Alan Chong

Singaporean foreign policy and the Asian Values Debate, 1992–2000: reflections on an experiment in soft power

Between 1992 and 2000, the international order witnessed a clash of discourses not seen since the height of the Cold War when both superpowers engaged in propaganda offensives to assert the superiority of their respective governing ideologies. However, unlike the Cold War, the Asian Values Debate did not involve a supporting cast of armed occupations, insurgencies and the preaching of revolution. It involved instead statements of difference couched in intellectual and material terms, and also relied heavily on persuasion by words and symbolic deeds. This article seeks to evaluate Singaporean foreign policy in the Asian Values Debate by using the concept of soft power as described by Joseph Nye. However, soft power, as the ability to obtain foreign policy ends through attraction or convincing rather than through coercion, is itself vulnerable to instances where the ideas propounded diverge from the practices they purport to inspire. Singapore’s role in the Debate will be examined through three events at its zenith between 1992 and 2000: the clash between Asia and the West at the 1993 United Nations World Conference on Human Rights at Vienna, the Michael Fay Caning Affair which directly pitted Singapore against the US in 1994, and the fate of the Asian exceptionalist argument in the face of the 1997–99 Asian Financial Crisis. The conclusion suggests that Singaporean foreign policy’s experiment in soft power has had its successes, but it remains qualified in its applicability to other Asian foreign policies by certain limits inherent in the Singaporean discourse.

A Universal Sacred Mission and the Universal Secular Organization: The Holy See and the United Nations

Today, the Holy See has formal diplomatic relations with almost all states around the globe as well as with the United Nations (UN), where it holds the curious position of a Permanent Observer. Representing a universal sacred mission, the Holy See views the UN as one of the most important avenues in international relations for pursuing its aims. Vatican diplomats have thus been at the forefront of lobbying for human dignity at the UN in various conferences and popes have even directly addressed the UNs General Assembly. In examining relations between the Holy See and the UN, at least two issues are obvious and of primary importance. First, both institutions share a universal approach – the latter to represent all states of the world and the Holy See to represent all Catholics. Furthermore, both preach to their constituencies that they represent a universal idealist mission – to pursue peace and work towards the universalization of human rights. Second, the Holy See enjoys a Permanent Observer status within the UN and also a seemingly privileged status among all other religious communities. By adopting short studies of the Holy Sees interventions in three dimensions of human rights advocacy at the UN, along with its supplement of the UNs mission in correcting capitalist development, the article concludes that the Catholic religion has returned in a role that reaffirms the possibilities of enhancing society on a globalist scale rather than merely reinforcing an international society of sovereign states.

Introduction: the foreign policy power of small states

Small states are by no means powerless. However, they are traditionally seen as lacking so much in the conventional dimensions of power that they are deemed inconsequential in international relations—hence the peculiar terminology of Great Powers, Middle Powers, and small states. Certainly, as recent scholarship has noted, Realist international thought seems to have coloured the policy options of small states to the point of acting as an analytical straightjacket (Gleason et al 2008). We maintain that the above viewpoint has in fact always been incomplete and is now, in the twenty-first century, obsolete. The challenge lies in identifying the often particular and unconventional sources of small states’ foreign policy power (Thorhallsson and Wivel 2006; Browning 2006). This selection of articles wishes to further stimulate the study of small states by focusing on innovative and critical approaches in accounting for the foreign policy power of small states. The discourse on innovative approaches to capture the particular and unique features of small states’ foreign policy has been insufficiently conceptualized and analyzed. We attempt to address this in part by applying the term ‘foreign policy power of small states’, which was carefully selected to emphasize the multiple dimensions, or possibilities, of power exercise. In light of this, the contributors explore ‘power’ through their particular expertise, and bring these explorations to bear on the instrumental capabilities of small states in steering their fortunes amidst a seemingly forbidding structure of international society. Some of the early literature on the smallest members of the society of states has merely hinted at the unconventionality of power exercised by these actors in institutionalized multilateral settings (Schou and Brundtland 1971; Handel 1981), or even within fluid balances of power (Fox 1959). The ongoing instabilities of the post-Cold War era, compounded by the trends of political, social and economic globalization, have added urgency to this quest for new scholarship. Indeed the selection of articles presented here ranges broadly, to varying degrees of emphases, over all the standard textbook entries on foreign policy power: diplomatic, economic, propaganda and the military. The three articles by Chong, Braveboy-Wagner, and Wivel and Noe Oest leave no doubt that small states’ foreign policy power is active in international society. It is even possible to claim that when such power is exerted, it stabilizes international order by addressing humanitarian and moral issues that larger states have condoned. By joining coalitions of the willing, or simply initiating targeted blueprints for regionalism, small states are demonstrating their subtle steering capabilities. Chong’s thesis of small state soft power acting to ‘virtually enlarge’ the former’s diplomatic space suggests that soft power is a viable tool for deployment by militarily-challenged states. Weakness should never automatically equate to haplessness. Chong’s controversial choice of applying case studies of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Volume 23, Number 3, September 2010

The post-international challenge to foreign policy: signposting ‘plus non-state’ politics

To scholars researching the connections between international relations and globalisation, such as those in the five books reviewed here, ‘foreign policy’ is becoming functionally and descriptively rivalled in a globalising context. Foreign policy, once the theoretically exclusive prerogative of the nation-state, is violated daily by new developments in non-state actorness arising from transnational technical and welfare issues such as trade, finance, labour standards and environmentalism. These books under review introduce the displacement lexicon of transnational politics, global civil society, non-state resistance and complexity into policymaking consciousness; in short, the post-international era. The conclusion proposes to tease out the preliminary outlines of the post-international challenge to foreign policy on the basis of ‘plus non-state’ actor-interest considerations.

Information Warfare?: The Case for an Asian Perspective on Information Operations

While information warfare (IW) has been treated by its foremost western proponents as a strategic revolution, the reasons for such a claim are actually rather weak if one considers how non-western approaches to the informational components of warfare have put forth their positions within a multidimensional context of strategy. This article ventures an Asian perspective that can potentially offer a more nuanced contribution to the study of IW. This article will pan out by first critically analyzing the predominantly American interpretation of IW as a set of five characteristics that can be contrasted to an Asian rival. Subsequently, we will elaborate a list of features likely to characterize a generic Asian IW approach, which I will argue, is more appropriately termed information operations (IO). These Asian IO features will be teased out through a reading of Sun Tzu, Mao Zedong, and Vo Nguyen Giap. An Asian IO approach will not distinguish wartime and peacetime applications, and neither will it place a premium on liberal democratic ideology as a basis for information superiority.

Singapore and the Soft Power Experience

Soft power is a product of nurture. It is the ability to get others to want what you want through cooptation or appeal, as opposed to hard, coercive power (Nye Jr., 2004). This is practically applicable to both small and large states alike, but for the former, it requires the transformation of political size and an intense trial of communitarian will. Given the ambit of the discussion covered in the Commonwealth Secretariat Report A Future for Small States — Overcoming Vulnerability published in 1997, soft power is a logical panacea for vulnerability. This report noted that ‘vulnerability is … the consequence of the interaction of two sets of factors: (1) the incidence and intensity of risk and threat, and (2) the ability to withstand risks and threats (resistance) and to “bounce back” from their consequences (resilience)’ (Commonwealth Secretariat, 1997: 13). Furthermore, it observed that small states’ security starts at home. Social cohesion in most small states is a major resource which adds to resilience and lessens internal insecurity. Small states exhibit an enviable record of political stability. While this is to be welcomed there is no room for complacency, since if order does break down in small states conflict can quickly ‘escalate beyond the survival of a particular regime to the survival of the core values of the society itself’ (Commonwealth Secretariat, 1997: xi).

An Unfinished ‘Diplomacy of Encounter’ – Asia and the West 1500–2015

Asian diplomatic practices consistently frustrate western policymakers. This, I argue, is due in large part to cultural factors and the differences in interpreting political modernization. I will identify the features that contribute to a ‘diplomacy of encounter’ by, firstly, performing a historical reading of early indigenous annals that treat diplomacy in Asia, as well as of Jesuit and Portuguese encounters with Asia in the 1500s and 1600s; secondly, by reading a sample of nationalist tracts from Asia between the late 1800s and 1960s; and, thirdly, by reading the practices of ASEAN and wider Asia-Pacific regionalism between the 1990s and 2000s. It is only through discourse analysis of the Foucaultian variety that one can tease out the cultural and modernization-related road bumps in so-called ‘modern Asian diplomacy’. This study hopes to contribute to enhancing appreciation of the ongoing procedural and substantive tensions between Asian states and their western, and mostly developed, dialogue partners.

Smart Power and Military Force: An Introduction

Abstract Smart power is comprised of two elements: the quest for building society among states and between states and non-state actors; as well as the desire for cleaner forms of power projection. This special issue explores how states continue to fumble over achieving the optimum mix of hard and soft power across several country cases and themed articles. This set of contributions suggests that smart power is not unlike a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ analogy: multifunctional and challenging to choose the right combination of ideational and material tools.

Militarizing civilians in Singapore: preparing for ‘Crisis’ within a calibrated nationalism1

ABSTRACT The Singaporean polity has created the ‘militarized civilian’. This policy phenomenon beckons the question: How is this cross-fertilization carried out in Singapores civil–military relations? Militarization is in the first sense meant to inculcate a calibrated dual personality within the civilian whereby being an effective soldier requires indulging in simulated military suffering as a badge of pride; at the same time, the citizen soldier has to believe that military and civilian values are perfectly interchangeable and contribute equally to the maintenance of peace. In a second sense, militarization is equally about permanently ritualizing sacrifices for a communitarian defence. We argue that while mostly successful, militarization also produces the tension arising from the need to appear pugnaciously vigilant while avoiding the casualties that must logically arise from heightened simulated combat. This tension is explained through two dimensions of ongoing crises: the parameters of a politically dramatized National Service ritual; and the constant propaganda of geopolitical dangers threatening the Republic.

Security competition by proxy: Asia Pacific interstate rivalry in the aftermath of the MH370 incident

ABSTRACT When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared from radar screens in the early hours of 8 March 2014, initial reactions suggesting that it was just another airliner disaster proved only partially correct. This article offers the interpretation that the multinational search effort for the missing Malaysian Boeing 777-200 airliner was revelatory of an abridged form of security competition among the mostly Pacific Rim states participating in both the post mortem and the search and rescue (SAR) operations. Although the Asia Pacific peace has been largely unbroken since the end of the Cold War, security competition among great powers, middle powers and weak states is still ongoing. In fact, this security competition is taking on proxy forms given the relative robustness of the overlapping architecture of Pacific Rim security regionalism in tamping down pressures for overt armed conflict to advance national security interests. MH370, following in the wake of the destruction wrought by natural disasters since the early 2000s, has provoked a competition in technological prowess in SAR operations, and more broadly, in quasi-civilian humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) capabilities amongst Pacific Rim states that have overlapping claims on the South China Sea and with interests in revising existing patterns of diplomatic order.