Why Malaysia Always Feels More Likely to Fail than Succeed

By Ooi Kee Beng

For The Edge Malaysia (Column “Picking on the Present”), 27 May to 3 June 2023

New nations by virtue of being “new”, suffer immediate ontological challenges. Not only does this concern its very existence as an integrated geographical entity, a national economy and a united polity, but also its acceptance by neighbouring countries and big global powers.

And so, one of the first things a new nation does is seek membership in the United Nations Organisation. (By this, you see that what I mean by new nations are countries formed after the establishment of the UNO on 24 October 1945). If it is a country freeing itself from external control, then having the support of the retreating power is a great help. Malaysia and Singapore had it easy where independence from their colonial power was concerned, unlike other new countries in the region such as Indonesia and Vietnam. But we did have trouble with our immediate neighbours such as Indonesia and the Philippines, who challenged the right of the Federation of Malaysia to be formed in 1963.

While not fully laid to rest, this lack of neighbourly recognition has become a very minor issue today.

What remains prominent and challenging are issues on the domestic front. Put simply, this tells us that the country’s success or failure is up to its own government and its own people. There will be no one else to blame.

How global big powers choose to treat new nations geo-strategically, therefore, has a great bearing on whether a new nation succeeds or not. And so, isolationism in chosen strategic aspects, most often in national discourses, has been a common—and necessary—approach that new nations have tended to adopt. Setting one’s house into order while forming international alliances and filtering unwanted external influences is the first general step in the nation-building process.

Confidently Malaysian?

This is the lot of “developing countries”.

While we can resolutely say that Malaysia now safely exists as a country, recognized as it is by all members of the UNO, it is much harder to convince ourselves that “Malaysians” as such, exist in a similarly comfortable and absolute sense.

In short, what is a bona fide Malaysian internally? Who are Malaysians in their own eyes?

Malaysian history is a highly complicated one, and this improbable country came into being amid countless contingencies, compromises and conflicts. Furthermore, the geostrategic backdrop for its creation involved profound cultural and epistemological disorientation.

The Independence Project, be this in Malaysia or any other new nation, is necessarily a work in progress. It began on 31 August 1957, and again on 16 September 1963, and one must ask what it is that gained independence on those two dates. What process began then? And for whom?

Many legal and political structures came into being merely as contingent solutions to the problems of the times. This included the formation of race-based parties which went on to run the country for decades, a federation of 11, then 14, then 13 states whose rights and governance structure differed, a Constitution that is largely secular but not quite, and which peculiarly proclaims definitions of ethnicity to distinguish forever one group of citizens from another.

Instead of building a nation, meaning a country aiming for all its citizens to be equal in opportunities and rights, this hotchpotch bag of political compromises that the hurriedly retreating British colonialists put together, wishing to retain as much strategic control and economic clout as possible over its many colonies and protectorates, created a path of dependency in the exercise of power and in public discourse that saw inter-ethnic inequality prevail over citizen equality and the centralization of governance prevail over provincial interests.

Future historians may look back at the first three decades of the 21^st Century as a time when the long-term effects of the strategic innovations put in place by the British retreat from the region in the face of Cold War conflicts half a century earlier are reconsidered. In that context, the coming into being of a unity federal government in 2022 headed by a Malay-led multiracial party supported by another led by non-Malays, and by a Sabahan coalition and a Sarawakian coalition, aided by a humbled Barisan Nasional to top up Malay support, is highly significant.

From now on, Malaysians will have to reflect upon what the goals of Merdeka actually are. Was the forming of the Federation of Malaya in 1957 an end in itself? Was the forming of Malaysia in 1963 meant to bring progress to Sabah and Sarawak, or to benefit the Peninsula’s political game? Were affirmative action policies meant to separate Malaysians from each other forever, or to create socio-economic grounds to bring them together?

To what extent is nation building the creation of an ecosphere within which citizens may strive to thrive. Or is it a process of separation, one citizen from another across the whole country?

Why Malaysia always feels like it is more likely to fail than succeed lies exactly in this persistent process working against the creation of Malaysians. It is far from certain that Malaysia’s six-decade-long nation-building endeavour has been about building a united citizenry, and not actually about separating for good bumiputeras from non-bumiputeras, East Malaysians from West Malaysians, Muslims from non-Muslims.

A citizenry united through common privileges and rights, if you ask me, has to be the goal of all new nations. However, hard it may appear, they should seek to leave old notions behind which are sadly what perpetuate the condition and status of their countries being perpetually “developing”—meaning remaining caught in the traps laid by answers to questions long past.

Datuk Dr Ooi Kee Beng is the Executive Director of Penang Institute. His recent books include The Eurasian Core and Its Edges. Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World (ISEAS 2016). Homepage: wikibeng.com.