The Republic at 80

To be strict and factual, we commemorate every June 12, the proclamation of independence that took place in 1898, but not independence itself. Independence in terms of belonging to the family of nations is reckoned as July 4, 1946, enshrined by law as Philippine Republic Day.

We are a people for whom any consensus is so hard to achieve, so that, in hoping to achieve a consensus, we are willing to paper over many inconvenient truths. Instead, appearances are everything, as it is easier to find form satisfying instead of substance; we prefer June 12 not because it was the start (the revolution against Spain began in August 1896) or the end (accepted by the world as a fact, in July 1946), but because it had all the feel-good pomp of what we feel an independence day should feature: a band playing an anthem, a flag presented to the people, a president—indeed, a generalissimo—to take the salute.

At his inaugural in 1943, then President Jose P. Laurel orated that, “I consider as rallying centers of our national unity: the Flag, the Constitution, the National Anthem, and the President of the Republic. The Flag, because it symbolizes the sacrifices of our heroes and synthesizes our common imperishable tradition. The Constitution, because it expresses our collective and sovereign will and embodies the sum of our political philosophy and experience. The National Anthem, because it epitomizes the trials and tribulations, and crystallizes the longings and aspirations of our race, the President, because he is the chosen leader of our people, the directing and coordinating center of our government, and the visible personification of the State.” He wasn’t merely being self-serving; he was proposing a definition that was already widely accepted and remains so.

Here the incarnation of the nation in the person of the President—originally, Emilio Aguinaldo—is significant and points to the feebleness of taking an institutional approach, because our institutions are precisely quite often window-dressing for personal regimes. We count our present republic as the fifth: our first being Malolos, the second under Laurel, the third beginning with Roxas, the fourth with Marcos alone, and the fifth from Cory Aquino to the present. But why should we?

But these are arbitrary distinctions, supposedly based on Constitutions that bookend our various regimes, with no room for the Katipunan, or the “Biak-na-Bato Republic,” and where Malolos itself is a place—a name overshadowed by Aguinaldo at his mansion in Kawit, or even, as Nick Joaquin once pointed out, the Philippine Executive Commission under Jorge Vargas (since you count Laurel anyway): and only made possible, besides, by a conspiracy to ignore the rulings of the Supreme Court, which declared (G.R. No. L-5, Sept. 17, 1945) the so-called “Second Republic” illegal and therefore, null and void. But you couldn’t very well ignore those who’d served in that impostor government, and as they rose in the ranks, they accomplished their ex post facto historical rehabilitation. This is the window dressing.

A more reasonable case could be made for our present republic being the second. The first, stretching (as not only intended, but made explicit by the framers of the 1935 Constitution) from the Commonwealth to the judicial assassination of that republic in January 1973; and the second, from 1987 (the ratification of Edsa in the plebiscite that approved our present Constitution) up to now.

This properly places in context all the other regimes. First, under Filipinos, of which there were three: 1. the various ad hoc governments organized under Aguinaldo from 1897 to 1901 as he alone, including his authority and the institutions he caused to be made (and often ignored) was the lynchpin of all authority; 2. under Marcos from January 1973 to February 1986; 3. under Aquino from 1986 to 1987, when she ruled by decree. And second, under foreign military occupation, under the Americans from 1901 to 1935, and the Japanese from 1942 to 1945. What all had in common was the absence of a direct electoral mandate from the Filipino people (to be sure, Aquino would be in a gray area since the outcome of the snap election was contested, but this was ratified in a free and not controlled plebiscite unlike the Marcos years).

But for most of us, it’s just a blurred sequence of National Bookstore postcards of presidential portraits flashed quickly so as to prevent any inconvenient questions about the chronology. We have been independent for 80 years, what happened?

The first was what everyone expected would happen, didn’t, unlike among our neighbors, where it did. By which I mean the trajectory of the colonies aspiring to become nations was the emergence of dominant independence movements, which then became monolithic political parties lasting through the first two generations of independence. Ours was the reverse, we were advanced in having a dominant party before World War II, but it didn’t survive the social and political fracture of the Japanese Occupation and led to an artificial, because ultimately factional, divide clawing at each other from 1946 to 1973, while increasingly incapable of facing down internal challenges. In contrast, Indonesia had the PNI from 1950-59, and authoritarianism under Sukarno and Suharto to 1998; Malaysia had UMNO from 1957 to 2018; Singapore, the PAP from 1959 to the present.

(To be continued.)