Singapore: A Social Democracy for the 21st Century?

One of the key challenges that globalization poses to the project of social democracy is that, by allowing capital to move production anywhere that suits its interests, the ability of labor to organise in opposition to capital is threatened, as capital can simply move production to other places as soon as labor starts making uncomfortable demands. In this article, I argue that Singapore is best understood as a social democracy adapted to the conditions of globalization. As such, Singapore's form of social democracy looks very different from most traditional/Western social democracies. Nevertheless, I argue, Singapore's form of social democracy is based on the same underlying principle of class compromise as traditional social democracy, only applied to very different circumstances. To make this argument, I begin by outlining what I mean by the term “social democracy”, and why we should care about whether Singapore fits that label. I then describe the nature of Singapore's class compromise, as well as its underlying social contract, which I argue has a distinctly corporate character — one that is based on getting the citizens to invest as shareholders in the state-as-a-corporation, rather than on accepting high taxes in exchange for a generous public sector in which goods and services are offered in a “de-commodified” form. Lastly, I address the question of why it makes sense to view Singapore as a social democracy, given that the country is not very “socialistic”, nor very “democratic”.