Singapore Emerges As A Key Player On The World Stage

SINGAPORE

Cutting the Strings

The small yet wealthy city-state of Singapore was in the international spotlight last month for hosting the historic summitbetween American President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.

It was the perfect venue for such an event, commented the Council on Foreign Relations.

Singapore has long served as a neutral arbiter of interests between East and West, and its security and intelligence apparatuses are highly regarded in both the United States and North Korea.

By some measures, Singapore is leaps and bounds ahead of other Asian countries in terms of societal and economic development as well.

Gallup ranked Singapore as the safest country in the world for the fifth year in a row last month, and its economic model, which prioritizes foreign investment over protectionist policies, has catapulted its GDP per capita to one of the highest rates in the world, according to World Bank data.

Meanwhile, the city-state of almost six million people now has the most sophisticated digital economy in Asia, and Reuters recently reported that, despite ongoing issues with trash exports, Singapore is a world leader in waste sustainability.

Still, Singapore’s impressive achievements since it declared independence from Malaysia in 1965 don’t mean it won’t face steep political and societal challenges in the coming years.

For one, the political philosophy of Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, to tightly control and micromanage society has earned the country the moniker of a “soft authoritarian state,” wrote the Council on Foreign Relations. Lee was known to jail dissenters and prioritize communal and economic prosperity ahead of civil liberties.

While that led to de jure affirmative-action policies that reach into the highest ranks of government, it also means that free speech is highly constrained and corporal punishment a common occurrence. The 2018 World Press Freedom Index, for example, ranks Singapore at 151 out of 180 countries.

Lee also established a political dynasty. His People’s Action Party has never lost an election and retains 83 of 89 seats in parliament. His eldest son, Lee Hsien Loong, has served as prime minister since 2004.

The elder Lee’s puppet-master tactics may have been enough to launch Singapore into orbit with the rest of the industrialized world, but reforms are needed to keep up the progress, given an increased “appetite for greater democracy,” Al Jazeera reported in a telling documentary about the Lee dynasty.

There’s been movement on that front from the nation’s only two viable political parties, writes the South China Morning Post. Both parties are gearing up for general elections in 2021 by putting forward new, young successors who may shift the status quo built by the nation’s founding father.

After all, if Singapore is to take real strides into the future, it has to cut the strings of the puppet master sooner or later.