Singapore Shows Sovereignty’s Benefits to World

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Singapore is not Hong Kong – and that’s a good thing. Nor is it any longer part of the Malaysian Federation – another great advantage.

Hong Kong’s bright future was hijacked by China after 1997, while Malaysia is riven with ethnic and religious conflicts between its Muslim Malay majority and its non-Muslim Chinese and Indian minorities, as well as indigenous people on Borneo.

Fortunately for Singapore, which had become part of the new federation in 1963, it was expelled by the rulings Malays two years later.

My late colleague Barry Bartmann was a great champion of the small states in the international system, and he always insisted that, no matter what, “sovereignty has its benefits.” No country has proved him more astute than the tiny republic of Singapore.

This island, at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, is a city-state of 5.63 people living on just 734.3 square kilometres. It has no natural resources other than the talent and ingenuity of its people, about three-quarters of them overseas Chinese.

They have parlayed those attributes into the development of an economy with a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of US$78,115. (GDP is most often used by the government of a single country to measure its economic health.) By comparison, the Canadian and American figures are US$55,646 and US$75,269 respectively.

 As someone has said, it’s a “first world” country in the “third world.” How did this happen? One man more than any other is associated with Singapore’s remarkable success: Lee Kuan Yew. In September, Singapore celebrated the centenary of his birth. How did he do it?

Singapore had been founded as a trading post by the British East India Company in 1819 and had grown as a port city under British rule. Conquered by the Japanese in February 1942, its largely Chinese population was treated harshly for the next three years.

Born in 1923, the young Lee’s experience of British failures destroyed his reverence for them. Still, he studied law in England after the war and, returning to Singapore in 1950, began to see a future in politics. It was clear that the days of British rule in Asia were coming to an end.

In 1954 Lee launched the People’s Action Party (PAP), committed to using “every constitutional means” to hasten the end of colonial rule. The party won an initial four seats in the colonial legislative assembly in 1955, and Lee called for the swift demise of British rule.

Malaya became independent in 1957 while Singapore attained self-government two years later. The PAP, campaigning on a pro-independence agenda and a detailed plan to solve bread-and-butter issues, won a landslide victory. Lee became its founding prime minister -- an office he would retain until 1990.

In August 1963, Lee declared de facto independence for the island state ahead of the official proclamation one month later of the new Federation of Malaysia, which comprised Malaya and Singapore, along with North Borneo (Sabah), Sarawak. But it was not to last.

Lee’s hopes of Singapore playing a role in the new Malaysian nation were dashed almost as soon as they had begun. No Singaporean minister was invited to join the right-wing Malaysian cabinet.

Tensions flared up over competing visions of what Malaysia represented. Was it to be a “Malay Malaysia,” where political power was jealously vested in a Malay-led and privileged central government; or a “Malaysian Malaysia,” where multiracial ideals were upheld.

The former view prevailed. In 1964, deadly Sino-Malay race riots broke out in Singapore. Lee blamed the riots on incitement by radical Malay activists hoping to undercut the appeal of the PAP’s agenda to young Malays within Singapore and Malaya.

Amid these political and ethnic tensions, in August 1965, at Malaysia's invitation, Singapore left the federation. The island became an independent republic, and the PAP has ruled it ever since.

Over the following decades, Lee built a strong government that was backed by a competent and virtually corruption-free civil service, while pro-business policies transformed the city-state into a leading financial, aviation and shipping hub. He created a vast system of public housing, where about 80 per cent of Singaporeans currently live.

The nation was promoted overseas as an efficient investment destination, offering favourable industrial infrastructure and generous tax breaks and subsidies, underpinned by the values of meritocracy, equality and the rule of law.

By the time Lee stepped aside as prime minister in 1990, Singapore’s GDP per capita had risen to around US$13,000, up from US$500 in 1965, surpassing South Korea, Israel and Portugal. Following the tenure of Goh Chok TongLee Hsien Loong,  Lee’s son, has been prime minister since 2004.

Singapore maintains extensive military and economic ties with the United States alongside a close economic relationship with Beijing. Singapore and China this spring formally upgraded their relationship after a visit by Prime Minister Lee to China, bolstering a free-trade agreement, environmental collaboration and telecommunications exchanges.

 Is Singapore a benevolent autocracy? Critics say it is becoming more like a plutocracy, in which well-paid yes men with the right connections to the Lee family rise up the ranks. The ideological hegemony necessary for continued PAP dominance of politics and governance in Singapore may be fraying.

Still, there isn’t much in the way of open dissent at the moment, and we can understand why.

 

New Right Takes on Liberalism

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

The populistic despair in large sections of the American electorate that propelled Donald Trump to power in 2016 and continues to support him through thick and thin has now been given some ideological heft.

Several American writers have recently published books criticizing the American liberal order, root and branch. Three of them, University of Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, and journalist Sohrab Ahmari come from the Catholic right.

Religion and culture

These “post-liberal” authors have jettisoned the older conservative tradition associated with figures such as William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. For them, the true conservative tradition lies in what is sometimes called “integralism,” the weaving of religion, personal morality, national culture and public policy into a unified theory of a proper political order.

Deneen and Ahmari, especially, describe an ailing society in which inequality is rampant, the exploitation of workers is widespread and community life is disintegrating. How, they ask, has this come about?

Deneen’s new work, “Regime change: Toward a postliberal future,” is scathing in its description of the state America currently finds itself. For him, modernity has had a baneful effect on the political culture.

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Deneen and Ahmari, especially, describe an ailing society in which inequality is rampant, the exploitation of workers is widespread and community life is disintegrating. 

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While earlier generations understood that true freedom resides in “self-rule, self-discipline, and self-government,” liberal modernists, in Deneen’s opinion, catastrophically reimagined it as “liberation from limitations imposed by birthright,” leading to a kind of social and cultural free-for-all.

“Modern thought,” writes Deneen, “rests on a core assumption: transformative progress is a key goal of human society.”

A new tyranny

Corrosive of every form of social life, liberal ideology, in his view, is an “anti-culture,” a “new tyranny,” a “totalitarian undertaking,” and “national suicide.” Liberals, he asserts, have purposely eroded the basic forums of social solidarity, that of “family, neighborhood, association, church and religious community.”

They now govern as a minority against the popular majority – what he terms “the many.” As a result, the problem of politics today is the gulf that separates the powerful from the masses.

Such liberals preach that the only reasonable life is one liberated from the constraints of duty and tradition, “all preparatory to a life lived in a few global cities in which the ‘culture’ comes to mean expensive and exclusive consumption goods.”

These coastal urbanities have abandoned anyone not in what he sarcastically calls the “laptop class” and have left the country’s geographic middle hollowed out and despondent.

Remaking the country will require “aristopopulism,” a regime headed by a new elite of trained aristoi (from the Greek for “the best people”) who “understand that their main role and purpose in the social order is to secure the foundational goods that make possible human flourishing for ordinary people: the central goods of family, community, good work, a culture that preserves and encourages order and continuity, and support for religious belief and institutions.”

Common good

So, Deneen’s alternative to an “exhausted, licentious liberalism” is a form of politics that stresses “the priority of culture, the wisdom of the people,” and “preserving the commonplace traditions of a polity.” It is a conservatism that seeks what he and others label “the common good.”

In the realm of law and practical policy, no one has done more to define this kind of common good than Vermeule. His "Common good constitutionalism" aims to recover a mode of thinking that he believes has been forgotten. In this view, law’s purpose is to promote what a flourishing political community requires: justice, peace, prosperity, and morality. This legacy, he maintains, has been lost, and Vermeule argues for its recovery in the form of “common good constitutionalism.”

The common good is “unitary and indivisible, not an aggregation of individual utilities,” a definition that requires preferring judicial rulings that favour obligation to one’s family and community, empowering lower levels of authority such as states and towns, and upholding what Vermeule understands as natural law.

Liberals have erected a constitutional order in which legitimacy derives from rights-bearing individuals who periodically choose representatives to write statutes, judge disputes, and keep the peace.

But if those structures produce outcomes contrary to the common good, Vermeule does not hesitate to state that they will have to be dismantled. The basis for rightful authority should be the “objective legal and moral order” that common-good constitutionalists are best placed to perceive.

Rigged system

The premise of Amhari’s “Tyranny, Inc.: How private power crushed American liberty – and what to do about it,” is that “private actors can imperil freedom just as much as overweening governments” and that “unchallenged market power can impair our rights and liberties.”

The book makes the argument that the country’s leaders deregulated big business on the faith that it would yield a better economy and a freer society. But the opposite happened. Americans lost stable, well-paying jobs, Wall Street dominated industry to the detriment of the middle class and local communities, and corporations began to dictate what people are allowed to think.

Ahmari’s worker-oriented conservatism contends that even well-meaning elites are no match for a system rigged so rampantly in favour of the bosses. An employer, simply by dint of being an employer, “faces an economic compulsion that forces him to coerce the worker, regardless of his cultural outlook.”

These writers seek to provide what we might call “old-new” ways of dealing with America’s formidable political problems. Will they gain currency?

 

 

The Geopolitical Contest Over Small Island States

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Earlier in my academic career at the University of Prince Edward Island, I was involved with the Institute of Island Studies. My own concentration was researching the political systems of self-governing tropical islands and archipelagos.

These are very small sovereign micro-states, both in size and population, found mainly in the Indian and Pacific oceans. In the past, they had become possessions of the major European powers, including Germany, Spain, France, and – especially – Great Britain. Later, Japan and the United States joined the list.

They are now independent entities, but their importance has not diminished. Their land areas may be modest, but they have exclusive economic zones (EEZs) extending out to 200 nautical miles in the surrounding waters.

For example, the Seychelles, 115 islands in the Indian Ocean 1,700 kilometres northeast of Mauritius, has a landmass of only 452 square kilometres, but the islands are spread wide over an EEZ of 1.33 million square kilometres.

Today, their 100,000 inhabitants have become part of a geopolitical tug of war between China and the U.S. In June, the country became the latest in a string of small nations around the world in which Washington has established, restored or is planning to open an embassy.

Meanwhile, China has built schools, hospitals, houses for low-income families, and public amenities, winning sympathy among those who felt abandoned by the U.S. departure 27 years ago. China constructed the National Assembly building and the adjoining Supreme Court, both important symbols of the country’s identity as a nation.

“They do the little things that America doesn’t do,” Seychelles President Wavel Ramkalawan told the Washington Post in an interview published Sept. 3. “This is why countries like China have come in, because there was a vacuum.”

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was in the capital, Victoria, in January 2021. He met with the country’s foreign minister, Sylvestre Radegonde, and described the Seychelles as “an important member of the big family of China-Africa solidarity and cooperation.”

In much bigger Mauritius, Beijing has been pouring investments into the country, developing its tourist infrastructure and buying friends and influence there. The U.S. fears that China might build a military base in the Chagos Archipelago once those islands, currently governed by Britain, return to Mauritian control.

Washington currently has a major American military base on Diego Garcia. The 27 square kilometre atoll is Washington’s most important asset in the vast Indo-Pacific region west of Pearl Harbour. It doesn’t want to give away its crucial strategic asset, so it is currently bargaining with Mauritius over giving it a lease to the Chagos.

China is the only country to have maintained diplomatic missions in all six of the Indian Ocean Island nations. None of the traditional players -- the U.S, Great Britain, India, or France -- have embassies in all six, though the Maldives, south of India, will host a new American legation soon.

China also does not have any standing territorial or sovereignty disputes in the Indian Ocean, unlike former colonial powers Britain and France, so Beijing is often considered a welcome player and an alternative in the region.

In January 2022, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi flew to Moroni, the capital of the Comoros for bilateral talks with his counterpart. This three-island country of 850,000 people off the coast of east Africa is just 1,861 square kilometres in area but sits on the northern mouth of the Mozambique Channel, a critical waterway.

China is everywhere in the Pacific as well. In the island kingdom of Tonga, their impressive embassy hosts diplomats, while young Tongans are invited on student exchanges to Chinese universities.

In response, Tonga and the Solomon Islands saw American embassies opened this year, and elsewhere in the Pacific they are planned for Kiribati and Vanuatu. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken became the first-ever Cabinet official to visit Tonga this past July, dedicating the new embassy in the capital, Nukuʻalofa.

In 2019, Kiribati and the Solomon Islands both switched their diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. Foreign Minister Wang visited both countries during an eight-country Pacific tour in May 2022.

One month earlier, the Solomon Islands announced that it signed a security agreement with China, just days before an American official was due to visit the Pacific nation in an attempt to derail the pact.

As for Fiji, police cooperation between China and Fiji began in 2011 based on a secretive memorandum of understanding on police cooperation between Beijing and the government of then-Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama.

Last December, however, Bainimarama lost the prime minister’s office to Sitiveni Rabuka, a longtime rival who ran a campaign critical of China. A month later, Rabuka announced he intended to terminate the police agreement with Beijing.

Rabuka this past August also said he hoped the Pacific islands would remain a “zone of peace, a zone of non-aligned territories.” He spoke after attending a summit of the leaders of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and host country Vanuatu, members of the Melanesian Spearhead Group, meeting in Port Vila.

Fiji a week earlier had co-hosted an Indo-Pacific defence chiefs conference with the U.S., which China attended.

Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Ishamel Kalsakau himself came under fire for signing a security deal with Australia, after some lawmakers feared it could upset China, a major infrastructure lender.