Although Myanmar has been an independent state for over half a century, its 135 different national races and equally numerous dialects and languages renders language the main continual source of problems for its incomplete and problem-ridden nation-building process. Because successive post-colonial Myanmar governments based nation-building projects on the culture and history of the ethnic majority, Burman, many ethnic minority groups and observers have long accused the Burman-dominated post-colonial governments, especially the Socialist and current military governments, of Burmanizing the country's entire population. The adoption of the Burman language as the country's official language by successive governments and the suspension of minority language classes at pre-university public schools since the early 1970s were viewed by many as attempts to homogenize the population and establish a monolingual nation. Both scholars and minority nationalists have directly and indirectly suggested that the Burman-dominated language policy only benefited the regime and the Burmans, whereas ethnic minorities suffered from it.

While acknowledging the prevalence of Burman chauvinistic elements in the nation-building discourse and activities undertaken by post-colonial Myanmar governments, this paper intends to show that successive Myanmar governments did not try to establish a monolingual nation. Rather, the governments would usually allow ethnic minorities to undertake cultural activities, including the freedom to speak and write their own languages, as long as those activities were not related to political attempts to topple them or undermine their control of the country. In addition, to understand the complexities of the politics of language in Myanmar, one also ought to pay more attention to the politics of interaction between officials from the centre and local areas. During the Socialist and current military periods, local officials responsible for promoting minority cultures were not elected by local people but appointed by the central government. Since those officials were more interested in keeping their jobs than serving the minority peoples, most of them stayed away from minority cultural activities because they did not want to be associated with insurgent groups, who usually sought to promote minority cultures.

INTRODUCTION

Thailand is located in the middle of the Southeast Asian mainland, which is a region where a large number of ethnic groups and languages can be found. There are only a few Southeast Asian countries, but each country comprises several ethnic groups. As a result, both cultural diversity and linguistic diversity are natural. The governments and the authorities of each Southeast Asian country have to accept, or at least be aware of, this fact in order to set up appropriate policies at all levels if they would like to achieve their goals in whatever they are pursuing. Handling peoples who have different cultural backgrounds is not an easy task. Without a real understanding of their diverse minds, it would be impossible to maintain peace and national unity.

In the past, the hidden policy of the Royal Thai Government used to be “assimilation”. Thus, the emphasis was on Ekkalak that is a coined word meaning “only one characteristic”. The “Thai identity” was related to Ekkalak Thai, a cliché that could be heard and seen very often. Furthermore, the Office of Ekkalak Thai was established in order to make the policy become true and fruitful. One of the major duties of the Ekkalak Thai Office is to campaign for the national unity and security of Thailand on the basis of “one language and one culture in Thai society”. When the Eighth National Socio-Economic Development Plan was launched in 1997, the concept of Pahulak or “pluralism”, recommended by the National Security Council and reinforced by Thai academics, replaced the previous concept of Ekkalak. Cultural diversity has indeed become part of tourism promotion in Thailand. Consequently, linguists specializing in ethnic-minority languages are able to share this new mainstream thinking.

This paper will look into: (1) some aspects of Thailand's demographic characteristics, (2) the classification of the ethnic minorities, (3) socio- linguistic setting in Thailand, (4) the positions of Thai and regional Thai languages/dialects, and (5) the positions of the non-Thai languages, which will be the main focus of this paper.

INTRODUCTION

In Rethinking Nation, Wong (2002) criticizes “literary workshops, conferences, seminars, [that] continue to trot out the theme ‘Literature and Nation-Building’ as if the idea of ‘Nation’ is fixed, indeed, sacrosanct and thus not open to debate.” Writing about literatures written in English in the Malay-oriented cultural/national politics, Wong is challenging “the belief that cultural identity is similarly fixed and unchanging, and that there is a pristine, pure origin to this identity.”

This paper will seriously consider the concern that Wong raises. Looking retrospectively towards the past runs the risk of committing anachronism, of imposing our contemporary, taken-for-granted notions that was then still nonexistent or in the making. Furthermore, what Wong suggests here is the need for scholars to critically position themselves vis-à-vis national myth-making, defined by Elias (1970) as follows:

This national self image usually masks not only internal power-relations but also the complicated, heterogeneous, and conflict-ridden processes that continue throughout processes of nation-building. This paper will start by looking at the formative history of Indonesian literature, precisely as the site of these myth-making processes, and by identifying the diverse voices that are being subordinated. Secondly, using a constructivist perspective, the paper will read three texts of pre-Independence literatures as illustrations of the roles these diverse voices play in nation-building. The paper will end by looking at the continuities as well as disruption of Indonesian literary history in the perspective of the contemporary scene in the continued processes of nation-building in Indonesia.

LITERARY HISTORY AND COLONIAL LEGACY

The perennial question that haunts scholars of Indonesian literary history is, “when Indonesian literature begins” (Damono 2003, p. 1). Tracing birth and origin cannot be separated from a more fundamental task of defining what Indonesian literature actually is.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, a surprising development in the Western European world was the emergence of spirited debates on the identity question. This rethinking of the identity question was propelled by two major transformations, one external and the other internal. The external transformation was in relation to the formation of the European Union, which aims to integrate the various European nation-states into a supranational state of sorts. In this supranational state, questions were raised about what will happen to the cultures and languages of the individual nation-state as it evolves. The internal transformation refers to the fact that many of the individual nation-states have over the years and with the arrival and settlement of non-European immigrants, become multiethnic societies.

Increasingly, the identity debates in Europe have revolved around the concept of “multiculturalism”. According to Bhikhu Parekh, multiculturalist perspectives recognize the cultural embeddedness of human beings, the inescapability and desirability of cultural plurality, and the plural and multicultural constitution of each culture. It follows that a multicultural society values its cultural diversity and respects the rights of its members to their cultures and languages. The multicultural perspective is indeed a stark contrast to the traditional concept of the nation, also a European construct, which imagines a nation as a homogenous cultural entity. It is in fact the overwhelming dominance of this concept of nation that historically made and transformed the various Western European nation-states into largely culturally homogenous entities. Thus, in Europe now the move is to shift from the culturally homogenous nation to one that accommodates multiculturalism.

Ironically, in the post-colonial world, including Southeast Asia, the nation-building processes continue to be largely influenced by the prevalence of the traditional concept of the nation. In this regard, language was and remains a key site of contention. In the early years of nation- building, attempts to build a monolingual nation was the overriding policy in the Southeast Asian region even though the inhabitants in all the countries spoke a variety of languages.

INTRODUCTION

One could argue that Malay nationalism, after the Japanese Occupation, was largely one that imagined the nation in terms of a people sharing a common culture and language; that is, the nation as a culturally and linguistically homogenous entity. While this led the Malay nationalists to take for granted that the future Malay(si)an national culture and identity should be fashioned out of their own, nevertheless, various factors and circumstances prevented them from pursuing an unambiguously assimilationist policy. This paper indeed will trace how language and education policy in post-Independence Malay(si)a became circumscribed and shaped by the politics of inter-ethnic bargaining, or “consociational politics”, that arose in the post-World War Two period and became, subsequently, the dominant political form in the country.

In a nutshell, conflicts over the language and education issues had oscillated between the Malays’ aims to consolidate the status of their mother tongue as the sole official language and main medium of instruction on the one hand, and the Chinese's insistence on their language rights as Malaysian citizens, including a state-funded Chinese- medium primary and secondary education system, on the other hand. In a sense, Tunku Abdul Rahman, the first Prime Minister, accurately observed that the language controversies have never been over Malay language as the sole national language, as everyone accepts this, but rather about Malay as the sole official language and main medium of instruction.

The first two sections of this paper examine the language and education issues prior to the achievement of political independence; the formation of a multilingual society and multilingual education system prior to World War Two, and then how the emerging politics of consociation shaped the language and education discourses and policies. The third section focuses on the immediate post-Independence period's escalating passionate language and education controversies. The fourth section examines the rise of Malay dominance and the institutionalization of Malay language as the sole official language and main medium of instruction.

LANGUAGE AND MEDIA POLICY FOR GLOBALIZATION

Until the mid to late 1990s, Vietnam's language and media policies were almost exclusively oriented towards issues of national unity, security and “territorialized” nation-building. In more recent years, a consciousness of the need to re-tool language and media policy to face the challenges and seize the opportunities of globalization has emerged. A subset of this new policy direction is concerned with the Vietnamese diaspora, which the State estimates to number 2.7 million. This population is believed to reside in more than ninety countries, and eighty per cent of it is estimated to be located in developed nations (Politbureau 2004).

As part of a more general policy to engage the diaspora's economic and intellectual resources, Hanoi is currently in the process of implementing diaspora-specific media and language directives. These include a project to encourage and support Vietnamese language teaching in overseas Vietnamese communities, and renewed attempts to project homeland print and broadcast media overseas. This latter initiative is being pursued by means of online versions of domestic newspapers and magazines, and satellite transmission and webcasting of a specially- packaged TV station, VTV4. These media initiatives have the twin goals of breaking the hegemony of anti-communist media producers in the diaspora, and fostering the maintenance and “updating” of the Vietnamese language overseas, especially among the younger generation(s). The ultimate aim of these policies is to create a sense of connectedness and nationalist affect in overseas Vietnamese communities, and thus to sustain links to the homeland across diasporic generations.

THE DIASPORA

The Vietnamese diaspora is made up principally of those who left as refugees during the Second Indochina War and its aftermath. In the United States alone, there were 1,122,528 Vietnam-born according to the 2000 Census. Other significant communities include those in Australia (154,830 in 2001), Canada (148,400 in 2001) and France (about 300,000). Overseas Vietnamese communities also exist in the former Eastern Bloc countries and in Vietnam's neighbours: Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and China.

INTRODUCTION

To understand the challenges faced by language policy-making and implementation in the Philippines, we need to examine the complex dynamics of “the coexistence of nationalist aspirations, sub-national group loyalties, and pragmatic concerns in a multilingual country” (Hau and Tinio 2003, p. 319). For the whole of the twentieth century, during which the search for a national language was deemed essential to the Filipinos’ search for their own identity, these competing demands exposed both the various layers of power relations in the country, as well as the limiting and liberating conditions that created such relations. In a sense, all stakeholders to the problem of language in the country — no matter if this was a question of medium of instruction, official language, or national language — would configure their own positions out of these competing claims, either to defend their privileged positions or to demand more access to the various resources of power in society, such as quality education, economic mobility, and political representation.

The bitter debates on the national language that ensued during the writing of the Philippine Constitution in the early 1970s were a case in point. Region-based, ethno-linguistic animosity between rival elites appointed to write the constitution resurfaced; prior to this, from the 1930s onwards, Tagalog (renamed Pilipino in 1949) 1 became the national language mainly through the workings of a Tagalog-speaking national leadership. Gonzalez (1980) describes the event that revived such bitter animosity; it was the opening of the pre-Convention meeting originally meant to discuss the procedural rules for the Constitutional Convention:

INTRODUCTION

The inclusion of the press in this book may help to better understand some aspects of the political crisis in the Philippines. Basically, it is a crisis of governance, resulting from flawed and failed leadership. The questions of legitimacy and credibility hound the Arroyo administration with consequent loss of public confidence and trust. In this situation, the press has played a role.

The press is a political institution, providing for the public exchange of ideas as well as disseminating news about issues, developments and events. How well or how poorly the press performs these tasks affects the public's ability to understand public affairs and to be engaged in the pursuit of solutions. The press is, therefore, as much part of the problem as, hopefully, it is part of the solution.

Whatever the form of government, the press is always involved in governance and public affairs. In controlled political systems, the press serves as a handmaid of government, a vehicle to transmit official information or propaganda. Such a press assists government to achieve what it sets out to do. It is expected to accept editorial guidance from government so that it can aid and facilitate public acceptance of policy decisions and official programmes.

In political systems based on greater freedom and autonomy, the press plays a different kind of role. The press defines and performs its duty as it sees fit. With varying degrees of independence from owners, the press operates as a private sector endeavour or enterprise. The libertarian model prescribes this freedom from government interference on the premise that the press will uphold public, rather than partisan, interests. To fulfil this mandate, the press must also exercise social responsibility and possess competence and integrity. With these values, the journalists are supposed to provide news and commentary that are truthful and relevant, so as to enable public debate. Because it reports on public affairs and public figures, the press acts as the “watchdog” of those in power. This places it in an adversarial relationship with government.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, in July 2006, broke from what was accepted as the “politically correct” post-1986 policy regarding the Maoist insurgency in the country. She asked the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to conduct a total effort to eradicate the insurgency by the end of her term of office and requested businessmen to refuse to pay “revolutionary taxes” demanded by the rebel group. To underscore her determination, she ordered the budget secretary to immediately make available an additional P1 billion to purchase the equipment required by the intensified counter- insurgency effort. The military immediately responded by transferring three combat battalions from Mindanao to the three pilot areas of the effort in the main island of Luzon.

The communist insurgency remains, without doubt, a military problem. There has been constant debate, however, over whether this is a problem with a principally military solution.

Over many years, those critical of a principally military approach to the lingering insurgency argued that the rebellion is based on valid social discontent. A “lasting” approach to the problem of insurgency should be based on addressing the social discontent. Government should, according to this position, approach the insurgency as a development question by attacking the poverty in those communities where the insurgency breeds.

This “development-based” approach to the insurgency has, in fact, been the dominant, politically-correct paradigm observed over the past two decades. The results have not been particularly impressive. Most frequently, this approach produced chicken-and-egg situations where all the best effort to bring investments into the most depressed provinces failed precisely because of the inhospitable business conditions caused by the presence of insurgents. Hundreds of business ventures have failed because of onerous “revolutionary taxation” enforced by the New People's Army (NPA). Hundreds of entrepreneurs who could have led in liberating the poorest communities have either fled because of threats from the rebels or have been killed.

If we read past the rhetoric and examine more closely the political dynamics of Muslim-Filipino separatism, the following peculiarities become apparent. First, despite repeated declarations by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), their rebellions are better understood as modern mobilizations against the intrusive reach of the nation state than as the latest edition of an epic Moro struggle against various colonialisms. The fighting is also portrayed as a principled act in pursuit of a sovereign Bangsamoro (Moro nation); but this is a slant that downplays ethnic, class, gender, and linguistic cleavages within the umma (community) itself. Second, while we should not deny the intensity of the separatist war, we also must be aware of its limited geography and the brevity of its major battles. Almost 95 per cent of the MNLF's and the MILF's clashes with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) occurred within a circumscribed area, and efforts by both groups to expand their military operations have failed. Third, the radicalism of their message is often belied by their political pragmatism. The MNLF was forced by Libya, the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), and Malaysia to negotiate with the Philippine government, with disastrous results. The MILF has called for an Islamic revolution but has asked the United States and Malaysia, and most recently Japan, to broker the peace talks with the government.

This chapter examines these issues to explain why, despite having taken a toll on the weak, corrupt and inefficient Philippine state, Muslim separatists are still unsuccessful in reaching their goal. The Bangsamoro Republik is nowhere in sight, the MNLF has been integrated into the state it once fought, and the MILF is having second thoughts about the viability of armed struggle.

INTRODUCTION

Remittances are one of the many dimensions of international migration that of late has attracted a great deal of attention from academics, public officials, and the media. For one thing, the magnitudes have increased sharply, at rates even faster than the departure of migrant workers. For another, in many developing countries, remittances have begun to significantly exceed foreign direct investment (FDI), capital market flows, or official development assistance (ODA). Moreover, remittances provide timely support to otherwise shaky balance of payments and fiscal positions. Further, remittances appear to contribute importantly to lifting households out of poverty, as well as benefit the wider community through the multiplier effects of increased spending.

The Philippines is reputed to be the world's third highest net remittance recipient country after India and Mexico. In 2006, remittances were officially recorded at US$12.8 billion, representing about 10 per cent of GDP. Clearly, remittances resulting from the Filipino diaspora have become a major factor in the economic and social life of the country. This chapter focuses on the home country consequences of remittances, addressing the question whether and to what extent remittances contribute to poverty reduction and regional development in the Philippines.

The next two sections revisit the causes and consequences of international migration, drawing on the more recent literature. The fourth section focuses on remittances in terms of what motivate them and what impact they may have in the labour-sending countries. The chapter then describes the pattern of labour migration and remittances by region in the Philippines. The sixth section carries out an econometric analysis to see if remittances matter to poverty alleviation and regional development. The chapter concludes with the main points and some implications for policy.

CAUSES OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION

Given the pronounced economic and social inequalities across the various countries of the world, one would expect floods of migrants from the worse- off to the better-off places.

INTRODUCTION

The development economics literature has not been kind to the Philippines. It has been variously described as the “East Asian exception”, “East Asia's Stray Cat” (Vos and Yap 1996), and a “Latin American country in East Asia”. Harvard's Lant Pritchett (2003) was even less complimentary, characterizing the country as a “democratic dud”.

This literature is struggling with the central development puzzle of the Philippines: why has a country with favourable initial conditions — at least relative to its neighbours — grown much slower than almost all of East Asia, particularly since 1980? In particular, the country commenced with a decisive advantage in educational spread and quality. It also inherited a set of functioning public institutions and a constitution, without the trauma of a protracted independence struggle or civil war. Moreover, although this observation is unpopular in certain circles, the Philippines had what many countries are now queuing up for — a free trade agreement with the United States.

The East Asian context is at once both central to the story and somewhat misleading. It is central in the sense that other countries, mainly in the neighbourhood, and some quite similar, have managed to grow very fast. The comparison with Thailand is particularly pertinent. The two countries share much in common — similar population size, land area, resource base, economic structure, movements in their terms of trade, and of course location. Yet Thailand, which was significantly poorer in the 1950s, overtook the Philippines in the early 1980s, and just prior to the recent Asian crisis its per capita income was almost twice higher. If ever there were a case of non-identical twins, this would be it. Thus, more generally, the international environment cannot hold the key to the puzzle, unless (implausibly in our view) one wants to argue that there are aspects of this environment specifically inimical to Philippine economic development interests.

Conversely, it might be argued that these countries are all “exceptions”, and that the Philippine record looks deficient partly because of the company it keeps. In fact, as Felipe Medalla often reminds us, the country's performance is broadly similar to that of the developing world as a whole.

INTRODUCTION

Addressing the widespread poverty problem is the single most important policy challenge facing the Philippines. Not only is poverty high compared with other countries in East Asia, but also its reduction is so slow that the country has become the basket case in the region.

Proposals peddled to address the poverty problem are plenty — and they keep on growing. At one end of the spectrum are proposals contending that the root of the problem is simply the lack of respectable economic growth. Putting the economy on a high-growth path is prescribed as all that is needed to beat the poverty problem. At the other end are proposals asserting that the poverty problem is nothing but a concrete manifestation of gross economic and social inequities. Redistributing wealth and opportunities is viewed as the key to winning the war on poverty. A variant of such proposals holds that economic growth does not at all benefit the poor. Focusing on growth rather than on redistributive reforms is seen to exacerbate inequities, which could lead to the further erosion of peace and social stability. Between these extremes are views that consider economic growth as a necessary condition for poverty reduction and recognize that reform measures have to be put in place to enhance the participation of the poor in growth processes. Most advocates of poverty-reduction ideas, including proponents of the so-called “pro-poor growth”, belong to this mold, although not necessarily sharing common ground on what, conceptually and operationally, constitutes pro-poor growth processes.

How do these proposals stand in relation to evidence and policy research? What are facts and what are fancies? Given the country's fiscal bind, what policy levers can be expected to generate high returns in poverty reduction?

This chapter attempts to answer these questions. It does this by examining the Philippine experience in poverty reduction from an “international” perspective. The next two sections characterize the nature, pattern, and proximate determinants of poverty reduction during the past twenty years.

The Philippines is in the midst of a deep, systemic crisis. The crisis confronting the Arroyo regime is not just one more instance of the refusal of competing elite factions to accept the legitimacy of elections as a means for mediating elite competition. The crisis of the Arroyo administration manifests the cumulative impact of a long simmering crisis of representation. It is not just President Arroyo who is being challenged, it is the capacity of the whole political system to select leaders capable of responding to the needs of the Philippines in the twenty-first century.

It is precisely the depth of the crisis that prevents a quick and easy resolution. A functioning state resolves conflict through mechanisms that organizes winners and losers. The deeper the crisis the more difficult it is to identify winners and losers. Political players are being forced to think beyond “who gets what, when and how” and to project from the “here and now” to the future, a difficult and uneasy task for most politicians. Put more simply, politicians cannot be sure how changes in the political system will affect them. As a result, even “system change” gets processed in narrow, partisan ways, distorting discourse, and making negotiated outcomes difficult.

Many political leaders, pro-administration and opposition alike, rhetorically acknowledge the depth of the crisis, but continue to behave in the same old ways. The most obvious is President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. For years she has talked about the crisis in the political system and the need to reform the institutions of government. In September 2005, for example, she said that charter change is one major step the nation must take to achieve peace and stability over the “rapidly degenerating political system”. But she has also behaved like an old-style traditional politician, a trapo. Worst, since the onset of the crisis only a little more than a year ago, she has undermined the very political institutions she would reform.

In 2004 and 2005, the Philippines' gross domestic product grew by 6 and 5.1 per cent, respectively. In the Southeast Asian context, this growth rate places the country behind Singapore and Vietnam, but it compares fairly well with those of Indonesia, Thailand and even Malaysia. Because of this, international credit rating agencies have been upgrading their ratings for the Philippines. Government figures show that, under the administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the Philippine economy grew by an average of 4.4 per cent a year, faster than in the three previous presidencies.

Yet, the question in many people's minds is this: why does the Philippines continue to be outside the “radar screens” of most international investors, including those from Singapore and other capital-exporting ASEAN countries? Why has the percentage of the country's population living below the poverty line remained stuck at 30 per cent (in 2003), which, in ASEAN, puts the Philippines in the same league as Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar and worse off than Vietnam (19.5 per cent in 2004)? In spite of the steady macroeconomic growth, why do so many Filipinos have to leave their homeland and their families to seek jobs? If economic growth brings stability and contentment, why do the Philippines' two insurgencies — the communist and the Muslim — so stubbornly persist? Why do Philippine politics appear so volatile? Why do elements of organized religion and the military find it necessary to intervene in the political process?

Is it just a matter of the normal time lag between a macroeconomic surge and its trickle-down effect? Is it a question of unjustified impressions purveyed by media free from undemocratic constraints? Is the problem the country's rapid population growth? Is it the consequence of political decisions? Is it a matter of political will or political institutions? On the other hand, are there niches of progress that are not obvious to many?