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The prose of passive revolution: Mobile experts, economic planning, and the developmental state in SingaporeAbstract: During the Cold War, a barrage of globally-mobile development professionals proliferated throughout the decolonizing Third World to both assist in economic development and to constrain the geopolitical spread of communist-sympathetic regimes. This paper considers a document authored by one such professional, Albert Winsemius, and draws on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution to theorize the process of state formation in Singapore. By examining Winsemius’s role in Singapore’s development planning, we demonstrate how globally-sourced, ideological anti-communism and transnational economic expertise were inscribed into the institutional structure of the Singaporean state under Lee Kuan Yew and the People’s Action Party. Basing our analysis in a close reading of a key economic planning document, we argue that Winsemius and the Industrial Survey Mission demonstrate a political understanding of state formation rooted in the need to suppress labor strife and maintain political stability. This paper contributes to a more spatially-nuanced understanding of East Asian industrialization and state transformation through a theorization of the influence of transnational expertise on an archetypal ‘developmental state’.

Introduction

Albert Winsemius arrived at Singapore’s International Airport at Paya Lebar late one night in early October 1960. An industrial economist by profession, Winsemius was a chain-smoker with “a deep guttural voice, a leathery face with deeply lined forehead and cheeks, horn-rimmed glasses, and hair combed straight back” who “spoke English fluently if ungrammatically with a heavy Dutch accent” (Lee, 2000: 60). Although he is today remembered as a key figure of Singapore’s economic history, he must have seemed an enigmatic figure as he conversed with the journalists on his first visit to the country in 1960. Winsemius was an expert in the emerging field of economic development and had built a formidable reputation from planning the post-war reindustrialization of his native Netherlands. By the time he visited Singapore, he was renown as an international economic expert because of his consultation to the governments of Jamaica, Turkey, Spain, Greece and Portugal in the late 1950s (Winsemius, 1982: 2). His reputation prompted the United Nations to task Winsemius with studying the situation in Singapore and to devise a strategy to jumpstart the country’s economy.

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Winsemius had never studied or even visited Southeast Asia. He readily admitted his ignorance to Singaporean reporters. He knew nothing of the historical and political context, including the city-state’s incipient labor-union militancy (Winsemius, 1982: 12). Nonetheless, Winsemius would maintain a close relationship to the Singaporean state elite for the rest of his life, decisively shaping the country’s economic landscape well into the 1980s. His influence encompassed the establishment of the National Wages Council, the heavy involvement of Dutch capital in Singapore’s petroleum sector, the creation of a bird park in Jurong, and the expansion of Singapore’s university system. Prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, who spent decades in power relentlessly leading the transformation of the backwater port town into a “First World Oasis in a Third World region” (Lee 2000: 61), deeply valued his two-decades-long relationship with Winsemius.i His 1960 visit marked a crucial moment in the developing relationship between international economic expertise and the development planning process in Singapore. Winsemius and his team wrote their prognosis for the Singaporean economy and produced a document that has become central to Singapore’s economic historiography (UNDP, 2015).

Titled A Proposed Programme for the Industrialization of Singapore (hereafter, the ‘Winsemius report’), the report provided an initial formulation of many of the policies and institutions that defined Singapore’s economic planning in later years (UNDP, 2015: i). The report is also a textual artifact that provides a window into key features of the social and geopolitical world that produced it. Some of the defining tensions of contemporary global political economy captured in the report – state formation in the global periphery, the prestige of international development expertise, and the ideological struggle between different models of development – were emerging in the immediate post-World War II era. In this paper, we engage in a close reading of the Winsemius report, placing it in it’s geopolitical, historical, and biographical context. We read the report not as a dry, technical, and ostensibly apolitical document, but as a theoretically sophisticated, spatially nuanced, and ideologically motivated guide for a Gramscian “passive revolution” in Singapore: a roadmap for state elites in the periphery to catalyze economic transformations while maintaining the political status quo.

Winsemius’ stature was based in his experience as a technocrat dispatched from the international financial institutions and aide organizations that sat at the center of the world economy to dispense advice to peripheral elites. Studies of decolonization in geography and cognate disciplines recognize the political importance of the global circulation of development expertise (Akhter, 2015a, b; Akhter and Ormerod, 2015; Craggs and Neate, 2017; Kothari, 2006; Rosen, 1985; Sneddon, 2015). However, the role of global expertise has been less thoroughly explored in the making of industrial policy in East Asian developmental states (though see Glassman, 2004: 38-46 and Doucette and Muller, 2016). Expertise, when mentioned, is often assumed to be anti-political and internal to national bureaucracies in canonical texts on Asian developmentalism (Amsden 1992; Johnson 1982, 1999; Wade, 1990, 1996). But this does not adequately account for how the complex geographies of expertise intersect with capitalist accumulation and state formation. Moreover, it also overlooks the distinctive ideological and political-economic function of development and technical expertise within projects of state making (Usher, 2018; Akhter, 2017; Doucette and Muller, 2016; Larner and Laurie, 2010). Given Winsemius’s prominence in Singapore’s development narratives (UNDP, 2015; Chng, 2000; Lee, 2000), analyzing his key economic planning text presents an opportunity to revisit not only the economic histories of East Asian developmental states, but also to enrich geographical

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understandings of uneven development, globally-mobile expertise, and state transformation more broadly.

Albert Winsemius (1910 – 1996) in 1971. Photo by Onbekend. Dutch National Archives.

How was transnational expertise employed in the making of Singapore’s state-led economic development, and how did this partnership impact the institutional forms and legacy of Singapore’s developmental state? This paper responds to calls for scholars of development to better integrate studies of international processes into East Asian geopolitical economy (Yeung, 2017; Glassman, 2016). Two major arguments are attempted in the paper. First, concurring with the rebuke of statist and territorially-trapped approaches to industrial transformation in Asia, we argue that transnational expertise provides a lens for analyzing the interplay between the political-economic and ideological dimensions of developmentalism. This argument hinges on translating Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution – a state-led effort to transform the economic structures of a territory while assiduously maintaining the socio-political status quo – in the context of planning Singapore’s post-colonial economy. By adopting a “more historically and geopolitically specific understanding of the developmental state”, our analysis also foregrounds how Singapore’s oft-celebrated People’s Action Party responded to its geopolitical-economic precarity by drawing on transnational development expertise (Yeung, 2017: 2). We highlight how this partnership articulated a “revolution/restoration”, a state-led developmental process that was politically reactionary, yet in some ways materially progressive (Gramsci, 1971: 109).

The second part of the argument is based on a close reading of the Winsemius report as a politically charged and spatially sensitive theory of the capitalist state. On the surface, texts of economic expertise and planning can seem dispassionate, objective, and apolitical. When these types of documents are placed in geopolitical economic context, however, they can instead be read as a sort of ‘prose of passive revolution’. Instead of providing apolitical guidance “from nowhere” on how to achieve economic growth, these texts should instead be read as part of the

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ideological and intellectual struggle to maintain the political status quo in the face of economic transformation. This approach takes inspiration from Ranajit Guha’s (1994) call to read the colonial archives of British India not as the scribblings of disinterested bureaucrats, but as the ideologically-charged ‘prose of counter-insurgency’ – part of a larger apparatus of political domination. Passive revolution involves efforts by existing political elites to counter or selectively accommodate the insurgent attempts of economically ascending classes and groups to change the political status quo. It also involves state-led efforts to modernize the economic landscape of the national economy. Attending to this dual thrust of passive revolution allows us to highlight the geopolitical and political economic implications of globally mobile expertise in state developmentalism (Craggs and Neate, 2017; Doucette and Muller, 2016; Doucette and Park, 2017; Akhter and Ormerod, 2015; Neveling, 2015).

The next section reviews the relevant literature on the developmental state and explicates the framework of passive revolution to capture the processual, politically-motivated, and ideologically-mediated construction of developmental states. The third section introduces the political economy of Singapore in the late 1950s and early 1960s, detailing the crisis that prompted Singapore’s passive revolution. The fourth section analyzes how Albert Winsemius and the United Nations Industrial Survey Mission theorized and influenced the Singaporean state’s developmental passive revolution. Our sources include primary materials such as planning documents, oral interviews, and journal entries, as well as secondary histories and institutional memoranda from Singapore. We conclude by underscoring how theorization of experts as mediators of passive revolution can contribute a more spatialized and politicized understanding of the history of state formation in the capitalist periphery.

The Developmental State and the Politics of Passive RevolutionDuring the Cold War, some East Asian states engaged in an active industrial policy with the aim of rapidly developing firm capacity and specialization during a period when private capital investment was not sufficient to facilitate economic development. Reducing developmental states to industrial policy, however, overlooks the material and ideological impetuses for founding specific forms of developmental institutions, as well as the broader geopolitical context in which they were formulated. In what follows, we review and evaluate the relevant literature to argue for a relational-processual conception of developmental states. This helps to highlights the relationship between geopolitical economy and the ideologically-laden nature of state formation by demonstrating the materiality of international anti-communism in the making of Singapore’s developmental state.

Recent research in geographical political economy calls for a revised conception of east Asian developmental states, stemming from a critique of ahistorical, statist- and territorially-trapped assumptions implicit in dominant formulations based on neo-Weberian theoretical and methodological frameworks (Doucette and Lee, 2015; Hsu, 2017; Hwang, 2016; Glassman, 2018b, 2004; Park, 2013; Song, 2013). Neo-Weberians generally base their research on extended case studies of institutional practices, cultures, and policies (Fine et. al, 2013; Glassman and Choi, 2014). Contra neoclassical economists, this research agenda has produced a narrative that East Asian economic growth was primarily the result of strong economic policy-making

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capabilities on the part of national bureaucracies, promulgated through programs such as export subsidies, interest rate controls, and direct management of inter-firm competition (Amsden, 1992; Chang, 2002; Johnson, 1982, 1999; Huff, 1995). This static conception, however, risks reifying the developmental state as a bundle of certain policies and institutions contained within nation-states while overlooking its broader historical and geographical context (Agnew, 1994; Gainsborough, 2009; Hwang, 2016).

More spatially and temporally sensitive interpretations of the developmental state phenomenon have underscored how many celebrated developmental regimes were, in fact, predicated on political-economic ties from outside of East Asia, particularly with respect to the United States military-industrial complex (Desai, 2013; Glassman, 2016; Hsu et. al, 2018). Measures such as foreign aid and military procurement contracts with the U.S. state were critical in nurturing transnational business ties that supported much of the export-oriented industrialization that characterized the quintessential developmental states of South Korea and Taiwan (Glassman and Choi, 2014; Hsu et. al, 2018; Yeung, 2017). While these approaches succeed in placing developmental states in historical and geographical context – as opposed to grounding their reproduction in culturalist narratives such as “Asian” respect for authority, apolitical bureaucratic planning, or altruistic national development motives (Glassman, 2016; Song, 2013) – we aim to offer a critical geographic analysis that explicitly conceptualizes their planning and formation. Our theorization of transnational actors undergirding the construction of developmental states draws on Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution.

Passive revolution has experienced a renewal in contemporary political and geopolitical theory (Morton, 2010; Nash, 2013; Akhter, 2015b; Brooks and Loftus, 2016; Arnold and Hess, 2017; Hekseth, 2017). Our use of the concept is meant to highlight a particular form of state formation outside of the capitalist core, “those countries that modernize the state through a series of reforms or national wars without undergoing a political revolution of a radical Jacobin-type” (Gramsci, 2011: 232). Through “legislative intervention by the state, and by means of cooperative organization, relatively far-reaching modifications are being introduced into the country’s economic structure… without however touching individual and group appropriation of profit” (Gramsci, 1971: 119-120). Passive revolution, then, is a dynamic process of reconfiguring state strategies through which elites secure the institutional conditions for maintaining power, while introducing capitalist modernity ‘from above’.

While Gramsci’s methodological and theoretical corpus have gained purchase in scholarship on state-led developmentalism (Glassman, 2018b; Lee et. al, 2018; Akhter, 2015a, 2015b; Morton, 2007), passive revolution is a particularly useful concept for analyzing Singapore for two reasons. First, by incorporating the ‘international’ as an active influence on national development, passive revolution permits a multi-scalar analysis of state formation. As Hekseth notes, “the universal pressures generated by capitalist geopolitical competition are acknowledged but the geographical seats of class articulation remain the priority for analysis” (Hekseth, 2017: 15; see also Ives and Short, 2013; Akhter, 2015b; Morton, 2010). This conception not only invites comparison across different developmental projects but internalizes how Singapore’s particular form of developmentalism was molded within Cold War geopolitical-economic imperatives and their regional articulations. Second, passive revolution highlights the agency of classes in guiding state transformation (Hekseth, 2017; Thomas, 2006). The concept foregrounds

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the construction of institutions by class-based agents, who, through forging new accumulation strategies and alliances, assuage demands for political transformation in the midst of social revolution. This departs from attributing state-led accumulation to abstract developmental cultures (Johnson, 1982, 1999) or juridical-idealistic “government autonomy from interest groups” (Huff, 1995: 1430). Instead, passive revolution offers an explanatory framework for uncovering the unity of diverse developmental state projects – such as land reform (You, 2017), public housing provision (Haila, 2015; Seng, 2013), as well as its trademark of industrial development – as material concessions that stabilize the political-economic power of extant ruling classes.

Passive revolution also allows us to theorize how transnational experts and their embodied ideological dispositions were enrolled in Singapore’s developmental transformation. For Gramsci,

when the impetus of progress is not tightly linked to a vast local economic development which is artificially limited and repressed, but is instead the reflection of international developments which transmit their ideological currents to the periphery – currents born on the basis of the productive development of more advanced countries – then the group which is the bearer of the new ideas is not the economic group but the intellectual stratum, and the conception of the State advocated by them changes aspect; it is conceived of as something in itself, as a rational absolute. (1971: 116-7).

This passage is typical of Gramsci’s spatial and cultural sensitivity to the historically intertwined processes of capitalist accumulation and state formation. State-led developmentalism is, at least in part, the product of transnational ideological exchanges between intellectuals in core capitalist countries and the bureaucratic-political elite in peripheral countries. Passive-revolutionary expertise, then, is a relation between state functionaries looking for ideological and intellectual legitimization for their hold on power, on the one hand, and class- and ideologically-bounded actors that offer politically-motivated technical assistance, on the other. This suggests that while the capacity of experts to act is circumscribed by regional structures of power, they still nevertheless exert significant influence on the production and maintenance of institutional and ideological landscapes (Akhter and Ormerod, 2015). To understand the geopolitical and ideological impacts of development and economic expertise in Singapore requires some further clarification of the regional connections between anti-communism, armed counter-insurgency, and passive revolution.

The economic history of East and Southeast Asia is thoroughly intertwined with the regions political and military history. The economic planning of East Asian economies was conducted in the aftermath of World War II, shifting Cold War alliances, and the emergence of the Asian Pacific as an outpost of US power. The Korean War of the early 1950s and the Vietnam war between 1960-1975 were crucibles not only of the extension of US military power, but also of its economic power, in the form of huge and targeted military offshore procurement, training, and contracts in the region (Glassman, 2018a). While the economic transformation of some parts of East Asia is remembered fondly in the triumphalist literature of economic orthodoxy, the links between this economic transformation and cultural, intellectual, and especially military war are less often recalled. As Jim Glassman suggests, “what the World Bank deigned to call the ‘East

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Asian Miracle’ was dialectically connected to what we may call the ‘East Asian Massacres’” (Glassman, 2018a: 3). Singaporean state elites – like state elites in Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and elsewhere in Asia – entered this zone of influence knowingly and as part of a geoeconomic political strategy of accessing resource that could jumpstart a state-led process of development as well as contain or otherwise neutralize their political opponents. Partly because of its connections to mainland China and its unique geography, Singapore was less involved with the US military’s overseas procurement process – but nevertheless strategically benefited from US (and UK) geopolitical objectives and legacies in the region (Glassman, 2018a: 485 – 494).

The Cold War passive revolutions in the rapidly transforming societies of East and Southeast Asia occurred on the landscape of “a regionally variegated industrialization process within the formation of a more integrated Asian regional economy” (Glassman, 2018a: 389). Anticommunist elites joined up with US state power to wage war – cultural and military – against workers, students, unions, and other progressive actors throughout the region (Gray, 2014). In the Singaporean context, the passive revolution intricately tied together strategies of state-led economic transformation with repression or selective accommodation of the political opposition. The labor movement was neutralized by deregistering the radical Singapore Association of Trade Unions during Operation Coldstore 1963, and the subsequent founding of the establishment-approved National Trade Unions Congress. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s repressive measures were implemented to control the autonomy and potentially oppositional role of the media, students, the law, and civil society more broadly (Chua, 2017). The government justified these moves in the name of making the nation safe from communism. Accompanying this political repression, however, was the economic plank of the passive revolution – the means by which the state could lead a process of economic growth that would buy the legitimacy of the population. Examining globally mobile economic planners, and the texts they produced, sheds light on the transregional nature of passive revolution. State elites in the decolonizing periphery, intent on depoliticizing capitalist transformation, treated economic and planning experts as vectors of a legitimate and politically stable path to economic modernity.

We read Albert Winsemius as a practical strategist for the state’s post-war passive revolution and a theorist of the capitalist state in his own right. Winsemius was not just giving economic advice – he was writing the prose of passive revolution. The essential role of economic planning in ideological and political struggle is not written on the surface of technical reports – this social function needs to be gleaned through close and contextualized reading. This approach to reading economic policy allows us to trace the transmission of specific conceptions of the world into material state forms (Wainwright, 2010). It also allows for an understanding of Winsemius as an agent of passive revolution, rather than the hard-headed, practical, and amiable foreign sage of Singapore’s economic development (UNDP, 2015; Chng, 2000; Lee, 2000). Reading the Winsemius report as a text written against nascent communist agitation and weak bourgeois hegemony in the region allows for a political-economic explanation of Winsemius’s reverent position in Singapore’s official history and his contemporary relevancy to the repeated anti-radical actions of the People’s Action Party. It also permits a more dialectical analysis of the interplay between transnational ideologies – in Winsemius’s case, liberal-internationalism – and their realization in practice, through the institutional materiality of Singapore’s developmental state (Poulantzas, 1978).

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To sum, we privilege expertise as an analytical lens within an overarching Gramscian framework to theorize the developmental state as a type of passive revolution. Passive revolution, understood as the strategic action of social groups to construct and maintain durable modes of political control over a rapidly-shifting terrain of socio-economic relations, allows a more nuanced understanding how globally circulating expert knowledges is incorporated into state structures and regional economies. The next section elaborates our argument using an analysis of the political and economic instability that fomented Singapore’s passive revolution.

Decolonization, Labor Strife and the UN Industrial Survey Mission to SingaporeThe economic and political structure of twentieth-century Singapore is in large part a product of its prolonged occupation by the British Empire. The holding, deemed a crown colony in 1946, functioned as an entrepôt for Southeast Asian markets and an intermediary between Pacific and Indo-European trading networks. Indeed, mercantile services comprised the majority of the city’s economic activity well into the 1960s. But the majority-Chinese city’s occupation by the Japanese Empire during World War II and Allied bombings led to chronic hyperinflation, shortages of basic commodities and foodstuffs, and critical damage to water, energy, and port infrastructures, leaving Singapore in a dire economic state (Rodan, 1989; Trocki, 2006). The economic problems, moreover, outlasted the war itself; despite a recovery to its pre-war output level by 1949, a period of sluggish growth plagued the colony while other imperial holdings enjoyed the ‘post-war boom’. A slight resurgence of demand in primary industries in the early 1950s – primarily in rubber and tin for the Korean War – did little to fuel the growth of a labor market to accommodate Singapore’s rapidly growing population (Visscher, 2002).

The conjuncture of rising food prices and dismal employment opportunities prompted the growth of a militant labor movement among ethnic-Chinese students and workers against the colonial bureaucracy and local industrialists. Repeated confrontations between increasingly radical students, workers, and activists and the state-business class erupted in to physical violence. For the British government, incidents such as the National Service Riots of 1954, the Hock Lee bus riots of 1955, and the 1956 Chinese middle school riots cast doubt on the ability of Singapore’s colonial bureaucracy to stabilize its own political economy (Lepoer, 1989; Trocki, 2006). Only after Lim Yew Hock led a campaign to repress leftist members of the People’s Action Party (PAP) did the British government acquiesce to the demand for increased local autonomy (Rodan, 1989: 56-60; Visscher, 2007). The British would remain responsible for foreign affairs and defense, while domestic concerns would be devolved to a new Singaporean state.

Labor unrest was not subdued with the nominal independence of Singapore in 1958, however, as the PAP gained power from Lim in the elections of 1959. The perception of leftist control and the PAP’s successful negotiation of wage hikes discouraged capital formation as many small industrialists and entrepreneurs relocated to bordering Malaya (Lepoer, 1989). At the same time, regional geopolitical tensions were growing, threatening to further destabilize the Singaporean economy. Neighboring Southeast Asian states were undergoing the process of decolonization, accompanied by nationalization and state formation. While the city-state was formally engaged in trading agreements with Indonesia, that nation-state’s newly-elected President Sukarno was moving toward import-substitution policies that would effectively close off Indonesia from

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foreign products, thus destroying Singapore’s ability to sell goods to its largest market (Shipway, 2007). Moreover, the terms of Singapore’s tenuous federation with Malaya allowed for alternative ports, markets, and trading centers to be established if organized labor threatened to render wages uncompetitive (Trocki, 2006). The relative scarcity of employment and growth opportunities foreseen among Singaporean and British bureaucrats created the widespread perception that the country would inevitably turn toward communism (Winsemius, 1982).

The PAP’s radicalism, however, rested on its ideological appeal to Singaporean workers against the Chinese business elite and British imperialists. Following the political defeat of Lim Yew Hock, the middle-class faction of party functionaries understood that to maintain their hold on state power, popular legitimacy and mass support would require an improvement in the material conditions for their constituency (Trocki, 2006: 163; Visscher, 2002: 244). Lee Kuan Yew, the newly elected prime minister, rose to power through his active participation as a lawyer in the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s, gaining a reputation as an organic intellectual and advocate for Singaporean self-determination (Turnball, 2009). His public rhetoric of solidarity with far-left politics, however, amounted to little more than political posturing; throughout the late 1950s, Lee had effectively suppressed the ability of the PAP’s working class base to participate in its decision-making. Following Lim’s suppression of pro-communists and Lee’s orchestrated party takeover by his own middle-class, technocratic faction, the PAP adopted a politically-moderate, nationalist agenda that aimed to secure long-term power through affecting economic growth (Rodan, 1989: 56-72). Among his first directives as an executive was to submit a request to the United Nations to advise solutions for the city-state’s burgeoning unemployment problem and housing shortage (UNDP, 2015: 4; Rodan, 1989: 64). It is at this stage that Albert Winsemius enters Singapore’s development history.

Albert Winsemius was born in the province of Friesland in the Netherlands in 1910. His father was a cheese wholesaler, and as a teenager and young adult, he worked as a cheese maker and later became a salesman himself, not attending university in Rotterdam until age 26. Despite being “a diligent student”, full-time employment during his studies prevented him from attending lectures, though he nonetheless secured employment as a price controller for the Dutch government just before the onset of World War II (UNDP, 2015: 5). The immediate post-war era, however, is when he gained mid-level notoriety in his role in carrying out the Marshall Plan in the Netherlands from 1945 to 1953. His reputation secured him consulting appointments with the United Nations and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, advising governments in Jamaica, Spain, Turkey, Portugal and Greece on industrial development, albeit with varying degrees of success (UNDP, 2015: 6). His rather unconventional and business-savvy upbringing, as well as his maturation in the small mercantile country of the Netherlands, perhaps hinted at the “unorthodox advice” of export-oriented development (UNDP, 2015: i).

Winsemius’s influence on the initial developmental form of Singapore’s state is considerable. As Garry Rodan notes, the State Development Plan 1961-1964 that largely reflects Winsemius’s initial recommendations on the formation of an institutional and financial framework that help catalyze growth in private investment (Rodan, 1989: 64-66). However, we stress that Winsemius, as an individual, did not unilaterally determine the historical trajectory of the city-state. Our analysis of Winsemius and the PAP-led Singaporean state understands the expert in a dialectical relationship with the structures of his time; though Winsemius and his mission formulated

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original political and economic recommendations, these proposals were demarcated by his own ideological position as a Western expert within the larger milieu of Cold War-era decolonization and his experience as an industrial planner in the Netherlands, Jamaica, Turkey, Spain, Portugal and Greece (UNDP, 2015). This position enabled a particularly salient form of anti-communism and authoritarian political prescriptions that manifest repeatedly throughout his plan. And in the context of the PAP’s struggle to maintain power, Lee and his cadre were considerably like-minded and receptive to his advice.ii

Winsemius’ first visit to Singapore in October 1960 resulted in a draft of an initial ‘Crash Programme for Singapore’s Development’ in 1961, reflecting the dire need to increase short-term employment opportunities in labor-intensive industries while long-term industrial strategy was still being crafted. Thus, Winsemius eschews financial and mercantile activities in both of his analyses while advocating for an expansion of manufacturing and heavy industry.iii While Winsemius had limited knowledge of the fledgling city-state, there were striking geographical and economic parallels between Singapore and his home country. The two states were heavily dependent on maritime foreign trade, and both sustained heavy damage to their fixed capital stock from World War II due to occupation by Axis powers (United Nations, 1961: 100). However, while the Netherlands had been a core capitalist country since the sixteenth century, Dr. Winsemius noticed a qualitatively different relationship between the few domestic capitalists and the majority of laborers in Singapore. Production activities were frequently disrupted by the large labor unions, to the point where businesses had little structural choice but to acquiesce to the demands of the organizers. His advice for the PAP was formed from his knowledge of similar circumstances that he noticed when advising Jamaica. In The Economic Development of Jamaica, his report produced for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Winsemius called urgently for smoother labor-capital relations and pleaded that “progress toward higher levels of production must be arrested as little as possible by prolonged interruption through strikes” (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1952: 82).

The economic tensions existing in the workplace between employers and workers was mirrored by political strife within the PAP itself. Although the party officially assumed power in 1959, the first five years of its rule, coinciding with Winsemius’ first visits, was fractious, and marked by virulent debates between the leftist wing of the party and the mainstream, particularly over federating with Malaya (Visscher, 2007). In July 1961, the leftist wing of the PAP was expelled, with the former members establishing their own party, the Barisan Socialis. In a struggle for power, the ruling PAP moved quickly and violently against the Barisan Socialis and leftism more broadly “through the application of the whole range of political weaponry… such as detention, deregistration of key opposition organizations, invocations of legislation restricting political actions and publications and pre-emptive organization,” (Chan, 1975: 295). The PAP’s actions impressed Winsemius, contrasting favorably with his experience in Portugal and Greece. In those peripheral European countries, Winsemius saw cronyism, sluggishness, and a lack of political will to tackle unemployment as hampering the development process. In Singapore, on the other hand, Winsemius gleaned that a powerful faction of the ruling elite was willing to exert authoritarian measures to control leftist opposition in the name of economic development.

Winsemius was far from a mere technical advisor; indeed, his reports on Singapore and Jamaica were saturated with detailed political analysis.iv Vehemently anti-communist, Winsemius

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understood that the establishment of capitalist nation-states was not only a matter of constructing plants and organizing supply chains, but depended on a stable political landscape made possible by redirecting the discontent of labor organizations. That is to say, Winsemius was a theorist of passive revolution, and his Western-sourced anti-communism was crucial to his approach to development. Contrary to the idea that expertise is anti-political, Winsemius was keen to point out the necessity of liquidating supposed communists. As he reminisced in a 1982 interview: “I am not interested in what you do with them [communists]. You can throw them in jail, throw them out of the country, you can even kill them. As an economist it does not interest me, but I have to tell you, if you don’t eliminate them in Government, in unions, in the streets, forget about economic development” (quoted in UNDP, 2015: 11).

Moreover, despite being an industrial economist, Winsemius was not primarily concerned with fostering growth. He was, rather, intent on controlling political unrest through expanding employment (Rodan, 1989: 64; United Nations, 1961: 10). Thus, the Winsemius report includes scant mention of Singapore’s most common industries in the contemporary era, such as financial services, corporate headquarters, or mercantile trade, because of their poor ability to absorb unskilled labor. Winsemius understood that the fundamental priority of the state ought to be to influence the formation of a proper social landscape – that is, the labor-capital relation – for capital accumulation, through state-led industrialization. In what follows, we highlight two aspects of the Winsemius report that were instrumental in creating the preconditions for Singapore’s developmental state: the report’s emphasis on subduing labor unrest through the attainment of full employment and a de-politicization of union activity through internalizing them into state institutions, and a spatially-attuned industrialization strategy based on the doctrine of regional competitiveness. These strategies, we argue, reflect how anti-communism, globally-mobile development expertise, and state power combined in the prose of passive revolution to influence Singapore’s state formation.

The Winsemius Report as the Prose of Passive RevolutionSingapore’s precarious geopolitical and geoeconomic circumstances cast doubt on its ability to industrialize successfully; Winsemius’s initial feeling was that “Singapore is going down the drain, it is a poor little market in a dark corner of Asia” (Hong, 2015). Winsemius’s counsel was clear:

“Capital can go to other countries. Enterprise can quiet down or escape. Labour has no escape possibilities. It needs employment here and has no time to wait. It is already now paying for the lack of cooperation between employers and unions. It will continue to do so in an increasing way unless the foundations for economic development are laid.”

(United Nations, 1961: xxiv)

Winsemius and the UNDP mission recognized the dire conditions that threatened the survival of capitalism in Singapore. In this section, we analyze the Winsemius report as the ‘prose of passive revolution’, adapted from Guha’s ‘prose of counter-insurgency’ (1994), to understand how Winsemius’s ideological anti-communism and liberalism resulted in a counter-insurgent, yet highly reflexive and pragmatic, theory of the capitalist state. Reading the report, and its effects, in this way provides a method for understanding developmental passive revolution on its own

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terms: as a simultaneously political, economic, and ideological strategy to maintain the state-capital power nexus (Morton, 2010; Akhter, 2015b).

At the time of the arrival of the Winsemius mission, the country had an official unemployment rate of fourteen percent, only fifteen percent of real gross domestic product in manufacturing, and political-economic uncertainty among the business sector (World Bank, 2017; United Nations, 1961: ii). There were also structural problems associated with the city-state’s dependence on its financial and commercial economy. As Rodan notes, “whilst this dependence had made dramatic economic growth possible, it also rendered the Singapore economy susceptible to equally dramatic downturns in economic fortunes” (1989: 42). Volatile commodity prices, particularly in rice, petroleum, tin, and fish, cast serious doubt on the ability of an economy based on regional trade to sustain itself. During the Korean war, for instance, total trade fluctuated from $2.4 billion in 1949 to a peak of $7.6 billion in 1951, before dropping to $4.3 billion in 1953. But the city-state’s largest problem was unemployment. A combination of high mobility, a youthful age structure, lack of agricultural land, and low labor intensity and demand in finance and trade created the chilling prospect of a large surplus population (Rodan, 1989: 42-49; United Nations, 1961: 8-10).

To combat these conditions, the Winsemius mission recognized the importance of instituting active industrial strategies that targeted manufacturing industries with high growth potential and a robust capacity to absorb labor.v Like European and American developmentalisms, Winsemius argued for some infant industry protection, anti-dumping legislation, and that the government give preference to local manufacturers in public purchases (United Nations, 1961: iv). In contrast to the city-state’s contemporary global stature as an international financial hub, Winsemius does not accord the banking or financial industry any role in his team’s vision for the economic development of Singapore. Though he would later gain notoriety as the one who suggested that, because of its placement in a time-zone between that of London and New York, Singapore could serve as a financial center for East Asia (UNDP, 2015), Winsemius, in the 1960s, advised exclusively for the development of manufacturing and industrial infrastructures. In a 1982 interview, Winsemius recounted how he foresaw a second phase of economic development focused on banking, tourism, and finance, to follow “at least ten years” after initiation of the first phase, which would achieve full employment through expansion of heavy industry (1982: 22). Because Winsemius understood growing unemployment as the key threat to the political stability and developmental viability of Singapore, he advised to target sectors which best exploited “the high aptitude and skill of workers in Singapore, industries which offer the best opportunities for immediate market expansion, and industries based on the central location of Singapore in South East Asia” (United Nations, 1961: vii; UNDP, 2015).

But Winsemius’ observation that the average “Singaporean had a high aptitude for manufacturing” conflicted with the aforementioned labor-capital relationships at the time (Winsemius, 1982: 15), evinced by his account of conversations with trade union leaders:

“The communist group – most discussions were… not concentrated on: How can we develop Singapore, create work… No, it was not very successful” (Winsemius, 1982: 14).

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Quantitatively, weak capitalist hegemony manifested through high wages and consistent struggle over the terms of the labor contract. Successful bargaining had driven worker pay “20% to 30% too high” (United Nations, 1961, 115), while employer regulations were stricter than many European nations at the time, granting workers the right to a 44-hour workweek and extended paid holidays (United Nations, 1961: 55). Industrial stoppages resulted in as many as 946,000 man-days of labor lost in 1955, 454,000 lost in 1956, and 109,000 lost in 1957 (United Nations, 1961: 55). Strikes, resulting from disputes over dismissals, retrenchments, and severance pay, numbered in the double digits from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s (United Nations, 1961: 80). With wages too elevated for the Southeast Asian market, and manufacturing quality insufficient to be competitive on a global scale, Singapore’s industry was in a state of relative stagnation compared to the booming world market.

The Winsemius mission’s response to the growing worker discontent was thinly-veiled suppression. While recognizing the average Singaporean laborer’s astute technical aptitude, the report simultaneously denigrates the worker and trade unions as unruly, entitled, and in need of discipline. Noting the “excessive pressure” on firms and unions “interfering” with management, Winsemius and his team judged that labor’s demands were not justified by their marginal productivity – the metric which neoclassical labor economics argues wages ought to follow – but instead sought wage increases based on the firm’s perceived ability to pay (United Nations, 1961: 80-89). These conflicting demands, of course, amounts to a confrontation of the liberal position that capital and labor are engaged in an exchange of equivalents, and a radical position that acknowledges the existence of an absolute surplus. For the liberal-internationalist Winsemius, the strikes registered as being “about nothing” and superfluous, since labor was already receiving its due share (Tamboer, 1996). Indeed, this exemplifies what Boon-Kheng (2006) perceived as an antagonistic class consciousness that prevailed in Singapore during its early statehood. The tendency toward dispute, the report argues, was a barrier to industrial expansion as well as Singapore’s reputation on the world market.

To reconcile these seemingly incompatible interests, the Winsemius report offers a proposed compromise based on a developmental nationalism. Like other Cold War-era nation-states, developmental nationalisms were deployed to rally otherwise antagonistic parties around an allegiance to the existing state structure during metamorphic economic modernization projects (Johnson, 1999; Song, 2013; Akhter, 2015b). Imploring cooperation through a plea for national unity is critical to the process of passive revolution; it ensures the stability of state power despite rising rates of exploitation – wage repression and higher labor productivity – that accompany late industrialization. The Winsemius report urges both capital and labor to avoid “delving much into the past and taking a more positive outlook on the future”, highlighting their commonalities rather than their disagreements (United Nations, 1961: 96-97). Trade unions were urged to adopt a “wage policy which took into account the economic situation of Singapore and avoided penalizing efficient manufacturers”, commit to non-interference with management, and exercise “self-restraint”, while manufacturers were obliged only to gradual wage increases, “reasonable severance pay”, and “more co-operative in bringing about good industrial relations” (United Nations, 1961: 96).

Global experience was directly implicated in the proposal and, ultimately, in the institutional measures that were established by the PAP. In the report, Winsemius draws on his experience in

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the reconstruction of the Netherlands to suggest how developmental nationalism can soothe the economic development process (United Nations, 1961: 98-101). Following the war, the Netherlands were left with destroyed factories, ports, and infrastructure, while competitors such as the United States and the Scandinavian countries were left relatively unscathed. To re-emerge as a globally competitive manufacturing location, Dutch workers ‘accepted’ a temporary suppression in wage levels until productivity recovered to its pre-war benchmark. The excess profits from artificially depressed wages would then, in turn, allow for the formation of a reserve fund that would be used to reinvest in exporting industries. Expertise from elsewhere, embodied in Winsemius’s and the UNDP team’s prior experiences, was critical in transmitting “ideological currents to the periphery” (Gramsci, 1971: 116-7).

To discipline the labor force into accepting lower wages, PAP leaders reorganized labor relations into an official, state institutional apparatus. This strategy was a key component of Singapore’s passive revolution – incorporating select subaltern demands while remaining consonant with the long-term objectives of the state elite. The National Trade Union Congress (NTUC), established in the same year the report was issued, effectively dismantled the bargaining power of labor by subsuming wage determination, worker discipline, and union leadership under PAP control. With an executive culled from the ranks of PAP (Periera, 2008) and alternatives to NTUC representation outlawed (Jones, 1994), the “compulsory affiliation” with the NTUC that the Winsemius report recommended was realized (United Nations, 1961: 107). But as the PAP’s grip on government tightened throughout the late 1960s, new policies were enacted that put greater restriction on union activity, exceeding the scope of the Winsemius report. These new policies reflected a consolidation of state elites in alliance with foreign industrialists. In 1968, an amendment to the Industrial Relations Act curtailed the legality of strikes; workers who dissented were made liable to lose their union membership in the NTUC, as well as their own employment (Verma et. al, 1995; Periera, 2008). The imperative to control wage growth led to the establishment of the National Wage Council in 1972, which formally ended the NTUC’s role in arbitrating wage disputes, thereby foreclosing any opportunity for workers to negotiate their wages (Jones, 1994; Huff, 1995). Compared to its chief competitors, average wages remained much lower in Singapore, growing only one percent annually during the 1960s and two percent annually during the 1970s, despite productivity growing at an average of 55 percent annually during these decades (Castells, 1988; Huff, 1995). Though somewhat assuaged by a robust public housing program, Singapore continuously absorbed surplus labor into new employment by attracting new industries, maintaining high exploitation and sweatshop-like conditions (Castells, 1988).

The Winsemius report, unlike many texts of developmental expertise, cannot be critiqued as ahistorical or de-politicizing (Peet and Hartwick, 2015). Singapore’s transformation is often promoted by state and developmental elites as unsentimental, apolitical, and above all, based on practicality and not theory or principle. Only several years after the Winsemius Report was issued, Prime Minister Lee lectured a democratic socialist in Brussels on how “[t]he millions of dispossessed in Asia care not and know not of theory. They want a better life. They want a more equal, a more just society. He who gives them this is their savior” (Lee, 1965). To read the Winsemius report as an anti-political or technocratic document would be a disservice to the author’s biographical and intellectual formation. Winsemius was not only a career economic expert, but a political-economic theorist – albeit one with a bureaucratic, not academic, audience.

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Singapore’s developmental state, then, is constituted not purely by an autocratic bureaucracy, but also by transnational experts who were, at once, middling technocrats and capitalist counter-insurgents. Moreover, Winsemius’ grasp of the geography of the world economy, informed by his experiences in the Mediterranean and in Jamaica, led him to formulate a deeply geographical policy procedure for Singapore. Though development economists are often criticized for being aspatial (Sheppard, 2016), geographic considerations fed into Winsemius’ proposed industrialization strategy and his understanding of Singapore’s capitalist state.vi Thus, keen attention to spatial concerns such as scale, region, and unevenness marks the Winsemius report.

The Winsemius Report’s preoccupation with absorbing the surplus labor force led directly to its engagement with the economic geography of Southeast Asia. Because of Singapore’s small territorial footprint, encompassing less than three hundred square miles, the popular development strategy at the time – import-substitution industrialization – alone would be “considerably difficult” (United Nations, 1961: 33). Singapore’s home market was small – 1.7 million called the island home, compared to Indonesia’s 90 million and Malaysia’s 9 million – and its wealth at the outset of the Winsemius mission was comparably polarized (United Nations, 1961: 22-33). It was clear that internal demand for goods and services would not be sufficient for propelling Singapore into capitalist modernity. To generate the projected 214,000 additional jobs needed to absorb the country’s growing population by the end of the 1960s, an industrialization program that was attuned to both Singapore’s own geography and its regional geopolitical-economic situation was required.

In place of import-substitution, the Winsemius report urges the PAP and the Singaporean government to “carry out an active export drive in all neighboring countries as well as in other parts of the world”, with an emphasis on Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Commonwealth countries (United Nations, 1961: 42-47). The report stressed the need to exploit the “central location of Singapore in South East Asia” by targeting industries that were both demanded by possible trade partners in the region and which utilized the existing territory’s factors of production (United Nations, 1961: xii). Directing this industrialization would be Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB), organized by the Winsemius commission as the lead agency for “planning and executing strategies towards shaping the future of Singapore’s business and economy” (EDB, 2018).

Through land allocation and loan provision, the EDB was charged with conducting analysis on Singapore’s industrial activity, selecting specific industries for export-oriented development, and supplementing direct command with indirect measures such as incentives and transnational firm recruitment (United Nations, 1961: 123-129). The Winsemius mission urged the EDB to invest in basic industries and raw material suppliers to develop a foundation for future intensive industrialization, building materials suppliers that had guaranteed demand from the government’s planned housing agenda, and industries that used local raw materials to save on input costs. From 1961 to 1965, the EDB was allocated $100 million to develop these industrial infrastructures in advance of the growth of its industrial labor force (Hamilton-Hart, 2002: 90-91).

Despite its neglect of the financial sector, the Winsemius mission had a lasting impact on Singapore’s financial industry. Following the EDB’s initial outlay of $100 million, the

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Winsemius report recommended that the board entrust development finance to a yet-to-be-established industrial development bank. Though the bank would maintain close ties with the EDB through a shared board of directors and executive, the separation of development finance from the EDB would allow Singapore to use private capital investment after gaining sufficient investor confidence from its state-led industrialization effort, and end its reliance on publicly-sourced funding (United Nations, 1961: 123). The bank would be formally established in 1968 as the Development Bank of Singapore (DBS), while the EDB would direct its efforts toward promoting inward foreign investment. DBS would continue to finance industrialization efforts in the 1970s as well as play a pivotal role in developing the Asian dollar market (Hamilton-Hart, 2002: 91). Indeed, the bank has long been the country’s largest, and is the largest bank in Southeast Asia.

After the founding of the DBS, economic policies such as the Economic Expansion Act (1967) formed the basis of the EDB’s economic policy. The Act reduced taxes on exported manufactured goods from 40% to 4% for ten to fifteen years on eligible industries (Castells, 1988). Tax holidays for pioneering industries and protective tariffs against imports encouraged the development of an industrial economy fueled by foreign direct investment (Visscher, 2007). These policies took both internal territory and resources, as well as external factors of effective demand, into consideration, thus providing a spatially-attuned basis for developing a dynamic capitalist economy in Singapore, and Southeast Asia in general.

What would prove to be perhaps the most dynamic sector detailed in the Winsemius report was the maritime industry, comprised of shipbreaking, ship repair, and transshipment. Winsemius had imported his knowledge of these industries from his experience on an advisory committee on shipbuilding in the Netherlands, which oversaw the substantial growth of container transport in Rotterdam (Tamboer, 1996). Exploiting the island’s physical geography on the Straits of Malacca, these industries provided both a rapid surge in employment and promised the possibility of future expansion. They also provided multiplier effects for the future expansion of other export-oriented industries by simultaneously contributing to the development of Singapore’s seaports. Indeed, the Winsemius report outlined specific strategies that preceded Singapore’s early adoption of container shipping, which, although initially unprofitable, eventually revolutionized global production and circulation, and placed Singapore as a transport hub for the region (Airress, 2001; Tamboer, 1996).

In the late 1950s, disputes between the extant longshoreman’s union and shipowners had resulted in a fall of productivity in the Harbour (United Nations, 1961: 133-136). The Winsemius report recommends, as a solution, “clarity about management rights” (United Nations, 1961: 137) and integration of the longshoreman’s union into the NTUC. The report also recommends the merger of the three previously autonomous shipping authorities – the Harbour Board, the Marine Department, and the Marine Public Works Department – into the Port of Singapore Authority, the acquisition of additional land, the sale of the Harbour Board Dockyardvii, and the construction of a large container terminal at Jurong Shipyard. With the eventual expansion of the facility into five distinct wharves in the late 1960s, Singapore’s seaport became a competitive asset for multinational corporations to locate in the city-state. Even to this day, the port remains the second largest in Asia (Trocki, 2006).

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Winsemius’s advice also presaged Singapore’s adoption of offshore industrial facilities as well as a substantial expansion of public infrastructure (Yeung, 2014). The Winsemius report urged the construction of industrial estates, which would provide transport, communications, water, and energy infrastructure in a concentrated allotment of land. This strategy attracted industry through the direct subsidization of industry’s fixed capital costs. These estates were also strategically located near an ample labor force (Rodan, 1989: 65).

Demonstrating a reflexivity to the broader implications of regional development and dynamism, the mission evaluated the regional geopolitical economy and constructed the industrialization proposal with an accentuation on cultivating geographically-appropriate industries and maintaining strategic trade partnerships, as well as recognizing the necessity for continuous evolution of the city-state’s economic capacity. This recognition, however, was predicated on the necessity to forestall an unemployment-fueled political crisis through the absorption and pacification of surplus labor. Indeed, Winsemius has been noted for advising Singapore’s eventual wage increases to accompany an increase in productivity in the 1970sviii, and its transformation into a command center for finance, transport, and services during the 1980s (Straits Times 1979: 1). Winsemius’s successful “predictions” led, in part, to his retention as Singapore’s chief economic advisor until 1984.

This section has situated the Winsemius report as an instance of the ‘prose of counter-insurgency’ – or of how economic planning in the Cold War period developed its own explicitly anti-communist political theory of the state. Our approach has shed light on how Singapore’s developmental state rested on a coherent theory of the capitalist political economy, globally sourced from diverse geographies such as post-war Europe and Jamaica, and mediated by historically-specific ideologies, experiences, and practices. This destabilizes the concept of ‘developmental states’ as monolithic bureaucracies or territorially-autonomous governments; instead, developmental states are also constituted by both globally-mobile ideologies mediated through experts and material flows of investment capital.

ConclusionThe post-war context was defined by the interweaving processes of decolonization and state formation, between the economic and ideological systems of capitalism on one hand, and communism on the other. Development interventions sourced by Euro-American capital and expertise in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s were driven by both material considerations – expanding markets and the realm of profitable industrial investment, for instance – and an ideological, hegemonic project to make communism appear less attractive to the war-weary peasants and workers of the decolonizing world (Gray, 2014). Modernization, as the internationalist project of the Cold War-era capitalist core nation-states, sutured these concerns together through framing social demands and geopolitical threats as technical problems, to be solved through development (Mitchell 2002; Scott 1998).

But developmentalism and modernization were not just instrumental ideologies employed by arrogant state planners, nor did all forms of developmentalism share a common modality. Michael Latham, for example, explains how the project of modernization was all too amenable to authoritarian governance, marked by a faith in technocratic control over the direction of social

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development, arguing that “modernization promoted a disregard for the significance of local history” and social context (Latham, 2010: 4). Winsemius, in fact, took local actors and context deeply into consideration. His professional experiences in the Netherlands, Jamaica, and elsewhere conditioned his prescriptions for Singapore’s development, but he was not unaware of the local specificities of Singapore, whether in terms of geography, labor market, or political situation. He took into deep consideration the concerns of the ruling, pro-capitalist nationalist party, the PAP, and Singapore’s geography as a vulnerable entrepôt in a transforming regional geopolitical economy. Rather than being a uniform expression of neo-imperial hubris, developmentalisms should be regarded as variegated responses to, and enactments of, struggles over the path of social transformation. They were informed by concrete conditions, experiences, and conceptions of the world that, in turn, delimited the imagined possibilities of post-colonial futures.

In sum, our analysis has yielded two insights. First, transnational expertise was directly enrolled in the process of developmental state formation in Singapore. As we have demonstrated, Albert Winsemius was not a unilateral determinant of the city-state’s economic development, but had a decisive influence on the direction and institutional form of the PAP’s passive revolution. This provides a further method for analyses that center bureaucratic practices, specific policy strategies, or cultural exceptionalism within a bounded territorial nation-state. Second, Singapore’s developmental institutions were not the result of “government autonomy from interest groups” (Huff, 1995: 1430) or a goal of “economic growth above all else” (Periera, 2008: 1190) but was the product of a premeditated, spatially-reflexive strategy on the part of the political elite to maintain power through labor repression and alliances with international capitalist firms and development experts. Winsemius and the PAP’s strategies in the 1960s constructed developmental institutions, such as the Economic Development Board and the NTUC, and formulated industrial policy that sought to simultaneously absorb surplus workers while maintaining Singapore’s competitive edge in relation to Malaya, Indonesia, and other decolonizing states in the Southeast Asian region. As such, anti-communism was not only reflected by military presence in the region, but was a geopolitical-economic consideration that directly influenced Singapore’s labor market, thereby shaping the region’s industrial transformation in the late twentieth century.

The resurgence of interest into economic restructuring in East Asia calls for new methodologies and articulations to be formulated for the analysis of state transformation and industrialization (Glassman, 2017; Sheppard, 2016). The geopolitical economy research agenda offers significant theoretical and empirical insights into the transnational, counter-insurgent underpinnings of East Asia’s industrial transformation that is sensitive to social struggle and uneven development (Glassman and Choi, 2014; Hsu et. al, 2018). We compliment this rich agenda by offering a textual approach to a key economic planning document, showing how experts mediated the promulgation of industrial policy that decisively shaped Singapore’s economic development. This is not to say that individual Western agents are in an isolated, causal relationship with political transformation. Rather, what we demonstrate is that the utility of critical textual and historical analysis to examine the spatial forms and effects of expertise, as well as how expertise shapes, and is shaped by, geographically-specific institutions, political practices, and developmental trajectories (Akhter and Ormerod, 2015).

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For geographers interested or invested in Gramscian analysis, the paper suggests a way to integrate the geopolitical analysis of decolonization, development and Cold War as distinct articulations of ‘passive revolution’ (Hekseth, 2017; Morton, 2010). While this paper has focused on Singapore’s history, the factors of ideological anticommunism, the aspiration to developmental statehood, and decolonial politics were common across much of Asia in the second half of the twentieth century. As such, the analysis presented here has broader implications for a research agenda that compares and connects experiences across decolonizing Asia, especially through a comparative-relational framework (Hart, 2018). To sum, our analysis takes some first steps towards developing a research agenda for political, economic, and historical geographers interested in the spatiality of expertise evoked and enrolled by state developmentalism in the twentieth and twenty-first century. As Asian regions rise to greater prominence in the global political economy, geographers have an opportunity to shed new light on the varied historical, geographical and biographical trajectories that constitute the uneven terrain of expert-driven capitalist globalization.

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i When he passed away in 2015, Winsemius had already been dead for almost two decades. But to mark the long and deep friendship between the Dutch economic advisor and the Singaporean state, Winsemius’ children, Ankie and Pieter, flew to Singapore to attend the funeral as personal guests of the Lee family (Yong, 2016).ii Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew, on the occasion of Winsemius’s death in 1996, noted that Winsemius had “laid down two conditions for Singapore’s success: first, to eliminate any communists that made economic progress impossible; and second, not to remove the statue of [British imperial governor] Sir Edmond Raffles”. (Lee, 1996, December 10).iii While the United Nations Development Programme, in an official hagiography of Winsemius, notes that Winsemius’s prescription for manufacturing came from his observation of “Singaporean resourcefulness” (UNDP, 2015: 11), it was well-understood at the time that absorbing surplus labor in Singapore, and thus the maintenance of the PAP’s legitimacy, would not be accomplished with the narrow employment opportunities associated with commercial or financial activity (Rodan, 1989).iv In a 1982 oral interview, Winsemius recounted that “our economic program had this preliminary necessity: more or less an assessment of the political situation, solving the political situation and trying to stop the lack of confidence of the investor in Singapore”. (30 August 1982: 17).v As the State of Singapore Development Plan, which, following Rodan (1989), mirrored the Winsemius report notes, “Entrepôt trade, traditionally associated with Singapore’s prosperity, has very limited possibilities of expansion. More emphasis will have to be placed on industrialization in order to provide job opportunities required by the growing population.” Extract from State of Singapore Development Plan 1961 – 1964 (1961), 18.vi Indeed, Winsemius demonstrated an acute awareness of the problem of uneven development, noting “there is no developed country which is not under-developed in certain geographical areas or in certain sectors of its economic life” (Winsemius and Pincus, 1962: 80).vii Winsemius was instrumental in the sale of the publically-owned shipyard to Swan Hunter, a British-based shipbuilding company. This helped, in Winsemius’s words, “depoliticize it, more or less” (Winsemius, 1982: 53). viii Winsemius actually recommended an increase in wages in anticipation of productivity gains. According to Garry Rodan, Winsemius “warned that the pursuit of a low-wage policy after the realisation of full employment would put a brake on economic growth by encouraging labour absorption ahead of labour replacement in production”. (Rodan, 1989: 107).