Democracy - In The Philippines

As the US champions democracy worldwide and goes about installing such regimes - as, for example, in Afghanistan - and as many voices are raised the world over in support of "free elections" - from Burma to the Arab world - I thought it might be pertinent to take a look at how democracy has worked itself out in the Philippines, a former US colony, which used to call itself the "show-case of democracy." This post is inspired by Pico Iyer's travelogue on this nation, dated 1988, when Ferdinand Marcos ruled. What Iyer reveals is shocking - and it is noteworthy that he says Manila reminds him in many ways of Bombay. I quote:

I had not known before I arrived in Manila that the tourist district was the red-light district. But then I had not known that one resident in every five of the "show-case of democracy" was reduced to squatting. I had not known that the $20 million government-run Manila Film Centre, the grand creation of President and Madame Marcos, made its money by showing porno movies, uncut. And I had not known that across the street from the glittering pavilions of the Cultural Centre of the Philippines, whose futuristic ramps and landscaped gardens were a gaudy monument to Marcos splendour, families were sleeping in bushes.

Before I came to Manila, I could not have guessed that more than a thousand families in what Imelda Marcos, Minister of Human Settlements, called the "City of Man" made their homes in the central garbage dump.

This is familiar territory for us Indians - for in all our "metros" over half the population lives in slums. The only solution is Property - and roads into the vacant surrounds.

Further, the sorry plight of the Filipinos is also a story of "unlimited democracy" - where the government prints the money, runs film centres and so on. The democratic government has not been "limited" to its only legitimate functions - the protection of life, liberty and property.

Yet, this was an American colony, and it is America that has installed this unlimited democracy. Pico Iyer comments on the difference between this American colony and British India after visiting a "hill station" near Manila called Baguio that was developed as a summer retreat for the American rulers - "a kind of New World Simla" as he calls it. Here are Iyer's reflections after visiting Baguio:

For all its silvered, foggy charm, though, Baguio did not seem to have the imperiousness of a British hill station, or its weighted dignity. And in much the same way, I did not sense in the Philippines anything comparable to the kind of stately legacy that the British, for example, had bequeathed to India. India seemed to have gained, as a colony, a sense of ritual solemnity, a feeling for the language of Shakespeare, a polished civil service, a belief in democracy and a sonorous faith in upstanding legal and educational institutions; it had, in some respects, been steadied by the chin-up British presence. By contrast, the most conspicuous institutions that America had bequeathed to the Philippines seemed to be the disco, the variety show and the beauty pageant. Perhaps the ideas and ideals of America had proved too weighty to be shipped across the seas, or perhaps they were just too fragile. Whatever, the nobility of the world's youngest power and the great principles upon which it had been founded were scarcely in evidence here, except in a democratic system that seemed to parody the chicanery of the Nixon years. In the Philippines, I found no sign of Lincoln or Thoreau or Sojourner Truth; just Dick Clark, Ronald McDonald and Madonna.

If Property and Liberty are the "great principles upon which America was founded," the same is true of British India. To the civil servants of the East India Company, as Philip Mason reveals, "Locke was their prophet" - and it is Locke who said "where there is no Property there is no Justice." Further, soon after the important lessons taught by Adam Smith had been established in the British mind, the East India College was set up in Haileybury to train recruits to the civil service in India - and the most important component of this training was classical liberal "political economy," then not taught in either Oxford or Cambridge. Mason writes thus of the "Haileybury mind":

At Haileybury, everyone had learnt that political economy was a matter of laws, that money and goods would move by themselves in ways beneficial to mankind. The less any government interfered with natural movements, the better.

India under the East India Company had a laissez faire economy. The only "public investments" made were in "roads, bridges and canals." Railways were later encouraged - under private ownership. And as for their civil servants in the districts, here is what Mason says of their priorities:

India was a poor country which could not afford luxuries and a district officer had concentrated on essentials – public order, the swift administration of justice, the prompt payment of taxes moderately assessed, the maintenance of accurate land records which would prevent disputes.

So we come back to the same Principles: Property, Liberty, Justice. A government that "limited" itself. This was "classical liberalism" at work.

It is unlimited socialist democracy that has destroyed India.

I hope this will serve as an object lesson to all those who hanker after democracy in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.