Situating Malaysia’s politics of hedging : historical roots and contemporary challenges

Abstract

Over the past three decades, observers and international relations scholars have used the concept of hedging to refer to the foreign policy orientation of various Southeast Asian states facing major powers’ ascendancy and competition in the region. By drawing on Jürgen Haake’s concept of hedging as a form of risk management and expanding its scope to comprehend a discursive dimension, this essay articulates a perspective on Malaysia’s hedging. It contends that Malaysia’s contemporary foreign policy orientation builds on a deep-seated practice of managing security risks, while engaging regional and external actors through security narratives. More specifically, the paper shows that the seeds of Malaysia’s hedging policy were planted in the post-colonial period, as the newly-born federation entered into a regional context engulfed in conflicts and Cold War-induced uncertainty, yet, one that encouraged shared narratives of cooperation and stability, rooted in anti-colonial political cultures. As a result of dealing with structural and protracted security challenges, risk-management became a distinctive theme of the state’s domestic and international political discourse, helping to frame Malaysia’s recognizable positionality at the interface of political narratives and policy praxis. Kuala Lumpur has so far managed to navigate the South China Sea predicament by capitalizing on this established foreign policy tradition, which serves both internal and external legitimacy purposes. Based on these considerations, the paper finally outlines how recent political developments at the domestic and regional levels might hinder, or instead facilitate, Malaysia’s capacity to maintain a similar line of action.