700 years of Singapore history? Part II: Politicising history

700 years of Singapore history? Part II: Politicising history
By Psellus, on July 5th, 2009

The superficial similarities between the old ports of Temasek and the modern port of Singapore – once we exclude the ‘apparent differences in ethnic composition, ancestry, and contextual issues such as technology’ (i.e. by excising most of the concerns of most other historians) – are supposed to ‘accord us a better understanding of the present social, economic and cultural state of affairs in Singapore’.

Extending our perspective into the pre-modern past opens up new dimensions. What we then see is the recurring theme of manpower challenges that societies in our immediate region have faced over the centuries, borne out of the absence of a large indigenous population, creating the need to co-opt foreigners of exceptional ability to contribute to the well-being of society. This has been a constant imperative for Singapore’s successive societies over the centuries.

…

Today’s practice of including foreigners, particularly those of exceptional talent, as a critical part of Singapore’s population is part of a longer history of such practices by port-cities in the region.

Forgive me for thinking this all sounds a little familiar.

None of it, strictly speaking, is untrue (I think). However, using history in such a manner is both historically and politically mistaken. Historically speaking, it commits the same port-city error by treating superficially similar, but horribly anachronistic phenomena as though they were somewhat the same thing, as synchronic occurrences of the same archetype: ‘immigration’, and ‘foreign talent’. There is a false equivalence being made between the often-transient settlement of Chinese and Bugis merchants in earlier centuries, settling in a very different society (a Malay trading princedom) and the immigrants and foreign workers coming into Singapore today.

It is precisely the context which makes all the difference. Here I must admit to my ignorance on pre-modern Southeast Asian societies. To the best of my knowledge however, Temasek ruled by a hereditary prince, who would gain most of his income from customs from the goods in transit, and who owed little to the mass of his subjects (he had few native ones to begin with!) and asked for little in return. Modern Singapore is a republic and a nation: it is a polity with an extensive social contract. It demands a lot from its citizens for its survival (taxation, military service) and in return grants them the benefits of this citizenship (protection, education, social security (hhmm), elections (hhhmmmmmm)). This is what Heng refers to as ‘the exclusivity of the nation-state’.

The Malay city-state was not a nation. There may have been a distinction between local and foreign, but one between citizen and non-citizen did not exist. A merchant who followed the flow of trade and settled in Temasek, providing revenue for the prince and his hangers-on, was obviously welcome. (After all, he could just turn up without having applied for a passport or a work-permit and without having his suitability assessed by a bureaucracy either. In many ways the past, without exclusive nation-states or borders, was a more mobile world than our contemporary one.) The prince’s subjects were by and large not consulted. Issues such as assimilation, resentment, the fear of non-citizens reaping the benefits of citizenship without incurring the costs (remember – there was no National Service in the 14th century!), the depression of wages, the competition for jobs (most people, presumably, had a subsistence level of existence anyway) did not exist or were not quite as important.

‘Immigration’ and ‘foreign talent’ in the 14th century are not the same things as they were in the 21st. In the former case it consisted of foreign merchants and their agents following the trade flows and settling (often temporarily) in places where it was convenient to manage their goods. In the latter case foreigners enter the country – after the appropriate bureaucratic authorisation – to look for jobs, whether as researchers, teachers, managers, or construction workers. To equate the two as ‘responses to manpower challenges’ would be an egregious mistake. It helps us understand neither the nature of historical migration, nor the issues engendered by modern migration.

But far more dangerous and more insidious is its political aspect. It seems to me – I’m not sure if other people will share this view, since there is a certain element of plausible deniability – that by placing present government policy within a ‘tradition’ Heng is implying that policy can and should be justified by tradition, and that what worked (though, as we have established, the ‘what’ consists of two very different phenomena) in an entirely different context would continue to work today.

I am mostly supportive of our government’s foreign talent and immigration policy. But I hold this view from a consideration of the contemporary issues engendered by contemporary political debate, and from weighing up the pros and cons of the policy. Simplistically subsuming present-day issues with historical ones under an archetypal ‘manpower challenges’ framework adds nothing to contemporary policy debate, and if anything encourages us to sidestep the complex issues involved.

Like the next historian I am more than happy to bring history into any contemporary social or political debate, to give it some context. Yet here I am pretty much stumped: the introduction of a 700-year narrative history doesn’t seem to add anything new. If anything it is used here to encourage simplistic discussion of pressing contemporary issues and justify trite old conclusions. Sadly, in this case, ‘extending our perspective into the pre-modern past’ has not opened up any ‘new dimensions’ – whether historically, or politically – at all.

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