Globalization and Social Transformation in the Asia-Pacific

As the Asia-Pacific region develops in economic strength and influence in the 21st century, a deeper understanding of the differences and commonalities among the countries of this region is needed. Australia and Malaysia share the Asia-Pacific region with powerful neighbours such as China and Indonesia, as well as small fledgling democracies such as Timor Leste. Australia and Malaysia also share similar histories as colonies of Britain that have transformed over time into independent and economically prosperous nation-states. Both countries have a similar population size and are multi-ethnic, culturally diverse societies. The two countries also demonstrate significant divergence both in terms of the formal aspects of the political process and the institutionalization of democratic governance as well as in the type of political culture manifest in both societies.

In this chapter I intend to use the interplay between Malaysian and Australian academics to highlight the role of both countries in the evolving regional architecture of East Asia. In so doing, I discuss the importance, both conceptually and empirically, of liberal democracy to competing visions of regionalism and security in Asia. This helps illuminate what I call the ‘Australia-Malaysia’ nexus as a key part of the process of Asian regional integration and institution building.

Transnational processes, also known as globalizing forces in the political, economic, cultural and strategic spheres, invariably impact upon, and are impacted by, the local conditions that intersect with the global environment. The trajectory of modern nation-state formation and its ability to project power far beyond its own borders since the 17th century, is itself a concrete manifestation of globalization. The manner in which state formation has occurred in diverse ways in terms of their internal socio-political and economic structure evidences how the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ have mutually impacted upon each other’s ‘sphere of influence’.

What major social transformations have re-shaped Australia — socially, politically, ideologically, culturally — over the 25 to 30 years of rapid globalization? In the Australian case it is clear that economic globalization has been first of all a top-down political project aimed at nothing less than a re-engineering of a whole nation society.

The discourse on globalization and its interactions with states and societies including the middle class, has undergone a marked shift in the last 20 years. This shift has occurred not only in the West but also in many developing countries especially those that have strong state systems. One major strand of thought was that globalization — unleashed by neoliberal or free market forces ‘charging like a juggernaut’ — holds states and societies captive so they became ‘losers’. This means that inequalities within and between states were entrenched. The ‘winners’ were owners of capital and their associates. Neoliberal globalization thus should be opposed or rejected, a school of thought that has been very much associated with the anti-globalizers, as well as those highly critical of globalization. However, of late, variations of this argument have emerged.

In this chapter I explore the ways in which increasing economic integration, understood as ‘globalization’, is impacting on the Australian state’s capacity to engage in strategic industrial governance, with a focus on strategic procurement policy. Specifically I ask: to what extent is Australia’s ability to use procurement policy for national industrial development purposes being constrained by its participation in international trade agreements? My argument is that despite being party to numerous trade agreements, Australia actually retains a significant degree of autonomy in its ability to use public purchasing for developmental ends. Interestingly however, since the early 2000s the Australian government has chosen not to use the policy space open to it, despite previously exhibiting a growing commitment to procurement-linked developmental activism. In order to explain Australia’s shift away from strategic public procurement since the early 2000s, we must look beyond ‘global constraints’ to the lack of political will on the part of Australia’s federal policy-making elite.

Rapid changes in technology have facilitated changes in production processes and structures, thereby accelerating cross-border movement of capital, labour, goods and services. This has led to increasing economic integration between most countries. These cross-border flows of goods, services, and factors of production — understood as the process of economic globalization — have contributed to the economic development of some countries. But, speculative financial flows have caused disruptions in the economic growth and stability of some countries as in the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) of 1997–1998 and the more recent Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009.

Multiculturalism is a loaded term with multiple meanings. Critical of the simplistic, superficial or idealized ways in which both its opponents and advocates used the term, David Goldberg prefers to talk about the ‘multicultural conditions’ instead (Goldberg, 1994, pp. 1–2). Will Kymlicka, on the other hand, uses multiculturalism in a normative sense, as ‘ideas about the legal and political accommodation of ethnic diversity’ (Kymlicka, 2010, p. 97). For him, multiculturalism is ‘a political project that attempts to redefine the relationship between ethno-cultural minorities and the state through the adoption of new laws, policies or institutions’ (Kymlicka, 2010, p. 99). Kymlicka is referring specifically to the historical adoption of policies of multiculturalism by specific Western countries such as Canada and Australia from the 1970s. He situates the emergence of these ideas in the globalization of human rights norms after the Second World War. At the international level, principles of equality and anti-discrimination are increasingly applied to cultural and religious minority groups as well as indigenous peoples. Rights to the preservation of cultural and religious identity have incrementally become the object of intergovernmental support through measures such as legislative change (Koenig, 2008). This general global trend evolves in an interactive way with the national processes of articulation of multiculturalism policies in several Western countries.

As in Malaysia, multiculturalism in Australia is a site of contestation. The contexts and main lines of this contestation are however, quite different. In Malaysia, as we have seen in the previous chapter, multiculturalism emerged as an attempt largely to maintain the country’s post-colonial status quo. The hallmarks of this status quo were firstly, a corporate pluralistic view of Malaysian society as comprising discrete cultural communities — chiefly Malays, Chinese, and Indians — and secondly, a nationalist-cum-elitist politics that sought to secure a privileged status for the Malay community as foundational to Malaysian national identity and culture. In contrast, multiculturalism in Australia mainly operates on a model of liberal nationalism. Grounded in the liberal values of individual liberty and equality, it sees diversity as the province of individual Australians and seeks to check, if not altogether overturn, the privileged status of the dominant Anglo-Australia culture. It categorically repudiates the ethnic-cum-racial definition of Australia as a white society and ‘outpost of the British race’ to which the Commonwealth of Australia subscribed for its first half century.

Attempting to compare refugee policy in Australia and Malaysia is like trying to compare apples and oranges. Australia is a developed, multicultural society that relies on a large government-sponsored program of immigration to maintain economic growth and labour needs (Colic-Peisker, 2009; DIAC, 2011a). Despite its geographic location, Australia maintains strong ties with Great Britain as the former colonial power as well as with other countries in the Global North. Malaysia is a fast developing post-colonial Asian nation with a rich cultural heritage, a national structure comprising of three major ethnic groups, and strong regional ties with its neighbours. Australia has signed and ratified the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and its 1967 protocol. Malaysia has neither signed nor ratified the Convention or its Protocol. In order to make any meaningful comparison between Australia and Malaysia these fundamental differences have to be addressed, and the implications of how these differences impact on refugee policy will be explored. In both cases the histories of ‘managing’ migrants and the cultural diversity of populations are open to interpretation, and are inherently political in their nature. As each country struggles to shape its refugee policy, and to work together within a regional and an international context of globalization and transnationalism, these differences pose many challenges.

Since the period of settlement, White Australia has understood itself as a ‘country of immigration’ through proactive recruitment of immigrants as a central part of ‘nation-building’. This history of incorporating newcomers is not uniform, nor linear. The history of racial discrimination against immigrants as well Aboriginal people is well documented, most obviously through the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, otherwise known as the White Australia Policy, which actively discriminated against immigrants on the grounds of race (Lake & Reynolds, 2008; Tazreiter, 2011). It is outside the scope of this chapter to review or critique this history. However it is an aspect of national collective memory making to bear in mind in relation to contemporary attitudes and political culture in Australian society and the formal and informal modes of ‘inclusion’ and social recognition newcomers encounter.

The intricate interplay between irregular migration, human rights and securitization has developed into a significant discourse in the migration regimes of a number of states. Migrant populations play a role in host state’s cultural constructs and security paradigms, and in altering political outcomes in the host states (Sadiq, 2005). However, irregular migrants are also often portrayed as a security threat to a nation’s sovereignty. Accordingly, counter-terrorism policies and measures taken by host countries in order to combat security threats, often lead to human rights violations of the irregular migrant populations (Amnesty International, 2008). The proliferation of global human rights treaties and conventions has engendered the labelling of the contemporary period as the ‘age of human rights’. At the same time, the issue of terrorism, especially Islamic terrorism, has risen to the top of the global political agenda (Jackson, 2007). Anti-terrorist measures adopted by the West after 9/11 have marked a shift towards greater state control over individuals (Edmunds, 2011, p. 11; Gearty, 2007). Under the new security regimen, stricter policies for the verification of documentation came into place, disproportionately affecting migrant populations. Stricter regulations have been adopted by most nations. Malaysia has received serious criticism for the violation of human rights in the ‘guise of state security’ (An-Naim, 1999).

This chapter concerns the regulation of intimate relationships by the nation-state in an age of globalization. The term intimate association involves a wide range of goods and principles, not only material but also of a spiritual, religious, symbolic and psychic character. The impact of globalization on the nation-state offers the promise of new spaces in which the identity and relationships of women in particular can be explored and defined in more open, egalitarian and autonomous ways than in the pre-globalization era. In part, these spaces are found in the increasing pluralism of western societies created through immigration and other forms of movement across borders. It would of course be a mistake to see this pluralism as an entirely novel phenomenon, even in a country like Australia, so often characterized as ‘white’ prior to the 1970s. Even before white conquest and settlement of Australia, movements of persons especially for trade to and in the north of the continent meant that its population was by no means homogeneous in racial, legal, linguistic or religious terms.1 There has never been a time of ‘one law, one language, one people’ in Australia. However, there is a difference in that modern societies value heterogeneity in more positive terms, and even as an aspiration, than have older societies.

This paper seeks to discuss debates in Malaysia relating to the intersection of gender, justice and rights. In Malaysia, social and political issues are frequently framed as contestations over the religious or secular nature of the Malaysian State. Whereas Lee has described in detail the nature of some of these discussions elsewhere (Lee, 2010a), we intend here to focus on those contests that pertain especially to gender. Our discussion describes the way in which some issues, which have played out in the public sphere, reveal the nature of public narratives relating to gender that both everyday Malaysians as well as activists must negotiate.

This chapter will discuss the historical trends in Australian international education, focusing on higher education, the role of the Australian government in promoting international education and supporting international students, the benefits and challenges of international education, and the debates related to the ‘marketization’ of international education, with a view to predicting future demand from international students for Australian higher education.

Globalization is a highly contested concept with multiple meanings. Since the focus of this chapter is on internationalization, as distinct from globalization, globalization for our purposes focuses primarily on interconnectedness between nations — as ‘the widening, deepening and speeding up of world-wide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 9). Based on this definition, globalization has potentially transformative impacts as it is a dynamic process that can drive local, national and global dimensions of contemporary social life more closely together (Marginson & Van Der Wende, 2006). Globalization thus has the potential to affect national autonomy with some nation-states having more power and capacity to manage it than others.