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Singapore Singaporean Identity
The period after Singapore's withdrawal from Malaysia
in 1965
saw much public discussion of Singaporean identity. The
discussion
tended to use terms, categories, and basic assumptions
provided by
the government and ruling party. One basic assumption was
that
there was not, at least in the late 1960s and 1970s, a
common
Singaporean identity, but that there should be. A
corollary was
that Singaporean identity would not spontaneously emerge
from the
country's ongoing social, political, and cultural life.
Rather, it
would have to be consciously created and "built" by
policies,
directives, and educational campaigns. The content of the
identity
remained somewhat ill-defined, and it often appeared
easier to say
what Singaporean identity was not than what it was. The
ideal
seemed to combine, somewhat uneasily, a self-consciously
toughminded meritocratic individualism, in which individual
Singaporeans
cultivated their talents and successfully competed in the
international economy, with an equally self-conscious
identification with "Asian roots" and "traditional
values," which
referred to precolonial India, China, and the Malay world.
Singaporeans were to be modern and cosmopolitan while
retaining
their distinctively Asian traditions.
Singapore's leaders explicitly rejected the ideology of
the
melting pot, offering rather the vision of a confidently
multiethnic society whose component ethnic groups shared
participation in such common institutions as electoral
politics,
public education, military service, public housing, and
ceremonies
of citizenship; at the same time they were to retain
distinct
languages, religions, and customs. Singaporeans were
defined as
composed of three fundamental types--Chinese, Malays, and
Indians.
These ethnic categories, locally referred to as "races,"
were
assumed to represent self-evident, "natural" groups that
would
continue to exist into the indefinite future. Singaporean
identity
thus implied being a Chinese, a Malay, or an Indian, but
selfconsciously so in relation to the other two groups. The
Singaporean
model of ethnicity thus required both the denial of
significant
internal variation for each ethnic category and the
highlighting of
contrasts between the categories.
Being Singaporean also meant being fluent in English, a
language which served both as a neutral medium for all
ethnic
groups and as the medium of international business and of
science
and technology. The schools, the government, and the
offices of
international corporations for the most part used English
as their
working language. The typical Singaporean was bilingual,
speaking
English as well as the language of one of the three
component
ethnic groups. Hence the former English-speaking Baba,
Chinese or
Indian, would seem to serve as the model of Singaporean
identity.
The resulting culture would be the type social scientists
call
"creolized," in which a foreign language such as English
or French
is adapted to local circumstances and the dominant culture
reflects
a unique blending of local and "metropolitan" or
international
elements. In the 1980s, there were signs of the emergence
of such
a culture in Singapore, with the growth among youth (of
all
"races") of a distinctive English-based patois called
"Singlish"
and the attraction of all ethnic groups to international
fashions
and fads in leisure activities.
Singapore's leaders resisted such trends toward
cosmopolitan or
creole culture, however, reiterating that Singaporeans
were Asians
rather than Westerners and that abandoning their own
traditions and
values for the tinsel of international popular culture
would result
in being neither truly Western nor properly Asian. The
consequence
would be loss of identity, which in turn would lead to the
dissolution of the society. The recommended policy for the
retention of Asian identity involved an ideal division of
labor by
language. English was to function as a language of
utility. The
Asian "mother tongues"--Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and
Tamil--would
be the languages of values, providing Singaporeans with
what
political leaders and local academics commonly called
"cultural
ballast" or "moral compasses." Stabilized and oriented by
traditional Asian values, the Singaporean would be able to
select
what was useful from the offerings of "Western" culture
and to
reject that which was harmful. This theory of culture and
identity
resulted in the effort to teach the "mother tongues" in
the schools
and to use them as the vehicle for moral education
(see Education
, this ch.).
In an extension of the effort to create a suitable
national
identity, in 1989 Singapore's leaders called for a
"national
ideology" to prevent the harmful drift toward superficial
Westernization. The national ideology, which remained to
be worked
out in detail, would help Singaporeans develop a national
identity
and bond them together by finding and encouraging core
values
common to all the country's diverse cultural traditions.
Suggested
core values included emphasizing community over self,
valuing the
family, resolving issues through the search for consensus
rather
than contention, and promoting racial and religious
tolerance.
Data as of December 1989
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