Identity Politics
from Ashbrook: “Self Determination” Did Not Work in the Philippines:
We can’t sit by and coo over how cute they look with their purple fingers if the results of their elections yield tyrants. The forms of democracy are not enough to sustain democracy….
A century ago, America launched its first democratic experiment in the Philippines with a view to preparing the Filipinos for self-rule. Since its independence fifty years ago, however, the Philippines has had a turbulent history with tyranny, oligarchy, a communist insurgency, a secessionist Islamist movement in the south, and two “people power revolutions”—hardly the stuff of liberty and justice for all! What went wrong, considering that America, its sponsor, is the most successful constitutional democracy in the world?
The failure of American-style constitutional democracy to blossom in the Philippines can be explained in large part by the philosophically inspired shift in American colonial policy during the critical early period of the Philippine experiment (1900 to 1921). Initially, the belief guiding American policy in the Philippines was that espoused by William McKinley and Elihu Root; namely, that American control and tutelage must teach the Filipinos about self-rule, preparing them for the duties and responsibilities of republican self-government until enough Filipinos appreciated and followed the principles of good government. In other words, they believed that Americans should be “republican schoolmasters.” They were not shy about the superiority of their ideas to local customs and prejudices. But by 1913 America had a new president, the Progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who argued for and put into effect a policy of “self-determination” for the Philippines as the sine qua non of democracy.
Wilson and the Progressive Democrats argued for self-determination for peoples as communities constituted by their shared history. The emphasis was not on individual rights, but on group privileges and powers. In practical terms, the colonial policy that emerged from this Progressive thinking sought for a transfer of political power from American colonial administrators to the local elite through “Filipinization,” conferring political authority and rights on the so called “best men” simply because they were Filipinos. It was a kind of affirmative action where the prize was not just a job but political power and influence.
Moreover, Wilson’s program treated Filipinos as an object, an abstraction—as “a people” bound together by racial, cultural, religious, or linguistic ties, as those were interpreted by Western intellectuals. Wilsonians did not follow the simpler principle of treating everyone as individual human beings bearing the same natural rights, obligations, and competencies as all other humans everywhere and at all times.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the local leadership took advantage of their ill-earned power to achieve their own political ambitions while hiding behind the cloak of nationalism. The aftermath is a post-independence democracy that easily gave way to oligarchic rule, which, in turn, led to the rise of tyranny, on one side, and radical insurgency movements, on the other. Just weeks ago, the Philippine government was subject to yet another military coup attempt, a phenomenon that seems to occur every couple of years.
In order to solve the sectarian problem in Iraq and for the transitory government to be able to form a genuine “national unity government,” they and we should change both our rhetoric and our policy and make clear the message that a national unity government for Iraq should be one that is grounded not on a coalition of all parties representing ethnic loyalties but on the consent of all Iraqis, every single one of them. The key to solving ethnic conflict is not to sharpen ethnic differences but to neutralize them. Hence, we should not allow a government that confers group rights to groups. Rather, we should encourage a government that rules to secure and maintain individual rights. This should have been our message from the very beginning, but there is no reason not to change it now.
Also interesting: Islamist Movements and Democratic Process in the Arab World.
