How a tiny island nation with no resources built one of the most effective diplomatic presences at the United Nations over five decades.
This book is a collection of 45 essays written by the people who were actually there. Singaporean diplomats, ambassadors, and officials share first-hand accounts of representing a small country in a world run by big powers. It covers everything from Security Council politics and trade negotiations to peacekeeping missions and, believe it or not, how Singapore helped create World Toilet Day.
What makes this book interesting is that Singapore had no business being as influential as it became. It got kicked out of Malaysia in 1965, had about 2 million people, and no natural resources. But it punched way above its weight. It created the Forum of Small States, helped bridge the gap between the G20 and smaller nations, and championed causes from ocean law to sanitation. If you want to understand how the world actually works behind the scenes, how countries negotiate, form alliances, and fight for their interests, these stories are a good place to start.
I just picked up a book that blew my mind a little.
It’s called “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations”, edited by Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, and Joanna Koh (ISBN: 978-9814713030, World Scientific Publishing, 2015). And honestly, it tells one of the most underrated stories in modern international relations.
Before we get into the 45 essays that make up the core of this book, there are some opening pieces that set the stage. And honestly, they’re worth reading on their own.
You know what nobody tells you about the United Nations? For the longest time, diplomats had to fight over chairs. Literally.
You think the UN Security Council is a place where 15 countries sit together and make decisions about world peace? Think again.
Imagine showing up to a new job and the Berlin Wall falls. That’s basically what happened to Chan Heng Chee.
This chapter might be the most honest thing anyone has ever written about the United Nations.
This is part of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).
Imagine showing up to a meeting where the big players have already made all the decisions. Nobody asked for your input. Nobody even told you the meeting was happening. That was life for small countries at the United Nations in the early 1990s. One Singapore diplomat decided to change that.
Imagine 20 countries making big economic decisions for the entire planet. And nobody asked the other 170+ countries what they thought. That’s basically what happened after the 2008 financial crisis.
Imagine showing up to the most important meeting in the world. You’re representing your entire country. And you have a team of three people. Three.
World Toilet Day. Yes, that is an actual thing at the United Nations. And Singapore is the country that made it happen.
When you think of global trade talks, you probably picture big countries throwing their weight around. The US, EU, China. But one of the most effective players in world trade negotiations is a tiny city-state with no natural resources.
A Singaporean diplomat walks into a room full of veteran trade negotiators, knows almost nothing about trade law, and somehow ends up chairing the first meeting of a brand new global organization. That’s this chapter in a nutshell.
Here is a question most people never think about. The United Nations belongs to all countries equally, right? One country, one vote. That is the theory. But in practice, the countries that pay the most money get to call the shots. And they have gotten very good at making sure it stays that way.
If you’re a small country, what do you do when bigger countries can just push you around? You team up. You play smart. You make yourself useful. That’s basically the entire playbook that Burhan Gafoor lays out in Chapter 12.
People love to trash the WTO. It’s too slow. It’s broken. Nothing ever gets done. You hear it all the time.
People love to mock the UN. Too many speeches. Too many resolutions. Not enough action. But is that actually true? This chapter makes a solid case that the UN has been “doing stuff” all along. And so has Singapore.
When two countries fight over trade, who decides who’s right? For a long time, the answer was basically “the bigger country wins.” That changed in 1995. And Singapore helped make it happen.
When people hear the word “atomic,” they think of mushroom clouds and disaster movies. But the International Atomic Energy Agency does a lot more than deal with nuclear weapons. And Singapore has been part of that story since 1967.
Singapore is a tiny island. No natural resources. No hinterland. But somehow it built one of the biggest aviation hubs on the planet. Chapter 17 explains how that happened, and how the UN’s aviation agency played a big role in it.
In 2001, a Singaporean judge flew to The Hague to help try war criminals. He was the first international judge Singapore ever sent to a United Nations court. His name was Amarjeet Singh.
A woman from Singapore’s trade union movement walks into a room full of global negotiators, and two years later she helps deliver the first-ever international convention protecting domestic workers. Something that the workers’ side had been trying to get done for over 40 years.
September 2011. Washington, DC. The headquarters of the International Monetary Fund. Europe is on the edge of a financial panic. Greece is drowning in debt. The US is heading toward a fiscal cliff. Japan just got hit by an earthquake and tsunami. And the person chairing the room full of the world’s most powerful finance ministers is from Singapore.
Ninety percent of world trade travels by sea. And forty percent of global cargo passes through the narrow waterway right next to Singapore. If that strait gets blocked or becomes unsafe, the world economy has a serious problem. This chapter explains how Singapore works with the International Maritime Organization to keep things moving.
When Singapore became independent in 1965, one of the first things it needed from the International Telecommunication Union was a country code. They got +65. By coincidence, the same number as the year of independence. Fifty years later, Singapore was helping shape global internet policy and building one of the world’s first Smart Nations.
Here’s a thing about international trade that most people don’t think about. Every country has its own laws. When you buy something from a company in another country, which country’s laws apply? What happens if there’s a dispute? Who decides?
Environmental problems don’t care about borders. Pollution from one country drifts into another. Climate change hits everyone. For a tiny island nation like Singapore, what happens outside its borders matters just as much as what happens inside.
When people think of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, they think of the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, Mount Fuji. Big, dramatic, instantly recognizable places. So when Singapore put forward its Botanic Gardens, a lot of Singaporeans raised their eyebrows. Really? Our little garden?
Janet Lim joined UNHCR in 1980. She spent over three decades working on refugee crises around the world. And she says something that’s hard to argue with: humanitarian work is probably the area where Singapore has been the least engaged with the UN.
Most countries that work with the World Bank stay borrowers for decades. Singapore borrowed for about ten years, then basically stopped needing the money. That is the short version of this chapter.
Can a mobile app help farmers sell their crops? Can slaughterhouse waste power a kitchen stove? These are the kinds of problems that infoDev at the World Bank works on. And the person running the whole thing is a Singaporean.
It started with a casual conversation about textbooks. It ended with 115 African policymakers visiting Singapore, a major conference in Tunisia, and four published books. That is how knowledge sharing works when the right people get involved.
Ask someone what a UN worker looks like and they will probably describe a diplomat at a cocktail party in New York. The reality, especially for the people in this chapter, is more like 700 trucks driving food through the Ethiopian desert to millions of starving people.
A young doctor in Singapore gets a phone call out of nowhere. His mentor asks if he wants to work for the World Health Organization in Indonesia, fighting bird flu. He says yes. That one call changes his career and puts Singapore on the global health map.
The World Health Organization has 7,000 staff in 150 countries. It works with 194 member states. And some of the most important decisions get made during coffee breaks. That is one of the many things David Ho learned during his time working with the WHO in Geneva.
In the early 1980s, Singapore was a country where commercial-scale piracy and counterfeiting were tolerated. The common view was simple: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan got rich by copying, so why should Singapore be any different? Three decades later, Singapore hosted a major international treaty conference, had the first overseas WIPO office in the world, and was recognized as a model of intellectual property cooperation.
Every person on Earth is affected by weather and climate. But almost nobody thinks about the UN agency that coordinates how the world monitors and predicts it. The World Meteorological Organization is one of the least famous international organizations out there. Singapore has been working with them since 1966. And the story is more interesting than you might expect.
Most people think of Singapore’s military as a small defense force guarding a tiny island. Chapter 35 tells a very different story. It is the story of Singapore soldiers wearing blue helmets in war zones around the world.
When you think of UN peacekeeping, you think of soldiers. But there is another side to it that gets much less attention. Police. Chapter 36 tells the story of Singapore police officers deployed to some of the most troubled places on earth.
Statistics might sound boring. But Chapter 37 argues they are one of the most important things the UN does. And a Singaporean ended up running the whole operation.
The title of Chapter 38 comes from a quote by Dag Hammarskjold, the legendary UN Secretary-General: the UN exists “to save humanity from hell.” Chew Beng Yong spent 26 years inside the UN Secretariat trying to do exactly that.
You hear about what the UN does. Peacekeeping. Humanitarian aid. Climate conferences. But you almost never hear about how the UN pays for all of it. Who manages the money? Who sets the salaries? Who makes sure that when 2.7 million compensation claims come in, the right people get paid the right amounts?
What happens when you take someone from Singapore’s private tech sector and put them in charge of technology for one of the UN’s biggest development organizations? You get cloud computing in disaster zones, facial recognition for police in Guatemala, and SMS voting guides for 120 million Pakistanis.
In conflict after conflict, women were being targeted. Rape was used as a weapon of war. Women were excluded from peace talks. And when the fighting stopped and countries tried to rebuild, women were left out of the decisions that shaped their futures. Noeleen Heyzer decided to change that. And she actually did.
The UN is mostly known for security stuff. Wars. Peacekeeping. Big political crises. But there’s a whole other side of the UN that most people never hear about. The part that works on social issues. Education. Health. Aging populations. Disability rights. Housing. Gender equality. This is the world that Thelma Kay spent her career in.
When Singapore got a seat on the UN Security Council in 2001, Christine Lee figured she would end up chairing a quiet committee. She was wrong. The job turned into one of the most intense learning experiences of her career.
“Be careful. You’ll be entering a cesspit of vipers.” That was the advice Dileep Nair got from a former senior UN diplomat before he took the job. He took it anyway.
Yeo Bock Cheng spent 32 years at the United Nations. He believes he was the first Singaporean to build an entire career there. His story starts with a casual job offer in Bangkok and ends with him arranging billions of dollars in peacekeeping payments in New York.
And that’s the last chapter.
This is the closing post of my retelling of “50 Years of Singapore and the United Nations” (Tommy Koh, Li Lin Chang, Joanna Koh, 2015, ISBN: 978-9814713030).