Asian Studies Review.

ISSN 1035-7823
Volume 23 Number 3 September 1999

NATION AND IDENTITY AT THE

CENTENNIAL OF PHILIPPINE
INDEPENDENCE

K ATHLEEN W EEKLEY
Swinburne University of Technology

This paper considers some theoretical and practical problems inherent in con-
temporary national identity projects. It pursues this objective through a review
of some of the ideas about Filipino national identity expressed during the
Philippines’ Centennial of the declaration of independence from Spain in 1898.
While the state attempted to reshape some of the core myths about Filipino
identity to make them more socially inclusive, critics raised questions about
the Philippines’ very status as an independent nation-state; they argued that a
sharper focus on certain past events, the nation’s “heritage”, was required to forge
or strengthen national feeling. However, I argue that neither the state nor its
critics has seriously considered the profound difficulties in maintaining (or
reshaping) a collective national identity—shared by all citizens—in a globalising
age, especially in a nation-state that defines itself as a democratic one, as does the
Philippines. In particular, the paper points to some of the problems inherent
in basing national and citizen identity chiefly on a notion of belonging that is
anchored in a heritage supposedly shared by all Filipinos.

GLOBALISATION AND IDENTITY

In April 1998, President Ramos urged a gathering of 2,000 high school students
to “take on the challenge of nation-building”, and noted that their conference
objectives of celebrating the declaration of the 1898 republic and of contributing
to a successful, honest national election addressed two events that were “truly and
deeply connected” (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 23 April 1998). The 1998 national
elections, he said, were “the culmination of a century of struggle to be free—not
only from the clutches of an alien ruler, but also from the shackles of regressive
and reactionary thought”. This latter phrase was carefully chosen; Ramos was
pointing to an interpretation of the past that he deemed most useful for the

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road,
Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
338 Kathleen Weekley

country’s future, and it was not nationalist struggle against foreign domination.
He was calling on Filipinos to work together for the common good, which is,
theoretically, economic development. (Indeed, it is an oft-made observation that
the virtue of hard work was a key motif in Ramos’ administration and his embodi-
ment of it was his greatest contribution to national cultural well-being.)1 In a
complication for the nation-building project, the object of all this hard work was
a neo-liberal restructuring of the economy so that the Philippines could compete
for a place in the new globalising world.
Traditional anti- or post-colonial nationalism, which took cultural as well as
economic forms (e.g., import-substitution, protection from foreign domination
via tariffs etc.), was not on the Ramos government’s agenda; nor is it part of the
current Estrada administration’s program, since such an approach may under-
mine the state’s competitiveness in today’s global economy. It was (and is) safest
to emphasise those past struggles or aspects of them which can be re-presented
as demands not only for independence from foreign rule, but also from ideas
that were not progressive. Clearly, for all governments pursuing a neo-liberal
agenda, it is difficult to sell the resulting upheavals as “progressive” to those parts
of society that are not benefiting. However, because the nation-state is still the
chief political unit in the world—and this remains strongly the case in Southeast
Asia—non-authoritarian governments must achieve hegemonic control (i.e., have
the effective assent of the governed within their territorial borders) in order to
maintain their legitimacy. Somewhat paradoxically, then, neo-liberal states must
rely on appeals to the imaginary nation to meet their globalising economic
objectives. Precisely as the processes of globalisation create new and deeper
alienations within national societies and undermine state power to manage them,
those states must attempt to strengthen the “social glue” that is national identity.
What do we mean by globalisation? The nature of globalisation is the subject
of a debate that is, crudely, polarised between those who argue that contem-
porary world economic integration represents merely the extension of patterns
of production and exchange which began as early as the sixteenth century, in which
the nation-state retains fundamental power (Weiss 1998), and those who assert
that globalisation constitutes an entirely novel set of arrangements in economic,
political and cultural fields, wherein national governments are losing the power
to influence the fortunes of nation-states (Ohmae 1995). The position assumed
in this essay begins from the observation that, even if contemporary economic
developments might sometimes usefully be described as the continuation of old
habits of capital, the real globalisation of finance capital, together with the develop-
ment of information technology, creates many new cultural and political effects
whose very novelty demands our attention.2
Globalisation is both an ideology and a set of practices/effects. While we might
renounce the first, we cannot ignore the second, and states are both losing power

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 Nation and Identity in the Philippines 339

to global forces beyond their immediate control and creating other powers (taking
up competitive strategies) in order to cope with the changing circumstances
(Palan and Abbott 1996, chapter 1). Not all states or state actors are in the same
position to affect the new environment, of course; the most powerful states and
fractions of capital are making the rules of the globalisation game, and the weaker
must abide by them or lose. Indeed, there are capital fractions, social groups and
whole states that struggle rather helplessly outside the global loop; the latter
includes a number of countries in Africa. On the other hand, some of the most
powerful national economies are making competitive arrangements intended to
ward off the worst exigencies of globalisation, which actually undermine the
sovereignty of the nation. Yet, at the same time, these arrangements are designed
to ensure the continued legitimacy of the state. Within the European Union,
Manuel Castells says that the nation-states are permitting “the systemic erosion of
their power in exchange for their durability” (1997, 268). Thus far, ASEAN states
refuse to acknowledge that effective regionalisation requires this kind of reduction
or sharing of sovereignty (i.e., a different identity for the nation-state).
Instead, many Southeast Asian states are struggling to maintain strong, trad-
itional, national identities as part of their effort to maintain legitimacy. This task
is difficult, though, as they contend with a series of social strains resulting from
the processes of globalisation, including the “systemic disjunction between the
local and the global” (Castells 1997, 11), which leaves all but the elite—what
Reich (1991) calls the “symbolic analysts”—feeling powerless and, more import-
antly, without meaningful connection to their previously “imagined” national
communities. Against the invisibility of power, against “the unidentified flows and
secluded identities” (Castells 1997, 11) of this global network that (dis)organises
their lives, individuals and communities begin to assert identities in ways which
increasingly by-pass the institutions of civil society through which the state
maintains hegemony.3 While individuals are having their identities changed for
them into, say, consumers, communities are also reconstituting their identities—
as environmentalists, religious fundamentalists, indigenous land-owners, smugglers
etc.—to resist or to challenge the changes wrought by global forces. These responses
make the state’s legitimacy projects increasingly difficult.
Castells divides these defensive community identities into “resistance” and
“project” identities: the first are created by those who are “devalued and/or
stigmatized by the logic of domination” and who therefore build “trenches of
resistance and survival on the basis of principles different from, or opposed to”
the dominant values of their society. These need not take what most would see as
positive forms, but may be neighbourhood criminal gangs. “Project identity” is
built by those seeking to redefine their social position and to change the “overall
social structure”; included here is feminism, which “challenge[s] patriarchalism
[and] thus the entire structure of production, reproduction, sexuality, and

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.

340 Kathleen Weekley

personality on which societies have been historically based”. Castells goes on to

say that “in the network society, project identity, if it develops at all, grows from
communal resistance”, rather than from the traditional sources of the institutions
of civil society such as the trade union/labour movement (Castells 1997, 8–11).
In other words, whereas a state’s legitimacy—in both political and cultural terms
—has been strengthened in the past by the successful translation of social demands
into national laws and mores, the failure to channel new community-identity
demands through the institutions of civil society will undermine state claims to
hegemony.
In these identity struggles communities are assisted, and the national state may
be further undermined, by the use of transnational laws and discourses. While
there might be no more measurable democracy in the world now than there was
twenty years ago, for example, the notion of universal human rights has more
purchase around the world than ever before; in fact, more and more com-
munities are using such transnational discourses to demand recognition of and
respect for their difference (Soysal 1997; Dodson 1999). Evidence of these trends
in the deconstruction and reconstruction of community identities and states’
struggles to maintain national identities in order to cope with the pressures of
globalisation can be seen in the Philippines today. Some instances are long-
standing; some are relatively recent. Some, for example NGO campaigns against
the programs of institutions such as the IMF and the World Trade Organisation,
arise directly from the processes of globalisation. Most are boosted in some way
by the growth of global discourses. For example, indigenous peoples in the
Philippines are at the forefront of the movement for recognition of indigenous
rights in the Asia-Pacific region because they have understood the power of organ-
ising across borders (Gray 1995, 44). Thus far, the identity demands of indigenous
peoples would not fit neatly into either of Castells’ identity categories since they
are generally directed through institutions of civil society. But the Mindanao
Muslim people’s long-running political struggle against the Christian central
government may be described as a “project identity”. Since the peace accord was
established in 1996 between the Ramos government and the Moro National
Liberation Front, other organisations, including the Moro Islamic Liberation
Front, have transformed the struggle into a battle for a more specifically Muslim
identity; the militant Abu Sayyaf group wants an Islamic republic established in
Mindanao (Gaudard 1997). Such a goal challenges “the entire structure” of
cultural, legal and political reproduction of Filipino society.
The notion found in human rights creeds that the nation-state can no longer
ethically be built on the erasure of ethnic difference is empowering communities
in the Philippines as it is elsewhere. In the age of globalisation of ideas as well
as of economic transactions, they all have access to the language, if not the prac-
tices, of universal human rights. Sometimes these communities demand strong

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 Nation and Identity in the Philippines 341

recognition of difference; sometimes they demand equality with the dominant

cultural group of the country, which at least implicitly requires prior recognition
of a difference the validity of which has hitherto been denied. In the latter category
in the Philippines, as we see in the following discussion, are gay rights groups and
Chinese-Filipinos. While they may be demanding to be treated seriously as
Filipinos, this demand is necessarily also one for the definition of “Filipino” or
the “Filipino nation” to be broadened.
Thus, the Philippine state is left with the task of constructing a national identity
that somehow observes the right to difference while also culturally reproducing
the “imagined community”. To reiterate, the state must carry out this task under the
multiple pressures of the socially deleterious effects of “globalist” economic re-
structuring (which has the potential to reduce feelings of national belonging
among those negatively affected and, in the longer term, to undermine the state’s
legitimacy) and the increasing efficacy of transnational political discourses which
challenge national sovereignty in all sorts of social and cultural policy areas.

K AYAMANAN, KALAYA A N AND DEMOCRACY

During his term as President, Fidel Ramos openly and vigorously pursued a neo-
liberal economic agenda which was intended to integrate the Philippines into the
global economy. At the same time, in order to harness the political and social
consent for the disruptive restructuring necessary for this agenda, Ramos also
tried to revive national spirit in the country. The five years of Centennial cele-
brations, which began in 1994 and culminated in the focus on the centenary of
the declaration of independence from Spain in 1898, were a major vehicle for
attaining this objective.
Central to Ramos’ national identity project was the theme of “development
with democracy”, a variety of the ideology of developmentalism. Whereas economic
development per se was the national ideology of the one-time “miracle” economies,
especially those of East Asia (which Southeast Asian countries have been trying
to emulate), the Philippines has differentiated itself in recent years by insisting
on taking the democratic path. The official slogan of the 1898–1998 Centennial,
Kalayaan: Kayamanan ng Bayan [Freedom is the Wealth of the Nation] had a
very particular meaning in the context of Ramos’ Philippines-2000 agenda. The
National Centennial Commission (NCC) was drawing a line of continuity between
the Philippines’ historical position as the first place in Asia to wage a war of national
liberation and its position (at least in 1997–early 1998) as the emerging tiger. The
message was that the nation can be wealthy only if it is free, but also suggested
that because the nation is free, it at least has the potential to be economically
wealthy.

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342 Kathleen Weekley

The Philippines’ contemporary status as a formally functioning democracy is

fundamental to its national identity in a region of nation-states whose economies
have almost all performed better in recent years but whose polities attract inter-
national opprobrium over human rights. Of course, the implied historical con-
tinuation is not an unbroken line of pride in being associated with “western
culture”, a “certain smugness vis-à-vis other Asian nations” evident earlier this
century (Mulder 1996, 189). No absolute continuity can be asserted, given the
fourteen years of authoritarianism under Marcos. Today, the country’s democratic
status can be deemed not as “given” by a colonising force but as earned through
the peaceful overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. President Ramos and
the NCC took every opportunity in 1998 to remind Filipinos that vigilance and
continued effort are required to maintain such a status.
Now, the attitude that Filipino national identity is characterised by commit-
ment to freedom and democracy is a healthy one indeed, because it focuses on
a non-affective, or procedural, notion of what constitutes a society. This com-
mitment, it must be said, usually includes important corollary notions such as
ongoing struggle against tyranny and injustice. There are two problems, though,
with the way in which this identity is often understood at present. First, it ignores
the reality that the Philippines is a multi-ethnic but not a multi-cultural society—
i.e., that there are many communities that do not identify with the democratic
Filipino nation because both the cultural references and the structures of the
dominant community tend to exclude them. Worse, as a recent study explains,
there are non-Tagalog communities among whose members Filipino identity is
sometimes felt negatively because it is “in one way or another, a by-product of alien
domination” (Guialal 1997, 163). As outlined in the third section of this paper,
the controversies over the citizenship of some 1998 election candidates showed
that the very question of who can call themselves real Filipinos is still a vexed one,
which elicits the occasional bout of bigotry.
The second problem with the standard view of Filipino national identity as
lying, in part at least, in the country’s commitment to democratic procedures is
that it does not consider in detail what institutions and structures are required to
make democracy real for those millions whose exercise of civil and political rights
is limited because their economic and cultural rights are systematically violated.
That is to say, there is little in the way of substantial critique of neo-liberal democ-
racy; the Philippines-2000 agenda of deregulation and restructuring did become
and remains (in slightly different form under President Estrada) effectively
hegemonic.4 There is much public condemnation in the Philippines of the greed
and self-interest, corruption and violence, both historical and contemporary, of
politicians, landlords and big businessmen. The remedies for such iniquities,
however, often revolve around an appeal to mythical “Filipino values” and a sense
of national pride which, if strong enough, would somehow generate respect and

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 Nation and Identity in the Philippines 343

fellow-feeling for less fortunate Filipinos. Despite the virtual dissipation of the
“spirit of EDSA”—the inter-class goodwill manifested in the February 1986
campaign to oust Marcos—the search continues for forms of identity that will
transcend basic social divisions and help to pull the country into full and fair
development. It is here that the “growth” gurus meet up with those nationalists
who otherwise see themselves as attempting to construct counter-hegemonies.

RICE AND CIRCUSES

In the context of hardships arising not only from economic restructuring but also
from the disastrous effects of El Niño in 1998,5 the Centennial celebrations seemed
intended to provide the relief of the circuses, while also having a serious nation-
building function. Hence there were many sub-textual political messages, but
these were often manifest in almost fatuous ways. One example will illustrate the
point: on one occasion, Ramos launched a ceremonial 10,000 peso bill which
he declared “concretizes what you and I already know: That this country and its
people have sustainable development and even greatness within their grasp [so]
long as we keep an open economy, and a free and open society” (Philippine Journal,
24 May 1998). Such gestures are often directed at foreign and domestic investors
as much as the general population; but when the ceremonial bill is produced in
gigantic form, there is more than a hint of the mass-consumption pantomime
about it.
The precariousness of the links between the state’s ideological means and its
economic goals could be gauged throughout 1998 by the ubiquity of jingoism
generated around symbols such as the flag. Not only is it difficult to link national
feeling with a globalist economic agenda, but there is also the first order problem
of creating national feeling for the nineteenth century independence struggle
among some Filipino communities who did not participate in it. As Greg Bankoff
(1998) argues, because of the lack of correspondence between the “history and
the geographical and ethnic boundaries of the modern state”, the national flag
took on “disproportionate importance as a symbol of [the] imagined national com-
munity”. The NCC and other bodies given the task of arranging the Centennial
had tried to make the Centennial celebrations as inclusive as possible, at least in
terms of ethnicity. They knew that they could not base the celebrations of Filipino
identity on a strong ethnic sense of nationhood because the Philippines is not
ethnically homogenous. Nor could the celebrations focus entirely on the 1896–98
Revolution, because too many communities in the country had not participated
in it. At the end of the twentieth century, “nations” simply cannot be made as they
were made in the past 200 years: it is no longer acceptable (for a formally demo-
cratic country, at least) to forge national unity by mercilessly erasing linguistic

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344 Kathleen Weekley

and other cultural differences and making people “forget” their own, different,
pre-national histories (Davidson 1997, 18–19).
The Philippine state knows this, and in order to make the celebration themes
as broad as possible, the NCC moved the official Centennial focus from the
Revolution to “the more inclusive concept of the struggle for freedom” (Bankoff
1998). The perceived necessity to keep the Centennial references as non-specific
as possible was the reason for the ubiquity and central symbolic importance of
the national flag: here was a national symbol that was supposed to transcend all
regional and cultural differences. Newspapers carried an extraordinary number
of stories about the flag and the ceremonies surrounding it, such as the re-
enactment of the sewing of the first national flag in Hong Kong. The President
himself called for everyone to fly the flag, at home and in the work place. The
NCC and the National Historical Institute (NHI) even made official announce-
ments about where and precisely how to do so, warning “against disrespect . . .
through improper display”. Flag-selling became a temporary new source of employ-
ment for street sellers. However, the NCC’s assertion that the flag is a transcendent
symbol was difficult to sustain: since the celebrations were all about the Centennial,
the reference always came back to the fact that what was being celebrated was the
victory of the Christian, Tagalog-centred struggle for independence. Despite
the best intentions, the flag did not escape intense debates about the symbolic
significance of its graphic details.6
The flag was not the only symbol of Filipino nationhood being draped about,
although it was certainly the most dominant. Less contentious were the “trad-
itional” Filipino costumes featured in many official and commercial celebrations
of the Centennial. The Civil Service Commission asked all government workers
to wear traditional dress one day a week. Some agency heads made it clear that
this was a voluntary matter, while others took it very seriously: the mayor of
Baguio instructed all male city employees to wear Katipunero hats while on duty.
Although there were complaints and protests at first (especially regarding cost
and the difficulties of commuting in costume), some workers took up the idea
enthusiastically. The elites seemed more eager to dress up. There were commer-
cial fashion parades of traditional costumes and fancy dress parties; and stories
such as the development of the terno (the butterfly-sleeved dress made most
famous by Imelda Marcos) featured often in the lifestyle pages of broadsheet news-
papers. This Centennial enthusiasm for Filipiniana follows a broader pattern of
consumption among the “new rich” which Michael Pinches (1999) says indicates
“both the desire for participation and recognition in a world of international
fashion [and] a declaration of national identity that is self-consciously Filipino”.
Other festive displays of historical pride were almost as contentious as the flag-
flying. During the planning of the massive 12 June parade in Manila, organisers
and the University of the Philippines (UP) argued over the latter’s refusal to

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 Nation and Identity in the Philippines 345

enter a float that would meet the recommended minimum sponsorship cost of
around two million pesos. Parade officials decreed that if the university wanted
to present a lesser, more affordable float, then it must enter one in “the People’s
Parade” which would be held on the following day.7 The UP Centennial committee
disapproved of the very notion of two separate parades, wherein those organ-
isations whose “interpretation of Philippine history and independence may differ
from the orthodoxy favoured by the NCC” were relegated to a second parade
on 13 June, a date of “no historical significance”. The plan, the UP committee
spokesperson said,

is exclusive rather than inclusive. It is not only unhistorical but also out of
touch with contemporary Philippine history and culture. [Moreover], it
subverts the meaning of the occasion it is supposed to commemorate:
freedom and self-determination.

The success of the first phase of the war against Spain had been achieved because
the wealthy “ilustrado and the common tao” had struggled together, UP said; the two-
parades plan represented a misunderstanding of one of the “enduring lessons of
the Philippine Revolution: solidarity” and it again “consign[ed] the masses . . . to
the shadows” (Alfonso 1998).
The differences in cultural flavour of these two parades were indeed marked:
the 12 June parade, costing scores of millions of pesos, consisted of 41 floats
which took more than four hours to pass, and was attended by up to two million
people. The extravagant displays depicted standard cameos of Filipino history,
from the slaying of Magellan by Lapu-Lapu to the EDSA revolution, interspersed
with marching military men and over-flying Air Force jets. The show ended with
reportedly the biggest fireworks display ever seen in the Philippines. University of
the Philippines’ Regent, Alfonso (1998), described it as “a canonical reading of
Philippine history informed by the values of the corporate establishment: osten-
tation, decorum (‘order’) and closure”.
The smaller People’s Parade, on the other hand, consisting of “floats, bands
and marching contingents from government agencies, local government units,
private companies, socio-civic organisations and schools”, featured those left out of
such historical canons. It was watched by an estimated 40,000 people. Most sig-
nificantly, many groups represented in this parade—including homosexuals and
Chinese-Filipinos—were those who still find it necessary to assert that they, too, are
“true” Filipinos (and are therefore entitled to all the social and political rights
accruing to Filipinos). A spokesperson from the gay rights ReachOut Foundation
said: “We would like to tell the world that gays also yearn for independence and
that we are for the betterment of the country. We are also proud Filipinos, creative
in our own way”. The Tsinoy (slang for Chinese-Filipino) float, which celebrated the

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346 Kathleen Weekley

central role of Chinese-Filipinos in the nineteenth century independence strug-

gle, carried the message “Ang mga Tsinoy ay Pinoy rin” [the Chinese-Filipinos are
Filipinos too]. Such declarations signal that these facets of individuals’ and com-
munities’ identities must be included in the definition of the “Filipino”.

HERITAGE AND CITIZEN IDENTITY

The two Centennial parades indicated some central problems in the Philippines’
national-identity project, one of which is the tension between historically-based
national belonging and the realities of contemporary Filipino society. While
history may yield different myths to support a shift from exclusion to inclusion of
Chinese-Filipinos in the national “family”, or underpin the possible inclusion of
gay Filipinos (Garcia 1996), perhaps the only effective way to include these and
all such “outsiders” in the national family is to move the focus of national identity
away from the past and towards the future—a future in which people are treated
with the presumed dignity (and rights to that dignity) afforded them by virtue of
their humanity. The formal democratic content of contemporary Filipino identity
gives the Philippines a head start in this undertaking vis-à-vis other states in the
region. Unfortunately, however, intellectual attention during the Centennial
seemed to be focused not on the possibilities inherent in this kind of approach,
but rather on digging even deeper into the past for means by which to forge a
collective identity.
Nationalist intellectuals have long scanned the Filipino past, especially the
revolutionary periods, for transcendent national symbols and for lessons and
values applicable to today. The first step in the process of applying such lessons,
they believe, is to ensure that Filipinos have an informed understanding of
their past. Many are concerned about what they see as “the alarming state of the
Filipinos’ sense of identity” (de Quiros 1998), which they see as underpinned by
a widespread lack of even basic familiarity with Filipino history, especially among
young people. Since the 1970s, historians—most notably Renato Constantino—
have lamented the poverty of a Filipino history that would inform active citizen-
ship, and have tried to construct alternative readings, to produce what Constantino
(1975) called a “usable past” to underpin a truly nationalist movement. Such work
was an important antidote to the elitist interpretations that previously dominated
Filipino historiography and was crucial in informing radical discourses of nation-
alism and other critiques of anti-democratic politics in the Marcos era.
Contemporary nationalists are still pursuing Constantino’s goal, even though
the nature of imperialism and national governance, and our understandings of
the nature of history, have changed. The Centennial celebrations presented the
latest opportunity to reassert the idea that, without an understanding of the past,

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 Nation and Identity in the Philippines 347

there can be no effective self-determination for the nation or the individuals

within it. However, public discussions about Filipino history and national identity
have neglected some important questions about “history” itself and the contem-
porary difficulties of basing a sense of national belonging on a heritage that is
necessarily exclusive, even of communities inside the national society.8 The appeal
for a society united on the basis of a shared, proud heritage does not explain how
those contemporary Filipinos who cannot lay claim to the dominant heritage are
to be included as active citizens of the nation-state. Whose heritage is deemed to
be the authentic experience that will form the basis of the national identity?
Whose stories must be actively forgotten—written out of Philippine history—in
order to forge this symbolic unity?
The notions of national belonging and citizenship are tightly intertwined, as
perusal of the abundant citizenship literature will show.9 Almost everyone in the
contemporary world lives in a modern nation-state—a political entity based on
abstract principles (theoretically empty of cultural and ethnic assumptions). Yet
the nation-state must also constitute itself as a collective that shares an identity
strong enough to overcome its heterogeneity. At times, this national identity
approaches a kind of family status, something akin to an ethnic oneness, to
maintain a sense of belonging. When a resident of the nation-state becomes a
citizen (through birth or “naturalisation”) he or she also acquires a “nationality”
—which may or may not have any connection with the ethnic nationality into
which he or she was born. As Aguilar (1998) puts it, citizenship is “the mech-
anism that hinge[s] the fictive nation to the empirical state”. This relationship is
as old as the modern state, and for some theorists of citizenship, especially the
communitarian school, the nexus is considered functional to good citizenship
practices. For the more liberal school, however, the link between national belong-
ing and citizenship must be broken if good citizenship practices are to keep pace
with the realities of the globalising world.
Various aspects of globalisation, including the mobility of capital, goods and
people, are forcing a reconsideration of the notion that, to be a citizen of a
nation-state, a person must belong to the dominant group in society in an ethnic
or family-like way. Apart from any moral or ethical requirement to recognise differ-
ence, in a world in which the Other is everywhere because of the extraordinary
movement of people, the contemporary imperatives of inclusive democracy sug-
gest that the nexus between state and nation must be loosened or severed (Castles
and Davidson, forthcoming). Recent political campaigns for the recognition of
difference, by indigenous people in particular, have been encouraged by the
growth of international human rights discourses. Although it is not facing do-
mestic quandaries caused by the influx of migrants, the Philippines has long been
a multi-ethnic society, but this fact has not been generally recognised. Today, it
can no longer be taken for granted that everyone “belongs” to the national state.

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348 Kathleen Weekley

As Doronila (1998) says, a crucial part of what makes the country what it is as a
nation-state today is its historical position in the world, as a point where many
different cultural, economic and strategic transactions have always taken place.
As indicated by messages portrayed by the “People’s Parade”, there are those
in Filipino society who do not feel as though they belong in the same sense as
others. There are also those who do feel as though they belong, but who find that
this status is not as assured as they think it is. A case of the latter type was seen in
a controversy during the 1998 national election period, when the right of three
electoral candidates to run for office was legally questioned and publicly discussed.
The Commission on Elections (Comelec) disqualified one of the candidates for
vice-mayor of Makati City: “Edu” Manzano was challenged because he held dual
US and Filipino citizenship—which he claimed under the 1935 Constitution.
Under the 1987 Constitution, however, dual citizenship is not permitted. Only a
“natural-born” Filipino (one of whose parents was a Filipino citizen at the time of
his or her birth) is permitted to hold certain elective positions, including Presi-
dent and Vice-president, Governor and Vice-governor, and certain judicial offices.
Although Manzano was the only one of the three candidates disqualified, his case
received the least publicity, since the other two were more prominent political
figures, both of whom were running for the Presidency.
The candidature of Emilio “Lito” Osmeña, ex-Governor of Cebu, was challenged
by the head of immigration, Homobono Adaza, who accused Osmeña of regarding
Filipino citizenship as “a matter of convenience and not a matter of commitment
to principles” because he had used a US passport (afforded him because his mother
was American) on trips to the US in the past two years. Osmeña argued against
what he saw as the absurdity of this legalist definition of citizenship by saying, “I
don’t know why I am being asked to prove my Filipino citizenship . . . My grand-
father was president of this country and my father . . . was beheaded by the Japanese
when he refused to serve as governor of Cebu under their puppet regime”
(Philippine Daily Inquirer, 2 May 1998).10 The case against him was dismissed.
Osmeña’s appeal to his family background is perfectly reasonable in one
sense: emotional commitment to the self-sacrifices of ancestors is strong in all civic
cultures. Where, though, does the force of such an argument leave the Filipino who
does not “inherit” this particular honour—and the obligations that come with
it—from his or her ancestors, whose grandparents, or parents, were immigrants?
Can one be a “real” Filipino without being able to support a claim to this sort of
past? The case against Alfredo Lim, former mayor of Manila, would seem to
suggest not. His case, too, was dismissed by the Comelec, which finally declared
that it did not have jurisdiction over the matter, but not before Lim had suffered
considerable public humiliation (and lost possibly thousands of votes).11 Lim’s
right to run for the office of President was legally challenged on the basis that he
was not a “natural-born” Filipino (he was born in the Philippines to Chinese

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.

 Nation and Identity in the Philippines 349

mestizos). While insisting that in fact his parents were Filipino citizens—like other
notable figures with Chinese ancestry such as the national hero Jose Rizal, former
President Corazon Aquino and His Eminence, Jaime Cardinal Sin—Lim was not
able to make the kinds of claims to a family heritage of self-sacrifice for the nation
that Osmeña made. Instead, he asserted his active commitment to the Filipino
nation during his own life-time: “I grew up as a Filipino. I have served the Filipino
people and on several occasions, I placed my life on the line in defense of our
Constitution, this country and our people” (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 15 April 1998).

“IT AIN’T WHERE YOU’RE FROM, IT’S WHERE YOU’RE AT”

Not having a “heritage” like that of the Osmeña family as “proof” of his “Filipino-
ness”, Alfredo Lim had to base the defence of his identity on what he does as a
committed member of Filipino society. This is an important aspect of what has
been called, in the French debate, the “scruples” view of citizenship, favoured by
younger people over the heritage view, which is generally favoured by the older
French generations. The latter “have a strong sense of the need to protect
and conserve what their forefathers and mothers have handed on” and view the
immigrant as a problem in their vision of the nation-as-community. In contrast,
the younger generation tends to believe that “citizenship is about living with the
Other convivially”, that “resemblance” of national origin does not matter and
that “the past is not crucial”. They tend to favour a regional future where the
nexus between nationality and citizenship is severed (Davidson 1999). In another
context, English sociologist Paul Gilroy (1991) quotes the title of a rap song, “it
ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at”, which describes some young black
people’s attitude to belonging.12
The 1998 election citizenship controversies in the Philippines highlight two
causes for concern: the first is that jus sanguinis is still not only legally but also
popularly regarded as the only proper basis for the kind of citizenship that
extends to the right to hold the highest offices of the land. In other words, there
is a view in the Philippines that it is quite proper and desirable that there be more
than one category of citizenship (one of which allows a certain type of citizen to
run for, say, the Senate, but not for President) and that the difference between
the categories will be based, however vaguely, on “blood”. In particular, the
campaign against Alfredo Lim illustrated a residual anti-Chinese sentiment in the
country which can be provoked into rearing its ugly head on certain political or
other occasions. It is a prejudice nourished by a narrow notion of what it means
to be a Filipino, which in turn is upheld by the constant reproduction of certain
“mainstream” versions of Filipino history that continue to marginalise the roles
and experiences of Chinese-Filipinos (See 1997, chapter 3).

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350 Kathleen Weekley

More broadly, the Lim case demonstrates the hegemony of a notion of

Filipino-ness that is still basically Tagalog-centric. One of the few Filipino writers
who seriously criticises the hegemonic processes involved in building Filipino
patriotism is Arnold Azurin. Referring to the sometimes discursive, sometimes
worse obliteration of ethnic difference by Filipino nationalists, he says that the
demand for “erasure of ethnicity . . . in order to become a full-fledged Filipino or
a nationalist . . . has made [our] sense of nationhood quite callously chauvinistic
because it is anti-cultural” (Azurin 1995, 77).

CONCLUSION

Solutions to the problems of the sort of social divisions exemplified by the Lim
case cannot be found in a project designed to honour “the past”. As in the post-
revolutionary France described by Renan (quoted in Davidson 1997, 19), sig-
nificant numbers of Filipinos have had to forget—and some must constantly try
to forget—elements of that past in order to live daily in their “nation”. Moreover,
and more importantly in this global age of constant movement, an inclusive and
democratic national identity cannot be based chiefly on the past because this
necessarily leaves out newcomers. It is bad enough that citizens’ civil, political
and other rights can be threatened on the basis of perceptions about their “true-
bloodedness”. Uglier things can develop from the intolerance to difference that
is sustained by the attitude that it is the past rather than the future that matters,
as recent attacks against Chinese-Indonesians demonstrate.
None of this is to say that heritage is not important for individual and collective
identities; but a mythical “national past” is no longer sufficient for a state identity
project in a world in which so many other layers of identity are constantly shifting
in response to non-national forces. The destabilising challenges of globalisation
cannot be met successfully through insistence on pseudo-ethnic oneness. Some-
how, the state must find other ways to manage the external disturbances and the
domestic resistances to its hegemony. What these ways are is another question,
but we know that the national identity must be fluid and inclusive and forward-
looking, not fixed in a past that denies the other identities of so many contem-
porary and future citizens.

NOTES
1
Michael Pinches (1999) points to the symbolic importance of Ramos’ signature habit of
rolling up his sleeves—both actually and metaphorically.
2
For a more balanced consideration of the multifaceted nature of globalisation, see Holton
(1998).

© Asian Studies Association of Australia 1999.

 Nation and Identity in the Philippines 351

3
There is much discussion now about the growth of “civil society”, especially in former
authoritarian states, in which its meaning is often ill-defined. I use it in the Gramscian sense,
like Castells, to mean those institutions of a non-authoritarian society that reproduce, in
ideology and practice, the dominant values of that society such that the state need not resort
to repression.
4
No hegemony is complete, of course, and there are critics of government economic strategies,
especially nationalist economists. However, their critiques and alternatives rarely become
policy and all too rarely connect with the more general discussions about social and political
arrangements. See de Dios, Montes and Lim (1991).
5
The Secretary for Agriculture reported that in the first half of 1998, crop production was
reduced by 14.6 per cent because of the effects of El Niño. See April–July newspaper reports
of deaths resulting from malnutrition and from resorting to eating poisonous yams.
6
Disagreement about recognition of the participation of non-Tagalog communities is reflected
in one of the more serious debates about the symbolism of the national flag: whether or not a
ninth ray should be added to the sun, to symbolise the part played by the Muslim communities
in the making of the Filipino nation. Historian Ambeth Ocampo (1998) says that this is
“ahistorical” nonsense, since President Aguinaldo himself explained that the rays symbolised
the “spread[ing] of the light [over] every spot in the Philippine Islands [including] the Itas,
Igorots, Manguians and Moros . . . whom I [Aguinaldo] recognise as our brethren”. Similar
arguments were made in the 1970s by Teodoro Agoncillo against a “ninth ray” proposal; but
more recently, Arnold Azurin reminds us that the eight rays always did and still do stand for the
eight Tagalog provinces. He argues in favour of added rays, and that the “eight-ray viewpoint”
itself does not respect history, “forgetting conveniently that the flag’s configuration has been
changing since it was unfurled for the first time” (Azurin 1995, 73, 101).
7
This is in fact what UP did. (Francisco Nemenzo, personal conversation with author, May 1998.)
8
See the mini-debate about history sparked by Amando Doronila’s criticisms of Ambeth
Ocampo’s “countdown to the Centennial” columns in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, March–June
1998, and the heated discussions between Glenn May and his interlocutors over the historical
treatment of the story of Andres Bonifacio. (May 1998; Churchill 1997.) I have dealt in more detail
with the relationship between “history” and national identity elsewhere (see Weekley 1998).
9
See F. Aguilar’s detailed discussion of this relationship and its changing nature in the Asia-
Pacific region, in this issue.
10
This was not the first time Osmeña’s citizenship had been raised as an election issue. His
proclamation as Governor of Cebu in 1987 had been delayed pending a case brought against
him by rival political party PDP-Laban in the Supreme Court, which ruled that given that his
father was a Filipino, so was he.
11
Political observers I spoke to in Manila during this time estimated Lim’s vote losses in the tens
of thousands. He certainly polled less well than expected.
12
I came to this article via N. Thomas (1998).

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