[MUSIC] We have now come almost towards the end of our course. There are two big regions now still remaining that we will look at in this course, and the region we will look at today is particularly rich both in its history and in its linguistic, cultural, religious makeup. It's also a region that is very, very different both geographically, historically and particularly culturally from the regions we've looked at so far. It's also the first region where the prevalent religion of Islam has not arrived as a result of armed incursions, but rather through the peaceful presence of Arab traders and Sufi missionaries. We're looking today and this week at Malaysia and Indonesia and to the extent that it's necessary also at the Sultanate of Brunei and the Republic of Singapore as they pertain to this region. If you look at this map here, with looking at Malaysia that is composed of the, the areas based on the Malaysian Peninsula and here, Eastern Malaysia, there is Northern Borneo and Sarawak. And here we are looking at the Sultanate of Brunei. Down here is the city state of Singapore. And over here you have the enormous island, empire almost, of Indonesia, and you've probably heard of the problems in East Timor that are here, which is almost now an island in an area otherwise composed of the, Republic of Indonesia. So, East Timor used to be a Portuguese colony and has not become part of the, Republic of Indonesia, but the rest of it used to be a Dutch colony. So, Indonesia is a formally Dutch colony that gained independence and Malaysia used to be a British colony. It's also, you'll probably hear that Indonesia is the largest Muslim country that we have. It's roughly 230 million people, and Malaysia is slightly less than 30 million people. So they're both rather large Muslim societies. They are also, and that is important together with Turkey, probably the only Muslim countries that are doing reasonably well economically, without having to rely overly on oil and gas. So they're relatively vibrant societies and vibrant economies in particular. And, if you look at, it's a very unscientific anecdotal way of looking at the appeal of a society, but if you look at a random cafe in, let's say in Afghanistan, which I know best, you will often see posters on the wall of either the City of Dubai or Kuala Lumpur, because these are vibrant, very modern, metropolises that are at the same time Muslim. So they the rest of the Muslim world does look to the to these places as places that are, seem to have managed the transition into modernity and into creating a modern economy rather well. And what we will do this week is we try to look a little bit at the [...] sociohistorical background to the creation of the states and then how they have fared after independence and how they have manged to create the conditions for this relatively positive economic development. So, as I just mentioned, Islam came to these parts of the world not through conquering Arab or other Muslim armies. It was adopted peacefully by emulation through local inhabitants taking on the religions of Arab traders of Sufi missionaries that had come there. And we see Islam starting to spread here from the 14th century onwards. And then from the 15th century almost you have here the Malacca Sultanate on the Malay peninsula that's where the Hindu ruler adopts Islam. And so since then you have a Muslim state presence. And the Malay royal houses that still exist today, they traced their lineage back to the Malacca Sultanate. And now this brings us, let's talk briefly in this lecture about, I will try to give you an overview of both places and then in the next videos we will go into greater depth into the historical origin of first Malaysia and then Indonesia. So, just as a means of introduction, Malaysia is formerly an elective constitutional monarchy and that is the interesting part, you have nine royal houses that are the successors to the Malacca Sultanate. And they came under British protection, let's call it that way. It's the same instrument that we've seen before. And we saw particularly in in the Trucial states around the gulf. So these royal houses come under British protection in the beginning and the late 18th century, where you see the British arrival. And then from the 19th century onwards Britain concludes treaties with these royal houses. And then, in addition, you have certain territories that were outright colonies that the British annexed and administered directly. And here on this chart, and we will come back to it, it shows you that it's somewhat complicated. But it looks more complicated than it is, but we will come back to this in the next video where we go into greater depths about it. But you basically have now, after the second world war when independence was contemplated, you have these nine princely houses, and the four directly administered colonies now forming a union and the federal structure. And it is now agreed that the nominal head of the government would be a an elected monarch, elected on a five year term and it's by convention. It rotates between the nine royal houses. But it's a constitutional monarchy, so it's a figurehead, [...] and you have a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy - very much on the British model. And the interesting thing about Malaysia is that despite having very severe security problems from it's inception onwards, and then again very severely in the late 1960s and 70s, they have managed to come up with a reasonably well functioning version of that Westminster democracy. Something that, when we looked at Pakistan or to a somewhat lesser extent in Bangladesh, we see that the same type of democratic model has not been made to function overly well in Pakistan, for example. Whereas, here in Malaysia, we see it works relatively well, and that's perhaps one of the reasons why it is seen as a model among others. The other thing that is common in both Malaysia and Indonesia is the very, very rich ethnic and religious landscape that exists there. And that is perhaps an interesting feature and a holdover from British colonial period, because what the British did in Malaysia, as they did in other parts of the world, is that they imported people or encouraged immigration from other parts of their empire, mainly for reasons of labor migration, and that leads in the 19th century to the arrival of large number of Indians, particularly Tamil speakers, and Chinese. And that is now creating the background to the enduring political, sociopolitical problem in Malaysia, is that the groups that the British brought to Malaysia they ended up being in an economically advantageous situation. And so, we see that the Chinese and the Indians come to dominate the entrepreneurial and professional classes, and the indigenous Malay population, which happen to be the Muslim population tends to be economically disadvantaged. So we have from the inception of the Malaysian Union a strong constitutional preference being given to the Malays, who happen to be the Muslim population. Before we come to the creation of the Malaysian federation and the Indonesian Republic let's briefly look at two seeming anomalies that you will find on our political maps these days. It's if you see here, and I just alluded to them, this is the Island of Borneo, the southern part belongs to the Republic of Indonesia, used to be a Dutch colony. And these two northern parts, they're now part of the Malaysian Federation. And in between you see, the Sultanate of Brunei. You see that better here on this map. And Brunei is in many respects very similar to some of the smaller, very oil rich Gulf Emirates that we talked about. And similar to them, it's one of the princely states that has come under the British protection in the 19th century. And it then chooses not to join the Malaysian Federation and remains under British tutelage right up till '84 when it finally becomes independent. And it's an exceedingly small place, as you can see. Its territory is separated by the the Malaysian province Sarawak. And it depends on, continuously depends on British protection, but it's extremely oil rich and gas rich. And it has a very, very small population and that is in geo-strategic terms an anomaly, it would otherwise not exist if it had not this strong external protector. And it's some of the same issues, that we talked about when we talked about the Gulf, apply mutati mutandis for Brunei. Brunei's also overwhelmingly Muslim society, is rather small, about 400,000 people and, as you can imagine, extremely rich and shows many of the same kind of characteristics of a rentier economy that we saw in the Gulf. The other seeming anomaly is the city-state of Singapore, which you can see here on this map, It's located at the very southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. And it's a territory that was ceded to the British in the early 19th century. They started a settlement there, and the settlement became quickly a very important port and ultimately a trading post, linking the trade from British India. And as a result of which it obviously has a very strong British administrative and cultural tradition. But and that is the interesting part, unlike the rest of the Malay Peninsula the composition between, it's the same as we discussed before, between Malays, Chinese, and Indians; but here you have a predominantly Chinese population now, roughly about 60-70% and a large Indian population and a relatively small Malay population. And as a result of the strong port, the strong trading activity, it's been economically very dominant. And, this leads when the Federation of Malaysia was created, Singapore joins the Federation in '63, but then is kicked out of the Federation again in '65. Where the Parliament in Kuala Lumpur decides that it did not want to have Singapore in the Union because it felt that it's economic might, might detract from the importance of Kuala Lumpur and also because it was worried about [...] the Chinese predominance in that part. And ultimately, as we all know, Singapore ended up enormously successful economic path [...] in the late 20th century. And perhaps it's been to the detriment of the Malay Federation and so what you need to remember is that Singapore gains independence not really out of its own volition. It's against its will that it's kicked out of the union and then assumes independence. So what's the take on right now and we will come back to these issues later, is that it's a British colony that negotiates it's independence with Britain and maintains a relatively close relationship with Britain afterwards, both in legal, particularly administrative, and also in security matters, and that holds true for both Singapore and Malaysia and certainly for Brunei. As you saw at the map, Indonesia spans a very, very large geographical area. It's an island nation, and not surprisingly, it's composed of very, very different ethnic groups and different languages that are spoken. And we see also a very rich religious composition. It's also important to see that, you know, you have strong Protestant, Catholic, and Hindu and Buddhist traditions there. And the same holds true for the ethnic and linguistic composition of the country. So Indonesia is very much a multiculture place, just as Malaysia is. And it's a place that has come relatively early under Dutch control and we come to that story in the next video. And it occupies a role in Dutch social and political thinking that can only be compared to British India for the British Empire. It's, tiny little Holland had this enormous island nation under control. It extracts enormous amounts of wealth from it. It's very important for the Dutch self-image. And, perhaps, that now explains why this relatively benevolent separation into an independent nation from its colonial power did not work in a similar vein here in Indonesia as it did in Malaysia. And here perhaps you can remember what we discussed with respect to Algeria. We saw, there also you had France after World War II being unwilling [...] to leave Algeria into independence and necessitating a very long and bloody war. And we come back to that issue when we talk at greater length about the colonial history of Indonesia. But at this time, remember that when Indonesia declared its independence in '45 it was from a country that had been itself occupied. You know, Holland is occupied by German forces during the second World War. In '45, Holland becomes liberated, just as France becomes liberated at the same time. And, just like France, Holland is now in no mood to contemplate this independence, and basically accept its now much reduced position in the world. So, it does not recognize this independence and it requires a very long and bloody war. Here you see Indonesian freedom fighters, and here you see the Dutch forces that are sent to quell this rebellion, and we see strong analogies to the war in Algeria, also in the degree of the violence used. Ultimately in '49 the Dutch recognized the independence and since then we have The Republic of Indonesia. And at this point, what I'd like you to remember is that unlike Malaysia, which despite strong internal conflicts, Indonesia does not develop into a functioning democracy. So we have for an extremely long period only two presidents and a very limited political climate. Here this is an image from the the purge of the Communists in the '60s. What we seen then in '98, and it's a direct result of the economic crisis that hit the East Asian economies that had until then done rather well. You see popular unrest against Mr. Suharto, and he's been replaced. And since then we have a period of renewed democratic culture, basically for the first time the provisions of the '45 constitution are actually now able to be lived. And you see in that period then since '98 attempts to reduce the very strong presidential role that was inscribed in the constitution and [...] tame it in a sense, and make it less dangerous to abuse. Finally, the one point that I mentioned at the outset of this video is that both of these nations have presided over rather impressive economic performances. Here, you see the Indonesian GDP growth over time and the graphs maybe slightly confusing but it's from the 1970s till 2000 in the top graph from 2000 to the present period now. And on average we, we see a GDP Growth of about 6% over a very long time which is not bad at all, this is from Malaysia. And we see a similar figures for Indonesia. So, that is certainly something that has captured the imagination of other Muslim nations. That here you have Muslim societies that seem to combine economic growth and in particular now, in both cases, a return to democratic governments, with an ability to deal with not inconsiderable security challenges internally. They see if they can do it there despite all these security challenges perhaps it's also applicable in other parts. And that explains the strong appeal of these two countries throughout the Muslim world. And this is one of the signs of this of economic prosperity is the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, that you might have seen. So in the next video we will look at the colonial history that produced the modern state of Malaysia. And the video after that you look at the colonial history that produceed the modern nation of Indonesia and thereafter, we look at the period post-independence. [MUSIC]
