Modern India was born out of the ashes of World War II. For more than a hundred years before the war India had no international personality, or had only a notional one when the British needed another signatory to the Peace of Versailles or an extra vote at the League of Nations. The war changed all that. Though other factors were at work, the timing and manner of India's midnight tryst with destiny — the transfer of power on 14–15 August 1947 — were largely the result of the tectonic shifts that altered the contours of the world after six searing years of conflict.

The India that emerged was hungry, bankrupt and in ferment. It had very little industry because of the “desire to keep India as a market for British manufactured goods after the war”, as Lord Mountbatten noted when his wartime request for large-scale parachute production in India was turned down. Sixty years later, India's rulers are still grappling with the residue of some of those problems. Regardless of the political party they might belong to, they find it unacceptable that the global balance of power as reflected in the composition of the United Nations Security Council, the constitution and operations of international economic and financial agencies and the distribution of nuclear weapons shou to reflect the war's outcome. Ironically, India was technically one of the victorious nations in 1945. But that does not mean that it either enjoys or approves of the spoils of victory.

While the victors of World War I sought to crush their vanquished enemies, the victors of World War II tried to establish their own permanent supremacy, albeit in a polity that institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank tried to make more equitable. It was the creation of a new two-tier world order.

Sixty years after the end of World War II, are memories of the war fading away or are the issues it generated still real? To find an answer to this question, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies organized an international conference in 2005. It brought together a diverse group of scholars who examined different aspects of the war's legacy. Their general conclusion was that the political and social fallout from the war is alive and divisive.

Two examples present themselves readily. One example is how former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine prevented China, Japan and South Korea from sitting down together to talk about Northeast Asian integration, and wider Asian integration. Only the presence of ASEAN in the driver's seat of the East Asian Summit process made any kind of dialogue on the issue possible. The other example is the question of comfort women. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's statement — that there is no evidence that Japan's government or army forced women to work in military brothels during the war — appeared to go back on a 1993 apology for the comfort women. His stance has upset many Asian countries and the United States.

The above and other unresolved issues such as the improvement of relations among and between the states in Northeast Asia, with implications for the rest of the international community, will be areas for study in the decade ahead.

INTRODUCTION

Unlike its neighbours in Southeast Asia, Thailand emerged from the ravages of World War II relatively unscathed. Although the government of then-Prime Minister P. Phibunsongkram (henceforth Phibun) officially sided with Japan and exploited irredentist claims of territories in Malaya, Laos and Cambodia from Great Britain and France, Thailand was forced to pay only minimal war indemnities. Owing to an influential anti-Japanese Seri Thai [Free Thai] underground movement, led by Pridi Bhanomyong, Thai leaders at war's end were able to secure American support in the face of British reparatory, punitive demands for Thailand's wartime efforts against the Allies. Spectacularly victorious after the war, the United States government persuaded its British counterpart to soften its stand on Thailand. The leaders of Seri Thai were also able to negotiate the release of financial assets in Japan and the United Kingdom for domestic economic recovery and revitalization. Notwithstanding the relatively favourable post-war settlement, the domestic political scene in the wake of the war was tumultuous, fragmented and fractious.

Following the downfall of Phibun's wartime government in July 1944, a series of shortlived and unstable democratic governments spearheaded by Pridi and his associates came to power over the next three years. During this period, the civilian leadership under Pridi drawn from political parties with socialist and leftist leanings as well as from the Seri Thai movement held sway, as the military and conservative élite under Phibun were in retreat. However, the threat of communist expansionism associated with Pridi's socialist ideas and crucial domestic developments, including the Supreme Court's exoneration of Phibun and his associates on war crimes charges in April 1946, the mysterious death of the young King Anand two months later for which Pridi was held accountable by the public, and Pridi's genuine support for anti-colonial nationalist movements in Southeast Asia, undermined the former Seri Thai leader's political legitimacy.

Soon thereafter, the brief post-war interval of parliamentary democracy came to an end.

INTRODUCTION

In Chapter 1, I examined the particular ways in which the construction of national identity began to take shape in post-independent Singapore. This early phase of nation-building was as much about creating a unique national-societal identity as it was about reworking the nation-state norm to suit the local context. From the outset, the Western-educated PAP elite rejected the possibility of reviving the past traditions of Singapore's immigrant population and chose instead to deliberately construct a pragmatic identity based on development and economic success as the symbols of national identification. At the same time, these nation-building efforts were designed to create a bounded sense of national identity, but they disregarded the diasporic connections of Singapore's people and its transnational history. Instead, a progress-oriented transitional narrative became a central feature of the PAP's nation-building strategy. The government's pragmatic approach to identity construction based on development and economic success reinforced the idea that Singapore as a nation is always in transition — on a path towards progress. While this transitional narrative generated a perception that Singapore is always evolving, it has also been accompanied by a state-generated discourse of anxiety over its long-term economic prospects and survival as a nation.

INTRODUCTION

Former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong's quote provides a typically colourful account of the latest set of perceived challenges facing Singapore. Continuing my exploration into the national response to globalization in Singapore, this chapter turns its attention to the government's project of “globalizing” the nation since the early 1990s and its related efforts to create a sense of home among its citizens. I argue that going global has posed particular challenges to the government, not the least of which is a trend among Singaporeans wishing to emigrate. In this chapter I analyse one of the main governmental responses to these “unhomely” consequences of globalization: the affective citizenship-building strategies put forward in the Singapore 21 policy.

INTRODUCTION

Once again, Goh Chok Tong's colourful and tantalizing image of Singapore in the new millennium has all the hallmarks of the PAP's developmentalism, efficiency, and orderliness written over it. At the same time, it also speaks of a new kind of Singapore which is lively, innovative, fun, and exciting. The idea of Singapore as “cosmopolitan city”, although not new, is an interesting proposition as a national response to globalization. In Chapter 3, I discussed the first distinct policy aimed at developing Singapore into a global city, The Next Lap. That policy was generally confined to the material dimensions of going global: finance, transport, expertise and so forth. However, by the late 1990s the government clearly realized that becoming competitive globally also required a shift in cultural terms. The new global economy demands entrepreneurial and creative workers with the social skills to succeed in a transnationalized workforce of professional cosmopolitan elites. And cities wanting to attract global capital in this new economy, and the professionals who come with it, have to be interesting and attractive enough places. In this chapter I investigate the Singapore state's cultural policy strategies.

INTRODUCTION

In Chapters 3 and 4, I examined the specific positioning of Singapore within the globalized space of flows and the ways the Singapore government has approached the processes of globalization. The 1990s saw a significant change in the way Singapore articulated its relationship to the rest of the world. Its earlier rhetoric of Asian values and the need to preserve and safeguard the Asian cultural traditions of its people against the penetration of “Westernization” gradually gave way to a more concerted effort to transform Singapore into a global city. This gesture towards a “wannabe global city” in Asia has been fostered by marketing Singapore as a regional hub for international finance, services, telecommunications, tourism and, more recently, in the area of arts and culture. In addressing the social and cultural challenges of globalization, the Singapore government continues to maintain rhetorically the need to make Singapore a world class “home” and a cosmopolitan city. Many of its policy visions are about “place-making” and are associated with the government's fear that Singapore risks becoming a “hotel”.

The first of these quotes comes from a section in Hannerz's book,Transnational Connections, where he examines the cultural role of world cities in the context of contemporary globalization. Hannerz suggests that Singapore and Hong Kong are representative of an emerging new form of cultural life and exemplify what he has termed cities of the global ecumene (see also Hannerz 1989). This is indeed a thought-provoking assertion. These two city-states offer many possibilities for thinking about places which are distinct from, and different to, the territorially and culturally bounded form of the nation-state. Now that Hong Kong is no longer a British colonial territory, it remains to be seen whether it will be allowed to evolve as an independent cultural entity under Chinese rule. Singapore, on the other hand, is a city-state which is both a nation and, as we shall see, a world city. While nations have clearly defined territorial boundaries, continuous histories and common identities, world cities are very much of the contemporary global ecumene.

In this chapter I present an historical background to Singapore's national development from colony to early nationhood, and detail the various nation-building strategies employed by Singapore's ruling PAP. The first section of the chapter offers a critical re-reading of Singapore's historical legacy and transnational connections up until its independence in 1965.Soon after independence and over the next three decades, the Singapore political elite embarked on the project of nation-building: to create a sense of national identity amongst the heterogeneous and largely immigrant population. Through a range of institutions and institutionalized practices, an official process of national identification was put in place. I will briefly examine the different aspects of this nation-building project in the second section. In the final section, I explore how we might better conceptualize the formation of nationhood in the Singapore context.

I advance two main arguments in this chapter. One is that, because of the circumstances of the formation of Singapore, the “imagined” dimension of nationhood did not emerge smoothly. The early phase of the Singaporean nationalization project was characterized by strategies aimed at reigning in, or binding Singapore's multi-ethnic immigrant population within the boundaries of the nation-state.

FROM A BARREN PIECE OF LAND TO A THRIVING GLOBAL CITY

Just as I was writing this conclusion, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong delivered his 2003 National Day Rally speech on 17 August. In this annual address, which has become a platform for re-assessing the year's significant events (in this case: the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak, the global economic downturn and the worldwide heightened threat of terrorism) and the challenges ahead, Goh pointed out that:

The gist of this statement is quite simple: what Singapore has achieved since independence is proof that it can do just about anything.

At the outset of this book, I have shown the historical debate on the famous seven words in the 1945 Constitution, which involved a requirement in 1945 for Muslims to observe shari'a, and which led to the proposal to establish an Islamic state in the 1950s. During the 1999–2002 constitutional reform, the issue was again raised by several Islamic political parties. Unlike in the periods of the Soekarno and Soeharto governments, in the reform era all political parties, members of parliament and the government examined the issue in a constitutional and democratic way, without issuing either presidential decrees to unilaterally stop the discussion or using military force to influence the process.

Another significant feature, and this could be argued as one of the main factors in keeping the military away from using its power, was the shifting of the issue from the idea of Islam becoming the foundation of the state (Dasar Negara) to the implementation of shari'a in Article 29. In other words, while the previous debate examined the preamble to the Constitution, which could change the state ideology of the Indonesian republic, the contemporary debate was more concerned with the special rights of Muslims and the obligation for the government to implement shari'a.

As has been discussed in Chapter 5, none of the Indonesian Islamic political parties wanted to adopt a caliphate system. They acknowledged the nation-state system. They did not even propose to establish an Islamic state based on nation-states like those in Iran, Egypt or Saudi Arabia. However, some of them made it clear that they wanted a constitutional guarantee that their rights to observe shari'a would be fully implemented. In this case, the amendment to Article 29 was perceived as essential. In order to understand this proposal, many issues will be examined in this chapter. Among them are the position of public religion in a plural society, the choice between Islamic law and an Islamic state, and the issues of dar al-Islam, as compared to dar al Harb.

These discussions will be a reflection of the struggle between secularism, which is considered by some as normal, progressive and enlightened, and the religious approach, which is seen as backward and reactionary.