Critical junctures? Complexity and the post-colonial nation-state

International Journal of Intercultural Relations 43 (2014) 22–34

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International Journal of Intercultural Relations journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijintrel

Review

Critical junctures? Complexity and the post-colonial nation-state Nora Fisher Onar a,∗ , James H. Liu b , Mark Woodward c a b c

Centre for International Studies, University of Oxford, United Kingdom Centre for Applied Cross-Cultural Research, School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University, United States

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 22 August 2014 Accepted 25 August 2014 Keywords: Critical junctures Colonialism Indigeniety Cultural nationalism Turkey Indonesia New Zealand

a b s t r a c t This paper develops a theoretical framework inspired by complexity theory to assess trajectories of the post-colonial nation-state. Drawing on notions like singularities and critical junctures, initial conditions, and system parameters relevant to the meanings, constituencies, and technologies that determine nation-building trajectories, it shows that in the cases of Turkey, Indonesia/Yogyakarta, and New Zealand – new forms of cultural nationalism are emerging. In keeping with Mill’s logic of difference, this convergent outcome despite the otherwise great divergence across the cases is suggestive of similar process afoot in the (re)imagination of the nation-state across the post-colonial and globalizing world more broadly. These emergent articulations, we show, are more inclusive of certain aspects of “indigenous” experience relevant to certain group identities, than earlier post-colonial nationalisms, while threatening to others. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Contents 1. 2.

3.

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Complexity theory: from empire to nation-state via critical junctures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1. Complex systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2. The colonial/indigenous nexus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3. The World Wars as a singularity and critical junctures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4. Initial conditions: (balance of) power and (political) geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5. System parameters: symbologies, technologies, and identities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.1. Symbologies of the state . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.2. Technologies of the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5.3. Identity space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

∗ Corresponding author at: Centre for International Studies, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Tel.: +1 919 800 8348. E-mail addresses: nora.fi[email protected] (N. Fisher Onar), [email protected] (J.H. Liu), [email protected] (M. Woodward). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2014.08.009 0147-1767/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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1. Introduction As Western power wanes and new centers of gravity rise, leaders across the formerly colonized world are claiming ownership of world historical processes. Sultan Hamengku Buwono X of Yogyakarta exuded this confidence as he accepted an honorary doctorate from a newly founded private university in Turkey’s thriving Anatolian heartland.1 “Turkey and Indonesia”, he declared, are working hand-in-hand to build a more refined and glorious world civilization. . .the 19th century may have been Europe’s era, the 20th America’s, but the 21st will be that of Asia.”2 Yet, even as the narrative of Asia’s rise gains traction, memories of Western dominion remain palpable. The persistence of Western power in shaping post-colonial national imaginaries was attested to by the commemoration in Turkey, just two weeks after the Sultan’s visit, of the Battle of Gallipoli. Redolent of an earlier world historical moment shared by otherwise disparate peoples, participants in the ceremony paid tribute to a battle in which the far-flung incipient nations of Turkey and New Zealand emerged from the ashes, joined by their antagonism or allegiance to the then world hegemon, the British. Both ceremonies – the Sultan’s speech, and the Gallipoli commemorations with their multiple keys and audiences – speak, as does this paper, to the ways that apparently unrelated peoples and places may be linked by their common participation in world historic events (Liu et al., 2009; Bobowik et al., 2014). This furnishes grounds for comparison, the specificity of each case notwithstanding (Byren & Ragin, 2009). For national projects across the post-colonial world emerged vis-à-vis a singular and momentous if by no means predetermined or irreversible development in world affairs: the eclipse of empire in general, and the western European colonial enterprise in particular. To be sure, the transition took many forms given variations in colonialism across place and time. There was at least as great diversity in the forms of nation-building by which empire was displaced. Nonetheless, the transition, from empire to nation-state as the primary mode of organizing political and economic affairs was near-universal. On the receiving end of Western colonialism was a wide array of societies which shared, if nothing else, a firepower deficit in the face of Western military might. This meant they were subject to coercive practices ranging from genocide to the (Sisyphean) exhortation of missionaries and colonial administrators to remake themselves in the image of the West. This compelled “native” agents to recalibrate their political, economic, and social institutions.3 But if indigenous roles in this process all too often are erased from Eurocentric narratives of world history, engagement and resistance of Western colonialism entailed what Gaonkar (1999) calls “creative adaptation” and the reinvention of indigenous logics and substance. Coloniality, indigneity, and their complex interplay were the threads in the tapestry of a world of empires, as constitutive of the colonial metropoles as of colonized peripheries.4 Their relationship was fundamentally transformed by the collapse of western imperialism in the wake of the World Wars (leaving representational residues that inform contemporary political decisions, like willingness to fight for your country, see Bobowik et al., 2014). Movements for self-determination capitalized on its ruin,5 (re)claiming indigenous identities while also (re)inscribing western modes of organizing states and societies through nation-building projects that borrowed many of their features from Western models. The upshot was new sovereign arrangements which empowered some groups and disempowered others within each national community. This, in turn, engendered revisionism as those excluded from the initial post-colonial settlement sought to (re)gain ownership of national projects. In recent decades, such mobilizations have been bolstered by economic transformation in many parts of the postcolonial world including access to new communications technology. They are resulting, we contend, in emergent visions of national belonging which reconfigure the (post-)colonial/indigenous nexus. To begin to understand this process, we develop a theoretical framework inspired by the tools of complexity theory. These include notions like critical junctures, initial conditions, and system parameters relevant to nation-building trajectories. We show that across three disparate “post-colonial” cases6 – Turkey, Indonesia/Yogyakarta, and New Zealand – revisionist forms of cultural nationalism have emerged. In keeping with Mill’s logic of difference, this convergent outcome despite the otherwise great divergence across the cases suggests that similar processes may be present in the (re)imagination of

1 The Sultan’s complete title is: Sultan Hamengkubuwana Senopati Ing Nagala Abdurrakhman Sayidin Panatagama Kalifatullah (The Sultan who hold the world in his lap, Supreme Military Commander, Servant of the Merciful, Descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, Regulator of Religion, Caliph of Allah. The title is a central part of Yogyakarta symbology. 2 “Endonezyalı Sultan: Dünya uygarlı˘gın ınins¸asında Türkiye Endonezya el ele” [Indonesian Sultan: Turkey and Indonesia hand-in-hand in the construction of world civilization]. Source http://www.haber3.com/endonezyali-sultan-dunya-uygarliginin-insasinda-turkiye-endonezya-el-ele-haberi-1895522h. htm#ixzz2SgNhMuDQ Accessed 25.04.13. 3 There is a voluminous literature on and contesting the categories of “colonial” and “native” or “indigenous.” We recognize that the terms (like “West,” and “East”) are reifications that are complicit, moreover, in power relations between their respective referents. Given space constraints, however, in this paper we use them as shorthand for the bundle of structures and agents whose complex interactions were empowering to and/or subjected by western European capitalist imperialism from the 17th to the early 20th century. 4 See, for example, Hobson’s (2004) contribution to a growing body of interdisciplinary work that challenges the “virgin birth” (Fisher Onar and Nicolaidis, 2013) narrative of European expansion and empowerment. 5 In the pre-war period, pan-nationalist movements such as pan-Islamism and pan-Asianism were prominent vehicles of anti-colonial mobilization. However, as Aydin (2007 traces in a seminal work comparing the two currents, the Wilsonian moment paved the way for the ascendance of the national over pan-national liberation paradigms. 6 All three cases may be viewed as post-colonial insofar as Indonesia was directly colonized by the Dutch who in Yogyakarta implemented a system of indirect rule based on unequal treaties and subsidiary alliances leaving the Sultanate in control of “custom and religion” but little else. Turkey, albeit to a lesser extent, was likewise heir to an entity that had been subject to a Capitulations regime on the part of European powers for almost a century culminating in Ottoman collapse and Allied occupation. New Zealand, meanwhile, was a site of the Anglo-Saxon model of settlement/replacement colonization.

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the nation-state across other post-colonial societies.7 These emergent articulations, we argue, are more inclusive of certain aspects of “indigenous” experience than earlier post-colonial nationalisms, while threatening to others. One reason for this is their tendency to privilege communitarian understandings of collective identity. This may not be welcomed by some individuals within the majority group, or by minority communities who (at least in principle if not necessarily in practice), may have felt more secure under the earlier order (see, for example, Inglehart & Baker, 2000). 2. Complexity theory: from empire to nation-state via critical junctures 2.1. Complex systems Empires and nation-states are nothing if not complex systems – what the OED8 defines as “sets of connected parts forming a complex whole.” Both provide a framework in which the empire or nation-state per se, as well as the relationships between the various parts of the system, are experienced in transcendental terms (Hardt & Negri, 2000; Smith, 2010). That is to say, empire and the nation-state alike are seen by their respective champions as outside of history – forms of governance that emanate from and are destined to endure for time immemorial. This serves to naturalize the ways that imperial and national logics regulate every aspect of social life from the political and the economic to the affective and cognitive. Yet, empires and nation-states are patently historical entities that thrive and decline. We saw this in the 20th century with the collapse of the western colonial empires, and in the 21st with the ongoing transformation of the nation-state in an era of globalization. Complex systems theory enables us to capture both continuity and rupture in the evolution of empires and nation-states as well as the world historical moment when the national paradigm superseded the imperial. It draws on the complexity turn in the hard sciences which challenged the Newtonian assumption of fixed variables and linear change to explain complex patterns and outcomes found in nature such as weather systems.9 The approach has been welcomed across a range of social scientific disciplines from management and social psychology to sociology and international relations. It has been welcomed for its ability to accommodate both quantitative and qualitative analyses (depending on whether one employs its instruments as positive measures or as metaphors).10 Its attention to the interplay of system dynamics across multiple layers also enables us to bridge the macro-(global), meso-(national to organizational), and micro-(individual) levels of analysis in a rigorous fashion. This, in turn, is conducive to inter-disciplinary inquiry with its potential for grappling with complex and outstanding real-world problems our understanding of which is often obscured by disciplinary turf wars within the academy. Another useful feature of complexity theory is that it mediates in the perpetual tug-of-war between structure and agency by honing in upon the emergent properties of their dynamic interaction when agents steer structures and structures circumscribe agents’ maneuvers. Last but not least, the analytical toolkit of complexity theory is filled with notions that can be fruitfully deployed in the study of empires, nation-states, and the transition from the former to the latter. These include concepts like attractors, singularities and critical junctures, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, systems parameters, path dependence, and emergence. They more fully described by Liu, Fisher Onar, Woodward (2014) as critical junctures theory. 2.2. The colonial/indigenous nexus The tools of complexity theory enable us to conceptualize the interplay between coloniality and indigeneity – the two constitutive threads of the imperial system. Their relationship was reconfigured with the transition to the post-colonial nation-state and, we contend, is being recalibrated again today. Coloniality refers to the military, political, economic, and cultural hegemony of Western agents, as well as its institutional and cognitive legacies. This process began in at least the 16th century and continued into the mid twentieth. It was a consequence of what Hodgson termed the “Great Western Transmutation”, and is documented by Hobsbawm as a historical process (1987, 1994). At its height from circa 1600–1900, this led to scientific, technological, and institutional innovations which enabled western European powers, including Britain, France and the Netherlands, to dominate vast territories around the world. The colonial condition was salient not only in places under direct rule like much of Indonesia, but also in settings where there was an invasive “Capitulations regime” from the Javanese sultanate of Yogyakarta to its much larger Ottoman counterpart. The colonial condition was also evident in settler societies like New Zealand where the white population was at once an agent of and on the receiving end of (the British) empire. For indigenous Maori, the encounter was almost, but not quite fatal. Thus, across all three cases, asymmetric encounters with the imperial West were formative of the nation-states that emerged in the wake of colonialism.

7 Indeed, we hail from disciplines which rarely converse (namely, international relations, social psychology, and anthropology) and specialize in cases that are almost never compared (namely Turkey, Indonesia, and New Zealand). It was the very realization that despite our disparate points of departure, we had developed remarkably congruent theoretical tools and arguments which convinced us that we are looking at a world-wide phenomenon. This spurred us to develop a theoretical framework that can encompass wide-ranging cases, and fruitful if counter-intuitive cross-case comparisons. 8 Oxford English Dictionary. 9 The classic example is the “butterfly effect” which postulates that the disruptions caused by a butterfly fluttering its wings in Brazil can set into a motion whole series of weather events. 10 For these reasons, there is a vibrant conversation on the merits of applying complexity theory to and across disciplines from social psychology and economics, to sociology and international relations (see, for example, Cudworth and Hobden, 2013; Urry, 2003; Walby, 2009, Kavalski, 2007).

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If the colonial experience was deeply disruptive, it did not always displace but sometimes inflected upon well-established indigenous forms of military, political, economic, and cultural organization. We use “indigenous”11 generically as a referent for societies on the receiving end of Western colonialism. This does not suggest that there were essential, hermetically sealed pre-Western indigenous cultures as all societies are shaped continuously by interactions, migrations, and crossfertilizations.12 Nor does it mean that there were intrinsic affinities across far-flung indigenous societies. Encounters with western colonialism nevertheless left a profound and traumatic imprint upon, among other things, the peoples, institutions, collective consciousness and memories of the states and societies in question. This meant that indigenous identities became interwoven with a subaltern subjectivity among elites as well as majorities and minorities within the broader population. Time and again, this experience piqued both resentment of Western authority, and self-questioning narratives to account for native impotence in the face of Western power (see Smith, 1999). Contrary, however, to the Westernist/modernist assumption that “traditional” blueprints would and should dissipate, indigenous” ways of being and doing were reproduced and innovated in diverse and profound ways.13 Driven by the disconnect, but also the dynamic (if asymmetric) interplay between western colonial and indigenous frameworks, the societies in question embarked upon adaptive programs. Strategies ranged from superficial to wholesale adoption – or interpretations thereof – of Western worldviews and ideological programs from liberalism and communism to positivism and secularism (Fisher Onar & Evin, 2010; Fisher Onar, 2013; Inglehart & Baker, 2000). Tactics included embrace of Western military techniques to enable resistance of Western coercion. Thus, just as the ¯ Ottomans eliminated the Janissary corps and replaced it with a Western-style military; Maori, who had stone age technology prior to European contact, quickly became skilled in the use of firearms. It took 10,000 British regulars to subdue the native population of New Zealand, and indigenous forms of resistance and collusion continue to this day. Adaptation also meant accepting Western diplomatic forms and norms. This enabled, in the case of Ottoman Turkey, a careful balancing act between rival Great Power interlocutors. As a result, the Ottoman dynasty actually outlived by several years its Russian archrivals, the Romanovs (whose Nicholas I famously but prematurely – vis-à-vis his own house – diagnosed the ‘Turk” as the “sick man of Europe”). This process of adaptation also precipitated new relationships and hierarchies, from the rise of positivist nationalists like the Young Turks and the emergence of the Yogyakarta sultanate as a preeminent institution in Java, to the rise of a Maori king to contest British colonization of New Zealand (an institution that continues today). Similarly, the need to grapple with colonial capitalism, with its appallingly harmful impact on millions subjected to enslavement and forced labor, did enable some groups within the societies in question to reposition themselves in opportune ways. This was the case, for example, among non-Muslim Ottoman communities whose commercial activities thrived, or those Maori tribes who bought British sailing ships and traded across the Tasman Sea in profitable ventures. 2.3. The World Wars as a singularity and critical junctures This process of reconstitution at the nexus of the colonial and the indigenous was fundamentally transfigured after World War I and through World War II. The “Great War” arguably marks the beginning of a singularity in world history – a moment of catastrophic change shifting the possibility space for all societies on the planet, or what Manela (2012) calls the “Wilsonian moment.”14 Through this time of calamity, it became possible to imagine a world of the nation-state universalized, one where the two-tiered structure of the colonial order (Suzuki, 2005; Keene, 2002) was formally overturned, though diverse forms of material and cognitive subordination continued (Chakrabarty, 2009; Fisher Onar & Nicolaidis, 2013). This is evident from the fact that many representatives of colonial peoples attended the peace conference marking the end of WWI even though their demands were largely ignored. Nevertheless, within a few decades, Europeans were compelled to acknowledge the sovereignty (or the right thereof) of many of their non-European subjects. To be sure, the singular transition from empire to nation-state in world history had prequels and sequels, from the Japanese defeat of the Russians in 1905, to national liberation movements in Africa well into the 1970s. But even in Latin America, where venerable republics had long achieved independence from older Iberian colonial empires, the re-imposition of (neo-)colonial structures by the United States around the turn of the century (LaFeber, 1963; McCoy & Scarano, 2009) lent the emancipatory logic of Wilsonian self-determination a new urgency. The upshot was the primacy of the nation-state in the political ordering of the world. This macro-level moment found expression at the meso (national) level in a series of critical junctures – windows of heightened contingency when dramatic transformation is possible (Capoccia & Kelemen, 2007; Liu et al., 2014). Critical junctures may be of a higher order, as in the shift from one attractor (empire/colony) to another (nation-state) and the

11 The very use of dialectical logic in our “coloniality”/”indigeneity” nexus is intended to capture this dynamic project of mutual constitution rather than reify its referents. 12 For a review of the rich and fraught debate on the merits and drawbacks of “indigenous knowledge” as an analytical category see Agrawal (1995) and Gordon and Krech (2012). 13 As such, innovation is always, at one level, a conservative enterprise – entailing invocation of the past to redefine the present in ways imagined as congruent with an earlier order. We owe this observation to Tim Marr. 14 There is a danger of viewing this moment through the prism of a sort of post-colonial Whiggish history. The key point about WWI, as Manela (2007) documents, is that it opened up a conceptual opportunity space which those assigned second-class or subjugated status in the global pecking order could utilize to insist upon recognition of their agency.

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reconfiguration of the (post-)colonial/indigenous nexus which this entails: we describe this as a singularity, as they involve macro-conditions connecting the globe. Or they can transpire in specific substantive fields in the form of, say, a military defeat or coup, technological innovation, economic crisis, popular revolution, or legal breakthrough. To ascertain whether an event is of the magnitude of a critical juncture, one can employ “objective” measures. This involves compiling sufficient empirical evidence to make a credible claim that the moment under scrutiny is indeed one of collapse and reconstitution, one when the ingredients of subsequent trajectories are dramatically reconfigured, as in a rupture (Liu et al., 2014). At the same time, it is important to recognize the subjective nature of critical junctures whose status as such – from the Treaty of Westphalia and Bastille Day to the Sultan of Yogyakarta’s declaration of support for the Indonesia independence movement – is the result of later day contests over their significance. Seen in this light, critical junctures serve as sites of narrative contestation – lieux de memoires (Kello & Wagner, 2014; Klar, 2014; Mols & Jetten, 2014; Nora, 1989; Wertsch, 2002). Thus, in addition to being a measure of rupture, the notion of critical junctures can be used to map conflicting visions of collective pasts, presents, and future. Here the critical juncture itself becomes grist to the political contest over whose version of history should prevail (Liu & Hilton, 2005). It entails speculation about changes in probability spaces before and after a hypothesized critical event. A third technique for designating critical junctures – counterfactual analysis – is amenable to both positivist and interpretivist research design. In many cases of transition from the empire/colony to nation-state, critical junctures took the form of what could be called a “Constitutional” or “Treaty moment” in which the founding principles for the new polity were established. The importance of such moments, as with Turkey’s foundational Treaty of Lausanne (1923), may have been evident to their authors, not least because that document stood in stark contrast to and prevented the outcome envisaged by the earlier Treaty of Sèvres (1921) (which would have parceled out the remaining Ottoman territories to the Allies). As such, its authors were aware that it represented a rupture from the Ottoman Empire that would never be repaired (Fisher Onar, 2014). Alternatively, the watershed significance of Treaty moments may be recognized only retrospectively as with the British settler-Maori accord embodied in New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840 between Maori chieftains and the British crown, is now considered as the foundational document on which the nation’s sovereignty rests (Orange, 2004). But for much of New Zealand’s history, it was deemed “null and void” due to a colonial-era judicial decision symptomatic of British settler desires to seize the land from its indigenous owners. As such, from, say 1877–1967, the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi would not have been interpreted as a critical juncture, but just another paving stone on the way to burying New Zealand’s indigenous people and its pre-colonial past. It was only with the efforts of the Maori political renaissance of the 1970s (invigorated by anti-Vietnam protest and the British joining the European Economic Community, see Walker, 2004) that the Treaty became again enshrined in legislation, and is today acknowledged as the most important event in New Zealand history by Maori and Europeans alike (Liu, Wilson, McClure, & Higgins, 1999). Maori, who were considered to be a “dying race” by Victorian era Europeans (Belich, 1986), are among the world leaders in indigenous language and cultural revival today (see Smith, 1999). Thus, there is something inherently subjective and human about some important moments in history that only in retrospect and as a function of self-conscious choices and mobilizations become regarded as critical junctures in the making of a people (Liu et al., 2014). If the name game is important, what forces actually catalyze the radical opening of the realm of possibilities which we call critical junctures? Arguably the most common impetus, as testified to by many a “Treaty moment,” is violent conflict. For while critical junctures without violence are possible, as often as not it is the experience of man-made (and sometimes nature-wrecked) conflagration which opens up the possibility spaces that characterize critical junctures (for interpretive data, see Liu et al., 2009). In the aftermath of Indonesia’s occupation by the Japanese during World War II, for example, the Dutch sought to reassert control only to be confronted with Indonesia’s declaration of independence and a revolutionary struggle in 1945. At this time, Sultan Hamengkubuwana IX of Yogyakarta came down strongly in support of the Indonesian revolution. This helped to ensure that the Sultanate was established as a “special region of the Republic of Indonesia with the attributes of a kingdom.” This marked a Treaty moment, albeit one between an indigenous and the post-colonial state. The sultanate proved less adroit at managing the next critical period of flux, after the alleged coup attempt by the Indonesian Communist Party and in 1965. The party was banned and at least 500,000 members and sympathizers were killed in the violence that followed (Cribb, 1990). In the aftermath, the authoritarian, military dominated, development oriented “New Order” government of Indonesia’s second president Suharto assumed power and held it for thirty-three years. The Sultan held cabinet positions in the New Order government and served one term as vice president (1973–1978). These steps fostered the legitimacy of the New Order and enabled Yogyakarta to retain its status as a special region. They did not prevent, however, the military from establishing effective control of the Sultanate’s territory and population. The most recent critical juncture was the democratic transition of May 1998 when the New Order regime collapsed in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. As we will see, for Yogyakarta, the democratic transition enabled the renewal of royal authority via the sultanate’s claim to represent an “authentic” Javanese religious nationalism. 2.4. Initial conditions: (balance of) power and (political) geography If critical junctures open up a new possibility space for political organization and for people’s mentality, they are by no means tabula rasa. Rather, they are shaped by initial conditions which prod and structure the newly coalescing order such that pathways unfold which become difficult to change over time. In the case of post-colonial nation-states, at least two initial conditions are prominent in shaping subsequent trajectories. The first regards the distribution or balance of power (BoP)

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between colonial and indigenous institutions and agents on one hand, and between rival groups within the nascent polity on the other. These encompass material conditions that can be captured via indicators like military capacity, population size, arable land, or level of economic development. To illustrate, the Sultanate of Yogyakarta located in south central Java was established in 1755 when the kingdom Mataram was divided between rival claimants to the throne. The process was brokered by the Dutch East India Company, which, at the time, influenced, but did not yet control Javanese politics.15 This initial Dutch foothold meant that initially the military power and political of authority of the Sultanate diminished under terms of political contracts negotiated between the Dutch and the new Sultan at the beginning of each reign. This further heightened Dutch influence in the transformation of the economic system from subsistence rice agriculture to forced cultivation of export crops (Houben, 1995). The case also attests to the ways that apparently minor actors and conjectural factors – simply being at the right place at the right time – can have a disproportionate influence on the trajectories that ensue from a critical juncture. Indeed, power is a relative and contextual rather than absolute condition – the “balance” part of the power equation. The profound flux that prevails during critical junctures makes it possible for cunning leaders or minority factions to capitalize upon ad hoc circumstances to defeat less adroit rivals (see Reicher & Hopkins, 2001 on identity entrepreneurship). A case in point was the ability of Turkey in 1923, having secured absolute advantage on the battlefield vis-à-vis Greek forces which had served as proxy for Allied occupiers, to play on the war-weariness of its otherwise more powerful negotiating partners which included the British and the French. By employing delay and stalling tactics that prolonged negotiations at a time Allied representatives longed to get home, Turkish diplomats were able to secure more favorable terms than the “objective” distribution of power warranted. By comparison, the power differential between European colonizers and indigenous people like Maori, who were organized tribally, had no industry and highly vulnerable to disease was overwhelming. Despite their manifest ability in warfare (Belich, 1986), Maori were colonized, and their tribal way of life subsumed within the larger fabric of an Anglo-settler society, albeit with “bicultural” elements that acknowledge Maori as part of the national identity (Sibley & Liu, 2007), and furnish a bicultural narrative of New Zealand that is compelling for many New Zealanders (King, 2003; Walker, 2004). A second, condition present during critical junctures which has a profound impact on subsequent trajectories is (political) geography. Geography, like power, entails both objective and subjective dimensions. Thus, physical location and proximity to or distance from, say, the global hegemon or the strategic body of water, or the equator will impact a country’s pathway. The perceived power of the hegemon and the reach of technologies of state similarly shape the perception of distance in political geography: that is, the way distance is imagined (Harvey, 2006; Dikec, 2012) plays an important role in the crystallization of national identities. Here, the role of technology – and its relationship with capital – is profound, as Anderson (2006) seminally showed vis-à-vis the role of print media in place like Indonesia in catalyzing national collective consciousness during the first wave of post-colonial nation-building. In short, the nation-building trajectories of Turkey, Indonesia/Yogykarta, and New Zealand were deeply influenced by initial conditions – the prevailing balance of power and geography. The new Republic of Turkey, for one, may have been able to secure its autonomy from European powers due to its considerable military and diplomatic capacity. However, by virtue of its geographical proximity, the Turkish national project remained enmeshed in European conventions from positivism to Cold War statecraft. By way of contrast, the vast distances between former imperial metropole and colony in the case of Indonesia/Yogyakarta, meant the power differential vis-à-vis western Europe was offset by the autonomy afforded by distance. By the same token, Maori were the weakest of the three in absolute terms when it came to the colonial/indigenous balance of power. They fought well, but military triumph to achieve independence against the British was ultimately impossible (Belich, 1986). That said, and the depredations of being colonized notwithstanding, Maori did benefit from their distance from the imperial center, retaining a degree of cultural vitality that enables them to have a significant, if minority voice in national affairs today (King, 2003; Walker, 2004). This is more than can be said for the indigenous peoples of North America, who were much closer to the imperial metropole and more thoroughly overwhelmed. Thus, power and geography constituted important initial conditions which circumscribed in profound ways nation-building trajectories in these post-colonial settings. 2.5. System parameters: symbologies, technologies, and identities In the aftermath of a critical juncture, as systems settle into the trajectories shaped by initial conditions, three parameters – symbologies of the state (SoS), technologies of the state (ToS), and the identity space (IS) – interact to theoretically describe both continuity and change in system pathways. Each parameter is composed of families of variables (rather than discrete indicators). Recognizing this, allows us to capture the multiplicity of each parameter while enabling their operationalization in specific case studies. This approach also accommodates both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. The upshot is that under the aggregate labels of IS, SoS, and ToS certain configurations within the system are reproduced, not least because of the role played by political actors who are both products of system dynamics and shape those interactions. At the same time, new properties emerge as a result of the ricochet between system parameters. It is this interaction between the

15 On the founding and early history of Yogyakarta see Ricklefs, M. (1974). Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi, 1749–1792: A History of the Division of Java. London: Oxford University Press.

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three parameters over time – and their mediation in the actions of political actors – which accounts for both continuity and change (including those moments when endogenous processes and/or exogenous shocks – like violent conflict or natural and man-made disasters – cause ruptures on the scale of a new critical juncture). 2.5.1. Symbologies of the state The first of these system parameters, symbologies, refers to the ensemble of meanings that, irrespective of historical accuracy, is propagated by a state in order to create a “fellow feeling” (Allesandri, Fisher Onar, & Unluhisarcikli, 2013) among subjects/citizens. Seen by some as “narratives” (Bruner, 1986), “myths” (Schopflin, 1997) or “ideologies” (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), symbological repertoires are neither frivolous nor random. Rather, through a process akin to that which Levi Strauss (1966) termed bricolage, they are assembled from extent symbolic resources and come to constitute and legitimize communal identities – what Liu and Hilton (2005), drawing on the classic work of Malinowski (1926), call symbolic “charters.” Enacted through ritualistic performances at the official level as well as via private and market practices regulated by the authorities (Fisher Onar, 2013) – symbologies of state establish the content and boundaries of membership in the political community. Ritual and other public state ceremonies, ranging from secular presidential inaugurations to state sponsored celebration of holy days are critical components of state symbology. The role of performance here is constitutive rather than merely instrumental; it defines and not merely expresses or leverages political communities and hierarchies (see, for example, Butler, 1997). Crucially, while actors must draw upon a pre-existing pool of images and meanings to be intelligible to their audiences, there is some scope for creative (re)appropriation. In fact, it is this agential aspect of symbology – the ability of political performers to invoke and deploy such frames – which breathes life into enactments of and contests over symbologies of the state (and the relationship with state technologies and the identity space that, in turn, define system trajectories). To capture symbologies of state at work, one can develop an “inventory” (Liu et al., 2014) of its tropes and enactments and the ways they are arranged in a “schematic narrative template” (Wertsch, 2002). These include foundational myths (which, in effect, are the retrospective naturalizations of the trajectories that emanate from critical junctures). The heroes and villains of these myths – and their ethnic, linguistic, religious, and gendered identities – also offer important clues about the content and boundaries of the group, in our case the (post-colonial) nation. These often become part of the contents of the social identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) of a nation. In the case of Indonesia, for example, ever since the critical juncture that was the democratic transition of 1998, there has been a political and legal struggle concerning the status of Yogyakarta as a special region of the Indonesian republic. Legally, the question revolves around the seeming contradiction between democratization, which presupposes popular sovereignty, and the sultan’s authority. To dispel the challenge, the sultan mounted a massive symbological campaign in which royal authority was revitalized by promoting Javanese-Islamic ethnoreligious nationalism. On the Javanese side of the equation, mini-state ceremonies were introduced in districts and villages, replicating rituals held at the palace on Islamic holy days.16 On these occasions, processions feature traditional troops in 18th century style uniforms with displays of local agricultural products, gamelan (percussion orchestra), dance, and often shadow play performances. Such rituals reflect the systematic investment the Sultan has made as patron of the Javanese traditional arts. These enactments further established the strong link between cultural “authenticity” and Islamic legitimacy, likewise said to reside in the person of the sultan. To this end, Qur’an recitation is practiced and prayers incanted for the prosperity and well-being of the nation, district, or village, and Sultanate. The royal family also forged an alliance with the local Hadrami (Arab Indonesian) leadership, the traditionalist Muslim organization Nhadlatul Ulama (NU), and popular figures such as Habib Syech, a Hadrami performer of shalawat (music praising the Prophet Muhammad) who attracts crowds as large as 300,000 and whose stage members of the sultan’s family regularly grace. The outcome of this symbological campaign combining cultural and religious claims to authority has been that ever since the provincial legislature voted in 1998 “not to vote” for a new governor, the Sultan has been able to continue to serve as governor by virtue of being Sultan. Almost a century earlier and halfway across the globe, the Ottoman sultan proved unable to position the dynasty for survival at that most critical of junctures: the transition from empire to republic. Instead, nation-builders led by Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) secured the country’s sovereignty through a war dubbed to be of national “liberation”. Far from seeking legitimacy in tradition and religion, they blamed the Empire’s collapse on Ottoman-Islamic practices and values which they proceeded to vilify, embarking upon a cultural revolution. This entailed a frontal attack on Ottoman symbology (which itself had been transformed in tandem with piecemeal Ottoman westernization over the preceding century). Symbological moves of the new republic that had a profound impact included abolishment of the caliphate and sultanate, switching from the Islamic to the Gregorian calendar, and abandoning the Arabic alphabet in favor of the Latin. Wholesale adoption of criminal and family codes from European models likewise altered the terms of ethical and intimate behavior. Symbology performances served demonstrative and pedagogic functions, alerting more and less baffled members of the citizenry to their new obligations as republican subjects. For example, the fez was banned17 and western headgear encouraged. Likewise, the veil was discouraged as part of the project to “emancipate” women, demanding from them public

16

On Yogyakarta state ceremonies see Woodward (2011). The fez, which republican nation-builders would abolish in their assault on Ottoman symbols, was in fact headgear that late Ottoman reformers had adopted as a sign of modernity in place of traditional turbans. 17

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performances commiserate with an idealized republican woman who was expected to dutifully serve the paternalistic state (Fisher Onar & Paker, 2012; Kandiyoti, 1996). If, however, the symbology revolution entailed rupture with earlier and “indigenous” frameworks, this was in service of preserving political autonomy from would-be western colonizers. In effect, Turkey’s early leaders sought to empower the new republic by inscribing it with those features of the colonial order deemed to have made the West strong. To do so not only meant disparaging the Ottoman-Islamic past, but erasing it. Moves toward this end included removal of the capital from ancient, cosmopolitan Istanbul – an imperial center for three millennia – to small, modernist Anakara in the heart of the Anatolian (now Turkish) plateau. While Ankara remains the heart of the Turkish state, some aspects of the Kemalist revolution in symbology did not stand the test of time. By the next critical juncture – the transition to meaningful multi-party elections in 1950 – some measures that had been highly dissonant with social conventions were repealed such as the rendering of the call to prayer in Turkish instead of Arabic. The Turkish history thesis – concocted by nationalist historians in the 1930s to claim continuity with preIslamic Anatolian civilizations while circumventing the Ottoman heritage – likewise lost credence over time. Other symbols, however, remained sacrosanct, such as the omnipresent image of Atatürk rendered in portraits, busts, and statues in every public setting from public squares to classrooms and government offices across the country. In New Zealand, Maori were positioned in the colonial era at best as noble savages, subjects of the Crown to be disciplined by the “greater civilization” of Britain. At worst, they were seen as cannibals and an inferior race destined to perish as a natural consequence of “fatal impact” and encounter with a superior colonizing race (Belich, 1986; Smith, 1999). Well into the 1960s, the government’s Hunn report described Maori as backwards. Only with the advent of incremental autonomy from Great Britain in the 1960s did attitudes toward Maori from New Zealanders of European descent begin to improve. At this time, New Zealanders began to search for a new identity to replace the one lost with the fading of the British Empire. In this task, they were led by Maori activism (Walker, 2004), fused with anti-establishment, Vietnam era activism by whites. In 1975, after intensive but peaceful struggle, the Treaty of Waitangi was enshrined again as national legislation “in principle” (what this meant in practice was to be hammered out in British Common Law style through case trials). Over the course of a quarter century of sometimes tempestuous struggle, sometimes harmonious debate, Maori symbols, values, and their history of battling colonial injustice have become inscribed as a part of New Zealand identities post-Empire (Liu, McCreanor, McIntosh, & Teaiwa, 2005). The national museum, for instance, is designed to be symbolically bicultural, with a giant Treaty of Waitangi as its centerpiece. The New Zealand coat of arms – printed on such signal documents of citizenship as the passport – carries a shield between a Maori warrior in a feather cloak and an Anglo maiden in a white dress. Visitors to New Zealand coming through Auckland’s busy international airport will pass through a waharoa, a carved Maori gate, before they set foot on New Zealand soil. All this symbology has become so ingrained into the national identity that young New Zealanders, unlike young Australians or US Americans, view Maori as implicitly just as closely associated with symbols of the nation like the flag and map as they do whites (Sibley & Liu, 2007). In the United States (Devos & Banaji, 2005) and Australia (Sibley & Barlow, 2009), by contrast, the nation is implicitly white, even though explicitly, people will claim that there is equality between the various ethnicities. 2.5.2. Technologies of the State If symbology is associated with meanings, the technologies of the state refer to the institutional apparatus which gives the state enforcement capacity. These are often tangible, comprised by government agencies with their mandates, personnel, and resources. But while technologies of state may appear to be among the most concrete of the system parameters in critical junctures theory, they cannot be reduced to the material. For institutions like the security establishment and education system are produced by dynamic interaction with the other system parameters (see Sakki, 2014 on education around the European Union). That is to say, it is only through the interplay with the symbology reservoir – and their capture by groups occupying the identity space – that technologies of governance shape system trajectories. In this regard, and as with symbology, the process via which technologies of state are implemented involves people in institutional roles. In carrying out their duties, political leaders, bureaucrats, and soldiers, like other public servants will be affected by his/her group affiliation(s) and their meanings (Archer, 1995; see Kello & Wagner, 2014, on the role of teachers of history). It is thus, again, actors who mediate between the ToS, symbolical meanings and the identity space, ensuring outcomes. This is attested to by the acumen, for one, of Yogyakarta’s rulers who at a series of critical junctures at the volatile nexus of Dutch colonial, Indonesian national, and Javanese local dynamics managed to position the sultanate in ways which have ensured the viability of dynastic institutions that almost everywhere else on earth have been eclipsed (not least the neighboring kingdom of Solo whose rulers were less adroit). ToS can be measured across a range of fields pertinent to the exercise of government, from budgetary and legislative regulations to the status and powers attributed to one state organ versus others. Also relevant is the distribution of power between central, federal, and even municipal authorities, and the implications of this balance for state symbology and identity constituencies. Recalling the case of Turkey, the initial cultural revolution was enacted by figures with military backgrounds, establishing an institutional imprint that enabled the military (and judiciary) to later become installed as self-appointed guardians of Turkey’s secular nationalism. Any time that revisionist groups mounted a challenge, these bodies sought to discipline dissent. Such efforts were by and large directed at the center-right and Islamists on one hand, and Kurds on the other who respectively sought to challenge the secularist and the (ethno-)nationalist pillars of the Kemalist project. When the

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perceived challenge was acute, interventions were undertaken directly through mechanisms like military intervention (1960, 1971, 1980, 1998) and Constitutional Court proceedings. Day-to-day politics were also regulated via lower order bureaucratic bodies such as boards for higher education and broadcasting which monitored perceived challenges to the secularist nationalist symbology through measures like a ban on headscarves in universities, and Kurdish-language education, radio, and television broadcasting. As such, to challenge Kemalist symbology it became necessary to acquire a foothold in those components of the state apparatus where one could exercise some degree of autonomous action, leveraging the technologies of the state to one’s revisionist agenda. Recognizing this helps explain why center-right and religious parties have sought to convert their command of a plurality of the vote into control of the parliament and executive. Meanwhile, Kurdish dissenters, representing a minority within the population and obstructed by the high electoral threshold from entering parliament, have often turned to violence, epitomized in the Kurdish militant organization the PKK. In New Zealand, Maori influence has always been at the margins of a British Westminster system of government, but it has never been insignificant either. There is today Te Puni Kokiri, the Ministry of Maori Affairs, but this is far from powerful compared, to say, Treasury. There are Maori seats designated in the nation’s Parliament, with guaranteed Maori representation in the highest governing body of the nation since 1867 (the 4th Parliament of New Zealand), but these are not positioned at the levers of system control. There are currently seven seats designated for Maori out of a total of 121 seats (the number may vary from election to election, as seats are based on population figures and enrolment on a special Maori electoral roll): there were 23 Maori members of Parliament in 2011, the first time in New Zealand history when Maori have been over-represented in Parliament relative to their proportion of the total population of New Zealand (19% vs 16%). Maori, together with English and sign language, is one of the three official languages of New Zealand, but it is not thriving, with the number of proficient speakers on the decline despite concerted efforts by Maori to protect the language. This is a real indicator of the health, or lack thereof, of Maori culture in the greater whole of New Zealand: surviving colonization, not obtaining control over the ToS was the major outcome for Maori in the 20th century as New Zealand gradually became more of a self-governing state. One might describe New Zealand as formally bicultural, with Maori having had to struggle for every accommodation they have gained over the years in the technology of state (Walker, 2004). Meanwhile, it is demographically multicultural (with many migrants coming from Asia post-1987), and institutionally mono-cultural, dominated by whites. The full inclusion of Maori in New Zealand, as promised by the Treaty of Waitangi, is mainly symbolic in nature, though there are specific mechanisms in the technology of state which act as a pressure release valve to ameliorate the many negative consequences of colonization on Maori well-being (from lower education to huge over-representation in prison, (see Harris et al., 2006; Reid & Robson, 2007). 2.5.3. Identity space In response to these institutional exclusions, Maori protests movements are regular, vociferous, and peaceful (see, for example, Barclay & Liu, 2003; Walker, 2004). For just as ruling elites seek to instill visions of national identity via symbology propagated through technologies of the state, so will this be met with resistance in various pockets of the population. This is due in part to the reality of heterogeneous populations irrespective of nationalist aspirations to uniformity. In the case of post-colonial nation-states, it is also a result of dissonance between insistence on the nation as prime locus of loyalty and pre-existing, parallel, and intersecting tribal, sectarian, and ethnic as well as local and cross-border loyalties. Unable or unwilling to conform to the promulgated ideal, many communities have long been excluded from the “public sphere.” Many of these groups – which de facto continued to occupy the identity space while being excluded from the political sphere – mobilized over time. Their goal has been to capture (or escape from) the technologies of the state in order to uphold alternative visions of collective identity via a revisionist symbolic repertoire. This may entail pursuit of inclusion in extent projects or bids to rewrite the national enterprise entirely. Such counter-narratives may be ideological in nature, as with left-wing political parties, or they may be driven by ethnic, gender, or religious identities, as with Timorese or Kurdish (micro-)nationalisms, women’s and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) mobilization, or Islamic revivalism. All of these movements have more and less formal – and more or less violent – expressions. This is exemplified by the range of forms Islamism can take: from loosely-organized groups which transform social imaginaries through rereading sacred texts, to organized political Islamic political parties, to clandestine militancy. Proponents of platforms in the identity space will define themselves not only in affirmative terms, but through juxtaposition with both the national meta-narrative and the claims of other, often rival groups in the identity space. These frames need not entail black-and-white, mutually exclusionary identities staked to the detriment of “Others.” After all, identities are nested in one another, and it is possible to be committed simultaneously to, say, an “Alevi”, “Kurdish,” “leftist,” and “feminist” identity. That said, the more turbulent the identity terrain, and the more fraught the contest over the state apparatus, the more likely it is that visions of the Other are articulated in zero-sum terms with the extreme expression being “total social identities” in which the multiplicity of both in- and out-group characteristics are washed out by a single dominant claim on collective identity (see Bar-Tal, 2001). In a given national context, there will be a multiplicity of groups occupying the identity space and vying for a voice at the center. Their restiveness is a good indicator of when the three parameters – SoS, ToS, and IS – may align in ways that precipitate a new critical juncture in which “charters” of national identity are renegotiated at the nexus of the (post-)colonial and the indigenous. To measure this, as with the other two parameters, one can apply a mixture of positive and interpretive, quantitative and qualitative methods (so long as one is consistent in the claims made about the epistemological foundations

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of the study and the nature and implications of the findings). “Objective” indicators might include measures of demographic diversity obtained through census and survey data. One also could document the ways important groups are portrayed in the state-controlled, and private media. To analyze the content of such representations one could use methods like textual and content analysis; while to analyze the underlying political economy of these ideas’ dissemination one could employ network analysis. The salience of various groups in both the narratives and the operations of the state from constitutional treaties to parliaments furnish another indicator. Having identified the various constituencies, it could be useful to map socio-economic indicators from income and education to prison population and parliamentary representation in order to estimate the degree of inclusion (or exclusion) from the state apparatus and the vision it purveys. If the identity space entails multiple factions, these may coalesce and dissipate into various alignment and counteralignments. The composition of such coalitions will reflect the main cleavages of society. In the case of Turkey, for example, the main axes of contention are the twin questions of what degree of religiosity and what degree of ethnic difference is to be permitted in the public sphere. Thus, challengers to Kemalist secularist nationalism have been drawn from Turkey’s conservative Sunni majority and have pursued a strategy of majoritarian electoral populism to gain control of the technologies necessary for instantiating an alternative national symbology. In the past decade, this has culminated in the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) taking control of both the security and the judicial apparatus, as well as a series of lesser bodies from the Board of Higher Education to the department of patents. The army’s budget has been slashed and middle- and high-ranking officer corps have been purged of perceived agents of the older order. Meanwhile, Kurdish groups have long mobilized in both licit and illicit ways to challenge the Turkification policies of the early republican state, and ethnicist criteria of national belonging enshrined in successive constitutions, most emphatically in 1980. Persistently excluded from the state symbology and subjected to intense censure by its technologies, some Kurds turned to violence. But if violent conflict over Turkey’s “Kurdish question” has claimed some 40,000 lives since the 1980s, Turkey’s EU accession process in the early 2000s and AKP capture of the state by the end of the decade opened some spaces for Kurdish identity in the public sphere.18 These included legislation permitting Kurdish language instruction, and national as well as private radio and television broadcasting in Kurdish (and other ethnic minority languages). Some Kurds remain skeptical, viewing such measures as superficial cover for repackaged Turkish ethnonationalist paternalism in a pro-religious as opposed to pro-secular vein. In other words, they believe it entails a re-imagination of the nation in collective terms which recalibrates the (post-)colonial/indigenous nexus in ways favorable to religious but not to ethnic identity. Such an approach would assimilate Kurdish claims of difference under the umbrella of a new Islamic “supra-identity”. Other Kurds, however, see Turkey’s recently installed Islamists as tentative allies. This has resulted in an ongoing if troubled dialog between the AKP leadership and Kurdish political parties and civil society including elements associated with the PKK. Turkey, in this regard, may be at a critical juncture as the two main groups that had been excluded from the Kemalist state and its symbology seek to hammer out a new vision of national identity while managing complex demands from diverse other groups within the volatile identity space from the former Kemalist elite and heterodox Alevis to disgruntled liberals (who lament the communitarian turn). The ultimate litmus test as to whether this moment is a critical juncture may be the degree to which a long awaited new constitution incorporates Kurdishness, among other identity referents, into a new symbological “charter.” In the case of Yogyakarta, the identity space has evolved from de facto homogeneity in the 18th century when the population was almost entirely ethnically Javanese and Muslim toward greater pluralism.19 That said, among Javanese Muslims there was and is a basic distinction between “santri” who practiced a text and Sharia based form of Islam (though one that was Sufi oriented), and “kejawen” who practiced a local form of Islam incorporating indigenous and Indic elements (Woodward, 1989). Historically, they were bound by elements of state symbology and elite ties as complimentary components of a single Islamicate civilization. The advent of “high” colonialism increased the number of Chinese, as well as Europeans. Another group to arrive were Hadrami Arabs whose religious orientations had affinities with Javanese santri and who played a role in state symbology – through ceremonies and patronage – because many were sayyid (descendants of the Prophet Muhammad). In the early 20th century, the identity space of the Sultanate expanded in ways that continue to the present. Islamic movements shaped by Egyptian modernism and by Wahhabi religious teachings hardened the santri/kejawen distinction (Ricklefs, 2007). Muhammadiyah, the largest of these, was founded in Yogyakarta in 1912 as a palace based movement and rapidly became, and remains, an important identity orientation. Javanist religious movements rooted in Sufism and local culture emerged during this same period (Woodward, 2011). Both stressed modern/western education and contributed to the rise of Indonesian nationalism. In the meantime, the colonial government pursued assimilationist policies, including Dutch education and the fostering of children in Dutch homes for aristocratic elites. This was intended to produce a secular elite loyal to the colonial state. Such policies failed politically and Dutch educated elite proved to be one of driving forces of Indonesian nationalism. They did, however, lead to the formation of elite communities with minimal knowledge of text-based Islam and a widening gap between santri and kejawen.

18 The first government to undertake such measures with an eye toward Turkey’s EU accession was an oddball coalition of the center-left, center-right, and right-wing nationalists. 19 There was a small Chinese community and other Muslim people from other regions of what is now Indonesia.

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In the postcolonial era the emergence of Yogyakarta as a national education center further increased ethnic diversity. There was significant conversion to Christianity by former communists after 1965. Since 1998, Yogyakarta has promoted ethnic and religious tolerance as components of provincial identity at a time when other regions of Indonesia were torn by ethno-religious conflict. It is officially described as the “city of tolerance.” As is true elsewhere in Indonesia and other Muslim countries there has been a growing sense of Muslim identity that transcends nationality and ethnicity, especially in university communities. Muslim brotherhood and Salafi groups ideologically opposed to local cultures are influential especially on the campuses of secular universities (Woodward et al., 2012). These groups deploy identity symbols, particularly “Muslim” clothing for both men and women associated with Arab, and more specifically Saudi Arabian, Islam. The Sultanate/provincial government seeks to accommodate and capitalize on these emergent properties of the identity space by promoting a reformulated Javanese/Islamic/Indonesian/royalist identity. It patronizes Javanese performing arts with newly invented local rituals modeled on those of the Sultanate. It actively promotes the traditionalist NU and Hadrami communities, as being emblematic of Islamic authenticity, to the consternation of Muhammadiyah. Palace officials describe this strategy and the “re-Islamicization” of Javanese culture as “bringing Islam home to the palace.” Among its purposes are to marginalize Salafi and other forms of Islamism, narrow the gap between santri and kejawen communities and identities and ensure popular support for the Sultanate and the status of Yogyakarta as a special region. Finally, in New Zealand, it was only in the 1970s that Maori were able to recapture some of the promise of the Treaty of Waitangi to engineer a cultural revival that has turned at least the symbology of the state in their favor. There is substantial participation by Maori at the highest level of government (Parliament), but at lower levels (e.g., civil servants, local government) they are still woefully under-represented. Most pressing, however, is the continued presence of negative statistics among Maori, with over-representation in prison, less education, poorer health and shorter life spans (see Reid & Robson, 2007). Perhaps as a consequence (Walker, 2004), Maori activism is a constant and vivid component of the political landscape of New Zealand, spanning the entire spectrum of activity from electoral politics to protest movements. But it is a minority movement, not the partnership of equals promised in the Treaty of Waitangi, and so there continues to be a gap between Maori aspirations and reality. But if this recalibration of the (post-)colonial/indigenous nexus is notable, New Zealand’s open migration policy poses a new challenge to Maori aspirations for a greater say in the identity space of New Zealand. In recent years, migration has made New Zealand increasingly multicultural, with Asians being among the most rapidly growing ethnic groups. This has sparked some backlash among Maori, who see their hard-won bicultural position possibly being eroded by multiculturalism (Sibley and Ward, in press). Auckland, as New Zealand’s economic capital, is now a patchwork quilt of ethnoburbs and people from all parts of the world, as New Zealand has taken on board neoliberal economic restructuring governed by fiscal (e.g. China is now NZ’s largest export destination) rather than cultural considerations. New Asian migrants are for now quiescent politically, but with their concentration in Auckland, this is not likely to remain a steady state: in time, Asians or sub-groupings under the rubric of “Asian” may strive for a greater voice in New Zealand politics, at which time the historical compromise of biculturalism may again require further negotiation. 3. Conclusion In this paper, we developed an approach we term “critical junctures theory” and invoked the “method of difference” to ground and compare three convergent outcomes across otherwise disparate cases (for an overview see Table A1). We showed that in the wake of a great singularity – World War I and the macro-level “Wilsonian moment” – there was a near-universal transition from empire/colony to nation-state. At the meso-level, the republic of Turkey, the sultanate of Yogyakarta, and the dominion of New Zealand emerged in the context of critical junctures. These newly opened possibility spaces were nevertheless circumscribed by the balance of power and political geography that prevailed in each case. The national trajectories that resulted were subsequently described by three system parameters – the symbologies and technologies of the state, and the identity space. Each of these parameters is animated by the actions of people from public intellectuals and politicians, to bureaucrats and activists. Indeed, it is the activities of these agents that mediates between the three parameters in our theory, accounting for both system continuity and emergent new dynamics. We have shown that in each of our cases this seems to be culminating in the recalibration of the (post-)colonial/indigenous balance. This is transpiring in ways that accommodate excluded identities into symbological charters, hence, at one level, there is a trend toward greater pluralism. That said, these emergent visions are also predicated on group identities in the form of reinvigorated religious, ethnoreligious, or ethnic categories, with potentially problematic implications for other individuals and groups within the societies. The potential of these tensions to erupt into violence was attested to by recent protests across Turkey and their aftermath. What is it about the Turkish system that has made the process of recalibrating the national project more conflictual than in, say, Yogyakarta or New Zealand? Is heightened violence a function of majority/minority dynamics in the identity space? Is it the result of an institutional set-up long predicated on excluding those who fail to gain access to the state apparatus? Is there something especially polarizing about the symbologies at stake? Or is Turkey’s turbulence a function of insecurities emanating from a political geography that unlike “rising Asia” or remote New Zealand is in the throes of a series of critical junctures – almost of the order of a regional singularity – in the aftermath of the Arab revolutions? Such questions point to important work still to be done in determining the impact on system trajectories of factors like the role of minorities, historical particularities, and geographical conditions. It is our hope that the theoretical framework proposed here can help

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Table A1 Cross-case comparison: critical junctures and post-colonial nation-building trajectories. History/initial conditions/system parameters

Turkey

Indonesia/Yogyakarta

New Zealand

“COLONIAL” players

Capitulations regime (Great Powers, especially Britain and France)

Settler society (British)

“INDIGENEOUS” players

Highly diverse; Sunni Turkish-speaking Muslim majority

TREATY MOMENT

Treaty of Lausanne (1923)

Initial condition at time of WWI singularity – BALANCE OF POWER

Initial condition at time of WWI singularity – POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

In absolute terms, Ottoman empire had sufficient state capacity to embark upon defensive transformation; in relative terms, it was the “Sick Man of Europe” Geostrategically valuable: control of Dardanelles; frontline NATO ally during Cold War; EU candidate country

Formal colony – Indonesia (Dutch)/Capitulations regime – Yogyakarta (Dutch) Highly diverse; Sunni Muslim Javanese majority; Roman Catholic and Protestant minorities Indonesian Declaration of Independence (1945) A component of the Netherlands Indies, the Sultanate’s authority during the period of colonial role was limited to cultural and religious affairs No great strategic value

SYMBOLOGIES OF STATE – Status quo and revisionist

From secularist nationalism toward religious nationalism. . .?

TECHNOLOGIES OF STATE

From Kemalist to Islamist monopoly

IDENTITY SPACE

Diverse; Pious Sunni Turkish-speaking Muslim majority; Alevi, Kurdish, secularist, and non-Muslim minorities

ENSUING CRITICAL JUNCTURES

1950 (multi-party politics); 1960/1980 (military coups); 1999 (EU candidacy); 2013/4? (Kurdish “peace process,” nation-wide protests, and municipal/presidential elections)

Javanese-Islamic sacral kingship toward increased commitment to orthoprax Islam From colonial dependency to semi autonomous special region in democratic, then authoritarian and again democratic nation state. Last democratic transition 1998 Diverse: Sufi and Sharia oriented Javanese Sunni Muslim majority. Other Indonesian ethnic minorities. Secular, royalist. and Islamist political orientations 1945 (Indonesian independence) 1965 (Imposition of military rule) 1998 (Democratic transition)

40+ Maori tribal groupings; (today, large numbers of urban Maori not tribally affiliated) Treaty of Waitanga (1840) British dominated settler society positioned as part of the British Empire

No natural enemies or strategic value given its distance from other lands; closest to Australia, another part of the British Empire; influential in Polynesia Status quo and biculturalism

British Parliamentary system

Diverse: large numbers of Asian and Pasifika migrants together with Maori/British bicultural core Continuity more than critical junctures

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