【by Oscar V. Campomanes, June 2025】
The groundwork for this discussion and analysis of Philippine authoritarianism was laid by some of our contributors here through a roundtable on the topic at the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP) Conference, “Theorizing Global Authoritarianism: To Reclaim Critical Theory Against the Grain,” held in Seoul, South Korea, on 9-11 June 2023.
The roundtable was put together by the Network in Defense of Historical Truth and Academic Freedom (NDHTAF) and Tanggol Kasaysayan (Defend History) group, with the former represented by Prof. Ma. Luisa Torres-Reyes (University of Santo Tomas-Manila), acting as Moderator and Discussant; Prof. Ramon Guillermo (University of the Philippines-Diliman); and Prof. Oscar V. Campomanes (Ateneo de Manila University); and the latter group represented by Prof. Michael Pante (Ateneo de Manila University).
The roundtable examined pressing issues such as the historical roots of authoritarianism in the Philippines, the dangers of historical revisionism, the exposure of human rights violations, and the role of information technology and social media in producing and combating disinformation. The initial and ensuing discussions underscored the global resurgence of authoritarianism, while also drawing attention to the often paradoxical interplay between authoritarian practices and democratic institutions.
We posed the following general questions for discussion:
1) How do the functionings of popular democracy get entangled with the machinations of political despotism, and in what ways can they be decoupled?
2) Under what now seem to be new or altered conditions for political engagement, what effective strategies and movements for anti-authoritarian critique and action might need to be imagined and attempted?
In what follows, we present more developed and additional commentary from that roundtable discussion. Along with the contributions of the roundtable discussants, we have invited a core member of the NDHTAF, Prof. Sol Iglesias, to share her own reflections on the state of authoritarianism and academic freedom in the archipelago, based on the documentation and dataset-making of incidents and risks relating to both which she has undertaken since 2022 (a project that continues to date). The study of myth-making and fact-checking in the case of the Tallano Gold Myth (TGM) that the Marcoses capitalized on before and during the 2022 Philippine presidential elections, with the formation of “communities of faith” and dissent around such political fictions and facts, was developed and detailed some more, from a sketch of it presented at the Seoul conference, by Prof. Ramon Guillermo, in collaboration with anthropologist Noreen Sapalo.
It can be seen from these contributions to this topic/issue of CAA that, more than just theorize Philippine authoritarianism, we sought to historicize and contemporize it, on balance.
Critical Context
Authoritarianism, in the Philippine case, is a function of liberal democratic processes and institutions, not a corruption of them. It is a structuring principle of Philippine liberal democracy, and has been virtually so, since the institution of a “colonial democracy” by the USA as its mode of governance over the archipelago in the period 1901-1941 (Paredes 1988, 1-12; Anastacio 2022, 56, 60-62, 69-70). A permanent contradiction lay embedded at the very heart of this colonial democracy: between a polity where organic sovereignty ultimately resided in the colonizer and a modern form of rule presumably predicated upon “the consent of the governed.”
Indeed, the US “Benevolent Assimilation” of the Philippines, beginning with the 1898 Treaty of Paris, precipitated a major constitutional crisis in the USA itself, a crisis far from having been settled, even by the so-called Insular Cases of 1901-1922 (Duffy Burnett and Marshall 2001; Sparrow 2006; Torruella 2013). It was a constitutional crisis downplayed by the imperial presidencies of William McKinley and, after him, Theodore Roosevelt, and which is just beginning to attract, rather belatedly, the sustained attention (of critical scholars and theorists) that it demands and deserves (Immerwahr 2019). Simply put, there is nothing in the US Constitution that allows for colonial rule over foreign peoples and territories, and the Philippine conquest and colonization violated its fundamental precept of republican/representative government.
The development of this colonial democracy, from which contemporary Filipino political culture and institutions directly descend, is traceable to that founding policy document of the Philippine conquest, William McKinley’s Benevolent Assimilation proclamation of 10 December 1898 (1899):
[T]he military commander of the United States is enjoined to make known to the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands that in succeeding to the sovereignty of Spain, in severing the former political relations, and in establishing a new political power, the authority of the United States is to be exerted for the securing of the persons and property of the people of the Islands and for the confirmation of all private rights and relations. It will be the duty of the commander of the forces of occupation to announce and proclaim in the most public manner that we come not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employment, and in their personal and religious rights.
[I]t should be the earnest and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of a free people, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule. [All underscoring mine]
Here, one sees that 1972 was not the first time that martial law was imposed on the Philippines, even with Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s ideological veneer of “constitutional authoritarianism” for it (see also Anastacio 2022). With what McKinley frankly calls “military administration,” mandated to establish US sovereignty over the archipelago which the USA had purchased from Spain for $20millions, his 1898 policy statement was, in real terms, a “martial law” proclamation. But its concomitant bestowal of liberal (or more precisely, bourgeois) democracy upon the neo-colony, its nascent promise of a constitutional democracy for it in due course, supposedly mitigates (even as it contradicts) the proclamation’s main aspect of military authority.
In fact, this uneasy conjoining of colonial authoritarianism and democracy was to shortly prove insupportable, and begin its half-life as a permanent scandal in Philippine-American political history, under the transitory conditions and on-going crises of American authority, especially as the Philippine-American War (1898-1910s) raged throughout key provinces in the islands. By 1901, US Secretary of War (later, Secretary of State) Elihu Root, perhaps more the true architect of Philippine colonial policy than William Howard Taft of the Second Philippine Commission, and with no end in sight to the American pacification of Filipino revolutionary resistance to the new power, advocated for the replacement of “military administration” with “civil government,” even if only a quasi-democratic one. For at its peak (1899-1900), the war of conquest necessitated the deployment of the full-strength of the US Armed Forces yet Filipino acceptance of American sovereignty remained difficult to secure or coerce; so Root felt, while ratifying part of McKinley’s Benevolent Assimilation doctrine, that a new “agency” to effectuate the major policy shift which he and the Taft Commission were advancing, had to be tried:
The great agency to bring industrial activity and awakened enterprise and prosperity and contentment to the country of the Philippines must be, not a military government, but the same kind of individual enterprise which has built up our own country. (Root to McKinley, 24 January 1901; Salamanca 1984 [1968], 28; underscoring mine)
Root’s phrasing of “individual enterprise” here obliquely refers to that founding fiction of liberal or bourgeois democracy, “civil government,” and the supremacy of civilian over martial authority upon which it subtends. It also subtly encodes capitalism (like McKinley’s proclamation does) as if it were, in the critical words of Filipino historian Renato Constantino, “the only possible framework for democracy” in a neo- (and later, post-) colonial context (Constantino and Constantino 1978). But most conspicuously, it orients a pragmatic appeal to the emerging native and propertied elites, quite a few of whom were at the helm of the continuing resistance against the US occupation (and a good number of whom also cut their teeth as resistance leaders of the founding revolutionary association Katipunan; see Richardson 2013, 452-465). The system of colonial democracy that would result was not only going to be a mongrel formation but a monstrous one: again, as oxymoronic as its colonial progenitor, “elite democracy,” or what Benedict Anderson would call “cacique democracy” (Anderson 1995 [1998]).
While American Filipinist scholars like to extol this colonial democracy as the USA’s exceptionalist, even self-abnegating, form of imperial rule, its patent contradictions were a function of its provenance as the USA’s main strategy of counter-insurgency during the Philippine-American War (1898-1910s) and major measure of addressing the acute shortage of American proconsular talent which confronted it, given the massive disenchantment with the “Benevolent Assimilation” of the Philippines among its own citizens during that period. The incipient American colonial state went on to develop and coopt an emerging native comprador elite to exercise surrogate rule over the colony on its behalf (Hau 2017, 32-44; Cullinane 2014, 94-95). It is from this comprador class, whose formation and dominance would reach their apotheosis in the Commonwealth period (1935-WW II), that the political dynasties (the Marcoses being only among the latest and most notorious)—and the known incubators of authoritarian tendencies in Filipino political life—would descend (Anderson 1995 [1988]; McCoy 1988, 114-160).
AUTHOR
Oscar V. Campomanes is Associate Professor in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program and holds the Rev James F Donelan Jr SJ Endowed Professorial Chair in the Humanities, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines. Email: [email protected]
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