Speech
of
His Excellency Fidel V. Ramos
President of the Philippines
On the conferment of an Honorary Doctorate by the Moscow Institute of International Relations (MIIR)
[Delivered at the MIIR Auditorium, Moscow, Russia, September 11, 1997]
A convergence
of destinies
NO TWO COUNTRIES seem more dissimilar than Russia and the Philippines. Yours is a vast nation—straddling two continents—endowed with tremendous natural resources—an ancient civilization—and a powerful state armed with nuclear weapons.
My country is a maritime nation of 7,107 islands—only half a century away from 400 years of colonial rule—with an armed force suitable only for coastal defense. Asia’s first free republic, it is a nation 70 million strong with a democratic tradition that will be 100 years old on June 12, 1998.
Despite their dissimilarities in size, power, national character and historical experience, Russia and the Philippines have been drawn together. They share a world being swept by the same tide of interdependence and inspired by the same political ideals.
And so our two countries are driven to work together for similar—or at least compatible—objectives. Dissimilar as they are, their destinies have converged.
Both Russia and the Philippines have become part of a world in which security is to be found no longer in military alliances or in the consolidation of buffer zones, or in the balance of terror.
Mutual security based on interdependent economies
A basic change is developing in international relations. And the change I see is that—in increasing portions of the globe, especially in Asia and Europe—the resort to force is becoming less and less necessary. Mutual security more and more now depends on interdependent economies, no longer on arms or military alliances.
If, in the age just past, great powers typically progressed from economic strength to military power, today no state need aspire to hegemony—because it can attain its goals through peaceful commerce and integration in the community of nations.
Our world is no longer a world of “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, which is founded not on force but on mutual benefit.
Driven by the logic of their market systems, more and more countries are moving toward pluralist political systems. Representative government has become institutionalized in Eastern Europe. Latin America’s democratic transformation is progressing steadily. The process is almost completed in Asia, and restarting in Africa after apartheid. Although pockets of authoritarianism remain, most countries have embraced the objectives and practices of the free-market system.
Russia itself has laid down its burden of empire, dissolved its military alliances, brought down the barriers that once divided it from the world and built partnerships with powers that had been its long-time ideological adversaries.
Similarly, the Philippines now seeks its security primarily in good relations with its closest neighbors, in dialogue and cooperation with other regional states, and in expanding its network of friendships in a world more interconnected than it ever was.
Repudiating inward-looking nationalism
Our two countries are alike in yet another way. Both of them entered the world economic community only recently—after years of being estranged from it by inward-looking nationalism. Both our countries have only recently opened up their economies and freed them from the restrictions that had prevented economic forces from expanding wealth and benefiting ordinary people.
We of the Philippines have been left behind East Asia’s dynamic growth of the past two decades because we mistakenly equated political nationalism with economic self-sufficiency. Now we recognize we must join the global economy—and not isolate ourselves from it.
We must redefine our nationalism to suit the globalization of production that is relentlessly reshaping international economic and political relationships.
Now we are aware our sustained development depends on how strong we can build our faith in ourselves—on the competitiveness of our industries—and on the efficiency and productivity of our workpeople.
So, just as you are doing here in Russia, we Filipinos are reforming our economy—to make the whole of national society an efficient creator and distributor of wealth.
Transforming our two societies
We started by removing the barriers—erected over the last 40-45 years—against foreign investment and multinational industry. We have also privatized a good number of our public corporations—and the process continues.
Over the past five years during my Administration, we have enacted 158 structural and landmark laws in economic reform, social reform and political reform—all for the purpose of empowering our people with a culture of excellence and making our country more competitive regionally and globally.
The transformation of Russia has been even more dramatic and more revolutionary. But the series of epochal events climaxed by the lowering of the red flag flying over the Kremlin on December 26, 1991, has reconnected the Russian people to their history of resistance to absolutism, and restored the sense of empowerment to their lives.
In both our countries, economic transition may have inflicted hardship on some groupings in the national community, but liberalization, deregulation and privatization have also reinvigorated the native sense of confidence in ordinary people—and released entrepreneurial energies that have already restored both our economies to the path of growth.
Through its participation, Russia has already transformed the elite Group of 7 industrial countries into the Group of 8 (G-8). As its economy gains momentum, we can expect Russia’s ample supply of well-educated and highly skilled workpeople to succeed in attracting multinationals engaged in the technological and scientific industries.
We Filipinos too have much to celebrate these days—in the economy and in our national life as a whole. From nearly zero growth when my Administration began in 1992, we have added—year after year—to national productivity in agriculture, in industry and in services. With a single-digit inflation rate, stable prices, a growth rate of more than 6 percent and a budget surplus for three years running, we can look forward to reaching the levels of growth most of our vigorous neighbors have known for more than a decade—and where we in our turn will strive to stay.
The cornerstone of our foreign relations
Let me now turn to a brief outline of our foreign policy.
Not too long ago, we Filipinos had set ourselves apart from our neighbors, glorifying in our self-styled distinctiveness as the “only Christian nation” and as “democracy’s showcase” in the Asia-Pacific.
The departure of the United States Navy from Subic Bay on November 24,1992, ended an era during which—for 421 uninterrupted years—there had been no single day that foreign troops were not based on Philippine soil.
Now we have found our rightful place and a significant role in the Asia-Pacific. Today we identify primarily with our partners in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations—and we have made our relationships in the Asia-Pacific the cornerstone of our foreign relations.
ASEAN’s dream of one Southeast Asia
The recognition of ASEAN, which celebrates its 30th founding anniversary this year, as a key factor for promoting regional cooperation and stability has indeed been gratifying. The ASEAN Regional Forum for political and security concerns has attracted 14 outside powers—including Russia and the European Union. And even APEC, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, has adopted ASEAN’s negotiating methods of consultation and consensus to overcome barriers to its concerted action.
Last November the Philippines hosted the Fourth Leaders7 Summit of the 18 member-economies of APEC at Subic Bay. That summit adopted the Manila Action Plan (MAPA ’96) containing concrete and doable commitments by its members to establish free and open trade in the Asia-Pacific—by the year 2010 for the developed APEC economies and 2020 for the developing economies.
The unification of Southeast Asia has been a 30-year dream of ASEAN’s founding fathers—as a safeguard against political and economic threats and uncertainties. It is close to being completed: nine of the 10 Southeast Asian countries (except Cambodia) have already been incorporated in ASEAN.
Unification will prevent Southeast Asia from becoming once more an arena for the strategic competition of the great powers—as it had been. Asia’s attractiveness to foreign investors and tradespeople enables its individual member-states to plug their economies into the global grid of information, technology and science.
A unified ASEAN will thus be able to exert a moderating political influence on East Asian affairs—considering its collective economic clout, its record of work efficiency and its 440 million people, who constitute a plentiful source of manpower skills and who themselves are a vast market for the world’s products.
Because their own relationships are still forming, the great powers with interests in East Asia have been content to let ASEAN take the initiative in dealing with regional security problems. Thus ASEAN has become the hub of preventive diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific. Although still in its nascent stage, the ASEAN Regional Forum has already drawn the four great regional powers—China, Japan, Russia and the United States—in a continuing dialogue to deal with regional security concerns.
Conflicting claims in the South China Sea
One of our principal concerns is that complex disputes arising from overlapping exclusive economic zones and conflicting claims to islands of the South China Sea could—by design or miscalculation—escalate into open hostilities.
Such a conflict would disrupt not only the maritime heartland of Southeast Asia but also the strategic sea-lanes through which the bulk of East Asian trade passes. It would alarm not just the states bordering the China Sea but also the world community. Certainly Russia itself has a strategic interest in the China Sea’s continuance as an international maritime expressway—open to all innocent passage.
The Philippines has proposed the demilitarization of the South China Sea islets claimed by six littoral states and the cooperative exploitation of the China Sea’s maritime resources through a joint development authority. By the careful exercise of preventive diplomacy the Philippines and China have agreed to a “code of conduct” on the disputed Spratly Island group, worked out together after a serious flare-up of the tensions there in February 1995.
Russia’s role in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific
The idea that our countries have both a national and a regional interest has taken time to establish itself. But I believe it is growing in our midst. And we need to cultivate it—if the East Asian community is to deal with problems that lie beyond the competence of single nations.
Sharing as it does the landmass of mainland Asia, Russia has always had a vested interest in East Asian stability. In the past, Moscow has regarded East Asia largely as a threat that the expansionist Asian powers might pose to its resource-rich and underpopulated maritime provinces. Not only have these threats diminished in our time: there are also tremendous economic opportunities opening for Russia in the Asia-Pacific, which is the world’s fastest-growing region.
Russia’s trade with both Japan and China has been growing fast in recent years. And beyond trade, there are tremendous potentials in the complementarities of its resource-rich far eastern economic region with its rapidly industrializing northeast Asian neighbors.
East Asians have always accorded Russia a major role in the regional power balance. I do believe that Russia has much to gain in joining the Asia-Pacific states in building the security with, and not against, others; and in creating development that enriches the life of every nation in the region—in constructing what President Yeltsin has called a “democratic zone of trust, cooperation and security” across the Eastern Hemisphere.
This November the 18 APEC leaders will meet in Vancouver; and in December the ASEAN heads of government will meet with their counterparts from China, Japan and the Republic of Korea.
Then, in April next year, the leaders of these northeast Asian countries and seven ASEAN heads of government, including the Philippines, will meet in London with the heads of government of the European Union for our second Asia-Europe Meeting.
Russian engagement in East Asia
It is my hope that the day will soon come when the Russian President becomes an active participant in all these economic and political networks of cooperative security whose value and importance continue to grow.
What role do we want Russia to play in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific?
We of the Philippines would like to see Russia deeply engaged in the political, economic and security affairs of East Asia. We want to see its residual territorial disputes with its eastern neighbors resolved. And we want it to be judicious in its transfer of military technology.
In the ASEAN Regional Forum, we appreciate Russia’s constructive participation so far and we want it to play an even more active part. Once the modalities for association by nuclear-weapon states are finalized, we hope Russia can accede to the protocol of the treaty declaring Southeast Asia a nuclear-weapons-free zone, which the 10 heads of government in the region signed in December 1995.
In economic cooperation, we want to see East Asian countries investing in Russia—and Russians investing in East Asia. We hope that Russia’s trade with Southeast Asia intensifies. We wish to see more Russian flights and shipping between Russian and Southeast Asian ports.
We want to see more Russian scientists working in Southeast Asia, and more Southeast Asian scientists studying in Russia. We propose more university exchanges, reciprocal learning of each other’s languages and expanded cultural exchanges.
A benign explosion of growth
There is much ground, and much promise, in such an invigorated engagement and involvement for both Russia and East Asia.
Russia not only has vast natural resources: it also has advanced science and technology; talented people, and improved economic performance. East Asia has steadily growing economies, entrepreneurial spirit, expanding markets, capital and higher family incomes, skilled workpeople, managerial expertise, organizational talent and natural resources.
Such expanded engagement and synergistic combination could produce a benign explosion of growth that will generate better lives for all our peoples.
Let me sum up and conclude.
Russia and the Philippines may be dissimilar countries. Our destinies, however, have fortuitously converged in a world rapidly being united—not only by technology and by migratory capital but also by the moral demands of ordinary people for their empowerment and access to wider democratic space.
What Russia stands for in the world
In the summer of 1991 we Filipinos relived our nonviolent People Power Revolution of February 1986 as we viewed the television images of the Russian people standing together to sweep away autocracy and then resisting its return.
In 1988 the Philippine Government convened and hosted the first conference of the newly restored democracies of the world. Thirteen such new democracies attended that gathering. Last week, 74 newly restored democracies, including some of the republics of the Commonwealth of Independent States, gathered in Romania for their third international conference. What a great achievement for democratic nations around the world! What a big difference in the lives of people in those countries! What a bright promise for other peoples elsewhere!
Today we Filipinos want to see a democratic Russia engaged in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific—not only for the economic benefits that such engagement can bring to both our peoples but also for the moral values that Russia stands for in the world.
The Soviet Union had come to being “as the manifestation of an idea, which was that there existed a shortcut to the perfection of political institutions and a just society that people, incapable of understanding their own best interest, had to be forced to accept,”* Few of those who saw that idealist dream transformed into bureaucratic tyranny could remember the enthusiasm with which working peoples everywhere had met Russia’s socialist experiment at its beginning.
The egalitarian idea is relevant still
However, during that difficult but heroic period, the socialist idea that rich and poor people have an equal moral worth was a revolutionary idea—whose impact on the world we can trace until now to the egalitarian values that have become embedded in the social legislation of every civilized country’s legal system.
What are these values?
The egalitarian idea is relevant still for developing countries like ours, which are struggling still to lift up the common life. In the Philippines we urgently need to infuse egalitarian values into our kind of capitalism. Although we pride ourselves on being among the most representative of democracies—where elections go all the way down to the level of the village council—Philippine capitalism still has many characteristics left over from the 19th century, during which time it was believed that the rich and the landed gentry were automatically entitled to vast wealth without having to work hard for it, being the products of “natural selection.”
We Filipinos now aspire to a kind of capitalism that not only emphasizes efficiency and individual creativeness but also cares for the poor and disadvantaged whom development and progress have left behind.
A national community based on sharing
We seek a way of placing individual initiative—the driving force of progress—within an empowering moral order, within a community based on compassion, civic responsibility, social harmony—on caring and sharing.
Russia’s experience these past 80 years teaches us that we must balance our ideals and our convictions with a sense of what is possible and doable. Governments cannot force mankind to strive for economic sufficiency social equity and happiness. But it is their duty to do all they can to actualize what they can of mankind s convictions and aspirations, which peoples everywhere cherish in their hearts.
This is the main thrust of the Philippine Government as we prepare our people for global competitiveness in the 21st century. This, too, I believe, is Russia’s primary concern for the future.
It is necessary to work together, and today is a good day to start.
* Walter Laqueur, The Dream That Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union, Oxford University Press, 1994