Democracy in Malaysia

Discourses and Practices

Khoo Boo Teik Khoo, Francis Loh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136825088
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Analyses discourses pertinent to democratic politics in Malaysia, including the political elite's interpretation of 'Asian values' and 'Asian democracy', contending Islamic views on democracy, the impact of developmentalism on political culture, and the recovery of women's voice in everyday politics.

INTRODUCTION

Khoo Boo Teik and Francis Loh Kok Wah

From the mid- to late 1980s, popular uprisings in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America overthrew several authoritarian regimes or military juntas and replaced them with democratic governments. In Asia alone, the military, martial-law or one-party regimes of the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan were toppled, and decades of authoritarian rule gave way to new forms of multi-party political competition and electoral government. Elsewhere, notably in China and Burma, popular assaults upon authoritarian rule were mounted but failed in the face of determined state repression.

As these international political developments compelled the academic world to catch up with the real world, so to speak, an extensive literature in political science and political economy developed around many important debates on democracy and democratization which were conducted along a broad theoretical spectrum. Given the specific focus of this book, it is not feasible to provide a systematic review of the voluminous literature ‘on democracy’ that has been generated. For the purposes of this volume, however, it is pertinent to recall that some social scientists seized upon the ‘pro-democracy’ uprisings, and the varied experiences of political competition that resulted from them, to advance rather triumphalist visions of democratization, especially visions that were offered as being consonant with capitalist economic growth in East Asia, or, alternatively, communist economic collapse in Eastern Europe. In short, there was a virtual celebration of ideas heralding the advent of a ‘third wave of democratization’ (Huntington 1991), a ‘global resurgence of democracy’ (Diamond and Plattner 1992) or the affirmation of the victory of Western liberal democracy as the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1989).

Against this seemingly globalizing ‘Western liberal democratic triumphalism’, one notable barrier was raised, not by the former communist countries which were undergoing a socially and politically severe ‘transition to capitalism’, but ironically by some of the economically most vigorous East and Southeast Asian developmental states or newly industrialized economies which had been linked to Western strategic interests throughout the Cold War. By the early 1990s, a peculiar ‘eastern’ reluctance to embrace Western liberal democracy had arisen which was expressed in an ideological mobilization around the so-called ‘Asian values’ propagated by certain Asian state elites and their ideologues in think-tanks, academic institutions or the mass media.

THE ‘ASIAN VALUES’ DEBATE

The subsequent ‘Asian values’ debate was likewise extensive (see Chapter 3 in this volume). But, briefly, the proponents of ‘Asian values’ argued that Asians demonstrated a cultural predisposition towards stable leadership and continuity in government. They suggested, too, that Asians, being communitarian and not individualist, placed the collective welfare over individual rights, had an intuitive respect for authority and social harmony, and thus showed a proclivity to consensus rather than a tendency towards dissent or confrontation. The point was extended to assert that Asians accepted a strong, even harsh, government so long as its policies and actions delivered economic prosperity. These supposedly ‘Asian’ values scarcely seemed to support the pluralism and respect for individual rights and civil liberties customarily associated with ‘democracy’. Yet, in their most strident form, ‘Asian values’ even became the legitimating code for an ‘Asian democracy’ (Chan 1993; Committee for a New Asia 1994) that many opponents or critics of authoritarian regimes considered to be neither immanently Asian nor fundamentally democratic (Ghai 1998; Robison 1996a; Rodan and Hewison 1996).

However, even if the concept of ‘Asian values’ was ideationally flawed and ‘Asian democracy’ was more than likely to be a euphemism for rule under illiberal regimes, as the ‘Asian values’ debate quickly revealed, their appeal or relevance to many Asians could not be so easily dismissed in the heyday of the ‘East Asian miracle’ (Chua 1995; Harper 1998; Khoo 1999). Indeed, some among the elites who governed the East Asian ‘tiger economies’ quite readily promoted ‘Asian values’, and ‘Asian democracy’, not just defensively as a logical ‘value-attitudinal-spiritual’ corollary to dirigiste ‘Asian capitalism’, as it were, but more ambitiously as East Asia’s developmental, cultural and political alternatives – and superior alternatives at that – to the neo-liberal agendas of ‘Western capitalism’ and the problems of ‘Western liberal democracy’ (Mahathir 1995; Zakaria 1994).

For some non-Asians, for that matter, ‘Asian values’ seemed to capture a kind of winning combination of economic dynamism, political stability, social discipline and cultural conservatism which the ‘west’ needed to arrest its ‘decline’ or to achieve ‘economic prosperity without social disharmony’ (Rodan 1996). Certain social and political conservatives – for whom ‘the major problem in the West is social disintegration and the overwhelming of the social interest by liberal individualism’ (Robison 1996b: 15) – evinced a degree of ‘enthusiasm for Asian authoritarianism and its assumption that a good dose of the same medicine would benefit the West’ (Robison 1996b: 16). Hence there existed ideological affinities between a supposed Asian commitment to ‘Asian values’ and some ‘Western’ promotion of a variety of ‘family values’ or ‘shared values’.

In this milieu Malaysia stood in an unusual position. Its prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, had emerged as one of the most forceful proponents of ‘Asian values’ (Mahathir and Ishihara 1995). Mahathir’s diplomatic, almost personal achievement (though not in this ‘Asian values’ debate alone) was out of proportion to his country’s generally uninfluential position in the region or the world. Malaysia itself was never the exemplar of the ‘East Asian model of development’ mostly because it never scaled the heights of late industrialization, unlike, say, South Korea or Taiwan, but partly because its class and ethnic complexities were largely alien to other Asian newly industrialized economies. Malaysia was also not an all-out authoritarian or martial-law state, unlike some Asian states prior to their ‘transition to democracy’. But by the 1990s, an industrialized and more prosperous Malaysia had actually undergone something of a transition from democracy (Khoo 1997a). How then should one grapple with Malaysia’s experience with democratic politics since independence in 1957? The situation was, after all, riddled with ambiguities that were difficult to reconcile with the expectations of theoretical orthodoxy that states should become more democratic with rapid economic growth and industrial transformation.

PROBLEMS OF MALAYSIAN DEMOCRACY

Up to the 1970s, much academic writing on Malaysian politics stressed two major, arguably contrary, themes in the Malaysian experience with democracy: the ethnically divisive tendencies of Malaysia’s plural society, and the consociationalism of the Alliance coalition (of the United Malays National Organization, Malaysian Chinese Association and Malaysian Indian Congress) (Ratnam 1965; Means 1970; Milne 1977; Vasil 1971). The principal analytical concern of such writing was the danger that inter-ethnic tensions posed for political stability and ‘nation-building’. Another equally important concern was the viability of a ‘parliamentary democracy’ that rested upon the political compromises that were struck by the ruling ethnic elites but were continually subjected to ‘communalist demands’. These concerns were perhaps best captured by von Vorys’s depiction of the Alliance-ruled political system as a ‘democracy without consensus’ wherein elite solidarity overcame mass polarization (von Vorys 1976). But any optimism that the Alliance’s consociationalism was the bedrock of Malaysian democracy vanished in the inter-ethnic violence of 13 May 1969. After that came a two-year suspension of parliament and an emergency rule by the National Operations Council (NOC). In March 1971, parliament was restored, but only with the precondition that the scope of democratic politics would be reduced by legislative and administrative strictures.

From 1974 on, with the Barisan Nasional (BN, or National Front) replacing the Alliance as the ruling coalition, and UMNO’s dominance superseding the Alliance’s consociationalism, the ambiguities of Malaysian democracy deepened. Some studies of Malaysian politics reflected those ambiguities by variously characterizing the political system as a ‘quasi democracy’ (Zakaria 1989), ‘semi-democracy’ (Case 1993) or ‘modified democracy’ (Crouch 1993). Whatever their theoretical assumptions, these characterizations implied that the political system was now perched uneasily between democracy and authoritarianism. Less ambiguous was the trend towards authoritarian rule. Yet successive regimes in Malaysia drew considerable flexibility and stability from the political system’s admixture of democratic procedures and coercive practices, subsequently theorized in different ways as the features of a ‘repressive-responsive regime’ (Crouch 1996) or a ‘syncretic state’ (Jesudason 1996). The Malaysian trend towards authoritarianism – unlike trends elsewhere in Asia, for example – was routinely justified by the ruling coalition as essential to the containment of inter-ethnic tensions, especially those associated with disputes over the New Economic Policy (NEP). But the political crises of the 1980s – the constitutional crisis (1983–84), turmoil in Sabah (1984–86), violence at Memali (1985), financial scandals (1984–86), UMNO’s split and BN’s disunity (1986–87), and the crisis of the judiciary (1988) – showed that the ‘pro-authoritarian trend’ could not be adequately explained by recourse to a ‘politics of ethnicity’. Consequently the problems of democracy in Malaysia were increasingly posed in different terms.

One important area of analysis covered various forms of executive aggrandizement vis-à-vis the monarchy (Kershaw 1993) and the judiciary (Hickling and Wishart 1988–89; Ho 1992; Khoo 1999; Rais 1995) which led to the loss of checks and balances within the system of government. At the same time, other studies surveyed the ‘non-level playing field’ which the ruling coalition imposed upon its challengers by altering the ‘rules of the electoral game’ via gerrymandering, coercion and repression (Barraclough 1985; Chandra 1986; Sothi 1980). Another set of analyses grounded the ‘pro-authoritarian’ trend in the social stresses and political crises emerging within the rapidly transforming Malaysian political economy of the 1980s (Khoo 1997a; Saravanamuttu 1987; Tan 1990). Closely related to this latter approach were studies of an accelerating pattern of ‘money politics’ which gave undue power to shifting coalitions of politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen (Gomez 1990, 1991; Mehmet 1986), particularly as the ‘redistribution of wealth’ justified by the NEP made way for ‘privatization’ under Mahathir. In short, and in contrast to the theoretical predilections of an earlier body of academic writing, it was not Malaysia’s plural society but its ruling elite which was assumed to pose the greatest threat to the preservation of a meaningful Malaysian democracy.

Accompanying this significant shift in perception as to who bore the burden of Malaysian democracy was the effort made by a collection of essays to problematize not only the growing authoritarianism but also increasing political and cultural fragmentation in relation to Malaysia’s modernity (Kahn and Loh 1992). This authoritative volume offered a reformulation of political discourses and practices which analysed the conflicts and splits within the ruling elite, the break-up of the old left, the Islamic resurgence and its competing strands, cultural revivalism and inventions of tradition, Malay and non-Malay redefinitions of ethnicity, Malay peasant resistance to proletarianization, awareness of gender, regionalism, and even new artistic expressions. While political ferment was clearly present among the new middle classes spawned by a decade of economic growth, so, too, was a fragmented vision of Malaysia’s modernity, especially for those social forces and groups which challenged the hegemony of the BN elite. This reformulation of the basic issues of democracy in Malaysia was critical to many subsequent studies of Malaysian politics.

A widespread expectation that the political ferment would lead to dramatic change was not realized in the 1990 general election when BN retained its customary dominance in parliament despite suffering a significant decline in the popular vote. Thereafter, buoyed by the rapid economic growth in the early to mid-1990s, which resolved many of the economic problems of the 1980s, BN once again consolidated its power. The relations between state and civil society were refashioned according to Wawasan 2020 (Vision 2020) – Mahathir’s vision of modernity for Malaysia. Indeed, BN’s landslide victory in the general election of April 1995 confirmed not only the practical strengths but also the ideological depth of the refashioned Mahathir regime.

The accompanying erosion of the position of the combined opposition exposed a broader failure of the 1980s dissent to establish a lasting Malaysian equivalent of the so-called Asian ‘pro-democracy movements’ of the period. If anything, as the Malaysian political system became less democratic, the regime appeared to have become more popular. One indication of this growing popularity was the virtually undisputed receptivity to Wawasan 2020 and the National Development Policy that replaced the New Economic Policy (NEP) when these were announced in early 1991. The scale of BN’s 1995 triumph was facilitated by a strong swing of support to the regime from the customary opposition strongholds of the urban non-Malay constituencies. Perhaps more than anything else, this change in political attitude among BN’s erstwhile staunchest opponents suggested that Malaysian society – now less riven by inter-ethnic competition (see Chapter 2 in this volume), and more driven by a sense of nationalist purpose, perhaps for the first time – was quite different from what it was in the preceding three decades.

In 1996, when the research associated with this volume of essays was mooted as part of a multi-country project, ‘Discourses and Practices of Democracy in Southeast Asia’ (involving Indonesia and Cambodia as well), the present editors thought it appropriate to suggest that the contemporary political milieu in Malaysia, in conjunction with some of the far-reaching socio-political changes briefly noted above, had raised many complex questions regarding the country’s state of politics and democracy. To begin with, why had those socio-political changes taken place? How and to what extent were these changes related to the rapid economic growth of the 1990s? What was their cumulative impact on the traditional parameters of Malaysian politics, even if those changes had not led to an immediate regime change? In what ways were those changes influenced by prevailing regional and international political discourses? How in turn did those changes inform domestic discourses and actual political practices, and with what kinds of implications for democracy in Malaysia? What did the defeat of the dissent of the 1980s portend for civil society in Malaysia? Was the Mahathirist achievement of ‘less democracy and more stability’ a vindication of Mahathir’s espousal of ‘Asian values’ and a ‘not so liberal’ ‘Asian democracy’? Finally, what lessons could an updated examination of Malaysia’s political system, civil society, public institutions and dominant discourses provide for a comparative understanding of ‘discourses and practices of democracy’ in Southeast Asia?

THE BOOK

The essays in this volume originate in a collective attempt to address these questions and related issues in order to provide a rounded analysis of politics, organized around the theme of democracy, in Malaysia from the early to mid-1990s. As the preceding survey of the changing foci in academic writings on Malaysian politics over that period suggests, the prospects for Malaysian democracy in the mid-1990s seemed less threatened by ethnic polarization than a sure, if creeping, authoritarianism, reflected in the loss or decline of certain institutional checks and balances upon the conduct of those in power. Simultaneously, Malaysian society appeared to have discovered a new range of discourses and practices, serving both as the requirements and possibilities, for democratic politics. These included the emergence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as a force in popular political participation, Islam’s ‘compatibility’ with secular, democratic government, and various kinds of strictures upon women’s role in politics.

Two general comments on these essays should be made at the outset. First, the organization of the volume in two parts also reflects the bifocal thematic concerns (with ‘discourses and practices’) of the multi-country research project to which this volume belongs. Although this volume stands alone in its coverage of Malaysia, it is the overall plan of the project to allow this volume, together with separate volumes on Indonesian and Cambodian politics, to generate a comparative understanding of democracy in Southeast Asia. Second, this organization has nevertheless been useful in directing attention to how detailed changes in Malaysian politics since the 1990s have been conceived and debated, implemented and contested, or institutionalized and adapted. In any case, the division of the volume into two parts does not imply a rigid delineation between ‘ideas’ and ‘realities’, or between ‘discourse’ and ‘practice’, as it were. In almost all cases, these essays have had to deal with both discursive elements (such as traditional conceptions, reigning ideology and contested arguments) and practical matters (for example, structural limitations, institutional adaptations and power shifts), without which no discussion of politics can really be satisfactory.

Part One focuses on discourses and contains three chapters. In Chapter 2, Francis Loh Kok Wah tracks a discursive shift that is as important as it was unexpected. He discerns in the political consciousness of not just the burgeoning Malaysian business and middle classes but, critically, among the politicians of the ruling coalition as well, a shift from a pronounced pre-1990s preoccupation with exclusivist ethnic issues and inter-ethnic competition to rather more common socio-economic concerns raised by rapid growth and mass consumerism.

Loh argues that a discourse of developmentalism now dominates among certain critical groups in Malaysia. This discourse valorizes sustained economic growth that facilitates an improvement in material standards of living but results in the spread of consumerist habits. Its corollary is an appreciation of the value of political stability that many Malaysians now believe can only be sustained by a strong BN-governed state. Significantly, this sentiment is widely shared by non-Malays who were previously opposed to BN and especially critical of its pro-Malay affirmative action policies. The discourse of developmentalism came into its own in the 1990s, when the economic liberalization associated with rapid economic growth produced, largely for utilitarian reasons, various measures of cultural liberalization. For example, the most important emblems of Malay identity – the Malay rulers, Malay language and culture, and Islam – which were hitherto promoted as the central attributes of the Malaysian nation-state, were de-emphasized or redefined by UMNO leaders themselves. In response, UMNO’s non-Malay counterparts in BN disengaged themselves from ‘sensitive’ (that is, controversial) ethnic and cultural ones. The non-Malay leaders in BN generally recast themselves as purveyors of development and providers of social services.

In Malaysian politics, therefore, Loh suggests that developmentalism may be seen as the cultural by-product of an economic dirigisme successfully undertaken by a developmental state. At the same time, the mass consumerism which forms part of developmentalism has pushed forth a ‘discourse of the individual’ as certain groups of individuals increasingly withdraw from the social and public sphere into their private spa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part One Discourses
• Part Two Practices
• Postscript
• References
• Index