Singapore: Surviving the Downside of Globalization

Summary

Introduction

When John Maynard Keynes discovered that in the long term we are all dead, he stumbled on an excellent piece of economic news. It enables plebes and patricians to make love and laws while they can and leave the future to its own devices. Yet, Keynes the metaphysical economist was only half right. Individuals and even their habits of thought turn to dust, but generations arrive, to go on imagining and inventing the future.

Keynes has even less currency in Singapore. Here, in an unlikely country that willed itself into being, time is not a fact of nature but an act of will. While intimations of immortality, inherited from thousands of years of self-affirming survival, drive civilizations such as China and India to seek greatness, mortality is the city-state's stalking companion. In characterizing Singapore as a trading emporium, Philippe Regnier, for example, refers to the “chronic fragility” of an emporium, which has no agrarian base or large internal market. For Michael Leifer, Singapore is an “exceptional state” in economic performance but also in an innate sense of vulnerability.

Leifer encapsulates Singapore's reality neatly. The country's character derives from the fact that it is, exceptionally, a product of globalization. Singapore saw itself as a global city long before it became fashionable to either lubricate or jam the wheels turning the world into a single factory. Ejection from Malaysia — the basis of an unwanted independence in 1965 — meant the loss of a natural economic hinterland. Therefore, argued former Singapore Minister S. Rajaratnam in 1972, it could no longer be the Change Alley of Southeast Asia but would have to find a role as a global city. What favoured its quest was the trading world of post–World War II international relations. In a book on the subject published in the mid-1980s, Richard Rosecrance saw the world since 1945 as poised between two historic possibilities: a territorial system of power which went back to the landscape of Louis XIV and was now presided over by the Soviet Union and to some extent the United States; and an oceanic or trading system of power left as a legacy by Britain in the 1850s that had now formed itself around the Atlantic and Pacific basins.