Nation Building: Five Southeast Asian Histories

9. Nation-Building and the Singapore Story: Some Issues in the Study of Contemporary Singapore History

Nation-Building & the Singapore Story • 221 221 C H A P T E R N I N E Nation-Building and the Singapore Story: Some Issues in the Study of Contemporary Singapore History Albert Lau HISTORY”, AS Claude Levi-Strauss asserted, “is … never history, but history-for”.1 Perhaps nowhere is the appropriation of this view that history must always be written from some viewpoint and, therefore, for some purpose in mind more evident than in its use for the agenda of nationbuilding . Few would deny that history and nation-building — defined by one commentator as “the creation by government of a cohesive political community characterized by an abiding sense of identity and common consciousness”2 — are inextricably related, for history, so far as traditional arguments go, not only “offers lessons (be they true or false) to which leaders, nations and peoples respond” but is also “the shaper of national identity”.3 Indeed, as the editors of Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 point out, “Historical writing has been connected to the process of nation-building across Europe ever since the concept of the modern nation was first formulated in the American and French Revolutions of the late-eighteenth century.”4 In Singapore’s experience of nation-building, however, the deliberative use of history in the fashioning of a national narrative — The Singapore Story — occurred belatedly, coming only after three decades of nation-building had lapsed. The use of history — and its perceived “politicization” — for the agenda of nation-building raises intrinsic conceptual and methodological concerns, as it did in the contemporary “ 09 NationBldg Ch 9 16/6/05, 12:22 PM 221 222 • Albert Lau Singapore experience, that invariably ignited ideological contestation regarding the integrity and purpose of history — and what is the proper way of portraying the past accurately. History and Nation-Building “The past” — “as it was” — is how history has been commonly defined. To be more precise, history is really about the “study” of the past, for the past “as it was” is irrecoverable and all we have are what historians, working with available records and archival materials, write about the past. Their retrieval, and representation, of the past has traditionally been validated by the methodology of “scientific” history based on the rigorous investigation of primary sources.5 By retaining “objectivity”, so the argument goes, historians could ascertain the “facts” and so report the “truth”.6 Of course, at the philosophical level, historians today recognize how this idealized “modernist” conception of historical “truth” is basically unrealistic: “facts”, which are necessarily pre-selected by their incompleteness, do not exist naturally as facts but need to be so defined — or “interpreted” — by the historian; and any scintilla of “objectivity”, which “implies the existence of vantage points absolutely without bias”,7 is simply unattainable in a subject where evaluation and interpretation are also intrinsic skills. If history, as the critique of historical truth-claims has sought to show, is never neutral, then recalling the past for the highly politicized purpose of nation-building only opens it to further possible contestation. “History manifestly becomes a political battleground,” argued Lysa Hong and Jimmy Yap: “Politicians who use history as a political weapon would claim that the version that they support is the most accurate and valid, if not the only acceptable way of understanding the past.”8 In the context of nation-building, the continued legimatory use of the past has, traditionally, been invoked for the purpose of fostering national consciousness and identity — and its corollary, instilling patriotism and citizenship.9 “Most national history and most group history are of this kind,” asserted William McNeill.10 “Consciousness of a common past”, he explained, “is a powerful supplement to other ways of defining who ‘we’ are. …and formal written history 09 NationBldg Ch 9 16/6/05, 12:22 PM 222 Nation-Building & the Singapore Story • 223 became useful in defining ‘us’ versus ‘them’ ”.11 Indeed, for groups “struggling towards self-consciousness” and those whose “accustomed status seems threatened”, the invoking of such “vivid, simplified portraits of their admirable virtues and undeserved sufferings”12 has always been seen as an indispensable means of developing their continued instinct for national survival.13 Such, for instance, was the consuming obsession of the Poles, as John Warren recounted from recent history: In an attempt to cripple the Poles’ will to resist, German forces in the Second World War destroyed much of the historic centre...