By Kishore Mahbubani

WHERE are the Singapore stars?

The Institute of Policy Studies posed this question at the Young Singaporeans Conference last month. I was puzzled. It seemed to imply that Singapore was devoid of stars.

To explain my puzzlement, I told the young Singaporeans to imagine the reaction of a young Somali parachuted into Singapore. He would have come from a country where large oil tankers get hijacked, where men are punished for doing traditional Somali dances and where a 13-year-old girl is stoned to death publicly for reporting that she was raped. Any Somali arriving in Singapore would naturally think he had advanced into heaven. Yet he would be told Singapore achieved all this without any stars.

The truth is that the Singapore story does not lack stars. What we lack is a national narrative that brings out the stars. And it would be easy to create such a narrative.

Personally, I have experienced three waves of Singapore stars. The first wave included the three founding fathers of Singapore - Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Dr Goh Keng Swee and Mr S. Rajaratnam. Having had the privilege of working with them (and many other great men around the world), I can confidently say that they would be considered 'great men' by any measure.

The second wave included people like Mr J.Y. Pillay, who built Singapore Airlines from scratch, the late Sim Kee Boon, who built the world class Changi Airport, and Mr Philip Yeo, who lured billion-dollar investments to Singapore.

The third wave comprised institutions like PUB, which is responsible for Singapore's water miracle; the National Parks Board, which created the greenest modern city in the world; and the Urban Redevelopment Authority, which is the best urban planning agency in the world.

If the Singapore story is full of stars - and I have only mentioned a few - why do we keep asking where the Singapore stars are? The simple and brutal answer is that our minds remain colonised. Until there is some external endorsement, preferably from a Western source, we do not believe that we have stars. Yet few realise how politicised the processes of selecting stars have become. There are few, if any, objective standards. Instead, political considerations trump objective calculations.

Consider the selection process for the Nobel prizes. It is one of the most hallowed prizes in the world. There have been brilliant choices, like the economist Amartya Sen and former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan. However, politics has occasionally distorted the Nobel decision-making process.

The world will eventually recognise Deng Xiaoping as the greatest man of the 20th century. His reforms lifted 400 million people out of poverty, doing more good than any other leader. Yet he was never considered for a Nobel Peace Prize. Similarly, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Vice-President Jusuf Kalla deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for their courageous initiatives in resolving the Aceh dispute. But the Nobel Peace Prize for Aceh was given to an European mediator instead.

The Nobel Prize that truly reveals the absurdity of the process is the award of the latest economics prize to Princeton University's Paul Krugman. Undoubtedly, Professor Krugman did some brilliant work in his younger days, but of late, he has meandered off course. One of the most eminent economists in the world told me privately: 'Kishore, they should shut this prize down if they have to give it to people like Paul Krugman.'

Prof Krugman once said that the 'Asian Economic Miracle' was a myth and Asian growth was comparable to that of the Soviet Union. He got Asia completely wrong. So why did the Nobel Economics Prize Committee award this year's prize to Prof Krugman? Simple! The committee hates United States President George W. Bush. It liked Prof Krugman's weekly rants against Mr Bush in The New York Times. This is why they gave him the prize. Politics trumped objective calculations.

Singaporeans, young and old, should stop waiting for external validations of our achievements. Instead, we should boldly create our own narrative. There is at least one powerful narrative that can be built around the Singapore story - and there are many other narratives. This narrative could portray Singapore as the city that launched the great Asian renaissance. Having just published a book on the rise of Asia, I know how much interest there is in the story of the great Asian renaissance.

Is it too far-fetched to give Singapore the credit for the Asian renaissance? Certainly we cannot take all the credit. The Japanese deserve the credit for launching the Meiji Reformation, which created the first modern Asian society. But the number of Asians who have learnt from Singapore is truly astonishing. Deng Xiaoping explicitly told many Chinese leaders to learn from Singapore. Mr Ratan Tata, the great Indian industrialist, also told Indians to learn from Singapore. In 1991, when Dr Manmohan Singh, then India's finance minister, was attacked by leftists for allowing foreign investments in the country, he replied that Singapore's ability to defy the wishes of the American government in many areas showed that a pragmatic acceptance of foreign investment did not mean a loss of political independence.

Singapore's greatest competitive advantage is that the three richest cultural streams of Asia - the Chinese, Muslim and Indian civilisations - are all represented in Singapore. We also have all the other elements of a renaissance city: world-class universities, museums, performing arts centres and think-tanks. Indeed, we are known as the think-tank city of South-east Asia. This is why I believe that the Singapore Tourism Board should launch a massive multimillion- dollar global advertising campaign to sell Singapore as the great Asian renaissance city. This story will capture the imagination of the world.

Would it be foolish to launch this expensive campaign in the midst of a tremendous economic crisis? Here I remember well a story Mr Rajaratnam told me. Gillette, he recalled, launched a major advertising campaign in Britain amid the the doom and gloom of World War II. Many thought Gillette was crazy. No one had time or money to buy expensive razors. But the advertising campaign worked. As soon as the war ended, men rushed to buy Gillette razors. It was a symbol that life had returned to normal.

Hence, this moment of global economic gloom and doom is the perfect moment to launch a global campaign to rebrand Singapore. And if we did so, we will also realise how wise one of Singapore's stars, S. Rajaratnam, was.

The writer is Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. Think-Tank is a weekly column rotated among eight leading figures in Singapore's tertiary and research institutions.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Dec 3, 2008.