A little red dot in a sea of green

KISHORE MAHBUBANI’S MOST recent book was called “Can Singapore Survive?”. Singaporeans are never allowed to forget that their country is small and its future fragile. If it does not remain exceptional, said the prime minister in that May Day speech, Singaporeans will be “pushed around, shoved about, trampled upon”.

Fifty years ago the city state was born out of a row with one of its neighbours, Malaysia. The other, Indonesia, had been waging a campaign of konfrontasi—just short of open warfare—against Malaysia and Singapore. Those days seem long gone. The Association of South-East Asian Nations, formed in 1967, boasts of its success in lowering regional tensions. Singapore’s relations with Malaysia and Indonesia are excellent. But for how long? The neighbours sometimes give Singapore reason to fret. In 1998 the then Indonesian president, Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie, was quoted in a newspaper article as saying he did not see Singapore as a friend. Pointing at a map, he went on: “It’s OK with me, but there are 211m people [in Indonesia]. All the green [area] is Indonesia. And that red dot is Singapore.” Mr Habibie denied saying this. But, with a characteristic mixture of pride and paranoia, Singapore adopted “little red dot” as a motto.

Besides peace with the neighbours, the other pillar of Singaporean security has been the benign, American-led order in Asia and the Pacific that has prevailed since the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. That, however, is now in danger. China seems to see America’s security presence as in part intended to thwart its own rise. Under Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore managed to position itself as the best friend in South-East Asia to both America and China. That makes a falling-out between the big powers especially ominous for it. It has already irritated America by joining the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that China has set up. China, for its part, gripes about Singapore’s links with Taiwan, where it sends its army to train.

So nervousness about the future is understandable. It is reflected in high defence spending (S$12.4 billion in 2014, or 3.3% of GDP, more than twice as much in money terms as in Malaysia, which has a population more than five times bigger); and in the two years’ national service for men which, according to the defence minister, Ng Eng Hen, enjoys 90% popular support among Singaporeans.

The sense of vulnerability and hence of the importance of national cohesion, instilled in Singapore’s leaders by Lee Kuan Yew and his fellows, is at the root of many aspects of the Singapore exception described in this report: in the fear of tolerating an effective political opposition; in the anxiety about communal tension; in the retention of repressive colonial-era legislation such as the Internal Security Act. It has also influenced economic policy, including the ideological objections to welfare and its debilitating impact on the national psyche.

It can even be seen in the tough law-and-order policies for which Singapore is also famous. Its use of the death penalty is repellent to liberals, as is the resort to corporal punishment, for which the official terminology—“caning”—grossly understates the barbarity. But, say many Singaporeans, these policies have worked—and the system made by Lee Kuan Yew is presented as a package, as if the economic growth somehow justified the caning.

Singaporeans are never allowed to forget that their country is small and its future fragile

Lee Kuan Yew’s defining characteristic, however, was pragmatism, a willingness to change his mind. He long opposed allowing casinos in Singapore, but was a member of the cabinet that in 2005 agreed to allow two to open, generating within a few years gaming revenues equivalent to the Las Vegas Strip’s. He also, late in life, accepted that homosexuality was “not a choice”, though for men practising it remains an offence.

Time for a sonnet

This report has pointed to plenty of reasons to be optimistic about Singapore’s economic future—certainly for its well-educated, globally aware young people, who are in one of the best places in the world to ride the wave of Asia’s rise. But they and their leaders need to decide what sort of society they want. The danger is that they will no longer be meritocrats sitting atop an unequal yet basically harmonious society, but an elite in a country that relies on increasing numbers of short-term migrants treated with little respect; and where an ageing, less educated group of fellow citizens feel disgruntled and let down.

Many countries in the world face similar dangers, but in Singapore they are especially stark because of its size and its severe ageing problem. As this report has also argued, Singapore is better equipped than most countries to avoid the worst outcomes. It can afford to relax politically without inviting chaos; it can afford to relax socially without causing unmanageable tension; it can afford to provide better for its needy and elderly without pushing the country down a slippery slope of welfare dependence; it can afford, in other words, to be less of an exception, more of a normal country; and, yes, it can afford even poetry.