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A Critical Assessment Chua Beng-Huat Department Of Pragmatism of the People's Action Party Government in Singapore: A Critical Assessment Chua Beng-Huat Department of Sociology, Trent University, Canada Housing & DevelopmentBoard, Singapore Set all nearly down into Economy. There is little choice - We must make a people. Edwin Thumboo The management of a state is necessarily guided by a political philosophy. Individuals who enter politics not for self-serving pecuniary benefits but out of benevolent in- tents to serve honestly one's fellow citizens are essentially motivated by the intent to realize their own political visions in the realm they govern. Members of Singapore's People's Action Party (PAP), certainly hold themselves out as gleaming examples of political moral rectitude. In the last twenty-five years of unbroken reign, they have indeed realized much of their political vision. The total set of conceptual terms of a governing philosophy may be broadly sub- divided into the "operant" elements and the overarching "utopian" elements. The distinction turns on the difference between the conceptual elements that politicians use actively to rationalize the day to day operations of the state and those they use I to define the "utopian" feature of their reign.' In the PAP government, the umbrella, utopian element is a vision of a democratic society in the "final" analysis. By this, we may take it as a democratic society with all that are conventionally taken as the desirable attributes of such a state, i.e., at- tributes not limited to the formality of "one person, one vote" but also a correspon- ding political culture in which individuals are respected as such and granted certain freedoms, and in which the collective good is balanced with individual preferences. All these are admissible within the utopian promise as matters of principle, even if the "final" analysis never arrives.' On the other hand, the operant element is "pragmatism" which enables the government to rationalize, from conception to im- plementation, state activities on a routine basis. Ideologically, it is argued by the politicians that there are internal logical con- nections between the two sets of elements, with the operant elements as necessary steps and bridges to the realization of the utopian vision. However, in practice, policies that are rationalized on pragmatic grounds turn out to be undemocratic in serious ways. Examples of these policies abound in Singapore. The only ideological justifica- tion is a promise that in the end all these policies will contribute to the establishment of a stable, democratic society. How all these policies are to be integrated into a democratic whole will never be logically articulated. 29 30 It is indeed impossible to construct such a systematic articulation because the contradictions that inhabit the meeting points of the utopian elements and the operant elements are results of two different and often competing modes of rationality that govern the two sets of concepts respectively. Briefly stated, pragmatism is governed by ad hoc contextual rationality that seeks to achieve specific gains and pays scant attention to systematicity and coherence as necessary rational criteria for action; whereas utopian rationality readily emphasises the whole and at times sacrifices the contextual gains to preserve the whole, if necessary. This essay will trace the "operant" set of concepts of the PAP philosophy. It will delineate the conceptual boundaries and the logic of "pragmatism", and the con- straints it has imposed on the political discourse in Singapore. In so doing, the essay will inevitably bring into relief, points of contradiction that appear to block the' govern- ment's way to democracy as an utopian vision, and thus serves as an immanent criti- que of the ideological system at work in Singapore. Roots of Pragmatism The origin of PAP pragmatism is at once historical, material and conceptual, in part imposed on the party when it formed the first independent government of Singapore in 1965, and in part a conscious formulation of its leaders as an explicit ideology. The historical and material constraints were determined by the domestic economic situation at independence. Singapore was until then a non-industrial, en- trepot and commercial centre of the British Empire with very high rates of unemploy- ment and underemployment coupled with a rapidly growing population. Under such conditions, the material question of "making a living"' exerted itself to the fore of the lists of problems that had to be solved. Immediate economic development through rapid industrialization was absolutely necessary; the only question was which model to adopt. The socialist or communist models were foreclosed because being an island nation with an overwhelming Chinese majority surrounded by Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines, it was important that Singapore not be perceived as "the third China" by her immediate neighbours. An explicit socialist or communist orientation in a Singaporean national identity would surely have given rise to such a perception (Chan and Evers, 1978:199). The capitalist road was the only one open, despite the PAP's early socialist rhetoric. The result was, and continues to be, an ideology that embodies multi-lingualism and its attendant multi-culturalism as the central cultural elements. This, together with a vigorous economic development orientation that emphasizes science and technology and centralized rational public administration as the fundamental basis for industrialization within a capitalist system, financed largely by multi-national capital. The PAP government may be said to have little choice but to do what is necessary, that is, to adopt these elements. Thus from the very beginning, these elements that form a conceptual framework for the day-to-day operations of the PAP government had always been identified as the "natural", the "necessary", and the "realistic" solution to the problems of nation-building. It is in their "naturalness", "necessity" and "realism" that the PAP strategy for nation-building is pragmatic. The attention paid to the cultural and the economic elements in this pragmatism .
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