The Future of Universities

Image of Oxford University

Photo: Sidharth Bhatia / Unsplash

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many universities conducting their classes online. This shift has sparked a debate on whether students should pay full tuition fees and, more broadly, the changes universities should implement in response to the pandemic.

But there is a more pressing debate to be had: the need for universities to embrace interdisciplinary explorations in order to tackle the problems that we face, which are often complex and filled with uncertainty.

In a recent essay, our executive director, Jan W. Vasbinder, argues that the uncertainty that is brought by the pandemic has punctured a long-held assumption that we are generally in control, and the research done by our universities would eventually solve whatever problems may arise.

On the contrary, the increasing specialisation of university departments into disciplinary silos and the consequent funding model meant that problems are often defined within discrete disciplinary boundaries. This results in universities being ill-equipped to tackle these problems as they are not so neatly defined in actual context. Such a trajectory, as Vasbinder puts it, is a “reduced reality” and this illusion has “come to haunt us”.

He then goes on to elaborate the disconnect between the universities and real-world problems from the perspective of evolution, exploration, and exploitation. This is to trace back why universities went on the trajectory it did with a warning that if it does not evolve and adapt, universities—like many other things in evolution—will soon be extinct.

Vasbinder also provides sketch of the qualities a future leader should have and that universities should strive to inculcate these values in their students. Taking the Santa Fe Institute as an example, he explains how universities should collaborate with such smaller institutions in order to stimulate students to think and explore across boundaries.


Click the icon to read the full essay.


The future of universities is an abiding theme that Para Limes is keen to explore. We have plans to organise a conference entitled, ‘What if There Were No Universities?’, in the near future which will touch on the themes explored in the essay.

Help us realise our mission to bring together experts from various fields and industries to discuss the direction higher education should take:

Para Limes Returns to Europe

Para Limes stopped its Singaporean activities in April 2018. It formally restarted in Europe in September 2018, but it took the first 18 months to get itself reacquainted with the European scene and find a basis from which to launch new activities. Now it is back, in a different setting and in a world that is facing change and uncertainty as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds.

In Singapore, Para Limes was funded by Nanyang Technological University (NTU). While working under the umbrella of its president, Bertil Andersson, it developed a unique brand of conferences and workshops. These events focused on different ways to look at complex systems by illuminating characteristic aspects of complexity (see past events to get an idea of the width, depth and quality of these conferences). Para Limes aimed to identify burning questions and crystalise new ways of doing science to address them. In the process, it built a unique network with world class speakers (scientists, artists, philosophers and people of practice) who think and operate far beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplines and organisational silos.

That network forms the basis for the activities Para Limes is developing in Europe. To give it a legal umbrella, Para Limes set up a not-for-profit foundation under Dutch law with a simple governance structure. At the same time, it looked for secure and independent funding. Hence, we opened the possibility for you to support us financially.

Dealing with complexity is what Para Limes is about. In Singapore, its focus was naturally drawn to essential questions related to complexity and complexity science. In Europe, its focus has shifted to existential problems. To find effective ways to address such problems, we need to recognise them for what they are: manifestations of the unpredictable behavior of complex systems. Any planned interference with such a system that does not take into account and respect its complexity, is bound to fail and cause unexpected problems.

In the 2013 Para Limes conference, A Crude Look at the Whole, the late Murray Gell-Mann approached it like this: “Our world can be seen as a huge complex system consisting of an enormous number of interacting natural, social and artificial complex systems. We cannot successfully analyse this system “by determining in advance a set of properties or aspects that are studied separately and then recombining those partial approaches in an attempt to form a picture of the whole. Instead, it is necessary to look at the whole system, even if it means taking a crude look, and then allowing possible simplifications to emerge from the work”.

Taking crude looks at the whole will be the focus of Para Limes activities in the coming years. An indication of such activities are the ideas for future events.

Jan W. Vasbinder is the Executive Director of Para Limes.

Complexity: The Comic

Complexity is not an easy topic to explain. Comic strips may actually help!

Sarah C. Firth has developed a set of comics to do just that. She is an award winning artist, writer and creative entrepreneur.

Here’s a preview of the first page:

To view the comics in its entirety, please visit the Complexity Science Hub website here (

Buying Time: A conference, two books and the urgency for a follow-up

Climate change and the urgency for action

In December 2016 the conference “Disrupted Balance- Society at Risk” happened in Singapore. It dealt with the resilience of societies in the face of major disruptions. There were twelve speakers, each uniquely qualified to address this issue. They talked about disruptions in the food supply, water management, governance, the financial system and its effects on society, and about disruptions due to natural disasters or from emerging infectious diseases, terror and cybercrime, collapsing infrastructure and lack of leadership.

These speakers, who did not know each other beforehand, came up with a remarkable coherent message:

  • Unless we do something, humanity is heading for a hard crash.
  • We have the knowledge to avoid that, but we need to act.
  • The question is: What to do, how to do it and where to start?

The book Disrupted Balance – Society at Riskis the collection of the edited talks given at the conference.

The book “The Stockholm Paradigm, climate change and emerging disease”answers to the above questions for the case of the growing threat posed by emerging infectious diseases.

The conference

Disruptions happen all the time. Floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, climate fluctuations, famine, war and pandemics are part of human history. Throughout history the impact of such disruptions were felt mostly locally or regionally, while temporal or cascading effects went largely unnoticed. Disruptions will continue to happen, but there will be more and the impact will be worse than in the past. Why?

Because of the growth of the world population, the increasing and intensifying global connectivity, the unexpected consequences of collective human consumption and behavior, and especially as a result of the synergy between these developments. That synergy has lead to a human induced climate change that has become a driving force common to the global threat of disruptions in the production of our food supplies, of pandemics, the availability of water and the sustainability of a large number of megacities.

As a result of this synergy, the number and intensity of disruptions will increase and their global impact will grow, even more so because of the accelerating development and impact of technology, the growing dependence of our trading and support systems on the integrity of cyberspace, the failing global financial system and the vulnerability of our social fabric to terrorism and populism.

These threats of disruptions and their effects on society are exacerbated by the fact that governance is at risk. Our local, national and international institutions do not know how to deal with the consequences and implications of the accelerating interconnectedness and complexity of our globe. Nor do they know how to make full use of the knowledge about disruptions that has been accumulated through science. Finally, there is a shortage of leaders who dare to expect the unexpected and prepare the world for the unthinkable.

If nothing is done, these collective developments undermine the resilience of our society and will inevitably lead humanity to a crash. On this, the speakers of the conference showed an amazing unanimity.

That is the pessimistic side of the story. If we do nothing, humankind is heading for a crash. That will be a hard crash from which it will be very hard to recover, because the abundance of resources that has enabled the development of the technological infrastructure that supports our society is now gone. It is gone because our society has consumed it. And we are running out of time! We need to create time.

The more optimistic side of the story is, that that crash does not have to be. In fact, we have the knowledge, both in science and engineering, to avoid mayor disruptions or mitigate their consequences. And we can buy us time to ensure humanity will make a soft landing, in which our technological infrastructure remains intact while we remedy the problems we have caused for ourselves over the last century. We need to create and execute actions plans that give us an answer to the questions: what to do, how to do it and where to start.

The books

The book “The Stockholm Paradigm, climate change and emerging diseases” gives an answer to these questions for the case of the growing threat posed by emerging infactiuous diseases.

New diseases show up almost daily. This is happening much faster than it should according to the old and dominant paradigm that says that ecologically specialized pathogens, that are strongly co-adapted to their hosts, should not be able to “change allegiances” easily. However, we now know that, given the opportunity, pathogens have the capacity to switch hosts. Climate change, changing demographics and the increasing mobility and interconnectedness of the rapidly growing number of people on the globe, offer such opportunities. As a result, pathogens are moving to new hosts.

This is creating a growing threat of emerging infectious diseases that may result in pandemics that could kill a substantial part of humanity. Such pandemics could wreck the technological infrastructure that keeps our societies vital and thriving. To lower the risk of such a hard crash we must find ways to ensure a soft landing. To do that, we must get the human population down, while keeping our technological infrastructure intact. Time is critical, because the likelihood of a pandemic is growing every day. In other words we need to buy time in which we must work on systemic approaches to counter the threat of pandemics or to mitigate its consequences. And we can, and we know what to do!

One of the key problems we must resolve in that time is that we know only 10% of the potential pathogens on the planet and we do not know which of the 90% unknown pathogens might be the ones that may cause a pandemic. This must change quickly and drastically. For that we need taxonomists and we need to assess the threat to determine on which of the pathogens we should focus.

Once we know which pathogens are the most threatening we can start to do something about mitigating their impact. We can monitor the threatening pathogens that we identified. For that we need population geneticists, and a variety of specialist like the ones that can do mathematical modeling. And we need community involvement.

We must also integrate human activities on multiple scales, from citizen scientists to world-renowned specialists to government policy makers. All this can be done. It will not be cheap or easy, and life will never be the same, but it is feasible, and it may be essential for the survival of technological humanity.

The book Disrupted Balance – Society at Risk describes similar examples regarding disruptions caused by natural disasters, by discontinuities in the food supply or water management, or by a failure of governance, the break down of the financial system, the threat of terrorism and cybercrime, or the lack of leadership. That book presents a view on the future for mankind that can be summarized in one sentence: Humanity faces big threats, but there are ways to deal with those threats and to avoid the disasters they foreshadow.

All the speakers of the conference in December 2016 alluded to ways to avoid such disasters or to mitigate their consequences and argued that we have the knowledge and technology to do so. They said, is short:

  1. We have the knowledge to improve the urban infrastructure to mitigate the results of natural disasters.
  2. We know how to make the food system more resilient. To do this requires concerted strategic actions, a “whole of government” approach, and better international governance.
  3. We know what needs to be done to manage the water on this globe to ensure that there is enough for everyone and for all its functions and we have the knowledge and technology to do it. And we know that applying that knowledge it is not so much an intellectual issue, as it is an emotional issue.
  4. We must raise awareness to the cyber threats. There is a role for government and education in this, and there is great opportunity for grass-root actions.

For such actions to take effect in an organic way, governments and policy must relinquish control in a decentralized fashion.

We know what needs to be done. So why are we not already doing it on a global scale? Here are some reasons given by the speakers:

  1. Individual human nature is such that it seems not to be willing or able to see the (black) elephant in the room.
  2. Long term inevitability does not draw as much attention by governments as short term problems, needs and electoral cycles do. So, while our knowledge of pathogens that may potentially cause a pandemic can rapidly be increased by a concerted effort on a global scale, getting governments and international institutions to act on the notion that this issue is key to sustaining our technological infrastructure, is short in coming.
  3. The nature and dynamics of the changes that governments and international institutions have to deal with, like changing demographics, rapid and accelerating technological transformations and growing interconnectivity, are beyond their capability and capacity to manage.
  4. There is an enormous and unknown territory between what we know that can be done technologically and the incentives and motivations for politicians and decision makers to do it.
  5. Governments and policy makers have great difficulty in relinquishing control in a decentralized fashion, and letting reactions take place in an organic, bottom up way.
  6. Education is not focused on making young people aware of the pending threats to their existence and the ways they can play a role in diminishing those threats. Nor is there a way to educate leaders so that they dare to expect the unexpected and prepare the world for the unthinkable.

All this and much more was discussed during the conference. To get a sense of that remarkable conference and the message it conveyed, read the books.

Follow up

That message was so coherent and strong that it cried for a follow up. That is now taking shape through a workshop to be held in January 2020. The purpose of that wortklshop is to produce some forceful action plans.

These plans will be proposed in the spirit of supporting and extending the reports of the recent IPCC, UN@75, Global Commission on Adaptation, Global Health and Lancet reports. These reports focus heavily on issues of food, water and energy but fall short of addressing the problems associated with urbanization and emerging disease. Also, these reports do not adequately show the interdependence of all these threat multipliers. Finally, the reports do not propose action plans of sufficient focus.

The workshop will foucs on two interconnected action plans – one dealing with emerging disease and one dealing with urbanization. The written version of each plan would begin with a discussion of the reason why the topic is of importance and why it is connected with global climate change. They would then progress to an assessment of the threat multipliers (for disease, this would be water-borne, food-borne, population density-dependent, and vector-borne diseases) and finally an action plan for mitigating the impacts of those threats. In the case of emerging diseases, this involves implementing proactive measures (what we call anticipate to mitigate) designed to reduce the cost of emerging diseases sufficiently that humanity can “buy time” for other measures to work.

The action plans will be widely published and distributed and will form the starting point for the conference “Buying Time, to be organized somewhere next year.

New Book: Grand Challenges for Science in the 21st Century

We are very pleased to announce the publication of our new title, “Grand Challenges for Science in the 21st Century.”

This interesting book is a compilation of the lectures and discussions held during a four-day event — Grand Challenges for Science in the 21st Century — organized by Para Limes at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

The elite group of speakers included Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner who called on all scientists to adopt a truth-seeking approach and not be afraid of challenging assumptions. The other panellists were Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and past President of the Royal Society, the much-cited Terrence Sejnowski from the renowned Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the well-known keynote speaker in economics and complexity sciences Brian Arthur, the former President of the European Research Council Helga Nowotny and the Director of the Parmenides Center for the Conceptual Foundations of Science Eors Szathmary.

The lively sessions were moderated by the Danish writer Tor Norretranders. The panel tackled topics from evolution and the origin of the universe to modern technologies and artificial intelligence. The challenges presented during the event are bound to get the reader thinking about what may lie ahead in our future.

To order this title, please visit

Transcript of “A Crude Look at the Whole” by Murray Gell-mann

This talk was given on 4 March 2013 at the conference, “A Crude Look at the Whole,” at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Murray Gell-Mann
Trustee, Science Board and Distinguished Fellow, Santa Fe Institute



It’s a pleasure to be able to discuss with this distinguished group the idea of a “Crude Look at the Whole”. I gave the talk with that title some years ago, under the auspices of the Pardee Centre for the study of the longer-range future at Boston University. There was a conference on looking ahead, and I was asked to give the keynote talk at the dinner.  I would like to begin today by expanding on that the title, “Crude Look at the Whole”. Many of the points that I treat here, were discussed in my book, “The Quark and The Jaguar”, which I’m glad to say is still mostly relevant, even 19 or 20 years after publication.

Over the years, I’ve organized some meetings devoted to aspects of the longer-range future and I’ve seen how difficult it is to get most intellectuals to discuss future situations that are significantly different in some way from what we’ve already seen in the recent past or the present. As an example of reluctance to consider big changes, we might take the widespread failure to believe that the Soviet Menace came with an early expiration date. Usually the intellectuals to whom I refer end up talking not about major departures from present conditions but rather about relatively small ones now that’s not a bad thing to do but it’s not what we mean by peering into the longer-range future. Despite my limited experience, I was able to share some ideas with the scholars at that meeting and I’ll share a few of them with you.

Until now, a great deal of research and teaching in the sciences and the humanities, especially in universities, is confined to individual departments representing particular fields of knowledge, while specialization and then some specialization are inevitable and necessary desirable they need to be supplemented by research and teaching to transcend those sometimes narrow disciplinary boundaries. There are a number of institutions inside and outside of universities where such transdisciplinary activities are carried out. The Santa Fe Institute which I helped to found 20 years ago and where I now work is devoted entirely to such activities. There, the study of transdisciplinary problems by self-organized teams of people, originally trained in many diverse specialties is the rule rather than the exception. Similarities in connections among topics in very different fields are recognized and exploited. The participants may have started as experts in subjects from the physical sciences, life sciences, social and behavioral sciences, history, or the other humanities. They take part in discussions of all sorts of topics each team does include of course at least one real expert in the particular subject matter under consideration. If nobody knows anything, you don’t get very far.

I’ve often spoken in public about the need for such research and about institutional arrangements for getting it done. What I have to say this morning may sound similar, but it concerns a very different topic, so one has to listen very closely to hear the difference. That topic has to do with broad policy studies concerned with the whole future of the human race, and of the biosphere of our planet including the other species with which we share that biosphere. Here is the point the difference in considering any very complex system.

We naturally tend to break it up into more manageable subsystems, or aspects defined in advance, and to study those separately. Looking at the longer-term future we might divide the various issues into such categories as, take a particular list; military and diplomatic issues, foreign affairs, political issues, ideological issues, environmental issues, human health and wellness issues, family issues, demographic issues, economic issues, etc.

In each of these categories, there are experts who have built their careers around the issues involved and there are NGOs and government departments devoted to these. As a citizen you might join one of the NGOs. It’s natural and common to try to break up the world problematique, as some people call it. The difficulty is that understanding a nonlinear system, by putting together descriptions of various parts or aspects will work only if they interact weakly. So that the system, as a whole, is what’s called decomposable and that’s not true of the world problematique. It’s very far from being decomposable, and studying various aspects and trying to put those together into a complete picture is it’s not possible.

So in that sense there’s truth in the old adage, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, which sounds on the face of it to be wrong but, it’s not. Look at the list of categories we discussed; can we really separate environmental issues from those involving population growth?

I’ll answer it, no!

Can we consider these in isolation from technological change or from economic policy? No!

Can we think about the attempts to alleviate extreme poverty, without considering the unwise environmentally destructive projects, that are sometimes carried out in the name of that worthy cause? Can we discuss issues of global governance, without considering politics in the various countries and regions, well without treating the competition and conflict among different ideologies? If military and diplomatic policies fail, and mankind is plunged into a hugely destructive war, perhaps involving thermonuclear weapons, can our other objectives be attained? Of course not!

Isn’t economic growth threatened by the widespread prevalence of fatal or debilitating diseases? Can we separate questions about democracy and human rights? Again, no! And what if democratic processes bring to power elements of society hostile to human rights and to tolerance, or ones that favor environmental destruction or aggressive war happen? Think how Adolf Hitler took power legally before destroying the whole democratic political system in Germany, or think of Klement Gottwald in Czechoslovakia. Remember some people make fun of naïve idealism about elections with the slogan “one man, one vote, one time.”

While separate considerations of the various aspects of the world situation is necessary and desirable, it very badly needs to be supplemented by integrative thinking, that not only puts together the studies of various aspects, but also takes into account the strong interactions among them.

We have to get rid somehow of the widespread idea that careful study of a problem in some narrow range of issues is the only kind of work to be taken seriously. It’s really a widespread impression. Integrated thinking is relegated to a cocktail party conversation, and that really has to change. We face that situation in a great many places in our society including academia, and most bureaucracies.

Some of my remarks on this subject were quoted by Tom Friedman near the beginning of one of his books, I think it’s the one called The Lexus and the Olive Tree. He came to a similar conclusion through his career working for the New York Times. He was assigned to cover one set of issues, and then a different set, then a third set. Each time he was reassigned, he observed that what he was covering was intimately connected with what he had been studying earlier. No one had told him that that would be so. So besides the work on the separate categories, we must have in addition, the work of teams of brilliant thinkers, many of them specialists devoted to considering the whole ball of wax, the whole thing. It can, of course, be argued that this is too big a job for any group of people, no matter how talented, or erudite to do really well and that’s true. Of course, such an ambitious aim can be accomplished crudely, and that’s why I refer to it as taking a crude look at the whole. If we insist on perfection the whole thing is doomed from the beginning.

Now the chief of any organization—say, a head of government, or a CEO—has to behave as if he or she is taking into account all the aspects of policy, including all the interactions among those aspects. Remember, I’m saying “as if”. It’s not so easy, however, for the chief to take a crude look at the whole if everyone else in the organization is concerned only with a partial look. Even if some advisors to the chief are assigned to look at the big picture, it doesn’t always work.

Here’s an example, some years ago the CEO of a gigantic corporation told me that he had a strategic planning staff to help him think about the future of the whole business, but then members of that staff suffered from three defects; One, they seemed largely disconnected from the rest of the company; Two, no one could understand what they said; Three, everyone else in the company seemed to hate them. I checked with several people high up in that company and got the same response. For an integrative effort to succeed, some kind of simplification is naturally required. Certain things have to be treated in a cursory fashion, and others in more detail. But that process, what physical scientists like to call coarse-graining, cannot be accomplished through the categories established in advance. It has to follow from the nature of the world system itself.

Rather, the necessary coarse-graining should be discovered, than imposed. Think of the relation between weather and climate; it’s a fairly common consideration, but I’m not sure that people are aware of what they’re saying when they talk about weather and climate. No clear results will follow from trying to examine the weather at each little place on earth with short time intervals, while neglecting the strong interaction with other phenomena. But much can be learned from a study of weather, suitably averaged over space and time, and treated along with such things as ocean currents; the nature and quantities of atmospheric pollutants; and the variations in solar radiation. Such a study can be immensely rewarding, but it’s essential to find the right coarse-graining of the weather, and the other phenomena for obtaining a useful definition of climate.

We didn’t talk only about policy studies. Integrated thinking can be promoted by thinking about history in similar ways to what has just been recommended for policy studies. In fact, they sort of go together, and reflections on history can be very useful in considering what to do about policy. One trend that’s encouraging is the increase in popularity of big history. Instead of laughing at it being ridiculously over-ambitious. One can try to show some sympathy with people who try to study big history. When Arnold Toynbee just after the Second World War published a study of history, many of his colleagues were not very impressed with the 12-volume book. He could, of course, be criticized for making a mistake here and there, and describing the rise and fall of some 21 civilizations. And he could be lampooned for implying that it was all leading up to the founding of the Anglican Church. That’s perhaps going a bit far, but wouldn’t it have been more constructive to help correct his errors, large and small, and try to build on his pioneering effort, rather than merely making fun of it. I don’t mind making fun of it, but one should be able to do something else as well. I think I’d like to think that nowadays some critics might be more charitable.

Another encouraging trend is the increased tolerance these days of contingency, what-if history or counterfactual history, as respected historians are now engaging in the study of counterfactual history. Alternative scenarios for the future are like a branching tree, with major branchings at the special points, where chance has a huge effect or important transitions occur. One can try to estimate probabilities at the branchings. What are the possible situations and, roughly, what are their probabilities? Does thinking about such structures help us to identify occasions of great policy leverage with respect to the future?

Well, I like to discuss many of the issues facing the world, under the rubric of sustainability, one of today’s favorite catch words. It’s rarely defined in a careful or consistent way. So perhaps, I can be forgiven by attaching to it my own set of meanings. Broadly conceived, sustainability refers to quality of human life and quality of the environment not purchased mainly at the expense of the future. Sustainability is not restricted to environmental demographic and economic matters, but it also refers to political, military, diplomatic, social, institutional or governance issues. Ultimately, sustainability depends on the ideological issues and lifestyle choices. As used here, sustainability refers not only to sustainable population economic activity and ecological integrity, but also to a considerable extent to such matters as sustainable peace and global security arrangements, sustainable preparedness for possible conflict, sustainable democracy and human rights, and sustainable communities and institutions. All of these are closely interlinked in the presence of destructive war. It’s hardly possible to protect nature very effectively, or to keep some important human social ties from dissolving if huge and conspicuous inequalities are present. People will be reluctant to restrain quantitative economic growth in favor of equality of growth as would be required to achieve a measure of economic and environmental sustainability.

Very often, I claim that sustainability is intimately tied to the notion of restraining quantitative growth in favor of qualitative growth. We see that in mostly in wealthy countries, a lot of resources are devoted to quality, and that’s different that you a different situation from that of countries with very large impoverished populations, where the poverty cries out for quantitative growth. It’s hard to recommend a future in which growth is all qualitative when so many people are poor, but as countries achieve a certain degree of economic success, they can better afford to divert resources from quantitative growth to qualitative growth. At the same time, great inequalities may provide the excuse for demagogues to exploit or revive ethnic or class hatreds, and provoke deadly conflict. In The Quark and the Jaguar, I suggested studies should be done on possible paths toward sustainability. In this very general sense, in the course of the 21st century, in the spirit of taking a crude look at the whole, this goes beyond trying to estimate the probabilities of various likely scenarios in the future. Rather, one would look for more sustainable futures, even if they seem to have low probabilities. As we think of them as desirable, it’s worth studying desirable situations, that to which we can’t assign very high likelihood, but somehow, we can make them happen. I like to employ a modified version of a schema introduced by my friend James Gustave Speth. Gustave Speth who was president of the World Resources Institute and was later the head of the United Nations Development Program. He was, for a long time, the Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale. The schema involves a set of interlink transitions that has to occur, if the world is to switch over from present trends toward a more sustainable situation. Well then, I have long comments on these various transitions, which I don’t think I should repeat here, but I can mention some of the names of these transitions. The demographic transition to a roughly stable human population worldwide and in each broad region; technological transition to methods of supplying human needs; and satisfying human desires with a much lower environmental impact per person at a given level of conventional prosperity that depends on technology.

Decades ago, some of us pointed out the obvious fact that a measure of environmental impact, say in a given geographical area, can be usefully factored into three quantities multiplied together so you get an identity. The three factors are; population, conventionally measured prosperity per person, and the environmental impact per person per unit of conventional prosperity. So the last factor is the one as we just said that depends particularly on technology. Its technological change that has permitted today’s giant human population to exist at all. While billions of people are desperately poor, quite a few others manage to live in reasonable comfort due to advances in science and technology, including medicine. The environmental costs have been huge, but nowhere near as great as they may be in the future, if the human race does not exercise some foresight. Technology, if properly harnessed, can work to make the third factor, the one that depends on technology, as small as can be practically arranged, given the laws of nature. How much the prosperity factor can be increased without damaging the environment depends to a considerable extent on how much is squandered on the first factor. Mere numbers of people are evidence that the beginning of the technological transition has started to show up in many places.

The economic transition to a situation where humanity is not living on nature’s capital, but mainly on the interest on that capital is very important. Let’s live on nature’s interests, not nature’s capital. Imagine a visitor to a little New England village who notices an old man walking down the street, a man whom everyone shuns. Children run away at his approach, people cross the street to avoid meeting him. The visitor asked his host who is that and, why is he treated that way. The answer is “Oh, that’s Eustace Barnwell, he dipped into capital”. But the human race is using up capital and not just dipping into it. We are mining fresh water in places like the Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska. That’s, by the way, why President Obama insisted on changing the route of the Keystone pipeline, if it is ever to be approved, because it was running right by the Ogallala Aquifer. We’re wiping out gigantic forests at an almost unbelievable rate. We’re depleting many of the world’s fisheries. We’re using up clean air by polluting it. The economic transition, I said this already, can be described as one in which growth in quality gradually replaces growth in quantity, while extreme poverty which cries out for quantitative growth is alleviated. By the way, analysts are now beginning to use realistic measures of wellbeing that depart radically from narrow economic measures, by including mental and physical health education, and so forth. Happiness has become a serious subject of study by scientists, philosophers, and medical practitioners. In fact, many different kinds of people are seriously studying happiness. You remember that the former King of Bhutan talked about how his government was interested in was gross national happiness, not some narrow economic measure. Some of us are thinking of sponsoring a conference here in a year or two on happiness looked at in the modern way. It may be that some holy new insights can emerge.

Well I think I will leave the rest of these transitions to our discussion. What I wanted to do with this introductory talk was simply to get us into the general field. The rest of the transitions need to be thought about, but we don’t have to enumerate them here. Well, what we should do though, is look around the world for some examples of people trying to study aspects of a “Crude Look at the Whole”. What kind of progress is being made on that important task? Are there places? Are there schools of thought? Are there universities? Are there businesses? Are there arenas somewhere, where the crude look at the whole is being taken? Are there groups of people who are taking a crude look at the whole seriously, especially in connection with sustainability in the broad sense?

I think we have to look carefully for signs of this kind of thinking. It is too early for it to show itself in a dramatic way. We’ll have probably have to dig it out from amongst the various things that people are considering, but it might be worthwhile it might have a really worthwhile effect to, to start to do that. Are there places where the “Crude Look at the Whole” is taking seriously enough, so that people are making progress on it? There are a few examples of at least lip service to it. For example, people who think about what’s called world systems analysis such as Emmanuel Wallerstein who spent some time at Yale. Another man named Richard Robbins. Their works do not impress me particularly because it starts out from Marxist criticisms of capitalism, and goes on to criticisms of Marxist criticisms, but it keeps its roots somehow in the soil of Marxist critique, and I don’t find that particularly illuminating. But at least they’re trying to do something that’s integrative. Are there other examples? What about world modelers? I understand there’s a whole class of people who are thought of as world modelers, but I’m not really familiar with what they do, but here in this distinguished gathering, I’m sure there are several distinguished people, who can help us with this search to see what kinds of look crude looks at the whole are being taken today that might indicate something about the practical courses in such thinking for the future.

Thank you.

Sharon Siddique: Continuing the Postcolonial Debate

Samuel Chong’s thoughtful commentary on postcolonialism begins with a great title: “Never Can Say Goodbye: Colonialism’s Enduring Grip”. How true. I agree with much of what he says, and will focus a few thoughts on what I don’t agree with, or which I feel can be elaborated.

The overhang of perceived European superiority is indeed a postcolonial frozen moment. Samuel cites my observation that “many Singaporeans know London and New York better than, say, the neighbouring Indonesian cities of Palembang and Pekanbaru. This was part of her point that Singapore is most comfortable as a global city than a neighbourly one.” We don’t graavitate to London and New York solely because they are European, but because they are global, exciting, futuristic, and developed. They stand at the vanguard of the future. It is difficult to argue with the fact that for most, London is a lot more exciting than Pekanbaru.

And yet, Samuel makes a good point that with Singapore “assuming the Chairmanship of ASEAN in 2018, it is an excellent opportunity to promote inter-provincial interaction rather than established inter-state ties.” This supports the old property axiom that property value is about location, location, and location. Singapore is physically located in Southeast Asia, and therefore an interest in the region is important to national seurity and the value of cultivating and being located in a relatively prosperous and secure environment.

Samuel is clear that “although there are many factors in why less-developed countries are as they are, how much can we attribute them to the impact of past colonialism and present neo-colonialism?” I would argue quite a lot, and my point is that we should not ignore that fact. For me, we can clearly focus on past colonialism and understand it in its purely historial context, and we can use the term neo-colonialism. But is neo-colonialism synonymous with postcolonialism? I think not, and this could be an interesting debating point.

Samuel also introduces some value judgements regarding postcolonialism: “Upon reflection, even if we recognise not being ‘post-colonial’ as claimed, was colonialism and its ongoing legacy truly a bad thing? Going forward, how much of the post-colonial identity should we remember or even embrace? Would this do any good to post-colonial states? Or would it be better if we actively purged ‘post-colonial’ notions from our history and cultural identity altogether?”

I am uncomfortable with this line of argument because it assumes that we are consciously aware of these options. And my whole point is that we are not aware of our position within the (post) colonial. His title reflects this conclusion. Colonialism has indeed an enduring grip on our mindsets largely because it is not consciously recognised.

Dr Sharon Siddique is an Adjunct Professorial Fellow at Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)

Never Can Say Goodbye: Colonialism’s Enduring Grip

Imperial Federation of the British Empire, 1886. Photo: Norman B. Leventhal Map Center / Flickr

When we see the term “post-colonial”, we take it to mean where colonialism is of the past and no longer affects anything. However, the world as we know it took shape because of what European colonialism created. It continues to create developmental disparities and shapes our cultural perceptions. We often overlook the continuing colonial influences in these areas, but it prompts me to wonder if sovereignty is enough to be considered post-colonial, especially if the West continues to exert such an influence and control over the economics and identities of these post-colonial states.

In the November 2017 edition of the Singapore Platform for East-West Dialogue, Dr Sharon Siddique spoke about how colonialism continues to shape our personal, regional, and international views despite nation-states constantly pronouncing beliefs of being in a post-colonial era; nation-states are in a “post-colonial frozen moment” from which we have not completely moved on from.

Dr Siddique shared that the Singaporean identity, while unique, is the product of the British and Dutch carving up territories between themselves, resulting in Singapore “gradually losing its original connection in the Malay World”; could we then re-evaluate other nation-state identities in view of colonialism’s legacy?

Moreover, by thinking that Singapore’s history only begins in 1819 with Raffles’ arrival, we fail to see the bigger picture of colonial politicking and our traditional, pre-colonial ties to the greater Malay World in Maritime Southeast Asia. To counter this as well as help us understand our neighbours better, Dr Siddique proposed taking short trips to countries in the immediate vicinity, seeing them not as places in a different country but rather as part of a porous region that one’s home state used to be so intimately intertwined with before colonial borders were set.

Beyond this, colonialism lingers on in economics and cultural perceptions, questioning whether we are truly “post-colonial”.

In terms of Economics and Development, colonialism is a key factor in Dependency theory. Dependency theory postulates that impoverished countries are as such because of their “peripheral” status, causing valuable resources to flow out to “core” wealthy states, enriching the latter at the former’s expense. Economists, like Andre Gunder Frank, have argued that this uneven state of wealth distribution is not due to geography or governmental policies, but the “ongoing legacy of colonialism, slavery and resource extraction.”[1]

This legacy can be seen in how aid packages from international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are criticised for being conditioned upon states adopting Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) like allowing large foreign (usually Western) corporations to enter the local economy and compete with smaller-scale domestic firms.[2] Critics like Halifax Initiative have viewed this interference in sovereign states as neo-colonialism – the practice of developed countries using capitalism and globalization to influence a developing country instead of overt measures like direct military or political control.[3]

In his article, anthropologist Joe Lugalla summarizes the problem by noting colonialism’s original capitalist motivation and arguing that SAPs drive growth by “integrating more African economies into the world economy – the very source of their underdevelopment, poverty and misery.”[4] Although there are many factors to why less-developed countries are as they are, how much can we attribute them to the impact of past colonialism and present neo-colonialism?

Popular representation is another field to examine. Despite the ongoing movement to recognise diversity, why is it that Caucasians are more likely to be seen as embodying prestige? The advertisements for Pears Soap in the late 1800s are classic examples of the notion of White desirability. While such messages are reviled today, the contrast between Whites and Blacks are still been used in advertisements today. Swedish-owned fashion retailer H&M attracted controversy in 2015 after having a lack of Black models in their South African posters; H&M’s response that their marketing plan was “one which intended to convey a positive image”, drew even more fire for implying that black models do not convey “positive images”.[5] Yet Europeans are not the only ones guilty of this. A Thai advertisement for skin-whitening pills and Chinese advertisement for detergent also generated outrage in 2016-2017;[6] the latter examples are interesting as non-Europeans are the ones perpetuating colonial-era racism.

On TEDxRotterdam, historian Frances Gouda talked about the history of Oriental leaders being represented as effeminate and espousing unmanly virtue in contrast to Europeans being rational so as to justify European superiority and colonial rule.[7] Similarly, on the lingering notion of European superiority, Dr Siddique mentioned that many Singaporeans know London and New York better than neighbouring Palembang and Pekanbaru. This was part of her point that Singapore is “most comfortable as a global city” rather than dealing directly with neighbouring provinces. With Singapore assuming the Chairmanship of ASEAN in 2018, it is an excellent opportunity to promote inter-provincial interaction rather than established inter-state ties.

Upon reflection, even if we recognise not being “post-colonial” as claimed, was colonialism and its ongoing legacy truly a bad thing? Going forward, how much of the post-colonial identity should we remember or even embrace? Would this do any good to post-colonial states? Or would it be better if we actively purged “post-colonial” notions from our history and cultural identity altogether?


[1] Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), 173.

[2] Dori Borrelli, “Neocolonialism in Jamaica: History, Practices, and Resistance,” accessed January 6, 2018,

[3] Asad Ismi, “Impoverishing a Continent: The World Bank and the IMF in Africa,” accessed January 6, 2018,

[4] Joe L. P. Lugalla, “Globalization and Structural Adjustments in sub-Saharan Africa: A New Dimension of Neo-Colonialism,” accessed January 7, 2018,

[5] Bernice Maune, “H&M in Racist Debate over ‘Positive Image’ Tweet for Lack of Black Models,” Sunday Times, November 6, 2015,

[6] Oliver Holmes, “Thai ad with ‘White makes you Win’ Message Lambasted for Racism,” Guardian, January 8, 2016,; “Outrage over Racist Chinese detergent ad,” Channel NewsAsia, accessed January 8, 2018,

[7] Frances Gouda, “How the Colonial Past Influences the Way we see the World Today,” uploaded September 13, 2010 by TEDxRotterdam, video, 19:09,

Chong Yong Kang, Samuel was a Research Assistant for Para Limes in 2018. He has a strong interest in 20th century history.

Bilahari Kausikan: Why Small Countries Should Not Behave Like A Small Country

The following is an edited transcript of a talk by Bilahari Kausikan, Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Singapore. It was delivered on 11 October 2017 at our monthly Singapore Platform for East-West Dialogue.


I’m going to take some liberties with the topic. I’m not going to talk about the role of small states between East and West, but I’m going to talk about small states. I’m going to talk about why small states should not behave like small states—not if they want to remain states anyway. Now if you are a small city-state, which historically does not have a very good record of surviving, you have to start from a very stark and simple premise—you are intrinsically irrelevant. You perform no irreplaceable function in the international system. If you disappear from the face of the Earth, by this, I mean disappear as a sovereign and an independent entity, you will not make a whit of difference to anything.

After all, Singapore has, as a sovereign and independent entity, only existed for 52 years. That’s just a blink of an eye in the long sweep of history.

Now, what do we mean by small? I mean physically small. This is essentially one city and, in some context, not a very large city. In a Chinese context, you are a second-tier city, about five to six million people. Now, of course we are not going to disappear, but your sovereignty and independence can be severely compromised. And that is actually the case of most small states today. There are about 196 sovereign states, and 193 members of the UN. Most of them have a seat at the UN, a vote at the UN, a flag, a national anthem, but that’s about it. Their autonomy and their ability to carve their own destiny is, more often than not, severely compromised. Now, I said physically small. By some other matrixes, we are not so small. As a port, a sort of logistics centre, a financial centre, or a trading hub, we are not that small. But physical size does matter.

Why do I say that? Well, let’s take your role as a logistics hub and trading centre. We have performed that role, according to some accounts, since the 14th century. We have certainly performed that role as a British colony, and as part of Malaysia. Of course, the manner in which we perform the role has evolved, but it’s essentially the same role. So you don’t have to be sovereign and independent to do these things. You cannot take your relevance as a sovereign and independent country for granted.

Relevance for a small country and a small state is an artefact. That means something created and maintained by human endeavour. How do you create relevance? Relevance is a contextual concept. What makes you relevant today may be quite irrelevant in a week, in a month, in a year, or in a decade. What makes you relevant vis-à-vis country A, may be quite irrelevant vis-à-vis country B. What makes you relevant on issue X vis-à-vis country A, may be irrelevant vis-à-vis issue Y. For the purposes of this talk, I’m not going into the details of that, but you can ask me questions about that later.

That said, the bedrock of relevance is success. Before I retired from the foreign service, I used to tell our junior officers that if Singapore’s foreign policy had any success, it is not because—or when I’m in my kinder moments, I say “not only because”—of their good looks, their natural charm, and the brilliance of their intellect. It’s because Singapore is a successful country, and you represent a successful country. Therefore, what you say is taken with some seriousness and some credibility. If you serve in the UN, as I have, you will find many individual diplomats from many countries who are absolutely brilliant, but they are not being taken seriously. Why? Well, it’s simply because they are representing countries that are not taken seriously.


Photo: Zehpylwer0 / Pixabay

What do you mean by a successful country? Here, I have to be very crass. Success, first of all, has to be measured in economic terms. If you are a basket case or a barren rock, nobody will take you seriously. You cannot be successful by any other criteria. Of course, that is the foundation, but that is not the end of it. Economic success gives you options that are not available to countries that, to put it crudely, do not have the cold hard cash in order to create options. Now, I’m not going to go into how to be economically successful. There are many pathways, and it is also in a state of constant change. But one thing is constant: even as you adapt to various changing circumstances to keep yourself successful, and adaptability is one criterion, you cannot be just ordinarily successful. You have to be extraordinarily successful. You can’t be successful as, let’s say, countries around you because every country around you is bigger than you. Brunei, is smaller in population, but is well-endowed with natural resources; oil and gas. Everybody else has natural resources. Therefore, even if you are as successful as everybody around you, why should they take you seriously? You don’t have any natural resources, and they might as well deal with a country larger than you.

Hence, you have to be exceptional. You have to be extraordinary. It doesn’t always make you loved, by the way, but that is the existential condition of being Singaporean.  To survive and prosper, you have to be exceptional; in being exceptional, it sometimes creates resentment. You just have to deal with it and manage it. It follows, therefore, that you cannot take the advice of my former colleague, who advocated in a rather stupid article that small countries should behave like small countries. If Singapore had behaved like a small country in 1965, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking to each other, or we would be talking in a different language. At least it wouldn’t be me addressing you all, because I am not a bumiputra.

Now, that does not mean we should not be aware of the constraints of being small. Of course, you should be aware of the constraints of being small, but you should not allow yourself to be limited by those constraints. You should not allow your ambition to be bounded by your mere size because that is precisely what when we had independence thrusted upon us. Don’t forget that Singapore is quite unique. We never sought independence, we had it thrusted upon us. And, in fact, the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew is on record as saying small island states are a political joke. That’s why he sought independence within Malaysia. It didn’t work out, and we had to make it work. If at that moment of anguish, when we were thrown out on the perilous seas of independence, we behaved like a small country, we won’t be speaking here because that is precisely what the Malaysians wanted us to behave like. They had three powerful instruments. I won’t go into details, but the first instrument was the armed forces. During the crucial years of 1965-1969, we do not have an armed force worth talking about. Second, the economy. Singapore was still largely an entrepôt, whose hinterland was Malaysia and Indonesia, and both were out to replace us in that role. The third instrument was water. Essentially, the assumption was these three things would either bring us crawling back or keep us as a small country tamely to heel. The story of Singapore since 1965 is how we overcame those challenges by being exceptional.

Now, one element of Singapore’s exceptionalism is the organising principle of Singapore, which is multi-racial equality and multi-racial meritocracy. I’m not saying that we do it perfectly. In fact, we are far from perfect. But there is no perfection to be found outside heaven, if there is a heaven. I don’t quite believe there is a heaven, so there’s no perfection to be found. But even if you believe in heaven, at least the Christian heaven, there is also no equality, there is hierarchy; there is God, there are angels of various kinds etc. And if you look around Singapore, as imperfect as we are in implementing the organising principle, it is nonetheless unique and exceptional. Look around Singapore, not just in Southeast Asia, but from Northeast Asia to South Asia. Most countries are organised whether explicitly—in the case of Malaysia, where the principle of Malay dominance is enshrined in the constitution—or implicitly. It’s bumiputra over non-bumiputra; it is ethnic Thai Buddhist over Muslim Rohingya; it is Sinhalese Buddhist over Tamil; it is Han over non-Han. Even in a very liberal democracy like Japan, it is ethnic Japanese over Japanese-Koreans or Ainu; it is Hindu over non-Hindu; it is Buddhist over non-Buddhist; there is no end. You just think about what’s around us.

Even beyond that, in Western liberal democracies, there is a reassertion of hierarchy; it should be white Christian first. That is the meaning of the Trump phenomenon; that is the meaning of Brexit; that is the meaning of these right-wing movements that have arisen on continental Europe. They don’t always say it so explicitly, but when they are anti-immigration, for example, that’s what they mean. And this foundation which makes us unique is under pressure. It’s under greater pressure today than it ever was before because part of the backlash against globalisation is a cultural backlash. It is the assertion of identities of various kinds as superior over identities of other kinds. Now, there are many such assertions. There is the assertion of an Arabised form of Islam as more authentic than other forms; and there’s an assertion of various kinds of evangelical Christianity as more authentic than other kinds.

Similar ideas have crept into Singapore such as radical Hinduism and radical Buddhism. If you think about the fundamental tenets of these religions, it’s an oxymoron, but it exists. Even in a secular way, you have the assertions of different kinds of political identity as more authentic to the exclusion of other kinds. What has that got to do with us? We are exposed to these things, and you can’t insulate yourself from these things. You can perhaps mitigate those things, but you can’t insulate yourself, because the cost of shutting yourself off is to try and become North Korea, and you know where that leads to.

Singapore is not just a small country, it is also unique in another way. Singapore is the only ethnic Chinese majority country outside greater China, by which I mean the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. That poses particular challenges, particularly with relations with China.


President Xi Jinping and his wife, Peng Liyuan. Photo: APEC 2013 / Flickr

Chinese foreign policy is unique in one way; it does not conduct international relations on only one track. It conducts international relations on three tracks. Of course, all countries, including ourselves, have more than one track of foreign policy. But China does it more insistently, much more systematically, and with a greater institutional apparatus devoted to the different tracks than any other country I know. What are these three tracks? The first is, of course, the normal track of state-to-state relations. These sometimes fluctuate up and down, and that’s quite normal. There is no substantive relationship of any country anywhere that is a smooth trajectory. I mean we have a smooth relationship with at least one country I know of. Guess which country that is? It is Botswana. You know why? Because there’s no substantive relationship with Botswana. Once you have a substantive relationship with a country, it’s bound to fluctuate. In other words, smooth trajectory in a relationship means that the relationship is, by and large, irrelevant. The state-to-state relationship we have with China is, by and large, not bad. There are ups and downs of course, but it’s still not bad, even quite good.

But that’s not the only track. China is not just a state, it is also what I would call a Leninist state. I don’t use the term “Communist” because I don’t think there’s anybody in China that seriously believes in the Communist ideology anymore. You might find a few people in Brown University or Harvard who still believe in Communism as an ideology, but you won’t find anybody in China, and certainly not in the Chinese Communist Party. However, they do believe in the Leninist structure of the state, in which the party is dominant, and that prescribes certain tactics, methods of control, and foreign policy techniques. For want of a better word, I would call them “united front tactics”. That means the use of other than state-to-state channels, cultural associations, business associations, literary associations etc., to gain influence—all Leninist states do this. The former Soviet Union did it up to the 1930s, when it was relatively isolated. By the 1950s, they by and large abandoned this because it was no longer isolated.

Now, post-Maoist China is certainly not isolated. But it still has United Front Work Department, which is under direct control of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. And you have seen in recent times, for example in Australia, where they tried to subvert politicians and political parties. You saw it in New Zealand where—bless the souls of the Kiwis—a new citizen who became a member of parliament was found to have been an instructor in the PRC’s spy schools. I don’t know what their vetting process was like, but there’s possibly a reason why the Kiwis are an endangered species. And there are many other examples around the world. China is not just a normal state or a Leninist state. It also has a third identity of being a civilisational state—China is a civilisation, as well as a state, and that prescribes the third track. It’s a track that is of particular relevance for Singapore, and that is the overseas Chinese track. They also have a very elaborate institutional apparatus devoted to this track under party control.

The purpose of this track is best encapsulated by a speech President Xi Jinping made in 2014 to a conference of overseas Chinese business associations in Beijing. And the title of that speech was The Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation is of Importance to all Chinese.  In other words, the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is of importance to all Chinese means that overseas Chinese are expected, on crucial issues, to define their interests in terms of China’s interest. That is something a multi-racial country like Singapore can never accept.  It is an existential issue. That’s why when a former senior civil servant says that a small country should behave like a small country— which is what the Chinese meant because you are a majority ethnic Chinese country—he has to be put down quite brutally, and not just by me, but by more important people than me.


Why is it an existential issue? It’s very simple because to align your interest with China’s interest means that you accept China, not merely as a geopolitical fact, but China’s superiority as a norm of international relations. Both concepts are very different. I mean everybody would accept China’s rise as a geopolitical fact. You have to be blind, deaf, dumb, and living on another planet not to do so. But that’s an entirely different matter from accepting China’s superiority as a norm of international relations. It is a very ancient norm of Chinese international relations, which is coming back, not exactly the same way as ancient times, but substantially the same. It manifests itself in big ways and small. Why can’t we accept that as a multi-racial country? China persistently refers to Singapore as a Chinese country. We persistently tell them we are not a Chinese country, but they persist. We cannot accept that. This is existential. That’s why the debate with the former civil servant is not just an academic or an intellectual debate. That’s why he has to be put down and brutally because it is a very small step from accepting China’s superiority as a geopolitical fact (“China” used as a proper noun. A big country, but still placed in a bounded territory) to accepting Chinese (“Chinese” as an adjective, which has no boundary) superiority as a norm.  And you know what the regional and domestic consequences are.

By the way, I don’t think China is out to destroy Singapore. In some ways, they do admire Singapore because several Chinese and some Singaporeans who are very familiar with China have told me that the Chinese admires Singapore because it shows what the Chinese people can do after 100 years. However, they fundamentally do not understand why we are successful. That’s why they have a lot of problems with the Uyghurs and other minorities. No matter how good our relationship is on the first track (state-to-state relations), from time to time, they will try the other tracks, and they have never stopped. Sometimes it’s high-key and public, while at other times, it’s low-key and private. We have to resist such attempts even if it means roughing relations on the first track. That’s what happened over the last year or so. Now, they are playing nice again for a variety of reasons.

I will make two more points. The first point is, I said these kinds of things have never stopped in the 30 odd years I have been in the foreign ministry. Sometimes they are public, sometimes they are private. The last time it was public was in 2004. Why was it public? When then Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsein Loong went to Taiwan, all hell broke loose. Now, that’s not the first time a Singapore leader has gone to Taiwan. They’ve gone many times, and the Chinese know well that no matter what, we know how to handle the One China policy. They do trust us when it suits them because some years ago, they came and asked us to do a free trade agreement with Taiwan because they were trying to prop up Ma Ying-jeou at that time. We don’t want a free trade agreement with Taiwan because it’s of no economic use. They asked us because they are confident that we know how to handle it without compromising the One China principle.

So what was their fuss in 2004 all about? It’s because it was quite clear, by that time, that Mr Lee Hsien Loong would be the successor to Mr Goh Chok Tong. One of the lies that the Chinese like to propagate on track two (united front tactics) and track three (overseas Chinese being for China’s interests) is that relations were so much better under Lee Kuan Yew, and these new people don’t know how to handle China. Mr Lee Kuan Yew did have good relations with many Chinese leaders including Deng Xiaoping. But why did he have good relations? There’s another fact that track two and track three of Chinese diplomacy never emphasises. Mr Lee Kuan Yew and the PAP is, as far as I can determine, and I have tried very hard to find an exception, the only non-Communist leader and party that went into a united front in the 1950s and 1960s with a Chinese Communist-supported party, the Barisan Socialis, and won. Every other non-Communist leader that went into the united front lost. And so, they had absolutely no doubt of Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s resolve, and that however friendly he is, he will be for Singapore first.  But when there is a leadership transition, they wanted to see whether the son is made of the same mettle. They also tested Goh Chok Tong, by the way, in a less public way.

And this time, the last year and a half, there were many proximate causes for the tension. But it is also a time of succession because about a year ago, Mr Lee Hsein Loong announced that after the next election, he’ll step aside, and let the fourth generation of leaders choose who the next Prime Minister would be, and it is also meant to test them. They had no doubt about Mr Lee Kuan Yew. They put some pressure on Goh Chok Tong; didn’t work. They didn’t put much pressure because they probably thought he was the interim leader. They have a rather dynastic mindset which you can see, because there’s a category of Chinese leaders known as princelings. They tested Mr Lee Hsein Loong, it didn’t work. So now they are testing the fourth generation. The test isn’t over; they have paused for a variety of reasons and decided to play nice. Prime Minister had a very good visit to China, but that’s not the end of the story.

I told you state-to-state relations will always go up and down. There’s nothing to get too excited about. But it is conceivable, not very probable, that one day, as did the Soviet Union, China may give up the united front track. But China cannot give up the third track, the overseas Chinese track, without ceasing to be China, because it stems from the civilisational nature of the Chinese state. So we will have to learn to deal with this. How do we deal with this?


Bilahari Kausikan taking questions from the audience at Singapore Platform for East-West Dialogue.


I think there are two fundamental things. One, is to have an educated public. It cannot be denied that a certain section of our compatriots who feel cultural affinity—nothing wrong with that—and therefore are either reluctant to acknowledge this track, or think there’s nothing wrong with it.  I told you it’s a very small step from acknowledging China’s status as a big power, “China” as a proper noun, to using “Chinese” superiority as an adjective. We are only 52 years old. Are you absolutely confident that the Singaporean Chinese identity is so deeply rooted that none of our compatriots would be tempted, whether consciously or not, to take that small step? I’m not. Maybe in another 50 years, we don’t have to worry about it. But the experience of the last year and a half, shows me there are some who are tempted to take that step. So you have to deal with it, and the first way of dealing with it is to have an educated public.

Here, I have to acknowledge that there is something of a quandary. I can educate you in this closed group, and because I am a pensioner after all, I can say anything I want. I have a title that is meaningless. Don’t ask me what Ambassador-at-Large means because I have no idea. In the colloquial sense of the term, “at large” means not-yet-called. But I am a pensioner, I have no authority, I have no official position. So I can say what I just said to you. It’s very hard for a government to say these things because you don’t want to go and roil the official track unnecessarily. If it is necessary, of course, we have to hold firm to this fundamental bedrock of what makes Singapore, even if it causes tensions in the first track, and that’s what we did over the last year-and-a-half and 2004. A few months ago, Mr Chan Chun Sing was asked a question about foreign influence in politics in parliament. He had to give a very circumspect answer. So circumspect that, unless you already knew, you won’t know what he was talking about. I can’t blame him, you know? But in small groups like this, I can try to educate you.

The second big factor is to have a very clinical view of what’s happening in the world. One of the other Chinese lines is that China is rising. Therefore, your best friend, America, is declining. So you are the wrong side of history, and you better jump on this bandwagon. Now, that can’t be denied. I told you that you must be blind, deaf, dumb, and living on another planet to deny that China is rising. But it is wrong to look at China’s rise in simplistic and binary terms. There will be a more symmetrical strategic equation between the US and China sooner or later, but that doesn’t mean that the US is going to disappear from the world. It doesn’t mean that the US is going to cease to be a substantive country. And not just the US, but Japan as well. It doesn’t make much substantive difference if you are the biggest, second biggest, or third biggest economy in the world. You are all still going to be important players, and you all are going to be strong military powers. You all are going, in that sense, to deter, check, and balance each other. That gives small countries like us manoeuvre room.

Whether or not you’re going to be agile and clever enough to take advantage of the manoeuvre room is, of course, another matter. Nobody says we got to be clever, we can be stupid too, but the possibility exists. In other words, you can be small, and not behave like a small country, and preserve your autonomy. It is up to us.

Bilahari Kausikan is an Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). Prior to this, he served at the MFA as Permanent Secretary from 2010–2013.

Sharon Siddique: East-West and the Post-Colonial














The Treaty settled several matters:





1) How many islands are there in Riau Island Province?

  • 3
  • 35
  • 350
  • 3,500

ANSWER: 3,500


  • Less than 500,000 each
  • More than 1 million each
  • Johor Baru’s population is bigger than Batam
  • Batam’s population is bigger than Johor Bahru

ANSWER: More than 1 million each.

3) Melaka was conquered by the Portuguese in which year?

  • 1641
  • 1598
  • 1704
  • 1511



  • Herman Daendels
  • Albert Wiese
  • Stamford Raffles
  • William Farquhar

ANSWER: Stamford Raffles.



  • 50 km
  • 70 km
  • 15 km
  • 5 km

ANSWER: 5 km


6) Where is the city of Tanjong Balai located?

  • Batam
  • Johor
  • Karimun
  • Melaka

ANSWER: Karimun






Jakarta │Photo: Kira Kariakin / Flickr




































Jan W. Vasbinder: The Dimension of Time

Gordon River, Tasmania. Photo:
Kristina D.C. Hoeppner / Flickr

















Jan Wouter Vasbinder is the Director of Para Limes. 





The following is a selection of tweets highlighting some of the main points she made.


On post-colonialism


Our neighbours’ idea of what constitutes Malay-ness 


Singapore and her neighbours


Looking to the future

[Preview] Singapore Platform for East-West Dialogue with Bilahari Kausikan

On 11 October, Bilahari Kausikan, Ambassador-at-Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, spoke at our monthly Singapore Platform for East-West Dialogue. He focused on why a small country should not behave like a small country.

The following  is a selection of tweets highlighting the main points he made.


The reality of Singapore’s standing on the world stage


An exceptional quality of Singapore


Singapore’s relationship with China


On the nature of friendship between countries


On the South China Sea issue


When asked about ASEAN’s general reticence on the Rohingya issue


Final Thought

[Preview] Singapore Platform for East-West Dialogue with Wang Gungwu


On 19 September, Professor Wang Gungwu spoke at our monthly Singapore Platform for East-West Dialogue. He focused on the different conception of law by the East versus the West.



The East and West have interacted for a long time


Implications of “Rule of Law”


The relationship between the ruler and the ruled in China


Legal history of China: How Confucianism came to hold sway


Confucian conception of the law


The main nub of the legal disagreement between East and West


China’s puzzlement over the implementation of  international law


China’s suspicions of Western motives


Prof. Wang answering a question about the balance of power


An interesting fact


East versus West on individualism


The South China Sea issue


China’s priorities

Q&A and Reflections on Michael Puett’s Talk


In this second article about the session with  Michael J. Puett, Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology at Harvard University, ISAAC TAN highlights some of the questions posed to him and his initial reflections about the discussion.

Questions for the Professor

The first question was how one should teach the next generation to appreciate the diversity and complexity of the world. This is in consideration that many aspects of society are intertwined, and the rise of extreme movements has made the world more volatile.

Puett prefaced his reply by pointing out that neo-liberalism harks back to liberalism which shaped the political system based on self-interest. Just as the economy collapsed in the 1920s, and right-wing movements rose in the 1930s, we are experiencing a similar pattern now because we adopted an ideology wholesale. The key to educating the next generation is to get them recognise that there is an “incredible fear of the kind of world that has been created” that is driving these movements. From there, we should respond to those fears by actually changing the system, but “we ought to have the discipline of not trying to [invent] new grand –isms to solve it.”

When asked whether there is an event today that parallels the fall of the Berlin Wall, Puett replied that the failure of the neo-liberal system is such an epoch. The silver lining is that the rise of right-wing movements have made people less complacent, and they are starting to consider what can be done to solve the problem.

Another interesting question that arose is whether one should view the practice of creating rituals as a sort of trans-cultural Confucianism, whereby the rituals created should be based on societal context, instead of importing the exact practices that Confucius was in favour of.

Puett agreed with the notion, and pointed out that Confucius emphasised what the Zhou rituals achieved, rather than the actual details of said rituals. Similarly, the rituals one decides to create or adopt should break us out of the patterns and ruts that we fall into. Hence, it would not make sense for us to perform the Zhou rituals because it has no resonance in our society.

As the session drew to a close, someone remarked that at first glance, all this seemed to be in the arena of the educated, and those who are actively looking for solutions. He asked if there is hope for the masses who are often bogged down by various worries, and understanding such concepts would be the last thing on their mind.

Puett replied that the hope lies in the momentary and fragmentary moments of interactions when people really connected. The sense of “joyousness that come from these relations where people are really connecting with each other” should be the focus. These are the moments in which people break out of their patterns, and open up for the possibility for change. Once people recognise these moments and start striving for it within their relationships, even if the connection breaks down shortly after, there is hope for change. This applies to everyday relationships and those on the societal level. Therefore, this is accessible to everyone.

Initial Thoughts: Singapore’s Lack of Identity—A Boon?

When it comes to extrapolating the idea of ritual to a macro level, Puett consistently emphasised that different sectors of society should be based on different systems, so as to prevent society from being shaped by a single totalising ideology. But what about a society’s sense of identity?

Since achieving independence, Singapore has been trying to articulate what a Singaporean identity is to very little success. The most recent discussion arose last year, when Minister for Education (Higher Education and Skills), Ong Ye Kung, was asked whether Singapore was ready to do away with race categorisation.

He replied, “The Singaporean identity itself is rather quite empty. What fills up a Singaporean identity is the identity of various races and all the traditions and cultures that we bring forth and create this tapestry [with].”

Undoubtedly, those who equate national identity to national unity will feel anxious about such comments. But what if there is a kernel of truth in it (regardless of whether it justifies maintaining the current system of racial categorisation)?

Puett explained that some classical Chinese philosophers argued against there being an essential self. Could this be applied to national identity, and what does it mean for Singapore to embrace it?

Rather than trying to piece together an identity by citing several buzzwords, we should truly take a look at what we have.

Racial diversity is often mentioned as one of Singapore’s plus points, but the demographics happened partly due to happenstance, and largely because of colonialism. Apart from advertising a set of statistics disguised as a strength, perhaps we ought to come up with dialogic practices in order to engage and learn from the plethora of cultures we have at close proximity.

Of course, this is easier said than done, but engaging with such complexity is the training we all need. Instead of being crippled by this existential anxiety, it could be turned into a strength which results in a society that is sensitive and adaptable.

Only then, could Singapore truly be a platform for East-West dialogue, and not just a title for a series of meetings and discussions.





A Generation Who Failed








An Alternative View








