during Q&A: Dr Mahathir receiving questions

“Now, do we understand what we mean by nation state and how are we committed to it? Many people think that a nation state would involve loyalty to the nation. But we have a multi racial society and it becomes very difficult to get the same kind of commitment to the state among people of races, religion, language and culture. Nevertheless, Malaysia manages to retain its identity as an independent nation state. There were, of course, some problems with the different races but they were not violent.

In the meantime, do we guard our sovereignty or not? This is a very important question. Some people feel that we should be inter-nationalists rather than nationalists. That today, the nationalism of old cannot be sustained any more. You need to come together in order to gain strength.

There is merit in that.

We would become a bigger market, for example, and would be able to compete with China. China has 1.3 billion people, whereas Southeast Asia has more than 500 million people. It’s a big market, half the size of China.  And of course there would be benefits if we can work together. But it will take a long time before we can reconcile the different ambitions, the different objectives, targets of the different states of Southeast Asia.

But as I said, in the meantime, we have to guard our own sovereignty. That means we have to be independent. To be independent means we would be in total charge of our country. That nobody has any right to make a decision affecting our country. We were very tough on this I would say. We didn’t want to be dictated to by anybody. We would criticise any other nation however powerful if they try to undermine our sovereignty.

But that depends on our attitude really. There are some people who say that it is not worthwhile to be so independent because we would benefit by submitting to some powerful countries. Well, that is something that we should think of, but then we would lose our freedom to decide for ourselves if we do that.

I believe that even small countries can sustain its own independence by judiciously having relations with different blocks, different countries so that we balance, their influence against each other. During the Cold War, small countries tended to rely on the conflicts between the Eastern and the Western block in order to sustain their Independence, in order to get some support from these antagonists in the Cold War.”