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Malaysia’s approach to foreign relations over seven decades has been in some ways both creative and distinctive. This article focusses on how Malaysian foreign policy has been influenced by...

The Najib government continued to consolidate its political hold on Malaysia in 2017. Various factors, including a moderately improved economic situation and a relatively generous 2018 budget, suggested that it had good prospects for winning the next election, to be held at the latest in August 2018. Beyond party politics, however, there were indications of deep change taking place in Malaysian society—deep enough to raise questions about the nation’s identity.

Looking back over the last 30 years, culture as an explanatory factor has been in retreat. Today, however, with the determined reassertion of Islamic values, and an increasingly confident China developing its own international paradigms, the need to investigate cultural and historical specificities is hard to deny. In the Asian region, developments in the South China Sea during 2016 have been especially perplexing for many commentators: International Relations (IR) analysis has come up against a wall of stubborn Chinese and Southeast Asian perspectives. Even some elements in Samuel Huntington ‘civilizations’ approach, widely condemned in the 1990s, today deserve reconsideration – certainly with respect to what Wang Gungwu saw as Huntington's stress on a ‘new language and logic of behaviour’. The common IR analytic framework – highlighting sovereignty, state interests and power (and the balance of power) – needs to be supplemented. Current interest in non-Western IR is promising, especially if it e...

Before considering how best to reposition Indonesia in the world – and I will be looking, in particular, at Indonesia’s current Indo-Pacific initiative - we need to ask how the world itself has been repositioned. The terms of reference for this conference go straight to this second question. They immediately highlight the theme of globalization, noting how it has promoted “growing connectivity among states” and “revolutionized human interaction”. How then has this region been reconfigured over the last decades? Until the mid-20th-century the entire Asian region was either under European colonial rule or strong Western imperial influence. That is how the region was structured – with the great centres of power in London, Paris, The Hague and Washington. After the extraordinary conquests by Japan, which effectively ended the Western imperial project, Asia was quickly drawn into the Cold War. Countries lined up as Communist or Anti-Communist, and some tried to sustain a degree of neutrality or equi-distance. At the end of the Cold War, in the last decade or so of the 20th-century, as is often commented, there was a unipolar moment – an America-dominated world with a sense of globalization not merely being economic, but also a globalization of ideas. One commentator wrote of the ‘end of history’ – the US had won, he said, with its liberal democratic ideology. Communism had been annihilated, and Western liberalism had the ‘wind in its hair’. This said, there were still objections. Dr Mahathir in Malaysia and a number of bright Foreign Ministry intellectuals in Singapore spoke of ‘Asian values’. They said you had to understand Asian values to explain the great economic transformation taking place in Asian countries – and there was also a need to respect Asian values in the political arena, and not just insist that all societies must develop in the same way. The democracy, human rights, and other supposed responsibilities of government which Westerners have tended to advocate, it was argued, are not necessarily universal norms.

Introduction The fact that the world over recent decades has seen a reduction in transaction costs and an increase in flows of goods, services, people and capital, is well established. (1) There is much less agreement, however, about the extent to which deeper economic integration, including increased gains from trade and investment, has brought change to institutional and value systems. At the present time this issue seems especially significant, as a region that had only a few years ago been celebrating its economic and social triumphs now confronts a widespread terrorist movement that invokes aspirations formulated some fourteen centuries ago. Perceptions of the Crisis--grounded in deep-running national aspirations and anxieties--differed from one country to another. A particular contrast, however, exists between United States and Australian experience of the Crisis, on the one hand, and most Asian interpretations on the other. Two longer-term developments seem to have been influenced by perceptions of the Crisis: the first concerns the future prospects of Asian vis-a-vis Asia-Pacific regionalism; and the second is the issue of whether "globalization" is likely to be potent as a concept extending beyond economic change and envisaging the evolution of a "world society". The Crisis The Financial Crisis marked the end of an extraordinary decade of internationally-oriented economic growth throughout developing East Asia. Most developing economies in the region doubled output in the decade to 1996. Growth was steady, and there was growing confidence that it would be sustained over a long period. Sustained growth supported trade and investment liberalization in all East Asian economies. The liberalization proceeded most rapidly in some of the economies that had been most closed to international trade, including China, Indonesia and the Philippines. In each East Asian state trade liberalization and economic growth supported rapid expansion of imports, further improving the environment for the expansion of exports and output through East Asia. These beneficent processes came to a halt in one after another East Asian economy through the Financial Crisis. The shock came first to Thailand, in July 1997, and over the next six months had a major impact throughout peninsular and island Southeast Asia. Through the first half of 1998 it generated deep recession in Korea and Hong Kong. The collapse of output in Thailand, Malaysia and Korea, and most of all Indonesia, was not only large in comparison with the prosperity of the previous decade. It was large by the standards of economic crises in other regions and other times. The reduction in output in Indonesia was greater than in Western Europe during the Great Depression of the 1930s. An economic catastrophe of this dimension inevitably has substantial effects on how political communities view economic reality, and through changes in such perceptions, on ideas about economic policy. The deep economic depression centred in Victoria in Australia in the 1890s, for instance, played a major role in shaping the economic policies of the Australian Federation in the early decades of the twentieth century. The approaches to trade protection and intervention in the labour market that were established in the wake of the 1890s Depression cast a shadow right through the twentieth century. The Great Depression of the 1930s in the United States marked the beginning of a "liberal" supremacy surviving into the 1980s and to some extent today, in which government expenditure on social welfare and intervention in market processes became much more prominent. In Western Europe, the stresses of the 1930s Depression laid the ideological groundwork for the welfare state in the United Kingdom and for Nazism in Germany. At the time of the Asian Crisis, Ross Garnaut commented that the largest long-term economic effects of the Crisis would be through its effects on ideas about policy. …

Malaysia Palace, political party and power: A story of the socio-political development of Malay kingship By KOBKUA SUWANNATHAT-PIAN Singapore: NUS Press, 2011. Pp. xxiv + 447. Appendices, Illustrations, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463412000227 In this new and stimulating survey of monarchy in Malaysia, Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian--the author of a fine study of Thai-Malay relations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (1988) and a widely-cited book on the Thai monarchy (2003)--writes of a current 'socio-political revival' of 'Malay kingship' (p. xxii). The 'proactive and participating constitutional rulers' of today, she says, are a 'new phase in the history of Malay kingship' (p. 391). Since Prime Minister Mahathir left office in 2003, the Rulers have claimed 'a royal discretionary power' that is a 'total rejection of the Westminster-style constitutional monarch'. According to Kobkua, the Rulers are seeking 'another type of constitutional monarchy'--one that is 'akin to the concept and practice ... perfected in Thailand' (p. 408). These observations will come as a surprise to many around the world who have taken an interest in Malaysian matters. Academics have buried the Malaysian monarchy time and again over the years. When the Federal Parliament 'abolished the royal immunity from suit' in 1993, for instance, the legal scholar Andrew Harding judged that 'the veil of mystique which has always surrounded royalty in Malaysia' was 'drawn aside', and that the 'forces of populism' had 'demonstrated amply their superiority to the forces of feudalism'. He then proceeded to proclaim 'the declining position of the Rulers in the Malaysian polity'. Kobkua's work is an ambitious survey, reaching back briefly to precolonial times. In discussing the British period, it makes useful comparisons between the Federated and Unfederated Malay States and criticises Simon Smith's impressive British relations with the Malay rulers from decentralization to Malayan independence: 1930-1957 (1995) for not giving enough stress to the damage caused by the Japanese Occupation. In the Occupation, Kokbua argues, the Japanese 'reduced the Rulers' royal status to that of commoners, no different from their erstwhile subjects ...'. She conjectures that it would have been 'a cultural and political shocking experience' for the 'average Malay' to witness 'his Ruler performing self-demeaning exercises such as bowing in the direction of the Imperial palace as a mark of homage to the Emperor' (p. 109). Her account of the Malayan Union period and the lead-up to Independence contains a good deal of interesting material on the Rulers' role, and will supplement the writings of Sopiee, Stockwell, Smith, Fernando, Lau and others. The account of recent royal developments, however, is likely to attract most interest--and contains particularly useful detail on the views of the Rulers of Perak and Selangor, and the Raja Muda of Perak. The main weakness of the book arises from poor editing--which is unexpected, given the generally high standard of NUS Press. …

The proverbial “man from Mars” would see immediately the fundamental importance of ASEAN to Australia. This is the region of Asia geographically closest to Australia—a region of growing states, with economies no longer small by Australian standards; a region offering great economic opportunities, but also where Australia must work hard to negotiate the defense, immigration, quarantine, policing, and other border issues that are considered of fundamental importance to the Australian national community. Today Southeast Asia is beginning to be viewed as the priority region by Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK)—the prime minister of Japan visited every ASEAN capital in 2013—and is taken increasingly seriously by the United States. Yet it might be argued that no external country has a larger stake in this region than Australia. The problem is that Australians—with a few notable exceptions—do not see things in these terms, and nor do many Southeast Asians. The chapters in this book provide not only an overview of Australia-ASEAN relations, detailing the history and throwing light on the breadth of our interactions with the region, but also help us to appreciate how and why the Australia-ASEAN relationship has been neglected.

This memorial essay pays tribute to John Legge’s academic career as a student and educator (especially his time at Monash and including a sabbatical at Cornell). It also touches on his interests, personal life, political and civic positions, and writings. Legge’s two best known works on Indonesia are a biography of Indonesia’s founding statesman, Sukarno (); and a highly innovative general history (). The general history is remarkable in bringing together Legge’s desire to understand Indonesia, especially the historical processes that shaped the country, with his commitment to making theoretical advances in the discipline of history. Indonesia is an achievement in interdisciplinary collaboration, with the historian Legge reaching out to a range of social scientists. A bibliography of his major works is included as well as a list of publications about Legge.

Islam is often seen as playing only a minor role in pre-colonial Malay political life. J. M. Gullick, for instance, in his seminal work Indigenous political systems of Western Malaya concludes that Islam “was not to any significant extent a ‘state religion’”. The “chaplains of the more devout Sultans and chiefs”, he explains, “never attained any collective importance in the political system owing to the lack of organization”; there were “no Kathis (Muslim judges and registrars) until the era of British protection”; and no evidence exists that “Islamic legal doctrine” was “effective law”?

We are all accustomed to regard the music for the Latin rites of the Catholic Church as a glorious part (for at least seven centuries the main part) of the heritage of Western music. So of course, it is. But if its development be examined from the pastoral aspect, if we ask how far this music has assisted the majority of worshippers in understanding and participating in the liturgy as ‘the outstanding means whereby the faithful may express in their lives and manifest to others the mystery and the real nature of the true Church’, a very different picture results. To understand the need for changes in liturgical music today and the reasons why it has taken so long for this need to be openly admitted and changes officially sanctioned, requires a brief historical introduction.