Mahathir, Malaysia and Globalisation: Challenging Orthodoxy
Published in Globalisation Volume 4: Issue 2Abstract
Most contemporary writings on globalisation have pointed to the primacy of global forces. They suggest that these global forces are overwhelming and states have no choice but to capitulate in the face of such an onslaught. Of late, a genre of writers, rooted in post-structuralism, have agued that whilst the impulse of globalisation is critical, there are indeed more enriching, interesting, exciting, relevant, reflective analyses emanating from probing the silences of globalisation. As critical and useful as these accounts may be, their analyses centred around the local and everyday may paradoxically be disempowering as all social and cultural forces are now denuded of anything but self-referential context. In this context, politics is both passé and imagined, leaving us no ability to 'speak' or to 'act', only that of explaining. Transposed globally, it leaves global capital tremendous leverage as it seeks and acts on specific sites to feed and replenish itself. This paper accordingly argues that rather than merely 'deconstructing' the world, it is also necessary to provide a critically engaged alternative. In examining Malaysia and its practices, this paper suggests that much useful analytical insights may be learnt from Malaysia's sometimes robust engagements with the west and global forces. The paper argues that a closer study of Malaysia's history and its engagement with the 'west' and globalisation reveals a more nuanced and sophisticated response by the Malaysian state to the exigencies of globalisation. Instead, it has been more considered and involves selectively appropriating 'western' discourses and modernity. In so doing, the Malaysian state has been able to redefine its relationship with globalisation and accorded for itself a degree of autonomy and self-determination enabling it to acquire much symbolic and political capital from its proclamations and posturings. The Malaysian case serves to remind us that states continue to matter despite the seemingly unstoppable force of globalisation and that imaginative and alternative practices and strategies can be crafted within the interstices of global capitalism.
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