Race and State in Independent Singapore 1965–1990

The Cultural Politics of Pluralism in a Multiethnic Society

John Clammer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429817069
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1998, this volume explores Singapore as an ideal case study for the examination of the management of postcoloniality, social diversity and the pursuit of economic growth with ethnic harmony. Singapore has, since independence, evolved a unique mix of state directed capitalism, revamped Confucianism and a social order based on an ideology of multiracialism. The result has been a State with enormous sociological diversity held together by the need to create a unified political order out of a population of immigrants of very diverse origins. This has placed the management of multiethnicity at the heart of political discourse and social policy. This book examines critically the operation of ethnicity in post-independence Singapore, the social policies that have been evolved to manage it, and the implications of the Singapore experiment for other plural societies in Asia and elsewhere.

1

Managing the Multiethnic State: Ethnicity, Classifications and the Power to Name in the Construction of Singaporean Society “Reality”

As Singapore passes its thirtieth anniversary of independent statehood, and then contemplates the challenges that lie beyond this symbolic date, such as the rapid approach of the end of the Twentieth Century, assessing the lessons of its development and considering their comparative application become important tasks. This task is necessary both because of the intrinsic interest of the society - its rapid economic growth, public policies in areas such as housing, and the complexity of its social structure. Singapore is to a very great extent a planned society, and this point, often used by critics to attack the high degree of social order and even regimentation, is significant precisely because Singapore does represent one of the few society-wide attempts at total social planning. Outside of small-scale communitarian societies and possibly some of the former communist ones, few societies have attempted social planning and regulation on the scale that Singapore has done - planning that has extended from the management of the economy through the fields of education, language usage, housing, transportation, the media and medicine, even to intimate areas such as family planning and mate selection.

The process of development which has characterised Singapore’s first thirty years has certain very visible features - an emphasis on economic growth, strong state intervention in all areas of life, a paternalist political style and the discouragement of strong intermediate and independent institutions standing between government and the people. The literature on Singapore’s development has tended to stress the economic and political aspects of this process, and relatively little attention has been paid to the sociological aspects of social change in this tiny but complex country. In this study, however, the focus is precisely on one of the most important and visible aspects of the social organisation of Singapore - the ethnic structure and its articulation with every other aspect of social life. Ethnicity is a pervasive reality in Singapore, informing not only public policy (for example the distribution of ethnic groups in housing estates), but also day-today social and cultural interaction between the citizens, the choice of mate, the choice of television viewing, the choice of language, dress, food, the furnishing of one’s house, and very definitely religious preferences.

The much vaunted success of Singapore (meaning again primarily in terms of economic growth rates and the translation of these into the provision of physical infrastructure) actually rests on sociological foundations, and is potentially fragile not only because of the volatilities of the world economy and the regional geopolitical situation, but also because of the underlying fragility of this ethnically based social structure. This in turn is influenced by events and trends well beyond Singapore’s shores - the spread of religious fundamentalisms, the emergence of ethnically based nationalisms and sub-nationalism in many parts of the world and the rediscovery of ethnicity as a resource for social mobilisation by disadvantaged groups or those by-passed by economic development around the world. New intellectual trends such as the popularity of forms of socio-biology and fresh varieties of ‘scientific racism’ based on these have also spread their influence.

In short the significance of ethnicity in the modern or post-modern world has not declined, and it is precisely those states built upon a foundation of ethnic pluralism that most seriously face the challenges to political unity, fair distribution of the fruits of economic growth and just social policies, especially in fields such as education.

Singapore since its inception (and for long before independence in 1965) has been a society based upon multiracialism. While the origins of this are to be found in colonial policies and practices, the social and economic realities of both East and South Asia in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries which made possible and encouraged migration and the geo-politics of trade in Asia at that time, the consequences were reaped by independent Singapore and have been and will continue to be the fundamental feature of everyday social reality.

The reality of this multiracialism has meant that the management of tensions has been precisely the management of relations between the ethnic groups that collectively comprise Singapore society. These tensions have arisen and may continue to arise in some fairly obvious contexts, especially in the dangers of ethnic stratification arising from the unequal distribution of the fruits of economic growth (Li 1989, Salaff 1988), but also in some less immediately obvious areas such as conflict over values, cultural orientations and religion. Some of these are inherent in the organisation of any plural society, while others in contemporary Singapore are the by-products of affluence. All development strategies bring with them social consequences. Much of the interest in the nature and potential applicability of the Singapore ^cmodel’ to other developing countries comes not from its economic policies, but from the impact of these policies on social life and from the problems and the lessons that can be learnt from the Singapore experience of inheriting a multiracial community which has had of necessity to be sustained and nurtured through the shocks and disruptions of rapid economic growth and the consolidation of a political structure.

Of particular importance in Singapore is the constant attempt to manage change rather than to allow social evolution to take place at its own pace. This is usually justified within the country, or at least within its political circles, as being precisely because of the fragility of the social foundations. Rapid growth has brought strains, which while they have to some extent fallen on all of the population, have especially affected the members of ethnic minorities who cannot mobilise social resources so fully or successfully as others. At the same time globalisation has brought ideas, technologies, alternative social patterns and awareness of world events to the attention of all Singaporeans, all of which affect the nature of the local culture. The real issues that currently face Singapore are no longer those of external threats, but rather internal ones - including achieving higher levels of social justice and the distribution of benefits around the different component communities. In the long run the success of Singapore will not be judged in terms of rates of economic growth, but of the success or otherwise of the social experiment, and in particular the ability to create a society in which genuine racial harmony, opportunity and distributive justice have been attained.

In all these respects the Singapore experiment is far from over, and in particular the nature of the ethnic situation needs full and critical exploration, something that has not been adequately done in much of the locally produced upbeat material on the prematurely announced “success” of Singapore. The essays in this volume attempt to provide this balancing point of view: an up-to- date assessment of the nature of ethnicity in Singapore, trends in ethnic relations, and the relationship of ethnicity to other aspects of social policy. The emphasis on what follows is very much on the social features of development, and in particular on the isolation and detailed exploration of the single most significant feature of Singapore social structure, the ethnic patterning of the entire society.

There are several reasons for approaching the analysis of Singapore in this way - conceptual ones such as assessing the reality or otherwise of ethnic and national integration, practical ones such as uncovering the dynamics of ethnicity as a route to avoiding tensions and even the violence that has plagued even what formerly seemed to be stable multiethnic societies such as Sri Lanka, and intellectual ones such as challenging features of the local orthodoxy on the nature of ethnicity in Singapore, itself an important task as intellectual assumptions often show up in and colour policy initiatives, even in a country like Singapore where the government is not famous for consulting its own local intellectual community. Implicit in this project is the questioning of the methodology of the study of ethnicity in Singapore, and in particular its ignoring of issues of foreign models of ‘scientific’ racism, of the social construction of ethnic categories and consequently their dynamic rather than fixed or classificatory nature and of the psychological aspects of ethnic identity, and in particular the role of memory in the construction of contemporary ethnicities that they produce.

This study also challenges the belief that Singapore has undergone a ‘depluralisation’ that “will break down ethnic boundaries, mellow ethnic identities, and, in the end, transform ethnic stratification into class differentiation on an individual, not ethnic group basis” (Chew 1983 : 33). This view I will argue is fundamentally wrong, not only on the grounds that ethnic identification remains empirically primary in Singapore and that the government has waged a continuous campaign against the emergence of class, but even more significantly that there has actually been a re-racialisation of Singapore society both through public policies such as the imposition of ethnic quotas in housing estates and through the introduction and widespread dissemination of ideas about race derived from some very dubious forms of socio-biology. The use of inappropriate models in attempting to characterise the ethnic situation in Singapore, whether they are derived from the social sciences (e.g. Chew 1983 : 43) or from biology and genetics has been a principal ingredient in muddying the waters of ethnicity and its interpretation in the country (and the use of very old data, much of it stemming from surveys in the 1970s or before and of quoting socio-biological ideas without considering their critics considerably deepens this problem).

A major issue in the analysis of ethnicity in Singapore has been its dynamic relationship to state formation. As Peter Preston has argued with particular reference to Singapore, the state is an artefact created over time by particular interest groups and used strategically to make sense of the present. “Such ideas are neither fixed in terms of meaning nor are they deployed in a politically neutral fashion” (Preston 1994 : 85). The nation-state is itself what Benedict Anderson has called an “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) in which there is a progressive integration of the population into a wider and finally totally embracing system in which the idea of loyalty to this abstract and far from obvious concept has to be inculcated. The process of state formation in Singapore must be seen as a complex combination of the attempt to create both a political structure and of a political culture to go with it and legitimate it through informal mechanisms, of the construction of a closely managed economy as far as possible under the control of politics, and of the attempt to create a “myth” - the image of a society multiracial in character but in which race is itself constructed and managed and ultimately subordinated to the demands of the state in its political expression (Benjamin 1987). The political construction of the state has needed to be accompanied by the persuading of the population to see ethnicity as important but subordinate - the strategic dynamism of the evolution of ideas about the state has been paralleled in the strategic evolution of politically engineered ideas about ethnicity.

Brown (1993) sees these as having passed essentially through three phases - an initial depoliticised phase in which ethnicity was identified with ‘high’ culture and was sanitised, a garrison ideology phase in which the dangers of ethnic instability were stressed and the necessity of a strong state argued to preserve society against these ever present dangers, and a contemporary ‘corporatist’ phase in which nation is first and all other ethnic or political loyalties are condemned, in which the national community is seen as a multicellular organism and in which the ethnic communities are redefined not as primordial entities, but as interest groups (Brown 1993 : 20-21). Out of this move has come the attempt to define a new, formally non-ethnic and overarching set of national values, the so-called “National Ideology”, which in fact, as will be argued later in this book, actually enshrine a very distinctively racial (actually Chinese) set of values.

The broader analysis suggests not only a re-racialisation of Singapore society, but also a very controlled re-racialisation. The dangers of ethnic or religious conflict are all too obvious in Singapore. The challenge then is to encourage the flourishing of ethnicity, especially its Chinese manifestations, while avoiding the excesses of ethnic fundamentalisms. In part this is being done through the importation of ideas about the genetic basis of race, which allow a discourse of race to be perpetuated while cloaking it in the guise of objectivity and science. This re-racialisation must in turn be seen in a larger context which has two major elements. The root of these is globalisation and the increasing and now virtually total integration of Singapore into the world economy. This has two main effects. The first is the spread of ideas of démocratisation that naturally include ethnic equality, participation and access to social resources. Within the Singapore political culture these are seen as trends that need to be contained, creating the necessity to acknowledge the multiracial character of the society while simultaneously managing the potential political implications of this. The second is the spread of consumer culture, already a highly developed way of life in Singapore. The point here is not to make a moral judgement of this phenomenon, but to consider its sociological consequences. These include the creation of cross-ethnic cultures (which may include such elements as shared popular music), forms of stratification based on symbolic forms of competition and on the accumulation of cultural capital (certain desired or strategically useful social skills, statuses or resources) as well as actual economic capital (Bourdieu 1984), and the increasing cross-national flow of culture - Japanese culture, for example, having had great impact on Singapore through fashion, food, popular culture, television programmes and consumer goods. The appearance of such consumer cultures also greatly confuses the class picture, as both the markers of class and the means of achieving social mobility begin to shift. When this is combined with new forms of income inequality such as those between highly trained professionals, managers and technicians, many of whom in Singapore are from outside the country, and semi-skilled or unskilled workers, the intersection of class and race becomes complicated in ways that conventional class analysis cannot capture.

Ethnic relations then need to be placed squarely in the context of developments in local, regional and global culture, in education, in technology and its social and cultural impact, in politics and in the local structuring of day-to-day relationships. Some of these have already become the focus of scholarly attention, such as housing, where clearly a great deal of inter-ethnic interaction takes place on a constant and recurring basis, and work. But there are many other areas of considerable significance such as consumption behaviour, entertainment, the arts, sport, education and military service where interaction also takes place, often under very natural circumstances of shared interest where ethnicity is present, but is not itself the primary structuring factor in the situation.

The future analysis of ethnicity and inter-ethnic relations in Singapore will methodologically have to take into account a range of factors. These include a more sophisticated grasp of the nature of social class and its nuances, the recognition of ethnicity as a socially constructed phenomenon that is not something that can be defined or explored by itself out of its wider social, economic, cultural and political environment, and the recognition that ethnicity reproduces itself at the level of everyday life - in kinship, consumption and leisure for example - as much as in formal relationships and institutions created by the largely politically generated categories of racial membership.

Present social trends may not of course continue indefinitely into the future, but some patterns can be predicted with some confidence. One of these is a slowly rising and also an ageing population. This population which will be characterised by rising educational levels, rising female participation in the workforce, consumerism as a way of life and as a culture, weakening of traditional family bonds and their replacement by a more individualistic lifestyle and changing leisure patterns towards more passive and electronically oriented pastimes and changes in the nature of work brought about both by technology and by Singapore’s high level of integration into the world economy. All these developments will take place in the context of the other major pervasive feature of Singapore’s social make-up - the very high level of urbanisation and the wide range of effects that this imposes on patterns of interaction and on culture. The intense urbanisation of Singapore and the physical scale have been largely ignored by sociologists in their exploration of wider-scale social relationships in Southeast Asia.

A young population extensively exposed to the forces of global popular culture is not necessarily going to see the future in the same way as their elders, and indeed one would be very surprised if they did. The ways in which this population sees ethnicity may itself be very different, especially given the fact that changes parallel to those occurring in Singapore are also taking place in the neighbouring ASEAN countries. The most interesting question here may well prove to be one in some ways similar to the basic sociological question asked about Japan. In Japan the question is how technological supremacy has been achieved while retaining many ‘traditional’ or at least culturally distinctive features of the society. In Singapore the question will be how the continuing ethnic fundamentals interact with technology, urbanism and consumption in Asia’s second most affluent society.

There are several potential ways in which this could go. In a worst-case situation ethnic stratification could take place along economic lines with the ability to handle higher levels of technology becoming the determinant of access to social mobility on a group or individual basis. A second scenario might be the further corporatisation of ethnicity and its continuing emptying of real organic meaning. An example of this might be seen in the recent decision of one housing estate to take on a “uniform identity” by building walkways and pavilions in Minangkabau (an ethnic group famous for its matrilineal kinship system from Sumatra in Indonesia) style. The fact that the uniform high-rise blocks will be left untouched and that there are very few actual Minangkabaus in Singapore (although the estate in question - Eunos - does have a large Malay population) reveals the cosmetic and devitalised use of ethnic symbols in a situation where the content of those symbols has been effectively sterilised {Straits Times 15 Jan. 1995 : 26). A third possibility is the rediscovery of genuine diversity and richness in ethnic identities, something that might contribute to the real (as opposed to the theme park style) vitality of Singapore, and to the management of the accelerating crisis of self-identity which many social theorists see as an increasingly common symptom of late modernity.

Most societies face problems of social cohesion, either because they have been since their early days plural societies (as with Singapore, Malaysia and Fiji for example) or because they have been the recipients of large-scale immigration (as with Germany, Australia or the United States). Each of these societies, given its specific history, size, culture and social make-up has managed these problems in different ways and with different degrees of success. Certainly the issue that confronts Singapore as it passes into its fourth decade of independence is how to maintain and indeed to enhance social integration in a highly plural society that has achieved developed country status economically in a very short period of time and which now faces the problems of affluence and a maturing economy.

Singapore’s ethnic mix is not just a side issue here, but will be a continuing part of the total social, political and economic equation for a long time to come. Any claim by Singapore to be able to represent itself as a ‘model’ of any kind for other countries {Sunday Times, 15 Jan. 1995) depends very heavily not only on pointing to success in economics and certain genuine but limited areas of public policy, such as the inevitably mentioned public housing, but in demonstrating that this social development has taken place while preserving and enhancing the social infrastructure. In Singapore this means pre-eminently the country’s rich and complex ethnic patterns, and it is the nature and status of these that this study now turns to addressing.

The chapters that constitute this book then develop a common theme: that central to the understanding of Singapore society and its cultural and religious manifestations is the role of ethnicity. This, it will be argued, is true at a surprisingly large number of levels. Ethnicity enters deeply into personal identity: deciding who you are or what you can be in Singapore almost invariably involves a decision about race. Culture and its religious expressions is mapped along ethnic lines. The distribution of political power (and even the allocation of Housing Development Board dwelling units) is structured ethnically, as are policies about reproduction, education, language usage and the provision of places of worship. The economy itself is marked by ethnic stratification.

Of course this is true...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Managing the Multiethnic State: Ethnicity, Classifications and the Power to Name in the Construction of Singaporean Society “Reality”
• 2 Race as Ideology: the Evolution of Ethnicity as the Basis of Social Classification
• 3 Integrating the Other: Ethnic Minorities and the Structure of the Whole
• 4 Multiculturalism and the Cultural Politics of Pluralism
• 5 Space and Power: Ethnicity, Class and Culture in the Urban Crucible
• 6 Falling Between the Cracks: the Informal Sector, Peripheral Capitalism and State Formation
• 7 Feeling the Strain: Social Movements, Ethnic (De)Mobilisation and Cultural Protest
• 8 The Racialisation of Identity and the Politics of Race
• 9 Plastic Confucianism and the Degendering of Identity
• 10 Modernity, Social Exclusion and the Developmental State
• 11 The State, Race and Values: the National Ideology and the Management of Pluralism
• 12 Ideology and Development in Singapore
• Bibliography
• Index