Globalization and Social Transformation in the Asia-Pacific

The Australian and Malayasian Experience

C. Tazreiter, S. Tham, C. Tazreiter, S. Tham

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137298379
• eBook ISBN: 9781137298386
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The contributors engage with a range of critical and contemporary issues of two key societies in the Asia-Pacific region, Australia and Malaysia. These include foreign policy and national security; multiculturalism and citizenship; the middle class; global governance; migrants and international students.

1

Globalization as Localized Experience, Adaptation and Resistance: An Introduction

Claudia Tazreiter and Siew Yean Tham

As the Asia-Pacific region develops in economic strength and influence in the 21^st century, a deeper understanding of the differences and commonalities among the countries of this region is needed. Australia and Malaysia share the Asia-Pacific region with powerful neighbours such as China and Indonesia, as well as small fledgling democracies such as Timor Leste. Australia and Malaysia also share similar histories as colonies of Britain that have transformed over time into independent and economically prosperous nation-states. Both countries have a similar population size and are multi-ethnic, culturally diverse societies. The two countries also demonstrate significant divergence both in terms of the formal aspects of the political process and the institutionalization of democratic governance as well as in the type of political culture manifest in both societies.

Australia is a country of enormous land mass, with a small population of 22.7 million. It is a highly developed, wealthy country with an average annual income of AUD55,000 in 2012. Immigration has been a key feature of Australian nation-building and prosperity, with 25 per cent of Australia’s population foreign born, including 0.6 per cent Malaysian-born. It is a country with a liberal democratic political history and a significant involvement in the institutionalization of international legal norms and intergovernmental cooperation. Australia is a founding member of the UN and is the 12^th largest contributor to the UN regular and peacekeeping budgets. Over the last five years Australia has doubled its aid budget, much of which is targeted to the Asia-Pacific region.

As an immigrant nation, Australia has transformed itself through waves of planned migrant arrivals. Indeed, nation-building in the Australian context is thoroughly immigration-led. In the early years of Australia’s federation after 1901, immigration was based on discriminatory and highly racialized selection processes. Today, Australia is officially committed to multiculturalism, undergirded by legal norms of anti-discrimination – though as demonstrated by Geoffrey Levey in this volume, this commitment has faltered at various points in the nation’s history.

In December 1983 the exchange rate was floated for the first time, a measure that moved control of the currency away from the Federal Reserve Bank and opened the Australian economy to globalized competition and market forces. Though the welfare state remained in place – never as strong as in the social democratic countries of Western Europe – Australia moved steadily toward neoliberal economic and social policy settings, appropriating aspects of Reaganomics and Thatcherite austerity and ‘reform’ including privatization of public utilities, education, health and other service provision; cuts to public service and bureaucracies in favour of hiring private consulting firms and tax cuts designed to hand responsibility back to citizens.

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 was countered in Australia by a post-neoliberal approach, characterized by a Keynesian style government intervention to stimulate the local economy through cash payments to individuals and households. Together with a more regulated banking sector than those of Europe and North America, Australia withstood the GFC through the intervention of the state.

It was during the Keating government, 1991–1996, that Australia squarely began to promote itself in the region as an Asian nation. At the end of 1995, Keating launched the Australia-Malaysia Society and in January 1996 he made an official visit to Malaysia. The period of the Keating government also marked some important milestones in relation to the recognition of the injustices of the colonial period. The Native Title Act was passed in 1993 in response to the High Courts decision in Mabo v Queensland. This was the first national recognition of Indigenous occupation and title to land in Australian legislation. In contrast, the Keating government also introduced mandatory detention for asylum-seekers with bi-partisan support in 1992 beginning an era of unprecedented securitization of refugees which continues today in the even more punitive form of off-shore processing, explored in detail by Bartolomei and Pittaway in this volume.

In September 2011, Prime Minister Gillard commissioned a White Paper on the topic ‘Australia in the Asian Century’, designed to examine past and future links with countries in Asia. Australia already has strong economic ties with the Asian region and the Australian government has been at pains to stress the unprecedented transformations taking place in the region and sees itself playing an important role as a trading partner, in diplomatic exchanges and in strengthening institutional arrangements across the region.

Malaysia is a small, open, upper-middle-income country with a population of 29 million and a per capita income of USD9,575 as of 2011. A multi-ethnic society with three major ethnic groups, comprising Malays, Chinese and Indians, and many indigenous sub-groups, Malaysia has successfully managed its diversity and maintained inter-ethnic harmony since the 1969 inter-ethnic riots. Some authors (Abdul Rahman, 2006; Loh, 2010) contend that while inter-ethnic tensions and conflicts continue to occur, they are of a smaller scale and magnitude compared to the 1969 riots. Such a situation has been described by Malaysia’s distinguished Professor Shamsul (The Star, 22 May 2008) as a state of stable tension. Prior to the onset of the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC), the relative inter-ethnic harmony can be attributed in part to the positive outcomes of the affirmative policies of the state, which had reduced poverty and inter-ethnic disparities in income as well as the creation of a Malay middle class, thereby making this class of people more multi-ethnic. However, the crisis exposed the use of the same policies has also led to state patronage, cronyism and corruption in the country.

Although Islam is the official religion of Malaysia, the constitution provides for different religions to be practiced. When former Prime Minister Mahathir, for political purposes, announced in October 2001 that Malaysia was an Islamic state, this declaration was highly contested by various quarters who maintained that Malaysia was a secular state based on the constitution of the country. Moreover, there are also contestations between the state’s version of Islam and other interpretations of Islam as propagated by different groups (Ahmad Fauzi, 2010). The inter-connectedness of ethnic and religious issues has increased the complexity in analysing the social dynamics in this country. Malaysia’s political system has been characterized as ‘quasi-democratic’, ‘semi-democratic’ and ‘competitive authoritarian’ (Brown et al., 2004 and see Abdul Rahman in this volume), while its economic development is charted by a developmental state, where state intervention is pervasive.

As a small trading nation, Malaysia has to engage with globalization, albeit selectively. There is an active use of international capital and labour to produce economic goods for domestic as well as international consumption. Nonetheless, despite the state’s support for neoliberal economic globalization, the state leaders also at the same time resisted other dimensions of globalization. For example, former Prime Minister, Mahathir, decried what he deemed to be western notions of democracy, rights and individualism, when faced with increasing global criticisms of his regime in human rights record (Wong, 1999; Thompson, 2001; Vidhu, 2002). Instead, he asserted that ‘Asian values’ or values based on communitarian ideals of harmony and consensus, do not support these notions. Consequently, he implemented an authoritarian style of governance that he claimed was better suited for countries with multi-ethnic and multi-religious groups.

Exposures to the vicissitudes of globalization have also changed some of the state’s support for globalization. Mahathir, in particular, took on an anti-globalization stance as the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) unfolded in 1997 and 1998, causing economic havoc to the previous ten years of strong economic growth under his regime. Globalization is instead officially viewed as a trap for developing nations as it benefitted the transnational companies and financial institutions of the developed world. Mahathir argued that developing countries, like Malaysia, have therefore to be vigilant against globalization and choose their own policies rather than the policies designed on their behalf by global institutions or other governments (Mahathir, 2002). However, despite the change in stance and the imposition of capital controls in 1998 as part of the economic recovery measures, Malaysia continued to foster greater integration with the world through trade, capital as well as labour flows while striving to maintain some of its policy space.

Malaysia is an interesting case to study due to its inextricable ties with economic globalization (Nelson et al., 2008). According to the KOF (Konjunkturforschungsstelle [business cycle research institute]) Swiss Economic Institute index of globalization,¹ as of 2012, Malaysia is ranked 30 out of 208 countries for economic globalization. This places Malaysia ahead of Australia which is ranked 32. At the same time, it also tries to maintain its autonomy in terms of policy space by managing globalization so as to ensure that the gains from globalization are captured by the country (Nelson et al., 2008). In other words, the state does not resist nor oppose globalization, rather it takes a position of ‘making globalization work’ as proposed and promoted by Stiglitz (2006). The struggles in Malaysia in balancing the impetus for economic growth and exposure to global markets with efforts to seek social justice and rights offer interesting lessons for other developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region, especially since these countries are also engaged with neoliberal globalization while at the same time many have yet to establish democratic political systems and a consistent approach to questions of human rights.

Globalization, social transformations and the local

Globalization is a much-debated phenomenon and set of processes, understood both as a modern process, as well as one with historical antecedents and continuities with past eras (Robertson, 1995; Arrighi, 1994). Some aspects of contemporary globalization and the transformations resulting from it are unique to the late-modern period. New technologies have penetrated all spheres of human activity and contributed to the shrinking of space and time in an unprecedented way. This has allowed instantaneous action and reaction to the fluctuations of markets, increased transparency into political movements, protest and change in far-off parts of the world, marking complex relationships between power and powerlessness such as the uprisings in the Arab world that began in late 2010 (Sassen, 2011). We can also see the penetration of values such as human rights as global values as a feature of contemporary globalization with wide-ranging impacts on inequalities and human dignity.

Dramatic rescaling of modes of governance and of identity have taken place in the post-WWII era and at an even greater pace and scale in the post-Cold War era. The spheres of migration, human rights and citizenship for instance, indicate a dramatic rescaling of governance as well as changes in the politics of identity and belonging as nation-states struggle to cope with the range and complexity of challenges to both entitlements and forms of recognition. The circulation of ideas, knowledge and people are central to the globalized economy in meeting the appetites of capital, yet also result in perhaps unintended consequences. First, inequalities are increasingly visible not merely within but between societies and second, the naturalized divisions between societies of culture and belief held in check by the nation are corrodible, porous and hybrid.

Many of the transformations associated with globalization are taking place inside the nation-state. Myriad ‘micro-processes’ constitute fundamental transformations experienced in daily life as processes that occur in local settings through for instance, the de-nationalization of capital, of policies and of political subjectivities, where loyalties are no longer tied primarily to nation, place and a singular national identity (Sassen, 2006). Others have characterized this change as the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, an instrumentalized appropriation of some of the values of justice-oriented struggles without ensuring the institutional reform required for effective change to redress injustice (Fraser, 2009; Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005).

From the divergent analytical vantage-points adopted by the authors in this volume, globalization is not perceived as a monolithic unstoppable force. Rather, it is understood as a complex set of processes and phenomena created and steered by human hands. The chapters in this volume contribute to nuanced understandings of the social transformations experienced through both macro-historical processes that connect and are experienced across nation-states. They also examine the micro changes at the level of everyday life where the distinctions of place and culture are marked by hybridization and unique forms that often defy the conformity of political and cultural forms described by some critics of globalization as ‘McDonalization’ (Ritzer, 2000). Rather than engaging with such well established debates, the book offers perspectives on globalized processes that both transcend the bounded nation-state as well as identifying and analysing those processes that emerge specifically through sub-national, localized processes and in turn influence regionalized approaches to change.

In Chapter 2 Reilly highlights the role of both Australia and Malaysia in developing the evolving regional architecture of governance in East Asia. In doing so, Reilly critiques the competing priorities of regionalism and security within the frame of liberal democracy as both concepts and as empirical processes. Reilly sketches a political history that indicates both Australia’s leading role in promoting the development of democracy in Asia as well as the sensitivity around issues of democratization and the promotion of human rights in the region.

K.S. Nathan illustrates that regionalism differs in approach as regional stability is viewed as necessary for reinforcing regime stability in the Malaysian case in Chapter 3. From the perspective of ‘development as security’, the state embraces neoliberal globalization in order to produce stability through increasing economic prosperity. The state is also cognizant of the negative effects of unfettered globalization and hence resorts to regional cooperation for the common good of security, welfare and empowerment in the region, which then has a stabilizing effect for the country. This commitment is reflected in the high priority given to regionalism, first at the ASEAN level, then at the East Asian level.

The culture of modernity, or late modernity, embodies the excesses and harms of unfettered globalizing forces, sometimes understood as neoliberal globalization, as well as providing the context or vehicle for the expansion of human rights values. Partly in response to the large-scale inequalities that are both driven by, and revealed through global processes, ‘rights-based’ approaches to human need and ‘development’ have emerged as an aspect of cosmopolitan globalization. These concerns are developed in discussions of the transformations of the middle class; of citizenship and belonging; and the treatment of migrants who are categorized unauthorized and unwanted.

Pusey, in his study of the Australian middle cl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1: Globalization as Localized Experience, Adaptation and Resistance: An Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Index