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Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276–285

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Journal of Historical Geography

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

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

Li Narangoa a,* and Robert Cribb b

a Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australiab Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia

Abstract

The locations of international borders reflect political aspirations as well as power politics and attempts to bring state boundaries in line with nations. Theexpulsion of Singapore from Malaysia and the exclusion of the Philippines from the United States indicate the power of narrowly defined borders togovern national identity. The concept ‘nations-of-intent’ allows us to explore counterfactual borders as a way of examining how political aspirationstranslate into national borders. The paper explores three Asian cases – Malaysia, Mongolia and Vietnam – and makes reference to Indonesia in consideringhow different senses of what was possible and desirable in the context of decolonization generated different ideas about where borders should lie. Thisapproach also allows us to interrogate losing forces retrospectively about the policies they would have followed within different border configurations.� 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Counterfactualism; Nations-of-intent; Borders; Mongolia; Malaysia; Vietnam

Since at least the Second World War, one of the most importanttrends in history writing has been the effort to give voice to thosewhose aspirations were not fulfilled in the working out of history.1

If we regard counterfactualism as a tool for conceptualizing andreconstructing unfulfilled aspirations, then the tension betweenthe real and imagined locations of borders ought to be a centralconcern of both counterfactual history and counterfactual geog-raphy. Borders are amongst the most contested geographicalphenomena and their precise location very often conjures upstrong feelings and strong hopes on all sides.

In this paper we examine the political implications of bordersthat might have been. We explore the kinds of nations whichmight have emerged in three Asian countries – Mongolia, Vietnamand Malaysia – if their borders had been located differently. Theborders we imagine are not arbitrary, but rather reflect rival ideasof nation (‘nations-of-intent’) that were present in these threeregions at the time when national borders were being set. Thisconcept gives us a tool for interrogating the bearers of theseunfulfilled aspirations about the policies they would have imple-mented and the constraints they would have faced if those bordershad been reality.

* Corresponding author.E-mail addresses: li.narangoa@anu.edu.au (L. Narangoa), robert.cribb@anu.edu.au (R.

1 E.R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley, 1982.2 R. Kjellen, Staten som Lifsform, Stockholm, 1916; P. Scholler, Die Rolle Karl Haushofer

(1982) 160–167.3 G.A. Lensen, The Russian Push Toward Japan: Russo-Japanese Relations, 1697–1875, Pri

and Eighteenth Centuries, Ithaca NY, 1998, 19–24.

0305-7488/$ – see front matter � 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2009.12.004

Nations-of-intent

Addressing the relations between borders and aspirations requiresus to step beyond the two dominant approaches to borders whichfocus simply on power and identity. According to the first of theseconventional views, the location of any border reflects andreinforces the relative power of the two states on either side. Inother words, states aim to set their borders as widely as they can, soas to encompass as many resources (human, natural, strategic) aspossible. As relative power changes, so too does the location of theborder (within the constraints of international law, as far as it isrespected). This view underpins the geopolitical view of the worldpioneered by Haushofer and Kjellen,2 and it provides a valuableperspective in understanding, for instance, the change in thehistorical frontier between Vietnam and Cambodia, or betweenRussians and the Japanese in Northeast Asia from late nineteenthcentury to mid twentieth century.3 In each of these cases, thechanging balance of power between rival states led to a series ofshifts in the border between them. This approach, however, doesnot pay attention to the internal political consequences of includingor excluding certain territories.

Cribb).

s fur die Entwicklung und Ideologie nationalsozialistischer Geopolitik, Erdkunde 36

nceton, N.J., 1959; Li Tana, Nguyen Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth

L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276–285 277

The second, but still conventional, approach presumes thatborders are an imperfect attempt to do justice to the principle ofnational self-determination. According to this conception, bordersare, or rather ought to be, primarily a reflection of national iden-tities, which have been created by some combination of ethnicityand shared historical experience.4 Borders which fail to coincidewith national identities, whether because they divide one nationbetween two or more states or because they include more than onenation within the same state, are imperfect and in an ideal worldwould be subject to correction. In broad political terms, the tensionbetween power and identity corresponds to the tension betweenempire and nation.

Applying counterfactualism to the study of borders opens upa third analytical possibility. It allows us to view borders not (just)as the arbitrary outcome of power relations, and not (just) as themanifestation of uncomplicated national identities. Rather, we canalso see the existing borders of each state as marking out only oneof a number of imagined national configurations. Counter-factualism commonly explores the long term effects of individualevents in the past. It tends to assume that a different outcome ina single decisive event can send history hurtling down an entirelydifferent trajectory.5 Thus, the course of human history is madedependent on the outcome of the battle, the result of a confer-ence, the survival or death of a leader. In other words, it implieshistorical determinism, the determining effect of past events onwhat came after. Our approach by contrast focuses on humanintention. We do not suggest that different starting conditionswould have led necessarily to different outcomes, but rather weexplore the ways in which people imagined different borders andthe ways in which they might have responded to the differentopportunities that those borders presented. We try to reconstructtheir sense of what opportunities there might have been and weattempt to suggest what people might have chosen to do. Weknow that borders have changed many times in the past, and thatsome borders remain contested. It does not take great imaginationtherefore to conceive of today’s borders in different locations andto explore the implications of those locations, but we try to askhow people of the time might have experienced thoseimplications.

Our interest in counterfactual historical geography lies in itscapacity to bring to life other configurations of borders which inturn reflect other national conceptions. Our starting point is thework of Shamsul, who developed the term ‘nation-of-intent’ todraw attention to the fact that unfulfilled political aspirations couldbe pictured as proposing a different kind of nation from the onethat actually came into existence. His focus was on Malaysia and onthe dominant definition of Malaysian national identity that

4 This approach implies, but does not absolutely require, a concept of the nation as exisA. D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Oxford, 1986.

5 J. Simensen, Counterfactual arguments in historical analysis: from the debate on th180–183.

6 A.B. Shamsul, Nations-of-intent in Malaysia, in: S. Tønnesson and H. Antlov (Eds),nation-of-intent first appears in R.I. Rotberg, African nationalism: concept or confusion?, Jfor nation in the making and does not raise the possibility that rival nations-of-intent mintellectual debt to an unpublished MA thesis (1975) by Rustam A. Sani. The concept of naModern Southeast Asia: a New History, Honolulu, 2005, 252. Sani himself recently returnedConcerns of a Malaysian Nationalist, Petaling Jaya, 2008, 60.

7 Dragojevic argues similarly that the defining characteristic of a national identity mayDragojevic, Competing institutions in national identity construction: the Croatian case,

8 E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, CambrCommunities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London, 1991; Smith,

9 The issue of choosing national identity arises acutely in the case of migrants. For sommigration changes the place of residence but has little impact on identity. This issue, ho

10 British territory consisted of the three Straits Settlements (Singapore, Malacca and Pand five Unfederated Malay States (Trengganu, Kelantan, Kedah, Perlis and Johor). The Strwere dominant to varying degrees in the other states.

privileged indigenous Muslim Malays (and by extension non-indigenous Muslim immigrants) over Chinese and Indians whowere seen as ‘foreign’ settlers and whose culture, religion andidentity received a kind of secondary recognition.6 In the case ofMalaysia, he identified three unfulfilled ‘nations-of-intent’ thatwere, and still are, in competition with the dominant definition ofthe soul of the nation. These unrequited ‘nations-of-intent’ are:

� a non-Muslim, non-indigenous (mainly Chinese) nation-of-intent based on ethnic and religious equality,

� a non-Muslim, indigenous nation-of-intent asserting the rightsof the non-Muslim natives of Borneo, and

� a radical Muslim Malay nation-of-intent which rejects allrecognition of other ethnicities and religions.

Shamsul’s argument is that these different, rival conceptions ofthe Malaysian nation are not just competing political programs.Rather, because they go to the very heart of what constitutesMalaysia, they represent different national ideas within the samegeographical framework. He calls them nations-of-intent becausethey are conceptual nations at least as well formed in the minds ofthose who imagine them as is the dominant nation-of-intent andbecause each of them remains a plausible intention or aspirationfor the future.7

Shamsul’s idea is novel because it conceives the nation in aninstrumentalist way as a tool for the achievement of a particularkind of society. This conception differs from the mainstreaminterpretations of national identity that regard national identity asa characteristic imposed on people either by their ethnicity or bytheir common historical experience, especially their experience ofa powerful modern state.8 Conventional theories give peopleagency in seeking to fulfil their national aspirations, but give themlittle or no agency in choosing the national identity that drivesthose aspirations. Shamsul, by contrast, recognizes that manypeople are potentially capable of living with more than one nationalidentity and that they may choose between them not necessarilybecause of some emotional ‘fit’ but rather on the basis of a rationalcalculation of risks and benefits.9

In our current work, we extend Shamsul’s ideas to the analysis ofborders and nation formation. Rather than limiting the idea ofnations-of-intent to competing political agendas within a single setof borders, we see the setting of borders as a major element in theconception of nations-of-intent. Shamsul’s own Malaysia offersa powerful example of what we mean. In the aftermath of theSecond World War, the British rulers of Malaya planned a newMalayan Union to encompass most of their territories in the MalayPeninsula.10 The Union gave approximately equal citizenship rights

ting independently of the state, presumably as a manifestation of ethnic identity. See

e partition of Africa and the effect of colonial rule, History in Africa 5 (1978) 172,

Asian Forms of the Nation, Richmond, 1996, 323–347; to our knowledge, the termournal of Modern African Studies 4 (1966) 37, but Rotberg uses the term as a synonymay compete over the same territory. Shamsul (p. 328, n 6) acknowledges a furthertions-of-intent is mentioned without elaboration in N. Owen et al., The Emergence ofto the idea in ‘Merdeka! But are we a nation yet?’, in Rustam A. Sani, Failed Nation?

change over time, emphasising, for instance, first religion and later language. See M.Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 11 (2005) 61–87.idge, 1992; E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, 1983; B. Anderson, ImaginedEthnic Origin (note 4).e, the act of migration is the deliberate choice of a different nationality; for others,wever, is beyond the scope of this paper.enang), four Federated Malay States (Selangor, Perak, Pahang and Negri Sembilan)aits Settlements, Selangor and Perak had strong Chinese majorities, whereas Malays

L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276–285278

to indigenous Malays and immigrant Chinese and Indian resi-dents.11 Malay protest over the loss of the special status that theyhad enjoyed during the pre-war period persuaded the British toabolish the Union in 1948 and to create a Federation of Malayawhich gave a privileged status to Malays in contrast with the non-indigenous Chinese and Indians, recognizing them as bumiputra(indigenes), giving them special rights over land, and entrenchingtheir sultans as sovereigns within the constituent states and asrotating head of state of the Federation. Informally, the Federationwas committed to leaving the main keys of political power –including the prime ministership and control of the armed forces –in Malay hands. In 1957, the Federation became independent.Britain’s support for Malay interests was based on their calculationthat Malay dominance would better serve continuing Britisheconomic and strategic interests in the Peninsula.12 This juggling ofcommunal rights to favour the Malays produced the situationdescribed by Shamsul in which Chinese and Indian had onlya second-rank standing within the Federation after that of theMalays.

Six years later, however, the location of Malaya’s bordersbecame a crucial element in preserving this Malay-dominatednation-of-intent. Predominantly Chinese Singapore, which hadremained a British colony, had become a source of concern for theBritish. There was a strong left-wing socialist movement in thecolony, and the British were afraid that it would become evenstronger if they did not give the colony independence. But theywere afraid, too, that the leftists might come to power in an inde-pendent Singapore. The solution seemed to be to incorporateSingapore into neighbouring Malaya, but to do so would riskupsetting the ethnic balance within the Federation. To balanceSingapore’s Chinese numbers with territories that had an indige-nous majority, the North Borneo territories of Sabah and Sarawakwere therefore brought into the expanded Federation as well.13 Thisnew Federation, created in 1963, was given the name Malaysia. Theborders of the main successor state to the British colonial order inSoutheast Asia, therefore, were thus adjusted to support thenation-of-intent that the British and their Malay elite alliesintended.

Border changes for the sake of a specific nation-of-intent did notstop in 1963. Even though Singapore’s presence in the Federationwas balanced by that of Sabah and Sarawak, the Malay elite alsoinsisted on quarantining it to some extent from federal politics.Singapore citizenship did not necessarily confer Malaysian citi-zenship and there was an agreement that the dynamic andsuccessful People’s Action Party (PAP) of Lee Kuan Yew would notextend its activities beyond Singapore. The PAP, however, came tosupport a sister organization, the Democratic Action Party (DAP),which began to promote ideas of ethnic equality within Malaysia.On this platform, the DAP soon made inroads into the support of theMalayan Chinese Association, which had accepted the subordinaterole for Chinese Malaysians that the Malay elite had marked out.These developments were so unpalatable to the Malay elite that in1965 they expelled Singapore from the Federation. In other words,the Malay elite again adjusted the borders of the nation to create

11 The terms ‘indigenous’ and ‘immigrant’ are problematic in the Malayan case. ‘IndigeIndonesian archipelago, whereas significant Chinese communities have been present in

12 T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya, Cambridge, 1999, 89–93.13 These territories had had completely different historical experience from the Malay P

family while Sabah had been under the charter of the British North Borneo Company.protectorate and was never part of Malaysia. It became independent in 1984.

14 We might note that this form of ethnic cleansing was rather more humane than th15 Y. Khan, The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan, New Haven, 2007; P.J.

grenzen van het zelfbeschikkingsrecht, Amsterdam, 2005.16 J. Silverstein, Burma: Military Rule and the Politics of Stagnation, Ithaca NY, 1977, 59.

a state that would be conducive to a nation-of-intent privilegingMalay Muslim culture while giving some recognition to otherethnicities and religions and that would tip the balance againsta key alternative, a non-Muslim, non-indigenous (mainly Chinese)nation-of-intent based on ethnic and religious equality.14

The case of Malaysia indicates that different nations-of-intentcan lead to different border configurations. Singapore had been asmuch a part of the history of the Malay Peninsula as the otherterritories in the Malayan Federation (and a good deal more so thanthe two northern Borneo states), and it was the region’s main portand main metropolis. Malaysia continued to include other regionsthat were demographically dominated by Chinese to much thesame degree as Singapore. History, emotion and economics spokein favour of Singapore remaining within Malaysia. But the inclusionof Singapore would have made the Malay elite’s preferred nation-of-intent more difficult to achieve, and so Singapore was excluded.The example demonstrates that, given the opportunity, people donot always choose to set the borders of their nations as widely aspossible. They will sometimes choose a particular nation andparticular borders for that nation not because they objectivelybelong to a particular identity, or because borders are historicallydetermined, but because they are aware of the political implica-tions of different border locations (Fig. 1).

Borders and the end of empire

During the last two centuries, the opportunity to make sucha choice has been bound up, as it was in Malaysia, primarily withthe end of empire. Although the international borders created bycolonial rule have tended to be resilient, most decolonizationprocesses have been marked by contestation over whether andwhere to draw new international boundaries within the formerimperial territory. The political classes in British India struggledover the plan to partition the subcontinent between India andPakistan. Indonesians and Dutch struggled over whether to includeWest New Guinea in the independent Indonesian Republic.15

Where new international borders were not contemplated, therewas often a question of constitutionally guaranteed special statusfor particular territories; the Shan and Kayah states in Burma, forinstance, were given the constitutional right to secede 10 yearsafter independence if they so chose.16 National pride and resourceor strategic implications were often important in these contests,but they sometimes reflected a deeper conflict between rivalnations-of-intent.

Sometimes the decolonization process itself reflected thischoice. In its expansion across the Pacific in the nineteenth century,the United States had taken possession of both Hawaii and thePhilippines. Initially, both were imperial or colonial possessions,but their eventual fates were very different. Whereas Hawaii wasintegrated into the United States, eventually becoming a state of theUnion, the Philippines was excluded, becoming first a self-gov-erning commonwealth in 1935 and then an independent state afterthe Second World War. These differing outcomes had nothing to dowith cultural differences or with the different aspirations of local

nous’ Malays include the descendents of recent immigrants from other parts of thethe Malay Peninsula since at least the fifteenth century.

eninsula. Sarawak had been ruled by semi-independent white rajas from the BrookeA third territory in northern Borneo, the oil-rich Sultanate of Brunei, was a British

at which was practiced in the former Yugoslavia.Drooglever, Een daad van vrije keuze: de Papoea’s van westelijk Nieuw-Guinea en de

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

L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276–285 279

people. The Hawaiians were as different from the Americans inculture as were the Filipinos and they had just as strong anaspiration for independence. But the Americans were aware thatthe relatively small population of Hawaii meant both that theycould assimilate it by migration and that the presence of indige-nous Hawaiians in the American polity made little difference to anybalance of power.17 By contrast, the far more numerous Filipinos,inhabiting an archipelago that was less attractive for westernsettlement, could not so easily be assimilated, and so, like theSingaporeans, they were excluded from the polity to which theyhad briefly belonged.18 For most colonial powers, losing an empirewas preferable to the political and social consequences of bringingcolonized peoples into the national polity as citizens. Significantly,the only colonial power to attempt this road was Portugal whichsought to avoid decolonization by declaring its African and Asiancolonies to be part of the metropolitan territory. It did so, however,during the semi-fascist Estado Novo period (1933–1974), when

17 G. Daws, Shoal of Time: a History of the Hawaiian Islands, Toronto, 1968, 285–292.18 P.A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippin19 T.D. Musgrave, Self-determination and National Minorities, Oxford, 1997, 94.

granting citizenship to far more numerous African and Asiansubjects had no democratic implications.19

Vietnam

One of the most telling examples of the choice between nations-of-intent in the decolonization process was French Indo-China. TheFrench colony in Southeast Asia was created in a series of militaryexpeditions between 1859 and 1893. Its people comprised threemain ethno-linguistic groups, the Vietnamese, the Cambodians andthe Lao, of whom the Vietnamese were the most numerous. Thecultural gap between the Vietnamese and their more westerlyneighbours was great. Vietnam was strongly influenced by Chinesetraditions; it had been governed by a Chinese-style bureaucracyunder an emperor who drew heavily on the political forms ofChinese tradition. Laos and Cambodia, by contrast, had been littleinfluenced by China and their traditions were those of the ancient

es, Chapel Hill, 2006, 160–165.

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

L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276–285280

Southeast Asian kingship with strong roots in traditional Indianculture. Royal power was flanked by a fluid aristocracy, rather thanby a Mandarin bureaucracy. Administratively, the French colonyconsisted of five pays, the Vietnamese territories of Cochinchina,Annam and Tonkin, together with Cambodia and Laos. For much ofthe colonial period, there was a significant degree of integrationbetween the five pays. In particular, Vietnamese spread out over thewhole colony as administrators, professionals, traders, labourersand farmers. As modern anti-French nationalism began to develop,there was a tension in Vietnamese thinking between imaginingonly the Vietnamese territories of Cochinchina, Annam and Tonkinas the framework for independence and imagining an independentIndo-china which would also encompass Cambodia and Laos.

The first Vietnamese resistance to the French emphasisedrestoring power to the Vietnamese emperor, and thus implicitly toVietnam, rather than to a multi-ethnic Indo-China. Vietnamesegeopolitical ideas, however, were shaped by pre-colonial Vietnam’sclaims to suzerainty over what is now Cambodia and Laos, claimsthat had always been contested by Siam. As French rule becamemore entrenched, the term Indo-China came to stand not just forFrench hegemony but also for the colonial modernization project.Writings in the early twentieth century described Indo-China asa modern stage which transcended the traditional (implicitlybackward) cultures of the colony. ‘Indo-China’ stood for a kind ofcivic nationalism whose essence was modernity, rather thanhistory or culture. For many Vietnamese, the modernization

20 C.E. Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? Contesting Concepts of Space in Vietnamese Nation

process meant not only that they themselves would learn selec-tively from the modern world, but also that they would be theagents of Cambodian and Lao modernization. This view wasparticularly strong on the Vietnamese left, influenced by ideas ofthe international proletarian revolution – the Comintern’s firstorganization in the French colony was the Indo-Chinese Commu-nist Party (ICP) and its slogan was ‘Complete Indo-Chinese Inde-pendence!’ – but Vietnamese confidence in the Indo-Chinaframework stretched well beyond the communists. Many Viet-namese saw themselves as the bearers of a mission civilisatricewithin French Indo-China. In the minds of some Vietnamese, thismission came close to implying the erasure of Cambodian and Laoidentity (Fig. 2).20

At the same time, there were significant voices calling for theseparate recognition of the three main ethnic groups in the colony.Cambodian elites were increasingly concerned about Vietnamesemigration into their traditional lands and Vietnamese dominationof the colonial bureaucracy and the modern economy in Cambodia.Some Vietnamese, however, also had misgivings about the Indo-China framework. The Vietnamese Nationalist Party (VNQDD),founded in 1928, drew exclusively on ethnic Vietnamese imagery.Still more important, the Vietnamese left began to feel misgivingsabout the practicalities of carrying out a proletarian revolution inCambodia or Laos where there was virtually no proletariat. By 1941,the Vietnamese Communists had agreed to sponsor separateVietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian independence leagues, even

alism, 1887–1954, Copenhagen, 1995, 50, 63, 70.

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though these national movements were formerly gathered underthe Indo-Chinese Independence League umbrella.21

The separate trajectories of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laonationalism were reinforced by the Japanese occupation forcesclose to the end of the Second World War, when they conferredseparate nominal independence on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia inMarch 1945. Nonetheless, the idea of Indo-Chinese independenceremained strong on the left, in June 1945, the ICP general secretaryTruong Chinh wrote in the party’s journal foreshadowing a postwar Indo-Chinese Democratic Republic and in August he called foran Indo-Chinese uprising. Only in the days after the Japanesesurrender on 15 August 1945 did the communist line changedefinitively from Indo-China to Vietnam. The declaration of inde-pendence by the communist leader Ho Chi Minh on 9 September1945 proclaimed an independent Vietnam, not an independentIndo-china.22 The key element in this decision was the communists’belief that thoroughgoing revolution would be easier to carry out inthe socially advanced Vietnamese lands than in a larger Indo-chinawhere reckoning would have to be made with the conservative,monarchist societies of Cambodia and Laos.23 In other words, theVietnamese Communist elite resembled the Malay elite discussedearlier in rejecting territorial aggrandizement in favour of a morecompact territory within which they would better be able to ach-ieve their political goals. The more expansive nation-of-intent inboth cases was trumped by a more narrowly defined alternative.

A similar dynamic but with a very different outcome was atwork in neighbouring Indonesia.24 The Dutch colonial presence inthe Indonesian archipelago long predated the French colonizationof Indo-China, but the Dutch empire took its modern form inSoutheast Asia at roughly the same time as the French. Like Indo-china, the Netherlands East Indies was ethnically diverse, but withone especially dominant ethnic group, in this case the Javanese.Also like Indo-China, the Indies was administratively fragmented,with a multitude of internal administrative borders along whichthe colony might have been divided in the transition to indepen-dence. After a brief initial period of ethnically-defined nationalistgroups in the early twentieth century, however, there was almostno talk of separate independence for the different regions becausevirtually all nationalists saw a large state as the most effectiveframework for achieving social change. The administrative diver-sity of the archipelago reflected the Dutch dependence on conser-vative aristocracies and the nationalists were conscious thatfragmentation would both strengthen the local power of theseelites and make the country more vulnerable to outside interfer-ence. ‘Indonesia’ later came to be a concept of deep emotionalsignificance to Indonesians but in the beginning it was a calculatedchoice of a political framework that would favour modernist overtraditionalist-aristocratic nations-of-intent in the Dutch colony.25

Mongolia

During the dismantling of the Chinese empire in the early twen-tieth century, Mongols faced an even more complex set of possi-bilities which required choosing between different potential

21 Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? (note 20), 69, 73–74.22 Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? (note 20), 91–93.23 This decision was made despite the obvious model of the Soviet Union as a multi-et

that oppressed peoples had the best chance of the liberation when they united.24 Goscha, Vietnam or Indochina? (note 20), makes some reference to the Indonesia

integration and exclusion in anticolonial nationalism: Indonesia and Indochina, Compar25 R. Cribb, Nation: making Indonesia, in: D.K. Emmerson (Ed.), Indonesia beyond Suha26 E.J.M. Rhoads, Manchus & Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and27 Still the classic source on this relationship is O. Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of Ch28 U. Onon and D. Pritchatt, Asia’s First Modern Revolution: Mongolia Proclaims Its Indep

borders. The political entity that we routinely call ‘the Chineseempire’ was until 1911 an empire ruled by a non-Chinese dynasty,the Manchu. Although the Manchu were highly Sinicized in somerespects, they had retained a separate identity and maintaineda system of ethnic discrimination against their Chinese subjects.The Chinese revolution of 1911 was therefore partly a class-basedrevolution against an imperial elite and partly a Chinese nationalistrising against foreign rulers, accompanied in some regions bygenocidal pogroms against Manchus.26 The Manchu empire hadextended well beyond China proper to encompass Mongolia,Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang), Tibet and of course the Manchus’native Manchuria. Until the closing decades of the Manchu dynasty,these regions, around half of the total area of the empire, wereruled separately from China proper, local elites having a directrelationship with the imperial court separate from the Chineseprovincial system. In areas such as Inner Mongolia and SouthernManchuria where there was significant Chinese settlement, indig-enous people and Chinese settlers were governed under separateadministrative arrangements (Fig. 3).27

Aside from the Manchus and Chinese, the principal nationalcommunities in the Manchu empire had been the Mongols, theUighurs and the Tibetans. For all these groups, the fall of theManchus was an opportunity to reassert the national indepen-dence that they had enjoyed to varying degrees before theManchu conquest. As in former British Malaya and former FrenchIndo-China, however, the question was whether and whereinternational borders might be drawn within the former colonialempire. To many Mongols, it seemed natural that the Manchuempire would fall apart in favour of its constituent ethniccomponents. In 1911, Mongol monks, nobles and intellectualsdeclared Mongolian independence with the words, ‘Because ourMongolia was originally an independent nation, we have nowdecided, after consultation to establish a new independent nation,based on our old tradition, without the interference of others inour own rights’.28 This nation by implication covered all thehistorical territory of the Mongols that had been under theManchus, a vast swathe of territory stretching from the Russianfrontier to the Great Wall. An independent Mongolia, however,was not the only nation-of-intent on the agenda. The simple claimof all land north of the Great Wall – built by successive Chinesegovernments of course to keep the Mongols and other nomads outof China Proper – was complicated by two facts. First, by 1911,there was extensive Chinese settlement north of the wall, greatlyoutnumbering the Mongols in some districts. These Chinese weremost unlikely to accept the rule of a Mongol state. Second, mostChinese, even those well outside the Mongol lands, refused toaccept the legitimacy of any Mongol state at all. They believed thatthe new Chinese Republic should simply inherit the borders of theold empire and that Mongols, Uighurs and Tibetans shouldsubmerge themselves in a modern Chinese ethnic identity. Theysaw the Chinese as the natural leaders of all the former subjects ofthe Manchus, with a mandate to lead lesser peoples to (Chinese)modernity. In this respect, their attitude resembled that of theVietnamese toward the Cambodians and Lao.

hnic socialist state dominated by Russians and despite the general Marxist doctrine

comparison, but the issue is developed more fully in D. Henley, Ethnogeographicative Studies in Society and History 37 (1995) 286–324.rto: Polity, Economy, Society, Transition, Armonk, NY, 1999, 3–38.Early Republican China, 1861–1928, Seattle, 2000, 197–199.ina, Boston, 1967.endence in 1911, Leiden, 1989, 15.

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

L. Narangoa, R. Cribb / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 276–285282

The Mongolian and Chinese leaders set out their ideologicalpositions in a public exchange of telegrams in 1911 and 1912, butthe conflict was resolved in part simply by force of arms. By the endof 1913, Mongolian forces had been driven out of Inner Mongolia,the area of most Chinese settlement, and in 1919 Urga (called by theMongols Niislel Khuree) itself fell to a Chinese army. In 1921a Mongolian national revolution supported by Soviet Russiarecovered the independence of Outer Mongolia from the resurgentChinese Republic, but Inner Mongolia remained uneasily within theChinese Republic.29

The outcome of these armed struggles was also shaped by thechoices of Inner Mongols between different nations-of-intent. In1911, the sense of Mongol national identity made little distinctionbetween Inner and Outer Mongols. Inner Mongolia – the Mongollands south and east of the Gobi Desert, a region roughly corre-sponding to today’s Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of thePeople’s Republic of China – had been dominated more closely bythe Manchu court in Beijing than the Outer Mongolia north of theGobi. There were also minor differences in dialect and culturebetween the two regions, but they shared a common Mongolidentity and there had been no suggestion at all that they mighthave different political futures. The declaration of Mongol inde-pendence in Urga therefore included Inner Mongolia, and InnerMongols played a prominent role in the first independentMongolian government.

Nonetheless, the Inner Mongols had a number of reasons to bedoubtful about the new state. The Mongol elite of Inner Mongoliahad in many respects been co-rulers with the Manchus in imperialChina. They held relatively high administrative and politicalpositions, and the Mongol and Manchu elites became closelyintertwined by marriage. They did not expect to rule China again,

29 C.R. Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia, London, 1968.30 C.P. Atwood, Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades,

but many of them were supremely confident that their aristocraticqualities, especially as descendents of Chinggis Khan, wouldensure continued prominence and respect in the new politicalorder. Feeling themselves to be more sophisticated than the moreremote tribesmen of Outer Mongolia, they had misgivings abouttaking a subordinate role in a state centred on distant Urga. Theirdoubt strengthened as the Urga government came increasinglyunder Outer Mongol domination. For other Inner Mongols, bycontrast, Chinese republicanism was attractive because it seemedto promise them allies in a struggle against the power of thesesame old Mongol aristocracies. The long alliance with theManchus had entrenched the dominance of hereditary princes,most of them descended from Chinggis Khan, and only a few ofthem were interested in bringing modernity to Mongolian society.In this respect, China was attractive to some Mongols in preciselythe same way as Indonesia was attractive to Balinese and Javanese:it was a large, progressive political formation in which old eliteswho had been complicit in the colonial order could be marginal-ized. Although there was strong support amongst Inner Mongols,especially at first, for an independent Greater Mongolia, thesemisgivings undermined Inner Mongol support for the OuterMongol government and contributed to the emergence ofa different nation-of-intent, an Inner Mongolia located within theRepublic of China but enjoying a high degree of cultural, politicaland economic autonomy.30 In 1921, Soviet Russia gave qualifiedsupport to Mongol nationalists in Outer Mongolia and so sealedOuter Mongolia’s independence, but part of the price for thissupport was that independent Mongolia give up its claim to InnerMongolia. For the moment, the Inner-Mongolia-within-Chinanation-of-intent was left by default as the only plausible option forthe Inner Mongols.

1911–1931, Leiden, 2002.

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In the 1930s, however, the ambitious presence of Japan in theregion opened new possibilities to the Inner Mongols. As part ofits strategy to extend its influence on the Asian mainland, Japanestablished a nominally independent state in Manchuria, giving itthe name Manchukuo. Although the population of Manchukuowas predominantly Chinese, about one third of the territory of thenew state comprised the eastern part of Inner Mongolia andMongols were a significant minority (possibly 5%) of the totalpopulation. At the outset, the Japanese publicly recognized theMongols as indigenous people and gave the Mongol communitiesa greater degree of autonomy than they had within the ChineseRepublic. As Manchukuo consolidated, moreover, the new statebecame a model of prosperity and economic development thatcontrasted sharply with the chaos in China Proper. For theMongols, Manchukuo opened the possibility of a modern, pros-perous society, free of Chinese intrusion, and allied to the risinggreat power in East Asia.31

Later, as the Japanese extended their influence into central InnerMongolia, they appeared to open a further possibility to the InnerMongols. The Japanese had begun to envisage an Asian empirewhich they portrayed as a constellation of independent Asianpeoples under Japanese leadership. Not only did they talk to InnerMongol leaders about the idea of an independent Inner Mongoliabut from 1936 they sponsored a series of governments in centralInner Mongolia which gradually acquired the trappings of politicalindependence, including their own army, currency, postage stamps,flag and government departments. It seemed to the Inner Mongolsthat Japanese assistance might help them to recover the indepen-dence that they had been unable to secure as part of GreaterMongolia two decades earlier.32

During these years therefore the Inner Mongols had spreadbefore them a smorgasbord of political possibilities: independencein their own right, absorption into Outer Mongolia, autonomywithin China and special status within the neighbouring Japanesesponsored state of Manchukuo. Each of the possibilities located itsborders in different places. None of these possibilities was truerthan the others in any objective sense to the Mongol nationalidentity. Each of them could find precedents and justificationwithin Mongol history and culture. They represented, rather,different aspirations within Mongol society, as well as differentjudgments of what might be possible in the circumstances. In theevent, none of them proved to be possible. Independent OuterMongolia never seriously resumed any program to recover the lostMongols in Inner Mongolia. The Chinese Republic bitterly disap-pointed the Inner Mongols by failing to defend their interestsagainst Chinese migrants and by failing to deliver social reform.Manchukuo’s promises of greater Mongol autonomy evaporated asthe wartime economy faltered and central government controltightened. And Japanese support for an independent central InnerMongolia receded as the Japanese increasingly wooed Chinesesupport for the war effort by promising to preserve China’s formerborders. In the end, a new option prevailed relatively late (1947) inthe form of an Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region withinCommunist-ruled China.33 Nonetheless, the fact that each of theseaspirations required a different set of borders enables us to extendShamsul’s concept of nations-of-intent beyond its original refer-ence to contending political visions within a single state border and

31 O. Lattimore, The Mongols of Manchuria: Their Tribal Divisions, Geographical DistribuLondon, 1935; S. Yamamuro, Manchuria under Japanese Dominion, Philadelphia, 2006.

32 L. Narangoa, Mokyo seiken ron – ‘‘Kairai seiken’’ no rekishiteki imi [The Historical MeWar] Vol. 7 Tokyo, 2006; S. Jagchid, The Last Mongol Prince: the Life and Times of Demch

33 X. Liu, Reins of Liberation: an Entangled History of Mongolian Independence, Chinese Terwas created before the Chinese Communist Party came to power in Beijing in 1949.

34 Bawden, Modern History of Mongolia (note 29), 201–221.

to make it a tool for conceptualizing unfulfilled national ideaswhich depend on imagining new or different borders.

The political implications of alternative borders

Taking these alternative visions of national futures seriously meansrecognizing the importance of unfulfilled aspirations amongst theMongols and the Vietnamese. It also sharpens, however, thequestions that we ask, as researchers, of the proponents of theseunfulfilled aspirations. Rather than simply acknowledging thatthese were serious aspirations which embodied noble hopes for thefuture, we are entitled to ask what the proponents of these aspi-rations would, and could, have done if they had been in a positionto implement their dreams.

Mongolia claimed its fragile independence under the leadershipof the eighth incarnation of the Jebtsundamba Khutugtu, spiritualleader of Mongolia’s Tibetan Buddhism, who then became knownas the Bogd Khan (holy emperor). The new government’s authorityrested generally on a widespread Mongol aspiration for indepen-dence, but its main political base lay amongst Buddhist monastichierarchy and the Mongol princes. As the selection of the title ‘khan’suggested, the new political order looked back to the imperialtraditions of Chinggis Khan rather than forward to a more demo-cratic political order. The new state’s territorial claim to all thetraditional Mongol lands, moreover, took in important regions inthe south and east, where Chinese settlements were well estab-lished and the Mongols were in a small minority.

In taking seriously the aspirations of Mongols for a GreaterMongolia, we are entitled to ask questions about how the aspiringleaders of this larger state would have dealt with two pressingissues: first, when and to what extent would political power shiftfrom monks and princes to technocrats and a voting public? Andsecond, how would the new state manage the presence of a largeChinese community?

Actual historical developments help us to answer the firstquestion. In 1919, Chinese Republican troops occupied Urga andsubordinated the somewhat inert government of the Bogd Khan.The Chinese were then displaced by the White Russian ‘bloodyBaron’, Roman Fyodorovich Ungern von Sternberg, but the Baronwas in turn driven out by a popular revolution under the leadershipof the Mongolian communist Sukhbaatar.34 In short, we can seewithin Mongol society internal forces that would have led tochange in the political order, whatever the external circumstances.These changes, it has to be said, had little to do with where Mon-golia’s borders lay, though the inclusion of Inner Mongolia ina Greater Mongolia would probably have accelerated rather thandelayed them because the modern non-clerical, non-princely elitewas stronger in the south than in the north.

By contrast, the issue of a large Chinese presence within theborders of independent Mongolia arises only if we imagine thoseborders running far to the south and east of the current borderbetween the Mongolian Republic and the People’s Republic ofChina. There are no reliable figures on the overall population ofInner Mongolia in the early twentieth century, or on the relativeproportion of Mongols and Chinese in the region, but we know thatthere was extensive Chinese settlement east of the Hingan Moun-tain and in a band of territory north of the Great Wall. It is possible

tion, Historical Relations with Manchus and Chinese and Present Political Problems,

aning of ‘Puppet State’], Iwanami Koza Ajia Taiheiyo senso [Series on the Asia-Pacificugdongrob, 1902–1966, Bellingham, 1999.ritoriality, and Great Power Hegemony, 1911–1950, Washington, D.C., 2006. The IMAR

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that the overall numbers of the two ethnic groups in InnerMongolia were roughly even in this period, although they wereunevenly distributed. Mongol grievances against these Chinesesettlers were an important element in Mongol nationalism. Inparticular, Mongols objected to the loss of their traditional grazinglands to Chinese agriculture, to discrimination in the legal systemand to the sharp practice of Chinese merchants. The Mongols ofInner Mongolia felt themselves on the defensive in their ownland.35

But what if the Mongols had taken control? Nearly all theMongol rhetoric on the position of Chinese put forward a system ofseparate government. Like the monastic, aristocratic and politicalorder of the Bogd Khan, this rhetoric looked back to old arrange-ments, to the Manchu era practice of ruling Chinese, Mongols,Tibetans and others separately, and of maintaining a firm system ofethnic distinction between these groups. The implication wouldhave been for a relatively developed Chinese administrative hier-archy governing Chinese subjects but subordinate to a Mongol-controlled national government. Previous formal and informaldiscrimination against the Mongols and in favour of the Chinesewould be reversed and in particular, Mongol title to traditionallands would be reinforced. Absent from Mongol rhetoric is any hintof ‘ethnic cleansing’. There was no suggestion that Chinese settlerswould be driven out or slaughtered, even though the Mongolswould have been aware that many Mongols in garrisons in Chinahad fallen victim to the genocidal pogroms against the Manchus in1911–1912. And indeed there are no reports of the massacre ofChinese settlers by Mongols in this period.

The sustainability of such a system would have depended verymuch on the demographic balance between Mongols and Chinesein Greater Mongolia. It is hard to imagine that a Chinese majority,flanked on the south by the Chinese Republic and drawing on theoften xenophobic orientations of Chinese nationalism in that era,would have tolerated subordination to a Mongol elite. A cannyMongolian government would have anticipated the Malay elite’sexpulsion of Singapore and surrendered to China the most stronglyChinese districts in order to strengthen the Mongol demographicposition.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Soviet Russia tothe north and China to the south developed minority policies whichrevolved around the twin principles of recognition and assimila-tion. That is to say, they rather generously recognized the existenceof ethnic minorities, even to the extent of creating formallyautonomous, territorial administrative units, ranging from districtlevel up to republic. At the same time, policies on education andopportunity worked strongly for the submersion of ethnic identityinto a nominally international but actually national Russian orChinese identity. The leaders of a Greater Mongolia might havetried to impose a program of absorption on Chinese Mongolians,but the cultural self-confidence of the Chinese in Inner Mongoliaand their proximity to China make it unlikely that they would haveaccepted such an assimilationist program. In these circumstances,a more formal system of ethnic segregation, perhaps resemblingthat of Malaysia, is a more likely outcome. Under such a system, thenon-indigenous status of the Chinese would be emphasised,Chinese departures to China would be condoned, even encouraged,and a variety of formal and informal mechanisms of discriminationwould ensure that Chinese Mongolians never dominated positionsof power, even though a Chinese cultural identity would betolerated.

35 S. Tsai, Chinese settlement of Mongolian lands: Manchu policy in Inner Mongolia/aUniversity, 1983).

36 B.W. Andaya and L.Y. Andaya, A History of Malaysia, Basingstoke, 2001.

If the later experience of Malaysia is any guide, the presence ofa substantial Chinese minority in Greater Mongolia would have hada conservative effect on Mongol society. Keeping the Chinese at baywould have involved emphasising the substantial differences intraditional culture between Mongols and Chinese. This emphasiswould have tended to strengthen the position of the Mongol reli-gious and aristocratic elites and would have made more difficultany cross-ethnic political alliances.

We have suggested that a Greater Mongolia might haveresembled Malaysia, expelling the most Chinese regions andcrafting a sophisticated system of discrimination to keep theremaining Chinese quiescent and subordinate. But what if Malaysiahad become more like Mongolia? To conjure up this option takesmore imagination than existed at the time, but something like thedistinction between Outer and Inner Mongolia existed between thelargely Malay regions in the north and east of the Malay Peninsulaand the southern and western regions where Chinese had settled inlarge numbers. Thailand’s annexation of the northern Malay statesduring the Second World War had given additional historical forceto this distinction. Britain’s partition of India indicates its willing-ness to consider the political separation of supposedly incompat-ible peoples. Let us imagine, then, a Malay Peninsula partitionedbetween a predominantly Malay state (‘Outer Malaysia’) andpredominantly Chinese one (‘Inner Malaysia’). The latter, a kind ofGreater Singapore, might have had many of the characteristics ofthe real Singapore: a determined pursuit of modernity withina framework provided by overseas Chinese culture. The indigenousMalays would be a small minority, given occasional signs ofrecognition (Malay is still the seldom-used official language ofSingapore), but would face a choice effectively between assimila-tion to the Chinese model or marginalization within what had oncebeen their own lands. This has been the fate of the Mongols in InnerMongolia.

In ‘Outer Malaysia’, by contrast, the Chinese would be a rela-tively small minority, their numbers giving them no possibility ofaspiring to political power. The absence of a Chinese option inpolitics is likely to have had a radicalizing effect on Malay politics.Rather than the conservative monarchist and aristocratic politicsthat dominated the real Malaysia,36 we might well have seena wider range of radical alternatives coming from within Malaysociety. The strong currents of leftist thought that streamedthrough Indonesia might have found a more fertile soil in ‘OuterMalaysia’, because of modern minded scepticism about the value ofthe traditional monarchies and because leftist ideas would not havebeen compromised by their association with the Chinese, ashappened in the real Malaysia. At the same time, the small non-Malay minorities would have had no power to resist any growth inIslamist political forces. The struggle between the left and Islamwould have given ‘Outer Malaysia’ a turbulent political history.

Similar issues arise if we interrogate the Indo-Chinese nation-of-intent that was an alternative to Vietnam. When Ho Chi Minhdeclared Vietnam’s independence in September 1945, there weremany Vietnamese nationalists who believed that it was a mistakenot to claim independence for the whole of Indo-China, rather thanjust the three Vietnamese pays. They saw the French incorporationof Cambodia and Laos into Indo-China as the historical continuationof the Vietnamese empire’s southern expansion. Vietnamese ethnicchauvinism and contempt for Cambodians and Lao combined witha sense of modernizing mission to lead many Vietnamese to believethat Vietnam’s hegemony over its Indo-China neighbours was

case study of Chinese migration in Jerim League (PhD dissertation, Brigham Young

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natural and desirable. But what implications would have flowed forVietnam if the independence that Ho declared had encompassedthese additional territories? Again, we are entitled to ask hardquestions of those in the past who aspired to different borders anddifferent futures.

The central question is whether the Vietnamese Communistrevolution would have spread at once to the rest of Indo-China,drawing Cambodia and Laos both into hostilities and into programsof radical social reform long before the escalation of the AmericanWar had this effect in 1960s. Or would Cambodia and Laos havebeen a drag on the Vietnamese revolution? Would the risk ofsecession by Cambodia and Laos have led the VietnameseCommunist leadership to moderate its revolutionary spirit as theradicals had indeed feared in 1945? Although there was socialinjustice aplenty in Cambodia and Laos, its contours were verydifferent from those that sustained the Vietnamese revolution.Whereas the organized structure of the Indo-Chinese CommunistParty in many respects mirrored the bureaucratic patterns oftraditional Vietnam, the politics of Cambodia and Laos was muchmore personalist, revolving around individuals whose power camefrom their personalities or their social status. The template of theVietnamese revolution was not one that could be applied ina straightforward way to Cambodia and Laos. All these consider-ations suggest that an Indo-Chinese nationalist revolution in 1945might have been a good deal more cautious than the Vietnameserevolution which actually began. We can imagine, at very least,a more ramshackle, decentralized revolution, in which leaderswould have been willing to compromise for the sake of interna-tional recognition, as in Indonesia.

If we can imagine a Malaysia somewhat more like Mongolia, wecan also imagine an Indonesia more like Vietnam. In apparentcontrast with Vietnam, the idea of an Indonesia encompassing thewhole of the former Netherlands Indies had been attractive tonationalists because it provided a framework for marginalizing theunpopular local aristocracies that had collaborated with Dutchcolonial rule. In this respect, a larger, more inclusive state inIndonesia could be a vehicle for social change in a way that a largermore inclusive Indo-China could not. The radical vision of theVietnamese Communists, however, had its parallel amongst radicalnationalists on the island of Java in the late 1940s, who hoped toinstall a seriously socialist political order.37 These radicals in Javafaced a dilemma similar to that of the Vietnamese Communists.Having declared independence on behalf of the whole of the formerNetherlands Indies, they felt constrained in the extent to whichthey could pursue the social revolution that many people on Java

37 B.R. O’G. Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance, 1944–194

saw as essential for making independence a practical reality. Thiswas because the interest in social revolution was very much less inother parts of the archipelago, especially in the east, and therevolutionaries on Java feared that the Dutch, who were fightingthe new Indonesian Republic for control of the archipelagothroughout the period 1945–1949, would lure the people of thoseother islands into separatism if Java appeared too radical. Anda more moderate Vietnamese nationalist government in the late1940s and early 1950s might well have aroused less alarm bothamongst conservative Vietnamese and amongst the Americans. Theexodus of conservative Vietnamese from the northern part of thecountry which gave impetus to the partition of Vietnam between1954 and 1975 might have been much less and the American fear ofa Vietnamese domino tumbling into communist hands in the wakeof Mao’s 1949 victory in China might also have been less acute. TheAmericans might have aimed to build on their good wartimerelations with Ho Chi Minh to ‘domesticate’ him, as they believedthey had done with the Indonesian leaders. The visceral fear ofcommunism that led to the creation of a rival Vietnamesegovernment in the south might not have come into play.

Conclusion

Analysing nations-of-intent is a special kind of exercise in coun-terfactualism. It does not demand that we move into a world ofimaginative fiction. Rather, it gives us a tool for investigating thevast amounts of human energy that have been invested in lostcauses, and it helps us to see the shadows of those efforts on thelandscape of that history which actually took place. These shadowsare an important part of understanding ‘real’ history and geographyfor two reasons. First, whereas historians once had little interest inlosers – traditional Indonesian historians, for instance, dismissedlost causes as kalah dan salah (‘losing and wrong’) – we nowunderstand that lost causes warrant attention as part of the overallhuman experience. Second, we can better understand historicaloutcomes by understanding the alternatives that people had inmind at the time. Especially important is asking hard, practicalquestions of the proponents of alternative nations-of-intent,because these questions help to expose the enduring constraintsthat all nations-of-intent would have faced if they had becomereality. Whatever mix we choose between voluntarist and deter-minist elements in historical and geographical analysis, we need torecognize and identify the importance of human aspiration in theshaping of history and geography.

6, Ithaca NY, 1972.