Neoliberal Morality in Singapore

How family policies make state and society

Youyenn Teo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136671227
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Using the case study of Singapore, this book examines the production of a set of institutionalized relationships and ethical meanings that link citizens to each other and the state. It looks at how questions of culture and morality are resolved, and how state-society relations are established that render paradoxes and inequalities acceptable, and form the basis of a national political culture.

The Singapore government has put in place a number of policies to encourage marriage and boost fertility that has attracted much attention, and are often taken as evidence that the Singapore state is a social engineer. The book argues that these policies have largely failed to reverse demographic trends, and reveals that the effects of the policies are far more interesting and significant. As Singaporeans negotiate various rules and regulations, they form a set of ties to each other and to the state. These institutionalized relationships and shared meanings, referred to as neoliberal morality, render particular ideals about family natural. Based on extensive field work, the book is a useful contribution to studies on Asian Culture and Society, Globalisation, as well as Development Studies.

1 Let's apply for a flat

The state and family in Singapore

In the year 2000, Lyn Na really married. Three years after she and her partner formalized their relationship at the Registry of Marriages (ROM), and four years after they applied to buy a flat from the Housing and Development Board (HDB), they held a “customary” wedding, renovated their new flat, and moved into their new home. In the years between what she refers to as their “ROM” and “customary,” Lyn Na lived with her husband—in separate bedrooms—in her widowed mother-in-law's flat.

She explains that their decision to apply for a flat in 1996 was prompted by several factors: she and her boyfriend had been dating for close to two years; they had heard from friends that the queue for these highly subsidized public flats was getting to be very long; she had already been working for a few years since she left school after her “O” levels (high school) and so had some money in her Central Provident Fund (CPF) account, and people around her were telling her the time was ripe to make plans toward securing a place to live. She cheerfully declared to me that, at the time of flat application, she and her boyfriend did not really talk about marriage, even though they were taking steps that implied it.

Soon after they put in their flat application, the deposit required for co-applicants who applied under the Fiancé-Fiancée Scheme went from S$200 (US$150) to S$5,000 (US$3,800).¹ That year, given three months to decide if they wanted to legalize their relationship or pay the extra money, she recalls thinking that 21 was probably too young to be “really” married but “okay” for ROM. She had little doubt that she and her partner would stay together, but felt that their finances were not in good enough shape to be fully married.

Three years later, anticipating that their flat would be ready, the couple held a customary wedding, collected their keys, did some renovations on their new flat, picked an auspicious day, and moved in. When I spoke to Lyn Na in 2004, she recounted this process and also told me that she and her husband still live very close to her mother-in-law and have dinner with her every day. They had recently started to think about having kids—two or three but definitely not four since the Baby Bonus² (at the time of our conversation) was not granted to the fourth child. She felt that living together with her mother-in-law was difficult but that living close by was “more convenient,” especially when they have kids and require childcare help.

Lyn Na's story has its idiosyncrasies, but it also captures a pattern that Singaporeans alternately complain about and embrace. At a recent wedding I attended, the groom joked that he proposed by suggesting to his bride: “let's go apply for a flat.” In the two years that I did my fieldwork and the subsequent years when I continued to live in Singapore, I could scarcely escape this “joke” whenever I described my project to people.

This sort of narrative informs one dominant understanding of the Singapore case: that the state is heavily involved in “social engineering.”³ Indeed, people I interviewed for this project often lamented that the state plays too big a role in Singaporeans’ lives and that it tries too hard to “control everything.” This interpretation of the Singapore state also implies the relative lack of autonomy for Singaporeans.

This claim is not entirely inaccurate but it is incomplete. It is the sort of interpretation that discourages deeper analyses of state-society relations insofar as it presumes that there is an immensely powerful state controlling its correspondingly powerless citizens. The idea of “relations”—implying as it does interactions, negotiations, and political processes—becomes almost irrelevant. If, after all, the state is an overpowering social engineer, what is there to negotiate?

This book starts from a slightly different place. It begins with highlighting the significant contradictions and incoherencies embedded in the state's approach toward the familial. I draw attention to the fact that rather than being a successful social engineer, the state has largely failed to achieve its ostensible goals of reversing demographic trends toward later marriage and lower fertility. That its policies continue to seem highly influential despite this is interesting and worth further scrutiny. Suspending the presumption that the case represents straight-forward social engineering forces a closer examination of how the policies actually work through their targeted citizens, and thereby a reconceptualization of the full range of their effects.

Family policies in Singapore generate important “latent effects”—effects that lie beneath the surface of obvious outcomes and which go beyond the parameters of specific policies and transcend the state's explicitly stated goals.⁴ One important effect: in the process of negotiating the various rules and regulations, Singaporeans develop collective practices, habits, norms, ideals, and beliefs. These give content to the ties that bind Singaporeans to the state. They also link Singaporeans to one another and define the very boundaries and meanings of “Singaporean-ness.”

An important aspect of this Singaporean-ness is nationalistic and indeed in keeping with certain neoliberal⁵ ideals: people see themselves as part of a nation where the capitalist economy is paramount, where markets have logics of their own, and where the state is doing the best it can to both produce economic growth and “protect” valued “traditions” in the face of an imagined global (and therefore externally imposed) economic logic.

The institutional as well as discursive framework that results from people's negotiations of family policies is significant for accounting for the reproduction of state power; they produce concrete structures as well as imaginations of state-society relations, and corresponding ideas about legitimate and illegitimate politics. I thus examine the production of what I call “neoliberal morality”—a set of institutionalized relationships and ethical meanings that link citizens to each other and to the state. These relationships and meanings render the paradoxes embedded within state pursuits of neoliberalism inevitable, natural, and indeed good.

The chapters to follow tell a story that complicates the stereotypical version of Singapore—wherein the state stands unusually dominant and strong, and the citizenry silent and docile. I first highlight the paradoxes embedded within family policies and show that given these, the policies are, unsurprisingly, rather ineffective. And it is in the practices and accompanying discourses of Singaporeans that we see that they have a set of effects that far transcend the state's explicit goals. In this way, the relationships between state and society have to be understood through a more processual and dynamic lens—with attention to how people's negotiations of the policies give content to state rule and state-society relations, and sensitive toward both the limitations and possibilities of governance. One important dimension of these involves the production of a political culture that blunts dissent. The inequalities embedded within family policies—particularly along gender and ethno-racial lines—which one would expect to be sites of contention, turn out to be where the valorization of family/culture serves as constraint. The naturalization of gender and ethnic differences as “cultural,” as integral to the so-called traditional family and thus to be protected, sets limits to people's critiques of the state and blunts the potential for organized dissent. Later in this chapter, I elaborate on how this puzzle sets up the rest of the book.

The book also challenges the state's own version of the story—in which the nation is led by a vanguard party continually mindful of its historic mission of bringing wealth to the people while ensuring that they are able to continue embodying important traditions; in direct contrast to industrialization processes of the West, it emphasizes its worldview as being more community-oriented than individually oriented. When translated into practice, however, what results is in effect a privileging of the quest for a particular, teleological path toward modernization and a rather truncated version of tradition. The community orientation is itself limited in important ways: while the family as an institution is valorized and institutionally reinforced as the central unit in Singapore society, the relationships established through family policies are primarily between the state and individual family units, often at the cost of lateral relationships between Singaporeans. I will argue at the end of this chapter that this sets up conditions for the state to pursue policies and a form of citizenship far better characterized as neoliberal than as communitarian.

The “failures” of family policies

The Singapore state's demands on the family are complex and filled with paradoxes. To begin with, the form the demands take is a contradiction in terms: claims about the primordial status of culture and the desirability of independent and self-reliant families are accompanied by sustained and explicit state policy interventions. Moreover, the definitions of tradition embedded within policies sit uncomfortably with state-led aggressive pursuits of modernity qua economic growth. Finally, while explicitly positioned as oriented to the nation as a whole, many family policies have obviously differential ideals and expectations and the divisions fall blatantly along gender and, to a lesser extent, ethno-racial lines.

It is not surprising, given these contradictions and incoherencies, that the policies have had limited effect in turning the tide away from delayed marriage and low fertility. Like their East Asian counterparts, Singaporeans are marrying later or not at all and having fewer babies, and there is no tidal shift in sight.⁶ The state, while maintaining its overall stance regarding the desirability of particular family forms—formed through age-appropriate heterosexual marriage and focused on close intergenerational mutual care—has turned its attention toward immigration as a more viable solution to the ageing population problem.⁷

These “failures” are important for jarring the analyst out of taking for granted the state's “social engineering” capacities. Comparative and survey data suggest that conflicting gender expectations and systematic gender discrimination are key explanations for why fertility declines are greater in some countries compared with others. Countries that have seen the greatest rates of fertility decline are places where women have had expanded opportunities in education on one hand but where “traditional” gendered divisions of labor, particularly within families, prevail (Castles 2002; McDonald 2000a, 2000b). The trends in Singapore certainly suggest that women—particularly the highly educated—are more likely to retreat from family formation in response to demands on them to take primary responsibility for familial life while being fully employed. In the haste to comment on the Singapore state's somewhat unusual pronatalism, this rather typical demographic trend is, oddly, often noted and yet not seen as evidence of the limits of state power. Instead, the attention continues to fall on the intensity and capacity of the Singapore state.

It follows that few have gone on to tease out the implications of the “failures.” The broad demographic trends—so intuitive given the contradictory demands placed on Singaporeans—in fact throw up a further, more interesting puzzle. If indeed the turn away from marriage and childbearing are predictable responses to contradictory conditions, it is surprising that people's responses do not take more dramatic form. Although there is seeming “flight from marriage,” as Gavin Jones (2002) puts it, there appears to be no corresponding rejection of marriage and family as institutions nor strong negative responses to these institutions in their current forms. Survey data show that Singaporeans continue to express great desire for marriage and childbearing (Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports 2008; Pereira 2006; Quah 1994); my interview data reveal that these are perceived not only as desirable behaviors but also largely taken for granted as natural life paths. The demographic trends, then, cannot be immediately interpreted as rejection of state positions, inevitable “failures” to be expected when misguided states—what James Scott (1998) has called “high modernist” states⁸—concoct spectacular schemes fundamentally at odds with social realities.

This is apparent when one spends time around Singaporeans: national matchmaking agencies and Baby Bonuses may be the bases of mockery and complaints, but their very ubiquity in conversations suggests they are not ignored. Family policies are not “failures” in the sense that people disregard them. Moreover, while people's discussions of family policies are far from ambivalent or free from critique, they rarely take the form of outright repugnance or rejection. Given that family policies embed the Singapore state's explicit claim to being a protector of tradition and spearheader of development, and given that the state's definitions of tradition and modernity are polyvalent as well as differential across gender and ethno-racial categories, it is surprising that trends in marriage and fertility are not also accompanied by stronger negative responses to the state.

This is particularly true of the emergent middle class, the focus of this book. Here is a group whose formation scholars have predicted would begin to challenge the state's particular style of rule (Chua 1995; Rodan 1997) and a group whose emergence has imposed pressure on states elsewhere in the region—Taiwan and South Korea, for instance—to take more democratic forms. On the other hand, failure to nurture an emerging middle class in other development contexts has meant increasing alienation of an important segment of society from the nation-building project. Shana Cohen's account of the middle class in Morocco, for example, stands in stark contrast to what I found in the case of Singapore. Where I uncover an emergent middle class strongly aligned to the state's development project and highly convinced of its importance in nation-building, Cohen describes a class that finds itself increasingly alienated from their country in the context of rising neoliberalism (Cohen 2004).

I explore Singaporeans’ negotiations of family policies in their lives in order to account for why family policies that have largely failed in significantly altering demographic trends, and which embed within them important paradoxes, do not inspire stronger negative responses from their targets. I argue that family policies may have failed in achieving their ostensible goals but that they have had an important set of latent effects.

Family policies are a productive site—a space where society and state come to take on particular form and content. They provide a shared context through which people collectively generate norms and ideals about family forms, familial practices, and the very significance of family to the definitions of Singaporean-ness. The institutions through which particular visions of family are channeled, moreover, establish regular relationships between individual Singaporeans and the state. The process unfolds sometimes in ways that suppress the salience and relevance of ideology, and other times in ways that reaffirm the state's image as a sincere if imperfect defender of tradition.

Singaporeans—through collective negotiation of the policies—develop shared scripts about their private conduct, and interpret their own decisions through lenses that are remarkably sociological. Ironically, however, this sociological thinking has important limits. The process also results in a naturalization of gender and ethno-racial differences; this reinforces the myth that individual Singaporean families ought to take care of their own because it is “in their culture,” and thereby suppresses the potential for more progressive political sensibilities and critical orientations toward the state. As they navigate policy rules and regulations, and thereby make sense of the state's rather large role in their lives, Singaporeans reify conservative familial forms and a relatively narrow definition of “tradition.” In the following section, I elaborate on these themes and begin to draw out their theoretical implications.

Of ostensible failures and latent effects

Singaporean-ness in production

For someone like Lyn Na, whose trajectory I described at the beginning of this chapter, the road to marriage cannot be separated from the quest for public housing. About 80 per cent of Singaporeans own and live in public housing, an indication that most Singaporeans are subject to the Housing and Development Board's criterion of “family nucleus” formation.⁹ Because payment for public housing is linked to the national mandatory savings scheme—the Central Provident Fund (CPF)—regularities are established that link employment, consumption, capital accumulation, and family formation. I elaborate on this process in Chapter 3. For now, I want to point out that family policies go well beyond rhetoric; the rules and regulations governing purchase of public housing and the use of CPF funds sets up a context—institutionalized, and somewhat coercive insofar as there are few alternatives for securing housing—that most Singaporeans have to negotiate.

One intriguing feature of this process is that, beyond becoming institutionalized and by extension, somewhat naturalized, its “naturalization” is accompanied by enthusiastic commentary and reflection on the part of Singaporeans.¹⁰ In the years leading up to my fieldwork, I was astonished by the regularity and frequency of conversations around the marriage-housing pairing. People talked knowledgeably about “queuing up” for public flats with t...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Neoliberal Morality in Singapore
• Routledge contemporary Southeast Asia series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedicaction
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of Photographs
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Let’s apply for a flat: the state and family in Singapore
• 2 Paradoxes of state rule
• 3 “Typically Singaporean”: producing Singaporean society
• 4 Singaporeans complain: producing the state through the limits of dissent
• 5 Family/culture as constraint: the production of a conservative political culture
• 6 Neoliberal morality
• Appendix A: Studying a big state and a “docile” society
• Appendix B: Interview schedule
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index