
O. Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria: Their Tribal Divisions, Geographical Distribution, Historical Relations with Manchus and Chinese and Present Political Problems,
London, 1935; S. Yamamuro, Manchuria under Japanese Dominion, Philadelphia, 2006.
32
L. Narangoa, Mokyo seiken ron Kairai seiken no rekishiteki imi [The Historical Meaning of Puppet State], Iwanami Koza Ajia Taiheiyo senso [Series on the Asia-Pacic
War] Vol. 7 Tokyo, 2006; S. Jagchid, The Last Mongol Prince: the Life and Times of Demchugdongrob, 19021966, Bellingham, 1999.
33
X. Liu, Reins of Liberation: an Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Territoriality, and Great Power Hegemony, 19111950, Washington, D.C., 2006. The IMAR
was created before the Chinese Communist Party came to power in Beijing in 1949.
34
Bawden, Modern History of Mongolia (note 29), 201221.

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L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276285

that the overall numbers of the two ethnic groups in Inner

Mongolia were roughly even in this period, although they were
unevenly distributed. Mongol grievances against these Chinese
settlers were an important element in Mongol nationalism. In
particular, Mongols objected to the loss of their traditional grazing
lands to Chinese agriculture, to discrimination in the legal system
and to the sharp practice of Chinese merchants. The Mongols of
Inner Mongolia felt themselves on the defensive in their own
land.35
But what if the Mongols had taken control? Nearly all the
Mongol rhetoric on the position of Chinese put forward a system of
separate government. Like the monastic, aristocratic and political
order of the Bogd Khan, this rhetoric looked back to old arrangements, to the Manchu era practice of ruling Chinese, Mongols,
Tibetans and others separately, and of maintaining a rm system of
ethnic distinction between these groups. The implication would
have been for a relatively developed Chinese administrative hierarchy governing Chinese subjects but subordinate to a Mongolcontrolled national government. Previous formal and informal
discrimination against the Mongols and in favour of the Chinese
would be reversed and in particular, Mongol title to traditional
lands would be reinforced. Absent from Mongol rhetoric is any hint
of ethnic cleansing. There was no suggestion that Chinese settlers
would be driven out or slaughtered, even though the Mongols
would have been aware that many Mongols in garrisons in China
had fallen victim to the genocidal pogroms against the Manchus in
19111912. And indeed there are no reports of the massacre of
Chinese settlers by Mongols in this period.
The sustainability of such a system would have depended very
much on the demographic balance between Mongols and Chinese
in Greater Mongolia. It is hard to imagine that a Chinese majority,
anked on the south by the Chinese Republic and drawing on the
often xenophobic orientations of Chinese nationalism in that era,
would have tolerated subordination to a Mongol elite. A canny
Mongolian government would have anticipated the Malay elites
expulsion of Singapore and surrendered to China the most strongly
Chinese districts in order to strengthen the Mongol demographic
position.
In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Soviet Russia to
the north and China to the south developed minority policies which
revolved around the twin principles of recognition and assimilation. That is to say, they rather generously recognized the existence
of ethnic minorities, even to the extent of creating formally
autonomous, territorial administrative units, ranging from district
level up to republic. At the same time, policies on education and
opportunity worked strongly for the submersion of ethnic identity
into a nominally international but actually national Russian or
Chinese identity. The leaders of a Greater Mongolia might have
tried to impose a program of absorption on Chinese Mongolians,
but the cultural self-condence of the Chinese in Inner Mongolia
and their proximity to China make it unlikely that they would have
accepted such an assimilationist program. In these circumstances,
a more formal system of ethnic segregation, perhaps resembling
that of Malaysia, is a more likely outcome. Under such a system, the
non-indigenous status of the Chinese would be emphasised,
Chinese departures to China would be condoned, even encouraged,
and a variety of formal and informal mechanisms of discrimination
would ensure that Chinese Mongolians never dominated positions
of power, even though a Chinese cultural identity would be
tolerated.

If the later experience of Malaysia is any guide, the presence of

a substantial Chinese minority in Greater Mongolia would have had
a conservative effect on Mongol society. Keeping the Chinese at bay
would have involved emphasising the substantial differences in
traditional culture between Mongols and Chinese. This emphasis
would have tended to strengthen the position of the Mongol religious and aristocratic elites and would have made more difcult
any cross-ethnic political alliances.
We have suggested that a Greater Mongolia might have
resembled Malaysia, expelling the most Chinese regions and
crafting a sophisticated system of discrimination to keep the
remaining Chinese quiescent and subordinate. But what if Malaysia
had become more like Mongolia? To conjure up this option takes
more imagination than existed at the time, but something like the
distinction between Outer and Inner Mongolia existed between the
largely Malay regions in the north and east of the Malay Peninsula
and the southern and western regions where Chinese had settled in
large numbers. Thailands annexation of the northern Malay states
during the Second World War had given additional historical force
to this distinction. Britains partition of India indicates its willingness to consider the political separation of supposedly incompatible peoples. Let us imagine, then, a Malay Peninsula partitioned
between a predominantly Malay state (Outer Malaysia) and
predominantly Chinese one (Inner Malaysia). The latter, a kind of
Greater Singapore, might have had many of the characteristics of
the real Singapore: a determined pursuit of modernity within
a framework provided by overseas Chinese culture. The indigenous
Malays would be a small minority, given occasional signs of
recognition (Malay is still the seldom-used ofcial language of
Singapore), but would face a choice effectively between assimilation to the Chinese model or marginalization within what had once
been their own lands. This has been the fate of the Mongols in Inner
Mongolia.
In Outer Malaysia, by contrast, the Chinese would be a relatively small minority, their numbers giving them no possibility of
aspiring to political power. The absence of a Chinese option in
politics is likely to have had a radicalizing effect on Malay politics.
Rather than the conservative monarchist and aristocratic politics
that dominated the real Malaysia,36 we might well have seen
a wider range of radical alternatives coming from within Malay
society. The strong currents of leftist thought that streamed
through Indonesia might have found a more fertile soil in Outer
Malaysia, because of modern minded scepticism about the value of
the traditional monarchies and because leftist ideas would not have
been compromised by their association with the Chinese, as
happened in the real Malaysia. At the same time, the small nonMalay minorities would have had no power to resist any growth in
Islamist political forces. The struggle between the left and Islam
would have given Outer Malaysia a turbulent political history.
Similar issues arise if we interrogate the Indo-Chinese nationof-intent that was an alternative to Vietnam. When Ho Chi Minh
declared Vietnams independence in September 1945, there were
many Vietnamese nationalists who believed that it was a mistake
not to claim independence for the whole of Indo-China, rather than
just the three Vietnamese pays. They saw the French incorporation
of Cambodia and Laos into Indo-China as the historical continuation
of the Vietnamese empires southern expansion. Vietnamese ethnic
chauvinism and contempt for Cambodians and Lao combined with
a sense of modernizing mission to lead many Vietnamese to believe
that Vietnams hegemony over its Indo-China neighbours was

35
S. Tsai, Chinese settlement of Mongolian lands: Manchu policy in Inner Mongolia/a case study of Chinese migration in Jerim League (PhD dissertation, Brigham Young
University, 1983).
36
B.W. Andaya and L.Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia, Basingstoke, 2001.

L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276285

natural and desirable. But what implications would have owed for
Vietnam if the independence that Ho declared had encompassed
these additional territories? Again, we are entitled to ask hard
questions of those in the past who aspired to different borders and
different futures.
The central question is whether the Vietnamese Communist
revolution would have spread at once to the rest of Indo-China,
drawing Cambodia and Laos both into hostilities and into programs
of radical social reform long before the escalation of the American
War had this effect in 1960s. Or would Cambodia and Laos have
been a drag on the Vietnamese revolution? Would the risk of
secession by Cambodia and Laos have led the Vietnamese
Communist leadership to moderate its revolutionary spirit as the
radicals had indeed feared in 1945? Although there was social
injustice aplenty in Cambodia and Laos, its contours were very
different from those that sustained the Vietnamese revolution.
Whereas the organized structure of the Indo-Chinese Communist
Party in many respects mirrored the bureaucratic patterns of
traditional Vietnam, the politics of Cambodia and Laos was much
more personalist, revolving around individuals whose power came
from their personalities or their social status. The template of the
Vietnamese revolution was not one that could be applied in
a straightforward way to Cambodia and Laos. All these considerations suggest that an Indo-Chinese nationalist revolution in 1945
might have been a good deal more cautious than the Vietnamese
revolution which actually began. We can imagine, at very least,
a more ramshackle, decentralized revolution, in which leaders
would have been willing to compromise for the sake of international recognition, as in Indonesia.
If we can imagine a Malaysia somewhat more like Mongolia, we
can also imagine an Indonesia more like Vietnam. In apparent
contrast with Vietnam, the idea of an Indonesia encompassing the
whole of the former Netherlands Indies had been attractive to
nationalists because it provided a framework for marginalizing the
unpopular local aristocracies that had collaborated with Dutch
colonial rule. In this respect, a larger, more inclusive state in
Indonesia could be a vehicle for social change in a way that a larger
more inclusive Indo-China could not. The radical vision of the
Vietnamese Communists, however, had its parallel amongst radical
nationalists on the island of Java in the late 1940s, who hoped to
install a seriously socialist political order.37 These radicals in Java
faced a dilemma similar to that of the Vietnamese Communists.
Having declared independence on behalf of the whole of the former
Netherlands Indies, they felt constrained in the extent to which
they could pursue the social revolution that many people on Java

37

285

saw as essential for making independence a practical reality. This

was because the interest in social revolution was very much less in
other parts of the archipelago, especially in the east, and the
revolutionaries on Java feared that the Dutch, who were ghting
the new Indonesian Republic for control of the archipelago
throughout the period 19451949, would lure the people of those
other islands into separatism if Java appeared too radical. And
a more moderate Vietnamese nationalist government in the late
1940s and early 1950s might well have aroused less alarm both
amongst conservative Vietnamese and amongst the Americans. The
exodus of conservative Vietnamese from the northern part of the
country which gave impetus to the partition of Vietnam between
1954 and 1975 might have been much less and the American fear of
a Vietnamese domino tumbling into communist hands in the wake
of Maos 1949 victory in China might also have been less acute. The
Americans might have aimed to build on their good wartime
relations with Ho Chi Minh to domesticate him, as they believed
they had done with the Indonesian leaders. The visceral fear of
communism that led to the creation of a rival Vietnamese
government in the south might not have come into play.

Conclusion
Analysing nations-of-intent is a special kind of exercise in counterfactualism. It does not demand that we move into a world of
imaginative ction. Rather, it gives us a tool for investigating the
vast amounts of human energy that have been invested in lost
causes, and it helps us to see the shadows of those efforts on the
landscape of that history which actually took place. These shadows
are an important part of understanding real history and geography
for two reasons. First, whereas historians once had little interest in
losers traditional Indonesian historians, for instance, dismissed
lost causes as kalah dan salah (losing and wrong) we now
understand that lost causes warrant attention as part of the overall
human experience. Second, we can better understand historical
outcomes by understanding the alternatives that people had in
mind at the time. Especially important is asking hard, practical
questions of the proponents of alternative nations-of-intent,
because these questions help to expose the enduring constraints
that all nations-of-intent would have faced if they had become
reality. Whatever mix we choose between voluntarist and determinist elements in historical and geographical analysis, we need to
recognize and identify the importance of human aspiration in the
shaping of history and geography.

B.R. OG. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance, 19441946, Ithaca NY, 1972.