Why does the military ever intervene in politics?
The Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington has given us the classic reply: “What draws the soldiers into the political arena is not their own strength but rather the weakness of the political system.”
This was precisely why, nine years ago in February 1986, I myself joined as the Vice-Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces (second highest-ranking military officer) in a mutiny against the strongman Ferdinand E. Marcos. The corruption, elitism and incompetence of his regime had so weakened the Philippine State it became vulnerable to a Communist insurgency and a Muslim secession movement. Fortunately, our desperate and seemingly doomed mutiny caught the spark of massive people’s support and became the world’s first successful non-violent ‘people power’ revolution and the foundation of our restored democracy.
In the settled states of the West, the military is a defender of frontiers, a force for stability, and, on occasion, an instrument of foreign policy. In the new countries, it has been both the restorer of order and the midwife of revolutionary changes in politics and the economy. Even in Latin America — where the Presidency had sometimes been merely the “highest rank in the Army” — the military has almost as often taken a “Left” as well as “Right” role, depending on its self-interest, age-grouping, caste tradition and ideology.
What specific role the military takes up depends on how much the people of a given country are attached to civilian institutions, and the value they put to a government’s legitimacy. But we can trace the modern history of military interventionism back to the nineteenth century, when it became clear that the Western powers had outstripped the countries of Latin America, the Middle East and East Asia in weapons and productivity.
MILITARY INTELLIGENTSIA IN THE POOR COUNTRIES
The initial reaction of the traditionalist country resisting imperialist pressure was to try and learn the military technology of the Western powers. As a result, its officer corps came to understand the West better than did its courtiers and bureaucrats. The military became the nation’s intelligentsia and political conscience.
In Japan, Turkey and Egypt, the young officers came to realize the challenge from the West was not merely military, but also involved the more compelling need to raise their own levels of state capacity in order to keep in step with a modernizing world. And this was what the samurai of Meiji Japan, Kemal Ataturk, and Gamal Abdel Nasser set themselves to do, with varying degrees of success.
For instance, the modernization of Japan started from a decision by its revolutionary elite — an elite, fearing colonization, which raised the vision of a “rich country, strong army.” In China, Mao Zedong and his People’s Liberation Army (PLA) set out to do the same, after winning a protracted social revolution that lasted 150 years. Nationalist armies created new nations in the Dutch East Indies and in French Indochina after World War II.
WEAKMAN RULE BY POLITICIANS
In Africa — where for the most part freedom came peacefully — charismatic politicians inherited makeshift states of fragile nationality. Consequently, the Independence generation of African politicians became increasingly despotic, corrupt, and grandiose in its pretensions. Within a decade, the African states had one after the other fallen to a predatory kind of militarism reminiscent of the Roman Empire.
In many developing countries, civilian autocrats had ruled only by balancing the different centers of political and economic power — rather than by commanding them. In this relative helplessness, the regimes of some so-called “strongmen” were really closer to what the Latin Americans call “weakman” rule.
Between 1945 and 1982, the military ousted well over a third of all Latin American governments, which had been unable to cope with the stresses of industrial development. Cleavages between exporters and industrialists and between capital and labor had so deepened as to make compromise impossible.
In East Asia, bitter ideological divisions were often added on to these economic conflicts. Once the system fell into this fatal weakness, military rule often was the only cure. The military became the forceful binder of countries that had not sufficiently developed national consciousness.
EAST ASIA’S EXPERIENCE OF MARTIAL RULE
Military interventionism in the new countries during the postwar period was often different from the classic Latin-American model — in which, for the most part, rival caudillos had simply replaced one another. In these later interventions, the armed forces entered politics as an institution, to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the representative state.
Authoritarianism is usually defined as a kind of transitional rule in the developing countries: it is undermined by both economic failure and economic success. And the process of change, once it begins, becomes hard to stop — because fractions of the old elite begin to stake their own future on further liberalization and criticism of the old order.
Since the middle-1980s, we have seen — hand in hand with economic growth — political systems loosening up all over the region. In Taiwan and South Korea, military governments gave in with relative grace (compared with the Stalinists of Eastern Europe) to middle-class pressures for political liberalization — the ground for which they had themselves prepared, by social policies that emphasize income equality and social mobility, primary health care, technological education, and bureaucratic merit.
In both countries, there has been a gradual shift in government’s role from leading and guiding to indicating and recommending strategies for the industrial and business sector. Most everywhere, economic growth is financing the professionalization of military establishments.
THE MILITARY AND THE PHILIPPINE STATE
In the Philippines, our armed forces during the American period started off as dedicated and law-abiding professionals and remained so throughout World War II and up to the early 1970s. The officer corps was, however, subverted by inducements of the strongman Marcos, especially opportunities to be part of the Palace elite. Under martial law, so many general officers became his pliant collaborators that the young officers who plotted to bring him down started out by indicting their seniors for being “too comfortable to be interested, or too wealthy to care.”
The 1986 mutiny gave the Philippine officer corps the chance to stand up and be counted. Individual officers commanding strategic units had to make agonizing choices between their loyalty to the chain of command and their compassion for the civilians who blocked their path to where we, the mutineers, were holed out. In the end, the majority of our armed forces, on my call, sided with the Filipino people and threw out the dictator into exile after four days of intense, but bloodless, confrontation.
Ironically, during the subsequent consolidation period, I had to lead our Armed Forces to fight some of my erstwhile comrades-in-arms who turned against the successor-government of the courageous Mrs. Corazon C. Aquino, whom I served first as Armed Forces Chief of Staff, and later as Defense Secretary.
From mid-1986 to late 1989, I had to rally loyalist troops several times against rebellious young officers anguished over their role in restoring a civilian government whom they regarded as a throwback to the bankrupt old order.
Again, fortunately, the great majority of the Armed Forces of the Philippines supported the Constitution and the Presidency of Corazon Aquino, and civilian democratic rule was preserved for the Philippines.
REMOVING THE ROOTS OF REBELLION; RAISING NATIONAL CAPACITY
When it came time for me to try for the Presidency, I did so with scrupulous regard for constitutional processes. I resigned as Defense Secretary in July 1991 and campaigned all over the archipelago with Mrs. Aquino’s support, but without the backing of a major party. Amazingly for a non-politician, I won a plurality of the votes in a field of seven candidates in the Presidential elections of May 1992.
Now I lead a nationwide effort to create the conditions for self-sustaining growth, to raise the capacity of the Philippine State, and to pull out the roots of rebellion from national society. The best measure of how well we have done over these past two and a half years is the outpouring of praise we have received from the international press. Asiaweek itself says “the biggest turnaround story [of 1994] is the Philippines. President Fidel Ramos switched the lights back on — and the economy brightened up. He got a governing coalition together and talked peace with Maoist, Muslim and military rebels. He opened the phone, banking and power sectors, pared tariffs further and sped up investment processing. The year’s estimated GDP growth, around 5.5%, tops even his planners’ most optimistic forecasts”.
My own satisfaction comes from the way we have been able to accomplish so much — by taking the democratic way to development, instead of the martial and authoritarian rule instituted by Marcos and other East Asian, Latin-American and African leaders of his time.
We have been able to institute structural reforms because of restored political stability and a more harmonious executive-legislative relationship at the national level. We have moved the insurgency, the military rebellion and even the secessionist movement in parts of our Muslim South from the arena of armed struggle to the negotiating table.
More and more, our field officers realize that for Government to react to insurgency and other internal threats in a purely military way is merely to alienate local people and enable the guerrillas to extend their influence. In the past, with the absence of real social reform, countering the insurgency became a war in which there could be no real victory for the government forces. Thus, social reform and people’s economic empowerment have the highest priority in the Philippine Government’s agenda.
In the Philippines, as elsewhere in East Asia, the professional military is the stepping stone to upward mobility for bright young men from poor families. The valedictorian of Class ’93 of our Military Academy is the son of a policeman of Cebu, and that of Class ’94 the son of a mechanic of Benguet province.
For four decades after the Philippine independence in 1946, we Filipinos have had no real sense of an external threat. This was mainly because of the protective umbrella provided by the United States until late 1992 when the U.S. naval forces withdrew from Subic Bay upon the termination of the Philippine-U.S. Military Bases Agreement. Now the Philippine military has become our only shield and armor.
We have restored professional standards for promotions, assignments and career-advancement in the officer corps. And, as the insurgency has eased, we have assigned the military to community development work, environmental protection and other civilian nation-building tasks. It is building roads through the rural backwoods and providing health and sanitation support as in the Mindanao area of the Southern Philippines. It delivers social services, including non-formal training and education, to poor communities in remote provinces and areas hit by natural calamities.
We are also working around the clock to remove the weaknesses that remain in the Philippine State. The most worrying among these is the avoidance, if not the removal, of political gridlock in the national decision-making process. This malady, coupled with the protectionist tendencies of monopolists in the business world, caused the Philippines to be the laggard in East Asia for three decades while her neighbors were becoming economic tigers.
But the Philippines, indeed, has now turned around. And the Philippine military has contributed substantially to our country’s economic take-off and social unification.