(De)Securitising national minorities: The case of Singapore

Abstract

Singapore presents a unique case study for multiculturalists in that the state leans heavily in its promotion of racial demarcations whilst simultaneously propagating a narrative of the state “regardless of race, language or religion”. This paper argues that this apparent contradiction is a deliberate calculation to use multiculturalism to desecuritise an otherwise disparate multiracial society. Extending He’s (2018) sequencing of multicultural progress as an a priori development to desecuritisation, this paper moves past traditionally democratic assumptions to demonstrate how the Singaporean state has in effect desecuritised national minorities through semi-to-autocratic management of multiculturalism. Referring to ‘securitised multiculturalism’ that has become increasingly evident since the 2000s, the paper progresses to consider how terrorism has affected Singapore’s multicultural formulation and examines the state’s top-down responses to desecuritise the security element in ‘securitised multiculturalism’ to the extent that such is possible.

Introduction

We, the citizens of Singapore, pledge ourselves as one united people, regardless of race, language or religion, to build a democratic society based on justice and equality so as to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation.

National Pledge of Singapore

Each morning in Singapore, students across the island-state stand and recite the national pledge in school assemblies. It is an act repeated without fail and its frequency underscores the six words imbued into the national psyche, ‘regardless of race, language or religion’. This idea of Singapore as a harmonious, multiracial society is a crucial element of state ideology and has been propagated by the government since independence. This is in the face of a contentious history of racial relations with the 1964 race riots along with continuing instances of well-publicised confrontations between individuals of different races and it masks the tensions that exist in Singaporean society over structural racial inequalities, immigration, and the place of temporary foreign workers. Yet it also denotes the fact that Singapore has managed racial tensions better than many other multiracial societies.

In the context of increased attention to this dynamic brought on by recent hostile local interactions between people of different races along with the greater emphasis on ‘securitised multiculturalism’ in contemporary societies, this paper explains how the Singaporean state successfully desecuritised its national minorities through the multicultural compact and advances its response to securitised multiculturalism as offering a model for other societies to draw on.

Concepts like securitisation/desecuritisation are particularly relevant to Singapore with its history and demographic composition encouraging efforts to avoid race or religious-based patterns of marginalisation. This paper contends that ‘desecuritising’ initiatives may be preceded by a baseline appreciation for multiculturalism. This goes against the prevailing understanding of multicultural sequencing, namely, that minority nationalisms are first desecuritised before the advancement of multiculturalism can progress.

The paper makes two principal claims. It first reaffirms the proposition raised by He (2018) that multicultural progression can precede desecuritisation. Singapore is presented as a case study wherein the state’s efforts at crafting an unambiguously multiracial society was an a priori development to the desecuritisation of national minorities. It posits that while western societies often view multiculturalism through the prism of new immigrants, Singapore’s formulation is constructed on a pre-existing pool of different races whose historical tensions along with the precarious security of the then-new state fostered an ideology of survivalism. Hence, where relative to Western multiculturalism that first necessitates the desecuritisation of ethnic minorities before multicultural advances which is then consequently undermined by securitised multiculturalism, Singapore’s operating basis of multiculturalism first prior to desecuritisation enables it to resort to multiculturalism as a solution rather than a cause.

Secondly, this paper puts forward the contention that these desecuritising processes do not involve an idealised form of organic sensibility within a wider public; rather, following Roe (2004), it involves a top-down approach. In Singapore, racial boundaries are not fluid but subject to a corporatist style of government (Brown, 1997) that produces state-led forms of desecuritisation. As Schwartzman (1977: 91) explains, within this ‘corporatist ideology’, ‘there should be some intragroup autonomy and self-regulation, but the very existence of groups and their relationships with each other are granted and regulated by the state.’ In short, multiculturalism and desecuritisation processes intermingle in ways that reflect the bureaucratic categories, and power, of the state.

The article proceeds as follows. The first part discusses the literature on ‘multicultural desecuritisation’ and examines He’s (2018) formulation of multiculturalism as a process that unfolds prior to desecuritisation. The second and third sections contextualise Singaporean multiracialism and argues for the application of He’s formulation through an examination of what it advances to be the state-directed multicultural format of Singaporean society that consequently desecuritised its constituent races. Part four considers what happens when this desecuritised environment is re-securitised with the threat of terrorism, focusing on the government’s response. The paper concludes that Singapore has in effect desecuritised through a state-led multicultural compact and it identifies avenues for further inquiries.

(De)Securitisation

Securitisation is ‘a political technique of framing policy questions in logics of survival with a capacity to mobilize politics of fear’ (Huysmans, 2006: xi–xii). Securitisation studies consider how a matter comes to be construed as a threat not by its nature but by politicians’ framing as such. As Buzan et al. (1998: 26) explain, ‘successful securitization has three components (or steps): existential threats, emergency action, and effects on interunit relations by breaking free of rules.’

Conceptually, securitisation is ‘seen as negative, as a failure to deal with issues as normal politics’ and consequently, ‘in the abstract, desecuritisation is the ideal’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 29). As a derivative of securitisation, it implies a progression whereby by way of speech acts, the matter is securitised as a threat, and desecuritising returns it to ‘normal politics’ (Hansen, 2012: 530). However, as (Coskun, 2008: 395) underscores, because ‘the Copenhagen School does not suggest an explicit framework for analysis as it has done for securitisation, different scholars and implied de-securitisation differently’ (see also Stritzel, 2007). Inversing the typical formulation of speech acts as prescribed in the Copenhagen School’s does not account for broader management strategies (Åtland, 2008: 262). ‘[T]here is not,’ Hansen (2012: 530) remarks, ‘strictly speaking, ‘a’ desecurity speech act.’

Hansen (2012) identifies four desecuritisation approaches, change through stabilisation, replacement, rearticulation, or silencing. Stabilisation and rearticulation are, for the purposes of this paper, the two divergent types of interest. Stabilisation (corresponding to Huysmans’ (1995) objectivist approach) being a ‘rather slow move out of an explicit security discourse, which in turn facilitates a less militaristic, less violent and hence more genuinely political form of engagement’ (Hansen, 2012: 539). Rearticulation (resembling the deconstructivist approach) is where ‘an issue is moved from the securitised to the politicised due to a resolution of the threats and dangers, that underpinned the original securitisation’ (Hansen, 2012: 529).

Narrowing the scope to minority rights and Roe (2004: 285) asserts that securitised issues ‘can thereby either be managed or they can be transformed’, the former is taken up in a later discussion. First, however, it is sufficient to note that transformation—and by implication, rearticulation or deconstructivism—is challenged by two factors: the first is the need for minorities’ ‘security-ness’, a point likewise addressed further down, and the second consideration being the sense that transformation requires a transparent discourse between a multitude of actors beyond that of the state; a situation absent in authoritarian states and in the competitive-authoritarian one-party dominant country of Singapore. ‘To try to eliminate security’, Behnke (2006: 63) opines, ‘is to try to eliminate politics’ and such a task made all but impossible in the absence of open political discourse.

Multicultural desecuritisation

Temporally, for multiculturalists, the desecuritisation progression is not a question of returning to a version of normality but to reconstruct a new normal that then allows for multicultural advancements. Kymlicka (2010: 106), for instance, writes that, inter alia, multiculturalism requires the desecuritisation of state-minority relations: ‘[w]here states feel insecure in geopolitical terms and fearful of neighbouring enemies they are unlikely to treat their own minorities fairly. More specifically, states are unlikely to accord powers and resources to minorities that they view as potential collaborators with neighbouring enemies.’ Multiculturalism and the desecuritisation of minorities are therefore related, albeit not in the manner strictly ascribed to by political scientists.

To further interrogate this relationship of multicultural desecuritisation, it is useful to tease out what Kymlicka (2002: 20) associates with minority ‘securitisation’. Here, ‘minority self-organization may be legally limited … minority leaders may be subject to secret police surveillance, the raising of particular sorts of demands may be illegal … and so on.’ Enhancing the standing of minorities involves their ‘desecuritisation’, so that people ‘think of minority claims in terms of justice/fairness rather than loyalty/security’ (Kymlicka, 2004: 145). As will be demonstrated later on, this sense of equality is especially pertinent in a post-independent Singapore which relied on the multicultural orientation of the majority and minorities so as to desecuritise all the elements that would otherwise be hostile to the new state.

Notably in the last two decades, with a concentration on the war on terror and specifically on homegrown terrorism, securitising practices have eroded the political space afforded to ethnic minorities (Kymlicka, 2012: 22). Addressing these ‘difficult questions, unresolved in theory or practice’ of ‘securitised multiculturalism’ (Kymlicka, 2015: 242), He (2018: 127–128) offers a new dialogical model whereby desecuritisation is not necessarily placed in a sequential relationship prior to successful multicultural development but rather, multicultural advancements in and of themselves actually desecuritise minorities. Insofar as it relates to a theory of human security, multiculturalism can be utilised as a ‘national security strategy to address conventional security concerns’ (He, 2018: 128).

This is a novel conceptualisation of desecuritisation vis-à-vis ethnic minorities. Using the example of Chinese-Australians in Australia, He (2018) argues that rather than multiculturalism being a consequence of desecuritised relations as it is widely held, it can instead function as a means of desecuritisation and offer security assurances in this period of ‘securitised multiculturalism’.

However, it is also one that reinforces certain preconditions related to the presence of ‘democracy.’ In particular, He and Kymlicka’s formulations of desecuritisation share a prior commitment to democratic principles. He (2018: 127) for instance underscores the centrality of a democratic element in the desecuritisation formula, opining that ‘there is a need to democratise the boundary of ethnic identities, meaning [not only] that any notion of the collective identity of one ethnic group must be fluid, but that it must also be subject to democratic scrutiny.’

Significantly, that is not true of all states’ experiences and one is pressed to query whether democratisation is a prerequisite. Is it possible that semi-to-autocratic management of multiculturalism can also overlap with desecuritising policies? Is multiculturalist desecuritisation possible in non-democratic states and what are the consequences of a more limited number of speech actors?

Importantly, He’s contribution forms part of a larger conversation articulated by Roe. Responding to Huysmans’ understanding of desecuritisation and appeal towards a deconstructivist strategy, Roe (2004: 290) offers a somewhat absolutist pronouncement that ‘the desecuritization of minority rights may … be logically impossible’. Such contention is premised on the view that the boundaries of ethnic membership cannot be removed, such that minorities are imbued with a certain “security-ness”, which, if removed, would lead to their erasure as a minority group. This relies on a sense shared by both majority and minority that minority differences, and minority rights, are intwined with notions of ‘societal security’. A society survives to the extent that its identity—in this case, its multicultural identity—endures. The deconstruction and continual fragmentation (Huysmans, 1995) or rearticulation (Hansen, 2012) that fundamentally alters this identity are thus unappealing if not impossible. In this vein, Roe (2004: 279) suggests cultivating a degree of securitised awareness with the deliberate management/calculated accommodation of securitising issues being more conducive in these instances of collectivised minorities that necessarily precludes Huysman’s formulation of the individual. Specifically, this managed securitisation is ‘about “moderate” (not excessive) securitization, about “sensible” (not irrational) securitization’ (Roe, 2004: 293).

But Roe’s notion of societal security is an issue for Jutila (2006) who notes that identities must be threatened before they can be considered as securitised: minority rights, Jutila (2006: 183) argues, ‘are not always questions of life and death’ for a given society as a whole. However, security questions do arise when ‘both the majority and the minority try to promote identities that cannot coexist within the territory of the state’ (Jutila, 2006: 180). Leaning into a multiculturalist paradigm, Jutila promotes a (re)constructivist strategy whereby societies move to strengthen their security with narratives or identities that are not exclusive to either majority or minority but allow both to co-exist within the state’s territory.

This call for (re)constructivism features two noteworthy provocations. The first is an observation by Roe (2006: 433, original emphasis) that while ‘it is not impossible that, in a situation of securitized minority rights (a condition of insecurity), majority and minority alike may choose to respond by reconstructing their identities in a mutually non-threatening way … it is, however, improbable.’

Secondly, if one is to consider, as Roe does, that societal security is not necessarily preoccupied with existential threats to society-as-a-whole, but rather with broader circumstances of security, then any incident or series of events that threatens to elevate the question of minority rights to one which requires emergency politics is, in effect, securitising the issues. Conversely, if the individual security of the majority, or a state tied to majority-minority relations, are dependent on the overall security paradigm of the state, then a threat to the state’s minority policies will affect the standing of all parties involved. The question is, therefore, not exclusively how to avoid such securitisation but crucially, how to ensure that the dichotomy of ‘us vs. them’ does not devolve into ‘friend vs. enemy’ (Roe, 2006: 433). It is on this question that He’s and Roe’s sequencing of desecuritisation is a paramount consideration; with the contention that no matter the prospect of a reconstructivist desecuritisation, one must first manage the state of affairs of minority rights.

Conceptual grounding

In summation, He (2018) builds on Kymlicka’s emancipatory ideation but stresses that multiculturalism can precede desecuritisation processes. However, moving past strictly democratic contexts opens up modes of desecuritisation that are perhaps more assertive in their management of minority rights—with potential implications for the possibility of rearticulation—specifically in states that actively deescalate majority-minority tensions below the level of emergency politics and engage in a dialogue that accommodates all parties but which retains elements considered necessary for that society’s continuing (multicultural) identification. This relies, in large part, on a shared understanding between constituent groups of (multicultural) ‘society security’ underpinning their own individual security.

The following section delves into the Singaporean experience of desecuritisation and the calculated accommodation of minority rights in service of a multicultural survivalist imperative.

The Singaporean context

I preface the following discussion with a clarification on the terminology used here on in. While much of the literature refers to multiculturalism, scholarship on Singapore engages with the concept as multiracialism, owing in large part to the colonial legacies of racial assignment (Chua, 2003: 58). Similarly, race is used interchangeably with ethnicity due to government policy. As explicitly defined in the Census of Population 2000: Administrative Report, an ‘[e]thnic group refers to a person’s race’ (Leow, 2000: 119).

It should be noted that compared to other multicultural states such as the United Kingdom and Australia that work towards policies of multicultural integration for their migrant worker populations, Singapore practices a policy of ‘differential exclusion’ of its migrant workers (domestic helpers, foreign manual labourers) ‘in which immigrants are incorporated into certain areas of society (above all the labour market) but denied access to others (such as welfare systems, citizenship and political participation)’ (Castles, 1995: 294). This state-sponsored perception of migrant workers as a temporary expedient to be used in periods of high economic demand resembles those of ‘guest worker’ permits in Switzerland alongside the Gulf oil states. As such, it is important to make a distinction between the multicultural inclusionary policies of Singapore that are addressed to its permanent residents and citizenry with its exclusionary practices that discriminate against low-skilled and low-paid foreign workers.

These distinctions allude to the peculiarity of the Singaporean experience; having over successive decades elevated ethnic pluralism or multiracialism as the most fundamental and secure ideation of statehood, where minority races (excluding migrant workers) are accommodated and advanced within a larger ethnopolitical sphere. The arguably contradictory elements of this identity—that it is both heavily racialised and yet be ‘regardless of race, language or religion’—underscores the delicate balance of the Singaporean experience; wherein it both acknowledges and caters for the plurality of its racial composition while promoting a larger unifying national identity.

So as to interrogate this curious dynamic, it is appropriate to delineate two critical ideational antecedents that inform the following sections; what was and continues to be the purpose of the Singaporean state and by what way does it attempt to accomplish this. As hinted to previously, the purpose can be distilled quite neatly as the singular question of survival; to disprove the ‘foolish and absurd proposition’ of Singaporean statehood (Lee Kuan Yew cited in The Straits Times, 1961). This imperative informed the consolidation and promotion of multiracialism. Significantly, this stasis is an arguably unnatural one and requires desecuritisation as a means of buttressing the original formulation. As such, Singapore’s circumstances necessitated a state of multiracialism first which consequently desecuritised its constituent races but which simultaneously is also one that requires an assertive degree of managed securitisation.

Such is the consequence of the government’s modus operandi of realpolitiking multiracialism. Whereby it leverages its corporatist mechanisms to selectively racialise the population (Lian, 2016: 17). ‘Racialisation’, as defined by Cashmore (1997: 306–307), refers to ‘a political and ideological process by which particular populations are identified by direct or indirect reference to their real or imagine phenotypical characteristics in such a way as to suggest that the population can only be understood as a supposedly biological unity.’ The process of racialisation is a social construct and must be understood, as Singh (2016: 79) stresses, contextually rather than universally applied and consequently misinterpreted. Accordingly, one should first locate the source of these delineations. In the case of Singapore, these racial demarcations originate with the British Empire and that, therefore, warrants some exposition.

Colonial British ‘conquest of the epistemological space’

The British first settled on the island of Singapore in 1819 with the arrival of Sir Stamford Raffles who sought to establish a free port to facilitate trade between India and Canton. Originally inhabited by 120 Malays and 30 Chinese (Kwan-Terry, 2000: 86), the port saw considerable growth with the arrival of sojourners and permanent settlers from across the region—from the Malay and Indonesian peninsulas (Malays), subcontinental India (Indians), and South China (Chinese) (Lian, 2016: 12). Notably, considerable immigration from South China saw the Chinese residents all but double the Malay inhabitants in the span of 50 years. The British authorities sought to segment this burgeoning population as a means of controlling, planning, and administering the free port city along what were essentially ethnic enclaves; with the Chinese residing in Chinatown, the Malays in Malay kampongs, and the Indians within the Serangoon Road area (Kwan-Terry, 2000: 86). This urban-ethnic arrangement remained largely the same throughout successive decades and by the late nineteenth century, some 80% of the population lived in these well-defined municipal allotments (Yeoh, 1996: 37).

The fragmentation of ethnicity in colonial Singapore and more broadly, across the British Empire, can be traced to what Shamsul (2001: 357) provocatively calls a ‘cultural invasion in the form of a conquest of the native “epistemological space”.’ Whereby ‘way of various investigative modalities … the British constructed a corpus of knowledge supported by “facts”, and introduced many names, labels and categories that people … regard as natural, self-evident, and existing since time immemorial’ (Shamsul, 2001: 357). That is not to say with absolutism that the British were the sole agents in this paradigm. Certainly, colonised groups manoeuvred within these oppositional constructs to increase the standing of their communities. Vasu and Ahuja (2018: 20) observe how during colonial rule, otherwise linguistically and culturally diverse groups of Sindhis, Gujaratis, Punjabis, and Bengalis saw cause to identify as ‘Indians’ so as to ‘arrive at a critical mass which could not be politically ignored.’

Putting agency aside, however, and the critical point is that racial walls in this ‘epistemological space’ were cemented by the British. Take, for instance, the use of censuses in Singapore—in what was first the Straits Settlements and then later as a part of British Malaya. The 1871 census provided 33 categories for race, later reduced to six overarching categories (European and American, Eurasian, Chinese, Malays and other natives of the Archipelago, Tamils and other Natives of India, and Other nationalities), and further refined in 1921 with greater specificity of races (Europeans, Eurasians, Malays, Chinese, Indians) (Rocha and Yeoh, 2020: 630–631). All of which goes to Hefner’s (2001: 42) compelling argument that rather than the Western colonial powers being a ‘world-conquering carrier [s] of pluralist tolerance’, they had instead ‘laid the foundation for the rigidly oppositional identities of “plural societies” fame.’

An ideology of survivalism

Whether you are of Chinese, Indian, Malay, Eurasian or Ceylonese descent, when it comes to the survival of Singapore, you or rather we, must all be one.

Lee Kuan Yew (interviewed in Vasil, 1992: 103)

Kymlicka (2004) writes that Western states engage the issue of desecuritising minority rights from the perspective of justice whereas Eastern Central European states approach desecuritisation as a matter of security imperatives. The oddity of Singapore is that rather than the discourses of security and justice pulling in opposite directions as Kymlicka’s (2004: 145) formulation would suggest, the circumstances of Singaporean statehood saw these dynamics fuse together. The inarguably traumatic manner in which Singapore was ‘expelled’ from Malaysia induced an ideology of survivalism that continues to this day.

With both significant immigrant populations as a consequence of its role in the British Empire along with considerable numbers of indigenous peoples with greater affiliation to Malayan culture and authority, the Singaporean government upon separation from Malaysia had to contend with a population with ‘[no] deep connection with the territory or … with each other through a common, primordial ancestry … [or] pre-colonial past’ (Ang and Stratton, 2018: 74). The undesired independence caused what Williams (2004: 104) remarks as ‘citizenship by shared fate’ with there having been ‘no plausible alternative to living together’ (Williams, 2004: 104).

Consequently, similar to the departing British colonial authorities who used corpora of knowledge as controlling devices, the government constructed and continually reinforced a narrative of pre-determined identities, immutable to exogenous forces and intrinsic to a citizen’s place in society as expressed in the often-cited racial nomenclature of CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Other). The government’s treatment of these identities goes to Roe’s notion of societal security in the respect that the reality underpinning this ideology of survivalism required a certain buy-in by the constituting races which was made possible by formatting society in such a way that it was culturally palpable to all demographic cohorts.

Cultural formatting

Patten (2014: 28) writes of cultural formatting as the state deciding the ‘the language, symbols, boundaries, and so on, that are associated with [state] institutions.’ In this sense, the state is a discerning editor whose exacting vision of a Singaporean travel guide has them strictly defining the margins; dictating an agreeable font; and, in the face of an indecisive writer, constantly revising which portions of the text should be bolded and which should be exiled to the endnotes. ¹ Having been advised that the book can only be successful if it addresses the theme of multiracialism, the editor goes about ensuring that all decisions are made towards that end goal.

In a similar way, Singapore considered its early survival as a state as being contingent on maintaining the multiracial equilibrium. The questions going forward was, thus, not of its genre but of the how; what margins, what font, and what to highlight to the readers? In this vein, the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) adopted a largely functionalist perspective (Ang and Stratton, 2018: 74), wherein it made a concerted effort to ‘depoliticise the cultures and to engineer them so as to eradicate the undesirable elements, while fostering those aspects which could constitute building-blocks for the national identity’ (Brown, 1993: 21). Being what observers have long called a ‘nanny state’ (Mauzy and Milne, 2002), there are numerous areas where the PAP have sought to exercise control but for the purposes of this paper, it will focus on the three most prominent aspects in racial relations selected on the basis of how foundational they are to Singaporean society (Mauzy and Milne, 2002; Trocki, 2006)—(a) public housing (b) self-help groups; and, (c) education and linguistic policy—and briefly detail their implementation before discussing how they contributed to multiracial development.

Public housing

Established in 1960, the Housing Development Board (HDB) was the first statutory board in Singapore. With the initial task of dismantling slums and relocating residents to new housing, the scope was later expanded to planning and constructing new towns, shops, and the provision of parks and community facilities. These new flats were and continue to be heavily subsidised by the government, allowing citizens to ‘buy in’ to housing at an affordable rate. The HDB scheme provided the government with a means with which to remedy the ‘lack of national loyalty by facilitating the purchase of a home’ (Moore, 2000: 349). As Mauzy and Milne (2002: 90) opine, Lee Kuan Yew ‘wanted not only gratitude, but abiding gratitude, and saw the potential appeal, not only of living in a house, but of owning it, making a home of it’, and in so doing, strengthen citizens’ connection with the newly independent state.

As it were, in the 1970s, through buying and selling flats, ethnic groups inadvertently began to re-concentrate into particular areas once more. Such was the issue that in 1989, the government mandated certain ethnic quotas for public housing estates with the introduction of the Ethnic Integration Policy, the ‘most intrusive social policy in Singapore’ (Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam cited in Singapore Government, 2020). As stipulated by the Singapore Government (2014), the

permissible proportion of flats in each neighbourhood for Malays was 22% while the permissible proportion of flats in each block was 25%. For Chinese, the permissible proportions were 84% and 87% respectively, and for Indians and other minority groups, the figures were reduced to 10% and 13% respectively.

The implications of which were tied in some part to the demographic composition of local geographically assigned neighbourhood schools. In ensuring a spatial distribution of races, the government socialised the population into intermingling with other CMIO cohorts; ‘the kids go to the same kindergarten, the kids go to the same primary school … and they grow up together’ (Shanmugaratnam cited in Singapore Government, 2020). Overall, the even distribution of race throughout different estates was seen as paramount in maintaining not only racial harmony but also social control reminiscent of colonial British rule. Moore (2000: 352) goes further, asserting that ‘the policy of racial housing quotas also serves to break up the minority electorate and also could be seen as part of a government effort to prevent the development of Malay-led opposition.’

‘Self-help’ groups

Nevertheless, a level societal playing field can only go so far in mediating racial demands, especially where it relates to economic inequalities. In Brown’s (1997: 256) observation, ‘[c]ultural minorities seek to preserve a civil society “space” in which to define their own identities and pursue their socioeconomic interests’. In 1981, a group of Malay PAP members, alarmed by the increasing social inequality between Malays and their Chinese and Indian counterparts, championed greater assistance to the Malay community. The resulting establishment of Mendaki (Council for Muslim Education) was provided with the mandate of raising the educational performance of Malay students. It furthered an understanding that the issues facing one culture had wide-ranging societal effects and it answered the consequential call notably articulated by Malay MP Tadin (1971: 4) that ‘the problems of the Malays must not be looked upon as a communal problem to be tackled by the Malays alone … Malay’s problems must be looked upon in a national perspective involving different groups.’

However, the establishment of Mendaki did concern some members of the PAP who voiced fears that it drastically deviated away from the notion of multiracialism so prominently championed by the PAP (Lee, 2000: 211). Tempering this concern somewhat was the continued degree of control exercised by the government which appointed Mendaki officials drawn in part from a list provided by Malay organisations (Mauzy and Milne, 2002: 111).

Notably, Mendaki marked a shift towards formalising civil society ties by lending support to ‘self-help’ groups but were not, as Mauzy and Milne (2002: 111) underscore, considered ‘affirmative-action organisations’. A decade after Mendaki’s founding, Indian PAP MPs saw the creation of the Singapore Indian Development Association (SINDA) with similar aims of promoting education and welfare among the Indian community. Following this, the Chinese community spearheaded the Chinese Development Assistance Council (CDAC). Like Mendaki, these organisations featured the influence of the government, with a senior government minister placed in charge of CDAC (Mauzy and Milne, 2002: 112). Considering the remit of these organisations as being everything but affirmative action then how should these organisations be seen within a supposed masterplan of society?

To that question, the establishment of these arguably semi-autonomous groups provided the government with corporatist ‘channels within which ethnic interests can be mediated, elites can be coopted, and state policies on the selective promotion of approved ethnic languages and values can be implemented’ (Brown, 1997: 260, emphasis added). Indeed, there is an element of social control inherent in these policies. Through segregating the population along racial lines, and guiding society to act through collective bodies organised according to race and under the purview of state authorities, the government avoided what otherwise might have been civil society actors premised on conventional class imbalances. The axis of social control in Singapore is thereby one dimensional, with the minimisation of conflicting variables such as those of gender and economic class rendering race as the only defining characteristic widely acknowledged by the government.

Educational & linguistic policy

The notion of race as an intrinsic element in a Singaporean’s identity is affirmed early on in their foundational years as the daily national pledges would suggest. It is also one that has a somewhat idiosyncratic history. Clammer (1985b: 100) articulates this well, arguing that there is ‘great importance is the way in which this official [multiracial] policy is reflected in educational and linguistic policy, two areas fraught with the greatest difficulties and ambiguities.’

Relevant to this discussion is the 1970s-onwards which saw multiracialism take greater prominence in the school curriculum with a concerted push to generate greater local identification among school children. Barr’s (2006) historical study of primary school English textbooks from this period illustrates this pattern of increasing racialisation. For instance, in an attempt to localise education materials to help aid children identify in settings familiar to them, from the 1980s, books were commissioned and produced domestically and the ‘Singaporean worldview that sees society through the prism of race was given free rein’ (Barr, 2006: 19). In one example of a 1981 coursework book, it describes the characters as the ‘Malay girl [pictured with dark skin] is Minah. She has [i.e., is the one holding] a doll. The Chinese girl [pictured with fair skin] is Sufen. She has [i.e., is the one holding] a kitten’ (Barr, 2006: 19). The distinctions drawn in such educational materials underscore the narrative propagated that the various races are separate but each has a place in Singaporean society. As the then-Deputy Prime Minister Lee (1998) attests, the government’s ‘ideal has never been a melting pot. We have not tried to amalgamate and assimilate the different communities into one.’

The notion of racial divides heralded challenges to the imperative of fostering a unifying national identity. Such is the potency of language that favouring any one of the designated ethnic languages—Chinese, Malay, or Tamil—would undercut the multiracial formulation. So as to negate such charges, the government adopted English as the language of business and education which also had auxiliary benefits. In a speech delivered in November 1971, Lee Kuan Yew explicitly laid out the rationale behind the adoption of English as the paramount national language, arguing that in order to advance, developing states must at the very least adopt the language of developed countries, lest Singapore ‘blindfolds the next generation to the knowledge of the advanced countries’ (Lee, 1971).

However, the primacy of English displaced the traditional use of Malay which, prior to the 1970s, was the common language between the different races (Chua, 2003: 77). By way of colonial legacy, English was the administrative language of the post-independent state and in 1966, was made the compulsory language in a bilingual education system (Mauzy and Milne, 2002: 101). Consequently, the ‘shared Malay identity [was gradually] displaced and replaced by the primacy of postcolonial national identities’ (Chua, 2003: 63). The cultural format of the country shifted accordingly.

A similar fate befell the Chinese who had themselves cultivated a distinct local culture with the proliferation of Chinese-medium schools and the Chinese-orientated Nanyang University (Nantah). Founded in 1956 as a centre for Chinese classical learning, the tertiary institution was viewed with suspicion by the authorities who considered it a hotbed of leftist individuals. The government did not recognise degrees obtained at Nantah with graduates who supported the opposition party, Barisan Socialis, barred from government jobs (Hack, 2012: 159). The institution was pressured to adopt English as a parallel language of instruction in 1975 and in 1980, was merged into the National University of Singapore which used English as the sole language of instruction. The politics of language presents itself most apparent in the treatment of Mandarin in Singapore throughout the 1960s to 1980s. As shown in the case of Nantah, Mandarin was inextricably linked to ‘Chinese-ness’ and more concerning for the government at the time, with Chinese nationalism and communism (Purushotam, 2000: 46). In disciplining an institution as closely associated with Chineseness as Nantah, the government all but declared that ‘mobilization along ethnic lines was out of bounds of the state’s meritocratic ideology and would provoke a PAP backlash, if not detention’ (Hack, 2012: 159–160).

Notably, in the late 1970s, the PAP marked a ‘dramatic shift in the application of multi-racialism’ (Vasil, 1995: 62). The downplaying of ethnicity in favour of a common identity as ‘Singaporean’ was gradually replaced by what can be thought of as identification through hyphenations—for example, Singaporean-Indians—and a re-emergence of culture being placed at the forefront of one’s identity. This shift in policy is due in large part to what was viewed as ‘the threats from the aggressive culture of the West’ (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Culture, Shaari Tadin, in Singapore Government Press Release, November 30, 1974).

In having cultivated an essentially English-speaking Singapore, PAP leaders in the 1970s realised that despite the implementation of a bilingual education programme, the supremacy of English had exacerbated the spread of Western values which was ‘virtually becom [ing] a hindrance to nation-building’ (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ong, 1973). In a different albeit relevant context, Wæver (1995: 68) observes that ‘if one’s identity seems threatened … the answer is a strengthening of existing identities. In this sense, consequently, culture becomes security policy.’

Sacrifices in cultural formatting

The intwining of culture with security policy opens the former to constraints that consequently comes at a price paid for by communal groups. In homogenising what were otherwise heterogeneous identities, the state imposed demands and sacrifices on the individual in an effort to build the collective. As Benjamin (1976: 122) observes, ‘Singapore’s multiracialism puts Chinese people under pressure to become more Chinese, Indians more Indian, and Malays more Malay’. This ‘tendency to de-emphasize the heterogeneous character of each race in favor of a more simplified, multiracial CMIO … quadratomy’ (Siddique, 1990: 36) brushes over the multifaceted complexities of race. ‘Malays’, for example, are composed of a variety of backgrounds, from Malays to Javanese, Bugis, and Boyanese. So too are the ‘Chinese’ an assortment of Peranakans, Hainanese, along with several others (Clammer, 1985a: 143–144).

This homogenisation affects all races with the Chinese majority likewise subject to such impositions. This is perhaps best epitomised by the cultural formatting of language and specifically, the inauguration of the ‘Speak Mandarin’ campaign in 1979. It mandated among several things that government officials speak Mandarin to Singaporean-Chinese (with the exception of those aged over 60), that Chinese taxi and bus drivers pass a Mandarin oral test, or attend Mandarin classes to gain proficiency (Vasil, 1995: 70). The campaign saw minorities (dialects such as Hokkien, Teochew, and Cantonese) within the majority amalgamated and folded into a collectivised identity of Mandarin speakers. Native Mandarin speakers numbered less than one percent of the population in 1980 (Clammer, 1985b: 91–92) but by the end of 1987, some 68% of Singaporean-Chinese primary students used Mandarin as their primary home language (The Straits Times, 1987).

Indeed, in propagating general idealisations of CMIO, there are significant cost of multiracial citizenship borne by these communities. Wherein the bounds of permissible conduct by individual groups are themselves subject to constraints and sacrifices with the aim of desecuritisation. The no-hijab stance of the government is but one example. In 2002, in view of what is argued as the compulsory donning of the hijab (Abdullah, 2016: 217), four primary schoolchildren contravened the Ministry of Education’s policy and were subsequently suspended for wearing the hijab to school. Amidst the controversy and questions of constitutional issues (Thio, 2002), the government argued in a letter to The New York Times that ‘[a]llowing exceptions [to the uniform policy] would fragment the common space’ (Press Secretary of the MOE, Lim Chee Hwee, 2002). As the then-acting Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs Yaacob Ibrahim reasoned, ‘[I]f we allow one community to express that identity, then other communities will also ask for it and we will heighten the differences’ (The Straits Times, 2002). The implication being that an expression of such identity would heighten differences portends a domino effect threatening the desecuritised ‘common space’ of society.

Evident in these brief illustrations of state policy is the government’s disciplining of difference. The state simultaneously differentiates by delineating the boundaries of Chineseness (exemplified in majoritising Chinese minorities) and minority communal groups in the CMIO model but disciplines what it considers to be too threatening a differentiation (as displayed in the no-hijab policy). In so doing, it defines and maintains the integrity of a desecuritised space. Ultimately, however, rather than completely immersing themselves in the varying and innumerate aspects of their cultures, CMIO communities are instead encouraged if not ‘stuck in increasingly narrow and conservative definitions of their respective “cultures”’ and ‘limited often to festivals, foods and the preservation of family traditions’ (Chua, 2003: 66).

As the above sections have argued, the multiracial compact has gone through some very acute evolutions but the basic premise of racial delineation remains so. This substratum of society characterised by an ideology of survivalism is buttressed by subtle and concrete measures; whether it be through the everyday multiracial interactions that come with racial quotas in public housing, public signage and announcements in multiple languages, self-help groups founded on racial issues, or the more elemental use of schooling as a means of racial demarcation—notwithstanding the detrimental impacts of such formatting. All of these goes towards the development of multiracialism and sequentially, the desecuritisation of national minorities. Such that

The minority can feel secure when certain provisions/ legislations/mechanisms are put in place that will guarantee its existence (in identity terms), while similarly the majority can also feel secure in the knowledge that the minority will thus work (politically, economically and also societally) within the existing framework of the state (Roe, 2004: 293).

Politics & implications of managed desecuritisation

By making minority rights a part of normal politics through its multiracial construct, the state has in effect desecuritised society. However, I submit that in the same way Roe (2004) speaks of managed securitisation, Singapore has developed a form of managed desecuritisation. This is in the sense that while it has largely removed the agency of securitisation through the corporatist management of race, it has not achieved absolute desecuritisation. As to why that is, one may conjecture certain reasons absent that it may be impossible with race reigning supreme over any everyday marker of identification.

However, it would be remiss to discuss the realpolitiks of racialisation without addressing its political implications, or more precisely in the case of the PAP, its benefits. History is instructive in illustrating the political dimensions of race. The PAP’s early struggles against Chinese ‘chauvinists’ and its leadership’s fears of being labelled as English-educated and aligned elite goes to its appreciation for how race can be a political cudgel or perhaps a shield. On this front, the government has been wildly successful in perpetuating a narrative over successive decades that ‘out-of-bounds’ (OB) markers on sensitive issues such as race and religion are in place to maintain ‘harmony’ or what is implied as being the very survival of the nation (Mutalib, 2011: 1165).

In this vein, the government has legitimised itself as the dominant and indeed, the only voice in such conversations in that it denies the opposition forces the ability to effectively engage in any OB dialogue on these issues. Consequently, the official opposition party in Singapore, the Workers’ Party (WP), has ceded ground in this area; stipulating in their party manifesto that in regards to race relations, ‘WP is Pro-Singapore and believes national interest should precede party interest … [and as] such we would be prepared to support government policies if they are for the common good of the nation’ (Workers’ Party, 2006: 5). This implicit link between multiracialism and the supposed very existence of Singapore is a notion propagated throughout every facet of officialdom with Chief Justice Chan (2013: 109) bluntly warning that ‘the espousal of any racial or religious community will destroy Singapore.’

Appropriately, this disciplining of differences comes naturally from the state in the form of legislation. Rajah (2012: 36) writes that laws such as the Press Act and the Religious Harmony Act ‘show how “race”, “language” and religion” have been appropriated by the state in certain ways, delegitimising any attempt on the part of the citizen to invest these categories with claims for rights.’ Where the legal instruments of liberal states would seek to endow their citizens with individual freedoms, the ‘sub-text of [these examples] appears to be that general principles to do with individual rights and freedoms cannot apply to Singapore because of these exceptional vulnerabilities’ with enemies both within and abroad (Rajah, 2012: 231).

Such is the perpetual construction of the other—whether it be in terms of the purported enemy or in the more abstract concept of failure engrained in a society so predisposed to success—that it renders the possibility of desecuritised transformation mute relative to stabilisation. These aforementioned discursive repetitions of other possibilities accord with poststructuralist readings illustrating how ‘states constantly produce and reproduce their national identities through discourses of in/security, in which the possibility of community and order on the inside is constituted through the construction of the outside as different, dangerous and disorderly’ (Behnke, 2006: 64).

Hansen (2012: 532) writes of institutionalised securitisation as being cemented to such an extent that they no longer necessitate speech acts as justification. In these scenarios, the absence of speech hinders efforts to desecuritise by removing the very means of doing so. OB markers—which paradoxically speak without speaking—fundamentally alter the prospect of transformation by itself framing the nature of the political; explicitly freezing a stasis wherein the very survival of the country is tied to its securitisation. Rearticulation is thereby impossible when the vocabulary to do so is inaccessible by all but a select few.

Desecuritising security

Managed desecuritisation is all well and good in normal politics notwithstanding the aforementioned inequalities. However, it is fundamentally challenged when outlier variables of security are introduced that threaten to exacerbate the fissures of race and destabilise the substratum of multiracialism. Crucially, it exposes the risk inherent in limiting the number of actors who can articulate security. This section considers one such instance where desecuritised politics was securitised, illustrates these risks, and develops the argument of societal security further.

In 2001, a terrorist group, Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), was uncovered by Singaporean authorities as having plotted a series of attacks against Western targets including embassies, military installations, and a train station frequented by foreigners. The exposure of the network came at a precarious time of heightened religious tensions, occurring not soon thereafter the September 11 attacks in the United States. In the following months, 36 individuals were arrested and detained under the Internal Security Act (ISA).

As noted in a subsequent white paper by the home affairs ministry, these detainees ‘were not ignorant, destitute or disenfranchised outcasts’ but raised in the mainstream of Singaporean society with a secular education and held ‘normal respectable jobs’ (MHA, 2003: 15). These profiles portrayed a collective picture of individuals with a high degree of compliance and deference to authority which were as Ramraj (2003: 473) observes, ‘qualities that, until at least recently, were regarded as desirable in citizens in the political sphere.’ That otherwise outwardly ordinary members of society would be enmeshed in such acts of terrorism posed a fundamental challenge to the authorities.

Indeed, the publication of a white paper on the matter, itself an unprecedented act (Roach, 2006: 419), goes to the severity with which the government viewed both the particular JI threat as well as the tenuous global environment at the time. Wherein public discourse was ‘inflected with a moral panic, which linked increased Islamic religiosity and perceived Malay-Muslim separateness with increased susceptibility towards terrorism’ (Tan, 2020: 4–5). Such that it threatened—and to the degree that it induced moral panic, was successful—to securitise a relatively desecuritised public space. Acknowledgement of this effect is reflected in repeated public pronouncements by the Singaporean government. Most notably in Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong’s 2002 Chinese New Year message where he cautioned about the possibility of terror attacks that could ‘destroy these precious foundations of our society’ (Goh, 2002).

Thus, the challenge for the government is not simply to prevent such attacks, which by their very nature is inherently securitising, but more consequentially, to desecuritise the security element to the extent such is possible. In this vein, some observations can be put forward about the conduct of the government. Firstly, it is noteworthy the degree of constrained action and muted determination in the handling of JI. Contrary to other countries where the apprehension, detention, and trial of terror suspects can be expected to dominate the public sphere, there was a relative lack of spectacle made in Singapore. Rather, the authorities used the provisions of the ISA to detain the suspects and in so doing, prevented them from coopting a public trial as a platform for further securitisation. ² As Hor (2002: 49) observed,

in the context of a history of delicate racial and religious relations, the spectacle of a public trial against alleged Malay Muslims accused of extremism and terrorism might polarise the different communities in Singapore to an unacceptable degree … It would also be an uphill task to try to persuade the Malay Muslim minority that the majority are not oppressing them out of racial or religious prejudice.

Secondly is what might be considered the diffusion of societal security. The immediate response of the government to the JI incident was anything but that. It located the impetus of de-radicalisation as the responsibility of the Muslim community (Roach, 2006: 420). In 2004, the government released a national security paper titled The Fight Against Terror: Singapore National Security Strategy that stated emphatically that ‘Muslims must speak out and denounce those who distort Islam. They have to engage the extremists, from the media to the mosque to the madrasah, and assert mainstream Islamic values’ (NSCC, 2004: 64). More pointedly was Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s declaration that ‘[o]nly Muslims can do this to challenge and correct these perverted interpretations of Islam’ (NSCC, 2004: 65).

However, doing so places a burden on a national minority and the privatisation of security to a singular cohort is an unjust obligation that undermines the collective desecuritisation of the state. This is all the more so a challenge given that the individuals in question strayed from mainstream religious affiliations and were, thus, logically beyond the capabilities of established religious authorities (Kassim and Hassan, 2004). The government realised this and in 2006, launched the Community Engagement Programme (CEP) which ‘seeks to strengthen the understanding and ties between people of different races and religions’ (CEP, 2014). The CEP is organised into five clusters, religious and community organisations, educational institutes, media and academics, grassroots organisations, and businesses and unions, and promotes a collective responsibility of these bodies. Moving to desecuritise the issue of terrorism, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong (cited in Tan, 2015: 645–646) declared at the program’s launch that

this is not a Malay-Muslim problem. This is a national problem and non-Muslims also have to play your part … by preserving the space for minorities in the majority-Chinese society by upholding the ideals of meritocracy and equal opportunity and treatment, regardless of race, language and religion.

Here again is the often-recited idea of ‘regardless of race, language and religion’. The discursive recalibration away from recognising it as a limited-minority to a whole-society problem highlights the intricate threads that weave the security of the state with the social fabric of multiracialism. Accordingly, the desecuritisation apparent in the rhetoric surrounding the CEP sought to once again bring questions of minority rights away from suspicions of loyalty and security and back to one’s evaluations of fairness irrespective of these qualities of religion, language or race. The reframing of security discourse in this instance is instructive in how societal security is construed in the Singaporean context. Wherein moderate and sensible securitisation of majority and minority identities (Roe, 2004) is a requisite for maintaining the societal equilibrium and consequently, any threat to that formula that portends to elevate the security concerns of one cohort over the other, is a threat to the societal security and requires further desecuritisation.

Conclusion

This article has examined how the Singaporean state desecuritised national minorities through multiracialism. By attending to multiracialism as a dialogical process vis-à-vis desecuritisation, the article builds on He’s reformulation of Kymlicka’s sequential multicultural development and it extends this formula beyond the otherwise normative democratic principles.

In Singapore, the socialisation of the individual along the demarcations of race is both a consequence of colonial heritage and also more significantly, a deliberate strategy of development. The state effectively mobilised its top-down mechanisms and levers of control to recalibrate the often-mentioned plural societies of colonial Southeast Asia and foster greater points of interaction between its races. Rationalising that endeavour is the government’s ideology of survival that permeates discourses of the little ‘red dot’.

Importantly, it is also one that necessitates a perpetual but tightly controlled environment of securitisation. It is this continued ideation of the state that calls on both the national majority and minorities to make accommodations to ensure the long-term viability of the state. The fostering of a sense of societal security wherein each constituent demographics’ individual security is premised on an overall harmony has come about through the state’s management of housing, self-help groups, and educational and linguistic policy. Where this societal security is threatened, as in the case of JI, the state has shown itself to firmly reassert this formula of multiracial societal security through calculated accommodation, albeit with slight lapses in initial judgement. All of which affirms the dialogical formulation of multiracialism and desecuritisation. Concurrently, it intervenes in the multicultural desecuritisation conversation by illustrating the limitations of rearticulation in such constrained discursive spaces where agency rests with a select few.

Going forward, the discussion developed here can be advanced further through a more rigorous assessment of critical junctures that characterised the development of multiracialism in Singapore, particularly where desecuritisation has been a feature of the contemporaneous debates. The observations contained in the case study of JI go in part to this goal but it is only one piece of the overall security dilemma that has vexed Singaporean authorities. Other instances would no doubt provide rich insight into this dynamic and further illuminate the multiracial-desecuritisation dynamic. Overall, the discussion proffered in this article is a modest contribution towards that aim.