Jothie Rajah, Visiting Scholar, UC Berkeley- "Legislating Illiberalism: Law, Discourse & Legitimacy in Singapore"
Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Law and Society, UC Berkeley
"Legislating Illiberalism: Law, Discourse & Legitimacy in Singapore"
Abstract: Through an interrogation of legislation and public discourse, this paper tracks the manner in which the Singapore state has reframed the liberal idea of the ‘rule of law’ into a rights-eroding ‘rule by law’ while sustaining its legitimacy as a ‘lawful’ state.
Applying critical theory on language and power to studies of four legislative enactments spanning the first thirty years of Singapore’s existence, the paper demonstrates that the state has responded to moments of public contestation by characterising critics as threats to national security. Legislation relating to seemingly disparate subjects – vandals, the press, the legal profession and religious harmony – effect a uniform outcome: the silencing of non-state actors, and the emasculation of the courts.
The paper identifies four main strategies relating to the state’s use of ‘law’ to render the state the primary legitimate speaker of the public domain. First, through an adherence to procedure, the state claims to be properly ‘rule of law’. Second, the state uses legislation and its dominance of public discourse to recalibrate state-citizen relations such that citizens are constructed as subordinate to the state. Third, the state links questions of ‘law’ to a state-scripted account of perpetual territorial vulnerability. Through its narrative of Singapore’s vulnerability, the state selectively adopts facets of ‘Western’ liberal notions of the ‘rule of law’ such that ‘law’ relating to commerce is substantively equivalent to the ‘West’ while civil and political liberties are treated as grants rather than entitlements. Finally, the paper argues that legislative text has been scripted in increasingly opaque terms such that ‘law’ becomes comprehensible only through acquiescence to the state’s ideologically-driven attribution of meaning.
The paper asks whether Singapore has constructed an insidious new model for authoritarian ‘rule of law’; strategically and incrementally denuding ‘law’ of its capacity to limit state power while delivering material prosperity.
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