Post-Colonial National Identity in the Philippines

Celebrating the Centennial of Independence

Greg Bankoff, Kathleen Weekley

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138730908
• eBook ISBN: 9781351742092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title was first published in 2002.Presenting a fresh understanding of the construction of Post-Colonial national identity in the new context of globalization, this text looks at the dilemmas of the requirement to compete in the global economy and the political demands of human rights and cultural differences. The authors are concerned with the ways in which a modern state attempts to mould the identities of its citizens and the ways in which the myriad of identities in a multiethnic, multicultural and multi-religious population give rise to intense contradictions. This important research will have implications beyond the Filipino case and will be of great interest to a wider audience as a reference for courses on Asian studies, political science and history.

1 The Competition State and National Identity

In this chapter, we discuss the meaning of ‘national identity’, the relationship between national identity and the modern state, and the role that history plays in the relationship between them. In the process, we explain our definitions of key concepts such as nation-state, national identity and globalisation – none of which is uncontested. Next, we discuss the particularities of these themes in the Philippines and the significance of a redefined national identity for the kind of economic and political changes that President Ramos attempted to make during his term in office. Finally, we consider the limitations that the context of globalisation poses for national identity projects. The latter question is answered in more detail in chapter five; here we explain how the Filipino state has responded to various global pressures and how these have affected its view of the required forms of ideological consensus-building.

The Nation-State and National Identity

It is a truism in comparative politics literature that both state and nation in the Philippines are weak in significant ways.¹ Almost alone in the Southeast Asian region, the country lacks any strong pre-modern cultural/religious history from which the ideological or symbolic aspects of modern nation-states are usually drawn in some way; and the effective reach of the central government – in pursuit of both economic and ideological projects – is relatively short. Else-where in the region, difficulties posed by weak associations between the nation and its territory, or the multiethnic composition of the new national society, were at least for some time overcome by state efforts to impose political and cultural unity. In the Philippines, the nature of the postcolonial state is such that it has been relatively incapable of forging a unified, imagined community through ‘nation-building’ exercises as was done in Malaysia, in Indonesia and, so far apparently more successfully, in Singapore.

The quest to form a Filipino nation began at the end of the nineteenth century, when some young men of the mestizo elite – condemned by the Spanish administration and the powerful friars to a benighted, narrow and dependent existence – fled to Spain, where they learned about nationalism and liberalism and began the ‘Propaganda Movement’.² They demanded that those living in the colony be afforded equal treatment with peninsular Spaniards. Later, these ilustrados (the enlightened ones) joined and finally took over the more plebeian Katipunan movement, which waged war against the colonial power and declared an independent republic of the Philippines a few years later. Partly because the new republic had scarcely a moment to catch its breath before it was deposed by the new American colonial power; partly because there was no pre-existing ‘centralizing force’ or political structures in the territory;³ and partly because of what has been called the ‘absent core’ of culture,⁴ the Filipino nation has not been forged to the satisfaction of most state leaders or nationalist commentators. As late as 1980, one of the most revered figures in post-World War II Filipino politics, Jose Diokno, said, ‘[w]e are a country independent but not sovereign, a state but not yet a nation.’⁵ Nearly 20 years later, under the increasing pressures of the economic and cultural effects of globalisation processes President Ramos took up – or created for himself – the challenge of revamping Filipino national identity.

Before proceeding to a discussion of that project, let us begin by reminding ourselves of the relative newness of nation-states and what is entailed in maintaining national identities. We must start where nation-states started – in Europe. One hundred and thirty years ago, the anti-nationalist Lord Acton remarked that, unlike in his day, ‘In the old European system, the rights of nationalities were neither recognised by governments nor asserted by the people. The interest of the reigning families, not those of the nations, regulated the frontiers.’ Nationality was associated not with political sovereignty but rather, where it did exist, with shared ethnological and cultural characteristics. Only with the decline of absolutism and the rise of democracy (popular sovereignty) did nationality become the basis for the state.

The France of history fell together with the French State, which was the growth of centuries. The old sovereignty was destroyed … The new central authority needed to be established on a new principle of unity. The state of nature, which was the [Rousseauean] ideal of society, was made the basis of the nation; descent was put in the place of tradition, and the French people were regarded as a physical product: an ethnological, not historic, unit … [T]he idea of the sovereignty of the people, uncontrolled by the past, gave birth to the idea of nationality independent of the political influence of history.⁶

During the next 200 years, nationalism – the quest for the independent, sovereign, political expression of ‘nationality’ – has been one of the most powerful political ideologies, sustaining movements across the globe, and national sovereignty remains one of the most important ordering principles in international relations. The power of the idea is not matched by clarity in its meaning however, and historians, philosophers and political scientists still debate definitions of and relationships between nationality, nationalism and the nation-state. This is not the place to go over those debates, but it is necessary to touch upon some of the most contentious issues in order to specify the assumptions underpinning the arguments in this book.

Summarising the debates, one scholar concludes, somewhat crudely, that there is a division between ‘those who see nationality as an exclusively modern phenomenon and those who see it as the continuation of ancient tribalism’, and both views, he says, are ‘half right. There was no sudden conceptual break, no invention of a radically new way of thinking about human communities … What was new was the belief that nations could be regarded as active political agents … in turn connected to a new way of thinking about politics, the idea that institutions and policies could be seen as some-how expressing a popular or national will.’⁷ There are several problems with this characterisation of the vastly complex social processes that took place over long periods of time and usually involved bloody struggles between anciens régimes and the new nominally popular forces.⁸

First, the French revolution did amount to a ‘radically new way of thinking about human communities’. It effected great ruptures in thought not only about political power (which has ramifications for other areas of community and individual life) but also about social and cultural relations – for example, about one’s relation to neighbours of higher status and to those also called ‘French’ whom one had never imagined before as somehow being similar to oneself, though they might live only two villages away. One of those presumably included as a proponent of the ‘continuity’ argument about nationalism and national identity is Anthony Smith, but he argues that the context for the French Revolution and the German Romantic movement was ‘the radical breakdown of traditional communities like the family and the church, and their accompanying political habits.’⁹ The new nation-states surely did result in very differently imagined social and political communities, as Benedict Anderson’s work has so ably shown.¹⁰

Second, Miller’s solution to the tensions in the literature says little of the practical realities of each specific historical shift from ‘ancient tribalism’ to the modern nation-state. No such shift was ever made without the deliberate exclusion, destruction or violent incorporation of those who did not belong to the original or dominant ethnie¹¹ which led the struggle for nationhood. Such exclusions are protracted and complex. In France, the first of the great modern nation-states, the ‘nation’ to which the revolutionary leaders and the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen referred, included ‘Alsatians, Basques, Bretons, Catalans, Corsicans, Flemings, and Occitanians, as well as Frenchmen’.¹² Modern France was first asserted in the struggle for popular sovereignty and then, as Ernest Renan explained at the end of the nineteenth century, was regularly maintained through political processes, and necessitated the ‘forgetting’ of old rivalries and injustices.¹³

Virtually all modern nation-states are misnamed if we understand a ‘nation’ to be a community whose togetherness is constituted by ethnic or other equally deep cultural ties.¹⁴ In fact, each is a multiethnic polity with a mythical singular ‘national’ identity which is (un)stable to varying degrees.¹⁵ Although Smith makes a strong case that the relationship between an ethnie and a state is not wholly arbitrary or manufactured, his larger claim that in national state-making, politics has followed culture rather than the other way around, is unconvincing.¹⁶ It is undeniable that in many cases there have been close historical relationships between specific ethnic groups or nationalities and state-making forces, and that the latter, led by articulate elites with access to universalising (nationalising) discourses, often attach their claims to nationhood to existing cultural ties and symbols. Indeed it would be a difficult task to lead a political movement for nationhood without doing so. But the relationship is not a necessary one, and in case after case, national or ethnic traditions do seem to have been invented, as Hobsbawm argues,¹⁷ in order to ensure that at crucial historical moments, such supposedly shared characteristics allow transcendence of divisive ones such as class, gender and even other ethnicities.

For our purposes, we may hazard the assertion that the reason why ‘nationality’ has been and continues to be such a powerful abstraction is precisely because it claims to be pre-political, that is, the ‘natural’ community like that invoked by the leaders of the French revolution. Even where the civil and political principles of a republic are dominant in discourses describing the community of the nation-state, as in France and the United States, national unity is described and maintained in terms more closely associated with the idea of the family. There is no shortage of evidence even for the most multi-ethnic modern states, pointing to the strength of the notion of the nation(state) in pseudo-ethnic terms, as a kind of family – whose individuals share a history and basic values and, most importantly, are loyal to fellow members in the face of threat, especially the barbarians at the gate.

Some studies have detailed the immense, if sometimes subtle and protracted processes of transforming collections of traditional communities, which prior to nationhood held no notion of national fraternity, or at least no version of it that easily translated into the psychological and social underpinning required for the modern nation-state.¹⁸ As Weber’s study shows, the process of making the ‘French nation’ was still not complete more than 100 years after the revolution, though the idea of that nation had been invoked as a fundamental theme supporting the overthrow of the old system. Lord Acton observed that ‘every effaceable trace and relic of [the old France’s] national history was carefully wiped away – the system of administration, the physical divisions of the country, the classes of society, the corporations, the weights and measures, the calendar.’¹⁹

Non-European nation-state identities, some formed more than a century later than those of Europe, were for the most part created in response to and heavily shaped by the experiences and practices of imperial or colonial occupation and subjugation.²⁰ Their borders often bear even less resemblance to any map of pre-modern ethnies than do those of the European nation-states, as colonial administrators infamously cut in half long-functioning communities with a stroke of their pen, or drew previously separate (sometimes rival) communities into unwanted proximity because it suited imperial purposes. The task of constituting the new nation is all the more difficult under such circumstances, but the goal of doing so has been central to almost all the post-national liberation governments. In post-colonial Africa, political leaders everywhere ‘consciously aim[ed] to build nations on the foundation of the existing states’,²¹ and openly acknowledged that the state was ‘a means to achieve the nation’, not the other way around.²²

We need only think of Thailand to remember that not all Asian nationalisms were created in direct response to colonial rule, however. Neither were the Europeans always the colonists, or those feared for their imperialist intentions: pre-World War II Lao nationalists wanted to see ‘a specific Lao identity … to counterbalance Thai nationalist claims’ to a ‘Greater Thailand’ which included parts of the old Lao kingdoms. Cambodian national consciousness and nationalism were shaped in significant part by resistance to the Vietnamese ‘traditional enemy’. During and after World War II, however, sentiments changed and the former antagonists became allies, ‘as progressive Thai and Vietnamese governments dissociated themselves from the expansionist policies of former regimes and paid attention to the anxieties of their weaker neighbours.’²³

Whatever the precolonial history, by the time most Southeast Asian postcolonial nation-states were being created, the ethnic, religious and cultural communities being nationalised within each state-ordered territory were myriad.²⁴ In order to make functioning ‘nations’ out of such diversity, each liberation movement and ensuing new state regime required a shared set of ideal national values to attach to its identity – indeed, these ‘national’ values often in part constitute that very identity – and stories of shared ancestry to anchor it firmly in ‘the past’. The new national values and history require symbolic representation:

It is easy enough to draw up a list of the symbolic and material items that any nation needs: a history establishing its continuity through the ages, a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: History, State and National Identity
• 1 The Competition State and National Identity
• 2 History at the Service of the Nation-State
• 3 Nationalists and National Identity
• 4 Dissenting Voices and the Politics of Patronage
• 5 Heritage, Identity and Citizenship in a Globalising World
• 6 Expo Pilipino and the Recolonisation of the Past
• Conclusion: Negotiating Identity
• Bibliography
• Index