SINGAPORE has always been outward directed. It’s meaning and significance – its raison d’etre  – has always taken bearing from beyond our shores: from the immediate region, from the ancestral homes of its constituent races, from the globe. Our exceedingly small size has ensured that we have always had to be in search of hinterlands, markets, multilateral fora, vaster vistas. And our history has underlined why this island can never be entire of itself. Geography and history have conspired to make us peculiarly open and porous. The fate of cities, even “global cities”, to always want to be part of something larger, has always expressed itself in peculiarly pronounced ways in our case.

Take a look at our major metropolitan dailies – The Straits Times in English and Lianhe Zaobao in Chinese. Most of the news in both papers – more than half on most days, three-quarters on some occasions — are not about Singapore. No other major metropolitan paper anywhere else in the world – not the Times of London or the Times of New York, Le Monde or Asahi Shimbun – gives as much space to the rest of the world. We in Singapore are as interested in what is going on in Indonesia and Malaysia, China and India, the United States and Britain, as we are about what’s going on in this little red dot.

I imagine that would describe the mental landscape of our earliest immigrants here too. Most of our Chinese and Indian ancestors – and perhaps a good part of our Malay ancestors too who came here from the Nusantara – would have been more exercised by news about their homelands than they would have been by the goings-on in this colony. This was after all to be a temporary sojourn. Scratch a living here; send as much money as possible to the family back home; and return home to rest your tired bones.

I digress, but it is worth noting that most of our ancestors resemble more the migrant workers in our midst today than they do us. We might bear that in mind once in a while when we look at our migrant workers. There by the grace of God go our forefathers and foremothers. Also, remember, that it wasn’t till after World War II or so that the majority of people here were not born elsewhere. For most of the 19^th century and a good part of the 20^th, the majority here were in effect migrant workers – or MWs as we call them.

I recall a Jewish scholar saying once wherever it is that you die, that is your country. I suppose that is why Rupert Brooke, a World War I poet, could write: “If I should die, think only this of me:/ That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is for ever England.” Where did our forefathers want to die? Even if much of their lives were spent here, their hearts invariably yearned for their ancestral homes in the evenings of their lives. Even my mother – a sixth generation Singaporean – asked that her ashes be immersed at the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and Sarasvati rivers in Allahabad (now renamed Prayagraj).

How did Singapore – just a place, a city but not yet home for most of its 200-year modern history – become home for us? Or to put it differently, how did we get from Singapore to Singaporean – to use the evocative tagline of the Bicentennial Exhibition: From Singapore, To Singaporean. How did we make this place, unknown, our own?

The simple answer is: It didn’t happen in a straight line. “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/And issues…”.

Our fathers, grandmothers, and great-grandfathers learnt to be nationalists in the years preceding the Second World War and after, by imitating nationalists in China, India, Indonesia. If there were no Indian national movement; if there were no Chinese Revolutions – of both 1911 and then 1949; if there were no Indonesian Revolution – nobody in Singapore would have thought of revolting against British rule, let alone the possibility of independence for ourselves. What’s more, even then, nobody spoke of a Singaporean nationalism. They could only conceive of a Malayan nationalism. Thus, there was the Malayan Communist Party, never the Singapore Communist Party. Thus, the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, not the Singaporean Anti-Japanese Army. Thus, merger with Malaya was declared to be the aim of People’s Action Party, when it was formed 68 years ago this year, not independence as a city-state.

We call them our “founding fathers” – Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee and so on. But they began their political lives thinking they might found something else beside an independent Singapore. They never thought there would one day be Singaporeans who would claim them for paternity. And they never conceived the possibility of Singapore being a city-state – the only one in existence today. The Vatican City and Monaco are not full-fledged states. A state must have the power to demarcate and control its borders; decide who belongs in the state, who doesn’t; control its borders and define its population. Singapore is the only city-state in existence today with the attributes of a state – the only successor in the modern era of the Greek city-states of the 5^th to 4^th centuries BC, like Athens and Sparta, and the Italian city states of the Renaissance, like Rome, Venice and Florence. And yet we didn’t arrive at this unique destiny by design; we stumbled into it. Tripped and fell into existence as a city-state en route to becoming the New York of Malaysia, as Tunku Abdul Rahman hopefully characterized us, for we were to have been their New York as Kuala Lumpur was to be their Washington DC.

Nor did we wake up on August 10, 1965, suddenly realising we were going to be a “global city”. Indeed, as late as March 1966, S Rajaratnam, another founding father, is on record saying the very idea of a “Singaporean identity” was “ludicrous”, for it was “inevitable” that we would soon re-merge with Malaysia. Look at the date again: March 1966 – just one month after he produced the first draft of the Singapore Pledge – Rajaratnam was saying it was impossible for this city to exist without its immediate hinterland, Malaya or Malaysia.

It was not till 1972, seven years after Separation, that Rajaratnam was to proclaim Singapore as a “global city”. It was an epochal moment in our history. I remember the profound impact that speech had on my generation. Till then we had no idea what story we were to tell ourselves about ourselves. It was a “Eureka” moment, that speech, for us: Ah ha, we told ourselves, that is what we are. We are a “global city”. It wasn’t Malaya that was our hinterland. We were wrong about needing a geographically contiguous hinterland. Rather, the world – the globe – was our true hinterland. And with the globe as our hinterland, this “city-state” will survive by serving the world; by being useful to all and sundry, near and far; by linking up with other global cities; by being open to global capital, innovation and talent.

This is not the place to rehearse in detail how we arrived at this formulation of our destiny as a global city. Suffice to say many things contributed to Rajaratnam’s seminal insight. Among them:

• It was Albert Winsemius, the Dutch economist who became a close associate of our founding leaders, who first told them in the dark weeks and months following Separation that they should snap out of their blue funk. Why are you so worried about the loss of the “common market” with Malaysia, he asked them. The world is your oyster, your market – 3 billion people, not the 10 million then in Malaysia.
• Second, by the late 1960s, Singapore had decided to industrialise by attracting multi-national companies or MNCs to invest here, bringing their technology and know-how, and producing for global markets. That was Mr Lee’s seminal insight of how we might leapfrog the region. This succeeded the earlier model of industrialization, which was import substitution and producing for the common market with Malaysia.
• And finally, as luck would have it – and though we didn’t know it then – our post-independence development coincided with a relatively benign period in world history. Barriers to trade were falling and what we now refer to as “globalization” began to take off. It is essential to note this trajectory: It wasn’t the ideological insight of Singapore as a “global city” that produced our economic strategy; it was our economic strategy of pursuing MNC-led industrialization even as barriers to trade fell everywhere that gave rise to the insight that we could be a “global city”. As Karl Marx would say, it’s the forces of production – or the economy – stupid.

I might at this stage specify three paradigmatic shifts in our modern history as a city. I don’t offer this with the rigour of scholarship, but as an aide memoir, a rough guide for further investigatio:

In the first, from roughly 1819 to 1942 or so, this city was an outpost of empire. For more than a century, the British saw Singapore as the means of advancing their interests in the Far East, including China; and to help protect the western approaches to the Jewel in the Crown, the British Raj. Within this frame of empire, our ancestors came here for the most part to earn a living, not to settle down and found new communities.

In the second, from roughly after the Second World War, in the wake of nationalist movements sweeping the Afro-Asian landmass, this city dreamt of itself as part of its natural, geographically contiguous hinterland, Malaya. But we tripped over that nightmare and stumbled into our third paradigm: Singapore as a global city and the world’s only city-state.

Is that the end of our history? Shall we forever find fulfillment in this third paradigm? Again, I am unable to offer more than rough suggestions for possible further reflection:

Singapore cannot survive other than as a global city, open to global capital, innovation, talent. But in the decades since independence, Singapore has also become increasingly less a place and more a home – to Singaporeans. From Singapore, To Singaporeans – that really happened. We now do have a pronounced “Singaporean identity”. Many of our founding leaders, including Mr Lee, doubted if we were a nation. They doubted that a Singaporean identity, strong enough to transcend our separate racial and religious identities, could form so soon in our history. I would hesitate to say they were wrong, but I think we have succeeded to a greater extent than our founding leaders had dared hope was possible. This is an undoubted good; a remarkable achievement; something to treasure, nurture and grow.

But this achievement stands in some tension with our status as a global city. On the one hand, we have Singapore as homeland – the private, intimate space belonging exclusively to people like us. The fact that most of you here know what I am referring to when I say “people like us” is evidence we know intuitively who belongs to Club Singaporean and who doesn’t. Almost wordlessly, we know.

But on the other hand, we also have the Singapore that is the global city. The most visible reminder of that is the world’s presence in our midst – the two million or so here who are not Singaporean, but who are nevertheless essential to our existence. Club Singapore contains many more people than Club Singaporean.

Another way to understand this tension is the contrast between our existence as a nation – like Indonesia or China, India or Japan – with our existence as a city – like London or New York, Shanghai or Paris. On the one hand, our Singaporean identity is a national identity – unique, determined, exclusive; on the other, our identity as a global city is protean – cosmopolitan, diverse, open.

Our politics is going to hinge on that tension – between nation and city; between national identity and cosmopolitan identity; between Club Singaporean and Club Singapore. If most Singaporeans cannot at once be members of Club Singaporean as well as Club Singapore, we will go the way of Brexit in Britain. If the benefits of Singapore as a global city do not accrue to all Singaporeans, regardless of economic class or social background, we will go the way of Trumpian politics in the United States.

May we have the wisdom to avoid such tragedies. May we last as the world’s sole remaining city-state.