Kyoto-CSEAS Series on Asian Studies. Singapore; Kyoto, Japan: NUS Press in association with Kyoto University Press: The University of Chicago Press [distributor], 2017. xi, 227 pp. (Graphs, B&W photos.) US$34.00, paper. ISBN 978-981-4722-52-0.
In today’s crisis of liberal democracy, we can find inspiration not from larger-than-life heroes but from boring, pencil-pushing bureaucrats. This is Lisandro E. Claudio’s pitch in the Kahin Book Prize Winner of 2019, Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in 20th-Century Philippines.
The book is clear in its approach and nuanced in its analysis. Through an intellectual biography of four Filipino liberals who served in government, Claudio demonstrates the deep tradition of liberalism in the Philippines. The power of the book lies in its vivid portrayals of Camilo Osias, Salvador Araneta, Carlos P. Romulo, and Salvador P. Lopez, with each personality representing liberal ideas in the fields of education, economics, foreign policy, and administration, respectively. What emerges from these narratives is an inductive description of liberalism in twentieth-century Philippines. The book’s analytical style is both particular and outward-looking. It is cognizant of the peculiarities of the Philippines’ postcolonial contexts while also portraying Filipino liberals not as vessels of Western thought but as active agents who have shaped the global conversations on human rights, democracy, economic redistribution, and freedom.
The book serves to fulfil three functions: a rejoinder, a corrective, and a provocation. As a rejoinder, the book provides a timely defense of the normative power of liberalism. When viewed “more as a blueprint than as an ideology” (2), liberalism offers a practical idea for nation-builders: “not revolutionary, not utopian, simply practical” (6). There is, for example, a practical value underpinning Osias’s view that the nationalization of education should “be neither ‘exclusivist’ nor ‘anti-foreign’” (32). This is not a generic appropriation of his mentor John Dewey’s ideals of liberal pluralism, but borne of the recognition that postcolonies need a contingent and deliberative national identity. Nationalist navel-gazing, Claudio argues, is anathema to nation-building as it imposes homogeneity over a diverse polity. What Osias’s liberalism brings to the table is a normative ideal of “dynamic Filipinism,” where multiple claims can be debated and discursive horizons left open-ended (35).
As a corrective, Claudio challenges the Manichean framing of Philippine history by rejecting binary categories of nationalism/imperialism and colonizer/colonized. He critiques the “Diliman Consensus,” or the orthodoxy in the 1970s that conflated “foreign” thought with elitism, (15). Far from mimicking the perspectives of their imperial masters, Claudio demonstrates how ideas imported from the West are undergirded by liberal principles shaped by local contexts and biographical contingencies. Araneta’s “New Deal for the Philippines” was inspired by the Keynesian ethos that rejects dogma and instead prioritizes problem-solving for specific problems. Araneta’s argument for deficit spending to boost the economy ultimately had “full employment” as the desirable outcome. Drawing on his Jesuit education, Araneta viewed the economy as a tool for social justice, where work was essential to human dignity. His proposals were eventually defeated not only because austerity economics ruled the thinking in the Central Bank, but also because his ideas were dismissed as nothing more than the interests of someone who came from “the sugar block”—a view perpetuated even by some of Philippine studies’ esteemed scholars.
The chapter on Romulo is equally powerful as it breaks the hackneyed characterization of Philippine foreign policy as pro-American. In this chapter, Claudio retraces the debates in the Bandung Conference (the Romulo-Nehru debate was particularly engrossing) and finds that Romulo’s Third Worldism offered an Asianist worldview. Romulo’s career in the United Nations was marked by critical moments where he built alliances with former colonies to challenge the position of more powerful nations. His insistence on the word “independence” in the UN Charter, his opposition to the partition of Palestine to create the state of Israel, and his constant call to review the veto powers of the Security Council were instantiations of an anti-colonial worldview translated to foreign policy. These examples, among others, are necessary correctives to the view that global institutions are nothing more than Western constructs imposing diktats to powerless states, as claimed by populist demagogues today. Romulo’s intellectual biography is evidence that “liberal” institutions like the United Nations are products of postcolonial struggles and continue to be sites for contestation, albeit with serious constraints.
As a provocation, the book prompts questions about the politics of possibilities. In the final substantive chapter, Claudio provides a striking narration of the tensions of holding a liberal view. The story of SP Lopez crystallizes the dilemmas of being “critical yet comfortable with state power” (117). As president of the University of the Philippines during the turbulent time of martial law, Lopez was faced with the predicament of maintaining ideological purity or embracing hypocrisy so he could keep his job and therefore keep student protesters safe. The provocations this chapter puts forward could not be timelier. It demands readers make moral calculations about the ethics of compromise and the ethical demands of charting unknown territories. Should one consider working for the murderous Duterte regime today? How about working for the White House?
There is something clever about a book structured around personalities to demonstrate that politics is about ideas. While Claudio could have sharpened his characterization of liberalism’s diverse intellectual trajectories across his four subjects, their contradictions, and resonance to broader publics, the book nevertheless offers a refreshing take on liberalism, which has become the whipping boy of today’s political moment. The book speaks not only to historians and social scientists but to any reader open to be persuaded that liberalism can be defended.
Nicole Curato
University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia