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5. At “Home” in a Globalized City-State? 159 5 AT “HOME” IN A GLOBALIZED CITY-STATE? For those who were born and bred in Singapore, those who have stayed or migrated, those who come to make a better living — for all these people, Singapore is a convenient and temporary base. The best that Singapore can aspire to is to be a virtual nation, an abstract entity, imagined by a number of people who have had some association with the country, can choose to connect with it whenever they wish, just as in logging on to cyberspace, clicking on to the electronic hypermarket of free-floating identities. (Kwok and Ali 1998, pp. 119–12.) 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”. Spaces void of any local particularity, unhindered by an attachment to community or identity effectively resemble what Augé (1995) terms a non-place. Transience undermines the capacity of the state to rely on its citizenry to identify as a national community and share a common 05 Nation_Culture Ch 5 7/4/07, 12:58 PM 159 160 RESPONDING TO GLOBALIZATION identity. A disinterested and indifferent population that has no affective sense of belonging, commitment, and investment in the nation-state would pose a direct challenge to the survival of Singapore. Thus, policy initiatives like The Next Lap; Singapore 21; The Renaissance City Report; and Remaking Singapore, along with other ongoing nation-building programmes have been aimed at building and nurturing a citizenry with affective investment in the nation. However, as I argued in the previous chapter, these recent policies bring with them some important contradictions and difficulties centred on maintaining the fine balance between embracing globalization yet ensuring the continuation of the nation-state as a distinct imagined community. An important question in this respect is how Singaporeans themselves perceive and experience the issues with which the government is so preoccupied. In other words, what is the view from below? What are the views of Singaporeans on the question of national identity and belonging? What do they say about Singapore’s self-proclaimed global city status and their experience of living in a globalized Singapore? These are important questions, especially in light of the hype generated around the challenges of globalization and the need for Singapore to remain a competitive economy. The views of Singaporeans on such issues can help provide a much better understanding of how people’s lives are shaped by state policies and how they negotiate and respond to the diverse processes of globalization and nation-building in Singapore.1 In this chapter, I examine the ways in which Singaporeans articulate their experiences in relation to the state-constructed narratives of national identity. Public debates on globalization and the nation-state in Singapore are limited (see Tremewan 1994; Ho 2000).2 Nonetheless over the last few years, Singaporeans have begun to participate in various News Polls and Internet Bulletin Boards to express their opinions and views. The views expressed in these forums offer an insight into the way in which the participants respond to government policies and rhetoric. It is also worth pointing out that the absolute anonymity that internet bulletin boards provide generates a more candid dissenting evaluation of PAP policies than other media. More broadly, these views are a sample of the current mood, especially of young Singaporeans, on some of the issues that I wish to explore in this chapter.3 I draw extensively on messages posted on the Straits Times Interactive Chat...

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