The infrastructure of institutions
Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah
There are some good things about our country which we do not acknowledge either because are too obvious or because it is politically incorrect to do so. One of these is the role played by British institutions in our country.
The Federation of Malaya and later Malaysia did not emerge from the colonial era through violent struggle. Our independence was negotiated, and the Constitution which grounds our existence was built out of consensus. We took an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary path. This is not to deny or downplay the political struggle leading up to independence.
In the last three decades, however, as the political discourse in this country has taken a more ethno-nationalist and authoritarian tone, there has been an associated tendency to paint present-day Malaysia as a violent rupture with the past. Nationalism glorifies the fight and undervalues the much harder, rarer accomplishment of coming to an understanding, forging a consensus, building a nation. This is a common and understandable tendency in the way postcolonial nations talk about their past, but it has obscured an aspect of our history which distinguishes us among the states and was an important source of our early success as a nation.
This aspect is that in coming to independence in an orderly and negotiated settlement, we retained intact the best of what we already had and did not have to start from some imagined Ground Zero or mythologized past.
The best of what we already had, come 1957 and 1963, were a set of viable modern institutions practices and skills: the Westminster model of Parliamentary democracy, civil law grounded in a Constitution, a capable and independent civil service, including an excellent teaching service, armed forces and police, good schools, sophisticated trade practices and markets, financial markets, and modern methods of management such as those applied in our plantation sector. We were already a functioning country integrated into global markets. The challenges of development and nation-building were serious, but we faced them with an independent judiciary, a professional civil service and a well-defined set of relationships between a Federal Government and our individually sovereign states. Indeed we were able to face these challenges because these institutions functioned well.
Institutionally, we had a good start as a nation. Why is it important to recall this?
