The struggles in many societies have always been over who has the power to make rules and to guide people's behaviour. The state has often been at the centre of these struggles.

The image of a powerful state, with its coercive apparatuses readily available to compel people to conform to a particular set of behaviours, has lured competing groups in the society to vie for state power. In modern democracies, the competition has been in the form of electoral struggles where political parties compete with each other to win elections and form governments.

But soon after winning elections, state leaders are often faced with mounting tasks to ensure that the states they lead remain intact. A myriad of social organisations - madrasahs, churches, kin groups, civic associations, professional associations - continue to bear considerable influence upon people's thought and behaviour. These social organisations remain influential in shaping people's perception of what is acceptable and what not, of what is right and what wrong - of legal meanings.

More often than not, state's strengths and weaknesses, and thus its ability to stay intact, are measured not against coercive powers it wields, but the sense of legitimacy it generates vis--vis contending legal meanings the people have in their minds. Should the state succeed in moderating and accommodating those myriad legal meanings, and turning them into shared meanings, it increases its chance to unite the people and to stay intact.

Of late, Malaysia is no exception to the dynamics of this state-society relation. Socio-economic changes that Malaysian society has experienced over the past decades proliferates new legal meanings which significantly define people's perception of and relationship with the state and its apparatuses.

The call for democracy, transparency, government's accountability and respect for women's rights are examples of new legal meanings at work. Value-laden concepts such as national unity, national security and racial harmony are increasingly been viewed in the light of democratic ideals rather than authoritarian ones.

The debate on the Interfaith Commission of Malaysia Bill as proposed by the Malaysian Bar Council aptly captures the above dynamics. The proponents of the bill mostly are among the urban educated middle class group who remain the main beneficiaries of the rapid socio-economic changes. It is thus not surprising that this group defines "religious harmony" in the light of the new legal meanings that they are very much engrossed with.