In recent years Singapore has become a sort of synonym for national autarchy. Politicians in numerous countries have viewed it as a state that successfully competes for its place at the top of the international market, without giving up its independence and without digressing from the accepted dogmas of free trade. Thus, Singapore presents a possible solution to the conflict between the supremacy of national sovereignty and the supremacy of the global market. The turn towards Singapore in the current political discourse reveals an unresolved conflict in the contemporary right between the tendency to surrender to the “scientific” formulas of success of neoclassical economics and the establishment of the politics of “national greatness.”
This article analyzes the role of Singapore in the contemporary political discourse and focuses on the Israeli Singapore program presented by Naftali Bennett and the British program “Singapore on the Thames.” A careful examination shows that the Singapore discourse does not maintain logical reason but uses it as a kind of image that does not obey the law of non-contradiction, as a powerful image that is meant to convey a message without convincing on the factual level, or, in other words, a myth. The deeper we delve into the Singapore myth, we will see that the success of the actual Singapore only emphasizes the contradiction between national populism in its present iteration and a policy of market supremacy, which still serves as the basis of the economic platforms of most of the conservative movements in the developed world. The article will explain why right-wing politicians persist in feeling the need to turn to that myth, and indicate some possible implications of the paradoxes therein for the political thought of different parts of the political spectrum.
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