In the face of the new assertions of communal identity that the Emergency seemed to be fostering, the British attempted to construct a new ‘Malayan’ political community. They had failed to impose this community from above during the Malayan Union débâcle. During the Emergency they therefore looked to foster new cultures of belonging from below. Their aim was to fashion a ‘Malayan’ nation, infused with patriotic spirit. The capacity of the state to create identity is a central issue in modern Malaysian history. Both the colonial and the post-colonial state attempted to build a nation, but in rather different ways. To explain their successes and failures, historians have looked to the politics of culture. However, they differ profoundly on the extent to which primordial political loyalties or more recent class formation have dictated the politics of culture. A key point of contention is the part colonial rule played in this process. A long-standing argument has been that late colonial nation-building was insufficient to reverse the legacy of divide and rule. Yet the people of Malaya were not passive bystanders in this process. Anthony Milner has argued that the opening of the public sphere in the later colonial period, the emergence of ‘politics’ as a language of public life and as a strategy for social action, allowed old identities and old divisions to be articulated in new ways. ‘Although colonialism promoted the practice of politics,’ Milner stresses, ‘it did not create this politics’. Other writers date the rise of a dissonant and ‘fragmented vision’ of politics and culture in Malaysia from more recent state authoritarianism, from the rise of an urban middle class and the reconstructions of identity it provoked within communities.