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E. J. Hobsbawm, in an address to the American Anthropological Association, remarks that, ‘Nations without a past are contradictory in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against another is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.’2 The past is thus ‘what we are’, immutably and essentially, and each state has a nation and national culture with deep, primordial roots. The essentialising functions of history and its connection with the discursive construction of nationalism of course have been much criticised,3 not least by Hobsbawm himself; nevertheless, as cultural anthropologist Akhil Gupta has written, ‘National identity appears to be firmly spatialized [in everyday life] ..., becoming almost a “natural” marker of cultural and social difference .... It is difficult to imagine what a state that is not a nation would look like and how it would operate in the contemporary world.’4 My argument in this chapter will be that Singapore functions as a type of transnational formation using the organisational form of the nation-state, a formation that draws its intellectual and cultural inspiration from parts of the British West and Anglo-American ideas about being modern. In the process, we get a Singapore that is precisely that ‘state that is not a nation’ which Gupta has difficulty imagining. 2 The ‘Modern’ Construction of Postcolonial Singapore Modernization consists in continually exiting from an obscure age that mingled the needs of society with scientific truth, in order to enter into a new age that will finally distinguish clearly what belongs to atemporal nature and what comes from humans, what depends on things and what belongs to signs. … The present is outlined by a series of radical breaks, revolutions, which constitute so many irreversible ratchets that prevent us from ever going backward. In itself, this line is as empty as the scansion of a metronome. – Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991 [1993])1 Deterritorialisation 34 What happens when a postcolonial state’s recourse to primordial national identity is hamstrung because it possesses several ethnic groups with the attendant dangers of what the British called ‘communalism’ (or ‘racialism’) within its national boundary?5 When 90 percent of its population is comprised of immigrant and therefore deterritorialised Chinese and Indians? And when there had been a postwar communist insurgency led mainly by Chinese in a Malay-dominated region?6 This is the position of Singapore when it was part of the Federation of Malaysia (1963–65) and later when it left the Federation (1965). Singapore, like West Malaysia, is composed primarily of peoples of various Indian (mainly Tamil) and Chinese descent, ‘Eurasians’ and Malays;7 unlike West Malaysia, though, Singapore is mainly Chinese8 and the leaders within the People’s Action Party (PAP), which has ruled Singapore continuously from 1959 until today, felt obliged to create Singapore as a multicultural entity in which no racial or linguistic group9 was seen to be privileged, and in which being modern itself would link the messy parts of each ethnic culture to the other parts, as it were. There was to be no state-supported history of the ‘nation’ stretching back into a distant origin, as might be expected from a newly-formed nation-state.10 The Alliance Government in Malaysia, in contrast, wanted inter-racial harmony first through the elevation of Malay rights, and only then would it follow with non-communalism. The Malay in Malaysia is considered to be bumiputera, a son or prince of the soil. The aim of the PAP under Lee Kuan Yew, the forceful first prime minister of independent Singapore, was to try to reject the primordialism so entrenched in the Western European model of nationalism11 and, also, primordialism’s possibly violent consequences, and to effect another strategy for Singapore’s survival, despite it being Asia’s smallest state with no natural resources and, in the 1960s, being surrounded by hostile neighbours and threatened by communists. The modernEuropean,mainlyBritish,modelofthenation-statewastoberearticulated for the PAP’s own purposes. Since there was no one racial identity, and thus no single ‘nation’, upon which to safely erect a national identity, Lee and his colleagues aimed to make industrial and capitalist modernity the metanarrative which would frame Singapore’s national identity, and to create a ‘Global City’ which because of its trading links would escape the restraints placed upon it by history and geography. The ‘national’ as a category was not to be jettisoned but instead to be renovated so that Singapore’s racial and...

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