Inventing a Nation

Singapore, as we know it today, was invented in 1819 by Sir Stamford Raffles: a tool fashioned to service the colonial world’s insatiable hunger for expansion. It was conceived as a product for the East India Company to capitalise on—not a place, nor country, community, nor home—it was an object to sell, a service to market, a profit waiting to be reaped.

With that temptation of trade, the world soon arrived on this island; each person hankering for a drink from this fountain of wealth, an opportunity to fill their bottle and return home to water their crop. This was a stopping point, a non-place, nothing more than a way for these people to realise their shared ambitions of progress and prosperity. Ethnicities mingled and cultures learnt to coexist, but always with the implicit understanding that these frictions of difference need not be resolved because they would all be going home soon enough.

Yet, the relentless passage of time often slips from our grasp, and Singapore’s accidental statehood 146 years later shone a light on this unwanted country, uncongenial community and unexpected home. Suddenly this island was a place, and with that it needed to find an identity, a sense of self. The reaction was a remarkably conscious governmental effort of nation-building. ‘Singapore' today is as much a constructed nation as it is a sculpted state: an unabashedly human creation, as it has always been.

However, there exists a disjuncture between human intention and the reality of our creation. The ongoing effort to craft Singapore as a nation-state is as inflexible as its initial fashioning as an economic tool. The plurality of Singapore’s purpose, function, and existence is at odds with the pursuit of any singular vision for its future, whether it be economic ambition or civic nationalism. When one is asserted, the heterogeneity of life and identity is denied. 

The result is a perpetual state of anxiety: a tension caused by the incompatibility of this rhetorical ambition for a singular and its plural reality. Singapore is a nation, but also several nations. A community, but also communities. A home, as well as homes. 

The anxiety that stems from these seemingly incommensurable perspectives of reality is a global experience. We live in a world that argues for the primacy of the singular, however our contemporary globalised world—with the fragmenting of formerly geographically specific cultures, the perceived simultaneity of spatially distinct experiences, and the resultant accelerated re-formation of cultural landscapes—cannot afford that. These tensions are typical of this epoch of human life; and Singapore has served as a microcosm for them since its invention.