opinion The famous slogan of the 1789 French Revolution was "liberty, equality, fraternity". Though the first two concepts - liberty and equality - are interrelated, it is significant that liberty comes first, for without liberty all else is meaningless.

Without, for example, freedom of the press, there can be no significant movement towards equality, no efficient mechanism to ensure the checks and balances vital to a thriving democracy.

Without an informed populace, a government - of the people, by the people, for the people - cannot but eventually degenerate into a government of the few, by the few, for the few. It could even result in a government of one.

Yet liberty rings hollow in a society steeped in inequalities. Environment determines the socio-economic status of individuals more than most people would admit.

That was why Rousseau commented, even before Marx, about the role played by private property, and how true democracy could be attained only in a society of equals. Rousseau was never so naive as to imagine that all persons are created equal, but he believed that they should be given equal rights under the law.

He knew that there would always be inequalities in wealth and power, but he thought, like Helvetius, that the best government is one in which the rich are not so rich as to be above the law, and the poor not so poor as to be deprived of their basic dignity as humans.

Assimilation not integration

For the most part, the inequalities in the Malaysian society is man-made. 'Pure' capitalism in Malaysia has enabled a small minority of people from all races to become super-rich while a large majority remained poor or became even poorer.

One could argue, however, that the "hidden hand" as proclaimed by Adam Smith could go to work and ultimately some of the wealth generated would trickle down to the downtrodden.

Yet this mechanism, if it ever existed, can hardly operate in an environment of corruption and cronyism. Capitalism cannot work when government projects are given on the basis of ethnicity and/or political affiliation, or when bankrupt firms are propped up by the government treasury.

The most questionable artificial inequality, however, is political inequality. Here the powers that be have decreed that only one particular ethnic has the right to decide the nation's future - a future based on one culture, one race, and one religion. It is inevitable that such an ideology would take the nation down the path of racial assimilation, not integration, to the undermining of other cultures, not to mention the creation of an Islamic state.

Controversies regarding university quotas, road-naming, rapid citizenship for Indonesian Muslims, non-Muslims asked to wear the tudung are manifestations of that ideology: they're symptoms, not the disease.

The ease with which Indonesian Muslims became citizens shows, within the Malaysian context, the inseparability of race and religion.

Further, the social, political, and religious institutions set up over the last few decades are such that if they are not dismantled and replaced with a more democratic structure, the nation might soon see a hybrid state resembling both Hitler's Germany and Khomeini's Iran.

The meeting of the two ideologies, one secular and the other religious, is not incidental: Hitler happened to be admired by some because the German dictator's Aryan supremacy ideology could be adapted within the Malaysian context. The bumiputra/non-bumiputra binary reflects that ideology, and is as divisive as the Islamic concept promoted in Umno's (withdrawn) handbook Malaysia is an Islamic state, a concept that essentially pits true believers against dhimmis .

Official Umno language shows it: non-Malays, like non-Muslims in an Islamic state, would be "protected" and whatever the Chinese or Indians possess are there only by courtesy of the dominant ethnic (and therefore they should be "grateful"). The other communities are all politically marginalised, as expected in an Islamic state.

'Dhimmihood' for the Chinese has never been so apparent as when Dr Ling Liong Sik compared MCA's request for another Chinese minister with a child asking a father for a new bicycle. The raced-based inequalities that non-Muslims fear might result from Premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad's declaration of an Islamic state are already there in one form or another because of the hierarchy inherent in the bumiputra/non-bumiputra binary.

All men are brothers

Fraternalism - the feeling of brotherhood - has a long history in all civilisations. In the famous ancient novel set during the Sung dynasty, Shui Hu Chuan or The Marsh Chronicles, there is a saying shih hai chi nei chieh siong ti, meaning "within the four seas all men are brothers".

During the French Revolution, feelings of brotherhood of the oppressed peoples were so strong that they were a factor in uniting the various European monarchies against France. The Cold War saw fraternal feelings among the democracies matched by the communist states. However, there are also drawbacks to such feelings in that they detract people from the problems at home.

It is futile to talk about democracy for others when dictatorship prevails at home. In fact, the ruling party loves that sort of diversion, as when Dr M, as a gesture towards Muslim fraternalism, talks about Israeli oppression of Palestinians to divert attention from the oppression of minorities in Malaysia.

In the past, there were also some Chinese Malaysians who felt toward China the same kind of feelings Muslims feel toward their Islamic counterparts. These Chinese were found mainly in the left-oriented opposition parties (the right were mostly from MCA, which had always supported the Kuomintang). Though it is absolutely legitimate to treasure the cultural affinities among the Chinese all over the world (just as it is for Malays to feel a cultural affinity for their cousins in Sumatra, and Indians for their cousins in India), it is another thing to let such feelings translate into political support, even if only in a moral sense, for the communist regime.

Long ago, Lee Kuan Yew had warned the Nanyang (south seas) Chinese that it was too easy, in the relative comforts of their home, to think of China's struggles as their own. Thinking thus could only divert attention from their own problems.

Mahathir, in fact, was happy to encourage such feelings: he paraded Chinese premier Zhu Rongji in front of Chinese Malaysians just before the 1999 elections and probably picked up some votes from older Chinese Malaysians who couldn't let go their old sentiments.

Is there no room, then, for fraternity? There is, but only in a true, universalist sense - the kind of fraternalism espoused by the Shui Hu's expression "all men are brothers".

In other words, we should empathise with all peoples in their struggle for liberty and human rights, irrespective of race, religion, or creed.

If we must condemn the West for their policies towards the Middle East, we should equally condemn Muslim aggression towards their own neighbours and peoples. And we should be just as concerned about the right to dissent in China as the right to dissent anywhere else in the world.

But it is at home that fraternal feelings are needed most: Malaysia has been a victim of the divide-and-rule policy not only of the British, but also of the present administration. The consequences of official corruption and cronyism affect all ethnic groups and for this reason all have to empathise with one another and regard the sufferings of one ethnic group as the sufferings of all ethnic groups.

We ought to feel sad and outraged at any unjustified discrimination against anyone, any incarceration of any person for his or her political beliefs, regardless of party, race or religion.

To put it in a 'Lincolnesque' phrase, we can all nobly win or meanly lose the last, best hopes of the country only as Malaysians, and not as Chinese, Indians, Malays.

Vanishing liberty

I will now turn to liberty which, as I said earlier, is most important. Throughout history, liberty has often proven to be an extremely fragile commodity, so fragile that even in democratic countries constant vigilance is required to prevent it from vanishing altogether.

For new countries such as Malaysia, it is not merely the preservation of liberty that must concern democrats, but its expansion as well.

Liberty can be seen through the prism of natural law or through its utilitarian aspects. The former - natural law or rights - tends to be fixed, invariable, and universal (e.g. the claim that all humans are endowed with inalienable rights), whereas the utilitarian concept of liberty is relativistic in the sense that it allows for different applications under different circumstances.

Many democratic governments operate under a mixture of the two. In the West, the Lockean sense of civil rights as sanctioned by God is still strong, yet most people have found it sufficient to define such rights within the purview of the rights of man. This is not surprising, for if we rule that every human life is, if not sacred, at least deserving of dignity and respect, then we ought to allow, within limits, that individual the right to order his or her life in a manner that seems best to him or her.

What are the limits? John Stuart Mill gave a "render unto Caesar" kind of answer: "To individuality should belong the part in which it is chiefly the individual that is interested; to society, the part which chiefly interests society."

The problem lies, however, in the nitty gritty details. What constitutes individual interests and what constitutes societal interests change according to the times, to different historical periods and under different religious/cultural norms.

However, before discussing the relationship between individual interests and societal interests, I would like to refer to the reality of living in a globalised world in which social, economic, and cultural interactions are an everyday fact of life.

Unless Malaysia aims to isolate itself or to have ties only with Muslim countries, it must learn to accommodate the diverse beliefs and lifestyles of the rest of the world. The first proposition, ties with Muslim countries only, is of course not practical or even possible. The brutal fact of today's world is that if a country's science and technology do not advance, that country will retrogress. That is why relatively progressive nations like Japan and South Korea are adapting themselves to Western cultural norms and lifestyles. Recently, even Chinese universities are using English as the medium of instruction for a number of subjects.

No one size that fits all

All that does not mean that Malaysia or any other Asian nation should embrace wholesale Western cultural practices. But it does point to the necessity of reaching out to people of different beliefs and customs, an act which involves not only a fair measure of tolerance but also a deeper understanding than what the party in power has shown thus far to the country's own minorities.

Moreover, many of the 'Western' customs have been with us for a long time, such as short-sleeve shirts and going about without the tudung. And the choice of dress or headgear or any other activity that obviously does no harm to others should be left to the individual Muslim, and not to any group of religious 'experts' or, indeed, the state itself. And if that is true for Muslims, it is even more so for non-Muslims who, if nothing else, are supposedly protected by constitutional guarantees in matters regarding culture and religion.

Societal pressures should be enough to keep in check the more adventurous individual. If not, as in the West, some decency laws can be activated, but only as a last resort. On no account should we think that because certain norms might be violated, a one-size-fits-all rule or edict must be promulgated.

This is the first of a two-part article written by LC, a self-proclaimed literature hog interested in applying a multi-disciplinary approach to world affairs. The article first appeared on Dec 17, 2001 in various Malaysian forums. The second part will be published tomorrow.