ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Malaysia's multicultural evolution as the development from multiracial consociation to projects of elite transculturalism and new multiculturalisms that attempt to transcend the plural society. After a century of social evolution, the ethnic pluralism brought about by economic immigration to Malaya developed into an emerging multiculturalism that sought the equality of the native races vis--vis the European residents in the colony. As Singapore's own political trajectory has shown, pluralism has not disappeared but has been worked into the very structuring of state-society relations, so that a welfarist and develop mentalist trans-ethnic state is legitimized by a society deemed intractably and essentially ethnic-pluralist and sustained as such by state interventions. The copycat crack downs in Malaysia and Singapore offer three contrasts that show important implications for the diverging multiculturalisms practiced in the two countries. The corporatist People's Action Party (PAP) party-state remains the guardian of a close-ended multiculturalism that precludes bargaining or activism of any kind.
