By OOI KEE BENG* , pp. 28-33 in Economics & Society Volume 1, 2024: Man & Generations. The Economic Society of Singapore. Singapore: World Scientific.
MODERNITY IS MORE often than not defined from a European point of view, milestoned by events selected to highlight the progress of scientific methods, the radical restructuring of society following the demystification of monarchism and theocratism, and the reshaping of political thought within Europe. Equally poignant is of course the facilitating growth of capitalism and its expansive appropriation of global economic resources.
What of Modernity as seen and felt and adopted by peoples and states outside of Europe? This paper adopts the view that it is the epistemological aspect that, in the long run, offers the greatest challenge to the so-called developing world. This would involve management of the rise of secularism, of science and technology, of international imperialism and trade, and of the synergy of politics and economics.
When global modernity began is a hard question to answer. Did the cross-ocean Iberian seafarers ignite it? Was it the American War of Independence and the French Revolution that should have that credit? Or, if we are to focus on the globality of things, did modernity go really global only with the forming of the United Nations Organisation in 1945?
Did modernity, defined as a socio-political and socio-economic reality, not spread globally only after European colonialism crumbled away after the end of the Second World War? Before that, was modernity not a European privilege, determined by political sovereignty?
Throughout the decolonising territories across the world, so-called nation states came into being only in the middle of the 20th Century, and these have persistently and indolently been considered copiers of a ready European model of nation state. It remains a deep point of contention whether the Europeans do or did have a ready model which the rest of the world would, could and should copy, or whether most of them have also simultaneously with non-Europeans been struggling to build nation states, and in as ad hoc and adaptive a fashion as the latter have been doing.
Taking the viewpoint that global modernity is more recent—and locally informed—than we have been prone to think, and taking seriously the refrains that Modernity is Maritime[1], or that Modernity is Urbanity[2], helps open epistemological doors for us to describe the unique processes undertaken in different parts of the world in responding to “nationhood”, “modernity” and its challenges.
The historical case of Singapore offers an excellent chance for us to undertake such an exploration.
Independence as prerequisite for modernity
It should be noted first of all how tumultuous Singapore’s early history as an emerging state was. The strong sense of urgency and uncertainty, saw the city-state’s technocrats and leaders rise to the occasion achieving things that I am prone to assume astounded even them.
For the most part, this article considers the economic thinking relevant to Singapore’s early years, and will do that by coupling it to the political aspect of the nation-building process, arguing in the process that national-economy building a la Singapore equates to the synthesizing of political stability and economic innovations. In a phrase, we wish to highlight the building of nation-based political economy as modernity.
Admittedly, this view further polarises what has been a common enough understanding, that people in colonised territories can be described to have been living in a hazy terrain between traditional society and creeping modernity. By putting the spotlight on national politics and national economic thinking, this paper simply wishes to argue that modernity was—and is—not something that can be properly harnessed outside of the nation-building process. Singapore is adopted here as a didactic inroad into the conceptual reframing for understsanding this post-independence modernity. This reframing is needed in order to highlight and analyse the local modernisational efforts of newly-established countries, especially in Southeast Asia, or even revived ones in the region, like China.
Independence in some cases, and new nationhood in others, have been a prerequisite for local modernisation. But while necessary, nationhood is not sufficient for modernity and its benefits to take hold. As Goh Keng Swee noted in 1968, the agriculture-based traditional societies that most developing countries are based on are also strongly and aggressively conservative. Worst yet, these “remain largely obscurantist and opposed to change and progress”. The latter, if not faced directly, he claimed further, bodes ill for the whole post-independence process of modernisation.
“Unfortunately behind the paraphernalia of a modern state there has not been built up in many of these countries the underpinning to the political system which was successfully realised in Europe. One can proclaim a modern constitution quite easily, since lawyers can be engaged to draft one. But without a solid base of support from a mature citizenry and without the checks and balances against government abuse which developed in Europe out of the powerful new classes, the industrialist and organised labour, there could be no secure guarantee against the return of parasitical tendencies which has plagued the governments of so many societies in the past. Universal franchise, though of some value, has proved to be ineffective where the majority of the electorate consists of peasants”. [3]
One can competently argue that the tentacles of British modernity took hold in East and Southeast Asia most early and most securely in Singapore and in Penang, but these being colonies, what their inhabitants experienced and lived with, were as yet patchy as far as the deeper consequences of modernity were concerned. The wish over time to close this gap between modern thoughts and tools on the one hand, and traditional political subservience—and no doubt in many cases also obscurantist behaviour—on the other was what finally led to the anti-colonial and pro-independence movement of the mid-1900s, across the globe.
The partial introduction of modernity in these cases, left the colonised, however more urbanised and modernised they may have been in relation to their fellows in the region, in a disorientated state of mind.[4] What was needed, even for a place like Singapore in the end, was the localisation of modernity, however global the country’s economy may continue to be. This required the establishment of a stable and sovereign political economy.
Singapore had been established in 1819 to be fully in line with the magnified post-Napoleonic ambitions of the British. In that sense, it was essentially “modern” from Day One, but only from the point of view of the British, for whom modernity was also imperialistic. As stated by Wang Gungwu, when appraising the growth of the East India companies initiated by the Dutch and the English:
It introduced the practice of state-protected private enterprise and may be seen as the young shoots of a new kind of political economy. The calculations that propelled the Companies to puruse material wealth in this way could be described as the product of a modern mind, one that was not burdened by the traditions of church and state and concentrated on profitable outcomes.[5]
As an island outpost, Singapore was not only maritime in all its dealings with the world, it was also an urban project from the word “Go”, and it was only a matter of time before the little island would become one big city, one could venture on hindsight.
In summary, understanding Singapore as a British project started in the early 1800s which came to anchor the Straits Settlements, whose relative modernity then had to be finalised and localised in the establishment and growth of the political economy we know as the Republic of Singapore, holds lessons—of success and failures—for its many neighbouring nation states.
The ‘completion of modernity’ for Singapore—although rather aptly described as a passage “From Third World to Third World” by Lee Kuan Yew in his personal history of that journey—is at the same time surprisingly well-reflected in the career path and the applied thoughts of his economic tsar, Dr Goh Keng Swee.
Constructing the political economy of a territorially and newly-defined nation state, and relating this to the globality of the political economy of First World nation states, was no easy matter. As mentioned earlier, the idea that there is a ready western model to apply has at best been a faulty one.[6] Local factors would in any case immediately call for deep structural innovations, be these for the better or the worse.
Let me conclude with some poignant points on Third World nation building made by Goh Keng Swee in 1968, which have great bearing on the successes and failures of a majority of relevant cases. They show clearly that although an economist, it was clear to him that nation building revolved around the building of a healthy national political economy. Arguing that “progress cannot be achieved when society is confused, bewildered and demoralised” or “in spite of corruption” and in the face of the “decline in the standards of administration and in the standards of public service”, he added that:
“The effort needed to create a modern industrial system is immense and would require a strong national sense of single-minded purpose, if it is to be achieved in a short space of time, say over three generations. If, for this period the underdeveloped country can enjoy enlightened government of integrity, the transformation of backward society can be accomplised in stages through education and by application of science and technology to all forms of production.”[7]
Commending the Meiji Restoration of Japan for providing the “firm and duralbe political structure under a leadership continuously committed to the drive for modernity”, something that “poor counties in Asia and Africa with very few exceptions” had failed to do, he however strongly lamented the strong emphasis paid to “the purely technical aspects of the development process to the neglect of social and political questions”.[8]
The purpose of this article, to reiterate it at this connective juncture, is for us to consider the modernising process as a definite one that could properly begin only with independence (and membership in the United Nations Organisation, to mark the spirit and narrative of the age), a is largely and that is a struggle against deeply entrenched traditionalist notions of economics and of power.
Modernity as undertaken by an independent state immediately requires a new focus on education, on defence, on finances—and on citizenship and civil rights in ways beyond the wont of colonial powers. It is this integrating and balancing between the nature of power, the needs of economics and the social acceptance of the whole project, which informs and differentiates the one nation-state from the other. In that sense, Singapore is a conceptually easy case to understand and by that, also an extreme case in how concerted its pursuit of national modernity has been.
* Ooi Kee Beng is the Executive Director of Penang Institute, Malaysia, and Visiting Senior Fellow of ISEAS –Yusof Ishak Institute. He is a prize-winning author of many books, including In Lieu of Ideology. An Intellectual Biography of Goh Keng Swee (ISEAS 2010), The Reluctant Politician. Tun Dr Ismail and His Time (ISEAS Pubishing 2006), The Eurasian Core and its Edges. Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World (ISEAS 2016), Yusof Ishak. A Man of Many Firsts (ISEAS, 2017) and In Lieu of Ideology. An Intellectual Biography of Goh Keng Swee (ISEAS 2010).
[1] See Ooi Kee Beng: The Eurasian Core and its Edges. Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World.
[2] Miriam R. Levin et al: Urban Modernity: Cultural Innovation in the Second Industrial Revolution. Penguin Random House. 2010.
[3] Speech of the Minister of Finance to the Public Service International Conference at Victoria Hall on Monday, 11th November, 1968. Singapore Government Press Statement MC: NOV/20/68(FINANCE): p. 12. This author cannot emphasise enough the inspiration that present-day scholars of post-WWII nation building and economic development can gain from reading this 16-page press release. However, while suitable for Goh Keng Swee’s purpose then to refer to Europe as a unitary model, that view is today questioned, as also noted above.
[4] Wang Gungwu. Living with Civilisations. Reflections on Southeast Asia’s Local and National Cultures. IPS-Nathan Lectures. World Scientific Publishing. 2023: 71. Wang considers Singapore’s founding as a British colony in 1819 to be a modernisation project, and that “the modernity of Singapore started from Day One (p72). While true, this view has to be tempered where the lived realities of its inhabitants are concerned, and with the stress that we are talking about is an ongoing and evolving process. Looking back, what was missing for modernity to gain locally-driven efficacy was local political sovereignty interwoven with notions of modern global economics. Stating more or less the same view as Wang, Goh had noted in 1972 that “The impact of modernisation on [Singapore] is less painful because many of the values of the traditional society have long been abandoned”. At the same, he warned that “when many of the old values have been or are being discarded, no new inherent set of beliefs has emerged which has received acceptance from all sections of our society.” (Dr Goh Keng Swee. “Modernisation in Singapore; Impact on the Individual”, pp. 15-23 University Education Press: 1972: 18).
[5] Ibid. p56.
[6] A potent idea picked up during an inspiring conversation with Wang Gungwu on 12 January 2024.
[7] Speech of the Minister of Finance to the Public Service International Conference at Victoria Hall on Monday, 11th November, 1968.
[8] Ibid.
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