Road to hell paved with good intentions

IN this case, our American colonizers’ good intentions in the early 1900s may have created the country’s hell of landlord dominance, for which not only our peasants suffer from but really the entire country.

Shortly after the United States acquired the Philippines from Spain in 1898, it set about remaking the country in its own image. It introduced a secular public educational system that was a huge success and nurtured generations of Filipinos fluent in English.

But its attempt at land reform purportedly to help uplift the lives of poor farmers was largely a failure. Worse, this failure created a landlord class that evolved into the country’s oligarchic elite that rules to this day, and is one of the factors for our country’s impoverishment.

While the Americans successfully built democratic institutions in the country, its attempt to distribute Catholic church lands to the peasants collapsed because it relied on the local court system to undertake the monumental task. This mistake ensured that the landed Filipino elite, the same families from the Spanish era, would continue to hold great wealth, power, and influence.

This isn’t just from me: this is according to eminent political scientist Francis Fukuyama in ‘Political Order and Political Decay,’ the second in his political order book series, which explains the growth and degeneration of political systems around the world. In his purview the Philippines is a weak state despite having acquired the trappings of democracy from the US, its former colonial overlord.

In colonial-era Philippines, the US believed it had the ‘manifest destiny’ to change what it saw as a backward country and thus decided to impose its own model of government and other sociopolitical norms. However, it only “dimly understood” the society it was trying to change. It didn’t help, too, that the administrators in Manila including Governor William Howard Taft, who would have understood local conditions better, were always being overruled by congressional leaders in Washington D.C.

As Fukuyama explained it: “American administrators left land distribution up to the Philippine court system rather than to an executive agency, since that was the way it was done in the United States. They failed to recognize that in the Philippines, in contrast to America, widespread illiteracy meant that legal proceedings would be dominated by educated elites, who then suceeded in grabbing large estates despite the Americans’ explicit desire to promote land reform.”

“By exporting the nineteenthcentury US model of a government of ‘courts and parties’ to the Philippines, the United States permitted the growth of a landed oligarchy that continues to dominate that country,” he added. A strong Catholic lobby in the US also hampered the efforts to redistribute church lands to the poor peasants.

Fukuyama contrasted America’s efforts at reforms in the Philippines with Japan’s more successful experience in pursuing the development of Taiwan, which it ruled as a dependency of the Japanese Empire from 1895-1945. For one, the Japanese administrators in Taiwan were powerful bureaucrats who had relative autonomy from Tokyo. They also had a good knowledge of Taiwanese society and culture, which allowed them to review and change their policies if needed, particularly those in education and land reform.

The problem with the American colonial rule was that it introduced democratic ideas and institutions to Filipinos before the country had created a strong and modern state. Other East Asian countries had been able to achieve development more easily with their tradition of central governments and well-trained bureaucrats going back to their dynastic rulers of several millennia ago.

“East Asia’s rapid rise from the second half of the twentieth century on has been driven by strong technocratic states whose leadership, however authoritarian, remains oriented toward shared goals of economic and social development,” Fukuyama said. “China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea could seek to modernize their economies while taking for granted the existence of a strong and coherent state as well as a well-established national identity.”

It is a bit unfair to compare the Philippines with other countries in Asia who have managed to achieve sustained economic growth on the back of their pre-existing bureaucratic institutions and centralized governments. Ours is a nation in transition. Only a strong leadership that is unafraid of the landed elite can ensure that genuine, egalitarian reforms will be undertaken for the betterment of all.