Regionalism and Globalization: The Malaysia Experience
While the vast majority of political, economic, and sociological analyses of trends occurring in the past two or so decades has focused primarily upon the process known as globalization, some attention has been given to the phenomenon known as regionalism. Analysts such as Georgios Chortareas and Theodore Pelagidis (2004, p. 253) suggest that it is important to recognize that what is often called globalization is in fact regionalism in which the increase in trade, cultural and technological transfers, migration, and political synergy tends to be regional in nature rather than genuinely global. It is quite possible that the degree of openness and receptiveness attributed to globalization converges faster in and across the countries of a specific region rather than at the global level. Indeed, Chortareas and Pelagadis (2004, pp. 268-269) conclude that trade integration, as one particularly significant aspect of globalization is more of a genuinely regional phenomenon than a truly global one.
This idea appears to be particularly apt in the case of Malaysia, a country which has had a strong focus on the promotion "of national unity through the eradicating of poverty and the restructuring of society so as to eliminate the identification of race with economic function" (Shari 2003, p. 256). Under the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the New Development Policy (NDP), Malaysia has aggressively pursued the goal of achieving the status of a fully developed nation. To achieve this goal, Malaysia has focused not only on improving its investments in human resources and expanding government expenditures on social services; it has also employed liberalization and deregulation to make it a more attractive investment locus for many of its neighbors as well as the multinational corporations (MNCs) that are associated with globalization. Hence, as this essay will demonstrate, Malaysia...