Authoritarian The modern nations of Southeast Asia are in many cases artificial post-colonial constructions. This is most certainly true in the case of Indonesia, and although less so in the Philippines, the occupation and rule over the archipelagos led to the imposition of unity from the outside. External sources of authority including both European and Japanese occupations, had ill-prepared either Indonesia or the Philippines for anything remotely resembling democracy. Both nations, exposed to Western political philosophy and social ideals, did attempt to install and maintain democratic institutions but they have not become entrenched enough to ensure political, economic, and social empowerment of the mainly poor and uneducated rural populations in both of these Southeast Asian nations. While it may be dangerous to overgeneralize about the related and practically concurrent rise of authoritarian rule in the Philippines and Indonesia, even a cursory analysis shows that from the vestiges of colonialism rose autocracy. Authoritarian rule was a logical extension of external oppression and artificially imposed concepts of nationhood.

Colonialism had undermined the traditional social, political, and economic structures of traditional cultures in both Indonesia and the Philippines. In Indonesia and the Philippines both, successive colonial regimes tore apart the sinews and connective tissues that bound together village life. Village political structures throughout these two archipelagos was far from democratic, to be fair. Big man authorities, patriarchal rule, vestigial dynasties,...

The histories of Indonesia and the Philippines are complex and multifaceted, underscoring the reasons for the failure of colonization. Colonialism, first by the Europeans with distinct financial and ideological interests, ravaged the people of Indonesia and the Philippines. In the Philippines, the Spanish conquests took full advantage of existing social and political hierarchies among populations like those of Maynila, Tondo, and Ifugau. Autocracies and plutocracies were common throughout the Philippines, enabling Spanish authorities to forge strategic bonds with local kings and tribal leaders. Control over poor peasant populations proved to be about as successful as it had been throughout the Americas. Using a combination of brute force, patriarchal social oppression, and the imposition of religious ideology, the Spaniards effectively created their strategic trading and cultural outpost in the Pacific. The Spaniards enjoyed the Philippines for its geographic position along the trade routes of the Pacific, which was threatened only by the British, and even so briefly, in the eighteenth century. European hegemony became intolerable finally, giving rise to revolutionary sentiment in the Philippines.
A similar trajectory of colonialism transpired in Indonesia, although instead of the Spanish the Dutch ruled over this ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and religiously diverse archipelago. Centuries of sultanates, preceded by Hindu, Buddhist, and hybrid kingdoms, had inured the…