Malaysia and Indonesia part of the same country?

This is another idea I read off of Randy McDonald's Tripartite Alliance Earth. See The Case of Malaya. Please let me know if the link goes down.

In it, an unstable Malaya is independent post-WWII, with substantial Chinese and Indian populations, and it doesn't hang together very well. By 1971, Indonesia's army comes rolling in, and the Malay military actively helps them stomp on Chinese and Indian resistance groups. And thus a blob nation is formed. Of course, this is a timeline where there is for some reason fierce anti-Chinese/anti-PRC sentiment in Southeast Asia, egged on by a dystopian U.S. and its FBI(!!) subversives.

That said, could Malaysia and Indonesia have found their way into becoming part of the same nation in a less crazy way?

Sorry, Flocc, I don't know anything about SE Asia.
 
Indonesia + Malaysia = Greater Indonesia. Culturally it makes much sense to have Indonesia and Malaysian territories united under a single state. Geopolitical factors however, kinda prevented it from happening.

Was the Japanese occupation realistically sustainable, there was actually a plan by Japan to make a client state out of Malaysia and most of Indonesia.

The only chance, and a very remote and stretchy one at that, would be Maphilindo plan. I personally don't know how, but the last time I heard anything about Maphilindo, somebody said something basically this : either you would need to make early Indonesia much less lefty and turbulent, or prevent Malaysia from forming by having Indonesia and Phillipinese successfully tackle it. Then again, it may won't include Northern Kalimantan especially for the later case, at least not immediately, but you would have Indonesia, Malaya and Phillipines joined together under a custom union.

The source
 
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Isn't there some sort of treaty between commonwealth nations in the Asia-Pacific region that ensures that whoever attacks one of them will get their ass kicked? I believe its between Malaysia, Singapore, Ausralia, and New Zealand but I can't remember the name
 

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Isn't there some sort of treaty between commonwealth nations in the Asia-Pacific region that ensures that whoever (Indonesia) attacks one of them will get their ass kicked? I believe its between Malaysia, Singapore, Ausralia, and New Zealand but I can't remember the name
Fixed it for you.
 
This sort of thing probably requires a pre-1900 POD for it to be a possibility. I'm not sure how, but maybe messing around with the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 might do the trick. Instead of polarising the region into Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, we could have British and Dutch colonies springing up all over the place. Either that or we can go further back in time to have just one colonial power controlling both the East Indies and Malaya. It would do wonders to territorial nationalism among the natives.
 
Napoleon wins, Britain gets the Philippines and East Indies.

Ah, after 1900... I could see POTUS Henry Wallace pushing for a combo here out if it caught his attention.
 

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Britain could have just kept the former Dutch East Indies after the Napoleonic Wars if the Congress of Vienna had gone differently.
 
Britain could have just kept the former Dutch East Indies after the Napoleonic Wars if the Congress of Vienna had gone differently.
If we are using 19th century POD's you could also possibly get a different Anglo-Dutch treaty in which Britain gives their Bengoolen and Penang for various Dutch colonies. Although I must admit the Dutch must offer a lot, Dutch India probably isn't enough, maybe including Dutch Guyana, the Dutch gold coast and Dutch Antilles. Of course with a POD before Napoleon could see a similar but different deal with the Dutch offering Ceylon and Dutch India for those colonies.
 

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If we are using 19th century POD's you could also possibly get a different Anglo-Dutch treaty in which Britain gives their Bengoolen and Penang for various Dutch colonies. Although I must admit the Dutch must offer a lot, Dutch India probably isn't enough, maybe including Dutch Guyana, the Dutch gold coast and Dutch Antilles. Of course with a POD before Napoleon could see a similar but different deal with the Dutch offering Ceylon and Dutch India for those colonies.
Or that, yes. Maybe Britain gets half of Java and everything east of it in exchange for the Dutch taking over Bengoolen and Penang? Doesn't seem too likely though.
 
Older PoD

Anybody know anything about La Naval de Manila? Dutch invade the Spanish Philippines in 1646 and are miraculously defeated, apparently by intervention of the Virgin Mary? Reverse that story and you've got Indonesian-Philippines under one colonial power; add to that the Dutch's anti-Catholicism and you've disrupted the sociocultural changes that might set PI apart from Indonesia.

As for Malaysia, the British took over Dutch colonial possessions during the Napoleonic Wars, so Stamford Raffles controlled present-day Indonesia as well as Malaysia. Also consider the Anglo-Dutch wars; adjust those slightly and you have England extending its power out from Burma down the Malay Peninsula and into the Archipelago.

Nationalist movement takes a different turn in the 20th century and WHAM! You have one country from Kuala Lumpur to Papua and form Ilocos to East Timor.
 
Hi! I just came across this thread Googling, and thought, despite its age, that I should answer it.

In the Tripartite Alliance Earth scenario--something that I came up by myself, as an isolated teenager without feedback, I should add--I imagined a situation where Malays in Malaya ended up a minority thanks to even greater immigration by non-Malays, China and British India being key sources. In this context, with Malays securely a minority, it was impossible for Malays to be dominant. Anything like the OTL ascendancy of Malays in Malaysia, driven by their always being at least a plurality of the general population and the electorate, was impossible. When it came down to it, only the continued consent of a non-Malay majority would allow things to survive. Without that consent, anything was possible.

In this particular timeline, China was seen as a radical and subversive power, much like OTL's China but perhaps even more so. A conservative anti-radical Indonesia that already had a vested survival in Malaya remaining fundamentally Malay could therefore count on support from China's adversaries, the United States chief among them, to support an invasion and annexation of Malaya. Thus Indonesia was able to achieve two goals at once, supporting its co-ethnics and going to war against the interests of a rival.

Would something like this be possible OTL? I certainly imagined that selling out entire ethnic groups to their adversaries and their allies might be possible. The extent to which the United States (and others!) overlooked the mid-1960s massacres in Indonesia with their disproportionately Chinese victims was informing my analysis.
 
Even now, I struggle to fathom how Maphilindo could work beyond a looser than loose confederation. Never mind the Phillipines, the cultural divide between British Malaysia and Dutch Indonesia was already cemented by the colonial powers, and neither UMNO (United Malays National Organization) nor PNI (Indonesian National Party) would entertain playing second fiddle to each other. Maybe if they obtained independence around the same time, or there's a merger in the two independence movements, Baath style?
 
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