Mahathir's Anti-Western World View: An Intellectual Origin of Malaysian Reactions to the Economic Crisis in the Late 1990s *

Abstract

This study attempts to investigate a key question: In the face of the economic crisis seen from the mid-1977, why did the Malaysian government take the reactions against the world moving rapidly toward ever greater globalization, deregulation and liberalization quite contrary to other Asian countries? In an effort to partly answer this question, this study examines Mahathir's anti-Western world view in an intellectual perspective. As a matter of fact, the prime minister is the most influential political figure in contemporary Malaysia. Calling himself as Chief Executive Officer or CEO of ‘Malaysia Incorporated’, he was able to engineer Malaysian Society at the apogee of the power center to engineer Malaysian society during the past two decades, putting his visions into practice through various policies. In this sense, Mahathir's world view is one of the key factors which been us to foresee the direction of the society. When the financial crisis broke out in July 1997, Mahathir revealed his anti-Western world view without reluctance, pinpointing currency speculators of the West as its main culprits. Mahathir was quite sure that the economic disaster was originated principally from the global economic environment in which no restriction was imposed on any currently trading. Thus, in the wake of the crisis, his prime concern was to curb currency trading by the speculators.