Speech
of
His Excellency Fidel V. Ramos
President of the Philippines
At the World Affairs Council, Asia Foundation and Commonwealth Club luncheon

[Delivered in San Francisco, California, U.S.A., November 10, 1993]

A global alliance
for democracy

IT TOOK US 12 hours to cross the Pacific and touch land in the dynamic city of San Francisco and this great state of California. But we Filipinos have a saying that no journey is hard when one arrives to a warm and friendly welcome.

I should thank you twice for the privilege of this forum: first, for receiving me; and second, for getting together for this meeting with me. When these three formidable organizations— the World Affairs Council, the Asia Foundation and the Commonwealth Club—join together in one forum, it has to be for a very good reason. For this, I am deeply grateful.

“Halfhearted imperialism”

People here generally date the connection between our two countries—6,000 miles apart—from the western expansion of the American republic. The same pioneer spirit that settled California in the 1850s colonized our archipelago—50-odd years later—in what Barbara Tuchman termed a “halfhearted imperialism.”

From San Francisco’s Presidio sailed the volunteer regiments who fought in America’s only colonial war. From here too embarked the Thomasite teachers who gave my country mass education in English.

We Filipinos like to remember an earlier time, when the tides of history flowed the other way.

For 250 years—from 1565 until 1815—the Manila-Acapulco galleons—after Pacific crossings sometimes lasting seven months—made their landfall on the California coast.

The voyagers’ need for way-stations after the arduous crossing compelled the early Spaniards to settle the California coast—founding seaports from Santa Barbara and San Diego to as far north as San Francisco and Monterey.

Today the countries rimming this great ocean make up the world’s fastest-growing region.

So vigorous is the trade across the Pacific that it has surpassed the trade across the Atlantic.

America is an integral part of the region—as the coming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Seattle dramatizes.

The promise of the Pacific

This early, the next hundred years have been tagged the Asia-Pacific Century. Over that period, the countries of the Pacific Basin, taken together, may well become—in the Japanese Saburo Okita’s words—”the driving force for dynamism in the world economy.”

This promise of the Pacific depends on America’s keeping to its role—as the heart of an open trading region spanning three continents, as the fulcrum in the regional balance of power, and as the guarantor of regional stability against the ambitions of any adventurist power.

The end of the Cold War has again ignited America’s recurring debate between isolationists and internationalists over the objectives and methods of U.S. foreign policy.

Those who urge Washington to bring home the “American boys and girls” still deployed in 20 countries worldwide—from Macedonia to Haiti and Somalia—invoke an argument with tremendous emotional appeal.

But isolationism for America is no longer a practical option.

Geography, history and the linkages of the international economy all compel your country to maintain global interests.

As Ambassador Madeleine Albright, your permanent representative to the United Nations, has pointed out:

“Whether measured in arms proliferation, refugees on our shores, the destabilization of allies, or loss of exports, jobs or investments, the cost of runaway regional conflicts sooner or later comes home to America.”

But beyond this practical consideration, we in East Asia continue to trust in the unique sense of mission which we know is part of the idea of America.

Its founding fathers saw America as a venture greater than just another national enterprise. They saw their country as bringing a revolutionary message to the rest of mankind.

“We are the heirs of all time,” wrote Herman Melville, “and with all nations we divide our inheritance.”

This inheritance America itself has not always spent wisely. But owing to their belief that America represents humanity’s striving for a just social order, America’s leaders have always had a spacious sense of American self-interest.

The sense of a shared destiny

In the 1950s this sense of a destiny shared with other free peoples expressed itself in the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift; in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was America’s first “peacetime” military alliance; and in President Truman’s Point Four Program.

America’s leadership of the United Nations Expeditionary Forces in Korea—where, after finishing at West Point, I served as an infantry platoon leader in my country’s 20th Battalion Combat Team—was also part of this unique sense of mission.

Since the need for cooperation among free nations is not over, the world’s need for idealism in American foreign policy today is still as great as it has been these past 40 years.

In fact, the end of the Cold War offers the world community an opportunity not only to remove the threat of force from international relations but also to achieve unprecedented prosperity in a democratic free-market system.

But this opportunity our world cannot seize without a unifying vision and the will to achieve it.

We look to America to supply that vision—and that will-to a global alliance for democracy.

What world role do we in East Asia see for America?

If it is no longer the policeman of the world—the lone western marshal of High Noon—America can still be the world community’s leader in deterring or stemming clear-cut cases of aggression or threats.

A concert of powers

We believe America must become the motive force of a concert of powers dedicated to keeping the peace in the world through multilateral action.

Such a central coalition is now feasible for three basic reasons:

First, although mankind has not quite reached the peak of its ideological evolution—the end of history Francis Fukuyama imagines—the great powers now certainly share a high degree of ideological agreement.

Second, the world community shares an ever larger area of economic uniformity. The effectiveness of open economies— free markets, unimpeded trade and investment flow—has been convincingly demonstrated, most notably in East Asia.

The third and most important reason is that the powers now know war among them has become unthinkable—because such a war is bound to result in mutually assured destruction.

This new concert of powers would have more than enough to do in our disorderly world.

As the stability enforced by the Cold War breaks down and repressive regimes collapse, ordinary people are reasserting their local identities against the homogenizing influences of the international culture.

All over the world, this modem tribalism generates religious and ethnic quarrels, as well as secession and irredentism.

Nor has the specter of nuclear proliferation been exorcised. Right now 10 countries have nuclear weapons. By the year 2000 their number could reach 21.

Ideally this central coalition should be housed in the U.N. Security Council—from where it can assert the moral authority of the world community.

Poverty and inequality among nations

Beyond fighting limited brushfires, America must lead its global alliance in easing poverty and inequality among nations.

Democracy believes there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.

But in many parts of the world, mass poverty closes off even that possibility. In Africa alone—according to Oxfam— some 20 million people are poised on the knife edge between life and death.

My own country counts itself relatively well-off. But even among us one out of five Filipinos lives on an individual income equivalent to less than one U.S. dollar a day.

This is why we are determined to modernize our economy— so that it can lift up the lives of ordinary Filipinos.

Political radicalism is another by-product of underdevelopment, and its root cause may be frustration with the inequities of the international economy.

We cannot deny inequality among nations is still growing.

Left to itself, the international economy develops mechanisms of privilege—just as we know national societies do— which lock in the poor countries to their relative deprivation.

Our collective concept of social justice must make the leap from the individual in the national community to the individual poor country in the family of nations.

I believe a basic change is developing in the world. The change I see is that resort to force in international relations is less and less necessary.

Mutual security and regional stability more and more depend not on arms or military alliances, but on interdependent and mutually progressive economies.

Our globe is no longer a world of strategic sea-lanes and chokepoints.

Command of the sea is no longer necessary to acquire and preserve “foreign markets” and “raw-material sources,” as it was during the age of imperialism.

A truly global market has risen; its complex linkages are speeded up by the new communications and information technology. And it is founded not on force but on mutual benefit.

The dangers we also share

We can no longer equate nationalism with central planning in a closed economy. For nationalism to flourish, it must respond to the demands of globalism.

Besides mutual benefit, however, shared dangers also compel our cooperation.

Traditional concepts of national sovereignty can no longer cope with the flow across frontiers of environmental hazards, aids and other epidemics, dangerous drugs, terrorist weapons, illegal immigrants and criminal bands.

No single state—not even the American superpower—can cope with these nonmilitary threats by itself. We shall need to agree on new rules and new institutions to deal with them.

In the countries of the Pacific Rim, our goal must ultimately be a community of Asia-Pacific nations.

The linkages among our countries are growing organically—out of geographic and economic complementarities—out of mutual advantage—in a word, out of pure market forces—and not anymore purely out of the formal decisions of governments.

We are correct in beginning modestly in Asia and the Pacific—with practical modes of cooperation that build up mutual reassurance even as we thresh out specific disputes and conflicts.

Already we have brought China, Russia and Vietnam into an informal security forum under the auspices of the ASEAN postministerial conference.

Our concept of common security is to seek security with other countries and not against them—to build mutual confidence, not mutual deterrence.

To complete this cycle of reassurance, we need America’s engagement in East Asia. We need the United States to help us build a political framework that encourages enlightened self-interest—but allows no power to dominate the region.

Beyond that, we expect America to throw its weight to propagate democracy, to ensure that democracy blooms in our portion of the world—and grows into full flower.

Be true to your spirit

During the Cold War, America was sometimes accused of a cynical willingness to sacrifice democracy abroad to preserve democracy at home. Now, at last, America can reconcile power and morality in its foreign relations.

America can be to the world what its founders meant it to be—the ultimate refuge of all those “yearning to breathe free.”

Throughout its time on earth, mankind has been striving for the ideal society. This ideal may remain forever beyond our grasp.

“But,” as Barbara Tuchman wrote, “if the great question— whether it is still possible to reconcile democracy with social order and individual liberty—is to find a positive answer, it will be here in America.”

If I have any single message for this great country—and everyone involved in your organizations, which take a keen interest in Asia—it would be this:

America, always be true to your spirit—for in being true to your values and ideals, you also serve your own highest self-interest, and of those in the world who wish you well.