PH: A 21st century industrial policy (2)
OXFORD—The great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described the modern state (Civitas) as nothing but an “artificial man,” whose soul is derived from ”sovereignty” (authority derived from either the expression of monarchical or popular will), which gives “life and motion to the whole body.” Invoking a Frankenstein-like figure (a ”leviathan”!), he spoke of how the state represents, literally, a body politic, where “every joynt and member is moved to perform his duty” and how the state mimics human anatomy: “for what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer?”
Thanks to our exposure to three centuries of spectral Spanish imperial rule and a half-century of libertarian American colonization, we tend to lack a proper understanding of the nature and awesome powers of the modern state—and its centrality to determining the fate of nations. We foolishly look for explanations in our “culture” or “geography” or a specific “leader,” when the root cause of our national underperformance is the lack of a central ”agent of change.” If one looks at the past 10,000 years of human history, it is clear that the modern state is the most consequential social invention.
Prior to its crystallization and spread across the world—whether organically (thanks to constant wars in ancient China, Medieval Europe, and the early modern Middle East under ”gunpowder powers” of Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals) or through colonial imposition (namely via European powers)–humanity largely lived under fractious, fragile, and highly absolutist (personalized and despotic) polities, which lacked the vision as well as capacity to shape, regulate, and reengineer human societies or meet the immense demands of capitalist mode of production.
As Perry Anderson explains in his “Lineages of the Absolutist State” (1985), it took centuries of brutal centralization, constant war-making, and systematic taming of the feudal aristocracy for Europe—and, later, its peers in Asia, most notably Japan—to birth modern state institutions. Once consolidated, the modern state turned into a massive machine capable of congealing whole new nations: In Japan and France, for instance, authorities in Edo (Tokyo) and Paris managed to build a whole new society and national language, albeit at the expense of regional identities. Backwater nations in Europe, from Russia to Norway, also managed to achieve rapid industrialization and the emergence of unified state institutions. As for Italy, the Risorgimento created a singular state, which crafted a national language and, with varying degrees of success, a unified identity after centuries of fragmentation and humiliation.
Even weak states in the 21st century boast a greater ability to monitor and shape their jurisdiction than the strongest empires in the pre-modern era. With few exceptions, today’s states have standing armies, a professional bureaucracy, and can monitor millions of individuals 24/7 through advanced surveillance technology. For French philosopher Michel Foucault, this represented a new physics of power: “biopower,” namely, the ability to even shape individuals’ minds and bodies.
The implication for underdeveloped nations like ours is clear. In our previous column, we discussed the indispensable need for a new industrial policy to bring about prosperity for all Filipinos in the 21st century—and help save our broken democracy. Drawing on the works of leading economists, I proposed a calibrated industrial policy, which eschews the mistakes of past experiments, especially the ”crony industrialization” of the Marcos dictatorship.
In particular, I argued that we should, instead of risking billions of taxpayer money on a dozen uncertain industries, (i) focus on specific sectors of interest (e.g., semiconductors and electric vehicles) that have greatest employment-generation capacity for low-skilled labor and enjoy economies of scale; (ii) adopt stringent monitoring mechanisms to ensure targets are met and subsidies are not wasted on unproductive sectors; (iii) develop a more collaborative public-private approach, which ensures the buy-in of top local businesses, who happen to also control energy; and (iv) fund modern infrastructure and subsidize energy to attract foreign long-term investments and make manufacturing profitable. Our current service-oriented economy is simply incapable of generating enough jobs and upward mobility for the majority of Filipinos.
To effectuate industrial policy, however, we need to empower our state and, in particular, nurture a new generation of independent technocrats and patriotic leaders, who can steer a long-term project of national industrialization beyond electoral cycles, oligarchic lobbying, and the pet projects of whimsical politicians.
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richard.heydarian@inquirer.net
