ABSTRACT
The complete and unqualified absorption of Singapore into the conventional understanding of “development” creates great vulnerability for the society, not only for the obvious economic reasons, but also because it creates a kind of moral crisis. This chapter examines the nature and outworking of such a process of ideology formation and expression in one small, but very interesting Asian case: that of Singapore. Singapore is consequently rather hard to place in any of the traditional political-economy categories - peripheral capitalist certainly. Implicitly or explicitly all patterns of “development” have underlying them an ideology of some sort. A peculiar feature of Singapore is its combination of capitalism and state control. In the early days of independence, the key question was how to define and bring into being a genuinely Singaporean culture which would somehow bring together and synthesise the best elements in Chinese, Malay, Indian and European or Eurasian culture as an expression of a uniquely Singaporean identity.
