Would I be wrong to say of Malaysians that most of them consider themselves Malay/Chinese/Indian/Kadazan/Iban first and Malaysians second?

There are exceptional occasions of course. A Malaysian travelling or studying abroad, or one who is a foreign tourist on the street of Kuala Lumpur, may put on his Malaysian hat temporarily. Nevertheless, the harsh reality of daily experience in multi-racial Malaysia would compel him to revert to his particular ethnic identity in no time at all. The mass media and the politicians would make sure of that.

Having many ethnic groups with a strong sense of their respective ethnic identity is not necessarily a bad thing. It offers us a variety of wonderful cultural universes, which makes life interesting. But when power relation enters into ethnic relation, when the will to dominate propels the political forces at work to construct a post-colonial nation-state based on the European model, then ethnic identity assumes distorted proportion, in both the public and private lives of citizens.

After half a century of independence, we should have sufficient hindsight to review the success and failure of this project of nation-building in Malaysia.

Obviously, this project has not been a total failure. Malaysia is one of the most stable and peaceful polities among newly emergent Third World countries. One could argue that this stability is achieved at the expense of human rights violation across the political board, and that the social engineering through education and the mass media has produced unthinking younger generations of Malaysians. The fact still remains that, as an experiment in modern nationhood, Malaysia has been a modest success of sort, compared to other countries on the same par.

I suspect that all Malaysians would by now have grown into a deep and abiding feeling for this abstract entity called Malaysia. Despite the race-based tenets of national politics, Malaysians would have no problem identifying this land of many tongues as their home. If attacked by foreign powers, and God forbids that this should ever happen, I suspect most Malaysians would be prepared to defend their territorial integrity, with their lives if necessary.

(Given better pay, less corruption, and retraction of racial policies, the police and the security forces would not have too much trouble in recruiting from Malaysian youths of all ethnic persuasions. Whether the ruling parties would want more non-Malays in prominent positions in uniform is quite a different matter. )

Strange concoction

Nevertheless, the probable fact that most citizens still hold dear to their ethnic identity above their national identity in their daily social intercourse is a sign that, beneath the veneer of social harmony and political stability, all is not well with the project of nation-building. The races may be mixed in the metaphorical cooking pot, but they do not melt, to form one homogenous Malaysian race.

In short, neither assimilation nor integration has completely come about. What we have, after half a century of social conditioning cooking with people's self-consciousness, is a strange concoction that reminds one of the local rojak, which is not entirely distasteful!

Is time of the essence here? After all, the model liberal democratic nation-states of the West have had a few hundred years to evolve into their current national consciousness. If given more time and more political will, can the dream of the original Malay ethnic nationalists be realised, in the creation of a Malaysian nation-state with predominantly "Malay character"?

On the surface at least, the symbols of the "Malay character" in our national political landscape seem to be in place, after half a century of concentrated, overwhelming, and all-encompassing effort in creating the national myth. In essence and in reality though, I doubt if anybody would seriously consider Malaysia as the embodiment of a Malay nation-state, or a Malay state-nation (whatever that means), or an Islamic state.

In short, the dream of nation-building envisaged by the arch Malay nationalists will not succeed in the form for which the Malay Dilemma has been the most eloquent and most powerful expression.

There are many reasons why I think this is the case. You can add your own list, or hold the opposite view. All such attempts at critical and independent analysis are pure conjectures of course, and we are merely playing the game of crystal-ball gazing. In any case, we will probably not live long enough to see our theory validated or disproved.

Actually, my instinct that this particular vision of nation-building will inevitably fail is based on my doubt about the sustainable viability of the idea of nations and nationalism, over and above the many historically contingent factors at work.

To say that the historical conditions engendering the flowering of the nation-states in Europe and North America are now no more, and therefore cannot be duplicated, for the universal replication of this sort of political organisation, is to claim unsubstantiated knowledge about historicity. It is a tempting idea, one for historians and philosophers of history to explore.

Decline of the nation-state

I am more concerned with the raging debate in academic circle between those who think that the idea of a nation is as primordial to human nature and those who regard nations and nationalism as simply the arbitrary product of modernity.
Publication of books, pamphlets, monographs, papers and studies on this subject has since assumed the form of a burgeoning industry. To compile a bibliography alone would be a monumental task.

Some notable names come to mind immediately. Works by scholars like Anthony D. Smith, Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Donald Horowitz, Hans Kohn, Tom Nairn, John Armstrong, Hugh Seton-Watson, and Earnest Renan have all become classics on the subject matter.

The 'primordialists' argue that the idea of ethnic bonding is as perennial and natural to humans as kinship, language, gender, religion and other eternal constituent aspects of humanity. They will provide historical evidence to show that ethnicity, together with its ever- attendant cousin called racism, have their origin in antiquity.

The modern phenomena of nations and nationalism, they claim, are but the historical manifestation of this primordial human trait in their social and political life. There is no way of changing this, just as the United Nations is still a community of nations, and will remain so till Thy-Kingdom-Come. International relations, they say, will always be dictated by considerations of 'national interests' and this seems to be borne out by fact.

The 'modernists', on the other hand, argue that nationalist sentiments are neither natural nor universal. The nation is a purely modern phenomenon, with a brief history of no more than three centuries. It is the product of certain modern developments, like capitalism, macro-economics, bureaucracy, secular utilitarianism, and universal education. In fact, Eric Hobsbawm boldly declares that from now on, we shall witness the decline of the nation-state.

Both sides have very cogent, internally consistent and erudite arguments, and like all academic theorizing, they are both not water-tight. However, this is one area in the academic world which has been most productive in widening our horizons in perceiving our human conditions. Studying them has certainly changed my outlook on our Malaysian situation.

Their problem, I think, is the difficulty in the definition or meaning of 'nations' and 'nationalism". This is to be expected, because as a historical phenomenon, the idea of 'nations' and 'nationalism' is notorious for its philosophical poverty. We observe this phenomenon as a social fact, but there is no sufficient theory to either justify or explain fully this so called "fact". The factuality itself is in doubt.

The core issues

There are two core issues. The first is when and how an ethnic community becomes a fully fledged nation. The second is the concept of self-identity.

To-day, it is a vogue not to believe in any foundational essentialism, the idea that there is an abiding permanent essence in what constitutes human nature, or ethnic identity. However, the least that we can say about the 'self' and 'identity' is that they do change over time and space, for individuals and for communities.

In short, the idea of Malayness, Chineseness and Indianness, or the idea of ethnic identity of any of the 70 other communities in Malaysia, is itself subject to some kind of historical metamorphosis and evolution. The occasional, though futile, call for the emergence of a Malaysian race is itself a symptom of this restlessness.

What I am doing here, is to cast some doubt on what most Malaysians would consider to be eternal immutable self-evident truths on matters of race and ethnicity. This doubt is not the same as the Cartesian doubt, one that aims at conviction to dispel the original doubt. Neither is it the nihilistic doubt that marks the sceptics or the cynics, that doubts everything except the doubting itself.

My doubt is meant to be a point of departure, for us to ponder upon the enigma that we call "human beings". It is based upon the horizons of possibilities and freedom.

Since we are an enigma, especially to ourselves, and we have not really solved the puzzle first raised by the Sphinx, we may as well prepare for the possibility that we are more than our race and religion put together.