Anne L. Foster is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana State University. She is an editor of The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, also published by Duke University Press.

Projections of Power

The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919-1941By Anne L. Foster

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4786-6

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………….viiPreface…………………………………………………………………………………………………………ixIntroduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………….11. New Threats and New Opportunities: Regional Cooperation in Southeast Asia, 1919-1929………………………………….152. “The Highways of Trade Will Be Highways of Peace”: United States Trade and Investment in Southeast Asia…………………433. An Empire of the Mind: American Culture and Southeast Asia, 1919-1941……………………………………………….734. Depression and the Discovery of Limits…………………………………………………………………………..1115. Challenges to the Established Order, 1930-1939……………………………………………………………………143Conclusion: The United States and Imperialism in Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia……………………………………….175List of Abbreviations…………………………………………………………………………………………….181Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..183Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………….219Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..235

Chapter One

New Threats and New Opportunities Regional Cooperation in Southeast Asia, 1919-1929

The United States had had a presence in Southeast Asia at least since acquiring the Philippines as a colony in 1898. Its importance in the region grew after the First World War, amid a variety of changes in the relationship between Southeast Asian and European colonial rulers, in global economic relations, and in the role of the United States in the world. The First World War saw a reorienting of perspective, with the idea of a separate region of Southeast Asia, defined in opposition to both Europe and the United States, becoming possible. Although this idea would not be fully realized until the Second World War, elements of it were present in these interwar years, as Europeans worried about the political changes that the First World War had begun, Southeast Asians searched for ways to overturn political and economic structures they found oppressive, and Americans believed that their ideas about the future could reconcile the apparently contradictory impulses of the other two groups. The ideology of self-determination which Woodrow Wilson held up as an ideal challenged traditional imperialism in Southeast Asia. Yet Wilson had not much thought about the possibility of self-determination for places such as Burma and the Netherlands Indies. When Southeast Asians began to make claims for independence based on political theories from Europe and the United States, Europeans and Americans reacted swiftly and cooperatively but could not find a way to quell the growing demands.

The political changes occurring in colonial Southeast Asia during the 1920s exemplify the characteristics of and tensions within the United States style of imperialism. United States officials worked easily with European officials on many political issues, relying both on a shared outlook and a sense of common identity. United States and European officials, in both colonial and foreign ministries, cooperated against communists, radical nationalists, and other perceived political threats to the existing order in the region. But European officials did not see the United States as a consistent, reliable ally in defense of the colonial regimes. Its participation was too often informal, even ad hoc, and Europeans grew frustrated with its failure to see that its actions sometimes undermined parts of the carefully constructed colonial system. Both Europeans and Americans did begin to see, with varying degrees of fear, that colonized peoples were forming groups with their own agenda and demands. Colonial powers found themselves in a defensive position, as Southeast Asians took the political initiative, offering increasingly persistent and organized resistance to colonial rule. In response, the United States throughout the 1920s projected its power in support of the colonial powers often enough to ensure that they maintained the upper hand.

Fighting the Public Opinion Battle

As part of the British government’s preparations in 1918 for the peace conference at Versailles at the end of the First World War, Arnold J. Toynbee, member of the British delegation, wrote a memorandum in which he noted that the United States, with its talk of self-determination, had won the “public opinion” battle. It is not completely clear which public he had in mind, but he was very clear about the consequences of this United States victory. From that point on Britain would have to “consider” self-determination in governing its colonies. The idea of self-determination had been introduced, and the question could never again be whether it would arrive, but only when. Toynbee also thought that the United States public opinion victory carried some responsibilities: the United States, through the League of Nations, should take the lead in administering the mandate nations of the Mideast. The Arabs might trust the United States more because of that public opinion victory, but Toynbee also suggested that the United States would do a better job than the British in leading what he envisioned as a radically reformed, if not completely new, world.

The French vice-consul in Manila, Maurice Paillard, shared some of Toynbee’s enthusiasm. He predicted that the United States would grant independence to the Philippines at the end of the war. Paillard was not worried about the future of an independent Philippines, because the new peace treaty had provisions to ensure the independence of small nations, like the future independent Philippines but presumably also like a potentially independent Indochina, without “fear for their future.” In 1918 both Toynbee and Paillard seemed remarkably willing to grant to the United States leadership of a world in which international relations would work very differently than in the past.

The First World War was not worldwide in the same sense that the Second World War would be; fighting was less global. Yet it deserves to be called a “world war” because the resources of the world were necessary to fight it, and the political consequences reverberated widely. No battles occurred in colonial Southeast Asia, but some Vietnamese fought in the war, some Indonesians made money from increased direct trade with the United States in strategic war materials, and Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points offered a new basis for anticolonial movements. The Vietnamese anticolonial movement, members of which arranged to be in Paris during the peace conference, carefully prepared a list of demands (revendications) based on the 14 Points. The list is now famous, since it was signed by Nguyen Ai Quoc, who became better known as Ho Chi Minh. The drafters acknowledged that “the principle of national states” was making the transition from an “ideal” to a “reality,” and put forth their modest demands for “a government of law, not decrees,” freedom of education, the press, and assembly, and equality of legal rights as a means of creating democracy in Vietnam in eventual preparation for independence. The group of Vietnamese meeting in Paris designed their demands specifically to meet the conditions of Wilson’s self-determination rhetoric: they were radical only in the sense that all anticolonialism was radical. The demands were gradual; they acknowledged the universality of the ideals of the American and French revolutions. Toynbee was right. Wilson’s self-determination had won the public opinion battle, even among Southeast Asian anticolonialists.

President Woodrow Wilson’s postwar vision did include the possibility that the United States would provide military backing for the type of world order he proposed, as well as the certainty that the United States would provide political leadership of the League of Nations. He wanted to create what Gordon Levin has called a “liberal-capitalist internationalism.” The participation of the United States in the First World War demonstrated Wilson’s willingness to fight for that order, while his commitment, minimal though it may have been, of troops to the anti-Bolshevik cause in Siberia in 1918-20 indicated that the First World War had not been an exception. But Wilson’s vision did not prevail. The U.S. Senate, in the belief that it was following the wishes of the American people, rejected the Treaty of Versailles. The reason most often cited for the rejection was article X, the very article which acknowledged the responsibility of league members to back their commitments with military force.

The defeat of the treaty in the Senate only confirmed what had become clear about the applicability of self-determination rhetoric to Vietnamese, Indonesian, Burmese, Malaysian, or even Filipino anticolonial movements: not only did the United States government have no plans to support such movements with military or political power, it also had no plans to support them with more than a minimum of gradualist, tutelary rhetoric about the possibilities for self-rule some day. Still, the battle for public opinion that Toynbee referred to in his memorandum was not completely lost. First, hopes had not been raised so high as to have been dashed by the failure of the United States to support anticolonial movements. Second, in the statements of United States policymakers, the rhetoric of anti-imperialism coexisted with promises to maintain order in the world. Southeast Asians took some hope from the former, while colonial officials took their hope from the latter. U Nu, later to be a prime minister of independent Burma, learned about the American Revolution as a teenager and later claimed that he “drew sustenance” from its example during his participation in Burma’s struggle for independence. The French ambassador to Washington, Jules Jusserand, acknowledged in 1921 that American ideals were appealing to colonized peoples, and that as a result colonial rule increasingly rested on the “good will” of the colonized, but he also reported that all the colonial powers in Southeast Asia recognized Japan as a serious threat to order in the region. Jusserand predicted that the United States would cooperate with Britain, France, and the Netherlands to restrain Japan.

Washington Conference and a New Politics for Southeast Asia

The election of a Republican president in the United States in 1920, Warren G. Harding, who pledged a “return to normalcy,” confirmed that the Senate’s defeat of the Versailles treaty, and the subsequent failure of the United States to join the League of Nations, were representative of United States foreign policy, not exceptions to it. But policymakers of the 1920s knew that a “return” to the foreign relations of the nineteenth century was neither possible nor desirable. Although Southeast Asia rarely attracted the attention of the secretary of state or president, it was in many ways the ideal location for practicing the type of global foreign policy which the State Department of the 1920s wanted to conduct. It was also considered a natural location for the exercise of United States power, both because the United States had a colony in the Philippines and because it was a “Pacific power.” Finally, it was an area where the exercise of United States power promised to be efficacious.

The Washington Conference of 1921-22 embodied two important components of United States foreign policy during the interwar period: a desire to shape the world by the American example rather than by force, and a Euro-American perception of the threat that Japan posed to the traditional order in Asia. The results of the Washington Conference included abolition of the Anglo-Japanese alliance and its replacement with the Four-Power Treaty, a loose agreement that the signatories would consult with one another should their “insular possessions and insular dominions” in the Pacific be threatened. Akira Iriye has found that the importance of the Four-Power Treaty stems from an attempt by the United States, ultimately successful in his eyes, to end the diplomacy of imperialism. Perhaps, but officials from the European colonial powers at the time thought it much more important that the United States had finally come very close to guaranteeing the colonial order.

Curtailing the Japanese naval buildup and attempting to enmesh Japan in a multilateral foreign relations organization, thereby restraining it from further expansion in China, are commonly cited reasons for British and United States participation in the Washington Treaty system. The United States briefing book for the conference identified the threat of Bolshevism in the region to be as great as the threat from an expansionistic Japan. Communist parties had recently been founded in the Netherlands Indies (1920) and China (July 1921). The Comintern, holding its Third Congress when the Washington Conference opened, immediately recognized the public relations opportunity, and in January 1922 sponsored the first Congress of the Toilers of the Far East, attended by representatives from Japan, China, Korea, India, the Philippines, the Netherlands Indies, and Indochina. These chronologically overlapping but ideologically opposed conferences suggest that the struggle between the United States and Soviet visions for Asia had begun by 1921.

The United States and Soviet Union were not the only countries to see Southeast Asia as a potentially fruitful area for the exercise of power. It was the one part of the world where all the great powers were present and actively attempting to shape the region’s future. The relative success of each power had implications for its ability to realize whatever vision it had for its place in the world. In this way interwar Southeast Asia functioned almost as a laboratory in which the great powers tested formulas for cooperating with and competing against one another.

The Washington Conference raised the stakes in the public opinion battle that Toynbee evoked back in 1918. To avoid a naval arms race and in hopes of promoting a new kind of international relations in Asia, the United States had joined forces with the European colonial powers in Asia. Washington policymakers saw no reason for these policies to undermine their efforts in the public opinion battle. In the same briefing book for the Washington Conference, the United States presence was held up as an example for others: “This memorandum deals with the great social, cultural, educational, moral and religious contribution which America has made and is now making to the Orient, together with the large investments in money and life which this contribution has occasioned and the profound influence which it exerts.”

The various foreign policy goals of the United States might appear contradictory: anticolonialism alongside endorsements, secret or not, of the colonial order, concern about Japan’s economic expansion voiced by those aggressively advocating an Open Door for United States investment and trade, the rhetoric of self-determination in the same sentences with denunciations of Bolshevism as an illegitimate challenge to existing colonial governments. A Dutch newspaper article in April 1919 claimed that some Americans found it “hypocritical” to denounce Japan’s activities in Asia while using the Monroe Doctrine to claim Central and South America as a sphere of influence for the United States. In the administrations of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, however, these policies appeared completely compatible. As will be discussed in chapter 2, the Open Door was always more a policy to defend the interests of United States corporations than an idealistic statement about how foreign economic relations should work.

In no way could United States policy toward European colonialism during the 1920s and 1930s be considered anticolonial, if by anticolonial one means that United States policymakers should have been denouncing British, French, and Dutch rule and helping Southeast Asians to throw off the yoke. Washington officials can be said to have been anticolonial only in the sense that they wanted no further expansion of colonialism, and that they believed colonialism was ultimately an inefficient way to organize the world economy and political system. They saw only one desirable end to colonialism, and that was one which guaranteed to the United States access to investment and markets, and which did not enhance the security of its rivals, namely the Soviet Union and increasingly Japan. Thinking about United States foreign policy in this way makes it clear that for policymakers of the time, anticolonial rhetoric, calls for an Open Door for investment and trade, and refusals to formally join security alliances could coexist logically with a foreign policy principle of respecting the territorial status quo in the region, keeping the door closed to most foreign investment and trade in the United States colony in the Philippines, and maintaining informal agreements among regional powers to simultaneously restrain Japan and the Soviet Union and transform international relations in ways that Washington officials believed promoted peace.

The Washington Conference set up a structure of foreign relations in Asia, including Southeast Asia, which would last until approximately 1930. It identified the two threats to regional stability, Japan and Bolshevism, and tried to co-opt Japan by bringing it into the international system as an almost equal player. The policy for Japan had promise, because it envisioned that Japan would act like the Euro-American powers and over time would come to be treated like them in the international system. The threat posed by Bolshevism initially proved more difficult to address. The colonial powers of Southeast Asia during the rest of the decade grappled with how best to identify and resolve the problems that Bolshevism posed to colonial regimes and regional stability.

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