According to recent reports the National Service (NS) programme attempts to inculcate in Malaysian youth a sense of anti-imperialism as a pillar of nationalism. This comes as a pleasant surprise given that we are living in openly imperialist times where we can hear brazen talk of imperialist ambitions from certain camps within Western nations.

However, the manner of instruction is sending NS trainees to sleep. They are questioned as to whether they know of Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal when one is hard pressed to find copies of his works in any Malaysian bookstore.

That anti-imperialism is a central tenet of National Service also highlights contradictions within Malaysia's past and present as well as the myths and realities which structure our everyday lives.

It points to a general crisis in our post-colonial society: what sort of anti-imperialist credentials can the NS claim when we are economically and culturally dependent upon so-called imperialist countries and are increasingly complicit in similar practices?

To take the genuinely anti-imperialist path means to forsake many cherished illusions about what our society and civilisation is about. It is a path of critical self-knowledge rather than spoon-fed ignorance.

It has happened for many in American, Britain, Europe, Australia and other so-called imperialist countries as well as many other oppressed nations. It has rarely happened in Malaysia.

The parochialism in Malaysian intellectual culture and the ideological censure against critical self-examination prevent us from perceiving how intimately we are caught up in the practices of imperialism.

The globalisation of Malaysian multinational corporations particularly those involved in extractive industries such as logging, mining, oil and gas is causing social, economic and environmental upheavals in a number of other countries although, much like Rizal's works, we would be hard-pressed to find much publicly available information.

Problematic also is the apparent focus on studying past anti-colonial struggles of neighbouring nations when equivalent radical movements in this country's history have been persecuted to the benefit of the present government.

If NS trainees are encouraged to examine the economic and political entanglements of imperialism in the region, how does the Barisan Nasional (BN) government hope to escape scrutiny of its ambiguous relationship with colonialism and contemporary imperialism?

This question applies in turn to the nationalism which the BN has tried to shape and which structures in part the imagination of those who are contesting its vision for Malaysia.

In the course of this two-part article I want to examine these complex threads and the challenges they present not only to the BN project but also to other competing visions of nationalism and development within Malaysia.

Rough guide to imperialism

Imperialism remains a threat to the national sovereignty of every developing nation. Simply put there is a double threat military and economic to the sovereignty of every developing nation. Both have been present since the era of decolonisation but the extent of the monopoly exerted on force, finance, trade, and international institutions has intensified.

The invasion of Iraq is the latest reminder of imperialist militarism, but it is only the most recent in a long line of re-invasions visited upon Third World countries in the last 60 years. The Korean war, Vietnam, Cambodia, numerous sponsored coup d'etat in Latin America and Africa, Sudan, Haiti, Solomon Islands and Afghanistan are others.

Over two-thirds of world trade is dominated by just 500 corporations, the majority of which are domiciled in the developed North. These corporations also dominate foreign investment flows and represent some 30% of world GDP.

Key industries of cereals, coffee, oil and gas, mining, automobiles, telecommunications and transport are each controlled or dominated by a small handful of transnational corporations (TNCs). Through their oligopolies and effective monopolies these TNCs dominate world trade, research and development, and prices.

They exert enormous influence on Northern governments who in turn use all manner of diplomatic arm-twisting, economic threats, military coercion and overwhelming resources to muscle through changes in developing country regulations which would allow these transnational corporations unaccountable access to Southern resources, public services and accumulated wealth. What once went naked in the colonies now goes clothed in the respectability of global business.

The 'World Investment Report' produced by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development details that the overwhelming majority of regulatory changes in developing countries over the last decade have been in favour of foreign capital, often at the expense, as civil society groups have pointed out, of local business, the environment and national security.

Developing countries have been brought to this desperate situation by the accumulated 'pauper-isation' of colonialism, unfair trading rules, and decades of devastating debt-inducing structural adjustment administered by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The latter two organisations are by a pseudo-aristocratic 'tradition' headed respectively by an American and European. This political monopoly of world governance is used to undermine the independence of Southern countries through financial coercion.

For over two-thirds of the world's peoples freedom still did not come after decolonisation because our economies remained in the grip of the North, trade in commodities were bottlenecked through their financial capitals, and their guns were still aimed at the beating breasts of the newly liberated peoples.

Despite a considerable tradition of criticism from within, the countries of the global North maintain this 'imperialism' because their private capital grows fat upon it, their culture and luxuries depend upon the South (coffee, sugar, bananas, tea, spices, textiles, furniture, art, music, exotic sensuality), and their fossil fuel-based industry is absolutely dependent upon a steady supply of raw materials largely found in the global South (like oil, gas, gold, copper, iron, aluminium, tin and rubber).

The South is also being turned into a subordinate consumer market by the TNCs, a process which subsumes Southern businesses, facilitates cultural imperialism and economic dependency, and concentrates profits in the North.

For those on the losing side of this equation, the labouring peoples of the world and those marginalised through economic expropriation, imperialism is not an abstract issue, it is a life or death question.

The rich of all countries, and the richest countries in the North and South, are the principle beneficiaries of this world economic order. Like Singapore, Malaysia has passed into this camp albeit as a minor player.

It is not sheer wealth but the conditions under which wealth is accumulated, particularly the degree to which transnational exploitation plays a role in sustaining national economic growth. Imperialism can also be the means to avoid addressing sharpening domestic inequality. Like Britain and the United States, despite their great concentrations of wealth, we also have concentrated pockets of immense dispossession and poverty.

This is the meaning of becoming a 'developed' country in today's global order. This is the economic, social and moral consequence of pursuing Vision 2020 though few in this country would care or dare to examine it.

It is a path which has driven many nations of the North, despite their many fine qualities, to commit monstrous acts in order to preserve their privileges. The country which is more developed in this manner only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own desired future.

Alternative development

Yet it need not be so. Development can still mean the emergence from poverty into a prosperity that is not built upon the unwilling suffering or exploitation of others. It need not mean engaging in the wasteful mimicry of modernist mega-projects.

It may mean having more faith and pride in the indigenous and traditional cultures of Malaysia's peoples rather than the anxious pursuit of desperate modernism or obscurantist religiosity. It will mean setting an example on the world stage that it is possible to achieve wealth, stability and prosperity without recourse to imperialist methods or piggybacking upon them.

An example of the latter is that a number of Malaysians from major companies were board members of Northern-based firms opposed to the involvement of the UN in co-ordinating the reconstruction of Iraq. These firms favoured the awarding of contracts to nationals 'loyal' to the invasion force, namely themselves.

Had this been publicly debated it would have likely put a dent in the Malaysians for Peace campaign of the time and at the very least could have mobilised moral pressure to support the UN consistent with Malaysia's official position, but our culture and media currently do not allow such checks and balances to be asserted.

Where can we situate the NS curriculum in this regard? It presents itself as perhaps the first public attempt since our colonial era to educate Malaysians in anti-imperialism. Let us tease out some of the character and contradictions within the BN's anti-imperialism stance.

Frustrated imperialist

The principle ideological force behind the inclusion of anti-imperialism in the curricula is almost certainly ex-premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad. His bombastic attacks on Western imperialism earned him the appreciation of many Third World countries and a number of others who might have otherwise disagreed with his domestic authoritarianism.

Western leaders have since learned that his bark is worse than his bite. Mahathir and the government could always be counted on to keep Malaysia open to Western investment. Western capital has never been shy of doing business with dictators of an even darker stripe.

Mahathir's anti-imperialism was on the surface exceptional. He was a product of Western modernity, obsessed with dragging Malaysians, and particularly Malays, into his vision of modernisation. Adopting the industrial and corporatist structure of Western economies meant also engaging in similar imperial adventures. There are several reasons for this.

The Malaysian economy is relatively small. Our corporate conglomerates built upon natural resource depletion, construction and gambling feel this pressure acutely since the desire to milk every shred of value out of their capital stock discourages them from retiring or shifting industry. Thus they pick smaller, weaker countries for overseas expansion.

Following Mahathir's advice in his Malaysia: the way forward thesis they also head for the scraps left by Western companies, the places where profit is marginal or investment is rendered taboo by pressure from human rights groups, countries such as Burma and Sudan.

These countries need economic help, but they don't need to be unfairly exploited. Malaysian businesses, while not universally deplorable are, as we well know, generally lax in their social and environmental responsibilities. Some, like the logging sector, are downright ruthless.

Other Malaysian investments benefit from forced labour under military dictatorship. Human rights can be ignored because the companies are free from scrutiny and accountability in Malaysia. This is the globalisation of Malaysian cowboy capitalism.

But there are limits to this. Malaysia is a small country and, as in some workplaces, there is a glass ceiling in the global economy for developing nations. Mahathir's anti-imperialism is born out of the frustration that the West has always preached a universal path to development to the South, but never intended to keep the way open. He is a frustrated imperialist.

The competitive element in capitalism has always tended towards monopoly. Monopoly is the prize that is defended vigorously once seized since it promises a a steady stream of the good life, at the expense of opportunities for others of course.

Likewise in world politics. Monopolistic control of the flows and terms of finance and trade helps the North leach hundreds of billions of dollars out of the South each year. What sane capitalist would give this arrangement up to people he once colonised?

Decolonisation did not guarantee universal acceptance of the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity between nations. Its global scale meant that these principles, a gift of the French revolution, had to be respected in form, but in practice forsaking the wealth of the colonies would have dealt an intolerable blow to Northern capitalism.

For settler colonies, decolonisation would mean forsaking a privileged lifestyle on land seized from the natives. (Within a month of its liberation from Nazi Germany France massacred 45,000 Algerians who demanded independence and an end to settler colonialism. France has only recently begun to admit publicly the atrocities committed in the Algerian liberation struggle.)

Characteristic of today's imperialism is that the relationship of mutual profit between neo-colonial elite and the imperialists contains an ever greater degree of antagonism generated by the greed and power of the latter.

Owing to their control and influence in world finance and key institutions such as the World Trade Organisation, World Bank and IMF the imperialists have an enormous amount of power with which to exercise their quest for profit and beat out lesser capitalist competition.

The solution to this problem lies in the democratisation of global institutions of governance and finance. It is a struggle that finds support from progressive camps within both North and South.

Malaysians are on the whole not particularly engaged in this struggle perhaps because they have not suffered as much as Indonesia, to take one example. I believe even the BN is concerned about the costs of complacency, theirs is an uneasy symbiosis with imperialism.

It is not just Mahathir's ambitions and the fortunes of his industrialists which are stake. It is also, to use a very Filipino phrase, all of our national patrimony.

Tomorrow

: Rewriting history

Yin Shao Loong is an environmentalist and activist on North-South issues.