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Philippines: Between democracy and
disaster
By Marco Garrido
 MANILA - Not without the faintest grimace did
Filipinos receive US President George W Bush's fulsome
praise of Philippine democracy. Bush hailed "the first
democratic nation in Asia" as an inspiration, "a light
to all of Asia and beyond", when he addressed the
Philippine Congress last month. And not without irony
did Filipinos mark his words - "All of you in this
chamber are the protectors of Philippine democracy" -
which, had Bush been more canny, might have been an
admonishment as much as it was a commendation.
But if it was, it went unheeded. No sooner had
the Great White Father conferred his benediction than
the institutions of Philippine democracy returned to
feasting on themselves. Bush's visit had interrupted one
scandal, a congressional assault on the executive, and
was swiftly followed by another, a congressional assault
on the judiciary. The target in the first case was the
non-person Jose Pidal; the target in the second is an
equally unlikely figure, a man whose integrity was
heretofore considered unimpeachable, Chief Justice
Hilario Davide.
Malice intended
Now
Davide finds himself the subject of an impeachment
complaint that seems all politics and no substance.
Accused mainly of "technical malversion", diverting a
portion of the Judicial Development Fund (JDF) allotted
to judicial employees to Supreme Court appurtenances
(cars, expensive chairs, summer-session cottages), the
charges against Davide have distended to include
"malfeasance", "breach of public trust", and
"thoughtless extravagance". The complaint has prospered
despite having been railroaded through the House,
despite the Commission on Audit having already found the
funds to have been properly used, and despite a
constitutional prohibition against impeaching the same
official twice within a year (the first complaint
against Davide had been filed by former president Joseph
Estrada for the chief justice's "illegal participation"
in the swearing-in of current President Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo). The complaint has prospered, despite
the law and normative procedure, because of politics.
Its sponsors and most of the 87 representatives
constituting the one-third of the House needed to lodge
the complaint hail from the political opposition. In
particular, they hail from businessman Danding
Cojuangco's Nationalist People's Coalition (NPC). And
Cojuangco, it would seem, has an ax to grind with the
chief justice.
Under Davide's watch, the Supreme
Court declared public the funds Cojuangco had used to
buy P100 million worth of shares in the San Miguel Corp.
In a separate decision, the court voided a lucrative
land-development contract that Cojuangco's business
partner had been positioned to control. There are, of
course, other reasons to explain opposition ire against
Davide, although none figure so centrally as his
inauguration of the Arroyo presidency.
Evidence
of conspiracy aside, what matters in this case, as in
the Jose Pidal case, is that a political grudge is being
pursued with the veneer of legality - that is, under the
pretense of being the legitimate work of a democratic
institution. This is law being used as a force of
disorder, in order to undermine the rule of law.
A transplanted democracy
President
Bush's acclaim of Philippine democracy cannot help but
be a sly pat on the United States' back as well. It was
the Americans, after all, who, during their
administration of the Philippines (1899-1946),
established its democratic institutions after the image
of their own democracy. On Philippine soil, however,
these institutions took on a distinctly Filipino
character, one not always consonant with democratic
ideals.
Ironically, the introduction of a US
Congress-style bicameral legislature led to the
consolidation of a national oligarchy. Sociologist
Benedict Anderson points out that a Philippine Congress
"proved perfectly adaptable to the ambitions and social
geography of a mestizo nouveau riche", a class fostered
under Spanish colonial rule. Through their interactions
in Congress, these caciques, who heretofore controlled
only their respective local political fiefdoms, now
enjoyed national-level exposure and access.
Consciousness of themselves as a ruling class deepened.
At the same time, by helping themselves to the
opportunities at their fingertips, they defined their
relationship to the state. The character of
post-independence cacique democracy is revealed by the
liberties it allowed itself: the manipulation of
exchange rates, the sale of monopolistic licenses, huge
defaulted central-bank loans, a sprawl of pork-barrel
legislation, and an enormous, ineffectual bureaucracy
that doubled as a family employment agency. The effects
of cacique parasitism soon became apparent as the
Philippine state slid into decrepitude; Anderson notes:
"from being the most 'advanced' capitalist society in
Southeast Asia in the 1950s, [the Philippines became]
the most depressed and indigent in the 1980s".
Only sustained US aid, investment and support
held the enfeebled state together. Political scientist
Paul Hutchcroft writes that "the Philippine status as an
ex-colony and post-colonial client of the United States
ensured the survival of the central state ... wrapping
it in a cocoon that insulated it both from the need to
guard against external threat and (because of a steady
flow of external resources) from the need to develop a
self-sustaining economy". Hence, the marriage of
American electoralism to Spanish caciquism enabled
oligarchy-building at the expense of state-building.
Between democracy and disaster
The
complaint against Davide demonstrates that Philippine
democracy still lacks the backbone of a state strong
enough to regulate its rambunctiousness. For the past
three weeks, the House and the Supreme Court have been
at loggerheads over the constitutionality of impeaching
Davide. One would think the constitution is self-evident
on the matter, and, were it not for lawyers, it is: it
explicitly prohibits the initiation of impeachment
proceedings against public officials twice within a
year. Pro-impeachment lawyers have muddled the waters,
however, by questioning the meaning of the words
"initiated" and "proceedings".
In no time at
all, a political witchhunt has become a turf war, with
each side brandishing the constitution. Last week, the
Supreme Court issued a status quo order blocking the
transmittal of the impeachment complaint to the Senate
until its constitutionality had been resolved (by - who
else? - the Supreme Court). Congress chafed under the
injunction, countering that impeachment proceedings fall
under its purview. The court went ahead anyway, and
early this week found the impeachment complaint
unconstitutional. Thankfully, Congress voted to junk the
complaint, although most of its initial supporters from
the NPC remained stalwart in their position. They
lamented their defeat as a breach of the constitution.
Representative Jacinto Paras remarked ominously: "The
people will have to resort to other measures to effect a
regime change."
Paras may have been more
prescient than he intended. All this legal wrangling is
missing the point. This is more than a legal question;
it is a moral one. The fact that an impeachment
complaint without solid legal basis got to the point it
did - to the point, very nearly, of real destabilization
- suggests that laws can be scuttled or twisted to serve
malicious designs. Given the law's promiscuity, then,
how authoritative can it really be? True, the House
ultimately respected the Supreme Court's decision, and
thus, one could say, upheld the rule of law, but had the
pro-impeachment forces greater moral support, it is not
unimaginable that they would have imposed their will
despite the law - and legalized their move after the
fact. One need not even imagine it; one need only recall
the events that installed Arroyo as president in 2001.
This is, no doubt, precisely what has tortured the
opposition's imagination.
This sense, that laws
lack sufficient moral authority, is nowhere more clearly
expressed than in each side's resort to drumming moral
support from that fourth and most authoritative branch
of Philippine government: the masses. People power has
been mobilized both for and against the impeachment.
They even have their colors: red for impeachment, black
against. The massing of a crowd in black in front of the
Supreme Court days after the impeachment complaint was
made known proved irresistible even for President
Arroyo, who discarded her neutrality to come out in
support of Davide - and perhaps to cash in on the cachet
of his support.
Furthermore, the excitement over
the issue has been so frenzied and unreflective that a
largely fabricated grievance has become more real. Court
employees have been on the cusp of staging a mass
walkout since the controversy began but have wavered
because, according to Jojo Guerrero, president of the
Alliance of Court Employees Associations of the
Philippines, "We are still asking ourselves: Are we just
being used or are we really not getting enough of the
JDF?"
While shows of people power curry moral
weight for one side or the other, they displace it from
exactly where it should inhere: the law. Resorting to
extra-legal rah-rah squads undermines the authority of
democracy's legitimate conflict-resolution mechanism and
licenses the politics of perpetual crisis.
The
Davide case well illustrates political scientist David
Apter's observation that "the moral basis of politics
determines the meaning of legitimate authority". It
would seem that it takes more than just the right
institutions to found a civil democratic polity. A
social consensus effectively defining normative behavior
is essential as well.
The opportunity to build
this consensus is what the American colonial regime
denied Filipinos by building their institutions for them
and calling it democracy. Democracy cannot be given.
Nothing spares a nation the tasks and tumult involved in
building its state, which, ultimately, is held together
more by the process of state-building than by the
institutions that have been built up. This process
endows its institutions with authority. This is the very
process that the Philippines is now undergoing as it
walks the tightrope between democracy and disaster.
George W Bush, overweening in his eagerness to plant
democracy in Iraq, would do well to consider not just
the light but the shadows cast by the first democratic
nation in Asia.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
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