Author
Dato’ Dr. Ooi Kee Beng
Few periods in human history went through as much strife and uncertainties as the 20th century, and needless to say, few periods produced as many prescriptions for how the world should be organised.
That conceptually challenging period is not over. The 21st century promises more of the same, and certainly at an accelerated rate. To my mind, some of these ideas remain more poignant and promising than others, and continue to hold potential as general solutions for policymaking in the future. Much of that is naturally due to the imperfections of the systems of human organisation that we have ended up with today.
The default formula today is the nation-state—a territorially defined area governed by one central government, populated by citizens and other residents, whose state capacity is exercised through its public service, through its system of lawmaking and law enforcement.
The expedient nation-state
For those that I call ‘new nations’, generally meaning territories that were not nation-states when the European national empires intensified their dissection of the world into areas of influence among themselves, the nation-state structure was more often than not a one-size-fits-all solution determined more by how the European global dissection took place than by realities on the ground.
The expedience involved jars with the ideal that a nation-state is a governmental reflection of a ‘nation’, namely a people, an ‘ethnicity’.
As we know, all traditional empires had fallen by the 1920s, leaving behind territories without historical borders, and populations confused by forces outside their control. Most importantly, empires, be these traditional ones or colonial spheres of influence, tended to be either multicultural or cosmopolitan sometimes, and plural societies in most cases. The monoethnic basis for the ideal nation-state was simply missing in most cases.
Imperial collapses in the early 1900s—of the Spanish, Habsburg , Ottoman, and Chinese empires, and the ending of colonial empires in the late 1900s, had left us with a chaotic world reordered according to the defensive principle of the nation-state.
Entry into the modern world of nation-states required membership in the United Nations. But as we so well know, this one-size-fits-all does not fit all. Thus, the United Nations Organisation had to have both a General Assembly and a Security Council. The diversity in culture and history, and in economic skills and ethnic identity prevalent in most of the ‘new nations’ made nation-state formation almost always a paradoxical undertaking.
At this juncture, let me return to the earlier point about the barrage of alternative ideas for human organisation that are relevant in mitigating the paradoxical nature of the nation-state, and the tension between big states and small states. There are many, but I shall in this article stick to three of them, and argue why these should be given prominence if political peace and stability nationally, regionally, and globally is to have any chance of being achieved. These are:
1. Federalism
2. Social democracy
3. Regionalism
Malaysia as a classic case
To simplify what cannot but be a complicated discussion that this short article cannot possibly provide space for, let me focus on the case of Malaysia. The Federation of Malaysia has a colourful story—chaotic and confusing, but colourful. And its struggles over the last six-seven decades towards implementing the nation-state ideal provide evidence not only of attempts at embracing the three ideas listed above, albeit often in a warped—and yes, expedient—manner, but of the doggedness of these ideas as potential mitigations to the paradoxes of modern nationhood.
The three terms above are consciously listed in that order to capture their appearance in relevance in the history of Malaysia. The Malayan Union idea that the British colonial power tried to impose on their disparate Malayan colonies or spheres of influence in 1946 backfired and led to the rise of Malay ethnonationalism. This resulted in the colonialists backtracking to such an extent that the Federation of Malaya Agreement was signed in 1948 which ignored all other ethnicities in the peninsula. That covenant basically implemented the idea of a federation of sultanates.
That this would not work either soon became clear even to the Malay folk-hero and founder of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), Onn Jaafar. The population was far from being a Malay nation which could be painlessly turned into a Malay nation-state. And so, other agreements had to be made, mainly in the 1957 Constitution to limit the idealism of nation-statehood and embrace the population’s multiethnic nature, and in the expedient consociational politics that soon came to be misunderstood as ‘the social contract’.
The pragmatic and opportunistic nature of the Federation was on full display in the coming decade, as British colonialism continued to contract and the threats of the Cold War heightened. Singapore, kept out of the Federation to remain under British control, gained self-government in 1959, and along with the protectorates of North Borneo (Sabah) and Sarawak, joined the Federation of Malaya through the Malaysia Agreement of 1963 to form the Federation of Malaysia. Ethnic tensions soon made Singapore’s inclusion untenable, and this led to it leaving in 1965. The Sultanate of Brunei chose to stay out of the exercise altogether.
In effect, then, of the British-controlled areas in Southeast Asia, three nation states came into being—Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei (not counting Burma in this analysis). The contingent nature of this process should not be forgotten, mainly because that is what makes the adoption of federalism so necessary in the creation of Malaya, and then Malaysia.
However, nation-state building as a project is necessarily a centralising one, and in the case of Malaysia, this took a highly ethnocentric turn, corrupting the social democratic and social justice ideals that had once informed the policymaking of the new country.
But even in the five-year Second Malaysia Plan, which came into play after racial riots broke out in 1969 and parliament was suspended, which many consider the start of proper ethnocentric policymaking in Malaysia, the goals were not expressly ethnocentric. Instead, they were rather social democratic, seeking to eradicate poverty in the country, and much more radically, hoping to eradicate the long-term effects of the plural society structure in the country where professions (and the corresponding income level) were tied to ethnicity.
However, the logic of the New Economy Policy (1970-1990), in allowing for ethnocentrism to become the rationale for policymaking, also allowed for centralisation to run wild. And with that, the mitigating effects of the federal system put in place from the start were not played out.
Regionalism came into play for Malaysia with the formation just four years after the country took its present form, when ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, was formed in 1967. This was a strong reminder that a country’s sovereignty is a conditional one. Keeping peace with one’s neighbours, and balancing big power interests, thus came to define Malaysia’s foreign policy till today.
While there are security and cultural concerns involved, the driving force behind ASEAN integration remains trade—intra-regional trade, as had been the rationale for the most successful attempt at regionalism so far, the European Economic Community (EEC), now transformed and expanded into the European Union (EU).
In regionalism, the sovereignty and integrity of each national government remains paramount, and this allows for collaboration without excessive external control. Britain’s departure from the EU, Brexit, in this context, was when that balance was lost.
Towards improving federal-state relations in Malaysia
And so, within an accidental country like Malaysia—formed as a federation so that its disparate parts would not lose their core integrity—the dynamics of balance and the goals of social justice need to be kept. They have not been, due to the overpowering logic of majoritarian ethnocentrism.
As the first vital steps in rectifying this historical misstep, the Penang State Government proposed in 20221 that:
1. A Federal-State Relations Commission be created at the federal level “to examine and review in entirety the working arrangements between the federal government and the states relating to powers, functions and responsibilities on all legislative, administrative, financial, and socio-economic matters within the constitutional framework.
2. An All-States Collaboration Committee on Decentralisation be established “to enhance both formal and informal cooperation and consensus building among the states to further their shared interests and to develop mechanisms to coordinate their collective response on federal-state issues, and;
3. Federal-State Relations Improvement Committees be formed at the state level “report upon matters concerning all operational and administrative working arrangements between federal and state government agencies, on finance, health, social welfare, education, road works, disaster management, flood mitigation, trade and industry, and the civil service.
References
1 Gooi Hsiao Leung, Ooi Kee Beng and Francis Loh Kok Wah: Enabling Decentralisation and Improving Federal-State Relations in the Federation of Malaysia. Penang Institute, George Town, Malaysia: 2022.
