Hardt and Negri comment on nation-building;

Nothing could be more post-modern and anti-essentialist than this notion of nation building. It reveals, on the one hand, that the nation has become something purely contingent, fortuitous, or, as philosophers would say, accidental. That is why nations can be destroyed and fabricated as part of a political program.

The experience of Indonesia suggest that the forging of a nation has to come from a desire within, rather than an external imposition.

I am not a philosopher, so am not so familiar that I can throw terms like post-modern and anti-essentialist around with confidence. What does Wikipedia have to say on post-modernism;

Although a difficult term to pin down, "post-modern" generally refers to the criticism of absolute truths or identities and "grand narratives."

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for anti-essentialism, but does have one for essentialism;

Essentialism is the belief and practice centered on a philosophical claim that for any specific kind of entity it is at least theoretically possible to specify a finite list of characteristics, all of which any entity must have to belong to the group defined.

Presumably anti-essentialism is the belief that an entity has no defining characteristics.

Hardt and Negri note that most of the international system of power, politics and trade rely on the nation-state as part of its hierarchy and maintenance of order. In the modern world of globalism, the nation-state remains indispensable. They also note that the strongest nations were forged internally, through many centuries of social development that ultimately led to the stability of the nation in a liberalistic and democratic organisation.

Hardt and Negri continue;

The contemporary projects of nation building are by contrast imposed by force from the outside through a process that now goes by the name regime change. Such nation building resembles less the modern revolutionary birth of nations than it does the process of colonial powers dividing up the globe and drawing the maps of their subject territories.

Conservatives like to cast the world since September 11th as being a cultural war, of global concern between the West and Islam. But this absolutist and doctrinaire view of the world gets knocked on the head when Iraq and Indonesia are compared.

The modern nation-state of Indonesia came out of the over-throw of the dictator Suharto. Since then the Indonesia government has flushed the military from its political system; removing their parliamentary seats, removing them from being responsible for civil order, removing them from the budgetary process. As a result the social turbulence in Aceh, Irian Jira and East Timor are quieting down as the military's role in aggravating tensions are stifled by civil political control.

For Indonesia, freedom came from within, not from without. It was not the result of imposition by an external power who then "nation-built" them. It was Indonesians doing it for themselves; seemingly the only way a nation-state can be constructed.

More Reading on Iraq

• Iraq
• Indonesia
• Nation Building
• Liberal Secularism is the Answer to Terrorism
• TAZ - Temporary Autonomous Zone
• Rule of Thumbscrew
• Cut and Run
• New Defence Report Coming Out Next Week
• From Mecca To Baghdad
• Australian Concerns On Terror
• Indonesia and Nation Building From Within
• Rosen on Iraq
• Three Reason-able Questions