The Politics of Nation Building and Citizenship in Singapore

Michael Hill, Kwen Fee Lian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134855995
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since independence in 1965 Singapore has strengthened its own national identity through a conscious process of nation-building and promoting the active role of the citizen within society. Singapore is a state that has firmly rejected welfarism but whose political leaders have maintained that collective values, instead of those of autonomous individuals, are essential to its very survival. The book begins by examining basic concepts of citizenship, nationality and the state in the context of Singapore's arrival at independence. The theme of nation-building is explored and how the creation of a national identity, through building new institutions, has been a central feature of political and social life in Singapore. Of great importance has been education, and a system of multilingual education that is part of a broader government strategy of multiculturalism and multiracialism; both have served the purpose of building a new national identity. Other areas covered by the authors include family planning, housing policy, the creation of parapolitical structures and the imporatnce of shared `Asian values' amongst Singapore's citizens.

1 The state, citizenship and nationality in Singapore

We ask ourselves, what is a Singaporean? In the first place, we did not want to be Singaporeans. We wanted to be Malayans. Then the idea was extended and we decided to become Malaysians. But twenty-three months of Malaysia – a traumatic experience for all parties in Malaysia – ended rather abruptly with our being Singaporeans.

(Lee Kuan Yew, cited in Chan, 1971b: 29)

In 1990, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia on 9 August 1965, footage was shown on Singapore television of the Prime Minister breaking down in tears in response to this traumatic event. It was shown to Singaporeans to remind the younger generation on the country’s National Day that the birth of Singapore had been a painful one. And despite, if not because of, the economic success achieved over the previous twenty-five years, a new generation of Singaporeans was being reminded that they should not forget the origin of their nation. Twenty-three months after the inauguration of Malaysia, Singapore had found itself on its own. August 9 was a fateful day in this history and, in the sense in which Anthony Smith (1988) uses the term, symbolically encapsulates the ‘myth’ of the modern nation.

This book explores the concepts of citizenship, nationality and the state, and how these have been articulated within a city-state such as Singapore which came into existence despite its leaders’ deep-seated conviction that it did not constitute a viable entity. It is argued that state-society relations are problematic and that concepts like nationality and citizenship cannot be taken for granted in examining such relations. Attention is drawn to the need to theorize the relationship between the state, sovereignty and nationality in order to understand how citizenship is perceived and practised. In taking this approach, it will be demonstrated that the relationship between the modern state and its citizens is at best negotiable and uncertain. Even when the state has achieved a high degree of surveillance and ‘reflexive monitoring’ (Giddens, 1985: 206) – as is demonstrably the case in Singapore – it needs constantly to address the unpredictable responses and demands of its citizens.

THE NATION AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION

A number of writers have emphasized that nationalism and nation building, rather than exposing deeply embedded primordial loyalties, are fundamentally synthetic processes. The point has been made very succinctly by Alter, who notes that, with few exceptions,

the nation is a goal rather than an actuality. Put simply, nations are not creatures of ‘God’s hand’, as post-Herder prophets of nationalism often claimed: instead they are synthetic – they have to be created in a complicated educational process.

(Alter, 1989: 21)

He draws on Barthes’ view of nations as a political myth. The process of nation building is seen as being engineered by intellectual minorities, though aimed at the whole social group. As such, nation building is a protracted process of political integration that always remains unfinished, even when the nation has gained its own independent state. The political consciousness required effectively to contain internal conflict does not result from a unilinear process of evolution but rather is a disjointed series of reverses and delays.

One such element in the forging of political consciousness – which will be demonstrated on several occasions in this book – is a mechanism we have labelled the ‘Return to Sender’ process. Stated succinctly, this is a process in which the definition of citizen vis-à-vis the state has to be repeatedly renegotiated. The concept was devised as an extension of Gellner’s evocative Wrong Address theory of nationalism (the Marxist contention that ‘the awakening message [of history] was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to the wrong nations’ (Gellner, 1983: 129)). The origin of the idea that the policies and doctrines enunciated by the leaders are modified as they become part of grassroots reality has its basis in classical sociology, and especially in Weber’s study of the gradual reformulation of Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, as Calvinist leaders were forced constantly to readdress the concerns of lay members confronted by its psychological consequences (Weber, 1976: 98–128; Hill, 1973: 104–22). In the process – which Weber termed elective affinity – some of the unintended consequences of the original doctrine contributed to a major episode of economic and social change; and, Gellner maintains, it was the ‘trick’ of Calvinist salvation anxiety that produces the ‘civic spirit’ of contractual obligation underlying modern rational capitalism (Gellner, 1991: 501). The Return to Sender dynamic emphasizes an interactive relationship between the political elite and citizens, between policies and their public resonance, in contrast with the ‘top-down’ approach of the corporatist model. As a result attention is focused on the way in which political leaders, in consolidating their control and legitimacy, require of their citizens a consciousness of themselves as citizens: this is important in confirming the regime’s claim to internal legitimacy. Citizens can in turn convert this consciousness into a basis for negotiation. The political leadership ‘educates’ its population into identities appropriate to its political agenda; but these identities take on an autonomy which cannot always be anticipated – and may well be unintended – so that the elite then has to readdress them. In the case of Singapore, political discourse has been articulated and encoded in such a visible fashion that the logic of the Return to Sender process is strikingly revealed.

In the establishment of political consciousness in the way we have just outlined, the leaders who initiate a process of nation building rely on a series of myths. Commonly, as Gellner shows, these myths invert reality: the elite claims to be defending folk culture while propagating high culture; to be preserving significant elements of the old folk society while simultaneously assisting in the construction of an anonymous mass society. In the particular case of Singapore, multiracialism can be seen as one of the Republic’s founding myths and as a central element in what Benjamin calls Singapore’s ‘national culture’ (Benjamin, 1976: 116). But as he goes on to demonstrate, this myth involves a recreation of culture in an attempt by the elite to prevent the erosion of what they perceive as desirable collective and socially cohesive components of an allegedly discipline-oriented Eastern culture by the individualistic emphasis of Western values. The latter are seen as an inevitable accompaniment of the importation of Western technological and economic innovations. One of the tasks of the book will be to scrutinize the construction of such cultural artifacts as part of the process which Breuilly (1982) terms the politics of cultural engineering. By this he means the attempt to create a sense of national identity in cultural terms, and he finds the process located principally in the areas of education and communication.

It is important at this stage in our argument to emphasize that the process of synthetic nation building has not been confined to those post-colonial states which are now engaged in political consolidation. There is much evidence to link these contemporary agendas for nation building with those of various European states in the late nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries. Bowles and Gintis show that the development of citizenship as a key force in stabilizing and legitimating the nineteenth-century nation-state required the securing of a sense of national identity and this was achieved through ‘providing universal education, inventing public ceremonies, and mass-producing public monuments’ (Bowles and Gintis, 1987: 38). Hobsbawm sees the key period in the invention and mass production of tradition as the thirty or forty years before the First World War, and links the process with the unprecedented problems faced by states attempting to maintain, or even to establish, the loyalty and co-operation of their subjects (Hobsbawm, 1983: 263, 265). Even more important was the development of an alternative ‘civic religion’ to replace more traditional forms of ritualized collectivity. Thus there can be observed consciously planned attempts to generate the sense of national identity among populations of territorial states.

On the other hand, there is much to suggest that this was only ever a partially successful process. Waldron believes that the whole trend of research into nationhood in Europe has been to weaken the notion that nationalism is an essential accompaniment of industrialization and modernization, a view which is associated with the work of Gellner. What the research shows is the great diversity that existed in historical nations quite recently: for instance, there was little national feeling in France in the nineteenth century, and ‘the national identity’ had to be imposed gradually from the centre.

In 1864, schoolchildren in the relatively remote Lozere could not answer the question whether they were Russian or English. A number of historians have traced the processes – ranging from the distribution of tricolors, the introduction of new textbooks, and the popularization of a new image of the past, to the development of mass armies – that contributed to the gradual knitting together of France as a nation.

(Waldron, 1985: 428)

In Poland, in censuses taken in 1919 and 1931, most inhabitants of the Pripet Marshes responded to questions about nationality with such statements as ‘local’ or ‘from here’. A similar localism seems to have been apparent in Italy: in 1860 – a time when national feelings were supposed to be rife – only 2.5 per cent of inhabitants spoke what eventually became the standard language (non-standardized languages being labelled ‘dialects’, a common feature of the way in which states appropriate domains of life in the process of nation building (Benjamin, 1988: 40)). ‘Italian’ reluctance to participate in the process of nation building has been shown to persist to the present day, for it has been noted of Italian migrants to Australia that ‘Italian Catholics do not normally have a strong, national sense of being Italian. Instead, their strongest tie is to their paese; that is, their village of origin and surrounding area’ (McKay and Lewins, 1991: 173).

The above illustrations are meant to temper the assumption, which so often accompanies discussions of nationalism, that there is something categorically distinct about the processes of nation building in the primary nation-states (those which had been emerging in Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) in comparison with secondary nation-states (many of which have arisen from decolonization in the aftermath of the Second World War). One of the implications of this approach is to refocus attention on the essentially political characteristics of nation building in general, an implication which Waldron is quick to seize:

Instead of emergent historical nations beginning to stir, and to cast up nationalist leaders who call them into being, it seems that it is the politicians who strive to create the nations. And to what end? One is tempted to say: in order to rule them.

(Waldron, 1985: 428)

However, a major concern of those involved in the nation building process in Europe was the principle of viability. Where nationalities were so interspersed on the same territory, a purely spatial unscrambling of them was seen to be unrealistic (Hobsbawm, 1990: 33–4). An independent or real nation also had to be a viable nation in terms of resources – the ‘threshold principle’ as Hobsbawm calls it. The conventional understanding of nationality (based, for example, on a common language, religion or ethnicity) had to be weighed against the viability of ‘nations’ to stand on their own feet. Consequently, some peoples were destined to become nation-states while others were swallowed by more viable nations.

Most of the political leaders of Singapore in the period leading to the formation of Malaysia in 1963 did not believe that Singapore could survive as an independent nation. The People’s Action Party, the ruling party of Singapore since 1959, for example, had always been pan-Malayan in its orientation, partly for pragmatic reasons and partly because many of its leaders were born in Malaya and had strong emotional ties there. The Alliance government in Malaya deliberated over the inclusion of Singapore into the proposed Malaysian Federation. One consideration was the prospect that Singapore’s predominantly Chinese population would offset the ethnic balance in which Malays would remain the numerical majority. In the end, geopolitical considerations were a decisive factor. The activity of left-wing militants in Singapore impressed upon Alliance leaders the conclusion that unless Singapore was accepted into an anti-communist Malaysia, it could become a base for communists to subvert the mainland (Yeo and Lau, 1991: 140). To offset the Chinese population, Sarawak and Sabah – which had significant indigenous as well as Malay inhabitants – were included in the Malaysian Federation.

STATE AND NATION

In referring to the relationship between the nation and the state, Gellner (1983: 6) demonstrates that states have emerged without the help of a nation, and nations have emerged without the blessing of their state. It is a separation well worth keeping in mind as a counterbalance to those theories which tend to overemphasize the significance of ethnicity in the development of the nation-state. An example of the latter would be Smith’s formulation of the ‘ethnic origins of nations’ (Smith, 1989: 352). He argues that while the state was necessary for the formation of national loyalties, its operations owed much to the presence of core ethnic communities around which these states were built up. However, states which were a direct consequence of colonization were imposed on peoples whose leaders, at the time of independence, were left solely the infrastructure of a state. Rarely was this accompanied by a common identity which could be utilized in the process of nation building, as Singapore amply demonstrates. Counter to Anthony Smith’s argument that the state is built around an ethnic community, rather the development of nationhood had to contend with the presence of ethnic communities.

It is therefore useful to draw attention to the two variants of the ‘nation’ discussed by Hobsbawm (1990: 22). For nationalists, the creation of a political entity was seen to be derived from the prior existence of a community, for example of an ethnic type, distinguishing itself from foreigners. However, the revolutionary-democratic notion of the state, as in post-revolutionary France, could only be understood as the response of a populace attempting to liberate itself from the control of absolute monarchies. When the revolutionary democrat appealed to a sense of patriotism or national loyalty, it was state-based rather than nationalist (Hobsbawm, 1990: 87). Such an appeal related to the idea of a sovereign people in the name of whom the state exercised power. Ethnicity or other elements were irrelevant to ‘the nation’ in this sense, and a common language was significant only on the pragmatic grounds of co-ordination and communication. The emergence of nationalism in the last third of the nineteenth century posed a potential threat to states (Hobsbawm, 1990: 89–90). The state was forced to confront nationalism as a political force separate from it. If nationalism could be tamed and become a central emotional component of loyalty to the state, then it could become a powerful asset of government.

States in Southeast Asia, which have been formed as a consequence of decolonization, are not the products of popular uprisings in the sense that revolutionary-democratic states could be seen to be. They were independent states created out of territories under colonial administration. Their boundaries were drawn, as Hobsbawm (1990: 171) portrays it, without any reference to, and sometimes without the knowledge of, their inhabitants. The formation of such states had no significance for their populations, except, perhaps, for their colonial-educated and Westernized native elites. Having inherited the state, such elites were subsequently faced with the problem of creating nationality. Singapore’s emergence as an independent state vividly illustrates this process. Singapore was given limited self-government by the British in 1959, incorporated into the Malaysian Federation in 1963 and gained independence reluctantly on expulsion from Malaysia in 1965. Its leaders found themselves in possession of a state but without a nation.

Although one option in the process of independence and decolonization after 1945 was the assertion of a primordial identity, the general movement was towards identification with socialist/communist anti-imperialism, as Hobsbawm shows (1990: 149). As such, many decolonized and newly independent states declared themselves to be in some sense ‘socialist’. The PAP leadership in Singapore was no exception to this broader tendency, but was inhibited from embarking on a radical socialist programme for a number of compelling reasons. From the beginning, the English-educated moderates within the party adopted a strong and militant anti-colonial stance demanding immediate national independence through peaceful constitutional means (Yeo and Lau, 1991: 130). However, despite their constitutionality the moderates could not be seen as overtly anti-communist since they needed the help of the Chinese-educated communists, an influential group within the PAP, to maintain communication with the Chinese-educated (and Chinese-oriented) population. The major ethnic communities in Singapore had strong affectual ties with their ‘motherland’; the Indians with India and the Malays with Malaya. The Chinese in the 1950s identified strongly with China, which had become a communist state in 1949. Consequently, the communist faction within the PAP had considerable support from working-class Chinese. When the left-wing leaders finally split from the party in 1961 to form the Barisan Sosialis party, the PAP moderates were left to chart their own course for Singapore. While initially committed to socialist ideals and a pan-Malayan nation, the shock of expulsion from the Malaysian Federation in 1965, followed in July 1967 by the announced withdrawal of British military forces from Singapore and Malaysia, required the PAP not only to formulate a new economic strategy of self-reliance, but also to articulate for its citizens the difficult circumstances in which it found itself as part of a nation building exercise. This has been variously characterized as the ’ideology of survival’ (Chan, 1971a), an ‘ideology of pragmatism’ (Chan and Evers, 1973) and a ‘garrison mentality’ (Brown, 1994). By the PAP leaders themselves it was seen as building a ‘rugged society’.

Westernized political elites in newly independent countries have faced the task of shedding their colonial or neo-colonial identities and replacing them with available alternatives. In Southeast Asia, there were two such alternatives (Chan and Evers, 1973: 303–4). One was to resort to a ‘regressive’ identity by reviving a long and proud cultural tradition through an appeal to the ‘golden past’. The other was a ‘progressive’ identity, embodying an ameliorative programme of building a society by discarding its feudal or colonial shackles: one such option lay in establishing a socialist state. However, neither of these alternatives was viable in the context of Singapore. A progressive identity was too strongly identified at that time with support for Chinese socialism. Events in the early 1960s which caused Tunku to fear a communist take-over of the Singapore government and the creation of Southeast Asia’s ‘Cuba’ (Busch, 1974: 26) was still fresh in the minds of the Singapore leaders, who were most concerned to attract foreign investment consequent upon its separation from the mainland.

A return to the ‘golden past’, which would have nurtured an ethnic revival, had potentially divisive consequences given the ethnic composition of Singapore. In 1970, over 76 per cent of the total population were Chinese, 15 per cent Malays and 7 per cent Indians (these proportions have remained virtually constant up to the present). A socialist identity, sanctioned by the PAP elite in the initial struggle for independence, was no longer acceptable in the 1960s as Singapore found itself having to squeeze every advantage it could get from the international economy for its mere survival. It had been first and foremost a trading centre. After the 1965 expulsion from the Federation and the 1967 announcement of impending British military withdrawal, the Singapore state embarked on an ambitious indust...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The state, citizenship and nationality in Singapore
• 2 The ethnic origins of Singapore
• 3 Education and bilingualism
• 4 Multiracialism and the structuring of ethnic relations
• 5 Housing policy in the nation building process
• 6 Between the family and the state
• 7 Parapolitical and intermediary structures
• 8 From the ideology of pragmatism to shared values
• 9 Civil society: the current project
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index