George Quinn – Personally I don't think Indonesia will break up, but we are talking here of probabilities, and there is an outside chance, but a real chance, that current stresses will tear the nation apart. If this happens in any comprehensive way, the new state of East Timor will find itself the star player in a whole new regional ball game. But it may not be on the winning side.

As I write these words, I'm taken back to the lobby of a hotel in Tokyo in December 1999. Late at night, around a low table strewn with coffee cups, a group of East Timorese intellectuals and activists are talking about the UN referendum and its aftermath. Some are pro-independence, others are pro-Indonesia now living in West Timor or in other parts of Indonesia. Across the ideological divide there is an air of jocular Timorese camaraderie, but there is also an edgy intensity.

Talk turns to relations between East Timor and Indonesia and the question emerges: what will happen in Timor if Indonesia breaks up? There is a kind of surprised consensus around the table. The break-up of Indonesia will make it possible for the island of Timor to reassert its primordial unity.

For both groups, the possible emergence of a unified Timor is a disturbing prospect. It will destroy the delusions that lie at the heart of their respective nationalisms. For pro-Indonesia East Timorese the dream of a prosperous, autonomous place within Indonesia, like Goa's place in the Indian Union or Macau's in China, will vanish once and for all.

For the pro-independence East Timorese a unified Timor will demand reversal of their nationalist myth that East Timor is culturally distinct from West Timor and other adjacent areas.

In 1994 I visited the Oecussi enclave, a lick of East Timorese territory on the north coast of West Timor. On the way out of the enclave I found myself sitting in a rickety bus with a party of Oecussi Timorese dressed in their spectacular traditional finery and chewing wads of betel and lime.

They told me they were on their way to Kefamenanu in the central highlands to present a formal proposal of marriage. Kefamenanu is across the border in the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara.

The hopeful groom was sitting opposite me, a ceremonial crescent of beaten copper lying on his lap. "My future wife," he said, "works in the market in Kefamenanu. I go there every week to buy and sell produce, and that's where I met her. We speak the same language and our families are known to each other."

For an instant the old Timor had materialised before me. Networks of trade, ritual and kinship had once knitted the island into a single cultural and economic domain. There were no borders. Of course, as far as is known, in pre-colonial times the island of Timor was never a single state. It was a patchwork of small polities, interacting in a dynamic, constantly shifting configuration of alliances and enmities.

But it is also clear that, despite its internal diversity, Timor constituted a coherent culture area bound by common elements of culture and trade. Goods and people moved freely from market to market from one end of the island to the other. In coastal areas the Malay language (today called Indonesian) played a significant role in lubricating commerce up and down the island and even over the straits to neighbouring islands.

When the Dutch and the Portuguese hacked a border across the belly of Timor they ruptured a number of trade paths, in particular the ancient route along which sandalwood and other products had been transported from the eastern part of the island to the port of Atapupu in what was to become West Timor. The Portuguese nursed an almost pathological distrust of the Dutch. Under their rule, East Timor sank into isolation. Knowledge of the Malay language dried up, trade across the length of the island likewise withered.

But the memory of Timorese unity never died. The vigour of this memory is one reason why East Timor's new elite, many of whom are strongly stamped with the outward trappings of Portuguese culture, feel compelled to set about resurrecting a pseudo-colonial image of East Timorese distinctness.

I suppose the most extreme manifestation of this is the decision to assign a role of prime importance to the Portuguese language. Given that no more than two or three per cent of East Timorese have (or ever did have) a communicative command of Portuguese, this will be a huge, long-term, potentially divisive imposition on the new state.

Paradoxically perhaps, the preservation of Indonesia's unity is essential to the development of a culturally distinct East Timor. If Indonesia breaks up and pan-Timorese primordialism emerges, East Timor, as it is presently being shaped, may well disappear too.

[George Quinn heads the South-East Asia Centre in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Australian National University.]