A global city in an age of global risks: Singapore's evolving discourse on vulnerability.

• Author: Heng, Yee-Kuang
• Position: Essay

As Singapore becomes a leading global city, perceptions of the country's vulnerability are evolving as a result of its hyper-connectivity and exposure to global risks. First-generation leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew, S. Rajaratnam and Goh Keng Swee of the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) viewed Singapore's strategic predicament as a function of its miniscule size and lack of resources and hinterland, as well as the country's turbulent history and a multi-ethnic population surrounded by larger Muslim neighbours. To overcome its vulnerabilities, its first foreign minister, S. Rajaratnam, presented the alluring vision of Singapore as a global city that would become a key node in the international system coordinating global flows of trade, money, materials, goods and people. Singapore's hub status in maintaining the smooth functioning of the global economy would also enhance its strategic relevance: major powers would have a vested interest in the country's survival. Being a global city, however, is not without its perils. Singaporean leaders have long realized that recent global crises (e.g. pandemics, financial meltdowns etc.) affecting Singapore are related to its position as a highly connected urban node in the age of interdependence. This paper examines the conundrum in Singapore's attempts to deal with its perceived vulnerabilities. While the drive to become a "global city" articulated by Rajaratnam has largely succeeded, Singapore's highly globalized status has ironically meant "new" vulnerabilities to fast-spreading phenomena that characterize what sociologist Ulrich Beck terms a "global risk society".

The first section outlines the core components of Singapore's early post-independence vulnerability as expressed by its leaders, providing a baseline for comparison. The second section describes Rajaratnam's global city vision to ameliorate such professed vulnerabilities and examines measures of its connectivity as a sign of success. The final section shows how becoming a global city as part of an attempt to enhance survival prospects has paradoxically introduced new elements into Singapore's earlier discourse on vulnerability. A discourse analysis is undertaken to identify emerging features of Singaporean leaders' perception of vulnerability to global risks. Key sources of data include policy documents, media interviews, speeches and statements. The focus here is on recurrent patterns whereby key code words to convey certain ideas are shared among political leaders holding Cabinet-level positions or senior policy-makers with Director-General or above rank in government bureaucracies. The sample is fairly representative of elite beliefs, drawing from the Prime Minister to a range of ministers and senior bureaucrats holding diverse portfolios from customs, transport, defence, health, to monetary regulation. These political and bureaucratic elites hold policy responsibilities for addressing vulnerability-related issues in their specific areas of work. Corporate elites are thus not included to the same extent in this analysis. The paper concludes that vulnerability is now seen to be coalescing around three types of critical infrastructure that Singapore paradoxically depends on to coordinate global flows as a global city. First, as a global maritime port hub, Singapore faces exposure to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) proliferation. Second, its aviation hub at Changi can also become a gateway for importing pandemics. Third, its financial centre is exposed to terrorist financing risks and financial contagion.

Singapore's Early Notion of Vulnerability

This paper concentrates on Singapore's perceived vulnerability, assuming in good faith that the leaders quoted believed what they said. (1) There are of course difficulties with analysing so-called crisis rhetoric, because "whether Lee's or the PAP's private sense making coincided with their public pronouncements remains unclear. ... they might have believed their own, self-confident rhetoric". (2) On the other hand, vulnerability could also be alleged, whereby such pronouncements are a rhetorical device to serve strategic purposes. Critics charged that "concern about vulnerability (was) ultimately a way to justify the PAP's monopoly on power and the lack of political competition". (3) For David Brown, Singaporean elites deployed an "ideology of survivalism, which stressed the lack of a national identity, absence of a viable national economy, and vulnerability of society to internal and international threats. They sought legitimacy by inculcating a siege mentality". (4) Others, such as Yao Suchao, allude to an "over-imagined scenario of chaos and disorder" and Michael Barr suggests that founding narratives such as the struggle for survival contributed to the nation-building project. (5) Carl Trocki also postulated that the ruling party's persistent emphasis on vulnerability helps to maintain its hold on power, while Lily Rahim traces how rocky relations with neighbours fed into a narrative of vulnerability which favoured authoritarian state structures. (6) This paper is not set up to delve into the agendas behind alleged vulnerability. Instead, it seeks to trace how the discourse on perceived vulnerability has evolved, in the belief that even at face value, how leaders' pronouncements change also provides useful data and trends to be analysed in its own right.

This section outlines some core components of Singapore's vulnerability as professed by its early leaders, setting the framework for comparison with contemporary challenges. Michael Leifer called Singapore an "exceptional state", not just because of its stellar economic achievements but also its "intensely innate sense of vulnerability". (7) Han Fook Kwang observed that for founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, vulnerability was not just an obsession, but also the "inescapable, permanent condition of Singapore as an independent republic". (8) Lee emphasized that "I thought our people should understand how vulnerable Singapore was and is, the dangers that beset us and how we nearly did not make it." (9) Reporters interviewing Lee in 2011 remarked that he became agitated when told that younger citizens were sceptical of Singapore's vulnerability: "You tell me we're not vulnerable? God! What do we spend all this money on defence for? Are we mad?" (10) Singapore was once belittled as a mere "red dot" by Indonesian President Habibie. (11) Singapore's current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong later said: "This was a vivid and valuable reminder that we are indeed very small and very vulnerable. The little red dot has entered the psyche of every Singaporean, and become a permanent part of our vocabulary, for which we are grateful." (12) It is not surprising then that, for sociologist Chua Beng Huat, "the political image of a country without resources, struggling against hunger, privation and internal and external threats" has been a commonly held one. (13)

Singapore's geography and history figure strongly in its leaders' perceived vulnerability. For Lee Kuan Yew, "we have not got neighbours who want to help us prosper". (14) He noted after independence, "our long-term survival demands that there's no government in Malaysia that goes with Indonesia. Life would be very difficult if I found myself between Malaysia and Indonesia." (15) For instance, when Malaysia and Indonesia held combined military exercises and parachute drops in nearby Johor state coinciding with Singapore's national day celebrations in 1991, this was viewed as an unnecessarily provocative reminder that the two giant neighbours could, in theory, collude and physically threaten Singapore. (16) Ex-President S.R Nathan recalled how:

... geopolitical circumstances played a big role in the formulation of our foreign policy. The circumstances under which we gained independence underscored our inherent vulnerability. As a newly-independent small country located in a then politically volatile region, our foreign policy, made on the run, was directed at coping with this vulnerability. In the initial years, much of our attention was focused on managing relations with Malaysia, with whom we were newly separated, and restoring ties with Indonesia, in the aftermath of Konfrontasi. (17) Indonesia's seizure of East Timor in 1975 further reminded Singapore's leaders of the need to "take the regional balance or distribution of power out of the exclusive control of regional states". (18) For Lee Kuan Yew, "if we do not have this strong SAF (Singapore Armed Forces), we are vulnerable to all kinds of pressures from both Malaysia and Indonesia". (19)

A belief that size matters in an anarchic international system also looms large in how Singaporean leaders' perceive vulnerability. Former Foreign Minister S. Jayakumar warned that "for all our success and growth, we will always remain a small state, and vulnerability is an inherent condition of all small states". (20) Singapore's leaders have often viewed the international system as anarchic. Jayakumar noted that "the dynamics of international relations bear a striking resemblance to the laws of the jungle: not all creatures are created equal and only the fittest survive". (21) In a 1984 speech, Lee Hsien Loong suggested that "the world of states shares many characteristics with the world of beasts ... goodwill alone is no substitute for astute self-interest". (22) In 2011 Foreign Minister K. Shanmugam rehashed this line of thought when he opined: "The smaller you are, the more likely you'll be eaten up. The bigger you are and the fiercer you are, more likely you will survive and the biggest and fiercest are usually the kings." (23) Anarchy in the sense that there is no "world government" to guarantee survival of small states, colours the perceived vulnerability of Singapore leaders.

Another plank of Singaporean leaders' perceived vulnerability lies in the country's heavy dependence on Malaysia for water and...