The thesis is online at: http://cn.geocities.com/aisuru2001/files/final_thesis.pdf

Singapore is an authoritarian state even though it maintains relatively free elections at irregular intervals in which the PAP and a number of opposition parties compete for at least a number of seats in parliament. In rare cases even an opposition member has been elected to parliament.

However election campaigns are heavily obstructed by the amount of money that may be spent and the length of time for any political campaign. Instead of the massive ad campaigns common in American battleground states you only get the relative quietude common to those states in which a strong incumbent is not facing a serious opponent.

Furthermore the media is almost completely owned by government-linked corporations and foreign media is silenced by the threat of litigation and the reduction of the numbers that the publication may sell in Singapore, commonly termed gazeting.

The Freedom House organization furthermore classifies Singapore as partly-free showing that Singapore is at best a semi-democracy or an authoritarian democracy, a more fitting term than the claim for communitarian democracy or the highly deceptive assertion that Singapore is an “Asian democracy.”

Elections, however, make it necessary that the governing elite must at least justify or legitimize its approach. My study of Singaporean politics since the election of the PAP to parliament shows that the government has used the threat of a crisis as a way to legitimize its authoritarian type of government.

In the beginning there was a clear emphasis on the threat from Communism, that the PAP used to eliminate its political opponents. The Barisan Sosialis was out-maneuvered when a number of its high-ranking politicians were arrested in 1963 and the party, which had large support from the majority Chinese, lost to the PAP in an election the same year. In 1968 and afterwards the Barisan Sosialis refused to take part in elections and thereby the only credible opposition party in Singapore’s post-colonial history disappeared. Furthermore, the threat of Communism was used not only against the Barisan Sosialis but also to maintain a strict national security law, which enabled the government to arrest anyone without a trial.

Even though the government has constantly raised awareness to all kinds of threats, the economic threat was the greatest motivating factor and when Singapore’s standard of living had reached an advanced level and most Singaporeans could be counted as middle class, the ability of the government to use the threat to legitimize its actions dwindled.

Election results show that the party lost in support as Singapore’s population became more affluent. This was despite or even because it stressed a number of threats. One of them was the decline of the birth rate, which put Singapore below the replacement level.

If that was not bad enough, Lee Kuan Yew went even further and suggested that mostly lower educated people were getting more children and he proposed a graduate mother program that was largely rejected by the majority of Singaporeans, which can be seen in the PAP’s downturn in its worst election result of its history in subsequent elections from 1984 till 1991.

The PAP had to do something to increase its poll numbers and it tried to emphasize every possible crisis. It even advanced the notion of the threat stemming from opposition parties. This has legitimized the litigations of a number of prominent opposition figures.

Singapore’s now affluent population, however, seemed little impressed by these accusations. Therefore the government resorted to more stringent measures and asserted that any district that voted for an opposition member risked housing upgrades. Therefore it can be assumed that the PAP itself believes that it is the only party capable of governing Singapore and securing the island state’s survival in the world. However, coercion also undermined its legitimacy and threatened the party’s future in the long run.

This changed when the PAP government was again able to show its ability to “save” the nation from terrorists after September 11 and the subsequent arrests of 13 members of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), which has close ties to Al-Qaeda. However this “new” threat was not without serious risks for the government’s campaign as it risked ethnic upheavals that it had successfully suppressed during Singapore’s economic rise.

Since nearly all the Muslims are either Malay or Indian the threat forced the government to again emphasize the threat of racial riots and thus pointed on its multiracial heritage. Thus it was able to pursue a strongly anti-terrorist course without creating large ethnic upheavals.

However the government’s attempt to politicize headscarves in class rooms again had averse effects, which underlines that the government’s pragmatic approaches are often double edged and lead to unforeseen results, akin to the outcry over Lee Kuan Yew’s call for educated women to bear more children.

The PAP government, most importantly, did not fail to point out that the terrorist threat was first of all a serious threat to the nation as a whole and that it was a threat that might last for a very long time. This opened the way for more authoritarian measures in the name of a war against terrorism and it again legitimized the National Security Act, which had nearly become an archaic act before the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Even though no terrorist attack has occurred in Singapore to date, various events continue to reinforce the threat. From the Nicoll highway cave-in to the recent partial blackout, all these events created a sense of anxiety in Singapore.

The government has been quick to show that it is able to control the situation and has taken a number of precautions to fight a potential terrorist attack. One of them was the creation of the Emergency Public Information Centre (EPIC), which was first able to show its effectiveness during the SARS crisis, to which the PAP government reacted very quickly and efficiently.

Unlike other authoritarian regimes, such as in China, Singapore did not shy away from publicizing the crisis, which earned the state praise from organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO).

I tried to show in my research paper that the Singaporean government relied on a managed crisis for its political survival. The more it was able to rally the people behind its cause, the more it felt legitimized to pursue an authoritarian path, something that was and still is deemed necessary for the survival of the nation.

Thus the government has promoted the so-called 4Ms, multiracialism, multilingualism, multiculturalism and multireligiosity, which are based on the fear of potential threats and which form to a large part the government’s vision of Singapore’s national identity.

In my doctoral thesis I plan to expand the notion of Singapore’s creation of a national identity to strengthen the PAP’s hold over the government. This will be done in a comparison with Taiwan, where the KMT government’s Chinese nationalism lost its legitimacy and is now slowly being replaced with what might be termed a Taiwanese national identity.

I hope to show that the PAP’s attempt to rally the majority of its citizens behind its version of a national identity allowed it to maintain its hold over government despite its advanced economy and its middle-class society.

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