So instead of independence being the culmination of a period of national solidarity, in our case it was one that came…

So instead of independence being the culmination of a period of national solidarity, in our case it was one that came as a kind of anticlimax. Nowhere else in our part of the world (not even in India, where the leaders of the independence movement spent the war years in jail) was national loyalty confused with loyalty to the colonial power—a dubious distinction, clear in its absurdity to the prewar political leadership but not to the broader public or the previously sidelined, who saw the war as an opportunity to supplant the monolithic political structure of the prewar years. The destruction of the country as the price of liberation, and the conditions imposed to secure rehabilitation, not only further soured public opinion, but also made the rhetoric surrounding independence seem hollow.

Divided, discredited, and destitute, the political class could not and would not find ways to accommodate any challenges to it; all this meant that the first decade of independence was spent fighting a civil war in Central Luzon, and it wasn’t until the mid- to late ’50s, and briefly, that national solidarity returned. Manuel Roxas and Ramon Magsaysay could likely have achieved the reunification of the prewar factions, but their deaths in both cases closed off the opportunity. Recent scholarship by Lisandro Claudio also suggests that the entire economic project of the period was anchored on the wrong assumptions—of having to prove to the old colonial masters that Filipinos could be thrifty and loyal to Washington’s policy formulations, which were skeptical of industrialization—when our neighbors did the exact opposite in defiance of the “experts,” with Park Chung-hee being a famous example.

It hasn’t helped that since a premium is put on appearances, understanding that the substance is different isn’t acknowledged even by our fellow Filipinos. The democracy that had emerged prior to World War II would be more familiar to many of our neighbors then and now than to Filipinos today, who only look, if they look back, to surface similarities with the West. It had become ingrained enough that its instincts—to belong to a monolithic party with little independence from a coalition leader—have remained, even as these instincts repeatedly collide with a public conditioned into believing its understanding of democracy is shared by the leaders it elects.

Article continues after this advertisement

Hence what I have come to call the “Three Old” and the “Three New.” The Three Old are our political inheritance from the Long Republic from 1935 to 1973 and are a bandwagon democracy, a plebiscitary democracy, and a partyless democracy. A mandate is contested and earned by a coalition whose success is measured not just in votes but in the breadth of the coalition; a mandate is retained, and periodically refreshed, through a combination of actual elections (at the start, to choose an administration, and in midterms, to determine its continuing viability) and symbolic referenda, whether through public opinion or public rituals; and this is where the instincts of the political class dating to the colonial era are to belong to the majority regardless of who constitutes it.

FEATURED STORIES

OPINION

OPINION

OPINION

The Three New are the fruit of our having become a middle-class Republic in the 1950s, with the reentry of the Catholic Church into political life and its cultivation of civil society. These are that since 1987 (and foreshadowed in 1957), we have a minority presidency, an unchangeable Constitution, and the substitution of families and fandoms for political parties. We continue to have vast expectations of presidents but deny them the foundation of their power, a majority mandate; we are increasingly disappointed with, and even despairing of the system achieving any lasting change, when we cannot even change the rules of the game despite the clear shortcomings of the system; and we are moving backward in terms of political organization when the times call for modernity and not a return to premodern ways of organizing.

The fruit of 1986 was the 1987 Constitution, which anchored itself on a threefold vision: to channel people power into reinvigorated institutions; to make accountability more accessible, in large part by limiting the executive’s prerogatives; and to institute an activist judiciary to uphold rights. The first failed, the second has created a gulf between the traditional expectations of responsibility, which cannot be fulfilled for lack of authority, and the last has made the first happen and continued to undermine the second (for example on rulings on budgetary processes making governance even more difficult).

Forty years, then, were spent seeing the collapse of a system unable to be itself, where we adopted a national attitude of victimhood to excuse ourselves from having to look too closely at ourselves. This was followed by 40 years of insisting on magical thinking to paper over the almost immediately exposed shortcomings of our experiment in a newly restored democracy. The republic at 80 is one where, at last, the period of decay and decline where something has to take its place, just as the 40 years from the ’30s to the ’70s led to a dictatorial experiment. We must ask ourselves what kind of experiment comes next, at the end of our current 40-year fall of the Fifth Republic.

Article continues after this advertisement

——————

Email: [email protected]; Twitter: @mlq3

Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.

Your subscription has been successful.