Singapore's Foreign Policy

Coping with Vulnerability

Michael Leifer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134569489
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the years following its traumatic separation from Malaysia, Singapore has risen to become one of the leading economic powers in Southeast Asia. This economic strength has carried it through the recent East Asian economic crisis, as well as providing the resources for an excellent defence capability. Singapore's diplomatic achievements include relationships with countries across Asia and Europe, and ensure its interantional status, Yet, despite this success, Singapore's foreign policy has continued to be influenced by a deep seated sence of its own vulnerability. Politicians from the first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, onwards have focused on Singapore's limited physical size, potential domestic and international frailty due to racial tension and confirmed geographical location. These factors have combined to create a powerful nation-state which has never allowed itself to take its sovereign status for granted.
Singapore's Foreign Policy is the first full-length English-language study of this subject and is an essential resource for all those interested in Singapore's international role.

1 Singapore

The foreign policy of an exceptional state

An exceptional state

The island-Republic of Singapore is the smallest state within South-East Asia and, indeed, within a wider East Asia. It also lacks natural resources, except for the human variety in limited numbers, and a harbour in an ideal location for servicing regional trade. And yet, in 1999, for the third year running, the Swiss-based World Economic Forum ranked Singapore first among over fifty leading economies (ahead of Hong Kong and the USA) in its Annual Global Competitiveness Report.¹ In its material accomplishments and attendant external recognition, Singapore is exceptional not only within its regional locale but also globally among so-called small states. The point has been well made that ‘Economic success is the main reason for Singapore’s high status and disproportionate influence in international affairs.’²

A size of some 648 square kilometres, a citizen and permanent resident population combined of around 3.2 million together with a confined geographic situation at the southern tip of peninsular Malaysia provide, on their own, misleading indicators of the remarkable achievements and international standing which have been attained in the years since an unanticipated independence in August 1965. For that reason, in addressing its foreign policy, Singapore is not to be located readily within broad generalisations about the category of small and micro-states to be found in an ill-defined academic literature.³ Singapore shares some common features with some states in that loose category; notably, an innate vulnerability arising from geopolitical circumstances which was registered at independence as the leitmotif of foreign policy. That underlying vulnerability has persisted, but its economic and environmental achievements, and also its regional diplomatic role, place it in a virtual category of its own so that Singapore is best represented as sui generis, irrespective of its size. Correspondingly, given its notable accomplishments, it is also not easy to locate Singapore comfortably within the overlapping category of ‘weak states’ which has succeeded ‘small states’ as a more pertinent label in academic literature. It merits noting also that, among post-colonial states, small or otherwise, Singapore is free of xenophobic hang–overs; its government has not made a fetish of expunging the colonial record and legacy. On the contrary, recognition has been accorded to Sir Stamford Raffles, the ‘imperialist’ founder of the city-state, for his enterprise and vision, while the British legacy is valued for having bequeathed high standards of professionalism and probity in public life. In that vein, Britain has not been attacked for its colonial past but has been derided for a national decline attributed partly to an indulgence in provision for social welfare held up as a negative model by the local media.

Despite a diminishing entrepôt role and the lack of an industrial base, it has been justly pointed out that Singapore was a thriving metropolis well before independence and that its post-economic development ‘began from a strong foundation and with very substantial advantages’.⁴ That strong foundation has served as the basis for an astounding government-led economic transformation after independence that has far transcended the island’s condition and role during the colonial era.⁵ At the close of the twentieth century, without any burdensome foreign debt and with foreign currency reserves of around US$90 billion and with an annual per capita GDP of over US$25,000, Singapore is the most advanced member of the regional Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) which it joined on its formation in August 1967. That position has been reflected also in an infant mortality rate of 3.8 per thousand live births, an average life expectancy of 77 years and a literacy rate of 92 per cent. A testament to Singapore’s economic transformation and attendant international standing was the decision to locate the secretariat of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) on the island in 1992, and to hold the inaugural ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) there in 1996.

Despite such recognition, Singapore’s achievement has rested on a vulnerable base of economic interdependence which was its experience when a colonial entrepôt. Although it has transcended its original economic role, it is no less trade dependent in its modern version which registers a global ambit. For example, in company with a number of other regional states, Singapore shared in the dramatic reversal of economic fortunes in train from mid-1997, albeit without experiencing the same acute adversity and political turbulence experienced by close neighbours. Singapore’s ability to cope with the regional economic storm better than most, as well as to return to growth, has been a function of an authoritarian interventionist system of governance and financial regulation justified with reference to its underlying vulnerability. That accomplishment has pointed up the paradox of the island-state’s condition whereby vulnerability has been managed and mitigated by promoting economic interdependence beyond the regional locale but without it ever being fully overcome. As former Prime Minister and currently Senior Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, explained in January 1996 to an Indian audience:

We had decided soon after independence to link Singapore up with the advanced countries and make ourselves a hub or nodal point for the expansion and extension of their activities. To attract such capital and human resources, Singapore set out to promote conditions and facilities better than those found elsewhere in the region. A consciousness of an innate vulnerability has promoted a culture of competitiveness through which Singapore has excelled.⁶

That pairing of vulnerability with excellence serves to register the basis of Singapore’s exceptionalism and its distinctiveness.

In assessing the exceptional nature of Singapore’s international position, Hong Kong might be identified as a regional comparator of a kind, but only as a major centre of economic activity which has enjoyed a unique linkage with the Chinese mainland. For long a colony without conventional international status, and since July 1997 a special administrative region of China, Hong Kong has been an international actor in a limited sense only through its qualified membership of some economic organisations. An additional comparison between Singapore and Hong Kong is valid up to a point in one particular respect, in that the overwhelming majority of the island-state’s population is ethnic-Chinese with links to a dynamic economic network of overseas Chinese and to China itself.

Unlike Hong Kong, however, Singapore is not located on China’s periphery but in the maritime heart of South-East Asia where ethnic-Chinese are well in the minority and also regarded with resentment and suspicion because of their cultural identity and economic prominence. Such resentment was made manifest with the onset of regional economic adversity from mid1997 and found violent expression in neighbouring Indonesia. Singapore’s ability to play a regional diplomatic role has derived, in important part, from a consistent registration of a political identity quite separate from that of China, and also Taiwan, and in seeking to integrate the island-state diplomatically within its geographic locale. Accordingly, Singapore and Hong Kong are hardly appropriate comparators. Hong Kong was returned to Chinese jurisdiction in July 1997, while Singapore has continued to assert and define its distinct independence partly with negative reference to the People’s Republic.

A comparison of a kind might be attempted also between Singapore and some of the small oil-rich Gulf sultanates, such as Bahrain and Kuwait, with which the island-state shares the experience of both wealth and vulnerability but not that of natural resources. Indeed, in the case of Kuwait, a sense of shared vulnerability was openly articulated with Iraq’s invasion in August 1990. Neither Bahrain nor Kuwait have matched Singapore, however, in scale and range of economic achievements and in active diplomatic role; nor have they registered the same sophistication and proficiency in their educational and defence establishments. Correspondingly, within South-East Asia the energy-rich Sultanate of Brunei also shares Singapore’s sense of vulnerability from its own experience of regional predators. It is grossly underdeveloped, however, by Singapore’s standards of economic accomplishment and public administration, and hardly a regional comparator.

In searching for a historical comparator in order to put modern Singapore into perspective, it is renaissance Venice which comes readily to mind as both a great maritime trading centre and as the locus of great business enterprise. Indeed, the Director of Singapore’s Scientific Centre pointed out a decade and a half after independence: ‘Just as Venice served as the dynamic centre for Europe during the Renaissance, so will Singapore serve as the city of the future in Southeast Asia.’⁷ The city-state of Venice, of course, did not suffer from the same geopolitical constriction which has been visited by nature and circumstances on Singapore, and which has been reinforced by evolving state practice as registered in the latest United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Moreover, if Singapore is like fourteenth-century Venice in aspiration, expressed from 1972 in the concept of a ‘Global City’, it is certainly not like Venice in cultural pursuits and attainment.

Singapore is primarily about the business of business with its denizens more interested and accomplished in the art of karaoke than in the arts per se. Indeed, it is worth heeding the comment made in 1976 by the head of the Department of Philosophy in the University of Singapore that the concept of a global city had a pretentious ring, and that Singapore was not a centre from which new frontiers of knowledge would emanate. It was founded to be a trading centre ‘which is what it remains to this day’.⁸ More to the point, Singapore in pre-colonial times was never the Venice of South-East Asia but a refuge for fishermen and pirates. It only became a great oriental bazaar from the early nineteenth century through the intervention and imagination of Britain’s pro-consul, Sir Stamford Raffles, whose achievement and memory is notably honoured and not besmirched within the island-state. Moreover, Singapore was set over time within a wider peninsular Malayan colonial structure from which it was only detached in 1946, partly in Britain’s strategic interest, after its occupation by Japan during the Pacific War. Nonetheless, the example of Venice, and not any contemporary city-state, has been employed by Singapore’s spokesmen to point to an ideal model for emulation.

Like so many contemporary small and micro-states which make up a large proportion of the United Nations’ membership, Singapore is the product of liberation from colonial rule. Its route to independence, however, has also been exceptional, in keeping with its achievement. After decolonisation in the form of a period of self-government short of full independence from June 1959 until September 1963, the island became a constituent part of the new Federation of Malaysia together with peninsular Malaya and two British colonies in northern Borneo. Indeed, independence in island form was neither actively sought nor anticipated until shortly before its second separation in August 1965 against a background of rising racial tensions and economic impasse.

Sovereignty was transferred from Malaysia dramatically and abruptly but also peacefully. Nonetheless, separation was a traumatic political experience, giving rise to the conventional wisdom that Singapore had been literally ‘cast out’ of Malaysia and that independence had been imposed on the island against the conventional experience of state succession.⁹ The official representation of that founding moment has served to define a national predicament and a national watchword of vulnerability.¹⁰ In that respect, Singapore does have much in common with a number of other small and micro-states, although such states do not necessarily share Singapore’s clear-cut sense of external threat; in its case, primarily from Malaysia.¹¹ Singapore has been exceptional, however, in the way in which its government has been able to cope with and mitigate that condition, including displaying an ability to go to war, albeit without being able to overcome fully an innate vulnerability present at its creation as an independent state.

The founding moment of the Republic of Singapore was so unlike that of virtually all other post-colonial small and micro-states that it would be an intellectual contrivance to try to fit its experience within that of the global set which makes up much of the United Nations’ membership. Indeed, within South-East Asia, where a separatist disposition has been endemic, albeit frustrated, since the onset of decolonisation, Singapore stands out as the exception and not the rule in its acquisition of independence by means other than a classical act of separatism. Nonetheless, that experience, as constructed into a national memory of being cast adrift to fend for itself against all expectations and in the face of all economic logic and strategic rationale, has left an enduring legacy which shapes the culture and the rhetoric of foreign policy. That culture, which is informed by a condition and consciousness of vulnerability, enables Singapore’s government to demand a constant vigilance and social discipline of its population as the price for protecting and upholding a fragile independence. The rhetoric of government registers a belief in the premises of the realist paradigm in International Relations, whereby states are obliged to fend for themselves as best they can in an ungoverned and hostile world. As recently as July 1997, Foreign Minister, Professor S. Jayakumar, informed a meeting of heads of Singapore’s diplomatic missions that ‘The dynamics of international relations bear a striking resemblance to the laws of the jungle: not all creatures are created equal and only the fittest survive.’¹² Social Darwinism translated to international life is the declared formula for coping with vulnerability.

Singapore stands out among the mixed set of small and micro-states only partly on account of the unique circumstances of its acquisition of independence. Nonetheless, the experience and legacy of the political genesis of Singapore have to be borne in mind perpetually in seeking to understand and to explain the underlying premises and conduct of its foreign policy. Although that genesis is a decreasing part of the shared experience of rising generations of Singaporeans, its legacy has become an integral part of the political culture of those entrusted with responsibility for its foreign relations. That legacy is expressed in the conviction that the future of the island-state can never be taken for granted and that its margin for error is minimal, which is reflected in the consistent proportion of national resources allocated for defence. In 1999, that defence provision amounted to US$4.2 billion.

In the context of an abiding vulnerability, Singapore’s exceptional standing and influence do not arise from its military might, even though its defence resources, designed primarily with deterrence in mind, are considerable for a state of its limited physical scale and population. Nonetheless, the resources allocated for defence serve as a clear indication of the government’s determination to compensate for natural shortcomings employing the societal concept of ‘Total Defence’ drawn from Swedish experience. In 1999, Singapore’s defence budget was three times that of neighbouring Indonesia which has a population of some 210 million and an extensive archipelago to police. The same disparity applied in the case of Malaysia, its other close neighbour, which has a population of 22 million.

Singapore’s defence establishment draws on limited human resources. It is modelled on Israeli lines employing only a small cadre of 50,000 professional soldiers complemented by 250,000 national servicemen. National service of two to two and a half years is compulsory for all males at the age of 18, who, after its completion, are obliged to undergo regular reserve training and service, in principle, up to the age of 45. Singapore’s defence establishment operates within tight geopolitical confines, wedged between Malaysian and Indonesian sea and airspace, mitigated operationally by access to extensive training facilities in Australia, Brunei, New Zealand, the USA, Taiwan and Thailand and, most recently, in France and South Africa. A deterrent capability based on modern weapons and sophisticated training as well as a growing competence in manufacturing arms has to be set against a lack of combat experience and minimal involvement in United Nations’ peacekeeping operations.

Singapore’s provision for defence discomforts its nearest neighbours, although to a lesser extent in the case of Indonesia which has granted access for training in Sumatra to units of Singapore’s Air Force. Despite the persistence of structural tensions within its close locale, the Republic has never had occasion to project its military power in anger beyond the bounds of its sovereign jurisdiction; nor has its defence establishment been employed as an instrument of threat in seeking to advance national interests. The island-state’s sophisticated deterrent power is, however, a reflection of the government’s abiding apprehensive political outlook and of the scale and quality of resources generated by the country’s resilient economy.¹³ The significance attached to defence has been highlighted by a statement in the national media that 20 per cent of the island’s land space was being used for training areas, ammunition storage depots, camps and air and naval bases.¹⁴

Singapore’s standing and influence, however, comes primarily from its civilian economic accomplishments, underpinned by an educational base with considerable strength in mathematics and sciences judged by the highest international standards. Singapore’s accomplishments are exemplified also by the global reputation of its national airline, its international airport and its maritime port, which register the remarkable way in which a one-time colonial trading centre has been able to adapt its economic role and to transcend its immediate environment. From a thriving commercial entrepôt serving the trade of colonial South-East Asia with its metropolitan powers, Singapore has become the prime regional centre for high-tech manufacturing and telecommunications as well as for financial services, ship repair and port and aircraft facilities; for oil refining and related energy industry provision and as a regional headquarters for an increasing number of multinational companies. Accordingly, it remains an entrepôt in important respects but as an example of skilful adaptation of that role to the revolutionary process of globalisation during the latter part of the twentieth century.

Singapore’s accomplishments are also a product of an efficient authoritarian political system which generates strong mixed feelings in the West. That system has been based on continuous rule through general elections by the People’s Action Party (PAP) ever since the island attained self-government in June 1959. It has been associated closely with the Social Darwinist philosophy of its intellectually awesome first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, who has remained in the cabinet as Senior Minister after relinquishing highest office in November 1990 to his deputy and successor Goh Chok Tong. Singapore’s authoritarianism and form of mandatory democracy, which brooks no opposition from interest groups outside of the Parliame...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Editions
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Singapore: The foreign policy of an exceptional state
• 2. The battle for sovereignty
• 3. Accommodating and transcending regional locale
• 4. Singapore and the powers
• 5. Driving and suffering the region?
• Conclusion: Coping with vulnerability
• Notes
• Index