Neoliberal Morality in Singapore: How Family Policies Make State and Society by Teo You Yenn (review)

Singapore has been through remarkable economic and social transformations over the past half century, elevating it to its current status as one of the world’s wealthiest countries. Family policies over the early part of this period were designed to lower fertility from unsustainably high levels, and then abruptly reversed in the early 1980s (somewhat belatedly, in the wake of one of the world’s most rapid fertility declines) to that of raising fertility. The Singapore public dealt with the sudden reversal of slogans emphasizing the benefits of small family size to ones extolling the virtues of having more children with remarkable equanimity — reflecting a perhaps surprising faith in the omniscience of the government’s planners.

The key argument of this book is that, although Singapore’s family policies have been rather ineffective in accomplishing their goal of achieving more marriage and raising the nation’s fertility rates, they do have important latent effects that transcend the state’s explicit goals. “What is produced through family policies are institutionalized relationships and ethical meanings that link citizens to each other, and state to society” (p. 21). Teo argues that there is a tendency towards the naturalization of gender and ethnic differences as “cultural”, thus integral to the so-called traditional family. The general acceptance of the need to protect traditional culture sets limits to the people’s critique of the state.

Over the past three decades, there have been many interesting inconsistencies between the rhetoric and reality of these family policies. While the state’s version is that its policies are communally oriented rather than individually oriented, the reality is that family policies are primarily between the state and individual family units, thus setting up conditions for policies that are more neoliberal than communitarian. Teo argues that the prioritizing of economic growth by the Singapore state necessarily disrupts the traditional family. Through its promotion of women’s engagement in the workforce, building of housing infrastructure to re-house the population from traditional housing forms to high-rise apartment living, promotion of English over other languages, and its intense population control policies, it has altered the structural conditions of family life. “The Singapore state has in fact been highly destructive of the traditional family, and intentionally so” (p. 34). Though state interventions in the family are aimed at encouraging some forms of supposed traditional behaviour, this has always been strictly in the context of the modern demands of economic development. This was equally true of the anti-natalist period and the pro-natalist period.

While Teo’s book utilizes a broad canvas in discussing governmentality, explained using broader Foucauldian conceptions of “government” as the regulation of a wide range of individual conduct in multiple realms of society, albeit with incoherence and gaps involving consent and dissent, adherence and resistance, much of the book focuses on the reactions of Singapore citizens to the state’s family policies through intensive interviews with ordinary Singaporeans. Based on these interviews, she argues that Singaporeans think about the family in remarkably sociological (if sometimes rather shallow) terms. Gender and racial stereotypes abound in the Singaporean conception of the family — for example, women and men have different responsibilities to the family; Chinese are seen as “modern”, with a very low birth rate, Malays are seen as “traditional”, with early marriages, more out-of-wedlock births, and higher fertility.

Methodologically, this study of state-society relations employs both a careful study of the paraphernalia of regulations, speeches, ministry websites, press releases, and the like, in order to see how the state shaped Singaporeans’ lives; in-depth interviews were also conducted with sixty Singaporeans to better understand how they negotiated family policies in their lived experience. These were recruited through snowballing techniques, with an emphasis on respondents who had had some experience with the public housing process (not a very restrictive criterion, since over 80 per cent of Singaporeans live in...