Has the EDSA revolution failed?

“[PEOPLE] will tolerate poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not tolerate aristocracy,” Alexis de Tocqueville once observed on the fledgling democracies of the late-19th century. It is an observation that proves relevant to our predicament today. No one in his right mind can call the Philippines a genuine democracy. It is an oligarchy, where elites either directly compete in elections and/or bankroll the electoral campaigns of their proxies. The Filipino voters, one could argue, have been reduced to glorified spectators in this clash of titanic oligarchs.

In Civil Resistance and Power Politics, edited by Sir Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, Filipino political scientist Amado Mendoza skillfully demonstrates the limits of EDSA uprising in terms of bringing about systemic change to the Philippine society. The “people power” uprising underscored the efficacy of non-violent resistance against brutal dictatorships, inspiring students, labor unions, and political activists in Taiwan, South Korea, Latin America, and much of Eastern bloc to successfully depose autocracies (both communist and capitalist) around the world.

The problem, Mendoza points out, was that the EDSA uprising largely returned the country to the pre-Marcos oligarchy, which was more interested in protecting its own privileges than promoting the welfare of a promising post-colonial nation. No wonder then, the Philippines rapidly transformed from one of the fastest growing economies in the world in the 1950s, with the second highest per capita income in the region, into a dysfunctional democracy by the late-1960s.

It was precisely the failure of the post-World War II oligarchy, which provided the perfect pretext for strongman Ferdinand Marcos to declare Martial Law with significant, at least initially, support among the populace and key institutions in the country.

It was precisely the incompetence and greed of the old oligarchy, many of whom descended from favored indigenous clients of Western colonial powers, which set the stage for Marcos’ dictatorship. Visionary and self-confident, Ferdinand Marcos thought (à la ‘modernization theory’) that democracy was not fit for a developing country like the Philippines, which had to first consolidate its nation-building foundations.

But Marcos was neither Park Chung-hee, who made South Korea a global industrial powerhouse, nor Lee Kuan Yew, who made tiny Singapore a global force. Over time, the Marcos regime descended into a repressive and dysfunctional order defined by endemic corruption and debilitating cronyism that went along rampant violation of human rights and basic civil liberties. By the 1980s, the Philippines fell into an economic abyss, as hyperinflation, gigantic dollar-denominated debt, a freefalling currency, and a ransacked treasury exposed national misery on an unprecedented scale.

Parts of Mindanao and much of rural Philippines also fell under the spell of insurgency, threatening to shred the country into pieces. The country was a total mess. International actors, particularly America, which for decades relied on Marcos as a staunch Cold War ally, eventually sided with more progressive elements of the old oligarchy in order to prevent a communist-led overthrow of a flagging dictatorship.

The result was the oxymoron of “elite democracy,” led by an oligarchy that persistently blocked efforts at bringing about social justice and egalitarianism to the poverty-stricken country. Instead of returning power to the people, it created a political system based on a modus vivendi among the ruling families, who agreed on the primacy of electoral competition as the prime mechanism for capture of the state machinery.

In his best-selling book How Asia Works, Joe Studwell, a trained economist and veteran journalist, eloquently shows how the postMarcos Philippines oversaw one of the most notoriously ineffective land reform programs in human history. Since genuine land reform means chipping away at the power of the landed elite, it is an excellent gauge of state power and the egalitarian nature of its policy.

Comparing land reform programs across post-war Asia, Studwell laments: “Nowhere in Asia has produced more plans for land reform than the Philippines. But equally no ruling elite in Asia has come up with as many ways to avoid implementing genuine land reform as the Filipino one.”

The post-Marcos elite also skillfully instrumentalized the mantle of patriotism to create a constitutional order, which placed all kinds of restrictions on foreign investments and market competition. This allowed them to protect their inefficient industries and monopolize key sectors of the economy.

Instead of creating a vibrant agricultural sector, so crucial to poverty-alleviation and early-industrialization takeoff, and establishing a world-class manufacturing sector, so crucial to employment-generation and exports earnings, the Philippines became a service-oriented economy, with major conglomerates dominating utility, infrastructure, and retail businesses.

In short, our existing democratic institutions provided a façade of egalitarianism amid an ocean of entrenched inequality. And this is the biggest shortcoming of the postMarcos political elite, which tried to prevent the mistakes of the Marcos era but forgot to correct the mistakes of the old oligarchy.

Note: This is the second part of an essay on EDSA People Power Revolution, partly based on an earlier column for Huffington Post.