Whose 88 Percent? A Rejoinder to Kishore Mahbubani

Refusing the West is one task. Refusing democracy is another, and the second is being smuggled in under the first.

In April 2020 the men who built Singapore's towers were locked inside them. Twelve to twenty to a room, in dormitories on the industrial edges of the island, hundreds of thousands of migrant construction and shipyard workers were sealed behind fences while the rest of the city was told to stay home. By the end of that year, more than nine in every ten of Singapore's recorded COVID-19 infections belonged to men living in those dormitories. The rest of the country had a pandemic. The dormitories had an epidemic, administered by the state that had built them, and the men inside had no vote, no union, no newspaper of their own, and no path to citizenship in the country whose skyline they had poured by hand.

I keep that image in front of me when I read Kishore Mahbubani's latest essay for the Institute of Art and Ideas, "The West has engineered its own downfall," and the debate on illiberal democracy that accompanies it. Mahbubani writes from his fellowship at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, where I held a Provost's Chair before moving to Aotearoa. The research centre I directed there sat for years with migrant construction workers, domestic workers and low-wage Singaporean families. The dormitory is where I learned what the Singapore model looks like from underneath.

Mahbubani is right about a great deal. The 12 percent of humanity who live in the West have projected their own historical form of liberal democracy as the terminus of political history, and that projection has too often arrived by bomber. The Costs of War figures he cites for the post-9/11 wars are real, and the dead are real, and no one has been held to account. Iraq was illegal and Libya was a catastrophe. He is right that the West's silence on Gaza has done more damage to its moral standing than any event in my lifetime, and right that the majority of the world reads Western sermons on human rights through the memory of rendition flights and Guantánamo. He is right that modernisation and Westernisation are different things. Every honest scholar from the South has spent a career saying some version of this.

The trouble begins with what Mahbubani does with the 88 percent once he has counted them.

The population that only eats

Under Gaddafi, he writes, the majority of Libyans "enjoyed a decent life." The evidence is GDP per capita, which was the highest in Africa in 2010 and has since halved. Libyan households received welfare from the state. Then the West came and the numbers fell.

The Abu Salim prison sits inside that decent life. In June 1996, over a period of hours, Gaddafi's security forces killed roughly 1,200 prisoners in its courtyards, and the regime spent the next decade refusing families the bodies. Libyans who asked about their brothers disappeared. None of this excuses the NATO campaign or the cynicism of "We came, we saw, he died." All of it disappears from a measure of "decent life" that runs on per capita income and household transfers. In Mahbubani's arithmetic the 88 percent appear as populations with stomachs and no throats. They are lifted out of poverty, they receive benefits, they prosper or decline. They do not speak, organise, dissent, publish, strike or vote, and the states that rule them are graded on delivery, never on what they do to the people who talk back.

The same operation recurs when he reaches for voices. The Global South's view of Ukraine is delivered by Lula and by S. Jaishankar, the foreign minister of a government that has stripped Kashmir of its statehood, jailed students under anti-terror law for protesting a citizenship regime that sorts by religion, and presided over the pogrom in Delhi in 2020. Jaishankar's line about Europe's problems being the world's problems resonated in the Global South, Mahbubani writes, and it did, in the same chancelleries that were buying discounted Russian crude and booking the margin. India's non-alignment on sanctions enriched refiners. It did nothing for the Muslim vegetable seller in Delhi whose stall was torn down that year under a bulldozer campaign the foreign minister's government ran as policy. When Mahbubani wants moral force he quotes Arundhati Roy on Gaza, and she deserves the quotation. He leaves out that the Indian state he has just platformed sanctioned her prosecution under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for a speech she gave fourteen years earlier. The South he cites is a roster of foreign ministries. The South I know is the people those ministries are trying to silence.

The sleight sits at the centre of the argument, where Mahbubani replaces one binary with another. The liberal/illiberal divide is dismissed as a Western obsession, and in its place stands West versus Rest, a divide drawn entirely between states. Once the only map is a map of nations, the inside of every nation goes blank. The Rohingya in Cox's Bazar, the Uyghur in Kashgar, the Adivasi in Bastar, the Tamil in Jaffna, the Papuan in Jayapura, the Bangladeshi welder in a Tuas dormitory: every one of them lives in the 88 percent, and every one of them is ruled by a government that Mahbubani's framework files under the aggrieved.

Democracy was never the West's to export

The deeper historical problem is that Mahbubani lets the West off with the wrong charge. Its crime in the Global South was rarely too much democracy promotion. Far more often it was the deliberate destruction of democracy wherever democracy threatened capital or the Cold War order. Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Lumumba in Congo in 1961, Allende in Chile in 1973. In Indonesia in 1965 and 1966 the United States and Britain fed names to Suharto's army while it killed somewhere between half a million and a million people, and then celebrated the new regime for decades as a model of development. Marcos, Mobutu, Pinochet, the Shah, the Saudi dynasty: the roll of Western clients is a roll of men who governed exactly as Mahbubani's framework recommends, delivering order and growth to populations denied a voice. The West's real offence against the South was the strangling of the South's own democratic movements, and the naming of that strangulation as stability.

Those movements were ours. The anticolonial struggles from Calcutta to Accra to Jakarta were democratic struggles, fought by people who wanted to govern themselves and who understood democracy as a claim against arbitrary power long before any Western embassy offered to teach it. The panchayat and the Buddhist sangha, the jirga and the shura, the Māori rūnanga, the deliberative councils of West Africa, the sharecroppers' committees of the Tebhaga movement in Bengal: each is a form of the same demand that rulers face constraint and the ruled possess a voice. None of them is Westminster. None of them needs to be. The demand travels because the experience of being ruled without recourse travels, and the peasant in Purulia and the worker in Punggol recognise it in each other without a translator.

That is why "civilisational confidence" should make anyone from the South uneasy. The phrase belongs today to a specific political project. The civilisational state is the vocabulary of Xi, of Putin, of Orbán, and above all of the Hindutva movement that governs India, whose entire programme rests on the claim that a five-thousand-year civilisation has an essence that liberalism corrupts, and that the essence is Hindu, upper-caste and male. When Orbán stood in Băile Tușnad in 2014 and named the illiberal states whose growth put the West to shame, his list ran Singapore, China, India, Turkey, Russia. Mahbubani's model city led the sentence. The Asian values he argued for in the 1990s have been picked up by the European far right and by South Asian majoritarianism as the same alibi, and the alibi always works the same way. Culture becomes a shield held in front of power, and behind the shield the state does what it likes to the minority, the dissident and the poor.

The model, from underneath

Singapore is the exhibit Mahbubani carries into every debate, and it is the ground I know best.

Singapore's achievements are real. Public housing that houses the majority, competent bureaucracy, low corruption, a multi-ethnic peace maintained through fifty years of a region prone to pogrom. I lived inside that competence and I do not sneer at it. The question is what the model needs in order to function, and what the model's accountants have decided not to count.

The first thing it needs is people who cannot leave and cannot stay. Nearly a third of the six million people on the island hold no residency at all. Hundreds of thousands are on work permits that bar them from marrying a citizen without ministerial permission, from bringing a child, from ever becoming Singaporean. Women on those permits are tested for pregnancy every six months and deported if the test is positive. Domestic workers are excluded from the Employment Act and its limits on working hours, and construction workers are housed in dormitories the state licenses and private operators run for profit. There is no minimum wage. The price of the skyline is a labour regime that would be unlawful in most of the West and that the model quietly requires, because the model's competitiveness is built on it. Mahbubani's 88 percent are inside the Singapore miracle in their hundreds of thousands, and the miracle is calibrated so they never appear in its statistics as anything other than a headcount.

The second thing it needs is the removal of the test. Mahbubani's case for good governance rests on performance legitimacy: the rulers deliver, therefore the ruled consent. The claim can only be checked by asking the ruled, and Singapore has spent six decades making the question unaskable. Operation Coldstore in 1963 jailed the left of the anticolonial movement without trial. Operation Spectrum in 1987 jailed church workers and theatre makers as a Marxist conspiracy. Chia Thye Poh was detained for thirty-two years without a charge. Two generations of opposition leaders, J.B. Jeyaretnam and Chee Soon Juan, were bankrupted through defamation suits brought by the prime ministers they criticised. The newspapers sit inside a trust the government funds, and the broadcaster belongs to the state's investment company. Group representation constituencies, boundaries redrawn before each election, the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act of 2019, the Foreign Interference Act of 2021: each instrument narrows the space in which a Singaporean can say the model is failing. The People's Action Party won roughly nine in ten seats in 2025 on about two thirds of the vote, and it has won every election since 1959. That is a record, and it is also the absence of the one experiment that could tell us whether performance legitimacy is legitimacy or just performance.

The third thing it needs is a hinterland. Singapore's per capita income sits among the five highest on earth because Singapore is a port and a vault, a node that services capital flowing out of the region, and much of that capital is the proceeds of exactly the unaccountable governance Mahbubani declines to judge. Indonesian plantation fortunes are listed on its exchange. The largest money-laundering case in its history, three billion Singapore dollars seized in 2023, arrived through its banks and its property market. A United Nations report in 2023 traced roughly a quarter of a billion dollars in arms and supplies to Myanmar's junta through Singapore-based firms; to the government's credit, the flows fell sharply after it acted, and to the model's discredit, they had flowed for two years first. A city that grows rich as the region's counting house is not a template the region can adopt. There is one Singapore for the same reason there is one Switzerland. The model is unrepeatable by design, and its prosperity is downstream of the very authoritarianisms Mahbubani's framework treats as legitimate cultural choices.

Then there is what the model does to its own. The Gini coefficient before transfers is among the highest in the developed world. The death penalty is mandatory for drug trafficking above fixed thresholds, and the men hanged are overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately Malay, and frequently couriers rather than kingpins. Nagaenthran Dharmalingam, a Malaysian Tamil with an assessed IQ of 69, was executed in April 2022 after an international campaign that the state treated as foreign interference. A Malay minority the constitution itself recognises as indigenous to the island has watched the presidency reserved for it in 2017 and delivered as a walkover. Meritocracy is the state religion, and like most state religions it explains to those at the bottom why they belong there.

The chair Mahbubani speaks from

None of this is hidden, and Mahbubani has lived alongside all of it for a lifetime. He has built a public career on asking where the West speaks from. The question is fair, and it is fair to ask it of him.

He was Singapore's permanent representative to the United Nations twice, permanent secretary of its foreign ministry, and the founding dean of a school of public policy named after Lee Kuan Yew. In the 1990s he was among the most fluent voices of the Asian values argument, the case that order and growth precede liberty and that liberty is a Western indulgence. He now writes as a distinguished fellow of the national university of the state he served. He is, in the most exact sense, an intellectual of the state, and the state whose arguments he carries into London festivals is the richest address in the 88 percent. To speak for the Global South from the top floor of Singapore is to speak for the poor from the office of their banker.

My own location belongs on the table beside his. I learned much of what I know about the limits of the Singapore model as its employee, and I left. I write now from a settler colony at the bottom of the Pacific, where a coalition government is dismantling Māori health institutions and the treaty that constitutes the state, and where a professor who says so in public is told he is importing foreign ideology. No location is innocent. The obligation that follows is to name the ground under one's feet, and to measure any model of governance from the position of the people it governs least gently. Mahbubani measures from the ministry. I measure from the dormitory, and from the marae, and the two measures do not agree.

What a dialogue among equals would require

The strongest thing in Mahbubani's work, and the reason he is worth answering at length, is his insistence that the West stop mistaking its own history for the measure of political maturity. That insistence is correct and overdue. The culture-centered position I have argued for over twenty years begins in the same place. It refuses to treat multiparty elections, bill-of-rights constitutionalism and an adversarial press as the only shapes accountability can take, and it holds that the people at the margins of any society know more about how its power works than the people who administer it.

The same position refuses the reverse move. A dialogue among equals does not exempt Beijing, Delhi, Riyadh or Singapore from scrutiny because the scrutiny sounds Western. It asks concrete questions of every arrangement, and the questions are simple. Can the people governed by this power check it without bloodshed? Does it protect the vulnerable from the state and from the majority alike? Can it hear its own failures and correct them? Who is allowed to speak, who is listened to, and who is housed in a dormitory behind a fence while the city congratulates itself? Those questions apply to the United States after Gaza with full force. They apply to Singapore after the dormitories, to India after Delhi, to China after Xinjiang, and Mahbubani's framework is built so that they never reach that far.

Western liberal democracy is one member of the family and a badly behaved one. Its money politics, its carceral state, its capacity for foreign slaughter and domestic despair are real, and Mahbubani documents them well. Its judiciaries, its elections that remove governments, its protections for dissent and for minorities are also real, and they are things a Bangladeshi worker in Singapore or a Muslim journalist in Uttar Pradesh would take tomorrow if offered. The plural democracy worth defending holds all of this at once. It treats the Western form without reverence and the Asian developmental state without romance, and it keeps the shared human interest in restraining arbitrary power in view across every cultural starting point.

Mahbubani ends by warning that the West will become a lonely, narcissistic civilisation if it refuses to see how the majority of humanity views it. He is right, and the same warning runs the other way. A South that learns to see the West's hypocrisy and not its own rulers' will find that the language of civilisational confidence has been borrowed by the men with the keys to the prison. The 88 percent are people, most of them ruled by someone who would very much like the argument to stop at the border. Democracy, in all its forms, is the name for their refusal to let it.