Malaysia’s Unexceptionalism: Like Elsewhere, Elites are Fractious

Most national elites in Southeast Asia must be understood as divided, skirmishing ceaselessly for factional advantage while surging periodically in epic warring. Thus, in countries like Thailand and the Philippines, regimes have been rocked by autogolpes, military coups, and social upheavals. In other cases, elites have mostly been contained, but coercively, whether by an enveloping executive as in Indonesia under Suharto or in Cambodia under Hun Sen; an absorptive single party system as in Vietnam and Laos, encrusted with revolutionary origins and ideology; or fearsome security apparatuses as in Myanmar during the generalship of Ne Win. But though regimes in these latter cases might avoid outright breakdown, relations between elites are punctuated still by purges, economic ruin, imprisonment, and exile. Such fractiousness is typical. Surveying elites around the world and across time, Higley and Burton (1989: 19) describe elite-level conflict as the ‘modal condition’. And in focusing more closely on Southeast Asia, Dan Slater (2010: 10) concurs, writing that ‘strong elite coalitions are extremely difficult to construct and consolidate at the national level. In most places and under most circumstances, elite politics is rife with factionalism and parochialism’.