Imagining identity: visions of Malaysia and the interrelationship between state, society and the global

Abstract

The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998 and the political crisis it engendered in Malaysia called into question the framework of governance associated with the long-standing Barisan Nasional (National Front, BN) government. And yet, despite the traumas induced by these twin crises, the fundamental relationships and structures that characterized political and economic relationships in Malaysia were not radically transformed. The underlying puzzle this thesis seeks to address is just how domestic reverberations of "the global" are mediated by the specific historical structure of a state. Utilizing the concept of national identity as an organizing principle while employing a model which positions the relationship between the international and domestic spheres and the state as a mutually constitutive dynamic offers a much more complete picture of the processes in operation. The central research question this thesis seeks to answer is: How are conceptions of national identity in Malaysia being shaped by the interrelationship between domestic society, the state and the global? By carrying out an in-depth empirical investigation into the historical (re)construction of and practices associated with national identity discourses in Malaysia, this thesis not only illuminates the society-state-global interrelationship but, in doing so, tells a story about how political elites in Malaysia have sought to construct and use ideas about "national" identity in order to, first, sediment their power and, second, to legitimize that power as authority. This thesis demonstrates that political elites in Malaysia found it easier to manipulate that identity in the periods immediately following independence in 1957 but that, in recent times, doing so has proven more difficult. The broad hypothesis behind this thesis is that state actors have found it increasingly difficult to avoid external socio-political and economic pressures, which has then made the maintenance of power and authority more problematic. That is, global forces increasingly act upon and destabilize political culture and assumptions about what is "eternal" and "taken-for-granted" in Malaysian politics and society, disrupting elite efforts to maintain social control and authority. The findings of this research have important theoretical and policy implications. At the theoretical level, they suggest that, in practice, any divide that exists between analyses of state-society relations on the one hand and state-global processes on the other, is largely redundant. But while they may be conceived of as two sides of the same coin, the exact nature of the mutually constitutive dynamic between domestic society, the state and the global may be an asymmetrical one. What is required, therefore, is a means of exploring the shape of any such asymmetry and a central finding of this thesis is that a historical consideration of discourses on national identity provides one such way of doing so. From a policy perspective, the findings suggest that political leaders in multiethnic states need to strengthen their role in formulating more inclusive conceptions of national identity if they are going to find an acceptable balance between particularistic ethnic desires and the universal desire for economic development and "national" stability in a world that is becoming increasingly globalized.