Constructing Singapore by M.D. Barr and Z. Skrbiš

MICHAEL D.  BARR & ZLATKO SKRBIŠ

Constructing Singapore: elitism, ethnicity and the nation-building project

Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008

xiii, 304 pp. ISBN 978-87-7984-029-4

pb £16.99; 978-87-7694-028-7, hb £50

Reviewed by V.T. King, University of Leeds

Local, expatriate and foreign scholars have been obsessed with the topic of post-independence nation-building in Singapore for many years. Presumably this is in large part due to the obsession of the political elite of this small anxiety-ridden republic which in turn provides ample material for research and because the political and economic project which Lee Kuan Yew and his lieutenants embarked on in 1965 has, against all the odds, been so conspicuously successful. So here we have another book on the construction of the Singapore nation-state.

Much is already known, particularly the intimate relationship which has been forged between the governing elite and the national project and its evolution; they are ‘the same thing’ (p. 7). Indeed one of the co-authors, Michael Barr, has spent a good deal of his career focusing intensely on the Singapore story and aside from a string of papers on Singapore politics, society and values, has published a very readable study of the architect of modern Singapore in Lee Kuan Yew: the beliefs behind the man (2000). Some of the current book with Zlatko Skrbiš has already appeared (though with some revisions) in several of Barr’s previously published papers, so there are no surprises here, and his co-author appears to be there to provide some theoretical ballast on nationalism.

Despite the weariness which some Singapore-watchers experience when they confront another study of the post-independence social and political engineering projects implemented in the city-state, this present book is not without some interest. For those who know David Brown’s work on the state, nationalism and ethnicity in Southeast Asia then some of the conceptual framework adopted by Barr and Skrbiš will be familiar. They place Singapore towards the ‘modern-civic’ end of Brown’s spectrum of Southeast Asian nationalisms but not at the extreme end; Singapore’s elite have addressed the potentially insuperable problems they faced following the separation from Malaysia and constructed ‘a multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-lingual secular state that combines a modern concept of citizenship with practices that essentialise and emphasise ethnic identity, thus making it less “modern” and “civic” than might appear at first glance’ (p. 4).

Nevertheless, one of the contributions of Constructing Singapore, it seems to me, is in interweaving Lee Kuan Yew’s biography and that of his son Lee Hsien Loong and the personal dimension of power with an examination of the development of certain ideological proclivities and the emphasis placed on elitism, meritocracy and ‘constructionism’ (constructing and re-constructing Singapore [in infrastructural, policy and ideological terms]). As we know ad nauseum the character of Singapore’s government is ‘technocratic’ and ‘pragmatic’, its objectives ‘modernist’ in combination with at least an overt emphasis on multiracialism but with the increasing emphasis on Confucian-Chinese cultural values and behaviour. The co-authors also argue that ‘the Singaporean version of elitism is substantially a product of the mind and imagination of Lew Kuan Yew’ (along with S. Rajaratnam, C.V. Devan Nair, Goh Keng Swee, Tony Tan and George Yeo) (pp. 8, 18, 113). They claim, with some justification that the strength of their book is its basis in detailed and long term archival and oral history research; this is evident in the reasonably detailed discussion of the education system and the various routes to elite status.

To explore this combination of practice and ideology we are provided with a rather standard narrative of ‘The Singapore Story’ and the ways in which myth construction have proceeded and been altered to meet changing circumstances (as presented, not in Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs carrying the same title but in a CD-ROM produced by the Ministry of Arts and Information under its National Education Project in 1999). This is followed by an explanation of the emergence of the twin anchors of Singaporean nationalism: elitism and meritocracy, and the reasons why Lee Kuan Yew and his advisors were able to embed these so successfully in the citizens’ psyche. The formal legitimating myths are also examined in relation to those other informal mechanisms and factors which drive the political system: personal power, patronage and social networks, gender, ethnic stereotyping, and socio-economic class position.

A question which immediately arises in a book about elites and elitism is what precisely do we understand by the concept of ‘elite’ and why is this preferable to, for example, an analysis of social class or status? In the introductory sections of the book it was far from clear and perhaps we should have gone back to C. Wright Mills for some conceptual clarity on the ‘power elite’. But thankfully we do get some clarity from chapter 4 where there is a discussion of the concept, explored through an examination of ‘the culture of elite governance’ (though even here there is some fuzziness). Barr and Skrbiš distinguish between an elite ‘core’ comprising the political and administrative leaders (‘a select group of ministers, members of the Administrative Service … senior members of the SAF and the security services’), and the ‘outer circles’ made up of ‘the talented among all walks of society’; these latter also appear, I assume, as ‘other’ or ‘alternative’ elites (communal, economic, academic and religious) (pp. 58, 61). Having introduced the distinction, Barr and Skrbiš tend to lose sight of it in the later chapters of their book.

Much of the book goes in search of the core elite (or ‘the apex’) through an examination of training and recruiting grounds: the civil service, the Singapore Armed Forces and the education system. Socialisation into nationalist values and conformity to the ideological principles of the government through education at pre-school, primary, secondary and junior college levels, based on the principles of kiasu (‘afraid to fail’), streaming, bilingualism, emphasis on the sciences and the stratification and diversification of schools (with cramming, private tutoring, rewards, rising parental expectations, extra-curricular character-building, elite schools, government scholarships) are discussed in chapters 7 to 10. The book also considers post-university vocational training and professional development in the government’s urgent requirement to instill loyalty to the nation.

There is an interesting examination of the processes of partially assimilating whilst also stereotyping and disadvantaging the ethnic minorities, particularly the Malays, in the construction of ‘new Singaporeans’. Not only is the elite overwhelmingly dominated by Chinese from privileged upper middle class backgrounds, who are university graduates speaking English as a first language with good levels of competence in Mandarin, good in science and coming from ‘the Raffles family of schools’ but they also happen to be men (pp. 226-27).

We might note that any political system is a combination of formal and informal ideas, structures, processes and elements; their character, importance and permutations will differ in any given case. The degrees and kinds of contradiction and the ways in which the political leaders address them are of course crucial in explaining regime survival. In Singapore incompetence and mismanagement, given the emphasis on meritocracy, are potentially disastrous, especially if failure is seen to be the result of personal power and patronage. To date the elite, though exhibiting clear signs of paranoia, has managed successfully to address the paradoxes, distortions, injustices and dissonances that their policies have generated, particularly in the arena of ethnicity. But because of the very nature of the Singapore state and its society and elite, I think that we might agree that the contradictions can never be eliminated.

Although Barr and Skrbiš have not told me anything that I did not know in broad outline, they do provide a substantial and interesting evidential base for their study and add a great deal of detail on the inner workings of Singapore’s particular ‘factory’ system of elite production and, in more culturally specific terms, the schooling of its mandarinate. I enjoyed reading what they had to say.