Search

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...

In this chapter, Anthony Milner seeks to define the contribution of Shaharil Talib to the study of pre-modern Malay political systems. His essay outlines the extraordinary range of analytical approaches employed over the years up to Shaharil’s time. Beginning with the work of Thomas Stamford Raffles and John Crawfurd two centuries ago, then considering such later scholar-officials as Hugh Clifford and Richard Winstedt, and finally noting the influence of different anthropological and Marxist-influenced perspectives developed in the post-colonial period, the chapter then examines the major study on Terengganu, which Shaharil published. Milner’s main focus is on the significant shifts and contests in the historiography of pre-colonial Malay societies, seeking to show in particular where Shaharil’s endeavours can be appropriately positioned. In Milner’s view, Shaharil was innovatory in adopting a diachronic approach—portraying the Malay states as societies in motion, and focusing on elite strategies, which Shaharil sees as driven by a quest for wealth. Milner notes that Shaharil’s conclusions, and the interpretive framework which he employed, have provoked scholarly debate—and this, Milner says, underlines the fact that Shaharil produced a classic work in the field of Malay history.

This article is a revised and expanded version of the author’s keynote address for the inaugural International Conference on Politics and International Studies (ICPIS) 2018, held in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia. The title reflects the official theme of the said scholarly congregation, which deliberates on the contested notions of globalisation and the phenomenon’s related outcomes, including its much touted hegemonic, universal liberal qualities, which have elicited a backlash that has seen the revival of nationalism and identity politics during the last few decades. That globalisation has arrived at a crossroads and the thought of what might lie ahead is what this paper seeks to ponder, through the prism and critique of both recent as well as older works by the likes of Francis Fukuyama, Charles Taylor, Wang Gungwu and Samuel P. Huntington. More specifically, it critically explores the evolution and progress of globalisation from both historical and international relations (IR) perspectives, explicating watershed eras in the long cycle of modern international history that had as much facilitated as hindered the realisation of a universal liberal consensus, or liberal triumph. Although concluding that globalisation has been stopped in its tracks, the article nevertheless, expresses concerns regarding the limitations of Western-oriented IR as a discipline in comprehensively grasping the complexities of post-globalisation dynamics shaped by cultural-ideational specificities, not to mention, the fallacy of overemphasising on “identity politics” as a “master concept” in explaining all that is happening in contemporary world politics. Instead, it contends on the need to review existing analytical frameworks, while exploring new “logics” in the quest to construct new paradigms to help make sense of a post-globalisation, post-liberal, probably post-Western era.

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...

In 2016 Prime Minister Najib overcame challenges that many predicted would destroy him. The crisis, however, has helped to deepen many of the fault lines in Malaysian politics and society, and to promote public apprehension. Much will now depend on the resilience of the country’s institutions and economy.

Much analysis of Asian regional relations and institutions is written in an historical and cultural vacuum. The impression is often given that security or economic arrangements are comparable with physical structures — creations of engineers rather than social scientists (or even architects). The writings of Amitav Acharya, now Professor of International Affairs at American University in Washington, DC, are a distinguished exception. Already the author of major books on security architecture and community identity in Southeast Asia – including hisConstructing a Community in Southeast Asia, which has just come out in a new edition – Acharya has produced a careful study of the diffusion of security ideas and norms in the Asian region, particularly Southeast Asia. He concentrates in particular on the establishing in Asia of the norm of ‘cooperative security’ (as against ‘common security’) and the institution of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). It is a study – dealing especially with the last half century or so – which draws not just on the historical record of Southeast Asia but also on the theoretical insights of historians of that region. Acharya is genuine in his cross-disciplinary endeavour, and, in my view, has developed a methodology that invites a response from historians as well as practitioners in his own field of security studies.

This article critically reviews the literature on Track 2 security dialogue in the Asia‐Pacific and suggests a number of possible avenues for further research. From almost a standing start, Track 2 security dialogue in this part of the world has burgeoned over the past decade and a half. As these institutions and activities have grown, so too has a body of scholarship grown around them which has striven to stay abreast of them and – at least in the case of some of the more prominent second track institutions and activities – to evaluate their influence and effectiveness. Just as viable second track processes must constantly adapt in response to changes in the regional and global security environment, however, this article contends that the scholarship on Track 2 security dialogue needs now to evolve beyond its heavy emphasis upon on the “success” of these institutions and activities. While this criterion remains vital, the article argues that greater analytical attention should also be given to d...

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.

In 1872 the colonies of Australia were connected to the British imperial cable network and by the time of Federation England was 100 minutes away from Australia, and 80 minutes from China. Although these technological developments made the world smaller, the new nation communicated with Asia and the Pacific region through the British network. This imperial arrangement was symbolic of a general pattern that continued well into the twentieth century. Positioned within the British and then the US sphere, a full Australian engagement with the Asian region was slow. There were individuals who sought to build a specifically Australian relationship with the countries of Asia, especially in periods of heightened regional consciousness. The mid-1930s – with the world economic crisis and the continued rise of Japan – was one such period. The years immediately following World War 2 constituted another. A third occurred in the late 1980s, when the scale of Northeast Asia's economic potential became apparent. For most of the twentieth century, however, Australians who were concerned about the wider world concentrated on their imperial relationships. Richard Casey, a future Minister of External Affairs, observed in 1928 that information about Asia was ‘vague, muddled and defective’. Even when faced with the Japanese threat in the 1930s, there was little community interest in Asian affairs, and a lack of interest in foreign relations generally. Although Australian universities created specialist expertise on the Asian region in the second half of the twentieth century, this seldom reached mainstream Australia. Cultural awareness was also limited. Those Australian artists who decided to draw inspiration from Asia tended to do so via Europe: ‘they travelled half-way round the world to learn from Europeans about art that had originated in their own hemisphere’. When Australians did reflect on their country's Asian context, they inclined to anxiety: a settler nation with a small population seemed at risk. Such is the dominant narrative of Australia's regional relations in the twentieth century. Australian foreign policy, it is true, developed a regional as well as an imperial dimension.

(1999). Approaching Asia, and Asian studies, in Australia. Asian Studies Review: Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 193-203.