Mahathir's Faded Vision

What would a Malaysia without Mahathir be?

Did Asiaweek deliberately select a photograph that portrayed an ‘old’ Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad looking a bit of an ‘idiot’?

Was the ‘Malay Action Front’, which was hastily assembled to attack his foes, so confused as to turn upon his leadership instead?


Now that is hegemony.
It was often all the more powerful for being so intensely personal because of Mahathir’s political longevity, domineering conduct, and the relative obscurity of his allies and subordinates.

Mahathir Era Ends
If one digs deeply enough, however, the assumed solidity of Mahathir’s domination of the political system is somewhat illusory. The superficial evidence of the cracks in the domination is already visible.

Outside UMNO, critical segments of the Malay community – civil servants, students and academicians – don’t rally to his ‘Malay unity’ cause. The marginal Gabungan Pelajar-pelajar Melayu Semenanjung (whose patron he is) is pro-Mahathir, while ‘pro-opposition’ students have swept the campus elections.

The truth is, the ‘Mahathir era’ is over, bar the weeping, cheering and jeering that will undoubtedly be heard the minute the man goes.

The era ended somewhere between the financial crisis of July 1997 and the political crisis of Anwar’s sacking in September 1998. Only a tentative economic recovery and BN’s flawed victory in the 1999 general election maintained the fiction of its prolongation.

This Thing Called Mahathirism
What was this so-called ‘Mahathir era’ about anyway?

Looking back, it was a time of restless ambition exemplified by Mahathir’s programme of heavy industrialisation. The ambition was driven by Malay nationalism and Malaysian capitalism which coupled to conceive Malaysia Incorporated and privatisation.

The beginnings of the era were charged with the energy of the ‘2Ms’ and sounded noble enough: Reform the bureaucracy! Modernise the economy! Change the Malays!

Its spiritual core was to be built around a liberal ‘assimilation of Islamic values’. At any rate they were values which celebrated learning, promoted thrift and dignified labour – the elements of an ‘Eastern work ethic’ which Mahathir wanted to impose upon Malaysian society.

Its most exalted target was the creation of a unified nation, Bangsa Malaysia, which would be led by the Melayu Baru – a corps of ‘new Malay’ capitalists and professionals – to undertake a conquest of foreign markets.

What Have We Today?
Today no one wants to talk of the bersih, cekap dan amanah (‘clean, efficient and trustworthy’) initiatives of the early Mahathir administration or the austerity measures of Daim Zainuddin’s first ministry. Instead the talk is all about bailouts, cronyism, and re-nationalisation: witness the public reactions to the recent episodes involving IWK, MAS, PUTRA, STAR, Bakun HEP, and Time dot Com.

The ‘assimilation of Islamic values’ was once posed quite attractively in a liberal and universalistic code. Now it would appear quite hollow against the strident idiom of the strongest Islamic opposition ever.

There was a time when Mahathir wanted to move a nation with a synergistic blend of a purposeful leadership and popular mobilisation. Presently any reference to his old slogan, kepimpinan melalui teladan (‘leadership by example’), can only invite public scorn while the most sustained popular mobilisation is anti-regime.

Mahathir no longer offers anything more rousing than a shrill call to defend Malay ‘special rights’, the constitutional position of the Malay rulers, and Islam.

Ever since UMNO suffered its unprecedented losses in the November 1999 election, he’s behaved as if he’s reliving his personal defeat in the 1969 election. His own unifying refrain of Bangsa Malaysia has been drowned out by the divisive strains of ‘Malay unity’.

Can there be a surer sign that the famed Mahathirist vision is exhausted?

No Room for Complacency
This summary depiction of a fervent opening phase of the Mahathir era and its flaccid end isn’t intended to delight those who seek to reform Malaysian political life and its public institutions. If it does, it can only mean that they misunderstand or underestimate the impact of the changes Malaysian society underwent during a critical middle phase.

The changes were not uniformly good or fair. Great benefits for some were purchased at the expense of others.

NEP’s two-pronged objectives of ‘poverty eradication irrespective of race’ and ‘restructuring society to abolish the identification of race with occupation’ were all too frequently reduced to one prong – restructuring.

And restructuring progressively became ‘less than one’ prong. It was increasingly used to justify a concentration of wealth among select groups of Malay businesses. This happened under Malaysia Inc., privatisation and the politicisation of business especially via UMNO’s massive penetration of the corporate world.

Despite this, there were several years of high growth and ‘trickle down’ which raised the general level of prosperity and visibly democratized consumption. At its peak, in the early 1990s, the Mahathir era provided economic and reasonably popular solutions to many previously intractable problems of education, language and culture.

Arguably, only the most marginalised citizens and a new underclass of migrant labour didn’t experience a gain in prosperity, a sense of a more unified society, and pride in Malaysia’s place in the world.

Political memories being short, it’s easy just six years after BN’s sweep of the 1995 election, to forget that many Malaysians came to possess a stake in the realization of Mahathir’s Vision 2020..

Turning Inwards
Without more than the support of cronies, Mahathir’s regime would have been blown away by the crises of July 1997 and September 1998 – the way the Indonesian Reformasi swept Suharto into oblivion.

At its clearest, from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, Mahathir’s vision took in the problems of Malaysian society, factored in global changes, and opted for outward-gazing solutions.

But the East Asian debacle led Mahathir, his political allies, and his corporate dependents to turn sharply inwards – economically by using capital controls, currency peg, and pump priming, and politically by resorting to repression and reverting to racial gamesmanship, beginning with the Anwar affair.

The political turn has been well resisted by a broad segment of the population rallying around BA and its NGO allies to offer the only credible bulwark against further erosion of constitutional government and escalation of interethnic politics.

However, no comparably significant alternative direction has been set for the economy which must occupy a central role in any future reshaping of Malaysian society – just as it did during the NEP years.

Dominant Vision
It’s true that Mahathir’s crisis management in 1998 helped to avert an Indonesian-styled collapse in Malaysia and bought time for economic reorganisation. His resistance to the market fundamentalism of mobile capital and global fund managers also had a crucial point.

But the point pales beside Mahathir’s waste of pre-July 1997 chances to extend and deepen social justice when he had the means to do so. After that, his foremost priorities were to rescue sinking conglomerates at great public cost and without penalty to their helmsmen. These measures showed Mahathir to be captive to the corporate creatures he’d helped to create.

That sums up the end of a dominant vision.

Dangers Ahead
If I’ve painted a bleak picture, it’s not just to capture a public mood that isn’t upbeat. It’s also to caution that Mahathir’s departure alone will not remove all that’s objectionable about Malaysian politics, particularly of these past three years.

Mahathirism’s end doesn’t necessarily promise a better Malaysia when in fact domestic and global conditions aren’t getting rosier.

At home, our new multiethnic elites – those who rule the corporate roost – are both arrogant and insecure.

They arrogantly consider it their birthright to profit from national resources when times are good, and, when times turn bad, to convert their private losses into public liabilities. They are insecure vis-à-vis the international market since, unable to sustain any serious level of global competitiveness, they depend upon their ‘cables’ of state protection.

Abroad, the new American presidency is avowedly warlike. It’s warmongers – a.k.a. the policy-makers of the military-industrial complex – are preparing strategic ‘Star Wars’ scenarios in which Asia is recast as the USA’s future cockpit. The USA unilaterally dumps the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

The major economies in the East and West are headed for recession. The imperialism of the global market has grown more extensive. The power of supranational institutions and multilateral agreements shrinks the space for small economies.

A New Pathway to Development
More than ever before, Malaysian society requires a new pathway to development.

The new pathway must avoid the pitfalls of an economic nationalism that is populist in rhetoric and elitist in practice. That kind of narrow-minded economic nationalism has long favoured deals with ‘foreign investment, technology and partners’ so long as the wheeling-dealing profits domestic elites.

Likewise there can’t be a naïve embrace of the global market. Those who shun the abuses of state intervention won’t find solace in the religion of the market: hardly anything from Malaysia’s post-colonial record of achievement can be credited to a ‘free market’.

An unfettered global market, which has ‘no heart, soul, conscience, homeland’, will merely subordinate the lives, liberties and happiness of communities to the pursuit of profit.

If there is to be an alternative pathway, it won’t arise from the thoughts of one or another leader of supposed genius; as it were, a ‘God’s gift to Malaysia’, as a flatterer once described Mahathir. Nor will the alternative be a ready-made blueprint inspired by any historical example or existing model.

The alternative can only be the product of broad democratic struggles for social justice that genuinely advance the long-term welfare of the vast majority of Malaysia’s citizens and those who labour within its borders.

Only such a social and political innovation can lead us out of the present impasse of being trapped between the end of a dominant vision and the absence of an alternative.

As long as the impasse remains, the dangers of political retrogression abound. And they’re ironically bound up with the issue of Mahathir’s exit!

Back to His Past
Mahathir is a complex man, vain enough to have had contempt for his opponents. He has repeatedly proven the strength of his convictions against staunch opposition.

In 1986 he ‘held the NEP in abeyance’. In 1998 he imposed capital controls. On another occasion, he was the only Muslim politician to object publicly to proposed legislation that would punish apostasy in Islam.

It is that kind of courage, including a readiness to change ‘the rules of the game’ when one’s back is up against the wall, that has helped Mahathir to stay in power for so long.

Today Mahathir’s back is truly up against the wall and time’s running out since his call for ‘Malay unity’ has been counter-productive.

Those who think about reshaping the future of Malaysia should be ready to go beyond Mahathir.
Dr Khoo Boo Teik
Aliran