The Small State That Helps Write the Rules

Singapore has no leverage of size. It cannot threaten anyone’s market access or dangle a vast domestic economy. What it has instead is a drafting pen — and a habit of reaching for it first.

That is the argument of a sharp recent essay on Fulcrum, the ISEAS commentary platform, by the Australia-based lawyer Tristan Eng. He calls Singapore a “norm entrepreneur”: a small state that writes the first workable templates for problems the big multilateral bodies are too slow or too divided to solve, then lets those templates harden into rules everyone else adopts. It is a persuasive frame, and 2026 has handed it two fresh pieces of evidence.

The templates, then the proof

Start with the prototypes. In 2020 Singapore signed the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement with New Zealand and Chile, and a separate digital economy agreement with Australia — among the first treaties anywhere to write rules for data flows, e-invoicing and digital identity.

At the time they looked like niche experiments. This year they look like drafts of something bigger.

In March 2026, the World Trade Organization agreed a pathway to bring its Agreement on Electronic Commerce into force — the first baseline set of global digital-trade rules, backed by 67 members representing about 70 per cent of world trade. It is co-convened by Singapore, alongside Australia and Japan. The ideas Singapore piloted bilaterally in 2020 are now the scaffolding for a near-global accord.

Then supply chains. In May 2026 Singapore and New Zealand signed the Agreement on Trade in Essential Supplies, billed as the world’s first legally binding bilateral supply-chain resilience pact: neither side will slap unnecessary export curbs on agreed essentials — food, fuel, medicine, chemicals — when global supply lines seize up. It was signed by trade ministers and witnessed by Prime Ministers Lawrence Wong and Christopher Luxon, and came into force in July. Another first; another template.

Why small works

The method, as Eng describes it, is the opposite of muscle. Singapore positions itself as a neutral facilitator and builds agreements that are modular — open enough for others to join on their own terms, yet substantive enough that a norm actually crystallises.

Being small is the point. A rule proposed by Washington or Beijing arrives freighted with suspicion about whose interests it serves. The same rule proposed by Singapore reads as a technical fix. Non-threatening is a form of leverage.

None of this is charity. Singapore is among the largest beneficiaries of an open, rules-based system; a world of blocs and export bans is a direct threat to an entrepot with no hinterland. Writing the rules is simply the cheapest available insurance.

The ASEAN test

For the region, the interesting question is whether the templates scale. The clearest test is the ASEAN Digital Economy Framework Agreement, the bloc’s attempt to knit ten very different digital markets into one rulebook — and the document leans heavily on exactly the concepts Singapore prototyped.

That is the quiet significance of Eng’s argument for the rest of Southeast Asia. If Singapore’s bilateral experiments keep graduating into WTO and ASEAN frameworks, then a city-state of six million is doing a surprising share of the drafting for how the whole region will trade digitally.

The limit is worth naming too. Norm entrepreneurship works only while the great powers tolerate it — a template has no enforcement of its own. Singapore’s bet is that being first, useful and neutral buys influence that size alone never could. On the evidence of 2026, it is a bet that keeps paying.

This piece engages with Tristan Eng’s essay “Singapore’s Trade Agreements Show How Small States Shape Global Legal Norms,” published on Fulcrum by the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. The agreements and figures here were verified independently against primary sources; where our numbers differ from the original, ours reflect the latest data, and any errors are our own.