Malayasia as a Nation-State

Abstract

An implicit assumption underlay the termination of colonial rule in Southeast Asia that the peoples who were thereby given their independence could reasonably indeed with certainty -be expected to stand on their own feet, the colonial interlude having been no more than a temporary disturbance of their historical condition and natural development as nation-states. It has yet to be demonstrated that that expectation was wrong. It has also yet to be demonstrated that it was right. India set the pace in the process of decolonization, and the unquestionable lightness of the expectation in her case -both a priori and in the event -was the foundation for a doctrine quickly extended to Southeast Asia. It was not unfitting that India should become the exemplar for Further India: she had been the source of most of its political ideas in the remote past; French Indochina had been constituted in many details on the model of British India, while Malaya had begun its colonial life as a dependency rather of India than of Britain; and Mr. Nehru was now adopting the posture both of patron and of advocate to speed the process of Southeast Asian emancipation ably and enthusiastically seconded, of course, by Mr. Malcolm Macdonald, the senior Briton and most prestigious European in the region, from his borrowed Mount Meru in Johore. Indeed, in the world political climate of the time, there was really no option for anybody over decolonization: the example of India could be followed, but it could not not be followed. There was no question that the metropolitan powers would relinquish their dominion only to whom, when, and under what constitutional arrangements. The question whether the Southeast Asian peoples could stand on their own feet did not arise as such -only how the successor states could best maintain internal unity, how they could be made economically and administratively viable, and how their independence, once they had it, was to be defended. On this practical level, the example of India was not much help, for, in giving up her Adam's rib for the creation of Pakistan, she had compromised her own internal unity from the outset, however reluctantly, while her very size as second biggest nation in the world, even when cut down by the loss of Pakistan, begged all the Southeast Asian questions of economics, administration, and defence. That the independence which would follow the termination of colonial rule would necessarily find its constitutional shape in nationstates had not been quite so clear in prospect before the event as it now appears to us in retrospect after the event: independence and nationalism did not become synonyms in common usage till after World War II. As late as 1941, Mr. Nehru was able to envisage an independent