I have two happy duties to perform today. The first is to open the celebration for the 50th Anniversary of the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. I am delighted to be here to celebrate this occasion fifty years after its establishment. The institute has certainly had its memorable moments during its exciting journey through the years.

I have had the privilege of following the institute's life from its beginnings and often wondered how it would fare given the extraordinary circumstances of Southeast Asia when Dr Goh Keng Swee came up with his idea of an institute. As I recall, he was not sure how it would develop, but had looked at several possible models. Dr Goh was very wise. He soon focused on some of the major universities that had institutes or centres of Southeast Asian Studies, in particular, Cornell University and Monash University. The former was already established and famous while the other was new. They both gave him valuable ideas as to how to plan his new institute.

He had a research-oriented model in mind but the practical side of it was always to help the people in Singapore to understand the region. It is easy now to forget that the regional leaders and officials responsible for nation-building in the 1960s were still quite ignorant of the neighbourhood. They had mostly been trained and educated to look to the metropolitan centres of their respective imperial masters, notably to Britain, Netherlands and France and, in the case of the Philippines, to the United States. Most of them knew much more about those countries than neighbouring countries. This was a major weakness that Dr Goh was very concerned about. Once Singapore became, to the surprise of most people, an independent country with responsibilities for which very few were prepared, its people really had to be very clear where it stood with their neighbours. That was what ISEAS was established for: to be a research institute that would help to explain the new region of Southeast Asia to the people of Singapore.

At the same time, it was clear that Southeast Asia itself was very much a new idea.