Introduction

Between the end of World War II and the birth of the authoritarian Leviathans that are the core concern of this book, Southeast Asia traversed an extraordinary era of mass political contention. What often appeared to outsiders as a singular, region-wide explosion of armed communism involved subtly distinctive types of contentious politics both across and within Southeast Asia's emerging polities. Anderson's invocation of a uniform “alarming profile” for the region accurately captures a widely held gestalt as World War gave way to Cold War – but it obscures the significant variation in how alarmed different types of Southeast Asian elites in fact were by the different types of conflict reverberating across the region's inchoate political landscapes.

This chapter traces variation in the first postwar wave of contentious politics, from 1945 until roughly the mid-1950s, in Malaya, the Philippines, and Indonesia. As subtle as this variation was, the patterns of elite collective action that arose in response would be strikingly divergent, with profound and lasting consequences for the institutions of political order. In line with Pierson's insight above, minor early differences would mean major differences down the road. Well before a second wave of contentious politics commenced in the mid-1960s, ushering in the demise of pluralist politics and the emergence of new authoritarian Leviathans, these three countries began traveling divergent political pathways: domination in Malaya, fragmentation in the Philippines, and militarization in Indonesia. Stark variation in elite collective action had yielded state, party, and military institutions of widely varying cohesion and capacity by the late 1950s. These institutions would later become the political bedrock of authoritarian Leviathans: regimes bearing the birthmarks of contention, deeply determining their durability during the worldwide wave of democratization to come.