27 - Fluid Nation: The Perpetual “Renovation” of Nation and National Identities in Singapore

Summary

SINGAPORE THE FLUID NATION

For national communities, the nation is a site of stability and resilience. It is often premised on kinship or the myths of ethnic communities for a sense of collective belonging. More recently, other scholars have argued that the nation requires the “regime of authenticity”, that is, a purposeful attempt to install timeless values within the idea of the nation such that it is seen as eternal and thus “authentic”, in contrast to the volatility of modernity. The regime of authenticity is the political project to inscribe the nation with timeless values thus rendering it eternal in order to anchor it in the ferocious stream of capitalism and modernity. It is this contrast against a volatile and random external environment that makes the nation, and the national identities within it, so treasured for its consistency and predictability.

Singapore has had to forfeit much of the traditional ingredients that go into the formulation of nation and national culture. For a variety of reasons well discussed elsewhere, its immigrant population, multi-ethnic complexion, and sudden separation from Malaysia all conspired to arrest the development of an ethnic-based national culture or the idea of a stable and timeless nation. Quite the opposite; with economic growth so central to the idea of national survival, the Singapore nation has been defined as necessarily dynamic, open to change, and adaptable to the demands of the world economy. Hence, instead of the division between nation (stable) and modernity (dynamic) where the former can be looked upon for security and orientation, the Singapore nation and modernity are collapsed into a political project designed to keep citizens entrenched in economic realism, the result of which is a fluid nation and identity that respond to the global economy. And it is because nation and identity in Singapore are premised on the shifting sands of capitalism and globalization, the state-sponsored search for identity and nationhood is destined to be a futile one.

This chapter looks at Singapore as a fluid nation, that is, the variety of ways the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) articulates the nation, nationalism, and national identities as a strategy to respond to the dynamic challenges of the political and economic environment.