Singapore's foreign policy.

• Author: Sadasivan, Balaji
• Position: Documento

A country's circumstance influences the development of its foreign policy. So I would like to start by briefly describing Singapore.

Singapore is a small country. We are a diamond shaped island about 40 kilometers from east to west and 25 kilometers from north to south. There are about 4.3 million people living on the island. We have no natural resources except our people. Our people are migrants coming from the 3 main Asian cultures- Chinese, Indian and Malay. We also have about hall a million people from the developed countries, like the US, UK, Europe, Australia and Japan living in Singapore.

We make a living by serving others. The two important pillars of our economy are manufacturing and services. We are a high cost centre because our wage levels are significantly higher than that in the other South East Asian Countries. Any manufacturing or service activity carried out in Singapore must be highly efficient or have a high value-added component in order to be able to compete in the global market from Singapore. We do not protect companies in Singapore from global market forces and so our economy is in constant flux as it evolves in response to globalisation, with many companies moving their mass manufacturing or service activities to other countries. On the hand, they often keep their high value added manufacturing or service activities and their regional or Asian HQ in Singapore.

Our GDP is about US$120 billion, but our total trade is more than 3 times the GDP at about US$450 billion. Our per capita GDP is about US$28,000.

We have more than 7,000 multinational companies in Singapore. We are a transport, logistic, energy, finance and tourist centre. About 30 million passengers use our airport. The port handles more than 20 million containers making us the busiest port in the world. 9 million tourists visit the country.

What is our foreign policy?

It is:

--To be friends with all the countries of the world and to make ourselves useful to others.

--To be a good international citizen in the global community.

We must distinguish political from commercial issues. From time to time, there may be commercial issues between Singapore companies and others. We believe that they should be resolved fairly according to the law and that commercial disputes should not affect political relations.

ASEAN

I will begin first with our relations with our neighbours in South East Asia. The countries of South East Asia are members of ASEAN. ASEAN is 40 years old. The countries in ASEAN are quite different politically, culturally and in terms of economic development. Nevertheless, ASEAN has ensured security for its members and there has been no armed conflict between the ASEAN countries. So in this atmosphere of peace and frequent dialogue between countries, occasional frictions have been ironed...