SINGAPORE -- You land at Changi Airport after flying for what seems a lifetime, and you're naturally disoriented, even before you hit the customs booths that feature bowls of mints, dire warnings about the death penalty for those bringing in drugs, and digital comment cards asking if the service was to your liking. Duck into a public restroom and you'll be exhorted to aim carefully and to "flush with oomph" for the sake of cleanliness. Outside, it's tropical sticky but impeccably clean, in a city inhabited by Chinese, Malays, Indians, and a multiplicity of guest workers from around the world -- all speaking English.
Singapore is an assault on one's preconceptions.
Singapore calls itself the Lion City, but it would be more accurate to call it the Canary City -- the canary in globalization's gold mine. Arguably no other place on earth has so engineered itself to prosper from globalization -- and succeeded at it. The small island nation of 5 million people (it's really just a city, but that's part of what's disorienting) boasts the world's second-busiest seaport, a far higher per capita income than its former British overlord, and a raft of number one rankings on lists ranging from least-corrupt to most-business-friendly countries. On the eve of celebrating its 50th anniversary as an independent nation, Singapore is proof that free trade can and does work for multinationals and ordinary citizens alike. So long as globalization continues apace, the place thrives.
Singapore's defining achievement is summed up in the title of its longtime leader Lee Kuan Yew's memoir, From Third World to First. When it split off from Malaysia a half-century ago to become a separate nation of dubious viability, Singapore had little going for it, other than a determination to become whatever it needed to be -- assembly plant, container port, trustworthy banking and logistics center, semiconductor hub, oil refinery, mall developer, you name it. But the brilliance of its founding fathers -- okay, it was mostly one father, Mr. Lee --was in realizing that the precondition for any and all of this to happen was good governance.
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