Speech
of
His Excellency Fidel V. Ramos
President of the Philippines
At the joint celebration of the 47th anniversary of the National Security Council and the 48th anniversary of the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency on the theme: “A Nation Is a Nation Secure”

[Delivered at the EDSA Shangri-La Hotel, Mandaluyong City, July 7, 1997]

A celebration
of our unity

YOUR PRESENCE at these celebrations symbolizes the political unity we have been able to organize in the national community these past five years. From the very beginning of our country’s history, disunity had been the greatest threat to its security and its stability.

In fact, Spanish history in the Philippines began with the conquest of the fractionalized principalities of this archipelago. The conquista was undertaken by no more than 400 to 500 Spaniards. Even at the time, the Filipinos already numbered between 1,000,000 and 1,250,000. Yet the warring barangays into which the archipelago was divided in the 16th century fell easily to the Spaniards.

How did that happen?

The conquest succeeded only because—in the words of the Augustinian historian Casimiro Diaz—the indigenous peoples “did not know their own strength; they could not unite with others: and, although they all desired liberty, they did not work together to secure it, and so they were subdued.”

Our search for peace and reconciliation

Mindful of this harsh lesson from history, I placed honorable peace and reconciliation with our military rebels, communist insurgents and Mindanao secessionists as my Administration’s most urgent priority in 1992.

So that, even before I took my oath of office, I initiated the peace process and the political reconciliation which were to become the foundations of the political stability that our country would need if it is to restore its economy to the path of growth and claim its place as an equal in East Asia—which is the world’s fastest-growing region.

Not only have I always regarded national unity as the foundation of national security. I have also regarded national security in terms much larger than merely military or defense-related. And when we contemplate our country’s contemporary history, we soon realize how economic insecurity, for one, can cause political instability.

Consider the series of agrarian rebellions in Central Luzon—which began in the 1920s, continued through the postwar period and remain with us until today, although on a much smaller scale. As Ka Luis Taruc here would testify, those rebellions were set off by the increasing refusal of landlords to recognize the right to survival and to a decent future of landless peasants and their families.

Even the military mutinies of the late 1980s were an offshoot of these peasant rebellions. Those coup attempts stemmed principally from our young officers’ frustrations beginning in the martial-law years at being committed to a bloody counterinsurgency campaign that, in the absence of reform, seemed doomed to last forever.

And the secessionist movement in Mindanao and Sulu arose largely because of our Muslim community’s increasing perception that it was being excluded from the development of the “Christian”—secularist—portions of the country.

Redefining national security

This is why—early on in the Ramos Administration—we redefined national security as founded ultimately on our country’s political unity, its economic strength and its social cohesion. In an increasingly interdependent world, we realized that national security would more and more depend on how efficiently we as a nation could create wealth and distribute it equitably and on how we could compete in the global market.

Many other countries now define their security in terms much larger than merely defense matters. Their strategic frameworks more and more include economic, political, social and even cultural factors as well.

Every state must account more and more for these nonmilitary factors in its calculations of national security—as force slowly but inevitably gives way to the more benign regime of mutual benefit in the relationships between nations and in interpersonal relations.

This is why many governments have restructured their cold-war intelligence establishments to include economic, trade, environmental and technology concerns. And they have geared them up to deal with nontraditional sources of threat to national security—such as the cross-border traffic in narcotic drugs and other transnational crime, and even capital flows.

A wider range of interests for the intelligence community

In our own case, this redefinition of national security has had the practical effect of broadening the interests and concerns of our security and intelligence communities.

Besides their traditional preoccupation with military intelligence, agencies like the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency are now compelled to delve also into the disciplines of trade, industry, finance, technology—the whole complex but interconnected challenge of achieving global competitiveness for our country.

And through institutions like the National Security Council, Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council and the Cabinet Clusters, information, intelligence, analyses and expert insight have all become decision-making tools more readily available to national policymakers.

Not only has the policymaking National Security Council become a more sophisticated venue for bipartisan or multipartisan policymaking in our foreign relations. We have also been able to harness its professional secretariat (alongside the conventional economic policymaking departments) in the work of conceptualizing economic strategy and social reforms—concepts that ultimately become translated into practical policies such as the “Philippines 2000” and the “Pole-Vaulting” programs.

During the ideological Cold War and the period of strongman rule, “intelligence” got a bad name—deservedly—because it was misused to harass intellectual dissidents and political enemies of the government.

Today, intelligence-gathering is done in a more transparent—a more open—manner: typically, by processing the raw information easily available in the media and in freely distributed official documents through the mechanism of think tanks and the sieve of professional expertise. Much of this information-gathering is now done by private think tanks that specialize either in development economics or in strategic studies.

Using foreknowledge

Politically, this Administration uses intelligence—what Sun Tzu calls, more appropriately, “foreknowledge”—not to divide but to unite the nation. Inputs from our offices dealing with various aspects of strategic studies—and located in the various Cabinet departments—enter routinely into all calculations of the national interests at every juncture of policymaking.

And, in this spirit, all the economic, social and political reforms we have achieved we have carried out to strengthen our country’s foundation of unity—knowing that, at bottom, we have only ourselves to depend on in our primordial task of safeguarding our country’s security and the integrity of its borders. And this is as it should be—because nationhood is nothing more than the acceptance of responsibility for our own fate.

Ultimately, of course, stability cannot be guaranteed by government fiat. Stability—if it is to endure—must spring organically from the very nature and quality of the political, social and economic policy environment.

  • A country is stable and secure where ordinary people are content—because they have a stake in the economy.
  • A country is stable and secure where the rule of law reigns—because the justice system regards rich and poor as equal in every way.
  • A country is stable and secure where there are no extremes of income and social inequality—because ordinary people can hope to fulfill the fullest possibilities of their lives.

Stability comes from the policy environment

This is the kind of stability that we, as the political, economic and intellectual elite of our country, should be striving for—together.

And that we are finally able to sit around like this—to break bread together in celebration of our unity—gives me hope that this kind of security—this kind of stability—we can achieve for this country we all love.

Recognizing in disunity our source of weakness, let us always seek in unity the source of our own strength, the light of our liberty and the foundation of our progress.