This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on April 29, 2024 - May 5, 2024

So, what can be wrong with the unity government?

It has a two-thirds majority, it is made up of four coalitions of parties, none of whom would be in positions of power if they did not work together, and it is headed by a man who had been trying to become prime minister ever since any Malaysian above the voting age can remember. So, one would expect him to know what to do once he did come to power.

Furthermore, its strongest coalition, Pakatan Harapan (PH), has been running the most developed and industrialised states in Malaysia — Selangor and Penang — since 2008. Due to its reform agenda, PH has the vote of most of the minority groups in the peninsula.

So, why is this government, saddled with the name of unity government — kerajaan perpaduan — so cautious, so willing to compromise and so fearful of being influential?

For starters, it seems to suffer from a syndrome common in democratic countries. After its victory, instead of getting on with its reform agenda and manifesto, it began to look back to study its own footprints. Addicted to the adrenaline rush of political campaigns, it does not get down to work but instead, fears that those who did not support it will seek to topple it. It continues to act in ways that will not offend those who did not support it — naturally disappointing those who did support it. The patience of the latter, from all accounts, is wearing thin.

Reforms may not happen overnight, but they will definitely not take place if they are delayed and hushed up.

Not understanding that democracy is about gaining a mandate and then getting down to work for the whole five-year term, it begins to fear its own downfall at the hands of its political opponents from Day One.

That is one explanation for its lacklustre performance so far. Political timidity.

But there are other reasons that are more profound, and which stem from the nature of queer societal notions of power and economic growth, and from a weak understanding of what sustainable development in a globalised economy entails.

Being a resource-rich country, its leaders and its bureaucracy’s grasp of the need to develop value-adding processes throughout the value chain has tended to remain shallow. Resource-poor Singapore, in contrast, endlessly seeks to climb value chains. The Taylor Swift concert monopoly the city state accomplished recently testifies to the efficacy of that obsession. It upset a lot of people but the money has kept rolling in.

One could maintain that a good balance between bureaucrats and technocrats in a government is a deeply consequential one. Having too many bureaucrats in the civil service stifles innovativeness in the political economy of the country, and the resultant dearth in technocrats blurs nation-building visions and dampens the country’s ambitions.

The fact that the education system of the country has been allowed to deteriorate for decades testifies to this lack of understanding of what competitive nation-building involves.

Then there is the inability of the reform government and most of its ideologues to realise that the greatest hindrance to change is the cocooning — we tend to simply call it “politicising” — of any event happening in the country. This takes the form of distractions and threats of violence, most often in the name of race and religion. This is a cocooning and an introverting of political consciousness, not just a politicising. And it is intended to derail attempts to think beyond provincial and mundane contestations.

What is necessary then, on this point, is for the unity government to work at breaking the cocoon. This can be done only with some high drama. The fact that the Asean chairmanship falls into Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s lap next year, right in the middle of his first term, is a godsend for the unity government.

Now, if ever, will the author of The Asian Renaissance please stand up? That book never really got a chance since the Asian financial crisis hit the region just a year after it was published. There is a need today to regain the ambition and confidence Malaysia possessed in the mid-1990s. The fact that Indonesia awaits its new president to be installed at the end of this year, a controversial person who should be very keen to develop a collaborative reputation in the region, is an opportunity for Malaysia as Asean chair to push the envelope for regional economic and strategic integration. As a re-emerging global statesman, Anwar’s hour may be at hand.

Regionalising Malaysian consciousness appears to me to be an unavoidable goal for any reformist, in government or not. Given the geopolitical and geoeconomic situation the region is in today, there is all the more need for a regional statesman to appear, and if his actions can at the same time pull Malaysia out of its aged conceptual cocoon, then all the better.

The systemic and conceptual web that blocks Malaysia’s reformist agenda is a complex one, but let me end with one more theme. This theme is not as academic a point as it might first appear to be.

While “unity” may be a nice and comforting word, what this unity government should be striving for is not so much unity as solidarity. But what solidarity? The Malay word for both of these is “perpaduan”, I believe. But in English, the connotative differences between the two terms are striking.

To simplify the discussion, and to put the spotlight on the point I wish to make, let me insert Emile Durkheim, one of the fathers of sociology, into the conversation and commend his attempt to distinguish “mechanical solidarity” from “organic solidarity”.

I quote from Philippe Eynard and Genauto Carvalho de França Filho’s Solidarity and Organization: Towards New Avenues for Management (Palgrave Macmillan 2023: 34), to ease the explanation of these terms.

“Durkheim [analyses] the transformation of solidarity. To this end, he distinguishes two types of solidarity in his demonstration. The first, which he describes as mechanical solidarity, functions by similarity. It refers to traditional societies where individuals are not very different from each other in terms of activity and where there is a great amount of homogeneity between the members who make up a society. The second, described as organic solidarity, characterises modern societies. It gives everyone a precise social position and a differentiation in the tasks to be performed. This solidarity offers less social control because it empowers its members.”

The specialisations in labour that urban life and modern technologies engender encourage solidarity to be based on concrete economic activities functioning in a connected fashion. Being more empowering and more effective, this allows for “solidarity” to be more and more organic, shifting human consciousness away from notions of identity based on similarities towards ones based on dissimilarities and the connectedness of those dissimilarities.

What an urbanising society like Malaysia is faced with is exactly the managing of this difference. Solidarity that is traditionally based on common identity in terms of fundamentals like race, professions and gender is naturally conservative. Urban modern economic realities, however, require policies that accommodate these if it is to achieve not only unity, but solidarity as well.

Encouraging organic solidarity before mechanical solidarity is the essence of reform work in a modernising society.

In summary, technocratising governance, extroverting political consciousness and building organic solidarity, instead of bureaucratising governance, cocooning political discourses and preserving mechanical solidarity, are how unity can be attained. And I mean adaptive and dynamic unity, not stiff and defensive unity.

Datuk Dr Ooi Kee Beng is executive director of Penang Institute and manager of its Forum for Leadership and Governance (FLAG@PI) programme. He is also a senior visiting fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. His latest book is Signals in the Noise (Singapore: Faction Press, 2023), a compilation of writings from 2018 to 2023. Homepage: wikibeng.com.

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