Abstract
Singapore appears to be a stand-alone case of authoritarian modernity in the post–Cold War world. But Singapore is much less a ‘lonely’ example of authoritarian modernity than it is a continuation of a historical trend in East Asia. This region has been home to the most significant examples of countries with advanced economies, but without liberal democratic political systems since Imperial Germany industrialized but did not democratize in the late nineteenth century. The ‘Prussian path’ of German authoritarian-led development was imitated by Meiji reformers and this model was later diffused throughout East Asia. Singapore is a particularly important example of this phenomenon not only because it ‘learned from Japan’ (an official campaign in the 1970s and early 1980s) and constructed a conservative culturalist discourse (‘Asian values’ in the 1980s and 1990s) to help justify continued authoritarian rule, but also because it served as the ‘model’ for China’s authoritarian developmentalist leadership. After Mao’s death and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European state socialist satellite states, Chinese officials and academic analysts became obsessed with tiny Singapore as the only modern non-democratic state worthy of imitation. This process of emulation was not chiefly about an appropriate economic model (there was a general consensus on the need for state intervention). Rather it was primarily a quest for authoritarian legitimation.
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Notes
- 1.
To be clear, my argument is not that Meiji Japan, Singapore, or China followed these ‘models’ slavishly. As ‘learners’ they were well aware of the (often literally huge) differences between their countries and that of their role model. They also often saw what they wanted to see rather than trying to study these paradigmatic countries in objective terms. Rather than the full-scale adoption of foreign models regardless of variation in cultural, historical, demographic, or socio-political circumstances, they adapted these outside influences to domestic circumstances with programmes implemented elsewhere becoming stimuli for designing new policies at home (Rose 1991, p. 22).
- 2.
A historicist correlate to this idea proved more inviting, however: Gneist believe that every country produced a constitution in accord with its own culture; that law, like language was embedded in the ‘spirit of its people’ (Takii 2014, pp. 48−49).
- 3.
Stein had preceded Marx in ‘turning Hegel on his head’, that is, moving from idealism to materialism. Although Stein’s influence on Marx is controversial—Marx and Engels generally cited Stein only ‘in an incidental matter and always with utter disdain’—it is generally accepted that Stein’s early work on French communist thought (Stein 1842, 1850) influenced them. Marx’s contempt probably had to do with Stein’s politics. Instead of moving into a revolutionary direction like Marx, Stein turned his findings into ‘an ensemble of objective empirical laws designed to establish harmony in the social order’ (Singlemann and Singlemann 1986, p. 433). Unlike Marx who saw industrial society as ripe for overthrow by its own workers, Stein’s work was dedicated to saving society from itself through the intervention of an ‘ethical’ state.
- 4.
Several of Bismarck’s advisers and many post-war German social democrats claimed Stein as the ‘father of the welfare state’ (Bollmann 2013). For the Meiji reformers, however, even though some of his ideas of a ‘Sozialstaat’ (social welfare state) were of interest, their initial focus was on their political implications—that parliamentary democracy only leads to social division, while Stein’s ‘social monarchy’ promises societal harmony. The German historian Heinrich August Winkler complained that Stein, with his dislike of parliamentarian conflict, began an unhappy German tradition ‘that made it easy to play off social security against political freedom’ (cited in Bollmann 2013).
- 5.
Roesler made a major faux pas when he left a provision about the Emperor’s divine right to rule out of his first draft of the constitution and instead tried to limit the Emperor’s powers over the military and parliament (Martin 1995, p. 36). The incongruity Roesler identified between monarchical fiat and constitutional governance did not disturb Ito.
- 6.
While China’s interest in Singapore is motivated by a search for ideological reinforcement for a project of centralized authoritarian rule with effective and corruption-free governance, it is based on a number of misperceptions, particularly regarding the significance of the Southeast Asia city-state’s quasi-independent legal system, its limited pluralism, and increasingly competitive if not fully democratic elections (Ortmann and Thompson 2016).
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Thompson, M.R. (2019). Singapore and the Lineages of Authoritarian Modernity in East Asia. In: Rahim, L.Z., Barr, M.D. (eds) The Limits of Authoritarian Governance in Singapore’s Developmental State. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1556-5_2
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