When did it all begin? (5)
On Nov. 16, 1982, former President Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. convened his Cabinet to discuss whether the Philippines should sign the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos). In the end, the official formulation was that the Cabinet authorized signing by the Philippines “so long as it would not prejudice our sovereign rights to the Kalayaan Islands,” and that afterward, the Convention had to be submitted to the Batasang Pambansa for ratification. In his memoirs, Arturo Tolentino, who’d been negotiating the Philippine position for years, recalled being sent as the chair of the Philippine delegation, together with then Supreme Court Associate Justice Vicente Abad Santos as cochair, Justice Minister Ricardo Puno, and Solicitor General Estelito Mendoza as co-vice chair, and other members to Montego Bay, Jamaica to attend the final session of the conference and sign the Unclos.
He did so, in the name of the Republic, with reservations, made in the form of a declaration on four points: broadly speaking, that the Philippine Constitution and the rights it asserted would remain supreme; that rights from historical treaties (the 1898 Treaty of Paris and the 1930 Treaty of Washington) would be maintained; that the Philippines would continue to adhere to its position that all the waters within its archipelagic baselines were internal waters; and that Unclos could not impair the country’s right to defend its territorial integrity and national security. The Philippines ratified Unclos on May 8, 1984.
Tolentino, for his part, recalled that the Philippines, despite these assertions, decided to sign on to Unclos because, in establishing rules governing the seas and resources in them, the overall interests of the Philippines would be enhanced as a stronger framework of international law would be beneficial to smaller countries: making it worthwhile, if necessary, to accept a 12-mile limit for its territorial sea.
Over time, this has edged aside the opportunistic petty-imperial fantasies of Marcos, with a more rational–because imbibing consistently and deeply the principles of international law, which the Philippines helped negotiate and craft—approach embracing international institutions and processes as a counterfoil to outright aggression.
You can see this in how our diplomats had tempered the extravagance of Cloma’s claims. Christopher Joyner wrote, “Interestingly enough, the official Philippine position contends that the Kalayaan Island Group is separate and distinct from the Spratlys and Paracels. This Philippine claim is predicated on a geological assertion that the continental shelf of the so-called Kalayaan Island Group is juxtaposed to the Palawan province and extends some 300 miles westward, into the heart of the Philippines’ EEZ”–the whole infrastructure of agreements painstakingly negotiated by Filipinos since the 1950s.
In 2014, the Philippines declined to invoke the Cloma claim in its submission to the International Court of Arbitration. I had to wonder why no one paused to point out, at that point, just how weird it is, that our foreign policy concerning the Spratly Islands is now based on the erratic adventures of an eccentric seaman. Then again, I believe what no one dares to say is that at a certain point, the conduct of our foreign affairs became unhinged, and it took a lot of experts a lot of time to walk things back.
With less-strong nations, invoking principles of international law and having a forum to do it through international organizations help maintain an alliance of nations against rogue states that may be both powerful and unscrupulous.
The story of our foreign affairs from 1935 to 1965 was of a quiet, but insistent, and consistent, development of a foreign policy conscious of the Philippines’ interests in maintaining reliable alliances, but also of being a responsible member of the family of nations and international organizations, because this serves our interests.
This–first, as we’ll see—story begins with a necessary realization. We artificially separate the Commonwealth from the so-called “Third” Republic (in truth, our second; the Japanese-sponsored Republic being null and void from start to finish) and, by doing so, muddle up what should otherwise be a straightforward story: even the 1935 Constitution explicitly stated it was for both regimes. The first steps of our foreign policy were taken even before independence, and continuity was assured by many of the same prewar leaders playing a role in the foreign affairs of the country all the way to the 1960s. Even the successor generation represented by Diosdado Macapagal (he’d been a legal assistant in the Palace before the war) was conscious that they represented a kind of continuity: he titled his own memoirs, “A Stone for the Edifice,” a deliberate nod to Quezon’s inaugural address back in 1935: “a new edifice shall arise,” he said, referring to the Commonwealth, “not out of the ashes of the past, but rather the standing materials of the living present.”
The second story, of the Philippines as a delusional monarchy that wanted to indulge in its own imperialism and international adventurism, is one we don’t like to tell because it’s more emotionally satisfying. In not recognizing the absurdity of the second story, we have left the first story not only unacknowledged but fatally handicapped.
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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3
