July 31, 2023

On 1 August 1958, Singapore’s independence began to take shape as the State of Singapore Act was passed upon receiving the royal assent. During the subsequent decolonisation process, the British continued to promote multiracial citizenship in Singapore and its neighbour Malaysia, in response to the tumultuous post-World-War-II times of class struggles and ethnic conflicts. Today, the two countries stand out as pluralistic postcolonial countries that have ‘successfully’ achieved peaceful ethnic relations, after decades of conflict.

However, there is more to postcolonial multiculturalism in Singapore and Malaysia than meets the eye. In ‘Arrested Multiculturalisms: Race, Capitalism, and State Formation in Malaysia and Singapore’ (Multiculturalism in the British Commonwealth: Comparative Perspectives on Theory and Practice (University of California Press, 2019)), Associate Professor Daniel PS Goh (NUS Sociology and Anthropology) elucidates how the two countries represent a paradox: peaceful ethnic relations that have been achieved by the building of strong states arguably depend on the enduring context of racial conflict.

A/P Goh posits that this chronic racial conflict has deep roots in the contradictions of colonial racial formation, which allowed for the colonial state to organise and distribute economic resources within society along racial lines. This process was manifested economically in the racial division of labour, and politically in the divergent native policies of each colonial state.

He evinces how the legacies of colonial political economy can be seen in how the successor postcolonial states of Malaysia (formerly Malaya) and Singapore developed. Singapore initially privileged industrialisation, which was led by migrant Chinese entrepreneurs (who were recruited as a new class of industrial labour). Meanwhile, Malaysia was deepening its agrarian economy, with the majority Malay population continuing to be seen as traditional human capital even after decolonialisation.

Each government then created institutional arrangements that utilised different forms of multiracialism, to buttress their own vision of political and economic nation-building. In Malaysia, patronage multiracialism was practised through political and economic affirmative action towards the Malays, such as through the recognition of the ‘special position’ of the Malays. Meanwhile, in Singapore, corporatist multiracialism (which enlisted unions and institutions representing racial groups in national development) was practised in conjunction with a state-based capital accumulation that focused on multinational capital, such as through attracting skilled migrants.

However, by the 1990s, these two forms of multiracialism had arguably become inadequate for a new era of globalisation, leading to the surfacing of their contradictions through the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. These contradictions in fact appeared to erode the same forms of multiracialism that they originated from.

A/P Goh concludes that Malaysia and Singapore ironically came to share the same characteristics of arrested development: direct involvement of the state in the economy arguably resulted in the underdevelopment of local enterprises and dependence on foreign multinationals. As such, overlapping racial and class inequalities persist in a slow-growth environment. A/P Goh cautions that Singapore and Malaysia must thus continue to maintain the precarious balance between peace and conflict, if the two postcolonial states are to endure without overt racial conflict.

Read the chapter here.