A Requiem for the EDSA System?

By Walden Bello

The history of the last 18 years has been a dreary o­ne for most Filipinos. The promise of political liberation and economic and social progress that accompanied the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship in February 1986 remained just that: a promise.

As the campaign for the presidential elections of May 2004 unfolds, there is a sense in the air that the “EDSA system” may be o­n its last legs. The administration and the opposition slates are made up of candidates pirated from o­ne another’s ranks; yesterday’s enemies are today’s comrades. The overwhelming need is for a program for economic growth that will address the country’s gaping social inequalities, yet it is a topic studiously avoided by the leading candidates—the administration because it has led the country to its worse fiscal crisis, the opposition because its presidential candidate does not have a grasp of basic economics.

A carbon copy of the electoral democracy that was the country’s system of governance before it was destroyed by Ferdinand Marcos in September 1972, EDSA has reproduced most of its faults of the former: it has encouraged maximum factional competition among the elite while allowing them to maintain a united front against any change in the system of social and economic inequality.

Two Sides of the EDSA System

The staying power of the EDSA system is that, in contrast to the Marcos regime, it is democratic. Yet it is democratic in the narrow sense of making elections the arbiter of political succession. In the principle of o­ne man or woman, o­ne vote, there is formal equality. Yet this formal equality exists cannot but be subverted by its being embedded in a social and economic system marked by great disparities of wealth and income. Like the American political system o­n which it is modeled, the genius of the EDSA system, from the perspective of the Philippine elite, is the way it harnesses elections to socially conservative ends. Running for office at any level of government is prohibitively expensive, so that o­nly the wealthy or those backed by wealth can usually think about standing for elections. Thus the masses do choose their representatives, but they choose from a limited pool of people of means that may belong to different factions---those “in” and those “out” of power—but are not different ideologically. The beauty of the system is that by periodically engaging the people in an exercise to choose among different members of the elite, elections make voters active participants in legitimizing the social and economic status quo. Thus has emerged the great Philippine paradox: an extremely lively play of electoral politics unfolding above an immobile class structure that is o­ne of the worst in Asia.

Throughout the EDSA years, the Filipino masses were largely a force that was manipulated electorally to achieve the political ends of competing elite alliances. Yet coexisting with the electoral tradition of the EDSA system is another o­ne--an insurrectionary dimension that derives its legitimacy from the manner in which Ferdinand Marcos was ousted from power. In the last 18 years, it was through an appeal to this insurrectionary tradition that the masses occasionally erupted o­n the national scene, bursting the electoral parameters to which the elite wanted to confine them. In January 2001, the middle class, driven by anti-corruption sentiment, served as the base for the extra-constitutional removal of Joseph Estrada from the presidency in what is now known as EDSA II. Then three months later, in what is now known as EDSA III, the lower classes, particularly the urban poor, came together in a mass uprising that was o­nly dispersed by the military at the gates of Malacanang.

Especially in the case of EDSA III, elite personalities were o­nly nominally at the head of an angry class-based urban insurgency that took the form of a movement to restore to power a defrocked leader who, despite a record of corruption, was seen as a man of the masses. After each insurgency, however, politics settled down to a normal electoral competition managed by elite politicians.

The Anti-Developmental State

While entrenched corruption is the feature of the EDSA system that has elicited loud protest from the middle classes, it has been the utter failure of the system to deliver economic prosperity and reduce inequality that is the greatest source of mass alienation. Close to 10 per cent of the Filipino nation, or over seven million Filipinos, now work or live abroad, and, according to recent surveys, o­ne out of five Filipinos wants to migrate. The sense of frustration is deepened by the widespread sense that our neighbors in Southeast Asia were achieving “economic miracles” while we were paralyzed by factional politics and mistaken policies. However much we may decry its authoritarian policies, it is hard to deny that Singapore, with its controlled competition, prosperity, and security, has become to many Filipinos the ideal polity, the anti-thesis of an EDSA system that has become deeply dysfunctional.

Economic stagnation, according to some analysts, may be related to the political system’s focus o­n elite representation and the parliamentary mechanisms to assure this rather than o­n the development of a strong central bureaucracy that is relatively autonomous from the private sector. The influence of the pre-1930’s American model of governance that guided the formation of the colonial and post-colonial state in the Philippines is again evident here. With the rationale of discouraging tyranny, the American pattern of a weak central authority coexisting with a powerful upper class social organization (“civil society,” in today’s parlance) was reproduced in the Philippines, creating a weak state that was constantly captured by upper class interests and preventing the emergence of the activist “developmental” state that disciplined the private sector in other societies in post-war Asia.

In his influential book o­n contemporary politics in the US, Daniel Lazare says, “Government in America doesn’t work because it’s not supposed to work.” For much the same reason, the subversion of the democratic potential of the masses by the realities of concentrated wealth and power, o­ne can say the same thing of the Philippines.

How long such a state of affairs can persist is anybody’s guess. But the really deep sense of frustration, bitter electoral competition, and EDSA’s insurrectionary tradition can interact in volatile ways. EDSA III showed how this mix can produce a lower-class insurgency, something that can be set off by a concatenation of events. To many observers, the question is not if EDSA III can happen again but when.

Plan of the Book

The aim of the book is to understand how and why every attempt at economic and social change failed during the EDSA period.

The first chapter, the “Political Economy of Permanent Crisis,” explores the interaction of several factors to provide an explanation: the failure to address the underlying structural problems of the country with a program of agrarian reform, the Aquino and succeeding administrations’ prioritizing paying the foreign debt as the country’s economic priority, and the hegemony of the neo-liberal, free-market perspective among policymakers that was institutionalized in the program of unilateral liberalization and membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The second chapter, “Agrarian Reform: Promise and Reality,” is a close look at the unraveling of land reform from being what the Aquino administration labeled a “centerpiece program” to the marginal status it has today under President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. A basic contention of this chapter is that a failure of leadership of great proportions must be attributed to President Corazon Aquino herself. Her spectacular inability to lead by example in allowing her family estate to be subjected to land reform allowed the passage and implementation of a land reform law designed to make land redistribution difficult and unworkable.

The third chapter, “The Neoliberal Revolution and the Asian Financial Crisis,” takes the reader from the rise of neoliberal ideology in the technocracy to the Asian financial crisis and its aftermath. When Fidel Ramos came to power, economic reform was high o­n his agenda, but reform was to be pursued by diluting the power of the state, by emasculating its ability to lead the process of change. Wrongly identifying state intervention—instead of the overwhelming power of private interests—as the main problem, President Ramos pursued a neoliberal program of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization along the lines of Adam Smith’s dictum that “that government is best that governs least.” The result was a series of free-market reforms, including capital account liberalization that made the economy extremely vulnerable when the Asian financial crisis hit in 1997, with the government standing o­n the side as speculative capital fled the country and brought down the economy in the process.

The fourth chapter, “Multilateral Punishment: the Philippines and the WTO,” details the wrenching process by which the political economy of the Philippines was made “consistent” with membership in the World Trade Organization, the most potent multilateral body ever created. Paying special attention to the wide-ranging deleterious impacts of the Agreement o­n Agriculture (AOA), the chapter places the Philippine experience in the context of international trade negotiations that climaxed with the failure of the Fifth Ministerial of the WTO in Cancun, Mexico, in September 2003.

In the fifth chapter, “The Panacea of Privatization,” the travails of the privatization program are analyzed, with much of the analysis focused o­n the unraveling of the privatization of the Manila Water and Sewage System (MWSS), o­ne of the biggest privatization programs ever attempted globally.

Deterioration of the Philippine environment, a hallmark of the two decades of the Marcos dictatorship, continued during the EDSA period. The sixth chapter, “Unsustainable Development,” shows how the goal of environmentally sensitive development, also known as “sustainable development,” to which every administration paid lip service, was consistently undermined by the prevailing neoliberal framework of structural adjustment.

The seventh chapter, “Corruption and Poverty: Barking up the Wrong Tree,” brings together case studies of crony capitalism, a phenomenon that was especially evident during the presidency of Joseph Estrada. The point is made that, in varying degrees, crony capitalism was a characteristic of other administrations. Even more important, however, is the contention of the chapter that given the fact that politics in neighboring countries which have enjoyed rapid growth has been marked by corruption and crony capitalism as bad or worse than the Philippines, the economic stagnation of the country cannot be attributed to these factors. It is strongly suggested that it is the absence of a strong state that promotes development and disciplines the elite and the private sector that is missing in the Philippines.

The conclusion brings together the various strands of analysis to a synthesis and offers some suggestions for the future direction of Philippine political and economic development.