In the late Chosôn dynasty in Korea and the late Spanish colonial era in the Philippines, both central states faced major restraints in the exercise of authority. The character of these restraints, however, varied considerably. The Korean monarchy faced a powerful yangban aristocratic class that enjoyed not only effective control over the bureaucratic structure but also hereditary rights over land. The yangban in many ways undermined the power of the central state, but their status was at the same time ultimately derived from their position within the state. Each yangban family owed its origin to an ancestor who had passed the difficult state examination. As Hagen Koo explains, “The yangban class had no interest in weakening state power; rather it sought to use state power only for its own interests.”4
The late Spanish colonial state in the Philippines faced an even greater
Reflections on a Reverse Image 545
range of challenges, and—quite unlike the Chosôn state—never achieved a substantial degree of centralization. First, the government based in Manila was so understaffed that it had to rely heavily upon ecclesiastical personnel in order to extend its reach throughout the archipelago.5 Second, the Muslim population in the southern portion of the archipelago was effectively independent until nearly the closing years of Spanish colonial rule.6 Third, and of greatest relevance here, the particular character of the colony’s agricultural commercialization throughout the nineteenth century “gave rise to a new class of . . . landowners who were quite separate from the bureaucracy.” This provincially based elite had an economic base firmly outside the central state.7
As a “new imperialism” swept the globe, both the Chosôn dynasty and the Spanish colonial regime were forcibly removed by two rising industrial powers, Japan and the United States. In each case, the new colonials built upon the foundations of well-established polities, successfully co-opted many elites into colonial structures, and in the process brought enormous transformation to subject states and to state-society relations. There was tremendous divergence, however, in the character of the colonial states that each established.
As Japan colonized Korea through a large, coercive, and Japanese-dominated bureaucratic apparatus, the power of the yangban class was severely diminished in the political realm but substantially retained in the agricultural economy. The Japanese gradually promoted economic change that in comparative perspective might be considered oxymoronic: colonial industrialization. In this top-down process, encouraged by new and sophisticated colonial financial institutions, Japanese capital (that of both state and zaibatsu) was overwhelmingly dominant and Korean entrepreneurs decidedly marginal.8 To the extent that Korean elites enjoyed any substantial degree of economic power, therefore, it was primarily as landlords; those branded “Japanese collaborators” became “the object of an intense national hatred.”9
American colonial rule in the Philippines was put in place after rapid defeat of the Spanish and in the midst of a fierce, protracted war with nationalist forces throughout the archipelago.10 Intent on ending a conflict that was tying down 72,000 American troops and facing increasing opposition at home, Governor-General William Howard Taft initiated a “policy of attraction” that promised Philippine elites a major role in governance—and sought to make the “modern lawyer-politician” the dominant figure in Philippine society.11 Elections for municipal and provincial posts were instituted in 1901 and 1902; in 1907, a significant amount of authority was
Comparative Perspective 546
given over to a national representative assembly; and in 1916, the creation of a Senate was accompanied by the explicit promise of future independence. As elections were held and legislatures convened, relatively little attention was given to the creation of a modern administrative apparatus.
The representative institutions enabled local caciques, or local political bosses, to consolidate their hold on the national state, and fostered the creation of what Benedict Anderson calls “a solid, visible ‘national oligarchy.’” This oligarchy—both Manila-based politicos and provincial lords—
took advantage of their independent base of power, and came to exercise powerful, particularistic control over all levels of the governmental apparatus through a spoils system that had become well entrenched at the national level early in the century.12
American colonial rule is essential to understanding both the origins of the modern Philippine state and the many basic elements of modern-day Philippine society and democracy. The outcome was, in many ways, the reverse of the colonial-era transformation found in Korea: while the Japanese turned the political-economic elite of the Chosôn dynasty into a tightly controlled economic elite harnessed to their colonial goals, the Americans transformed the economic elite that had emerged in the late Spanish era into a broadly influential political-economic elite that soon proved capable of frustrating major U.S. goals of colonial “tutelage.” In stark contrast to the powerful and highly centralized Japanese colonial state in Korea, the American colonial state in the Philippines was remarkably weak and decentralized.
Through their control of the political apparatus, Philippine oligarchs continually created more economic opportunities for themselves (for example, land-grabbing through control of the land titling process). Collaboration with the Americans created many opportunities for gaining greater degrees of legislative authority and local autonomy, and with the creation of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935 all branches of government were effectively turned over to the oligarchy that the Americans had created.13
Commonwealth president Manuel L. Quezon was a consummate Philippine “lawyer-politician”: he emerged from provincial roots with the backing of influential American colonials, and proved masterful in using the rhetoric of American democracy and subtle understandings of American institutions simultaneously to consolidate his provincial base of power and build a nationwide network among other provincial powerholders. In many ways, Quezon was the antecedent of Marcos: both men skillfully manipulated diverse components of the political system to accumulate personal power, and spawned regimes “characterized by corruption and cronyism.”14
Reflections on a Reverse Image 547
Change and Continuity in State-Society Relations: From Independence to the Early 1960s
The end of World War II brought independence both to Korea and to the Philippines, and the inauguration of the two new governments was presided over by the same U.S. military official: General Douglas MacArthur.
Although the experiences of colonization and processes of decolonization were extremely distinct in nature, one can nonetheless observe a surprising degree of convergence in the character of the states and elites that initially emerged in the Republic of the Philippines and the Republic of Korea.
In Korea, independence came suddenly and resulted in a partitioning of the nation that remains in place more than six decades later. The landlord class was challenged everywhere by a nationalist and “contentious”
civil society born in the colonial era.15 In the North, under Soviet occupation, this class was quite thoroughly stripped of their landholdings. In the South, on the other hand, American occupation provided a necessary degree of protection to Korean landlords, and permitted them to regain a measure of political influence. For the post of the presidency, the Americans needed a figure who could combine fierce anticommunism with anti-Japanese nationalist credentials. Syngman Rhee fit the bill, and after taking the helm he worked out a marriage of convenience with the opposition Korean Democratic Party, “the organ of landed wealth and local power.”16
Through its association with Rhee, the landlord class sought to defend its economic positions and regain the political clout it had lost during the Japanese colonial era, and thus consolidate itself as a political-economic elite.
In the Philippines, entirely unlike Korea, the impact of the Pacific War was to cement closer ties than ever to the former colonial power. MacArthur’s promised return conquest of the Philippines and the fulfillment of prewar promises of independen
ce seem to have brought unprecedented legitimacy for deep American involvement in postwar politics. When granted on July 4, 1946, independence was accompanied by provisions clearly advantageous to the landed oligarchy that controlled the state. In exchange for military bases coveted by Washington and economic concessions desired by some elements of American business, the United States provided the Philippines with both continuing access to its market as well as postwar rehabilitation assistance. In part because the grantor of independence was a rising superpower, it was especially difficult for the Philippines to emerge as a truly sovereign nation. Even in the postcolonial era the oligarchs have remained highly dependent upon U.S. aid, invest-
Comparative Perspective 548
ment, and counterinsurgency support. Although the country as a whole has faced no serious external threat, oligarchs have needed external support to sustain an unjust, inefficient, and graft-ridden political and economic structure. Washington, in turn, received unrestricted cold war access to two of its most important overseas military installations.
As in Korea, the Philippine elite faced major challenges from below in the late 1940s. The Hukbalahap (People’s Anti-Japanese Army), formed in 1942, battled against both the Japanese and their landlord collaborators.
Despite their frequent willingness to cooperate with U.S. forces, the Huks soon found themselves enemies of the state being reestablished by MacArthur and his many oligarchic friends (some of whom had collaborated with the Japanese during the war). By late 1946, after efforts at parliamentary struggle were obstructed and repression of the peasantry worsened in the countryside, the Huk units were once again in full-scale rebellion.17
The Philippine government had major difficulties in meeting this challenge; as in Korea in the late 1940s, one finds a weak and corrupt state highly dependent upon the United States for its basic survival.18
The Huk Rebellion peaked between 1949 and 1951, after which counterinsurgency efforts began to achieve considerable success. Especially important was the role of U.S. advisors in cultivating Ramon Magsaysay,
“America’s boy.”19 The major reason for the Huk’s decline, explains Benedict Kerkvliet, was that “peasants in Central Luzon liked Magsaysay, first as secretary of defense (1950–1953) and then as president (1954–1957), because he had personal contact with villagers and because the military became less abusive under his leadership.”20 The eventual defeat of the Huks was achieved far more by symbolic actions than by substantial concessions, and in its wake came no major change in the character of either the state or state-society relations. Agrarian discontent was temporarily ameliorated through resettlement in the southern island of Mindanao, and U.S. proposals for land redistribution were blocked.21 With the root causes of insurgency unaddressed, the Left would soon rise again.
In contrast to the Huk Rebellion, the impact of the Korean War on the South Korean state and state-society relations was nothing short of cata-clysmic. “No single event in modern Korean history,” Hagen Koo writes,
“has influenced state formation more than the Korean War.”22 Of particular importance, especially as we compare state-society relations with those of the Philippines, is the issue of land reform. Prior to the war, reformist measures pushed by the Americans had been obstructed by the landed class; during the North Korean occupation, however, revolutionary land reform greatly weakened this class; after the war, American pressure forced Rhee to carry through earlier reform measures. With the landlord class
Reflections on a Reverse Image 549
thus wiped out, the Rhee regime no longer faced the threat of a nascent political-economic elite challenging it from within. Bruce Cumings writes of the war as a “great equalizer,” not only undermining the landed elite but also spawning a new group of entrepreneurs thriving on opportunities brought forth by massive social dislocation.23
While the South Korean state of the late 1940s was “extremely unstable and fragile”—not unlike its Philippine contemporary—the war brought considerable consolidation of state authority under the Rhee regime.24
This is reflected in the emergence of a modern and efficient army, the en-shrinement of the unchallenged ideology of an “anti-leftist state,” and efforts to control popular sectors.25 Massive quantities of U.S. aid provided the Rhee regime with myriad opportunities for allocating particularistic benefits and strengthening its base of political support. Rhee actively resisted American attempts to reintegrate Korea into colonial-era trading patterns, using his leverage in the geopolitical realm simultaneously to promote an alternative national development strategy and to strengthen his own regime. He nurtured a much stronger domestic capitalist class, largely dependent upon the state for its success, and ensured that the allocation of benefits would generate large contributions for the ruling party.26
In the late 1940s Rhee’s regime needed to accommodate the demands of an economic elite; by the late 1950s, it quite effectively manipulated a qualitatively different sort of economic elite now rooted much more in industry and commerce. At least in the political realm, Rhee was quite successful in achieving his goals: “By the late 1950s,” conclude Eckert and his colleagues, “Rhee had made the political system largely his own.”27
In the Philippines, as well, the political economy of the 1950s was characterized by corrupt rent-seeking and import-substitution industrialization (ISI). While at first glance this might seem to reveal major similarities with Rhee’s Korea, closer analysis reveals substantial differences. Broadly speaking, one can observe that if rent-seeking in Korea promoted the consolidation of political power in the ruling regime, rent-seeking in the Philippines benefited a political-economic elite that was not only diffuse but expanding in size. Reacting to a major balance-of-payments crisis in 1949, the newly created Central Bank of the Philippines instituted import and exchange controls with the strong backing of the United States and U.S. investors. The allocation of import and exchange licenses was rife with corruption, and several scandals erupted in the course of the decade over particularly favorable allotments provided to those with the best political connections. One (perhaps apocryphal) incident symbolizes the plunderous manner in which licenses were sometimes obtained: in the late 1950s, it is said, opposition congressman Ferdinand Marcos “burst into [the] of-
Comparative Perspective 550
fice” of a Central Bank official who had refused to license the imports of
“a well-heeled Chinese businessman” and pointed a revolver at the head of the official until “the documents were signed and turned over to him.”28
As in the case of Korea under Rhee, economists find little rationality in the process by which Filipino individuals and industries were selected.29
Unlike in Rhee’s Korea, however, it is more difficult to discern any regime-based political logic behind the madness of this period’s rampant rent-seeking. Industrialization was a major goal of national development planning, but Filipino leaders generally did not share Rhee’s nationalist aver-sion to the liberal prescriptions of American economic planners. (Indeed, rather than resisting dependence on the former colonial power, a major economic priority was continued access to U.S. markets.) Reflecting the highly decentralized character of political and economic power in the Philippines (especially under democratic institutions), the central allocation of economic benefits did little to promote the centralization of political power. Rather, the period of controls provided one more source of booty for an oligarchy whose strategies of capital accumulation had long depended on favorable access to the state apparatus. As a rule, what the oligarchs grabbed from the state was theirs to keep; the beneficiaries of the system had little if any obligation to contribute to (1) larger developmental objectives (in some cases, “industrialists” requested a foreign exchange license to support manufacturing ventures and then diverted the proceeds to import finished goods); (2) the coffers of the state (there were minimal taxes on the sale of foreign exchange); or (3) political parties (payoffs tended to go not to partie
s but rather to politicians). Finally, one can observe that—unlike in Korea—the Philippines saw no major transformation of the character of the elite from the late 1940s to the late 1950s: while the elite expanded in size and acquired more diverse economic interests, it remained a powerful political-economic elite.
In both Korea and the Philippines, changes in U.S. policy encouraged important shifts in development strategy. In Korea, the reduction of U.S.
aid in the late 1950s eventually brought down the Rhee-era political economy, and contributed to the end of the Rhee regime.30 Also in the late 1950s, the United States reassessed its support for the system of controls in the Philippines. A process of decontrol followed in 1960, and in 1962 the peso was devalued by roughly 50 percent.
By the end of the 1950s, after many years in which civil society had been quiescent, student activists began to challenge the autocratic basis of Syngman Rhee’s rule. The students’ April 1960 “revolution” brought the opposition Democratic Party to power, but a mere thirteen months later it was toppled in a military coup led by Park Chung Hee. In the wake of the
Reflections on a Reverse Image 551
coup, the new military government arrested the richest men in the country and condemned them as “illicit profiteers.”31 Subsequent compromises notwithstanding, this event highlights not only the clear separation between state and society that existed at the outset of the Park era, but also the highly asymmetric relationship between the country’s political and economic elites.32
Such a bold attack by the state on the business community would be absolutely unimaginable in the Philippine context, where the institutions of the state were commonly overwhelmed by the particularistic demands of a single dominant elite enjoying power in both the political and the economic realms. Instead of being dispossessed of their land, as in Korea, landlords came to possess much more diversified economic interests across a range of sectors. Politics was above all a fight for spoils, and continuing corruption scandals provided a steady supply of political ammunition as the two elite parties attacked each other, exchanged members, and rotated in power.33 When the Marcos era began in 1965, unaddressed grievances in the countryside and widespread disenchantment with corruption, electoral abuse, and economic travails helped to activate students, remobilize popular sectors, and reinvigorate leftist movements that had been temporarily vanquished in the 1950s.
Park Chung Hee Era Page 78