Choosing What to Remember in Neoliberal Singapore: The Singapore Story,State Censorship and State-Sponsored Nostalgia

This article interrogates the persistence of heavy-handed censorship of political films in Singapore at a time of cultural liberalisation when the state has generally shown greater tolerance for alternative political expression in theatre, the literary arts, academia and public events. Part of this has to do with the focus of these films on political dissidents and their greater capacity to present a fundamental challenge to The Singapore Story, which is the regime-legitimising official account of Singapore’s history. It also has to do with the power and outreach of relatively low-budget independent films and the documentary genre in particular to evoke alternative histories vividly, give voice to the silenced, and channel these voices digitally into the collective cinematic and social media experience of the present. With the jubilee celebrations of 2015, the ruling party has been working hard to regain hegemony after experiencing its worst electoral losses in the 2011 general elections. Its main approach for achieving this has been to sponsor widespread national nostalgia coupled with highly selective censorship of political films that challenge the dominant official discourse in ways that can erode the government’s electoral dominance and political authority.     

“Sports is Politics”: Swimming (and) Pools in Postcolonial Singapore

Almost immediately after Singapore’s independence in 1965, sports became an agent of social engineering in the creation of the new nation, and the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) government pragmatically used the institution of sports in its nation-building enterprise. Based on an analysis of the speeches and press statements of Singaporean bureaucrats and civil servants from the 1960s to the 1980s, this article investigates the ruling elite’s general perception of sports and regional sporting events, examining how such a perception influenced Singapore’s local governance and strategic thinking in foreign relations. Although scholars have pointed out that sports were prominent in the nationalistic discourses of Singapore and in the projection of Singapore’s international image, little about the history and development of individual sports in Singapore is known. The article argues that swimming was the premier sport of choice for Singapore’s ruling elite in its projects of building bodies and the nation after independence, manifested in the swimming pools that the nascent nation strove to build in the residential estates outside the “colonial stronghold” of the central town district.     

Political pragmatism and the creative economy: Singapore as a City for the Arts

Can the arts and culture prosper under a less than democratic political regime? This paper looks at the soft authoritarian Singaporean government and the making of Singapore into a ‘City for the Arts’. Many scholars advocate that a culturally vibrant and creative city must also celebrate diversity, tolerance and experimentation. This implies that a democratic space is needed for creative energies to flow. Singapore is not known for its democracy. But Singapore has become relatively successful in being the cultural hub in the region. A more liberal approach to diversity and criticism of the authorities can now be observed but there are still many strong‐handed social and political controls in the city‐state. This paper tries to answer these two questions: has Singapore become democratic because the authorities want the arts and culture to flourish? Is democracy necessary for the creation of a lively cultural city?     

Elites and masses: the prevalence of economics and culture in nineteenth-century American party platforms

Scholarship on political party development in nineteenth-century America has focused on the relationship between elites and voters on the influence of policy proposals. The question is how elite perception of voter demands influenced parties’ ideological development. This study addresses this question by assessing the dynamic between cultural and socioeconomic concerns in party ideological formation and policy articulation. A content analysis of national and state party platforms from 1840 through 1896 sheds light on this dynamic. Ultimately, party leaders set the political agenda by referencing economic concerns to a greater degree than cultural concerns in their platforms.     

Young people,place and devolved politics: perceived scale(s) of political concerns among under 18s living in Wales

Despite clear linkages between conceptualisations and perceptions of politics, society, culture and territorial rescaling, research into young people’s political engagement, participation and representation is underrepresented in the field of social and cultural geography. Here the gap is addressed using perceptions of devolved politics, as a form of territorial rescaling, among young people living in Wales. Specifically, it shows the geographical scales at which young people locate their political concerns and where responsibility for these concerns is perceived to lie, with a focus on the National Assembly for Wales and the Welsh Government. This is a key contribution to our understanding of the role devolution plays in youth political engagement in the light of the following: the relative infancy of the devolved U.K. institutions; their asymmetrical development and increasing divergences; the growing variation in turnout among young people for different types of election and referenda; and the lack of research examining the youth engagement dimension of Welsh devolution as a political, social and cultural process of territorial rescaling in the U.K. The paper concludes with a critique of the notion that devolution poses a ‘politics of hope’ for youth political engagement in Wales, a very different picture to Scotland.     

Re-examining a modern classic: does Putnam's Making Democracy Work suffer from spuriousness?

What makes democratic institutions work efficiently? Robert Putnam argued in Making Democracy Work that a mixture of political participation and immersion in associative and social networks in the community, conceptualised as ‘civic community’ or ‘social capital’, is the explanation. Ever since its publication, many questions have arisen about the validity of Putnam's theory. Among the most relevant concerns stands the influence of the Italian Communist Party on Putnam's empirical tests. This paper aims to fill the gap left in the literature by testing Putnam's hypothesis against the political party in the regional government and the PCI's electoral support. Supporting Putnam, this paper finds that variations in the quality of democratic governments in Italy's regions are a function of civic community even after adjusting for the presence of the Italian Communist Party.     

Remembering Lee Kuan Yew: politics,heritage and political heritage in Singapore

The paper discusses issues of political heritage and the commemoration of notable figures within the context of the small city state of Singapore, a former British colony which celebrated 50 years of full independence in 2015. Particular reference is made to Mr Lee Kuan Yew, hailed as the founding father of the modern republic, who also died that year. Heritage overall is shown to occupy an important place in official nation building efforts, including political heritage dominated by the narrative of the success of the government formed by the party created and led by Mr Lee. Approaches to remembering the man and his legacy are considered, focusing on debate about turning his home into a memorial and possibly a national monument. The case confirms the generally observed manner in which formal depictions of political heritage, encompassing stories of influential individuals, are inextricably tied to contemporary politics. It also reveals the particular challenges of heritage management in Singapore arising from its history and official endeavours to shape public and private memories.     

The Little Nyonya and Singapore’s national self: reflections on aesthetics,ethnicity and postcolonial state formation

Singapore’s postcolonial state formation process has combined the appeal/distress of a multiracial society with the nationalistic pride of economic development. In recent years, the city-state has witnessed a revival of Peranakan culture and history, referring to the descendants of early Chinese immigrants who integrated into Indigenous societies before becoming prized mediators for British colonisers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We question how these references are strategically deployed as part of the process of postcolonial state formation and how their aesthetic representations support public discussions and debates about what defines contemporary (Chinese) Singaporean identity. By examining Peranakan representations in the television series The Little Nyonya from a Deleuzian perspective, it will be argued that Peranakan history and culture are mobilised to de-territorialise previous meanings of national ethnic markers, specifically Chineseness, and to re-territorialise a local sense of Indigeneity. In reaction to concerns over Mainlander identity, representations of Peranakan culture and history in The Little Nyonya support the indigenisation of a specific Chinese identity that is accessible to all Singaporeans, offering an aesthetic framework in which the ongoing process of negotiating between Singapore’s national self and other unfolds.     

Transforming the Classic Political Forest: Contentious Territories in Java

Java’s extensive political forests and their contentious social relations have been profoundly transformed since the turn of the 21^st century. This paper analyses new forms of forest land use, control, and revenue distribution, shaping and shaped by political-economic changes and neoliberal-era reforms. Villagers’ expanded uses, access to, and control of the forest understory under the violently thinned out canopies of the main tree species has generated newly spatialised forest politics, with new institutions and forest labour practices. The changes in land, species, and labour controls, and in villagers’ access to forest products and revenues define this historical transformation in the constitution of Java’s classic political forest. Contentious co-production has resulted in fragmented territories and a momentary (at least) weakening of state controls within the old imperial political forest.     

‘L’île des bannis’: Jersey,Britain and the French Emigration 1789–1815

ABSTRACT

The case of the Channel Island of Jersey is an important yet understudied part of the British Empire’s response to the French Emigration 1789–1815. During its high point in 1792–3, the émigré population in and around Jersey’s main town of St Helier was as large as that in London and one of the European centres of political migration. This article explores the complicated relationship between Jersey’s political institutions, the British military authorities in London, the British government and the émigré community. It shows how a brewing humanitarian crisis in the island prompted the British government to sanction subsistence payments in Jersey and enlist Royalist émigrés months before these policies were adopted in Britain. But British support was intimately bound up with the émigrés’ anti-Revolutionary military activities, as much as humanitarian concerns. The forced expulsion of most émigrés to Britain in summer 1796 resulted not from concerns about the wellbeing of the émigré community in face of imminent French invasion, but concerns about the Royalists’ military loyalties. During the Napoleonic Wars, British policy towards the émigrés lacked coherence and was not categorized by overriding humanitarian goals, though such concerns did compete with strategic ones.     

“The New World” of Karl Barth: Rethinking the Philosophical and Political Legacies of a Theologian

ABSTRACT

It is only recently that a few histories of interwar European political thought have come to acknowledge that its discursive framing of ethical and social crises was closely interwoven with upheavals in the ways Europeans rethought and debated God. The first aim of the present article is to restore to Karl Barth (1886–1968) a central place in promulgating a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach to twentieth-century European ethical and political thought. Secondly, it seeks to correct the commonplace association of Barth’s theological revolution with radical and authoritarian political ideologies by exploring his early political thought and activities, whilst focusing on several of his most politically and intellectually influential ideas. The article concludes with a discussion of the wider implications of rethinking Barth’s role in intellectual history.     

The Transylvanian promise: political mobilisation,unfulfilled hope and the rise of authoritarianism in interwar Romania

This article addresses the relationship between political mobilisation by raising hope for change and the increasing loss of confidence in democratic order in the Romanian transformation process after the First World War from a regional perspective. The survey focuses on the political discourse of the Transylvania-based National Party (from 1926 the National Peasants’ Party), which gained governmental power in 1928 through regionalist activism, benefiting from a multi-stranded discourse of permanent crisis caused by living conditions that could not meet the expectations of social advancement raised by the general enthusiasm about the emergence of ‘Greater Romania’. Unable to fulfil its promises of fundamental political change and economic recovery after a century of failed transformation, the Transylvanian-led government’s failure marks the moment of another profound disappointment, which saw the public discourse on political order turn more and more towards strengthening the concept of ‘authority’.     

Political trust and residents’ support for alternative and mass tourism: an improved structural model

ABSTRACT

Political trust is a key requirement for tourism policies to flourish and sustain. The purpose of the research was to investigate the determinants of political trust and analyze whether the latter influences residents’ support for mass and alternative tourism. To this end, we develop a structural model based on the social exchange theory, institutional theory of political trust, and cultural theory of political trust. The model proposes six determinants of political trust which in turn is considered to influence residents’ support for mass and alternative tourism. Data were collected from residents’ of Mauritius selected using a stratified random sampling approach. We used a survey method based on a structured questionnaire. Using AMOS, the data were subjected to a confirmatory factor analysis to determine the fit of the measurement model. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized model. Results indicated that such variables as the political and economic performance of government in tourism, interpersonal trust, and tourism benefits significantly predicted political trust. In turn, the latter was found to influence residents’ support for mass tourism only, lending support to Hetherington sacrificed-based concept borrowed from political science. The theoretical contribution of the study relates to the inclusion of the political trust variable to analyze its relationship with residents’ support for two opposing types of tourism development in a single theoretical model. We found that such relationship is contextual, depending on the object of exchange, conceptualized in here as the types of tourism residents are asked to support. Political trust figures more prominently for mass tourism than for alternative tourism given the considerable amount of sacrifices residents have to make to accommodate mass development. Our findings suggest that it is important for government to foster political trust among local people for tourism development to sustain.     

Two forms of Catholicism in twenty-first-century Italian public debate: an analysis of positions on same-sex marriage and Muslim dress codes

There is a peculiar relationship between religion and the political system in twenty-first-century Italy. In particular, the collapse of the Democrazia Cristiana party has favored the rise of new political entrepreneurs eager to exploit religion as a legitimacy factor, while the Catholic Church has attempted to influence politics without the mediation of any specific political party. New debates involving religious values have therefore developed. This article analyzes the positions taken and the frames proposed by Italy’s Catholic political actors in relation to two particularly telling issues, that of same-sex marriage and that of the Muslim dress codes. Its most striking finding is the presence in the Italian political system of two distinct forms of Catholicism in politics. One, promoted by the Catholic Church and followed by most centrist Catholics, is quite tolerant in terms of social and religious pluralism and supportive of human rights and social justice, but it emphasizes the ‘traditional’ heterosexual family as the cornerstone of society. The other, ‘civilizational’ form, promoted by the Lega Nord and some other center-right representatives and intellectuals, is based on an idea of Italian citizenship articulated in religious, cultural, and ethnic terms, and thus excluding those who are not members of this community. Here Christian identity is not defined by the Church’s teachings, but rather represents a marker of Western civilization in opposition to Muslim civilization.     

Is there a core national doctrine?

National doctrines are notoriously diverse, and often embody contradictory political values and criteria for membership. This article asks whether there is a ‘core’ national doctrine that connects republican, cultural, ethnic and liberal concepts of nationality. It considers two attractive candidates: one locating the ‘core’ in a doctrine about the political and psychological significance of pre‐political cultural identities, the other in the constitutional principle of popular sovereignty. After assessing the limitations of both, I sketch a different core national doctrine. This doctrine is constitutive and geopolitical, not constitutional or cultural. It has deep roots in the security concerns specific to the modern, pluralistic system of sovereign states, and prescribes in general terms the form that any community should take in order to survive or distinguish itself in that system. It says very little about the appropriate basis for such communities; the choice of political, cultural, ethnic or even racial criteria is left wide open. More than other versions, this ‘core’ is able to identify the common ground between cultural, constitutional, and other national doctrines. It also puts a sharp focus on the reasons why, historically, national and liberal values have been so hard to combine.     

Creative shifts and directions

The availability and “readiness” of culture as a mode of governmental control makes cultural policy a matter of great importance in any contemporary society. This is true not only in liberal democracies with established arts councils or cultural policies, it is also proactively pursued by a technologically advanced yet illiberal regime like Singapore, eager to position itself as the global “Renaissance City” of the twenty‐first century. What this “renaissance” model entails remains highly cryptic, not least because cultural terms and political markers are often elusive, but also because the very concept of “cultural policy” shifts along with the political and economic tides in Singapore. Drawing on a rarely cited essay by Raymond Williams, this article offers an historical look at cultural policy in Singapore – from its first articulation in 1978 to its present standing under the rubric of “creative industries” (2002). It considers some of the problems encountered and the societal changes made to accommodate Singapore’s new creative direction, all for the sake of ensuring Singapore’s continued economic dynamism. This article contends that cultural policy in Singapore now involves extracting creative energies – and economies – out of each loosely termed “creative worker” by heralding the economic potential of the arts, media, culture and the creative sectors, but concomitantly marking boundaries of political exchange. In this regard, culture in Singapore has become more than ever a site for governmentality and control.     

Bringing Back the (B)order: Post‐9/11 Politics of Immigration,Borders, and Belonging in the Contemporary US South

Abstract: Post 9/11, debates about borders, immigration, and belonging have reached a new intensity in the US South. The temporal overlap of growing immigration to the South since the late 1990s and growing nativist sentiment across the US since 9/11 has led southern communities to fuse new regional racial demographics to new national border anxieties. This convergence enables southern political elites to address the changing contours of local communities through recourse to national imperatives of border security, all the while avoiding an explicit language of race in a thoroughly racialized debate. In an analysis of recent political maneuvers in the South, this article examines what happens when debates about nation, community, and borders are relocated to southern spaces heretofore absent in discussions of immigration. It argues that legislative actions against immigrant populations in southern states are virulent and multi‐scalar border policings in which concerns about the social and cultural boundaries of southern communities, new racial projects across the South, and post‐9/11 immigrant anxieties across the US become inseparable. To conclude, it discusses the theoretical insight that this critical assessment of the South's new border projects offers vis‐à‐vis understandings of, and struggles against, exclusion, racism, and social injustice.     

当代加拿大华人精英参政模型分析

论文将当代加拿大华人精英的参政情况概括为五种模型：选举型和委任型、全国型和地方型、象征型和实在型、主流政党型和华人政党型及华人选票型和非华人选票型,并运用这五种参政模型对当代加拿大华人精英的参政情况进行归纳与分析。认为华人精英无论采取何种模型参与加拿大政治,只要能成功进入主流社会,对改善华人在加拿大社会的公共政治形象,提高他们的社会政治地位和维护他们的合法权利都十分有益,对华裔新生代未来参与政治的热情也是一个激励。     

Gellner redux?

The work of Ernest Gellner continues to be an influential part of nationalism studies. A recent appraisal has raised questions about the argument that Gellner offered in his central text on nationalism, Nations and Nationalism. This article takes up other issues in Gellner's work on nationalism. The article examines Gellner's influential definition of nationalism and the interpretation that he placed on that definition, as well as his treatment of ‘political cohabitation’. It also pays more attention to Gellner's later work, namely, Gellner's discussion of ‘the time zones of nationalism’. The paper draws on secondary literature but its primary purpose is to assess the coherence of Gellner's arguments.     

中国特色政党制度与社会的关系

政党与社会的关系是政党政治的基本关系之一。政党制度作为政党政治的实现形式,是社会不断发展的产物,同时它又对社会发展产生着重大影响。在我国,中国特色政党制度与社会主义社会的关系,除具有一般政党制度与社会的关系外,还具体表现为中国特色政党制度与社会利益群体、社会资源和社会意识形态的关系。