Malaysia and the Developing World

The Asian Tiger on the Cinnamon Road

Jan Stark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136263163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

As Malaysia's economy grows and flourishes, strong new links are being forged with other developing countries in the region and beyond. This book traces the ways in which age-old organizational, political, religious and trade networks between Nusantara, the Malay World, and Central Asia, East Africa and the Middle East have changed in recent years. The book argues that these old links are being revived by new forms of globalization, modernization and knowledge transfer that are developing and implementing non-western models of governance, often in direct reference to Islam. The book goes on to explain how, as Malaysia develops new links with Indian Ocean countries, many of them Muslim countries, a new style trading network is being formed, a network with Islamic characteristics, which echoes Indian Ocean Islamic trading networks of earlier times. Interspersed with interesting methodological insights into the latest network, transnational and spatial theories, the book provides detailed case studies of Malaysia's and Southeast Asia's trade and numerous other links with Indonesia, Egypt, Zanzibar, Comoros and Central Asia, and concludes by assessing how Malaysia's and ASEAN's new style network is likely to develop and influence wider global networks. Written with a depth of knowledge reflective of the author's many years of research throughout Asia, this book gives a real insight into how Malaysia's mentalities, traditions and ways of thinking are being applied to its interactions with its immediate neighbours and the wider world.

1 Introduction

Trends, visions and concepts in the developing world between the Middle East, the Silk Road and the Lands beyond the Winds

The end of the Cold War brought about a new interest in regional studies and in questions of regionalism, South–South cooperation, as well as new narratives and theories on translocality and transnationalism. A reinterpretation of history, historicism and spatial geography has promoted new transdisciplinary approaches such as “entangled history” (histoire croisée), which looks at the “other” from a localized non-western perspective, or the new concepts of space and region addressing the redefinition of geographical boundaries and their cultural, religious, ethnic and other denominators (among them “the spatial turn” and “postmodern geographies”).¹

At the same time, new regional economic strongholds are emerging and gathering political momentum: China, Central Asia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members and developing powers like Brazil, India and Iran not only challenge western attempts at cultural and economic domination and globalization; they are also very different in their discourses of governance, authority and power-sharing. These discourses often remain entirely alien and perplexing to the West. Examples are the Islamic capital punishment, hudud, as part of the Islamic state concept or the “Asian Tiger networking” practices of huge Asian conglomerates that elicit rather helpless answers from western countries, be they the ever-repeated call for democratization and western models of liberalism or threats of trade embargoes and trade wars (US–China). Malaysia and ASEAN emerge in this carousel as important mouthpieces for a new southern regionalism, economically, politically and culturally. This book will trace the various linkages between the Nusantara region (Muslim parts of Southeast Asia) and its traditional neighbours in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa – on centuries-old trading routes such as the Cinnamon Road, the Clove Road or the famous Silk Road that are being revived today after lying dormant for many decades during the eastern–western bloc divide, and are carrying new discourses of knowledge transfer, trade, religious innovation and developmental modernization that are often entirely non-western in nature.

The central argument of this book is that Malaysia’s relations with the developing world cannot be understood merely by using the traditional International Relations (IR) theory approach and by limiting the analysis to IR themes such as bilateral relations and administrative, regulatory and governmental theory constructs. Rather, these contacts can be understood as networks in the wider sense, from people-to-people flows to travelling knowledge, the bonding of emerging regions, and translocal identity construction, but also as networked regime promotion and organizational and trade linkages, in short as transnational forms of life.

However, Islam as a common denominator cannot serve as an all-round explanation for the functioning of these networks because Islam is too diverse and the regions involved are too deeply involved in what they inherited from the nation-state, its boundaries and ethnic, national and cultural-mental allegiances. There are even examples of Islam actually blocking networks, either because its alleged universal appeal could not be fulfilled in practice (transnational networks such as al-Qaeda) or because construction of “the Islam” as a presumably uniting force (Malaysia’s Vision-Islam as a collective Islamic work ethic and engine for growth) falls short of economic and political realities. Thus, multi-faceted networks of religion, trade and development provide the larger picture of our analysis. Their over-arching vision could be development, it could be a postmodern, highly diverse “Islamic democracy” in the making, or a “civilizational Islam” that former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, Turkish President Erdoğan and others have envisioned.

The search for a new “meaning” after the collapse of the two blocs, the US and the Soviet Union, has resulted in a wide range of new theories and interpretations, from Laidi’s A World without Meaning (1998) to those of transnationalism (Vertovec and many others) and studies on the authoritarianism of regimes in the developing world (Brownlee; King).² This volume takes three of these approaches as points of departure.

First, it examines networking on various levels, whether the old (but now reviving) Sufi networks between Southeast Asia, Central Asia and East Africa, the trade routes between Southeast Asia, India and the Arab Peninsula or the bilateral relations and organizational linkages between ASEAN, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and new regional players like Kazakhstan or Indonesia – referring to social science networking theory in globalization studies as stipulated by Grewal and others.³

Second, it looks at instances of transnationalism, a broad, methodologically ill-defined field, in the literature dealing with topics as diverse as ethnicity, minorities, migration, border studies or translocality of cultures and life-styles. This author understands transnationalism in a more specific sense, looking at a “New Asian Regionalism” and regionality from a perspective that goes beyond traditional approaches to regional integration.⁴ I rather deal with political and cultural questions of de-westernization, the return of history, the oriental “other” in a southerly order and its linkages and networks, and examine them from a regional point of view.

Third, questions of authoritarianism will be analysed – not by applying authoritarianism theory as suggested by Brownlee – but by looking at both eminently political and cultural instances of regime survival, regime maintenance and a new authoritarian regionalism in a vibrant developmentalism reaching across southern regions and involving rapidly modernizing semi-authoritarian and authoritarian systems from Singapore via Malaysia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Gulf and some African states, which will be related to the network paradigms of Owen and his observations on forcible regime promotion.⁵

Furthermore, this book will contribute – in terms of both content and methodology – to the analysis of networks, regionalism and South–South cooperation,

• by moving beyond the existing literature on regionalism which is very much concerned with regional integration, enforcement of law and good governance, or simply with organizational and security policies in the region;

• by attempting to reinterpret transnationalism and translocality approaches from a regional, historical and cross-boundary point of view, which takes into account the centuries-old linkages between Asian and southern regions that are of eminent importance both culturally and politically to an understanding of the re-emergence of a southern globalization emancipating itself more and more from the West and creating new modern discourses on development, modernity, governance, trade and religion;

• by using new methodological theories such as histoire croisée, “imagined communities” (Anderson), and transnational and geopolitical but also regional “spaces” to explain the oriental “other” as a phenomenon of the “new Asian self” manifesting itself in many new southern state concepts and slogans of development and governance, from Vision 2020 and Vision 2030 (Malaysia and Kazakhstan), to the Islamic state and Islamic transnational Caliphate, the Asian values debate, a new Confucianism, or the Islamic/Asian work ethic of the “Asian Tiger” (ASEAN and Asian Far East) and “Central Asian Snow Leopard” (Kazakhstan) category;

• by elaborating the untold stories of southern–southern encounters in terms of political and economic innovation from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century, Islamist discourses and knowledge transfer, the re-emergence of old trade roads and region-to-region flows of people and traders, labourers and Sufi saints, Wahhabis and clandestine terror cells;

• by shining a deliberative light onto the western mass media narratives on terrorism and the networks of terror – using the new approaches of authors like John T. Sidel, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said. The author argues that states have undeniably played a role in creating terrorism by denying meaningful political participation and thus creating increasingly violent opposition towards authoritarian regimes. Abundant examples include Egypt, Uzbekistan, Syria, and Algeria, but sensationalized terrorism experts like Rohan Gunaratna or Zachary Abuza still claim a large following among the western media, security experts and even western governments and their allies for their crude networking theories on al-Qaeda and other terror groups. On the other hand, the state has gradually dismantled its once dominating position, pushing populations in the developing world into the arms of Islamists, as Chomsky observes.

The book’s nine chapters will translate these topics into the following points and narratives.

Chapter 2 explores a world without meaning after the end of the Cold War, which left a discursive vacuum after the centuries-old focus on the nation-state stretching from the period of the Enlightenment to the end of communism (1989). Meaning can be produced through a focus on several strata such as culture and its intertwinings with politics, questions of power and control, popular appeals to history and a shared past or through authoritarianism and development and its appeals to modernity, progress and change. The immediate results of such appeals are new developing society models in which “authoritarianism works” – both through the consent of the conservative middle classes and through the state itself as it promulgates participation in growth and wealth through highly attractive politics-cum-business arrangements providing for rapid upward mobility, often accompanied by cultural, ethnic and religious appeals for development (Malaysia and its Vision 2020; Kazakhstan and its Vision 2030; other Vision countries around Asia). These modernizing societies are bound together by networks of various kinds, whether those that Owen explores – networks of regime promotion in the developing world – or bilateral, organizational or grassroots linkages and translocalities that have emerged or re-emerged after lying dormant during the Cold War period. After a period of lull during the Second World War and the time between 1945 and 1989, these networks are experiencing a very dynamic renaissance, a point which will also be demonstrated in the third chapter (Africa/Southeast Asia).

Chapter 3 looks at the historical linkages across the Indian Ocean involving networks of Sufis, traders and seafarers in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods. Trade and Sufi networks between Africa and Southeast Asia have been gradually overshadowed by emerging linkages of empire, both western and oriental, that zigzagged the Indian Ocean in the early twentieth century, creating transnational discourses of national belonging and identity that Westerners and Easterners alike have used to create a picture of the other, reflecting a self of deep class-consciousness, ethnic superiority and actively lived social hierarchy. Regional and local visions of the transnational have emerged that have been depicted not only in the understanding of the “oriental” in western interpretations of the East, but also in the deliberations of white expatriates as nation-builders and saviours in the tropics (Vichy in Africa) or in the dreams of a far-away Asia linked to Africa as various phenomena came into sight on Mauritius, Madagascar or even among the Cape Malays in South Africa.

Chapter 4 (post-revolutionary Middle East) investigates the following themes. First, Asian counter-hegemony is seen as linked to developments in the economic and foreign policies of ASEAN and Asia Pacific, leading both to new forms of Asian regionalism and to policy solutions that take care of regional specific interests (and try to circumvent western hegemony and control). Second, these new forms of Asian globalization are related to Asian counter-visions of development and (sometimes carefully guided) democracy that have sprung up in Southeast Asia, notably in Malaysia, since the early 1990s as the most timely responses of “alternative modernities” to “a world without meaning” (see Laidi, discussed in Chapter 2 below) that had grown tired of imperial concepts of both western hegemonic “democracy” and Soviet authoritarian socialism. Third, these Asian counter-visions of development and political participation are brought together with narratives of space and cultural imperialism, finally leading to a strategic survey of policy options – the axis moves east, development and Islam – beyond the coming years.

Chapter 5 (Southeast Asia and the Middle East) explores the following: relations between the Middle East and Southeast Asia have for many centuries been characterized by a one-sided relationship where the scriptural and religiously dominant Middle East has “enlightened” “syncretistic” Southeast Asia with its oral and lax Sufi and Hindu–Buddhist traditions. Southeast Asian students studying in Cairo have enforced this perception since the nineteenth century – the Islamic resurgence of the 1980s was the most recent to import perceived “Arab” ideas across the continent and into the Lands beyond the Winds. However, recently there has been a tremendous change in this relationship, whereby modernizing discourses on Islam and numerous trade initiatives by the Asian Tiger states like Malaysia and Singapore have started to influence and even dominate emerging dialogues with rather stagnant Middle Eastern partners. Knowledge of Islamic banking, the halal food trade, developmentalism and “evolution instead of revolution” in terms of political contacts has shown new perspectives but also poses new challenges to western policy-makers, who no longer reign undisputedly while South–South relations develop into new bilateral ties and globalized governance. Network analysis of cultural convergence and trade as well as of other themes serves as a tool to understand these shifting identities of Asian modernity.

Chapter 6 (Guyana/Malaysia) discusses aspects of network theory by applying them to events of regime promotion in Guyana and Malaysia, going from the networked survival strategies of both countries after the race riots of 1962 and 1969 to the shared discourses on labour, religion and ethnicity that have closed the ranks of threatened elites and their economic interests. Anti-Chinese and anti-Indian slogans have established a sense of Malay and black African unity (in Guyana under Burnham), that have provided a collective sense of belongingness to the ethnic groups concerned. This has since been translated into networks of solidarity that have evolved through adherence to Islamic movements (OIC) and non-aligned international bodies (Non-Aligned Movement, NAM), fostering networked regime promotion abroad (to echo Owen). Institutional linkages through enhanced bilateral cooperation between Guyana and Malaysia/Indonesia have developed since 1994 and 2007 as the reflection of local personal networks among the Burnham family in the Guyanese government or the triangle of Mahathir Mohamad, Daim Zainuddin and Anwar Ibrahim in the financial politics of Malaysia. Both networks have enhanced regime stability and ethnic loyalty in shared appeals to unity and – sometimes – crony politics.

Chapter 7 (Malaysia/Central Asia) shows that sometimes – unfortunately – networks do not work. Looking at the state of affairs between Malaysia, ASEAN and the newly independent Central Asian states, especially the biggest and most influential such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, shows that at least at the beginning of their official relationship in the 1990s over-arching visions of Islamic brotherhood, of Turkish empire or of shared Asian values failed because of political, economic and ethnic realities. They actually had to fail because of Central Asia’s transitional economy in total chaos after independence, a society divided into clans and an anti-Islamic Soviet legacy, but also because of the local ambitions of ex-communist leaders pursuing different concepts, a developmental Russia-oriented Asia-Europe vision on the part of Kazakh President Nazarbayev and the pseudo-Islamic concept of an Uzbek empire reclaiming Central Asian traditions, history and memories of greatness proposed by Uzbek state leader Karimov. How could a shared vision develop under such circumstances, a vision that in Malaysia’s opinion should have been Islamic, uniting nations as diverse as Bosnia, Malaysia and Kazakhstan in a developed, value-imbued, authority-minded rim of nations that would come together for the common goal of modernization, independence, emancipation from western hegemony and a shared heritage of Islamic historical and cultural values? Briefly touching upon the observations of Carl Schmitt, Niklas Luhmann and Peter Mandaville in brief references to policies of regional space, the re-creation of spatial geographies and non-networked counter-models, this chapter investigates why networks failed, why the Westphalian state in Schmitt’s understanding as a power of all-embracing order prevailed, and why in the early 2000s this very gradually started to change.

Chapter 8 (Central Asia and Asian regionalism) investigates the networked communities of Central and Southeast Asia that have sprung up in recent years. Whether it is the “arc of prosperity” that – as a result of market integration – is developing east of India, comprising countries such as Japan, China and South Korea as well as Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, or the Caliphate state of strict but equally global Islamic adherence, regionalism stands for a shared effort to propel a regional agenda of some kind. Looking at regionalism from this viewpoint, the architects of Asian globalization share a wide variety of agendas which are, considering the huge diversity of ethnic, religious and other Asian denominators of identity, again very much culture-driven. One of them is the economic-cultural visi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• The author
• 1 Introduction: trends, visions and concepts in the developing world between the Middle East, the Silk Road and the Lands beyond the Winds
• 2 New theoretical meanings? Transnationalism, networks and the semi-authoritarian state
• 3 Sufis, traders, seafarers: reconsidering nineteenth-century networks between Nusantara, East Africa and the Arab Peninsula
• 4 Towards the middle path? The tectonic shifts in the Islamic world
• 5 The Asian Tiger on the Nile: knowledge transfer, modernization and bilateral linkages between the Middle East and Southeast Asia
• 6 Race, patronage and the hybrid authoritarian state: Guyana and Malaysia revisited
• 7 The failure to create a networked Islamic space: Malaysia and Central Asia in the 1990s
• 8 The Snow Leopard’s Vision 2030: Central Asia, the Asian Far East, ASEAN and regional cooperation
• 9 Instead of a conclusion: Khilafah, transnational Islamic networks and the Caliphate state in Southeast Asia
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index