Recently, Singapore celebrated 50 years of nationhood. The success of this remarkable country is a vivid exemplar of the proposition that we still live in a world of nation-states.
Singapore’s birth in August 1965 was traumatic. It was a tiny country with no natural resources, a land area of less than 1,000 square kilometers, and a population of only 1.9 million. Effectively, it had been ejected from the Federation of Malaysia because the pro-Malay policies of the Federation discriminated against the ethnic Chinese who constituted the bulk of Singapore’s population.
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