Abstract
Singapore has been ruled by a single party, the People’s Action Party, since its political independence in 1965. The history of the party’s rise to monopolistic parliamentary power was strewn with political repressions of radical left, throughout the entire Cold War period. It was without doubt a history of authoritarianism. At the same time, it had achieved spectacular national economic success within global capitalism, spawned an expansive middle class and improved the material life of Singaporeans across the board. In defiance of the current hegemonic liberal democratic capitalism, the ruling Singapore government has very explicitly rejected American liberalism as the necessary end point of Singapore’s political ideological development. Instead, drawing on its root as a social democratic party, it has reworked and reinscribed the idea of the ‘social’ and weaved it into a ‘communitarianism’, with supposedly Asian characters distilled from its multiracial citizenry. The concept of the social/collective/communitarian in practice is institutionalized in the universal provision of public housing through a national housing program, the redistribution of gains generated by state capitalism through the subvention of the annual national budget and the governing of race through the insistence on racial harmony as a public good. Arguably, it is the concrete benefits delivered by these institutions which have the collective well-being as the core value that explains the longevity of the People’s Action Party in parliamentary power rather than its diminishing authoritarianism in these post-Cold War days.
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Notes
- 1.
Bell has since then embraced a more collective definition of communitarianism based on his reading of Confucian philosophy, see Bell and Hahm (2003).
- 2.
Many were imprisoned without trial in excess of 10 years, with the longest for 23 years. Only in the past few years were counter historical narratives and memories published by the detainees, protesting their innocence from alleged communism (Poh et al. 2013).
- 3.
In 1983, the first Minister of Finance, Goh Keng Swee, set up the Institute of East Asian Philosophies in Singapore to research the possible link between Confucianism and economic growth. Unsurprisingly, the Institute’s very first conference aimed to compare Confucianism and Weber’s thesis on protestant ethics and capitalism (Tu 1991).
- 4.
“White Paper on Shared Values,” presented in Parliament by PM Goh on 3 January 1991 (Straits Times 4 Jan. 1991).
- 5.
The idea that “Asian” are essentially communitarian-oriented predictably flew into a storm of scepticism and criticism from inside and outside Asia, as a thin veil for authoritarianism. The debate around “Asian Values” abated after 1997, when the Asian Financial Crisis put a stop to the seemingly sustainable rapid economic development in East Asia, which in turn stopped the triumphal touting of Asian values among political leaders and their thought-supporters.
- 6.
The Act was amended in 1973 to allow the state to compensate owners of acquired land at the 1973 market value or the land’s value at the date of notification, depending on which was lower.
- 7.
An individual’s CPF is unevenly apportioned into three different accounts: ordinary, medical and special accounts. Only the ordinary account, which constitutes the largest portion, can be used for housing. Housing consumption is about 60% of the annual pre-retirement withdrawal from CPF.
- 8.
- 9.
Space limitation does not permit the discussion of the investments by the Government Investment Corporation and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which invest national reserves.
- 10.
The elected team also constitutes the town council which is responsible for the management of the public housing estates within the GRC.
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Chua, B. (2018). Singapore From Social Democracy to Communitarianism. In: Reese-Schäfer, W. (eds) Handbuch Kommunitarismus. Springer Reference Geisteswissenschaften. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16864-3_31-1
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