The cultural logic of a capitalist single-party state, Singapore

摘要

Singapore is a settler nation in which the majority population is descended not from White colonizers but from Chinese migrants. Being without proprietary claim to the land, the new postcolonial island-nation declared itself a constitutional ‘multiracial’ nation of Huaren, Malays and Indians, without the isomorphism of race, culture and nation. Lacking a pre-colonial political structure, the new nation was constituted on the template of a modern nation-state, with all the liberal rights and freedoms that this implies, and where the government is to be established by popular mandate through periodic general elections. Operating within the political space framed by these two conditions, the People's Action Party—which has governed without effective opposition since 1959—has been able to manoeuvre between the logic of individual competition in the capitalist economy and the logic of equality between racial groups in social and cultural administration, pragmatically privileging one set of rationales over the other as the situation requires. Thus, the ideology of meritocracy is emphasized in the kinds of individual competition that determine and allocate educational and economic opportunities, thus individualizing economic success or failure. On the other hand, equality of race is emphasized in the management of cultural policies and in the administering and policing of race relations, including the suppression of conventional claims for redress made by racial groups which consider themselves discriminated against or marginalized. Racial harmony as a public moral good is evoked as an instrument for the management of race rather than as an arena for deepening the understanding and mixing of cultures. These strictures of the single-party state disrupt the universalizing desire of contemporary liberalism propagated by the West, providing other East Asian nations with the possibility of an alternative mode of capitalist development without a multi-party polity.View full textDownload full textRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2010.518347