Would I be wrong to say of Malaysians that most of them consider themselves Malay/Chinese/Indian/Kadazan/Iban first and Malaysians second?

There are exceptional occasions of course. A Malaysian travelling or studying abroad, or one who is a foreign tourist on the street of Kuala Lumpur, may put on his Malaysian hat temporarily. Nevertheless, the harsh reality of daily experience in multi-racial Malaysia would compel him to revert to his particular ethnic identity in no time at all. The mass media and the politicians would make sure of that.

Having many ethnic groups with a strong sense of their respective ethnic identity is not necessarily a bad thing. It offers us a variety of wonderful cultural universes, which makes life interesting. But when power relation enters into ethnic relation, when the will to dominate propels the political forces at work to construct a post-colonial nation-state based on the European model, then ethnic identity assumes distorted proportion, in both the public and private lives of citizens.

After half a century of independence, we should have sufficient hindsight to review the success and failure of this project of nation-building in Malaysia.

Obviously, this project has not been a total failure. Malaysia is one of the most stable and peaceful polities among newly emergent Third World countries. One could argue that this stability is achieved at the expense of human rights violation across the political board, and that the social engineering through education and the mass media has produced unthinking younger generations of Malaysians. The fact still remains that, as an experiment in modern nationhood, Malaysia has been a modest success of sort, compared to other countries on the same par.