Philippine Senate: Time to abolish it?
Cardiff—History has a cruel way of reminding people of the dangers of self-destructive complacency. The rise and fall of nations—contrary to hagiographies of supposed great statesmen and self-aggrandizing national myths of greatness—is primarily determined by the ability (or lack thereof) to adapt to new challenges, as well as maximize and preserve existing advantages.
In “The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000),” University of Chicago historian Kenneth Pomeranz made a revolutionary argument that shattered decades-old triumphalist Whig history. What made the West the progenitors of the modern industrial revolution, Pomeranz argued, was less a triumph of supposedly exceptional European enlightenment values than access to strategic resources vital to mass production. On one hand, colonial exploitation provided Western empires unprecedented access to, inter alia, slave labor, precious metals, vast lands, and cash crops, which boosted the expansion of increasingly sophisticated financial sectors, modern bureaucracy, as well as standing armies in the metropole.
The other decisive factor, meanwhile, was access to coal, which largely explains why the United Kingdom, rather than other equally (if not more developed) counterparts in Europe and Asia, was structurally privileged to birth the first modern industries. Throughout the 19th century, Wales was the center of global capitalism, mainly thanks to its vast reserves of coal. The rapid expansion of coal mines transformed the tiny nation into a vital source of energy not only for factories and households across the United Kingdom; Wales also provided “steam coal”—the more efficient and smoky version—for the Royal Navy, which undergirded the largest empire the world has ever seen. Barely over a century later, Wales would transform into what the economist Paul Collier describes as a “Left Behind” community. Even if coal remained a vital source of energy to this date, Britain oversaw the decisive collapse of its coal mining sector mainly thanks to smog neglect and market fundamentalist policies of the Thatcherite regime, which brutally cracked down on miners’ strikes and privatized the energy sector to the exclusion of traditional suppliers. Within a generation, Wales descended from a “Saudi Arabia of Europe” into a developmental disaster: gross domestic product (GDP) per head these days are around 25 percent lower than the UK average.
In many ways, Wales reminds us of our own Philippines, which was, for centuries, a global entrepot—connecting the Americas to Asia via the Galleon trade and, later, as a major exporter of sugar and other major commodities. By the early 20th century, we had one of the highest literacy rates in Asia; among the best universities in the world; and a respectable GDP per capita. Even after World War II devastation, the Philippines managed to become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, hence the decision by Tokyo to establish the Asian Development Bank in Manila rather than in then-also-booming Seoul or Tehran. The second half of the 20th century, however, was the “lost decades” for the Philippines, as cronyism devastated our institutions and mindless neoliberal policies destroyed whatever was left of our industrial base.
The sad circus that is our Senate nowadays is a perfect microcosm of the root cause of Philippine developmental debacle: a deracinated elite body, dominated by mostly mediocre, self-seeking politicians with little genuine regard for national interest. The few “good guys” are marginalized by a coalition of the factotums of demagogues and the most regrettable species of traditional politicians, with the current Senate president representing a curious fusion of the two strands.
The great Singaporean statesman Lee Kuan Yew once rightly pointed out the sociology of our political elite: “The people at the top, the elite mestizos, had the same detached attitude to the native peasants as the mestizos in their haciendas in Latin America had toward their peons. They were two different societies: Those at the top lived a life of extreme luxury and comfort while the peasants scraped a living, and in the Philippines it was a hard living.”
Privately, during a visit in the 1990s, he discussed a potential solution with then President Fidel Ramos, namely a transition to a parliamentary-type system, which transcended the populist vagaries of presidential politics. After seeing one “worst Senate ever” after another throughout the past decade, I think we should seriously consider moving past the supposed “august chamber” that has clearly lost its way.
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