THE SPECIFICITY OF FILIPINO NATIONALISM IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING

E. SAN JUAN, Jr.,
Director, Philippines Cultural Studies Center,
Storrs, Connecticut.

The historical specificity of the Philippines’ emergence as a dependent formation controlled by the United States in the twentieth century has meant that Filipino nationalism grounds its popular and democratic impulses on the anti-colonial revolution against Spain in 1896-1898. This central event of the nationalist movement evolved into the Filipino-American war of 1899-1902, articulated with the Moro resistance up to 1914 and beyond against U.S. genocidal aggression. Its anti-imperialist substance thus provides it a radical internationalist perspective.

Right from the start, then, anti-imperialist nationalism informed by secular democratic and socialist principles may be discerned in such developments as the Sakdal peasant revolt in the thirties and the popular Huk uprising in the forties and fifties. The neocolonial client state (from 1946 up to the present) came into existence only by a revision of the Philippine Constitution unprecedented in the whole world: U.S. citizens enjoyed the same rights as Filipinos to exploit the country’s natural resources. Mandated by ratified treaties and agreements, the U.S. maintained numerous military bases and installations, as well as supplied and supervised (and continues to do so up to now) the government military and other police agencies that served its global “Cold War” strategy and its current agenda of a “new American century.”

Dialectical analysis can grasp the regressive uses of fragmentary motifs from the nationalist tradition by the landlord, comparador, and bureaucratic-capitalist classes under U.S. patronage. This oligarchy exploited the legacy of the 1896 revolution to try to establish their hegemony, but their attempts have failed—violence and other coercive means enabled a fragile legitimacy enough to earn U.N. recognition. Four instances of U.S. forcible intervention may be cited to prove dependency: the manipulation of Magsaysay populism against the Huks in the fifties; the support for the Marcos dictatorship (1972-1986); the patronage of Corazon Aquino’s “total war” against the Muslims and the New People’s Army after the February 1986 insurrection; and its patronage of the Arroyo administration through foreign aid, military logistics, and the unlimited entry of U.S. troops presumably for carrying out the “war against terrorism.”

U.S.-backed developmentalism has utterly failed in the Philippines. The resistance against globalization and its neoliberal extortions is spearheaded today by a national-democratic mass movement with grassroots constituency. There is also a durable left-oriented insurgency which seeks to articulate the "unfinished revolution" of 1896 in its demand for genuine sovereignty against IMF/WB/WTO dikta, for equality and social justice for the majority of citizens (80 million) ten percent of whom are now migrant workers abroad due to economic backwardness at home. Filipino nationalism constantly renews its decolonizing energy by mobilizing new forces (women, church workers,, indigenous or ethnic minorities). It is organically embedded in emancipatory movements whose origin evokes in part the Enlightenment narrative of sovereignty as mediated by third-world left movements. Its sites of actualization are the local events of mass insurgency against continued U.S. domination. In effect, the Filipino “nation” remains in the process of being constructed primarily through diverse modes of opposition against corporate transnationalism, fashioning thereby the appropriate forms of cultural identity with a unique Filipino singularity open to solidarity and collaboration with the humanist, progressive struggles of people of color and working people around the world.

His latest books are: Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke University Press, 2002) and Working Through the Contradictions: From Cultural Theory to Critical Practice (Bucknell University Press, 2004).