Malaysian worldmakers in the age of decolonisation, 1950s-1970
In the 1950s and the 1960s, Malaysian nationalists harboured ambitions to remake the world following the age of empires. Among them was a group of state actors whose Anglophile and anti-communist profiles had facilitated their rise to power. Turning to the platform of international institutions, these leaders competed, cooperated, and clashed with their counterparts across the North-South divide in their quest to correct global inequalities and to safeguard Malaya’s newfound sovereignty. They also creatively adapted and translated anticolonial idioms from different international circuits to consolidate their nationalist regimes at home. Synthesising sources from different national repositories and archives of international organisations, this thesis locates the Malaysian leaders in a series of overlapping ‘global orders’, namely the Commonwealth of Nations, the United Nations, and an imagined Muslim World. In doing so, it makes three interventions. First, this thesis recovers the understudied intersections of internationalism and nationalism in the making of the postcolonial state. Second, it foregrounds distinct visions of decolonisation embedded in varying international organisations, recovering inventive means through which smaller ex-colonies like Malaysia exercised sovereignty. Third, by scrutinising underappreciated Malaysian initiatives in a range of international theatres, it distils hidden asymmetries between Afro-Asian states and exposes the facile quality of ‘Global South’ solidarities. In making these interventions, this thesis illuminates the process of entrenchment of the nation-states system as well as the limits of self-determination in the postwar world.
Commonwealth of Nations, Decolonisation, Malaysia, Muslim World, United Nations
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