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Singapore Political Culture
Singapore possessed a distinct political culture, which
fit
into no simple category formulated by political
scientists. It was
centralized, authoritarian, and statist. It was also
pragmatic,
rational, and legalistic. In spite of possessing the
superficial
trappings of British institutions such as parliamentary
procedure
and bewigged judges, Singapore was, as its leaders kept
reiterating, not a Western country with a Western
political system.
Although elections were held regularly, elections had
never led to
a change of leadership, and citizens did not expect that
political
parties would alternate in power. Nor was there a
tradition of
civil liberties or of limits to state power. The rulers of
an excolony with a multiethnic population, and a country
independent
only by default, assumed no popular consensus on the rules
of or
limits to political action. Singapore was a city-state
where a
small group of guardians used their superior knowledge to
advance
the prosperity of the state and to bring benefits to what
they
considered a largely ignorant and passive population.
Singapore's leaders were highly articulate and
expressed their
principles and goals in speeches, books, and interviews.
Their
highest goal was the survival and prosperity of their
small nation.
They saw this as an extremely difficult and risk-filled
endeavor.
Conscious of the vulnerability of their state and aware of
many
threats to its survival, they justified their policy
decisions on
the grounds of national survival. They viewed government
as an
instrument intended to promote national ends and
recognized no
inherent limits on government concerns or activities. They
prized
intellectual analysis and rational decision making, and
considered
their own decisions the best and often the only responses
to
problems. The senior leadership prided itself on its
ability to
take the long view and to make hard, unpopular decisions
that
either responded to immediate dangers or avoided problems
that
would become apparent one or two decades into the future.
They
valued activism and will, and tried to devise policies,
programs,
or campaigns to deal with all problems. In a
characteristic
expression of Singapore's political culture, the rising
young
leader Brigadier General (Reserve) Lee Hsien Loong, when
discussing
the threat to national survival posed by declining birth
rates,
said "I don't think we should ... passively watch
ourselves going
extinct." Passivity and extinction were linked and
identified as
trends the government's policies must counter.
The leadership's conviction of the state's
vulnerability to
manifold dangers and of the self-evident correctness of
its
analysis of those dangers resulted in very limited
tolerance for
opposition and dissent. According to Singapore's leaders,
their
opponents were either too unintelligent to comprehend the
problems,
too selfish to sacrifice for the common good, or
maliciously intent
on destroying the nation. Although by the 1980s Singapore
had the
highest standard of living in Southeast Asia, its leaders
often
compared it with generalized Third World countries. They
saw such
countries suffering from widespread corruption and
demagogic
politics, both reflecting concentration on immediate
payoffs at the
expense of long-term prosperity and the common good. For
Singapore's leaders, politics connoted disruptive and
completely
negative activities, characterized by demagoguery,
factionalism,
and inflammatory appeals to communal, ethnic, or religious
passions. When they spoke of "depoliticizing" Singapore's
government, they had this view of politics in mind.
Data as of December 1989
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