Related to the uncertain character of Malay identity, there existed
the problem of establishing the terms of interracial engagement in
the multiracial, post-colonial state. (At the time, of Malaysia's
population of around ten million, 56 percent were Malays, 34 percent
Chinese, and 10 percent Indian.) Between 1955 and 1969, this meant an
electoral "alliance" between UMNO, the Malay Chinese Association and
the Malay Indian Congress. This coalition of ethnic elites presided
uncertainly over a friable community. The arrangement initially
provided for the political dominance of Malay aristocrats, epitomized
by post-independence Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman, whose urbane
style afforded considerable latitude for Chinese economic influence.
But the alliance fell apart in the course of the 1960s, and the fear
that Chinese economic power might translate into political domination
prompted Singapore's expulsion from the Federation in 1965.
Subsequently, in the wake of elections that saw UMNO's parliamentary
dominance threatened, serious interracial riots involving hundreds of
deaths erupted in Kuala Lumpur in May 1969.

The events of May 1969 represented the year zero of the new state.
Subsequently, official state ideology animadverted against
"communalism." To reinforce this, UMNO altered the constitution,
"removing issues considered sensitive from public discourse", and
redrew electoral boundaries in favor of rural, ethnic Malay
constituencies. The "consociational" contract was renegotiated to
facilitate increased Malay economic participation. After a period of
emergency rule, Malaysia's second prime minister, Tun Razak,
announced a New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1972 that defined the terms
of the new contract. Henceforth, the government actively engaged in
economic management to ensure that bumiputeras (sons of the soil)
directly participated in and benefited from economic growth.

The renegotiated social contract was, moreover, extended to include
the offshore states of Sabah and Sarawak. The evolving understanding
that the native peoples of East Malaysia shared a common identity
with the native Malays, which distinguished them from the
non-indigenous, urbanized Chinese, facilitated this development.
UMNO's capacity to dominate a new multi-ethnic Barisan Nasional
(National Front) coalition in the Malay interest, maintain a
two-thirds majority in the federal parliament, and, without quite the
same urgency, dominate the state assemblies of the peninsula and East
Malaysia was subsequently central to political stability. As Mahathir
caustically observed in 1971, Malaysia's internal politics were
"racial politics" and its evolving democracy a limited and
elite-guided one "to ensure that the mutually antagonistic races of
Malaysia will not clash."

The Doctor's Prescription

On the basis of this revised contract, Malaysia's post-colonial
elite, unlike that of several of its Southeast Asian neighbors,
sustained economic growth with equity and maintained political
stability without undue recourse to political violence or
"extrajudicial killing." Given the inauspicious conditions that
shaped the emergence of Malaysia, it was an impressive achievement on
the part of UMNO that between 1969 and 1998 Malaysia was transformed
from a commodity-based colonial economy of 10 million people into an
urbanized manufacturing economy of 22 million with a per capita GDP
of $5,000. In the process, the incursion of the party into economic,
social and political engineering facilitated both a concentration and
centralization of power, as well as an ideological understanding of
the state as an incorporated enterprise association.

The deliberate construction of a "nation incorporated" particularly
appealed to Malaysia's fourth prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad. Given
the Malay conception of power and the need for unswerving loyalty,
the political ideology of contemporary Malaysia is largely reducible
to the personality of its leader. Mahathir is a self-proclaimed "man
in a hurry" who brooks no interference with the realization of his
visions. Uncharacteristically for a Malay ruler, he is a self-made
man who avoids the elaborate courtesies that elsewhere define Malay
social and political etiquette. The son of a Kelantan schoolmaster of
Indian Islamic extraction and a Malay mother, Mahathir apparently
developed early on an anxiety about identity, an acute sensitivity to
the humiliation of subjection (particularly the colonial variety),
and a consuming desire to build a new, self-confident Malay released
from feudal tutelage and adapted to the needs of a rational modernity.

His involvement in nationalist politics dates from the colonial era,
when as an unassuming medical student in Singapore he compiled
pseudonymous articles for the Malay press. Indeed, a surgical
approach to political problems, combined with anxiety about his own
miscegenated provenance and the need to overcome Malay backwardness,
seems to constitute the psychological template through which Mahathir
assesses such problems. He considers politics

"a good profession for people with medical training. Doctors go
through the process of observing a patient, recording his or her
medical history, then you make a physical examination, do lab tests
and finally arrive at a diagnosis. The process is basically the same
in politics."

Medical science also contributed a distinctively eugenic and Social
Darwinian flavor to his world-view. As early as 1971 Mahathir had
controversially identified The Malay Dilemma, the title of a book he
wrote in that year. This consisted of the eugenic and
climatologically induced Malay propensity to an inbred dependence,
fatalism and apathy. The need to address these flaws in the Malay
character through state intervention along the lines prescribed by
"Dr. UMNO" was of such urgency that dissent from the proposed course
of treatment could not be tolerated. Mahathir's political aggression
thus masks an acute sensitivity to Malay weakness and an awareness of
a need to strengthen the country in order to catch up with a West
whose economic achievement he wishes to emulate, but whose
free-market blandishments and democratic rhetoric he considers an
insidious attempt to reimpose colonial subjection.

Fervent belief in his own diagnostic rectitude, exacerbated by
anxiety at the prospect of being left behind, contributed to an
evolving climate of political confrontation and crisis after Mahathir
became prime minister in 1981. Indeed, he admits to relishing a
fight. It permits him to isolate the disease, whether feudal,
Islamic, communalist or Western, and surgically remove the infection
from the body politic. This mixture of "surgical" ruthlessness,
pragmatism and narcissism has consistently characterized Mahathir's
approach to the economy, to the Malaysian constitution, to the
inchoate opposition and to foreign relations.

Malaysia, Inc.

As early as 1971 Mahathir had envisaged the NEP redistributing
socioeconomic goods to the economically deprived Malay and other
indigenous communities, thereby building a self-confident,
entrepreneurial, new Malay identity. While the earlier
administrations of Razak and Hussein Onn had seen the NEP as
inaugurating a new era of state intervention, it was Mahathir who
gave the policy urgency and a definitive shape. After 1981, Mahathir
and his favorite financial adviser, Daim Zainuddin, promoted a
Malaysia Incorporated strategy creating a bumiputera capitalist class
through the partial privatization of state-owned banks and
industries. UMNO's investment arm, the Renong conglomerate, with its
various media, finance, infrastructure and tourist interests,
exemplified a policy Mahathir has variously described as "affirmative
action" and "constructive protection." In 1985 the Heavy Industries
Corporation of Malaysia launched a national car, the Proton Saga
(really a Mitsubishi Lancer assembled in Malaysia), which seemed to
symbolize the success both of industrialization and of the
Japan-focused Look East strategy.

The evolution of the NEP under Mahathir also distorted the character
of Chinese economic activity. The large Chinese trading
conglomerates, like Quek Leng Chan's Hong Leong Group and Vincent
Tan's Inter-Pacific Group, increasingly cultivated close ties with
key figures in the UMNO elite--like Mahathir, Daim and Anwar--and
functioned as their business proxies. The evolving developmental
coalition thus co-opted the conglomerates into UMNO business
politics, while the recently created bumiputera enterprises became
inured to state dependence. While business became entangled in
politics, the governmental bureaucracy developed an institutional
investment in shielding corporate activity from public scrutiny.

The increasing malleability of the constitution and the money
politics that became inseparable from the Malaysian electoral process
further enhanced both single-party rule and the evolution of state
corporatism. In all elections held since 1969, including the most
recent one in November 1999, UMNO and its coalition partners have
secured the two-thirds majority in parliament necessary to amend the
constitution, and they have not been reticent in using it. The
constitution has now been altered thirty-four times. Increasingly,
the party treats the document merely as a technical mechanism for
securing political ends. Through judicious constitutional
manipulation Mahathir has eroded judicial independence and the rule
of law; undermined the autonomy of state assemblies and the
traditional authority of the sultanate; and increased the authority
of the party in general and the office of prime minister in
particular.

As a commoner and a political outsider who was excluded from UMNO in
1971 for his attacks on the aristocracy's indifference to Malay
backwardness, Mahathir particularly has sought to detach the Malays
from their feudal past. In that same year, he accused Tunku Abdul
Rahman of playing the "grand vizier." In 1983 as prime minister, he
succeeded in removing the monarch's power to veto parliamentary
bills. And in 1992, when the sultan of Johore assaulted the state
hockey coach for questioning his son's big match temperament,
Mahathir took the opportunity to curb the aristocracy's extrajudicial
authority.

In the same vein, in 1988 Mahathir manipulated an internal UMNO
crisis to sack the Lord President of the Supreme Court and two other
judges. Subsequently, the judiciary was made directly accountable to
the executive. This development, together with the Internal Security
Act dating from British rule and the Malayan Emergency--which
permitted detention without trial and trial without jury--effectively
undermined the rule of law. In the course of the 1980s, a leading
critic of Mahathir's growing autocracy observed that parliament, the
judiciary and the royalty had surrendered their power to the UMNO
executive "to which everything else in the country is subservient."