S'pore makes bold bet on the future of democracy

SINGAPORE'S leaders can always be relied on to argue the case against democracy. Though Singaporeans go to the polls once every five years and many people thus are under the impression that Singapore is a democracy, the country's leader are not at all shy about their hostility to Western-style liberal democracy.

Following January's general election, won by the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) in a landslide, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said the result showed Singaporeans had "rejected Western-style liberal democracy and freedoms".

Education Minister Teo Chee Hean has said that "a two party system would put us on the dangerous road to contention when we should play as one team", while Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew recently told Hong Kong people not to "waste time talking about democracy. There never was any democracy in Hong Kong in the first place".

Now Minister for Information and the Arts, George Yeo has taken up the baton by raising his voice once again on this topic. In a recent speech, he questioned whether human society could be held together "solely on the basis of one-man-one-vote democracy and the marker, without an underlying moral framework which encourages the voter to calculate not only for his self interest but also that of the larger community".

As Yeo see it, western-style liberal democracy is fundamentally flawed. For while it recognise the "spiritual equality of all human beings, it disregards the fact that human beings are not born equal, that some contribute more than others and that the views of a minority may matter much more than the views of the majority".

Socialism and the welfare state are a direct consequence of "one-man-one-vote taken to extreme". Yeo argues because the majority tends to vote in favour of the redistribution of wealth to itself, no matter what harm that might do to the overall economy.

Deficit financing, he notes, means borrowing from the future to pay for the present, something that prevents the young and the not-yet-born - who do not have votes - from protecting their interest.

Still, as imperfect as Western-style liberal democracy is, many have countered that no better system of governance has yet been devised by man. For all their deficiencies, liberal democracies generally do better than other societies. Just consider Myanmar today and the Philippines under the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Several prominent members of Singapore's opposition parties, who are now living in exile after tangling (no pun intended) with the ruling PAP, would be bound to agree.

Yet Yeo points to fundamental flaws in Western political systems that cannot be ignored. The burden of the welfare state has undermined Western competitiveness and an overemphasis on individual freedoms has sometimes resented in rampant crime, excessive litigation and weak government.

Yeo argues that even many Western intellectuals now question whether Western democracy has become an impediment to social change and further economic development.

And he is confident enough about his beliefs regarding governance to predict that, in the next century, Asia may be able to provide ideas to the world on how democracy and one-man-one-vote can be better adapted "to meet the needs of a fast changing, unequal world".

But is Singapore's brand of authoritarian democracy any more able to meet the challenges of a fast changing, unequal world? If Singapore is to retain its rigid political system, one of its biggest future challenges will be to weld onto it a creative, innovative and entrepreneurial culture capable of competing in the information-rich 21st century.

Singapore recognises that greater creativity and innovation are essential to its future well being, "Our strategy in the past of relying on foreign capital and ideas will not be enough to see us through the new competitive economic environment of the 21st century." Prime Minister Goh has said, "We will have to be more efficient and innovative."

But Singapore has so far skirted the issue whether such traits can be nurtured within a rigid political environment. Many, even in Singapore, believe that nurturing of such creativity requires greater political space than is now permitted. Today, they note, it is no accident that the world's most creative societies are those that have Western-style democracy and freedoms.

Nonetheless, Singapore's leaders are confident that the hybrid political system they have created can, over the long run, perform better than Western-style liberal democracies. If Singapore can achieve such a feat, Yeo may be right that Asia will soon be providing ideas to the world on how democracy and one-man-one-vote can be adapted "to meet the needs of a fast-changing, unequal world".

But it would be a brave man who would bet that a political elite can, over the long run, outperform the tried and tested formula of one-man-one-vote democracy.