More to middling traps than meet the eye
Ooi Kee Beng
WHAT seems to have happened in Malaysian politics since 2008 is that we have a voter population that is divided right down the middle, and given the nature of the game, this state of affairs is expected to last a while.
We have a siege situation where the opposition, which is not always a united front, tries to wear down the protective walls of the long-term government. The government, in turn, has given up on winning back support. Instead, it has adopted a profoundly defensive strategy and would rather go out of its way to avoid offending remaining supporters than take risks to recapture the deserters.
The newly formed status quo is being maintained at all costs, even when it is obviously not conducive to the general development of the country. The situation is such that the opposition and the government are both easily held hostage.
The recent case of Terengganu comes to mind, where dissatisfaction among three Umno state assemblymen threatened to topple the state government until they were cajoled into withdrawing their letters of resignation from the party just a couple of days later. In 2009, the Perak government changed hands due to three members of its coalition parties switching sides.
Malay right-wing groups pushing back the boundaries for what counts as sedition, with no fear of the government using the draconian Sedition Act on them, further shows how the deep division in Malaysian politics has emboldened those holding extreme ethnocentric positions.
Just as its political situation is caught in what I shall call the “middle-outcome trap”, Malaysia is also ensnared in the infamous middle-income trap.
Since the 1960s, Latin American countries have maintained a standard of living that is around 30% of that in the US, symbolising the middle-income trap most poignantly. As Woo Wing Thye, president of the Jeffrey Cheah Institute for Southeast Asia, has shown, countries in Western Europe have developed to a level where their standard of living is 70% to 75% of the US’. Where East Asian countries are concerned, Japan has been up there for a while now and, in recent years, has been joined by South Korea and Taiwan.
And then we have countries like Thailand and Malaysia, which were growing impressively until about 20 years ago. Since 1996, they have stabilised at about 30% of the US level. China, meanwhile, leapt from about 12% to 20% of the US level between 1994 and 2006. It remains to be seen if the economic giant can evade the middle-income trap in the coming decades. If it does, and Malaysia and Thailand do not, then the situation will get dire indeed for the latter two.
One has to wonder if the analogy of “traps” is the right one here. Or is the situation worse than that notion suggests? After all, a trap has an upside to it — even if you are not going upwards, you are not going downwards either, at least not in the immediate term.
Sad to say, even though the political economy in Malaysia seems to have hit a plateau, what with the dominant party controlling the apparatus of not only the states, but all its government-linked companies, ethnocentrism having become a stronger passion than patriotism and religious exclusivity now a greater rationale for policymaking than developmental efficacy, the future of the country may be bleaker than it looks.
