Singapore is no stranger to globalization. In an earlier era of free-trade capitalist competition, in 1819, Stamford Raffles of the British East India Company founded modern Singapore. The island, nestled at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, was strategically located at a major junction of the China shipping route. The colonial port grew quickly into a cosmopolitan emporium, attracting migrants from China, India, Malaya and the surrounding Indonesian islands.

In the epic struggle of decolonization after the Second World War, a radical Fabianist segment of English-educated Singaporean elite allied with anti-colonial leftists, rode on their mass support and emerged victorious by crushing the leftists through colonial-era security instruments. In the two decades after independence in 1965, the ruling elite sought to combine their democratic-socialist ideals with export-oriented industrialization that took advantage of growing American economic demand to feed its war machine in Vietnam. Socialistic welfare policies such as universal healthcare, education, public housing and pension programs were implemented, while the government attracted Western and Japanese industrial capital and built up key sectors through state-owned companies.

By the 1980s, the developmental strategy proved to be successful, with Singapore joining South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong as emerging Asian economic tigers. But while South Korea and Taiwan democratized in the heat of labor, student and middle-class activism, the Singaporean elite dropped their democratic socialism and hung on to authoritarian rule. Through the 1970s, labor unions were disciplined through their consolidation in the state-controlled National Trade Union Congress and student activism was crushed while local universities were brought under state control. The elite muzzled mass media by legislating for government powers to direct the shareholding of newspaper companies.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the elite turned authoritarian state powers against all political opposition. Unrelenting middle-class activists and political dissidents were bankrupted by lawsuits if not placed under administrative detention without trial for being security threats. Human rights organizations and Western leaders put the elite under severe international pressure. But the elite absorbed democratization pressure by developing the ideology of Asian values, which rejected universal humanism and liberal rights and asserted conservative communitarian values as the foundation for Asian societies. As Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister, father of the current prime minister and now officially designated as Minister Mentor, told Time magazine in December 2005, "We ... have a different culture, a different way of doing things. The individual is not the building block. It's the family, the extended family, the clan and the state."

Despite its authoritarianism, Western democracies found Singapore acceptable because the ruling elite fully embraced economic globalization. The elite continued to attract Western investors to Singapore with generous financial and social infrastructural policies and firmly supported international free-trade initiatives and economic liberalization. Singapore became a player in globalization too, with state-owned companies investing in regional economies and developing free-trade economic zones in Southeast Asia, India and China. At home, consumer culture took off in a big way, keeping the middle classes happy with continuing flow of consumer goods, while the government adopted "workfare" programs similar to those in the US and UK to prod the structurally unemployed back into the workforce.

In short, Singapore was becoming more like developed Western societies, except for one feature: a security state without democratic safeguards. The recent IMF-World Bank meeting brought this characteristic to the forefront. An international furor erupted over the barring of 27 IMF-World Bank accredited civil society activists. Other non-accredited activists were deported or stopped from entering the country, including two American animal rights activists who conducted a naked protest outside a fast-food restaurant in downtown Singapore. Peaceful protests were deemed by the government as "events that will pose a security threat to Singapore", placing non-violent groups advocating economic justice and Third World developmental issues in the same league as terrorists.

It was ironic when World Bank president and right-wing architect of George W. Bush's foreign policy, Paul Wolfowitz, cynically sided with activists and criticized the Singapore government for being authoritarian. Nevertheless, the government maintained its ban on outdoor protests and limited indoor protests by accredited activists to a tightly-guarded space in a small corner of the convention center. Thus, in another ironic twist, international civil society groups held their meetings and demonstrations on the neighboring Indonesian island of Batam, which has been transformed in recent years into a free-trade industrial zone for globalizing Singapore capital and recreational playground for middle-class Singaporeans.

But who the regime was perhaps truly afraid of was its own people. In the recent general elections in May, the ruling party kept its parliamentary near-monopoly but its electoral performance shrunk from three-quarters to two-thirds of the total votes. The middle and working classes are increasingly disenchanted with globalization and are harkening back to democratic socialism, voting for the two tiny opposition parties against the elite's powerful party machine. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong promised during national independence celebrations in August, "We are building a more open society, and encouraging freer debate." A month later, a different tune was sung. Former prime minister and now Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong said in a television interview during the IMF-World Bank meetings, "We have very strict rules for our own locals, and we can't have two standards; otherwise, we would be in deep political trouble with our citizens."

10,000 police and military personnel were mobilized for the event. Heavily armed police patrolled downtown and suburban areas far from the convention center. Random checks were conducted on citizens and residents, while surveillance of local civil society was heightened. Police investigated three young citizens for possible incitement of social unrest. They attempted to organize by emails a peaceful protest, where protestors would wear protest tee-shirts and move in pairs near the convention center distributing informational pamphlets on developmental issues. Artists and musicians seeking to organize a street carnival to coincide with the meetings were rebuffed.

The IMF-World Bank in maximum-security Singapore represents neo-conservative globalization, where the economic mobility of capital is maximized while the political mobility of rights and freedoms is circumscribed and selectively applied by the security state. Perhaps this would characterize the Asian stage of globalization, led by authoritarian-capitalist China, which just gained more IMF voting power at the Singapore meetings. Perhaps the security state is itself a symptom of economic globalization. As the Singapore meetings drew to a close, a military coup unfolded in Thailand, deposing Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and bringing the country's democratic crisis to a martial law resolution. Earlier in the year, Thaksin's family sold their major telecommunications and media conglomerate to Singapore's state-owned investment arm for a substantial tax-exempted profit, thus deepening democratic opposition to his increasingly authoritarian rule. In defense, Thaksin simply said, "It's globalization."