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`Elias in Singapore': Civilizing Processes in a Tropical City

In recent years Singapore has come to be seen as a successful project of economic transformation and capitalist development. What is more remarkable - but less discussed - is Singapore's success in building a multiethnic society and the unique concomitant civilizing processes that have accompanied this. Singapore represents today a project of a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural polity and a postmodern global city that combines civility, nostalgia and economic functionality. Here it is argued that - despite some well-known and decisive dark spots on the political landscape - this success has to do with two concomitant processes. One is the functionally administered extension of the state into the meaning-sphere of the individual, totalizing it from within his own nostalgia in an exoticized urban space. The other is the soteriological transcendence of individual and intra-individual relations within and beyond the culturally recognized `communities'. Westerners will not be able to learn from the Singapore process of multi-cultural civilization should they continue to merely understand it in terms of `Asian authoritarianism'.

Key Words: civilization • community • global city • multi-culturalism • Singapore

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