ABSTRACT
Introduction Upon securing independence from Malaysia on August 9, 1965, the imperative was for Singapore to build a Singaporean Singapore society. This was notwithstanding the relatively large ethnic Chinese majority on the city-state of about two million people. Nurturing such a new society was a geopolitical necessity given its location in Southeast Asia. With its survival as an accidental nationstate under grave threat, the choice for Singapore’s leadership was clear. To subject ethnic minorities to a subordinate status would not only be a betrayal of the founding ideal of the fledgling nation-state and risk internal strife; it would also invite interference in Singapore’s domestic politics from neighboring countries ostensibly seeking to protect their co-ethnics in Singapore. When Thomas Stamford Raffles set up a trading post in Singapore on behalf of the British East India Company in 1819, conventional wisdom has it that it was a backwater settlement of 150 Malays along the banks of the Singapore River and some 30 Chinese engaged in pepper and gambier planting. Subsequently, the development of Singapore as an entrepôt and a regional emporium attracted traders, requiring migration of people from other parts of Asia to attend to the increased economic activity. By 1824, with the conclusion of the AngloDutch Treaty and the Treaty of Cession resulting in the British acquiring unchallenged sovereignty over Singapore, the local population had reached 10,683 (comprising Malays 60 percent, Chinese 31 percent, Indians 7 percent, and others 2 percent).1 Further and rapid migration led very quickly to the indigenous Malays becoming a minority within 50 years of the commencement of the colonial period. By 1867, the Chinese community had become the majority, making up 65 percent of the population of 55,000. By 1959 when the British granted Singapore self-government, the racial composition had already long stabilized with the ethnic Chinese making up about three-quarters of the population, the Malays no
larger than one-sixth of the total population, and the Indians one-twelfth. The Malays were, however, the majority once again during Singapore’s short-lived and tumultuous merger with Malaysia between September 1963 and August 1965. Since independence, with the government’s strategic intervention on the demographic front, these racial ratios – seen as a foundational prerequisite for Singapore’s success – have been maintained. This brief historical and demographic overview suggests that the majorityminority status within a society can be fluid and may easily mutate into a citizen-subject type of relationship.2 In any multi-ethnic society it is inevitable that there will be majority and minority communities and the concomitant contestation for finite resources of the state. Majoritarianism is problematic if it results in exclusivity, privilege, and preference for the majority, and discrimination and marginalization of the minorities. Path dependence also means that the aspiration of multiracialism and equal citizenship, however inchoately expressed, would have to contend with extant colonial practices in an earlier and extended period. In Singapore, the notion of relegating the ethnic minorities to a subordinate status was a non-starter. In the negotiations for internal self-government in 1957 to 1958, all key stakeholders in London and in Singapore embraced the ideal of civic citizenship for all, but with a “special position” for the Malays. This was a tacit recognition that colonial rule had disadvantaged the Malays and that their interests must be safeguarded in the headlong rush to self-government and, eventually, to merdeka (independence). There was the cautious belief that racial contestation could be avoided through a deliberate process of constitutional recognition and political commitment to the Malays’ special position, even if there were competing conceptions of what it meant and entailed. This chapter comprises three sections. In the first section, I examine how Article 152 of the Singapore Constitution recognizes the Malays as Singapore’s indigenous people. This constitutional recognition, however, did not and has not resulted in the provision of special rights to the Malay-Singaporeans by virtue of their race, language, and religion. There is no affirmative action policy in favor of the Malays or any minorities. Concessions or benefits to any racial group, when provided, are carefully couched to avoid any sense of entitlement or legal rights. This is elaborated in the second section, which explores two significant policies, namely the Group Representation Constituency and the free tertiary education benefit, that give effect to protecting the interests of the Malays. In the third section, I examine the institution of National Service in Singapore as a contested expression of equal citizenship vis-à-vis the Malay community, and where the interests of the state predominate over the rights of the individual and the concerns of the community. Focusing on the significant Malay-Singaporean minority, I argue that the conscious avoidance of a rights-based legal regime in the management of ethnic issues in Singapore has removed a significant element of contestation and depoliticized, to a large extent, the postcolonial nation-building project. Central to this is the constitutional and political approach toward the special position of the Malays. The constitution, laws, and policies have structured and moderated the
expectations of the majority and minority communities with regard to their rights, interests, and power. Further, interests, duties, and responsibility – rather than rights and entitlement – are the de facto collective language of citizenship, wherein the larger good of the state and society takes ultimate precedence. These two significant constitutional practices ensured that Singapore’s constitutional and political model as a sovereign state diverged from the liberal Western model from the outset. In responding to the state’s management of ethnic relations, Singapore’s ethnic minorities and the ethnic Chinese majority have embraced civic citizenship based on civic nationalism as the most democratic form of non-majoritarian, non-plebiscitarian accommodation. Second, the ethnic minorities have not forfeited their individual group’s collective claim to a distinctive identity. Third, they have not demanded special concessions or sought privileges from the state in order to maintain their own culture, values, and way of life. Fourth, notwithstanding the occasional bumps in the nation-building quest, the ethnic minorities have not sought a competing nationalist ideology and separatist cause. What undergirds the multiracial ethos is the tacit recognition of a particularistic ideal of constitutionalism where interests and accommodation are valorized in the construction of an overarching Singaporean identity that is distinct from the component sectarian and subnational identities.
