At any given time, there are dozens to hundreds of popularly supported independence movements, many with legitimate grievances, agitating for peoples’ or regions’ freedoms around the world. There are so many that chances are few people will ever be aware of them all. A survey of independence votes shows that when given the chance to separate, the vast majority of even mildly disaffected factions will gladly do so, which is why the story of Singapore‘s independence is so weird. Singapore is arguably the only modern nation to have been forced against its will into independence. And this year being 50th anniversary of that reluctant independence, it’s as good a time as any to tell the tale.
Singapore did technically willingly declare independence from its colonial overlord, the United Kingdom, in 1963, after growing progressively autonomous and separate for decades. But this independence was all in the service of merging into a larger nation: Malaysia. Today composed of the former British territories of Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak, the nation was actually first proposed by Singapore’s longtime (and recently deceased) ruler Lee Kuan Yew in 1961 as a federation of all the region’s British client states—these three alongside Singapore and Brunei. This was appealing to most of the regions involved for one reason or another (Brunei’s Sultan approved of the plan, but was constrained by local dissent to the merger), but especially to Singapore, which was worried about its lack of land, resources and physical capabilities.
Unions like this aren’t unheard of. The United Kingdom formed via the willful and economically motivated fusion of England and its empire with Scotland in 1707. Even the United States started out as a willful confederation of 13 separate political entities bound by common ideals, causes, history and needs. What’s unusual in the case of Singapore is what happened next.
As soon as Malaysia was formed in 1963, Singapore started to rub against the grain of the central government. Yew and company did not agree with the state’s economic philosophy, nor its legal favoritism towards the Malay ethnic group, cusping between a plurality and a majority. The city-state also started to face its own ethnic tensions, with race riots between the majority Chinese Singaporeans and other ethnicities like the Malay breaking out leading to a great deal of damage. This and food shortages and development needs made Singapore a grating liability for central authorities in Kuala Lumpur. So, on August 9,1965 the central government decided unilaterally in a parliamentary vote to expel Singapore from the federation of Malaysia; it’s said that Yew wept at the news.
Some argue that Singapore’s independence wasn’t totally without agency. These nationalists and academics say that in its insistence on its own model of development, which has served it well over the past half-century, making Singapore a global success story, was an implicit form of protest against Malaysian rule and central hegemony. As such the nation had an independence movement and streak without even knowing it. But the fact remains that while grievances may have grown over time, as Singapore became more confident in its own skin and security, at the moment that it was kicked out the city desperately wanted to remain a part of its imperfect union.
There is no great parallel in modern history for this forceful ejection. Arguably, the United Arab Emirates was formed by a coalition of seven British client state emirates that weren’t too jazzed about losing the protection of the British. But these principalities, alongside Bahrain and Qatar, were ultimately actively involved in their own independence in 1971, even if it was not totally their idea.
You can also see parallels in the way that the absolute king of Bhutan in 2007 imposed democratic reforms and a whole new system of governance on a people who were apparently shockingly content with his rule and who expressed great trepidation about this whole representative government thing. But even these tepid acts of liberation, external or internal, ultimately involved the agency of local actors.
Singapore’s independence was beyond lukewarm—it was an utterly unwilling mess. It’s a situation that no other nation ought to have to go through. Still, it does make the last 50 years of Singaporean history all the more amazing.
