Singapore after Lee Kuan Yew

S. C. Y. Luk, P. W. Preston

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351019040
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: 19th Century History

This book addresses key questions about how Singapore is likely to develop going forward, what are the key challenges facing the state, and how is the government going to deal with these matters. The book shows how important Lee Kuan Yew and subsequent individual leaders have been in shaping Singapore, and goes on to consider specific new challenges, including rapid population growth, migration and a changing population mix, the rise of China and possible shifts in the regional balance of power, and anxieties about the economy and an increasing global backlash against the neo-liberal free trade regime. It considers key areas of economic policy, social policy, and foreign policy, and explores the changing nature of governance. It also examines the Singapore government's effort to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. Overall, the book provides a concise, comprehensive assessment of the current state of Singapore and its likely future direction.

1 Analyzing Singapore’s historical trajectory

The development experience of Singapore has been the subject of extensive commentary in scholarly, political, and policy analytic contexts, and such work has adopted a variety of intellectual approaches. In this book, looking at the broad character of the country in the years following the March 2015 death of Lee Kuan Yew, an historical institutionalist approach supplemented with culture-critical work is adopted. This approach to analyzing Singapore will be spelt out in this introductory chapter: noting its philosophical base, its substantive concerns, and its linkages to the analysis of government policies.

Historical institutionalism is, formally, rooted in the interpretive and critical social sciences (Bauman, 1987; Bernstein, 1979; Rorty, 1989); in contrast, much mainstream social science looks to the model of the natural sciences; a search for reductive argument – cause/effect - otherwise ‘positivism’. Interpretive work looks to the language-carried realms of human social practice; to culture, social learning, and the multiplicity of machineries of social order. The key intellectual concerns of these types of enquiry are with the construction of arguments (interpretive/critical); the context-bound nature of argument-making is stressed (tradition/conjuncture); rigour in argument-making is stressed (reflexive criticism/disciplinary criticism); and the practical utility of arguments is stressed (audiences addressed, actions proposed).

Substantively, historical institutionalism seeks to unpack the creative social dialectic of structures and agents, and these exchanges are taken to inform the construction and reconstruction of social institutions. It is within the context of governmental institutions that elite policymakers operate, sketching out desired routes to the future and appropriately disciplining their populations. These processes are embedded within international contexts (so policymaking is not simply determined by local internal concerns) and also in history (the restless dynamic of the modern industrial-capitalist system). Historical institutionalism can track changes in domestic institutions as their elites read and react to changing circumstances, and such processes sketch out a developmental trajectory. Any development trajectory will record a mixture of phases and breaks; change is a given (endogenous and exogenous), and sometimes the political unit will remain more or less stable (during a ‘phase’) and at other times it will run through more or less rapid changes (‘breaks’). And, finally, policymakers lodged within the machineries of governance of their political unit – state/nation – will have to formulate their policies within this ever-shifting domestic and international context. It is a difficult business, so too the task of mobilizing their population in pursuit of the specified goals.

The geographical island of Singapore has been lodged within a number of wider structures of power: economic, financial, security and cultural. The island has been a site where these systems have intersected and brought into being locally coherent forms. Each has been distinctive: thus, Singapore island has been a part of a network of Malay maritime sultanates; a part of a global trading empire; a part of a post-empire state; and finally, at the present time, contingently, home to an independent sovereign state. But sovereignty is a matter of specific patterns of authority/power; it does not imply an autarchic separation from wider contexts. Global structures of power run through the territory and the elite read and react to these contexts. It is this unfolding, contingent process that, since 1965, has shaped contemporary Singapore.

Historical institutionalism: the promise of the approach

Scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences have developed a number of approaches to the analysis of the political life of communities; the business of patterns of power, institutional organizations and related systems of legitimation. The work of artists (architects, sculptors, and painters, in particular) and humanities writers (histories, biographies, and novels, again, in particular) has been detailed by many authors (Gay, 2008), so too has work more closely associated with the spread of the social sciences, both positive and interpretive. In the more narrowly defined field of political science further approaches can be identified: political philosophy, concerned with the elucidation of abstract general concepts; political institutional analysis, concerned with the organization of formal bodies, such as parliaments, law and the like; political ideology, focused on the claims, both elaborated and common-sensical, of active political agents, parties, in particular; and finally an assortment of behavioural (or positive) approaches concerned with measuring and quantifying aspects of political life.

All of the above have their merits in regard to illuminating the nature of social life in ordered political communities; however, here, one particular strategy will be adopted. In essence, a variant form of historical institutionalism (Lowndes and Roberts, 2013) further supplemented by culture-critical work (Habermas, 1971), and these two lines of analysis will allow the historical development trajectory of contemporary Singapore to be unpacked in detail: its political-economy, social structures and means of self-understanding. In sum, the ways in which agents have read and reacted to the enfolding structures of power in order to creatively fashion a distinctive form of life continues to change and evolve. Historical institutionalism allows the history of the country to be recovered and thus the historical trajectory of the country detailed, but the real-world processes are open-ended for the only given is change, and so states needs must read and react to the ripples of change running through enfolding structures.

Historical institutionalism: roots, varieties, and developments

Vivien Lowndes and Mark Roberts (2013) track the development of institutional analysis, first amongst economists, then sociologists and finally political analysts. So, within economics, institutional analysis derives from late nineteenth and early twentieth-century replies to theories of free markets; institutionalists pointed to the elaborate social structures within which economic activity was lodged; key figures included Thorstein Veblen, Gunnar Myrdal, Joan Robinson, JK Galbraith, and this tradition continues up to the present (Hodgson, 1988). Within sociology, institutional analysis finds expression in the work of the so-called founding fathers of the discipline, Marx, Durkheim, and Weber (Giddens, 1971), all concerned, one way or another, with the social production of ordered social life, thus institutions; and finally, within political science, where an early concern was with the formally given machineries of government, that is, institutions/organizations.

Lowndes and Roberts (2013) argue that today there are several versions of institutional analysis and they note one list containing seven versions, but they prefer three: rational choice (derived from liberal neo-classical economics of individual actors oriented via rational calculation to selfish ends), sociological (derived from mainstream sociology and concerned with the social construction and ordering of social life) and historical (concerned with macro-scale analysis of the development of large-scale institutional structures over time – for example, countries).

The authors (2013: 200–1) go on to note the debates amongst political scientists about institutionalism, hence the seven varieties, and propose that:

institutions shape political behaviour in three different ways: through rules, practices and narratives … modes of constraint … it is when they work together [to constrain political agents] that they are most effective.

It is a dynamic; the authors argue that (2013: 201):

actors construct the world according to mixed motivations, and that the institutions they encounter are themselves the outcome of mixed motivational constructions … and just as institutions seek to constrain, they also empower.

And, crucially for our purposes, Lowndes and Roberts (2013: 203) look at the issue of designing institutions, noting that in the case of decolonization this would entail state-building. They conclude that:

political actors will always seek to design political institutions as they endeavour to bind others, over time, to particular courses of action that reflect their ideas and values … design does not only include those heroic foundational moments in which constitutions are written or fundamental reforms launched, but also the many disparate acts of ‘institutional bricolage’ undertaken by strategic actors on the ground who respond to changing circumstances and shifting power relations.

Here historical institutionalism supplemented by culture-critical approaches best fits the task of analyzing the unfolding development trajectory of Singapore.

Historical institutionalism: analyzing historical trajectories

Institutional analysis calls attention to the ways in which agents read and react to enfolding patterns of structural power, reading them in order to render them intelligible (making sense) and reacting to them in order to formulate policies oriented to the future (planning for the future). This process of reading and reacting to enfolding structures puts in place both ideas (what is going on) and machineries (how to deal with structural demands); together, institutions (embodying ideas and machineries). The business of making and re-making institutions has been theorized in three distinctive ways: sociological institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and the more recent rational choice institutionalism. In this text, it is the opening pair that is used, but the stress is on historical institutionalism; the ways in which institutions are made and re-made down through time.

Historical institutionalist scholars have developed a set of approaches: first, the use of case studies of particular communities, where these accumulate detail, aiming at theoretically informed plausibility (not putatively reductive ‘causal’ explanation). Such analyses can be turned to communities at various scales, local or national; second, historical surveys of long-term change, tracking the exchange between elites and their domestic and international structural contexts, and such historical work allows a development trajectory to be sketched; and third the ways in which different communities, for political science, typically existing countries, have dealt with the demands of the modern world can be described. Singapore is not Britain, and neither is it the USA; the historical development trajectories of these three countries (or any others) are different. One aspect of such un-packings would be the interpretive-critical elucidation of the world-views of particular elites: how they read the world around them; and whilst the same is true of other groups, typically, political elites are the key players.

The approach has developed a number of distinct ideas, its conceptual vocabulary, including the idea of ‘path dependency’, pointing to the idea that sets of circumstances will continue as they are unless they are impacted by new events, as the social world is notable for its inertia. That said, there are episodes of change, more or less rapid, more or less deep-seated (superficial/systemic), and the key to these being ‘critical junctures’, provoked either by circumstances external to the polity or the release of tensions within a given polity; grasping the long-term nature of these processes, the idea of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, such that the social world is generally stable but liable to sharp change.

Culture-critical analysis

The concern for change in social relationships, cast in terms of path dependency, critical junctures, equilibrium, and the like, calls attention to the exchange between agents and structures. It is in a sense descriptive, but the social world is not a machine or organism rather it is made up of persons, and they will inevitably be members of groups, multiple groups making greater or lesser demands upon these individuals (thus, schematically, family, neighbourhood, community, nation, or some equivalent), and interpretive-critical analysis can elucidate the relevant patterns of understanding, the ideas upon which action inevitably depends, as people act for reasons (Winch, 1990). So, once again, a set of preoccupations: first, language, calling attention to the deep-seated interlinkages of language and practice; second, ideology, calling attention to the ways in which patterns of understanding are shaped by contexts, in particular, in the modern world, class (plus race and gender); and third, discourse, the ways in which such patterns of understanding are made routine, embedded in ordinary ideas and practice (Foucault, 1970). Thereafter, once again, we have a technical vocabulary: the elucidation of texts, after the work of hermeneutics; the elucidation of patterns of culture, read as text-analogues. All these approaches are turned to the elucidation of patterns of understanding, the bases of action.

Historical institutionalism: an agenda for analyzing Singapore

The historical institutionalist approach sketched out here offers a way of grasping the dynamics of long-term change, and it allows analysts to intellectually reconstruct the long-term development trajectory of a polity to reveal the inner logic of its track through time. It is true that all human life is contingent (Rorty, 1989), it is not determined, this way or that, but it is quite clearly elaborately structured and historical institutionalism allows analysts to grasp the processes whereby such order is created and re-created.

The structural circumstances enfolding a given polity can be specified, and changes in these circumstances can be noted; the membership of political elites can be specified, and the ways in which they have understood their circumstances can be reconstructed. The exchange between such elites and powerful external groupings can also be reconstructed. And the ways in which elites have formulated plans, that is, read and reacted to circumstances, can be grasped. Finally, the ways in which domestic populations have been mobilized can be spelt out, and the business of disciplining populations. All this allows the contingent, unfolding historical development trajectory of a polity to be spelled out.

The discussion begins with Singapore placed in its historical context, and an available, familiar distinction is drawn between ‘Singapore island’, a geographical term, the name of a place, and ‘Singapore’, a political term, the name of a country, and it is pointed out that eliding this elementary distinction is dangerous as it can tempt commentators into thinking that contemporary Singapore has deep historical roots (Guan, 2017). It does not. So-called ‘colonial histories’ that date contemporary modern Singapore from 1819 are correct (Turnbull, 1977). But it is true that Singapore island was home to earlier political forms, sultanates of one sort or another, and for scholarly history this is undoubtedly interesting. But running the two together – place and polity – allows nationalists to wrongly claim a continuous history reaching back into the mists of time. It is a particular strategy of legitimating the contemporary polity, but it is a poor one, and cast in terms of scholarship these issues of understanding and legitimation are best discussed explicitly, they are matters of collective memory and the national past.

Matters then turn to politics and policy,...