1 - Introduction

Summary

This book considers Malaysia-Singapore relations from a range of disciplinary perspectives. The chapters on history, politics, regional security, law, and economics collectively aim at a multidimensional study that seeks to convey the density and complexity of connections “across the Causeway”.

But this book also demonstrates the fact that the challenges of undertaking such a project are not confined to soliciting and assembling contributions from scholars in the field. The fraught legacy of historical entanglement, political union, and subsequent separation not only continues to cast a shadow over ongoing transactions and negotiations between the two countries, it also imposes burdens on scholars of Malaysia-Singapore relations. Politics is in part a matter of language, or to be more precise, loaded language. The Singaporean leadership's call for “meritocracy” was taken by the Malay leadership as an attack on the political entitlements of Malays. Lee Kuan Yew is often described as “assertive” and “temperamental”; economic success is said to have made Singaporeans “condescending” towards Malaysians. Accounts of what happened (or is happening) between Malaysia and Singapore — whether advanced by the political actors themselves or by witnesses or by those whose lives are affected by events and their consequences — thus encode standpoints and carry emotional overtones that may provoke positive or negative responses far in excess of their literal meanings. While scholarship strives to maintain critical distance from these accounts, it can only do so by working within, rather than outside of, language. If to write at all is to necessarily write from a position, then writing cannot completely insulate itself from the politics of language that shapes politics. Indeed, scholars of Malaysia-Singapore relations have sometimes found themselves implicated, by their own use of language, in the very debates and controversies that they claim only to examine.

In light of the contentiousness of some aspects of Malaysia-Singapore relations, Across the Causeway adopts a decidedly eclectic approach. Each section contains essays by Malaysian, Singaporean, and third-party scholars and highlights the heterogeneity of interpretations that underpin different disciplinary approaches to the issue.