This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on March 24, 2025 - March 30, 2025

As western powers go into crisis mode again, and as the global structure within which the nations of the world relate to each other evolves beyond recognition, there is great need for historians to step up. Their voice is needed to help us analyse, in this new context, what modern times are and what globalisation means, given the new phase of history that we suddenly find ourselves in.

That vital task should certainly not be left to be dominated by the quantifying economists, the modular political scientists and, worst of all, the immediate international relations people.

Historians are of two kinds, though. There are those who see the past as another country, whose tales may hold lessons for us in some cases, but whose main import to the world of the present is entertainment; and then there are those, the rarer kind, who see how the present and the past intermingle, locked in an embrace of love and hate not unlike Greco-Roman wrestlers carved in eternal marble.

To clarify this difference, let us consider Malaysia itself and ask which of the two perspectives on our past has dominated our self-understandings, our national discourses and indeed our conflicts.

This is a vital question, for it can reveal to us our mistakes, the shortcomings in our nation-building process and the hidden political agendas of certain centres of power in our midst. Just as Western nations are having to undergo 21st-century soul-searching, post-colonial countries like Malaysia also need to revisit their past and confront early mistakes. In short, we need to identify where and how the defensiveness and make-do attitudes of early nationhood might have put us on paths that, over time, are turning out to be dead ends, to be a cul-de-sac.

The fact that Malaysia is a federation built upon a federation is a good point of departure for this discussion. The vagueness of its jurisdictional boundaries continues to trouble the country to this day. What within the Malaysia Agreement of 1963 (MA63) is set in stone, and what is not? Why is the federation perhaps the most centralised system in the world today? Why is its population, despite being passionately nationalistic across all ethnic groups, tiered and divided? Why, after 70 years, are race and religion still so central to policy discussions?

First of all, realising why the country is a federation should give us all the clues we need. Whether or not the Federation of Malaya is basically a federation of sultanates is not the important point. What is quintessential is that the states of the federation mark out territories with very diverse cultures and histories — and self-identity. And so, the contingencies of the post-WWII period demanded that these divisions be recognised and accepted as a necessary framework for the future. The past and present placed in an unavoidable embrace.

Going beyond that, we should also realise that the social and political discontent and the disagreements that led to the racial riots of May 13, 1969, were largely socioeconomic in nature. This was expressed clearly in the Second Malaysia Plan covering 1970-1975. In fact, there was a deep generational change brewing which led to the New Economic Policy coming into play, whose logic has since coloured Malaysian political contestations ever since. (Interestingly, the Reformasi movement in 1998 was another period of generational change whose effects are being worked out as we speak.)

We now come to the main point of this article: what has been the country’s dominant mode of understanding its own history? What approach to its past has influenced its present the most? Its distant past, which by its nature would have influenced its present the least? Or its recent past, which logically should format its present — its nation-building — most?

Admittedly, there are many other aspects to consider where the subject of history is concerned, but a critical difference lies in how much conceptual space we have been giving, in our nation-building discourses, to the revolutionary dynamics of the colonial period.

The immediate history of the regions that make up the Federation of Malaysia today is what gives us details about its demographic structure, its economic diversity, its urban centres; in fact, that we have a nation at all is the direct result of ideas which grew out of recent history. Malaysia’s recent history, whether we like it or not, is essentially the colonial period.

No doubt, much of the stories and discourses we know of that period were sadly dictated by the colonial powers. But much else did happen. Endless events affecting the people who lived under colonialism, countless personalities surviving under colonialism, and innumerable achievements attained during colonial times remain untold and uncelebrated. Bringing those histories back into epistemic relevance provides nation-building with solid ground for understanding the present and preparing the future.

However, if nationhood is instead established by sidelining these realities through an emphasis on ancient (and vague) histories of pre-colonial times, then nation-building becomes troublesome and conflict-laden. Since 1957 and 1963, much of the country’s nation-building has been built on myths and on denials of the peninsula’s diverse history of the last 200 years. This erases the personal and collective histories of most Malaysians, majority Malays included, not to mention the silent and oft-silenced orang asli.

Reclaiming the depth and diversity of Malaysian history during the formative years of British colonisation is therefore the glue with which we can connect Malaysia’s past, present and future. Without that, a harmonious society remains elusive and illusionary.

The idea of the nation state also differs greatly from country to country, but in post-colonial territories like Malaysia, the notion of nationhood being an unavoidable movement towards ethnic and cultural conformity has tended to overshadow most other conceptual paths. What happens is that a preference for a distant past which denies the recent past takes over — as epistemic laziness, as an anthropological lie and as political trickery. And this turns the embrace of wrestlers into the stand-off of gunslingers.

Datuk Dr Ooi Kee Beng is the executive director of Penang Institute and senior visiting fellow at ISEAS — Yusof Ishak Institute. He is the award-winning author of The Reluctant Politician: Tun Dr Ismail and His Time (ISEAS 2007), founder-editor of Penang Monthly and ISEAS Perspective. His most impactful books include The Eurasian Core and Its Edges: Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World (ISEAS 2016). Web page: wikibeng.com

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