6 - Singapore and the possibility of enforceable benevolence

Summary

Issues associated with ‘race’ have played a much smaller direct role in defining the nature of Singaporean society than they have in Malaysia. This is because a clear majority of the population is Chinese, 76 per cent in 1987. The remainder of the population comprises Malays, who made up 15 per cent of the population in the same year, Indians, who made up 6 per cent, and ‘Others’, who made up 3 per cent. The Sumatran words from which the name Singapore is derived mean ‘Lion Island’. The coat of arms of the present republic features what heraldic experts term a ‘lion rampant’. What I want to argue in this chapter is, first, the unsurprising thesis, given that it represents an instance par excellence of Pacific capitalism, that Singapore is an island of rampant patriarchalism. And second, the perhaps more novel thesis for a socialist sociologist at least, that this could carry a positive significance. That is, I wish to bring out the luxurious as well as the unchecked nature of the rampancy of Singapore's patriarchalism and so demonstrate that states may achieve very high levels of social and economic justice despite their openness to transnational forces. Indeed what the Singaporean experience suggests is that, where the flexibility and self-disciplining of the population are the keys to economic survival, such levels of social and economic justice are necessary if nation states are to thrive under conditions where trans-national forces are dominant.