A negotiated revolution

Back in 2017, during the late, great Inquirer Briefing infographic experiment, we reviewed revolutions in our era by adopting the point of view of Timothy Garton Ash, who described two kinds of revolution. On one hand, “In old-style revolution, the angry masses on the street are stirred up by extremist revolutionary leaders—Jacobins [in France], Bolsheviks [in Russia], and Mao [in China]—to support radicalization, including violence and terror, in the name of utopia. Bring on the Red Guards!” On the other hand, “In new-style revolution, the masses on the street are there to bring the power holders to the negotiating table. The moment of maximum mass mobilization is the moment of a turn to negotiation; that is, to compromise. Or in some cases, to violent repression—at least for the time being.” Ash himself acknowledged that we, in the Philippines, gave the world a vital component, or feature, of new-style revolution, “People Power,” but he himself called the new-style revolutions in the Philippines and Eastern Europe, “Velvet Revolutions.”

We explained the reason for this in our Inquirer Briefing. It had to do with a demonstration of People Power that failed: Tiananmen Square. “Ash points out that what occurred in Tiananmen Square helped Europeans to push for nonviolent and negotiated reforms. They saw what could happen if they reached violent confrontation, and they redoubled their efforts to avoid it. What happened in China is one of the reasons it did not happen in Eastern Europe.” Well, except perhaps in Romania.

The great Polish journalist and chronicler of the fall of dictators, Ryszard Kapuściński, famously wrote, “When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that can’t be answered.” In my previous column (see “Arrested development,” 2/23/26), I proposed what the question was during the period of political, moral, and financial bankruptcy that represented Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s pyrrhic victory: What would come next? Was the only answer the eventual succession of Marcos Jr.?

We forget that Ninoy Aquino preferred a negotiated solution precisely to provide an answer. He wanted to propose a restoration of electoral politics as the means to settle the succession: Marcos Sr. would relinquish power and, by so doing, secure safety for his family. In our Inquirer Briefing, we put forward an early example of how this could be accomplished. The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 in Britain, we wrote, “marked the overthrow of King James II and the accession of William III (of Orange) following a bloodless revolution and settlement establishing the supremacy of Parliament over the crown, setting Britain on the path toward constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy.”

Ash wrote, “So another name for [new-style revolution] is ‘negotiated revolution.’ Exit prospects for the ruling elites are critical. Instead of losing their heads on the guillotine or ending up hanging from lampposts, transition-ready members of an ancien régime, from a president such as F. W. de Klerk all the way down to local apparatchiks and secret policemen, see a bearable, even a rosier future for themselves under a new dispensation. Not merely will they get away with their lives; not only will they remain at liberty; they will also get to retain some of their social position and wealth, or to convert their former political power into economic power (the ‘privatization of the nomenklatura’)…”

He had no illusions about what this meant. “[It] is not just the Abbé Sieyès who survives. Louis XVI gets to keep a nice little palace in Versailles, and Marie Antoinette starts a successful line in upmarket lingerie … These uneasy and even morally distasteful compromises with members of the ancien régime are an intrinsic, unavoidable part of the velvet revolution. They are, as Ernest Gellner once memorably put it, the price of velvet. They produce, however, their own kinds of postrevolutionary pathology. As the years go by, there is a sense of a missing revolutionary catharsis; suspicious talk of tawdry deals concluded between old and new elites behind closed doors; and, among many, a feeling of profound historical injustice.”

To this day, an indictment of Edsa is something that happened after: the return of the Marcoses; yet it happened because of human rights—the insistence of Switzerland, that in exchange for being helpful to the Philippines in identifying and freezing the Marcos wealth, the Marcoses, according to European principles of human rights, must be allowed to come home to confront their accusers before the courts. The miracle of Edsa consisted of officers refusing Marcos’ orders to kill, even as he playacted, refusing to do so on TV. This miracle did not extend to restoring what was lost during the dictatorship in lives, money, and the social fabric.

Ash identified the missing link between the blessings of avoiding rivers of blood and a dangerous resentment of necessary compromise: A truth commission. We know what happened when, once, a president had the wisdom to create one. The Supreme Court struck it down.

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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3