Cultural System of Philippines (1)

The context for democracy and redistributive reforms in the Philippines is a function, not only of the country’s political evolution, but of the cultural systems that shape Philippine life. The issues of how people identify themselves, and for what purposes, are complex and not readily reducible to single dimensions such as class, ethnicity, or religion. Multiple, cross-cutting identities—family, ethnic, region, religion, political party, patron-client, class—operate simultaneously, some changing over time. These identities constitute multiple claims on an individual’s loyalty, just as they afford access to a variety of vantage points from which to interpret and respond to a changing economic, political, and social environment. These competing identities are the subject of constant negotiation, and some become more salient at times than others. Moments of economic or political crisis can help select of foreground aspects of individual identities. The very existence of powerful, cross-cutting class and group cleavages in Philippine society makes national reform problematic. The democratic class struggle presupposes that class is the most politically salient identity. Where it is not strong, class-based political parties are unlikely to emerge to pursue fundamental redistributive reform.
The Linguistic Cleavages
Cultural identifications based on regional origin, language, and ethnicity have long worked against development of a national identity and nationwide peasant action in the Philippines. Reflecting the country’s archipelagic land-base, linguistic diversity in the Philippines is extreme, with some 80 languages and dialects in use in the archipelago. No single language is common to all Filipinos. Filipino, a revised form of Tagalog, is the national and most common language and is spoken by some 55 percent of the population. English remains the language of major businesses, the government, and secondary and higher education.
Nationalist sentiment prompted constitutional recognition of Filipino as the national language in 1987. The Constitution further directed the government to initiate the use of Filipino as the medium of official communication and as the language of instruction in the educational system. The University of the Philippines has already taken steps to introduce the use of Filipino in instruction. The use of Filipino as the medium of instruction at the elementary school level remains more complicated. The initial years of public schooling are typically conducted in the regional languages. As many rural children abandon schooling in the course of grades 1-4, they are largely beyond the reach of instruction in the national language and whatever national socialization is attendant thereto. Linguistic diversity is also an impediment to nationwide dissemination of information concerning peasant rights under various government programs, including agrarian reform.
The national print media are overwhelmingly English. Television is somewhat more varied in its linguistic choice; local dramas, variety shows, and news broadcast are in Filipino; imported dramas, of which there are many, and at least one nightly news program per network, are broadcast in English. Radio broadcast are also mixed linguistically, with somewhat greater use of Filipino than is true of television broadcasts.
Linguistic identity remains an important pat of Philippine political life. A pre-martial law (1969) survey found dialect to be a much more significant determinant of voter behavior than party affiliation. Inter-provincial migration, intermarriage, and urbanization are argued to have reduced the importance of linguistic identity among Christian Filipinos, but regional/linguistic distinctions remain a common theme of Philippine political analysis.

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Philippines in the Pre-independence Time (5)

Wartime Occupation and Collaboration
Japanese occupation of the Philippines during the World War II brought the issue of elite collaboration with foreign powers into sharp relief. Confronting the dilemma of collaboration with the Japanese or resistance in the name of the Philippine Commonwealth and its colonial ruler, the United States, many members of the Philippine elite opted for collaboration. Among the most prominent collaborators were Jose Laurel, Sr., and Benigno Aquino, Sr. Wartime profiteering afforded substantial gains to some of the nation’s foremost families.
At the War’s end, the machinations of General Douglas MacArthur, and the President Harry Truman’s initial inattention to the collaboration issue and subsequent deference to MacArthur, effectively undermined President Sergio Osmena’s limited resolve and capacity to mete out punishment to wartime collaborators. David Steinberg argues that Filipinos decided against punishment of collaborationists out of concern that thus purging the elite would “decapitate” the society at a time of extreme destruction and social disruption. This decision was, however, a product of Philippine elite and U.S. policy; the Philippine masses had no voice in the matter. Four decades later, the Aquino government’s treatment of former Marcos loyalists and rebellious military officer would sound a variant on this theme of non-punishment for the supposed sake of national unity.
Collaboration with the Japanese struck at then-prevailing perceptions of Philippine national identity, an identity closely tied to the United States. Elite collaboration thus called into question the legitimacy of elite political dominance. In their grievances against collaborators, peasants received some support from elements of the Philippine elite and for a time, from official U.S. policy. The issue of past and present collaboration with the foreign powers, and the benefits that have thereby accrued to the Philippine to the Philippine elite, are thus another basis for the gulf between elite and mass in Philippine society.

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Philippines in the Pre-independence Time (4)

American Colonial Rule
Three hundred years of Spanish colonial rule ended with the Philippine war of independence in 1896. Philippine independence was no sooner proclaimed than it was lost to the United States—a casualty of the Spanish-American War. The American colonial era saw little change in the patterns of elite-dominated politics in the Philippines. American colonial administrators repeatedly acknowledged the poverty and social, political, and economic inequities attendant on the prevailing patterns of landownership and distribution of wealth. Yet they concentrated on less controversial education, public health, and infrastructure programs rather than on fundamental societal reform.
As had their Spanish predecessors, U.S. colonial administrators (1898-1946) relied upon the Filipino landowning elite and their clientelist networks for social control. The contest for relative power continued between Manila and the localities. U.S. introduction of periodic elections facilitated elite penetration of the state by creating a wide range of elective offices at the local and provincial levels. In capturing these offices, the Philippine elites founded many of the political dynasties that dominate present-day politics. The clientelist networks of the landowning elite became the foundation for national political alliances. The sugar bloc was particularly effective in utilizing its considerable economic resources to build patron-client networks and exercise regional and national political power. Many of the bloc’s most prominent figures were from Negros Occidental. The power of the provincial landowning elite thus continued to frustrate efforts to develop a strong central state. As Willem Wolters notes, “The classic state monopolies known from European history, namely those over violence and taxation, have never been fully developed in the Philippines.”
The stage was thus set for a post-independence Philippine “democracy” in which the vast majority of the population exerted little influence, and from which they derived little benefit. Electoral campaigns wee not mass appeals to voters nor forums for the discussion of societal issues, but negotiations between provincial elites and national political personalities.” In the period 1907-1941,Philippine politics in general, and in the independence movement in particular, was dominated by the Nacionalista Party, whose members and leaders came from the wealthiest Philippine families. The only calls for agrarian reform emanated from a few radical parties, whish were small, under-funded, and operative only in parts of Luzon. In voting, tenants and landless laborers—dependent and new to politics—typically followed the lead of their landlord or patron.
At the same time, the 1938 union of the Socialist Party and the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP = Communist party), under the PKP banner, provided a vehicle for mobilizing a portion of the disgruntled peasantry in Central Luzon. They helped inspire strikes and the Sakdal uprisings in the later years of American rule. These were the precursors to the Hulk rebellion of the 1940s and 1950s.

To Be Continued…

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Philippines in the Pre-independence Time (3)

The Historical Development of Negros Occidental
As part of the regional specialization in agriculture, the province of Negros Occidental became the focus of Philippine sugarcane production. Located 300 kilometers south of Manila, Negros is in the center of the Philippine archipelago. Technological innovations—the introduction of foreign sugarcane varieties and furnaces fueled by bagasse (waste cane)—and foreign-financed sugar-mill construction led to the rapid expansion of sugarcane production in Negros Occidental beginning in the mid nineteenth century. In the 1920s, the American colonial government facilitated significant further expansion of Negros sugar production by financing the construction of six centrifugal mills (centrals) through the Philippine National Bank. The provinces of Negros Occidental and Oriental have generally accounted for over two-thirds of Philippine sugarcane production. Sugar exports, primarily the United States, supplied roughly 20 percent of Philippine foreign exchange earnings in the 1960s and 1970s.
Expansion of sugarcane production in Negros was marked by extreme concentration of landownership. Spanish barriers to foreign capital—restrictions on Protestants landownership, inter-island migration, and inter-island travel by foreigners—prompted reliance on part-Chinese mestizos as brokers between European commercial interests and sugar planters. In turn, these mestizos came to dominate the sugar industry in Negros. Sugar production was organized around haciendas employing hired labor.

To Be Continued..

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Philippines in the Pre-independence Time (2)

The Emergence of regional power centers
Although Spanish rule was administratively centralized, the members of the various religious orders enjoyed considerable de facto autonomy at the village (barangay) level, autonomy that increased with time. Until late in the Spanish colonial era, the parish priest was the sole Spaniards in more than half the Philippine villages, the only representative of colonial authority. Where present, the priest became “judge, mentor, landlord, and symbol of foreign power.” At the same time, local elites, whose power increasingly became a function of personal landownership, were able to consolidate their influence at the local and provincial levels.
In the Philippines, the regionalized pattern of growth in intra-Asian trade in the late eighteenth century and the explosion in trade with European and American markets in the mid nineteenth century unleashed powerful centrifugal forces, which have fostered fragmented social control and reinforced regional identities at the expense of a strong national identity. Anglo-American trading concerns, rather than the Spanish colonial regime, dominated the development of the Philippine export economy. With the opening of provincial ports to foreign trade after 1855, the Anglo-American trading houses were able to establish direct links with different parts of the archipelago, emphasizing distinct regional crops, and working with a variety of region-specific production systems.
Geography, colonial policy and the particular nature of commercialization of Philippine agriculture thus assured continued fragmentation of social control. This social organization limited, but did not eliminate the possibilities for concerted rebellion against the colonial power and hindered the emergence of Philippine nationalism. Furthermore, it played a prominent role in the undoing of the national revolution (1896-1902). Most important for our current analysis, this regional fragmentation of social control has frustrated the development of a centralized state organization capable of effecting nationwide redistributive reform.
In assessing the present-day capabilities of Third World states, Migdal highlights the role of colonial powers in shaping contrasting patterns of social control:
Of all distinctions in the local population these policies fostered, one stands out in its long-term effect on state-society relations. Colonizing rulers could either give preferential access to resources to many local indigenous leaders, each of whom could establish social control in only a circumscribed part of the society, or the foreigners could support those in a position to create central, countrywide institutions capable of forming an eventual, centralized state.
In the Philippine case, we would want to modify the thesis slightly, according greater recognition to international forces and powers distinct from the colonial power. The patterns of economic development and resulting social control that emerged in the nineteenth-century Philippines were arguably more reflective of the influence of Anglo-American trading concerns, and the relative weakness of the central colonial (Spanish) government, than of purposive action by the colonial power.

To Be Continued…

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Philippines in the Pre-independence Time (1)

Spanish Colonial Rule
The Spaniards defined the Philippine nation geographically and introduced a centralized political and administrative system. In the absence of a language common to the entire archipelago, Spanish clerics translated the Christian doctrine into the various local vernaculars, thereby preserving, albeit with changes; the myriad indigenous languages. In turn, Philippine ethno-linguistic identities have persisted, competing with a national identity.
Although Spanish rule had vast cultural implications, its most important impacts were on the locus of social control and patterns of Philippine land tenure. As the most remote of the Spanish colonies, and in the absence of obvious mineral or other treasured resources, the principal roles of the Philippines in the Hispanic colonial order were as a transshipment point for galleon trade between Mexico and China and as a military outpost. Apart from Catholic missionaries, few Spaniards settled in the Philippines, and those who did were prohibited from residing outside of Manila until 1768. For much of the Spaniards period, there was no appreciable colonial development of domestic industries or agricultural resources. Nonetheless, the Spaniards were to have a profound influence on the evolution of land-tenure patterns.
The Spaniards sought to minimize the administrative costs of colonial governance in the Philippines, Spain’s most distant and poorly endowed colony. Colonial rule outside of Manila was founded on a limited bureaucracy, Catholic missionaries, a native constabulary, and the collaboration of traditional datus (village chiefs). In the position of pre-colonial datu, we see the historical origin of leadership tied to reciprocity and indebtedness. The datu was the “one most capable of securing the surplus with which to engage in a series of reciprocal exchanges with others in the community.” Other villages evidenced their deference to the datu through various behaviors, including contributing labor for cultivation, ritual, or military activities. For colonial convenience, the datus were accorded appreciably greater political status than had been their traditional right. With Spanish rule, the village social system was resituated in a complex bureaucracy, the authority of which was premised on royal and in turn divine patronage.
As part of the encomienda system—an arrangement whereby individual Spaniards were granted administrative jurisdiction over specified regions—the datus (renamed cabezas de barangay or more generically, caciques) were made responsible for local collection of the tribute, organization of conscript labor, and administration of justice. Encomenderos and caciques frequently abused these powers for purposes of personal gain, in turn occasioning continual peasant resistance and periodic peasant rebellion. These abuses were at odds with the idealized Spanish ideology of domination, providing a basis fo peasant radicalism linked to criticism of that ideology in its own terms. For their part, the colonial and local authorities repeatedly turned to the military for enforcement of the objectionable practices. In the absence of a large Spanish military force, these “police” actions were conducted by local constabularies consisting of native mercenaries from other regions of the country. This hiring practice both reflected and reinforced regional identities at the expense of national or class identities.

To Be Continued

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The Long Journey of Philippines

The transformation of Philippine society occasioned by colonial policies and the penetration of the world market economy, particularly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had a lasting impact on Philippine cultural traditions and the nature of state-society relations. Spanish and later U.S., colonial policies dramatically recast land-tenure patterns. With the commercialization of agriculture came important changes in social mores and institutions, peasant survival strategies, and the strengthening of regional economy elites. The mode of colonial rule—indirect rule through collaborating elites—had equally important implications for elites-mass social relations and for patterns of social control.
Although there is continuing fluidity in the composition of the Philippine elite, many of the leading families first prospered under Spanish colonial rule and then consolidated their economic and political power under American colonial rule. While governmental authority was formally concentrated in Manila, local caciques strengthened their influence over local behavior, constraining the power of the state.
Philippine peasants have responded to the varying impacts of commercialization and Spanish, American, and Japanese rule with episodic rebellions, in addition to “everyday forms of peasant resistance.” This legacy and its cultural underpinnings are important to our understanding of present-day peasant activism and the role peasant-based organizations have played, and can play, in advancing redistributive reform in Philippines. One theme that runs through much of the analysis is the existence and persistence of powerful, crosscutting class and group cleavages in Philippine society. These cleavages make national reform of any sort problematic. One concern of the analysis, then, is the salience of various identities and cleavages in explaining the outcome of reform under the Aquino and Ramos regimes.
Philippine history is not characterized by a dominant or unifying cultural tradition of the type found in other Southeast Asian o East Asian countries. Since the fourteenth century, the Philippine people have felt the successive influence of Islamic, Spanish, American, and Japanese cultures. One consequence is the continuing search for a Philippine national identity, reflected both in scholarly work and in the nationalist appeals of a series of Philippine social and political movements. In recent decades, Philippine historians have reexamined their national history, rejected the dominant paradigms of colonial scholarship, and given new emphasis to the rule of the working class in the struggle for independence, and the harmful influence uncritical acceptance of an alien language and values has had on Filipino identity.
Nationalism was a prominent theme in the fight for independence from Spain, in the resistance to American intervention and conquest, in the rise of the Nacionalista Party during the commonwealth period, in the resistance to the Japanese occupation during World War II and most recently in the armed struggle of the Communist Party of the Philippines/New People’s Army (CPP/NPA). Yet even as Filipinos have sought a national identity, there have been important centrifugal forces—regional, linguistic, and religious—at work.

To Be Continued…

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Towards A Pacific Peace: No Clash of Civilization

The assumed opposition between Western and Asian values is more of a political than a cultural issue. I see no ‘clash of civilization’ of the kind imagined by Samuel Huntington impending in East Asia (although Singapore’s senior minister Lee Kuan Yew suggest there may be racialist undertones in America’s attitude toward a resurgent China). Cultural differences between East Asia and West are not the critical determinants of politics, economics, or manners. As societies get more complex, they must increasingly be ruled by compromise and majority rule if society is to become both free and orderly. And to the extent that countries (East or West) accept these consensual methods, their political cultures will converge.

As political cultures converge, the differences between countries will arise largely from the civic values that specific cultures prize, and also from the deliberate efforts that East Asia’s modernizers are making, to avoid the mistakes the early modernizers in the West made; for example, in failing to restrain the egotism of individualistic capitalism, and in allowing both the deterioration of family ties and the extreme secularism of society and of human life.
China must be incorporated peacefully into this Pax Pacifica. Apart from military reach, economic impact, and political muscle, a superpower must have a message of worldwide relevance derived from an inner moral code of its own, defining a ‘shared standard of conduct as an example to others.’ The Asia-Pacific as a community must impress on China that military reach, economic impact, and political muscle by themselves can no longer command respect. Respect must be earned and China can deserve the region’s respect only if it has a message that transforms power into a leadership that commands moral legitimacy. How China behaves in Hong Kong, in the South China Sea, on Taiwan, and in Korea will define for the Philippines its message to the region and the world. In the past, states moved effortlessly from economic strength to military power and then to imperialism. But today no state need aspire to hegemony, because it can attain its goal of wealth and prestige through peaceful commerce and integration in the community of nations. The long-term objective should be to replace security arrangements based on the military balance with mutual security based on economic cooperation (on mutually beneficial trade and investment). A Pax Pacifica must be founded on the stability imposed not by any hegemonic power but on the peace of virtual equals: the product of security cooperation that comes from reasoning together.

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The Philippines and the Spratlys Dispute

The Chinese encroachment on Mischief Reef the Philippines regards as the concern of all the powers interested in the stability of the South China Sea and its strategic sea-lanes. The Philippine government sees no substitutes for consultations that produce a consensus among six littoral states claiming portions of the Spratlys. President Ramos has proposed demilitarizing the South China Sea and placing each disputed island under the stewardship of the claimant-country closest to it. The claimant states can then undertake multilateral ventures in oil expansion, marine research, fishing enterprises, joint policing, environmental protection, and so forth, perhaps under a joint development authority.
Chinese leaders have several times reassured the Philippines that China poses no threat to the growth and stability of the Asia-Pacific. But the Philippines is still not completely at ease in its bilateral relationship with China. It cannot reconcile Beijing’s avowals of neighborliness and friendship with its continued presence on Mischief Reef.

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The Special Philippine-U.S. Relationship

Since the 1900s the U.S. presence had insulated the Philippine state from disturbances to its social stability and shielded it against any sense of an outside threat. Successive generations of Filipino politicians manipulated the colonial relationship to their advantage, using Washington to prop up a corrupt and inefficient political and economic system. Now the free ride is over. From Washington’s point of view, the Philippines may have been reduced from a strategic ally to just another poor client in need of American benevolence. But both sides should welcome the evolution of the relationship to one governed by straightforward economic and strategic considerations.

Relations with the United States will remain a major aspect of Philippine foreign policy: the former colonial power remains the country’s top trading partner. But the Philippines now have the chance to design the course of this relationship if it develops a strong and outward-looking economy. U.S. resources will then come into the country no longer as handouts but as revenues from trade and tourism, and as direct investment, joint-venture capital, and commercial loans. And the Philippines should welcome even the winding-down of U.S. aid, because it forces the country to face up to structural reforms needed in the economy.
The bases for this new beginning are sound. The historical association of the two countries has resulted not only in a shared belief in liberal democracy but in a large and growing Filipino American community. By 1990 Filipinos had become the United States’ most numerous ethnic Asians. The Filipino American community is potentially important as a source of investment and a lobby for Filipino interest in Washington, D.C. It also ensures that for many Filipino families, Philippine relations with the United States will remain special whatever turn the official relationship may take.
And while it may be fashionable to belittle the representative system the Americans transplanted to the Philippines, ordinary Filipinos do put their faith in it. Walden Bello, a left-wing scholar inquiring into why the communist rebellion has become marginalized, found one reason to be “to continuing vitality of the tradition of formal democratic electoral politics as a source of political legitimacy, not only among the middle class but also the peasantry and workers.
If the new relationship is to prosper, Filipinos will of course have to soothe U.S. anxieties about the Philippines. These include commercial piracy and violation of intellectual property rights, and the country’s increasing role in trans-shipping narcotics to the American market. And security cooperation must mean more than the passive kind of dependence on the U.S. that the Philippines developed in the postcolonial period.

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You Get Ranked or You Get Bombarded

What is your first think if I mention name of some countries like Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea. You might think about the communist country, petrodollar, or nuclear energy. Yet all these countries share one thing in common: they prohibit or impose conditions on foreign investment and imports. That includes US investment and US exports. It would hardly be surprising that the US state, dominated by business interests, where the majority of cabinet members are, and have, for at least the past century, been corporate directors or members of corporate law firms, would be hostile to countries that interfere with, or prohibit, activities related to the accumulation of capital by US-based trans-nationals.
Accordingly, Iran prohibits private ownership of power generation, postal services, telecommunications and large-scale industry – hardly an inviting place for a foreign investor looking to expand his capital. Add to that the fact that Iran’s constitution severely restricts foreign ownership in the petroleum sector and mandates that the banking sector be state-owned. There’s also the reality that the government uses its ownership stake in over 1,500 companies to influence pricing to meet social policy (not trans-national profit-making) goals. Top these multiple crimes against the potential for fat profits with a trade policy that fosters the development of domestic industry by discouraging imports, and the conclusion is clear: Iran isn’t the kind of place a capitalist scouring the globe for markets and investment opportunities is going to warm up to.
So, is alarm over Iran acquiring the means to develop nuclear weapons, and Ahmadinejad’s reputed “violent anti-Semitism,” a cover for an effort to pry open the Iranian economy to move it up the Index of Economic Freedom?
To answer the question above, we can make an analogy toward Iraq. Before the US installed itself as the effective ruler of the country, Iraq had a largely state-owned economy, imposed restrictions on foreign ownership of key economic sectors, and subsidized necessities, such as fuel, cooking oil and staples, to meet social policy objectives. Like Iran today, Iraq had all the features of a largely closed, dirigiste economy, so richly at odds with the expansionary requirements of US capital. But Iraq, under US guidance, is in the midst of an economic makeover. State-owned enterprises are to be sold off. Subsidies for fuel and oil are being eliminated. The country is under the control of the IMF. Foreign investors are to be allowed to enter the state-run oil-export business, and promises are being made to open up downstream infrastructure, like refining, to private investors. (New York Times, August 11, 2005) So, yes, Iraq is being transformed from an economy much like Iran’s into one much like Hong Kong’s.
That’s one reason to believe that alarm over Iran is contrived, a cover for pursuing a new economic makeover project to benefit the economic elite of the US imperialist alliance. But there are others. Lay aside the monumental hypocrisy of rich, industrialized countries, some teeming with nuclear weapons, all with the capability of producing them, most with their own civilian nuclear power industries, demanding that Iran relinquish its right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to independently develop nuclear power for civilian use. Ignore, too, that the same demands are not made of other less developed countries, higher on the index of economic freedom, and more accommodating to the profit-making interests of Western investors and trans-national corporations.

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