Gestural Politics: Civil Society in “ New” Singapore

Abstract

This paper offers a short history of the term and discourse of civil society in Singapore: from its promulgation by then Minister of information and the Arts (MITA) George Yeo as civic society (in the 1990s) to its reassertion as a government vision statement calling for active citizenship and public participation and feedback (from 1999). In 2004, in the lead-up to the installation of the city-state's third Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, civil society has been re-framed and re-branded with political buzzwords like openness and inclusiveness. This paper argues that while to some extent, engagement with the concept of civil society has become a political necessity in the Singapore, the appropriation and propagation of such new rhetoric remains by and large gestural. In the final analysis, this paper posits that gestural politics — where the liberal gestures of the regime is more important than its substance — remains the most meaningful way of understanding the role and direction of civil society in Singapore.