The Philippines: New Directions in Domestic Policy and Foreign Relations

David G. Timberman (ed.)

Asia Society

1998

New Directions and Priorities in
Philippine Foreign Relations
by Jose T. Almonte

 

Introduction

 

At Philippine independence in 1946, President Manuel A. Roxas set the country's "safest course" in the "glistening wake of America." Now those who command the Philippine ship of state must plot for it a new orientation. The country's opening to the global economy, the dismantling of U.S. air and naval bases on Luzon Island, and the uncertainties raised by the power configurations emerging in the Asia-Pacific region--all these have made necessary a broadening of Philippine contacts and friendships in the world. This new foreign policy is based essentially on the country's membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Today's Philippines is more open than in the past to its Asian affinities; it is eager to take part in the communal life of the new East Asia.

This chapter begins with discussions of the changing security environment in the Asia-Pacific region and the potential regional flash points of greatest concern to the Philippines. It then explores future trends in Philippine foreign relations and the prospects for a Pax Pacifica--for lasting peace across the Asia Pacific imposed not by a hegemonic power but attained by the unforced cooperation of all the states in the region.

 

The Changing Security Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region

The Primacy of Economic Security

The Philippines' national security is founded ultimately on the nation's economic strength, political unity, and social cohesion. Like many other countries--including the United States--the Philippines has redefined its security increasingly in economic terms. A common faith in policies oriented to trade is speeding up the post–cold war realignment. A shift toward outward-looking, market-oriented, private-sector-led growth among both the region's developing and newly industrializing economies is linking them more closely each year.

The political impact of the market system has been most dramatic on East Asia's Leninist systems. But the market is in fact homogenizing all of the East Asian states--so thoroughly that "anti-communist" ASEAN has effortlessly incorporated "communist" Vietnam. Growth rates should remain high, although no longer as spectacular as they have been.

Poverty is easing: living standards in the region, measured by average individual incomes, increased fourfold over the last generation, and prospects seem good for their continued steady rise. Both the United States and the European Union now trade with East Asia more than they do with each other.

Open export markets made East Asia grow. Now freer world trade is promised by the Uruguay Round Agreements and an economic "rule of law" by the World Trade Organization. ASEAN's own economic grouping, the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), has decided to speed up the dismantling of national tariff barriers from fifteen years to ten. This means virtual free trade within Southeast Asia by the turn of the century. Intra-ASEAN trade is growing very fast (by 43.8 percent in 1994). It now makes up a fifth of all the trade of member countries. Meanwhile, APEC has agreed that its developed members should open their markets completely by 2010 and its developing members ten years later.

In his effort to link up the country with the regional economy, President Ramos has conducted a vigorous personal diplomacy. Since mid-1992 he has visited all the major East Asian states--as well as Australia and New Zealand, the United States, and much of Western Europe. Ties with Latin America and Africa he has strengthened through Philippine membership in the Nonaligned Movement. He has also visited Saudi Arabia and other key countries in the Organization of the Islamic Conference. At the United Nations, Philippine contingents took part in peacekeeping efforts in Cambodia (1994) and in Haiti (1994–95). A fifty-man humanitarian relief force has been in Iraq since the Gulf war.

The Challenges of Political and Social Change

The region also faces a variety of challenges rooted in the rapid pace of socioeconomic and political change. In Cambodia, the unlikely coalition government organized under the Paris agreements of 1991 proved too weak to put down ideological and personalist factions and to allocate a realistic sharing of power. The strongman Hun Sen finally broke the stalemate by bloodily seizing power in Phnom Penh and expelling his royalist partner, Prince Norodom Ranariddh--in the process forcing ASEAN to delay Cambodia's entry into the regional association. In Myanmar the ruling generals are maneuvering to preserve a political role for themselves after the unavoidable restoration of representative processes. In Vietnam the controversy over economic and political strategy between communist conservatives and reformists is still unresolved. It is in ASEAN's collective interest to encourage the reformists seeking to open up the economy and to incorporate Vietnam completely into its regional institutions.

Rapid economic change in East Asia is producing its usual by-products in society--the break-up of custom; the disintegration of tribes, clans, and families; alienation and political terrorism; crime and violence; prostitution and the use of narcotic drugs. Their relative deprivation sharpens the anguish of social groups that development is leaving behind. Communications systems which governments can control less and less fuel the drive of the new middle classes, in Francis Fukuyama's words, for "nonmaterial goals like recognition of their status and political participation." ₁ All of these give East Asia an underlying instability that could surface once the region's economic growth falters.

The failure of secular culture to satisfy desires deeper than consumerism stimulates fundamentalism--Christian as well as Islamic. The deconsecration of human life has led to a widespread feeling of loss--an anxiety that the younger churches, with their personalist approach to religion, have been able to satisfy better than the institutional churches. Fortunately, the traditional syncretism of Southeast Asian culture mitigates the power of religious fanaticism in the region.

Communist insurgents, who once operated all over Southeast Asia, have now disappeared except in the Philippines, and even there they are in terminal decline. Not that Marxism's collapse has invalidated its Leninist component, whose teachings on how to run a revolutionary conspiracy remain useful to any clandestine organization.

Another irritant in East Asian relationships concerns illegal migrants and undocumented workers. The Philippine government is particularly interested in the cross-border movement of workers, a sizable number of whom are its citizens. Many of these migrant workers are virtually without civil rights in their host countries, and the Philippines wants ground rules laid, ideally on a regional basis, to ease their problems somewhat.

Many current and prospective regional problems can be dealt with only cooperatively. This is true of piracy, the narcotic drug trade, and organized crime. As for the increasing threat to the regional environment, forest fires in Indonesia cast a haze over Singapore and Kuala Lumpur for weeks during the 1997 dry season. Remedies will be difficult to impose, because they are susceptible to the "free-rider" option.

East Asia's Evolving Balance of Power

Robert Scalapino has noted that if East Asia is economically vigorous, it is also politically fragile. ₂ Since the 1970s the American military presence--and China's--had balanced that of the Soviet Union. That power balance created the precarious stability which enabled many economies to flourish. Now that arrangement has collapsed--and a new balance of power has yet to firm up. As Russian influence recedes, China is becoming increasingly assertive. Thus the U.S. presence is as crucial as ever. But now it assures the East Asian states not so much against identifiable enemies as against uncertainties. And these include aggressive nationalism, territorial conflict, and clashing regional ambitions.

The post–cold war balance of power in East Asia is still evolving because the relationships of the major actors are still evolving. There is as yet no status quo to which every power subscribes. And only now is East Asia beginning to develop a regionwide security organization, in the embryonic ASEAN Regional Forum. The probable outcome is a five-power balance among the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and a greater ASEAN. In at least two of these great powers--Russia and China--the military will continue to have a key--perhaps even decisive--role, with all that implies for regional instability. For five powers to learn to live with each other will be more difficult than for two powers to do so (as during the cold war).

But learn they must. In the nuclear age, war is no longer a reasonable recourse for the great powers. As the new world order becomes established, the Philippines expects relations among the regional states to be driven primarily by pragmatism and compromise. It sees these neighborly virtues as being helped along by the recession of authoritarianism, by the spread of democratic systems and, most of all, by the increasing linkages of the regional economy.

China and the United States are most likely to determine the shape and form of the East Asian power balance. The relationship between the two is the classical example of the dominant state and a rapidly rising subordinate state. In the past, such a clash of interests would have been resolved by a hegemonic war. Now there is no alternative to engaging China. As Germany was integrated into Western Europe, so must China be integrated into East Asia if the region is to have stability that lasts.

In the immediate future, only the United States and Japan will be strong enough to influence China's political evolution. How these three powers arrange their security relationships will dictate the security framework of the smaller East Asian states in the new century. Thus the U.S.-Japan relationship is the key relationship in East Asia--the relationship in which all bystanders have a vested interest. Just now the Philippines worries that the endless disputes between the two over bilateral trade may spill over into their strategic relationship, particularly now that "standing up to the Americans" has become so attractive to Japanese politicians. And bystanders worry just as much about the growing pessimism among ordinary Japanese about the effectiveness of their representative system.

Russia--for good or ill--will continue to count in the Asian balance of power. It is worrying that President Boris Yeltsin does not seem strong enough to stand up to his conservative nationalists on issues like the Kurile Islands dispute with Japan. Political instability in Moscow will reflect on the security concerns of the East Asian countries.

Anxiety had been raised throughout Southeast Asia by the dismantling of the U.S. bases in the Philippines in 1992. The fear that potentially aggressive regional powers may be drawn into the power vacuum is undoubtedly real. But the United States will stay on in East Asia, and in its own interest. Shifts in its demography and overseas trade have made the U.S. a true Pacific power. It cannot tolerate East Asia's being dominated by a single power any more than it could a Western Europe in the same predicament.

China's Intentions

The biggest factor in East Asia's future is the rise of China. Since 1979 its economy has doubled roughly every seven-and-a-half years. In fact the World Bank projects China to become the world's biggest economy by 2020. The appearance of a great new power has always disturbed the balance of the world system. But a forcible rearrangement of the hierarchy of powers is not inevitable this time around. Unlike Japan in the 1930s, China is entering an increasingly open world economy.

On market reform there seems no turning back for China. Market reform has developed a constituency--within the party, among technocrats, even in the military, and among the middle class of entrepreneurs, managers, and professionals. Already Beijing allows the media and local congresses greater leeway to air popular grievances. More recently, it has begun to allow village communities to choose local leaders freely. But individual dissidence is still dealt with harshly--undoubtedly to prevent student and democratization movements from starting again.

How China evolves will depend primarily on the interplay of internal forces. The Communist Party faces the modern-day "rulers' dilemma." To preserve its power, it must deliver growth to its national constituency. This requires it to liberalize the economy. But liberalization and deregulation have unavoidable political consequences. They create a civil society that works to loosen central government control.

For some time now, East Asians have discerned opposing strains in Beijing's basic policy goals. One is to modernize China's economy so that the Communist Party can deliver growth to its people and reinforce its legitimacy, and so that China can attain international respect in keeping with its size, population, and culture. The Economist reckons that China's GNP must continue growing at its average of 10 percent per annum if the economy is to create the ten million jobs or so each year that China needs to keep pace with population growth and stave off social unrest. If China is to grow at this breakneck pace, it needs foreign investment, foreign technology, foreign markets, and regional stability over the next twenty to twenty-five years. Conflicting with this conservative need is China's other driving force--its proud people's collective memory of 150 years of weakness and humiliation at the hands of the great powers and their need to "right the wrongs of history." And since China has unsettled border disputes with ten of its neighbors and claims two million square kilometers of territory outside its present-day borders (it has in fact fought four local conflicts with neighbors over the last generation) East Asians cannot be blamed for their renewed anxieties about their huge and potentially very powerful neighbor.

Engaging China

How should its neighbors deal with China? Containment may have been justified for an ideological power like Stalin's USSR. But it would be unwise to approach today's China with such a preconceived notion when this huge and complex nation is in the middle of such epochal transition.

China's neighbors need to discourage (as far as they can) China's lingering idea of itself as the "Middle Kingdom," while encouraging those trends that make the Chinese economy increasingly interdependent with those of its neighbors. In a word, other Asian nations must induce China to develop a stake in the Asia-Pacific status quo.

ASEAN's economic ties particularly with China's southern coastal provinces may be expected to grow even more. At the moment, China's economy complements those of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, but competes with those of Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam in labor-intensive industries. Southeast Asia's ethnic Chinese communities will have a big role in linking China and ASEAN in ties of mutual benefit.

This is why the ASEAN states--which are of necessity acutely sensitive to China's feelings--refuse to commit themselves prematurely to a proposal for "prepositioning" U.S. military supplies, in advance of any potential need, in their territories. But Beijing's continued encroachments on the South China Sea will surely accelerate security cooperation among the Southeast Asian states and between them and the United States.

Japan

Japan is seeking a political role in East Asia--and the world--that reflects its economic and financial power. Japan too is in transition, from rule by bureaucrats to rule by politicians. The Philippines is confident this political role will be exercised on the side of peace, which Japan needs more than any other great power because of its worldwide trade and investments and its extreme vulnerability to nuclear conflict. The Philippines supports Japan's bid for a permanent seat in the Security Council, which should enhance its political integration into the world community. The Philippines has no apprehensions about Japan's taking a more active role in regional security cooperation.

Like other Southeast Asian countries, the Philippines wishes Japan's security ties with the United States to continue, as the linchpin of East Asian stability. President Ramos has said he wishes the alliance put on an even keel, to raise Japan from a strategic client into a full partner of the United States and to shift the focus of the alliance from the passive defense of Japan to the promotion of East Asian security.

That Washington and Tokyo should read Beijing's motivations accurately is crucial for all the East Asian countries. Foreign pressures apparently tend to shore up hardliners in the Communist Party leadership and in the administrative bureaucracy. For instance, what Chinese intellectuals see as Washington's heavy-handed way of negotiating trade disputes is said to have caused even relative liberals among them (those who sided with the student-protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989) to rally around the Beijing establishment.

The Idea of "America"

East Asian anxieties about U.S. staying power in the region stem from perceptions of a new age of isolationism beginning in the United States. But isolationism has always been less of an option for their country than Americans themselves have believed possible. It is even less of an option now that U.S. prosperity increasingly depends on overseas trade. While it is true that U.S. security commitments remain the principal source of its influence in the region, America's unique sense of mission is also integral to its appeal to many East Asians.

For the United States, national interest has always had a moral component. Over the past forty-five years, a spacious sense of self-interest impelled the United States to help shape East Asian development--in fact, to make it possible. That role began with land reform in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea undertaken under U.S. guidance and continued with the U.S. military umbrella that, in President Bill Clinton's words, enabled the Southeast Asian "dominoes" to become "dynamos."

Thus there is a reservoir of goodwill that the United States can draw on in its dealings with East Asia. The Philippines appreciates that the United States is looking for a new sense of fairness in its trade with East Asia and has no problem at all with the proposition, because a strong U.S. economy is as good for East Asia as it is for the United States.

Potential Flash Points

From the perspective of the Philippines, East Asia's most urgent problems are those involving the Korean peninsula, the Spratly Islands, and Taiwan.

The Nuclear Problem in Northeast Asia

North Korea, the last Stalinist regime, still seems geared single-mindedly for war. It apparently devotes 20 to 25 percent of its GNP to military spending, risking even economic decline and severe food shortages. East Asians may reasonably expect China and Vietnam to evolve from "hard" to "soft" authoritarianism. But in North Korea the liability of a sharp break between the old and the new order is very real--most likely through a military coup. Now that the urgent issue of nuclear proliferation has been set aside by the agreement reached between the United States and North Korea in late October 1995, East Asia's best hope is that confidence-building mechanisms set up by the six powers engaged in the region can begin to work toward the only stable resolution of Northeast Asian instability--reunification of the two Koreas.

Reunification will bring about many interim problems. Organizing the integration of the North alone will take much money, a great deal of time, and plenty of mutual goodwill. But, by bringing together the North's natural resources with the South's technology, reunification will eventually make Korea a formidable regional power. It will then have a population of more than seventy-two million and an industrial economy and a military to match (among whose assets would be the North's nuclear know-how). Given Korea's still-festering colonial grievances against Japan, this combination will have repercussions in Tokyo if no overall settlement is reached among the Northeast Asian powers.

Taiwan and the Spratly Islands

Beijing's behavior vis-à-vis Taiwan and the Spratly Islands is fueling the regional anxieties raised by China's resurgence.

The Taiwan issue could crucially disrupt East Asian stability. Political liberalization has opened the door for advocates of independence to enter Taiwanese politics. The conservative Kuomintang, which agrees that Taiwan is an integral part of China, has been losing ground to the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, which has mobilized the island's young, professional middle class, and to the new generation of Kuomintang leaders like President Lee Teng-hui.

The cross-strait crisis generated in March 1996 by China's effort to influence the course of Taiwan's first free presidential elections ended without mishap. China's intimidation of Taiwanese electors ironically produced a landslide for Lee, their first Taiwan-born leader. But the situation in East Asia will not be easily restored to what it was. China's brusque attempt to intimidate Taiwan has shattered East Asia's comfortable assumption that its efforts to draw China into its web of economic interdependence would moderate Beijing's political behavior.

More recently, China has encroached on Mischief Reef, which is only some 135 nautical miles from the Philippine main island of Palawan. China's claim to the Spratlys chain of islets, reefs, and cays in the South China Sea--which it disputes with Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam--seems to hinge on two things: the oil resources the area is believed to contain and China's new military strategy of "forward defense."

China's need for new oil fields has become more and more urgent--it became a net importer in 1994--and this resource the Spratly Islands are believed to contain in large quantities. For instance, a Russian research institute estimates the Spratlys region to contain the equivalent of one billion tons of crude oil, worth about $126 billion at current prices. But military necessity seems an even stronger motive. People's Liberation Army (PLA) strategists have given up the Maoist guerrilla strategy of luring an adversary deep inside China in favor of building up their capability to fight a hightech naval conflict in the China Sea and in the Western Pacific. And regional security analysts believe the PLA is using China's claim to the Spratlys to justify its general modernization plan, whose long-term goal is to develop a full-open ocean fleet--a blue-water navy--which China has lacked since the early fifteenth century.

Anxieties over China's intentions may have spurred several Southeast Asian governments to build up and modernize their arms inventories. Even the Philippines has reluctantly begun to modernize its coastal defenses, using money it could ill-afford to divert from its effort to build up its infrastructure devastated by decades of neglect. But the bargain-basement prices offered by Western suppliers, ironically led by the cold war protagonists, seem a greater impetus than perceptions of outside threats. Even so, the Ramos government sees the need for greater transparency in the defense programs of the Southeast Asian governments, and it has proposed intensifying exchanges of intelligence, defense white papers, and other military programs.

The Philippines and the Spratlys Dispute

The Chinese encroachment on Mischief Reef the Philippines regards as the concern of all the powers interested in the stability of the South China Sea and its strategic sealanes. The Philippine government sees no substitute for consultations that produce a consensus among the six littoral states claiming portions of the Spratly Islands. Indonesia--which hosts informal talks among the claimants--has suggested they share the natural resources in the Spratlys. President Ramos has proposed demilitarizing the South China Sea and placing each disputed island under the stewardship of the claimantcountry closest to it. The claimant states can then undertake multilateral ventures in oil exploration, marine research, fishing enterprises, joint policing, environmental protection, and so forth, perhaps under a joint development authority.

Chinese leaders have several times reassured the Philippines that China poses no threat to the growth and stability of the Asia-Pacific. But the Philippines is still not completely at ease in its bilateral relationship with China. It cannot reconcile Beijing's avowals of neighborliness and friendship with its continued presence on Mischief Reef.

Future Trends in Philippine Foreign Relations

Philippine foreign relations in the future can be expected to hew even more closely to the ASEAN consensus. Regionalism may not have sublimated sharp differences in leadership style among ASEAN's personages. But ASEAN's increasing cohesion prevents serious conflicts caused by irredentist claims, rebellions, and other intrigues from breaking out among its constituent states. Policy differences within ASEAN are discreetly resolved out of public sight--in the meetings of senior ministers and in the informal summit of heads of government held at every year end. ASEAN solidarity in the ASEAN Regional Forum, the Nonaligned Movement and APEC, and in its dealings with the European Union and in the United Nations is exemplary.

Toward One Southeast Asia

Outside pressures have historically shaped the forms and set the pace of ASEAN cooperation. Now Southeast Asia has no alternative to eventual unity, if only because separately its ten countries cannot stand up to the intense competition of the emerging global economy, and the power politics that might yet replace the relatively simple power configuration of the cold war era. Intensified regional cooperation is necessary to provide a combined counterweight to intrusive external powers.

Take trade as an example. Like any other aspect of foreign relations, it becomes equitable only when either side can enforce reciprocity--when each can demand roughly equal access to the other's markets and productive capacities. Separately, the Southeast Asian countries cannot hope to be strong enough to enforce reciprocity against the European Union, North America, Japan, or even China. Even a unified Southeast Asia may not assure the region complete control of its own fortunes. But as Jusuf Wanandi has pointed out, ₃ only unification gives it a fighting chance to resist external pressures and play a role in influencing the development of the region. Unification will give Southeast Asia's nearly 500 million people the cultural variety, the talent pool, and the economic weight they need to become a major player in the future world.

In the beginning, economic cooperation was merely the least controversial topic on which to hang the concept of ASEAN. Now it has become one of the association's main purposes--alongside political and security cooperation. The ASEAN Free Trade Area goes further than any previous economic agreement among the ASEAN states. It abolishes nontariff barriers and binds members to accord almost free-trade treatment to each other within ten years (to end in 2003) and over almost the entire range of traded products. Already AFTA has stimulated intra-ASEAN trade, which by 1995 had multiplied by almost 50 percent over trade in 1993, the first year of its implementation.

ASEAN's intermediate goal of incorporating all of Southeast Asia should be completed before the turn of the century, now that Vietnam, the linchpin of Indochina, has joined. The Fifth ASEAN Summit in Bangkok in December 1995 convened the heads of government of all ten Southeast Asian countries for the first time. (It produced an agreement on a nuclear-free zone in Southeast Asia.) Of course unification will raise its own problems. An enlarged ASEAN will certainly find it more challenging to achieve consensus. It must then also ensure that commerce between its rich and poor halves in no way resembles the colonialism the Western powers once imposed on the region.

Laos and Myanmar were accepted into ASEAN during the celebrations of its thirtieth anniversary in July 1997. But full membership for Cambodia cannot wait for too long, because instability in the heart of Indochina is liable to draw in not only the traditional rivals, Thailand and Vietnam, but also the external powers with strategic interests there.

Myanmar's membership has drawn much criticism from ASEAN's Western dialogue partners, in the United States and the European Union--whose own interests focus on human-rights issues in Yangon and the failure of the ruling State Peace and Development Council to negotiate live-and-let-live arrangements with its civilian opposition led by the gallant Aung San Suu Kyi. In this case, too, strategic reasons compel ASEAN to take Myanmar under its wing--to prevent the country from becoming a pawn in big-power rivalries. For fear of offending national sensibilities, ASEAN leaders tend to downplay variations in standards of civil liberties among member states. But the ASEAN collective sense will want to see in Myanmar a minimum adherence to the rule of law and a measure of respect for human rights.

A united Southeast Asia can become a stabilizing influence in East Asia. Already the Asia-Pacific community has accepted ASEAN's leadership in the ASEAN Regional Forum and in APEC. Both groupings have adopted ASEAN's negotiating principles of consultation and consensus as standard operating procedures. They emphasize building political trust before coming to grips with specific disputes. In working incrementally, informally--keeping in mind that the process of reaching an agreement is important in itself--both APEC and the ASEAN Regional Forum gain a unique flexibility. Once the APEC leaders develop the habit of economic cooperation, they will begin to discuss shared political and security concerns.

Another recourse Southeast Asia's security specialists are beginning to consider is a concert of middle powers--organized outside the orbit of any of the great powers--as a moderating influence in the region. Over the medium term, the ten Southeast Asian states plus Australia and New Zealand can deploy a combined economic and political strength comparable to any of the individual great powers. Regional security analysts regard the security agreement between Indonesia and Australia signed in December 1995 as a step in this direction.

The Special Philippine-U.S. Relationship

Since the 1900s the U.S. presence had insulated the Philippine state from disturbances to its social stability and shielded it against any sense of an outside threat. Successive generations of Filipino politicians manipulated the colonial relationship to their advantage, using Washington to prop up a corrupt and inefficient political and economic system. Now the free ride is over. From Washington's point of view, the Philippines may have been reduced from a strategic ally to just another poor client in need of American benevolence. But both sides should welcome the evolution of the relationship to one governed by straightforward economic and strategic considerations.

Relations with the United States will remain a major aspect of Philippine foreign policy: the former colonial power remains the country's top trading partner. But the Philippines now has the chance to design a foreign policy that looks beyond special relations. It can influence the course of this relationship if it develops a strong and outward-looking economy. U.S. resources will then come into the country no longer as handouts but as revenues from trade and tourism, and as direct investments, joint-venture capital, and commercial loans. And the Philippines should welcome even the winding-down of U.S. aid, because it forces the country to face up to structural reforms needed in the economy.

The bases for this new beginning are sound. The historical association of the two countries has resulted not only in a shared belief in liberal democracy but in a large--and growing--Filipino American community. By 1990 Filipinos had become the United States' most numerous ethnic Asians. The Filipino American community is potentially important as a source of investment and a lobby for Filipino interests in Washington, D.C. It also ensures that for many Filipino families Philippine relations with the United States will remain special whatever turn the official relationship may take.

And while it may be fashionable to belittle the representative system the Americans transplanted to the Philippines, ordinary Filipinos do put their faith in it. Walden Bello, a left-wing scholar inquiring into why the communist rebellion has become marginalized, found one reason to be "the continuing vitality of the tradition of formal democratic electoral politics as a source of political legitimacy--not only among the middle class but also the peasantry and workers." ₄

If the new relationship is to prosper, Filipinos will of course have to soothe U.S. anxieties about the Philippines. These include commercial piracy and violation of intellectual property rights, and the country's increasing role in trans-shipping narcotics to the American market. And security cooperation must mean more than the passive kind of dependence on the U.S. that the Philippines developed in the postcolonial period.

Toward a Pacific Peace

Economic growth in East Asia is proceeding at such a pace that regional output is projected to exceed that of both North America and the European Union by the year 2020. But an explosion of cross-border violence in any region of East Asia will burst the stability that allows the region's economy to grow. Thus the countries of the region must first and foremost preserve the peace among them.

The key to peace in the region in the new century is the peaceful accommodation of the ambitions of the rising powers--China, Japan, a resurgent Russia, a unified Korea, an increasingly self-confident Indonesia--for influence in regional affairs. Because China's potential is so great and its historical grievances so strong, East Asians may be sure it will never be content to remain a regional power. And since U.S. strategy in the Asia-Pacific envisions continued U.S. preeminence, one can easily foretell a difficult long-term relationship between the two countries most likely to contest world hegemony in the twenty-first century.

Finding this key will thus be difficult. Fortunately the Asia-Pacific countries have the leisure to do so. None of the major powers faces an immediate threat to its security, while rivalry among them has lost its ideological edge. And U.S. military superiority seems assured for at least the next 15 to 20 years, since the United States keeps at the cutting edge of the technological revolution in weaponry and in battlefield communications and command systems. This should allow time for Chinese living standards to rise and for liberalizing influences in Chinese politics to induce a new generation of Chinese leaders to seek the satisfaction of their country's aspirations within the regional community. At the very least, the economic and political costs of resorting to force in any bilateral dispute should be progressively higher as regional integration deepens.

End of the Age of Hegemony

How can long-term stability be assured on the rim of the great ocean its discoverers named so felicitously? It is true that, in the past, stability--even a flowering of civilization--had resulted from the hegemony of a great power: the Roman Empire in the ancient world, the British Empire during the nineteenth century, and the American Republic after World War II. But the age of hegemony has passed. Today no state, however big and powerful, can act unilaterally. In a world more interconnected than it ever was, big nations and small are virtually equal in the restraints the world community places on their behavior. It is time the region's thinkers began conceptualizing a Pax Pacifica.

The market too has shown its liberative political effects--its ability to transfer power painlessly from the state to civil society. It is in East Asia's collective interest to promote the deepening of market reform in all its countries. And this effort should include the encouragement by East Asian governments of the entrepreneurial activities of the region's overseas Chinese communities. Regional leaders must also strengthen nascent multilateral institutions for practical security cooperation such as the ASEAN Regional Forum and the APEC Leaders' Summit.

APEC's immediate objective is comprehensive trade liberalization among its 18 Pacific Rim states. According to an Australian analysis, this by itself will raise the aggregate real income for APEC economies by at least $303 billion yearly. Even more important, APEC's every broadening act of liberalization should speed up worldwide free trade. As chairman of the APEC Leaders' Summit in 1996, the Philippines has taken up the burden of leading the collective effort to sustain APEC's forward movement. President Ramos has also challenged the APEC leaders to deepen and broaden their vision of an Asia-Pacific community.

No Clash of Civilizations

The assumed opposition between Western and Asian values is more of a political than a cultural issue. I see no "clash of civilizations" of the kind imagined by Samuel Huntington impending in East Asia (although Singapore's senior minister Lee Kuan Yew suggests there may be racialist undertones in America's attitude toward a resurgent China). Cultural differences between East Asia and the West are not the critical determinants of politics, economics, or manners. As societies get more complex, they must increasingly be ruled by compromise and majority rule if society is to become both free and orderly. And to the extent that countries--East or West--accept these consensual methods, their political cultures will converge.

As political cultures converge, the differences between countries will arise largely from the civic values that specific cultures prize, and also from the deliberate efforts that East Asia's modernizers are making, to avoid the "mistakes" the early modernizers in the West made; for example, in failing to restrain the egotism of individualistic capitalism, and in allowing both the deterioration of family ties and the extreme secularism of society and of human life.

China must be incorporated peacefully into this Pax Pacifica. Zbigniew Brzezinski memorably said that, apart from military reach, economic impact, and political muscle, a superpower must have a message of worldwide relevance derived from an inner moral code of its own, defining a "shared standard of conduct as an example to others." The Asia-Pacific as a community must impress on China that military reach, economic impact, and political muscle by themselves can no longer command respect. Respect must be earned--and China can deserve the region's respect only if it has a message that transforms power into a leadership that commands moral legitimacy. How China behaves in Hong Kong, in the South China Sea, on Taiwan, and in Korea will define for the Philippines its message to the region and the world.

In the past, states moved effortlessly from economic strength to military power and then to imperialism. But today no state need aspire to hegemony, because it can attain its goals of wealth and prestige through peaceful commerce and integration in the community of nations. The long-term objective should be to replace security arrangements based on the military balance with mutual security based on economic cooperation--on mutually beneficial trade and investment. A Pax Pacifica must be founded on the stability imposed not by any hegemonic power but on the peace of virtual equals: the product of security cooperation that comes from reasoning together.

 

Endnotes

Note 1: Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History," National Interest, Vol. 16, Summer 1989. Back.

Note 2: Robert A. Scalapino, "Political and Social Change in East Asia" (Paper prepared for the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu, Hawaii, September 1995). Back.

Note 3: Conversation with Jusuf Wanandi. Back.

Note 4: Walden Bello, "The Crisis of the Philippine Progressive Movement," Kasarinlan [Independence], A Philippine Quarterly on Third World Studies, Vol. 8, no. 1 (Third Quarter 1992), p.146. Back.