The new media and Malaysian politics in historical perspective.

• Author: Pepinsky, Thomas B.
• Position: Essay

Analysts of Malaysian politics since the 1970s have repeatedly anticipated how various socio-economic changes will foster a more democratic, accountable and representative political system. In previous decades, modernization and globalization were two key concerns. Today, technological change, most notably the rise of new media and Malaysia's vibrant online society, may augur well for political liberalization. Indeed, since mid-2007, political developments in Malaysia have suggested that political liberalization may be on the horizon. Empowered through technology, ordinary Malaysians, along with the country's official opposition, have together undermined the incumbent Barisan Nasional (BN) regime's organizational and informational advantages, which over time may render the political status quo unsustainable.

This essay argues that any predictions of political change as a result of the rise of Malaysia's new media are premature. Despite truly dramatic changes in Malaysian society--the consequences of modernization, globalization and technological development--the logic of political conflict in Malaysia has remained nearly identical from 1957 until today, and as a consequence the legal and rhetorical tools employed by the incumbent BN regime remain the same as well. Viewed in historical perspective, the basic cleavage structure (1) of Malaysian politics (a Malay/non-Malay cleavage overlaid by a class cleavage) looks strikingly similar to the cleavage structure at independence.

Malaysia's cleavage structure congealed amidst the political contestation preceding independence. Since then, the broader socioeconomic context sustaining this cleavage structure has changed, but without upsetting this essential foundation for Malaysian political conflict. The identity of the "players" of Malaysian politics has changed over time, and I argue in this essay that the social, economic, and global political contexts surrounding Malaysian politics have changed in important ways that should not be ignored. But until either a particular individual or event, or a set of social or technological changes, can unsettle the fundamental logic of Malaysian politics, political change will be superficial, any overtures towards political liberalization will not be genuine, and crackdowns on the opposition will continue. Individual elites and important opposition groups may favour political liberalization, but Malaysia's political order will resist because incumbents do not want to reform the policies and institutions that sustain the BN.

This essay therefore interprets the rise of Malaysia's new media as having political consequences that are similar to those generated in previous decades by modernization and globalization. New media help to create new coalitions, place new challenges on the incumbent regime, and introduce new tactics for the political opposition, but they do not themselves cause political liberalization. Theoretically, these conclusions fit well with existing research on the ambiguities of modernization in the newly industrialized economies of Southeast Asia (2): despite the emancipatory potential of new technology in Malaysia, political change will most likely occur only after Malaysia's cleavage structure fractures. This argument is also consistent with general theories of democratization as an outcome driven by events rather than one driven by structural preconditions. (3)

After first presenting a brief overview of the origins of Malaysia's cleavage structure, this essay discusses the ways in which socioeconomic change has shaped the ethnic and class cleavages that drive Malaysian politics, and in response, how Malaysia's political order has rearticulated these cleavages in ways that protect the existing political order. From there, it uses this historical perspective to interpret three recent political developments: the Hindraf rally of 2007, the March 2008 election, and the 2011 Bersih 2.0 rally. It concludes with an assessment of the prospects for meaningful political liberalization as a direct consequence of any sort of long-term socio-economic changes such as globalization, modernization or technological development. These shape only the tactics through which Malaysia's political actors contest, not the terms of political contestation. Meaningful political liberalization in Malaysia will not take place absent fundamental changes to Malaysia's cleavage structure itself.

Political Cleavages and the Deep Structure of Malaysian Politics

Malaysia's cleavage structure centres on ethnicity and the economy. Nearly every political issue that has animated political oppositions and motivated incumbent elites over the past sixty years can be reduced to one of these two issues. They are linked in obvious ways.

The origins of Malaysia's political system are well known. Malaysia gained independence as a multi-ethnic state with relatively functional political institutions and a good foundation for economic development. Numerically, ethnic Malays are the largest ethnic group in Malaysia (comprising about 50 per cent of the population). At independence, an elite Malay aristocracy occupied the highest positions in politics, but most ethnic Malays were poor and rural, with little participation in the formal economy. In the local understanding, Malays did not "control" their share of the economy. (4) By comparison, members of the country's substantial ethnic Chinese minority (comprising about a third of the population at independence) occupied a comparatively higher economic position, and therefore disproportionately "controlled" the Malaysian economy. A third group, denoted "Indians," comprising those immigrant communities and their descendants from the Indian subcontinent, were smaller numerically than both Malay and Chinese communities, but were held, like Chinese, to "control" a disproportionately large share of the Malaysian economy.

It is not certain if the majority of Malays held grievances against Chinese and Indian communities for their comparatively superior economic position at the moment of independence. But among many Malay elites, the issue of the disparity in wealth and control between "indigenous" Malays and "immigrant" Chinese and Indians proved a rallying principle through which to articulate a vision of a post-independence Malaysia in which they were accorded special privileges as part of a grand political bargain. These privileges were subsequently written into the country's constitution. It also led most of the country's largest political parties to form around exclusionary ethnic lines. Constitutional privileges, ethnic-based parties, and the numerical superiority of Malays as voters together ensured that the majority of Malaysia's governing elites would be ethnic Malays drawn from an explicitly Malay-based party whose platform at least partly rested on ethnic exclusionism. (5) Prior to 1969, a relatively moderate regime was led by elites from the Malay, Chinese and Indian communities who formed an alliance ("the Alliance") of the largest ethnic parties: the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC). After a brief period of inter-ethnic violence following elections in May 1969, and two years of suspended parliament, (6) UMNO elites created the BN, which folded several additional parties into the coalition while further entrenching UMNO dominance.

Motivated by the interrelated pressures of Malay social grievances and economic stagnation that elites believed had motivated the 1969 riots, the new BN regime redoubled its efforts to establish a durable political order. To do this, the regime further politicized ethnicity to maintain control over its opponents, and used the economy to redistribute resources towards its supporters. The politicization of ethnicity means, at base, that no Malaysian may question (either in his words or as a consequence of his actions) the special rights accorded to bumiputeras--a term which designates Malays and other "indigenous" groups, and excludes Chinese and Indians. (7) With interethnic disparities in economic prosperity as their motivation, elites then built an economic system featuring a range of mechanisms to redress economic disparity across ethnic groups. This meant using economic policy to channel both money and opportunities to bumiputeras, with the goal of enabling them to participate in the formal economy and ultimately eliminating interethnic disparities in wealth. The key platform through which this was accomplished was the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1971-90), (8) which was superseded by the National Development Policy (NDP, 1990-2010) and later the New Economic Model (NEM, 2010-present). While the NDP and the NEM are on the surface different from the NEP, the essential economic policy and social policy frameworks developed under the NEP remain in place, (9) and many Malaysians today discuss the NEP as if it were still in force.

Beginning in the 1970s, three central planks of the NEP were the government management of equity investments on behalf of bumiputeras, government investment in bumiputera-run companies, and government owned enterprises that would employ bumiputeras. (10) These efforts transformed the Malaysian economy as well as Malaysian society, fostering the emergence of a new Malay business elite and a large Malay middle class. More importantly for the purposes of this essay, such policies also reified the ethnicity/ economy cleavage in Malaysian politics: with economic policy now a tool for regime maintenance, and ethnicity the central driver of economic (and social) policy, ethnicity and the economy became inextricably linked the BN regime's political survival. Social and economic changes, in turn, shaped Malaysian political development by transforming the composition of UMNO and introducing new potential cleavages in Malaysian politics. Before addressing political...