National Day

What is the meaning of National Day?

Why did we call the anniversary of Singapore’s independence “National Day” and not “Independence Day”? Let’s think about the circumstances of Singapore’s independence. Relatively ignominious. We didn’t achieve independence. We had it thrust upon us. We couldn’t get along with the Malaysians, and they wanted us out. We were born of a divorce. We could have called it Succession day, or Divorce Day, it would have been more accurate. In the end, I suppose we just wanted to remember that it was a day to commemorate Singapore, rather than one event – the birth of Singapore as an independent entity.

After all, it doesn’t really matter what happened on Aug 9th 1965, that affects how we think about National day. Suppose Mr X had a divorce. Was it a good thing, or a bad thing? And we will always look towards what happened both before and after that date in order to help us figure it out. There was no heroic revolutionary war (but the Japanese Occupation partially served that function.) There was no great struggle against injustice. You could say that LKY’s fighting against the Malaysian bumiputra policy being implemented in Singapore was partially a struggle against injustice, but it was hardly the same heroic stuff like, say, the fight against apartheid.

You could look at Zimbabwe as a comparison. It was a struggle against a supposedly racist Rhodesian government. Mugabe was acclaimed as a worldwide hero for a while. He made a lot of grand speeches about national reconciliation shortly after independence. But after that it was mostly downhill. Mugabe turned out to be worse for Zimbabwe than anything the white government could ever come up with. Thus a heroic independence was subsequently tarnished by subsequent events.

If Singapore has a great amount of confidence in itself, it is largely because of the nation building that has taken place after independence. A high standard of living for many (if not all), the avoidance of racial conflict and a safe and secure environment, these are not easily sniffed at.

What Singapore has achieved, I would argue, is a death knell for the national myth. You used to think that a successful country not only has to enable their citizens to live a good and full life, nationhood should evoke some romantic and glorious feelings.

Singapore has actually shown that nothing is further from the truth.

In a way, I would say that Singapore is not really a nation, and it will never be a nation. A more accurate description of Singapore is that it is a principality, much like those little states that used to pepper Europe. We are like Andorra, or Luxembourg, or Athens or Venice.

It is not for me to discuss what nationhood here, and what it means, because it is such a big and complex topic, and also because, having read Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities”, I find that others before me have done it so much better. But Anderson points out that nationhood is a juxtaposition of 2 very different visions. First, a nation is an entire landscape, a sort of an entire universe unto itself. He points out that nationhood came about around the same time when the literary genre of the novel came about. The idea of the nation is echoed in the scope of a novel, which attempts to describe to the reader an entire landscape of sights and sounds. Just as the novel encapsulates events that take place in a large community of people, this is also the idea behind categorizing an entire region as a nation. The second idea is the seeming opposite: that the nation is not universal, that it describes your tribe, and not somebody else’s tribe.

This (partial) definition of a nation as a landscape is something that makes a lot of sense, because there aren’t a lot of other definitions that make sense. It is difficult to categorise Singapore in terms of language (although Singlish is almost our unique national language, Malaysia notwithstanding). Race? Forget it. But if you’re not Chinese, Indian or Malay there might be a bit of difficulty getting used to you as a “real” Singaporean. The thing that makes you Singaporean is that you have lived in Singapore for a long time, hung out with Singaporeans, have Singaporean friends. The true meaning of Singapore is the Singaporean environment.

Singapore, I feel, is far too small to be an all-encompassing landscape. It is a city. I feel that a lot of the resentment felt at Singapore is really about the smallness of this place. Walking around with a Singaporean nationality is like being a short person, one would feel. While it is not a handicap or a deformity, you do feel a little squashed all the time. Yes, people get unhappy at the government, or the dysfunctional Singaporean behaviour, but for me a lot of it is the smallness. Of course, the caveat to this is that there are many forms of smallness, and physical size is just one of them. In terms of per capita GDP Singapore is a giant in our region, and sometimes when we go to neighbouring countries we act like kings. But these are just some of the many contradictions in Singapore.

Singapore also suffers from another form of smallness which is quite intangible. Singapore is spiritually small. We don’t feel, like Americans, that we are some kind of chosen people. We don’t feel like we have something fresh and new to offer to the world. Singapore is not the spiritual ancestral homeland of our race, and anyway Singapore does not have its own race, unless you’re Malay.

Singapore, however, is the land of opportunity. It was founded as a land of opportunity, that’s the way that Raffles saw it, and it still is one. In a way, Singapore reflects the characteristics of our Great Leader Lee Kuan Yew, who was a giant in all aspects except for his emotional quotient.

But do you really need a great founding myth to find meaning in your own life? I mean your life is yours to live and therefore also yours to make some meaning out of. You can always go your own way, forge your own identity, mythologise your own life, since you can’t always mythologise your own forefathers.

What we need to understand about nationhood is that it is something that came out of the Western tradition, particularly the enlightenment. Nationhood is an abstract idea, and a lot rests on the peoples’ willingness to believe in abstract ideas such as these. Westerners have always been more accommodating towards abstract ideas than, say the Chinese. For them, even in the Dark ages, the whole society was dominated by the Church. Can you imagine there ever being a Chinese theocracy? There is a lot of earthiness in Chinese culture in contrast, and there is a definite limit to how much we can believe in abstract ideas. An American might cry out, “give me liberty or give me death”. The Chinese would die, but for something more tangible, like the Chinese people, or the Chinese nation. You might go to church and pray for the well being of the spirits of the departed. If you’re Chinese, you do something more concrete, and

In a way, Singapore illustrates this pragmatism. We didn’t invent the golden straitjacket (a term coined by Thomas Friedman) but our nation played its part in making this acceptable to people. We might just have discerned some truths that a lot of political scientists were heretofore reluctant to acknowledge: that people generally value material wealth more than abstract notions of freedom, like free speech, right of assembly, right of dissent.

There are things that Singapore have granted to its citizens, which can be thought of as forms of freedom, although not commonly accepted in Western political thought. If we make the streets safe for people to walk around at night, that is a form of freedom. If we impose restrictions on discrimination on the basis of race, that is also a form of freedom, albeit for a minority of people.

Our national pledge rests on a highly negative definition of what Singapore is about. We say that we are citizens “regardless of race, language or religion.” Singapore is not about race, language or religion. In fact, the very idea that there would be a national myth is partially discredited when you add in “creed”. This almost precludes the possibility that there would be such a thing as a national ideology! Incredible – it’s almost as though you are saying, that there are so few things upon which you could build your national identity upon.

Elsewhere, though, we have borrowed heavily from the intellectual tradition of the. “So as to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation”, that sounds a lot like the “pursuit of life, liberty and happiness”, without the liberty, unfortunately. But they are fairly concrete objectives. No hairy ideas like “freedom”. Are you happy? Are you rich? Do you feel like your life is going forward? These are easier questions to answer than “what is freedom”.

The pledge distinguishes between means and ends. It says, “To build a democratic society based on justice and equality”. But do we want all these things of themselves? We only tolerate the philosophical stuff because these things help us achieve what we really want, which is “happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation”.

So, what is Singapore? I see something very pragmatic about our existence. And what we have done, is we have used that pragmatism well, we have achieve some degree of prominence, at least as much as what our small size can allow, and we have showed the world what this pragmatism can achieve. We have made a contribution to the political debate: just how important or not are ideals? We have achieved a lot, compared to what some more idealistic and well meaning nations have accomplished. We have not won the argument, but we have made a point. The triumph of Singapore is the triumph of pragmatism.