MikeLigalig.com

So this morning, at some risk of exaggeration, I’ll embark on a sharply angled view of Philippine affairs, and I hope you’ll pardon me if I make one too many references to the United States, as this talk taps into a paper I delivered last year on Philippine democracy and modernization as a Pacific Leadership Fellow at the University of California, San Diego.

Who, exactly, are we Filipinos? Two years ago, a Gallup poll revealed that Filipinos were the most emotional people on the planet. We laugh and we cry with equal facility—so don’t be too surprised if this talk descends from the sublime to the ridiculous within a paragraph of each other.

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We respect our elders—senior citizenship in the Philippines has many pecuniary and honorific privileges—but we will not automatically defer to their judgment. Academic mentors are highly valued but not deified, and any kind of authority—government, Church, military, academic—has had to face a longstanding tradition of protest and resistance.

Anyone who has been here will remark how easily our people smile, even and especially in the most difficult and awkward of circumstances. This is a country periodically ravaged by both natural and man-made disasters, with infernal traffic in Manila, whose international airport is reputedly among the most vexatious in the world, and a political system best described as feudal. And yet again, this is a country of the most resourceful and resilient people, a country blessed with such natural bounty and beauty that one wag once described it as “a rich country pretending to be poor.”

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These contrasts are, of course, hardly unique to the Philippines in today’s globalized world, where traditional societies have been overlaid with growing patches of modernity and the mindsets that come with exposure to foreign shores. What distinguishes the Philippines is its cultural and political position as a gateway between East and West, a position asserted in its longstanding claim—often made as a boast—of being the “only predominantly Christian English-speaking country in Asia.” This, as we shall see, has upsides and downsides.

The Philippines is a country of over 100 million people. At 300,000 square kilometers, the Philippines is just about as large as Arizona or Germany; but unlike either, it’s an archipelago of over 7,000 islands, or three main island groups, broken down further into 17 administrative regions and 81 provinces. By one count, we have around 175 languages, with English and Tagalog, which forms the core of Filipino, the national language, widely spoken throughout the country. More than 80 percent of Filipinos are at least nominally Roman Catholic; about 5 percent are Muslim. There are also over a hundred indigenous groups struggling to preserve their culture and heritage against the onslaught of Manila and Hollywood. As of 2014, more than half—53%—of our population was below 25 years old.

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Our ruling class saw Spain as the Mother Country and sought representation in the Spanish parliament, but Spain would have none of it, and so revolution became inevitable, with generals and ministers from the landed gentry leading battalions of the poor. Just when we were about to win our freedom in 1898, another invader stepped in to snatch it away. This was none other than the United States, which had gone to war with Spain, and which was therefore claiming the Philippines as collateral damage. Commodore George Dewey sailed out of Hong Kong with his Asiatic Squadron and easily overwhelmed a small and decrepit Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. The Spaniards surrendered and left, picking up a check for $20 million at the Treaty of Paris before handing over the Philippines to America.

And so began our next colonial adventure—not even 50 years long, but no less indelible, and perhaps even culturally and politically more powerful, than all those centuries of Spanish domination.

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In other venues and especially in the US, I’ve often begun my presentations on the Philippines with this simple statement: “We were your first Vietnam.” And indeed we were. That complicated relationship began with a war of resistance that for the longest time was known only as the Philippine Insurrection, despite the fact that 20,000 Filipino soldiers and 200,000 civilians died in it, against just over 4,000 American deaths. Only in 1999 did the Library of Congress finally rename its Philippine Insurgent Records to the Philippine-American War.

The Muslims never did give in to Gen. John J. Pershing and his men. The Filipino Muslims led such fearsome charges that, according to contemporary American accounts, the US Army was forced to upgrade to the Colt .45 in 1902 for its stopping power. But most of the rest of us did, and it didn’t take too long before we fell in love with English, with Hollywood, and, inevitably, with that newfangled concept, democracy. This change of mind and heart was achieved not by the bullet but by the book.

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I don't mean to provide the whole history of Philippine-American relations here, but I raise these points to highlight the modeling and the patterning that marked the period of American colonial occupation, formally from 1898 to 1946, but with an influence that extends well into the present.

Over much of that period, whatever was American—the term we used was “Stateside”—was deemed to be superior. Not only did we switch to English and largely forget Spanish within a couple of generations; aside from American fashions, we adopted American jurisprudence, and were given a Supreme Court which wasn’t supreme enough, because its decisions could be appealed before the US Supreme Court in Washington. We were given a bicameral legislature, with a Senate and a National Assembly that was the equivalent of Congress. We learned about and launched national political parties, and threw ourselves with gusto into the electoral process. The Philippine press became as active and as raucous as its American counterpart.

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Many Americans liked to believe that they had succeeded in parenting a bright young child halfway around the world; as late as 2003, George Bush was still holding up the Philippines as a model for what America was seeking to achieve in the Middle East, as a project in “liberation” and “democracy.”

And here we have to pause and wonder exactly what kind of democracy we have in the Philippines, and what needs to be done to achieve a fuller sense of the word.

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Indeed, economically and politically, the Philippines has been largely ruled for more than a century by an elite, a roomful of families from the landed gentry and comprador capitalists who developed their wealth and power as agents and executors of colonization, and have taken turns at governing the country well into the present, with the quiet support of the postwar taipans. In that sense, our new President represents the counter-elite, which likely accounts for his popularity, but only time will tell if he and his family will join other budding dynasties in a new elite shaped less by election spending than by name recognition in the traditional and social media.

Philippine politics today can only be described as atrociously dynastic, with the members of one or two families alternating for political control of provinces, towns, and cities; in many places, we don’t have a two-party system, but a two-family system. Political parties do exist in the Philippines, but they’re largely flags of convenience, ideologically indistinguishable from one another, except for what remains of the old Left, which has now allied itself with the present administration. Not surprisingly, the judicial branch of government has been subject to the same pressures of power and patronage, which can trump the rule of law.

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At this point I should note that one out of every ten Filipinos now lives and works abroad—about three million in the US alone—in a decades-long diaspora that has kept the Philippine economy afloat through remittances amounting to about $30 billion in 2015. But they bring home not only money but new ideas, and I feel confident that, in the long run and for all its social costs, this diaspora will have salutary effects because that domestic helper in Milan or mechanic in Bahrain will no longer be simply a domestic helper or mechanic when they come home. Tourists bring home snapshots of pretty places and exotic food; foreign workers bring home real learning, lessons in survival and getting ahead, and raised expectations of their local and national leaders.

This exposure to global culture and its elevation of local aspirations will, I believe, be the one of the strongest forces in reshaping the Filipino future. And again, it is the middle class—the denizens of the Internet and the Ulysses of this new century—that will lead in this transformation, just as they have led the most important movements for political and social reform in our history.

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On this note, from the things that have held us back, I’d like to move on to some of the things that are helping us move forward.

As I mentioned at the outset of this talk, the Philippines is full of sharp and often perplexing contradictions. But we have also managed to make many of those contradictions work to our strategic benefit.

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We can see how this will happen. Tax reforms and increased spending on education, health, and infrastructure will grow the economy further in the coming years. The key will be consistency of policy and sustained implementation, political unity and will (admittedly not the easiest thing to achieve), and the willingness to adapt and to invest. In education, to align ourselves more closely with the rest of the world, we have adopted a K-12 program and even adjusted our academic calendar. Bucking decades of neglect, the government has also begun to invest massively in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education and research, particularly through the National Science Complex in my university.

But I’d like to draw special attention to one of my pet concerns: the emergence of what have been called the creative industries, which embrace a wide array of subsectors including advertising, animation, architecture, broadcast arts, crafts, culinary arts, cultural/heritage activities, design, film, literature, music, new media, performing arts, publishing, and visual arts. These are areas which tap into centuries of cultural talent and expressiveness in the Filipino, adapted to the digital and global age.

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We need nothing less than a new cultural revolution leading to our own understanding and acceptance of what it means to be a Filipino in this globalized world. We have to agree on who we are, what we want, and how to get what we want—and achieving that agreement is the task of culture.

Forging that identity is crucial to securing our future, again in a world and in a part of the world where our neighbors seem to have very clear ideas about their roles and capabilities. In this ocean of resurgent nationalisms, we Filipinos need to redefine ourselves as more than America’s students and surrogates. And again, it will likely be the educated Filipino, steeped in political and cultural discourse, who will lead in this enterprise.

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never had i come across a better read to describe our nation.

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