Federal Malaysia

Most cases of successful secession or dissolution have occurred with the consent of the relevant central authorities (United Arab Republic, Mali Federation, Malaysia-Singapore, Czechoslovakia, Yemen, Eritrea) or in the colonial context. There are hardly any examples of unilateral opposed secession that have remained effective over the long term. As noted above, the case of Bangladesh appears to be truly exceptional given the special role played by India. In that case, elements of state practice did initially reject the result, as evidenced in the records of the UN General Assembly, but this position was not maintained over time. 

Malaysia and Australia have a federal system of government. The other countries have a unitary or centralized system of government. 

In Australia and Malaysia, which have a federal system of government, the delegation of inspection responsibilities and reporting systems is organized in different ways. In Malaysia, inspection of distribution channels in the states comes under the authority of the State Deputy Director of Health (Pharmacy), and there is a direct route for reporting between the states and the federal agencies. 

Secondly, stmctural features in dmg regulation in countries operating a federal system of government affect the ability of the DRA to monitor dmg distribution throughout the entire country. In Australia, authority over distribution channels is fully delegated to the individual states. As a result, the TGA does not have the authority to assess and control the dmg distribution situation for the whole country. In contrast, the Pharmaceutical Services Division in Malaysia appoints a deputy director of health in each of its 13 states with power to issue licences, carry out inspections and submit reports. Under this arrangement, command and control may be exercised and an official channel established for information flow between the federal and state governments. 

Such a problem is not necessarily inevitable in federal-state delegation of authority. Mechanisms exist in some countries which can provide a link in the line of command and control. In Malaysia, the chief officer of the state regulatory authority is also a member of the federal-level organization. Policy communications between the federal and state levels, such as reporting, thereby become a routine. 

Information available in 1999 indicated that di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate was produced by 30 companies in China, 15 companies in India, 12 companies in Japan, eight companies in Mexico, seven companies in Taiwan, five companies each in Germany and the Russian Federation, four companies each in Argentina, Brazil, the Philippines and the United States, three companies each in Canada, Chile, Spain, Thailand, Turkey and Venezuela, two companies each in Belgium, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Korea (Republic of), Malaysia and Poland, and one company each in Albania, the Czech Republic, Finland, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Peru, Romania, South Africa, Sweden, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and Viet Nam (Chemical Information Services, 1999). 

Other imperial constructs decolonised and democratised in a series of federal compromises which left the outer shell of empire still able to act in the world as a nation-state with the same borders as the old. India is the classic case, but in Southeast Asia the example was followed in Malaysia s strikingly asymmetric form of federalism. 

Aceh follows as the ethnie nationalism most threatening to the Indonesian state. Chapter 5 demonstrates that the strength of this ethnie nationalism, by contrast with the stateless examples that follow, is precisely its memory of state. Acehnese may be less distinctive as a minority than Indonesia s Bataks or Malaysia s Kadazan, but they inherit an unusually strong sense of state resistance to outside control. The Batak and Kadazan cases, in chapters 6 and 7, reveal the different paths of political identity formation and assertion of previously stateless peoples that were possible in Indonesia and Malaysia respectively. The different outcomes are largely set by the gulf between the two state nationalisms with which they contended post-revolutionary, centralising civic nationalism in Indonesia evolutionary, federal and ethno-nationalist Malaysia. 

The boundaries drawn between British and Dutch spheres in what the British called the Malay World were arbitrary. The peoples and histories in the space that came to be Malaysia were not fundamentally different from those that came to be Indonesia save for their more recent, immigrant quality. Indonesia had by far the more intractable assemblage of ethnies rooted in distinctive histories, languages and literatures. Yet it is Malaysia that has the complex federal system, while Indonesia remains, with China, the world s largest experiment in organising exceptional cultural diversity through a unitary state. 

S. K. Chan, Tapioca, Investigations at the Federal Experiment Station, Serdang, Malaysia, 1969. 

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