Speech
of
His Excellency Fidel V. Ramos
President of the Philippines
Upon the acceptance of an Honorary Doctorate in Laws conferred by the University of Melbourne on the occasion of his State visit to Australia

[Delivered at the Parkville Campus, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, August 21, 1995]

Developing as
a democracy

I THANK this great institution of learning for conferring upon me this high honor. This I gladly accept in the name of my countrymen and for our beloved Philippines.

The citation recognizes what my people and my country have achieved and are doing today—to bring democracy, education and development to our land. By this you also affirm the sense of kinship between Australia and the Philippines as nations inhabiting the same Asia-Pacific region and espousing the same ideals of democracy and freedom.

The University of Melbourne and Asia

We are aware of what the University of Melbourne has been doing to foster greater understanding between Australians and Asians, and to deepen consciousness in Australia of its place and role in the Asia-Pacific region.

Your doors have been opened to many students from Asian countries, including the Philippines.

The introduction of Asian languages in the University is also worthy of mention. I will only point out that your Asian Language Room could be further enriched with the inclusion of the Filipino language.

In these activities, the University of Melbourne reminds us of a sometimes forgotten fact: that relations between peoples are not only spun by governments and their foreign service. They are especially fostered by our institutions of learning, which have been connecting even before there were nation-states.

I will therefore reply to this high honor by telling you about the journey of my people and my country—from the womb of empire to independence, from the years of crisis and decline to the present time of growth and optimism.

There used to be a popular caricature of the Philippines—fashioned by Filipinos themselves and popularized by the media—that we faltered so long as a nation because we are the product of “350 years in a Spanish convent and 50 years in Hollywood.” The heady mix of religion and fantasy—it is suggested—made us confused.

The meeting of East and West

A more generous reading of our history would say that we are the product of the historic meeting of East and West. Throughout our history, the Philippines stood at the confluence of Islamic and Christian influences, of Eastern and Western cultures.

From the fount of Western civilization, we imbibed beliefs in human dignity, freedom, justice and democracy.

From our Asian location and heritage, we have learned much of what is distinctive in Eastern civilization—the importance of family, culture and community.

The messianism of our early colonizers—the Spaniards—made the Philippines the only Christian nation in Asia.

The thrust of our second colonizer—the Americans—was secular. On a base of mass education, the Americans built on the Philippine Archipelago a representative democracy unique in colonial Asia.

From such rich and varied beginnings, we became a free republic with great expectations. But our story has instead been a striking mixture of achievements and disappointments. We did not automatically become, as America hoped, democracy’s showcase in Asia. Neither did democracy immediately bring progress and development as our people wanted.

For this there are many reasons—not least our 20-year immersion in authoritarianism, which squandered away the early gains of our democracy; the Cold War, which made our country a troubled battleground of ideologies; and the delusion of equating economic protectionism with economic self-sufficiency.

But after four decades of false starts and false hopes, we are finally turning things around in our country. Today, we know we have entered the mainstream of global commerce in order to develop. Today, we are a nation on the move to reinvent itself.

That reinvention is not just the rhetoric of high aspirations. We have had three years of accelerating growth, and this year we should exceed 6 percent growth. More important, the long-term outlook is good.

Time magazine has commented: “A new era has clearly dawned . . . signs of the turnaround are everywhere.”

For its part, the World Bank has observed: “The Philippine Government has made considerable progress during the last three years in setting the foundation for sustained and broad-based growth over the longer term.”

Philippine democracy

We Filipinos would be the last to say that our struggle for modernization is won. We still have a long uphill road to travel.

Nonetheless, there are important lessons already worth examining in the Philippine experience.

This may surprise some of you, but the most suspect of ideals today in our part of the world is the demanding ideal of democracy. There is a belief that democracy and economic growth are incompatible in developing countries—principally because our East Asian neighbors have succeeded or are succeeding in modernizing by following an authoritarian course.

Democracy is suspect because its exuberance sometimes generates political instability, which is inimical to economic growth. The separation of powers in government—which is a canon of democratic theory—is regarded as a needless hindrance to the making of public policy.

I do not know how this argument can stand the rigors of analysis by political and social scientists here at the University of Melbourne. If dictatorial rule had succeeded in lifting up some societies, many more have regressed under it. We Filipinos should know. We passed that way ourselves—to our sorrow.

The so-called quarrel between democracy and authoritarianism in Asia seems to me misplaced.

The glue to social cohesion

In my view, there is no single, unfailing formula for development. Every country must develop according to—and from—its own peculiar conditions and circumstances. In the case of the Philippines, democracy is a given. It is the glue to our social cohesion, and our economic modernization must proceed from it.

We are developing as a democracy—not as an example to boast before other peoples, but because history has so shaped our political culture that any other way will not work with us.

In a sense, this is analogous to Australia’s development. In your historic journey, there was no other course that would have worked for you but democracy, for this is part of your heritage.

In the work of governance, the key element, I believe, is not a government’s degree of social control, but how it exercises that control. And that depends on the government’s motivation—and the capacity and effectiveness of its machinery.

It is clear that Philippine democracy has suffered from many imperfections—not least the fact that our political democracy was superimposed on what was basically an oligarchic economy at the start.

Democracy, we have realized, could never work in our country if it amounted only to a democracy of pressure groups. The Philippine State had to be set free from the importunings of the elite and the monopolistic. The economy had to be governed not by politics, but by markets.

Strategies for reform

Thus we launched over these past three years a comprehensive program of reform—of putting our house in order so that development could take place.

The critical strategies were five:

First, restoring political stability and civil order after the end of strongman rule that lasted for 14 years, from our People Power Revolution of February 1986 to early 1992 and the instability of the transition. We have moved to negotiate a peaceful and honorable settlement with the insurgencies that once racked the country. Crime has been contained. And in three years, we have now successfully held three key elections.

The second strategy was opening the economy to competition—to all who bring in new capital, new knowledge and new efficiency. We have dismantled monopolies and cartels that have disfigured economic activity in the country. And we have brought down tariffs as part of our program to develop global competitiveness in our industries.

The third strategy is enhancing the political capacity of Government—by checking corruption and inefficiency in the civil service and adopting new standards of performance and accountability in our bureaucracy. For we cannot meet the challenge of modernization unless Government can fill its end of managing the macroeconomy, laying the infrastructure for development and providing basic public services.

The fourth strategy is social reform. In a country where 60 percent of the people are poor, you cannot have development unless you secure for all the basic humanities of life. We have adopted a comprehensive social agenda, and one of our most important tools for social change is education.

Finally, as a fifth strategy, we have reoriented our entire diplomacy and foreign relations toward the service of national development. Given the new global economy, we have sought strong ties with neighbors and nations all over the world.

Our role must begin in Asia-Pacific, where we are centrally located. But it also must extend to other regions and continents. And it means active participation in the councils of nations.

Poverty and people empowerment

I shall focus for now on the progress of our war with poverty—for this is where our experience can be the most instructive to other developing societies.

As many Australians know, modernization has meaning only in the Third World if it succeeds in lifting up the common life.

We have had growth before which never trickled down to our millions. The poorest of our poor live in scarcity unimaginable to you here in Australia.

When we began our modernization drive, one in every five Filipinos subsisted on an income equivalent to less than one US dollar a day.

The top 20 percent of Filipino families received 50 percent of total household income; the lowest 20 percent, only 5.

Some 2.3 million workers were jobless as 860,000 men and women joined the labor force every year.

Poverty in our context had meant more than a mere lack of material things. Poverty was also a pervasive pessimism, constant mistrust, a sense of being without social worth.

Our response to this challenge has sometimes been called “people empowerment”—an idea I introduced in 1991 during my campaign for the Presidency.

Since development cannot happen for all our people without their taking part in it, we subscribe to a comprehensive program of people empowerment, not just in the political sense but in terms of people’s livelihood, housing and opportunities for a decent future.

In the struggle against poverty, the familiar answer of different ideologies has often been calls for more government, and more public money committed to the effort.

Our richest resource

While we believe Government is important in leading the way, we submit that the answer must ultimately be located in the human person and in human community. Ultimately, we will uproot the problem of poverty—not by channeling more power and resources to bureaucracies, but by committing these to people and their communities. In short, by empowering them to be productive members or units of society.

This has meant during these past three years the expansion of our programs in education, health services, rural and community development and direct intervention in the most poverty-ridden areas of the country.

Again and again, our experience tells that our people are our richest resource. And this they are proving not only at home but in other lands. At least four million of our people today work overseas, and their skills are highly prized by these countries. Their earnings constitute an incalculable asset for our economy.

One reason for this is mass education. The educational foundations laid by American teachers at the beginning of the century have not lain idle and untended. Education is a value prized by all Filipinos—old and young alike.

As the nature of work has changed—conferring more importance on knowledge—we are in the midst of major reforms to make our education system contribute responsively to our modernization. At each level—primary, secondary and tertiary—we are now addressing the challenge of quality education.

Empowering communities

As important as empowering individuals to fight poverty is the need to empower communities.

Our democracy in the past often was more effective in legislating rights than in enabling the citizenry to use their rights creatively. Thus we granted the vote to illiterates, before we could make our electoral processes foolproof against fraud and money politics.

Today, electoral reforms are one of the major priorities in our legislative calendar.

Meanwhile, through a landmark Local Government Code, we are giving our local communities greater control over their lives by devolving political authority and resources to them. Decentralization is now a cornerstone of Government administration.

In all my years in public service, I have always been impressed by the fact that problems—more often than not—are not national but local. They occur at the level of communities and neighborhoods before they become a national malaise.

Thus our response must be quicker at local level. We must enable individuals and communities to cope.

For me, one of the most cheering things about our recent growth is that economic activity is spread across our archipelago. Manila no longer stands alone as the growth center. There are dynamic growth centers in every one of our 16 administrative regions.

Our country cannot rise beyond the level of the ordinary Filipino’s competence. If people empowerment has proven anything to us these past three years, it is that the competence of our people is pretty high.

This transformation taking place in the Philippines has some relevance and meaning even to a country as developed as Australia for several reasons.

First, it means that in the inchoate world order emerging from the ruins of the Cold War, we Filipinos are prepared to account for ourselves and contribute to building peace and progress.

Second, it means that our bilateral relations can now develop much further—especially in the economic sphere—because there are more benefits to realize on both sides.

Bearers of values

And finally it means that we can be the proud bearers and propagators in Asia and the Pacific—including Australia—of the values of democracy and freedom we share.

Democracy, let us not forget, has its incomparable advantages, and one of these has to do with learning.

It is our advantage, not our crutch, that democratic values have grown roots in the Philippines, because with freedom, we can share more in the community of scholarship and learning. With freedom, we can explore and embrace new knowledge without fear. With freedom, we can travel the bridges of knowledge.

Our national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal, also regarded knowledge as indivisible, setting no barriers of race or station in life. He believed that the future of our people and our country lay in educating ourselves and throwing the full light of our intellects upon the great labor of nation building.

In the past, we did not always use these links effectively with the world community of learning to the profit of our country and people. Even the fact that we are one of the largest English-speaking countries in the world was overlooked.

The maker of progress

But that was yesterday. Today, the tide in the Philippines is moving away from failure. We have taken up the burden of reform in our society, faced down the challenges of groups that have always kept us down and released the energies of our millions. And today we stand at the threshold of development.

In honoring me here today, you in this great University have expressed great faith and confidence in our people and our country.

So we will return your generosity by proving in the Philippines the undiminished vitality of democracy and freedom as the maker of progress.