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SCMP Reporter

PARADOXES OF MAHATHIRISM Khoo Boo Teik, Oxford University Press, $225 Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has earned a reputation as a leader of singular, often head-strong determination. He appears to court controversy and confrontation.

  In certain Asian bureaucratic circles, insiders joke that God proposes, Dr Mahathir disposes.

  Khoo Boo Teik's book attempts to piece together the puzzle presented by one of Asia's most successful, if enigmatic, politicians.

  In charting Dr Mahathir's ideas on nationalism, capitalism, Islam, populism and authoritarianism, what Khoo discovers, and what makes this an engaging read, is a man of many paradoxes and apparent inconsistencies.

  Dr Mahathir seems at once both shy and combative. Over the years, he has been described as both an ideologue and pragmatist.

  He changes his mind on fundamental issues. For example, early in his career as Prime Minister, he refused to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. In 1989 he decided to host it.

  Although a Muslim and supporter of Islam, he punished a domestic journal for writing about the plight of Muslims in southern Thailand.

  Will the real Mahathir Mohamad please stand up?   In trying to get the 'real' Dr Mahathir to do just that, the author finds a number of personalities popping up from their chairs.

  It is probably best, says Khoo, to understand the politician as a series of persona responding to personal and social paradoxes of the time. Khoo's principal window on Dr Mahathir is the leader's ideas, outlined in essays, speeches and interviews, as well as the policies he has adopted as Prime Minister since 1981.

  Dr Mahathir's changing views on Malay nationalism, for example, support the validity of Khoo's approach.

  One of Dr Mahathir's early works, written when he was out of political favour between 1969 and 1972 was so outspoken, unabashedly making use of racial stereotypes, that it was banned in Malaysia.

  The proscription added to his fame as a Malay nationalist.

  In that work, Dr Mahathir explains the Malays' low standing in the economic pecking order as the result of lush tropical largesse which left them without fear of starvation and thus deprived them of the survival instincts developed by those, namely the Chinese, who had come from circumstances where life was more precarious.

  Yet, Dr Mahathir, the social Darwinist, paradoxically concluded that Malays had to be protected from excessive competition, an argument which bolstered the Malay-boosting New Economic Policy of the 1970s. However, when recession set in during the mid-1980s, he announced not more protectionist measures, but rather a suspension of the policy.

  At the same time, the Prime Minister pushed an economic strategy which made privatisation and foreign investment two of its cornerstones. Wealth creation, rather than distribution, had become the central task and Dr Mahathir the pragmatist was able to shake off his ideological stripes.

  As the Malays' social and economic standing improves, he later enunciates a very different view.

  In his policy to transform Malaysia into a developed country by the year 2020, he now promotes productivity rather than protection, and instead of defending the Malay cause, he puts greater stress on the idea of a unified nation where ethnic distinctions melt away.

  Dr Mahathir is not a xenophobe and can be disarmingly charming when he willed to be diplomatic. Yet, in the 1970s, he began articulating hostile views of the West which have often won him headlines and helped him become one of the main spokesmen for Asian values.

  It did not matter that many of his views of the West were ill-informed or superficial, as Khoo notes.

  For example, Dr Mahathir stated some young Americans refused to go to war in Vietnam simply out of cowardice - a view which, of course, ignores the deeper moral and political debate which tore the United States apart.

   He also sometimes backed his declarations with outlandish, even trite examples, such as using attire as an indicator of discipline.

  But as the author demonstrates, the timing rather than the message itself was all important: the notion that the West was in decline and should not be copied gave the politician a way of focusing Malay nationalism outward, beyond inter-communal rivalries at home.

  Still, the roots of his nationalism and sometimes anti-Western policies as Prime Minister go beyond theory and perceptions. His Buy British Last policy was prompted by what he saw as the UK media's and London Stock Exchange's hostility to the Malaysian government's takeover of the Guthrie Corporation, a British plantation company.

  Likewise, it was the actions of the West - protectionism, a sudden increase in interest rates, foreign exchange manipulation - with often disastrous consequences for developing countries, that convinced him that poorer nations should not rely on developed economies.

  Why, asked Dr Mahathir, should prices of commodities produced in developing countries be set by exchanges situated in Western countries?   Throughout these pages, the reader comes, if not to sympathise with Dr Mahathir, then to at least understand the roots of his world view. Khoo appears to admire his leadership, yet that does not seem to have compromised his objectivity. Indeed, the author is critical of his theories and pronouncements, noting that, even if politically astute, they have sometimes been based on a lack of understanding.

  Khoo is a scholar and his book is academic in approach, full of long quotes from the politician and pages of footnotes.

  The research has obviously been painstaking and it lends the book much authority.

  On the other hand, the writing style is dry, perhaps unnecessarily so.

  Khoo could have helped less-informed readers by setting the stage with background on the intricacies of Malaysian politics.

  As it is, non-specialists may find themselves stumbling from time to time for want of markers to guide them through.

  Fortunately, the unique twists and often abrupt turns in Dr Mahathir's development as a thinker and politician create enough drama to carry the reader along.



The many faces of Dr Mahathir