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from 50th Anniversary Public Lecture by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on 13 March 2018
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 May 2019
Prime Minister, Distinguished guests, Friends and colleagues of ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, Ladies and Gentlemen
It is a privilege to have Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong deliver his lecture at ISEAS’ 50th Anniversary today. I must say there is a nice symmetry to the occasion because exactly twenty-five years ago ISEAS had the pleasure of hosting Prime Minister Lee (then Deputy Prime Minister) as our Guest of Honour at our 25th Anniversary in 1993.
I should also add that it was ten years ago that we had the honour of hosting Minister Mentor (MM) Lee Kuan Yew for the Institute's 40th Anniversary in 2008. MM Lee graced a very stimulating dialogue that ranged from domestic politics to global geostrategic trends. And it was this combination of domestic politics in the region and the geostrategic trends that saw the need for the establishment of an institute like ISEAS fifty years ago.
ISEAS was set up in 1968 as the brainchild of Dr Goh Keng Swee at a time when the region was trying to build new nation-states and also seeking to form a regional organization like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), both at the same time. Dr Goh saw that it was essential to understand what was happening to Southeast Asia and what the unfolding trends would mean for Singapore.
Dr Goh visited several renowned research centres and think-tanks when he was thinking about ISEAS. They included Chatham House in the United Kingdom, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rand Corporation in the United States, and also a number of universities with strong Southeast Asian programmes like Yale, Cornell and Berkeley.
In his discussions with these institutions, Dr Goh quickly realized that the soon-to-be-formed ISEAS had to be something very different, a special institution that served Singapore's unique needs. For example, he noted that:
The Rand-type of think factory can only be created in a continental superpower and is not within our horizon of possibilities. Nevertheless we can draw a few lessons from Rand's working and recruiting methods and its insistence on high-quality personnel. Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations are again unsuitable because of their total concern with contemporary events. What we need is research into matters not of immediate value in policy-making but which are necessary to the development of well-rounded expertise.
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