Legacies of the Cold War in Malaysia: Anything but Communism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Malaya’s anti-communist Emergency of 1948–1960 demonstrated the lengths to which elites – first British colonial, then local – were prepared to go to combat communism’s advance domestically. But the threat of communism, then the spectre of an all-too-convenient communist bogey, resonated across the polity well beyond the Malayan Communist Party’s defeat. The Cold War left a complex and enduring legacy for Malaysian formal politics and civil society. We can see these legacies in terms of political ideologies, settlement patterns, restrictive legislation and geo-political positioning. Overall, Malaysia did experience a genuine and aggressive communist movement, and its counterinsurgency measures, coupling a hearts-and-minds strategy with military suppression, remain a model for even present-day efforts against extremist mobilisation. But what has left a deeper stain is less the Malayan Communist Party per se than how these battles sculpted the ideological, demographic, legal and security landscape: a largely Chinese, internationally vilified, anti-capitalist movement at a formative period in Malaysian socio-political development helped to delegitimise ideological alternatives and bolster a strong, centralised, specifically communal and capitalist state, nested in a significantly depoliticised society.