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disaster</strong></font><br>By Marco Garrido <br><br><img hspace="8" src="/web/20031203093124im_/http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/images/jeepney.gif" align="right" vspace="5" border="0">MANILA - Not without the faintest grimace did Filipinos receive US President George W Bush's fulsome praise of Philippine democracy. Bush hailed "the first democratic nation in Asia" as an inspiration, "a light to all of Asia and beyond", when he addressed the Philippine Congress last month. And not without irony did Filipinos mark his words - "All of you in this chamber are the protectors of Philippine democracy" - which, had Bush been more canny, might have been an admonishment as much as it was a commendation. <br><br>But if it was, it went unheeded. No sooner had the Great White Father conferred his benediction than the institutions of Philippine democracy returned to feasting on themselves. Bush's visit had interrupted one scandal, a congressional assault on the executive, and was swiftly followed by another, a congressional assault on the judiciary. The target in the first case was the non-person Jose Pidal; the target in the second is an equally unlikely figure, a man whose integrity was heretofore considered unimpeachable, Chief Justice Hilario Davide. <br><br><b>Malice intended</b><br>Now Davide finds himself the subject of an impeachment complaint that seems all politics and no substance. Accused mainly of "technical malversion", diverting a portion of the Judicial Development Fund (JDF) allotted to judicial employees to Supreme Court appurtenances (cars, expensive chairs, summer-session cottages), the charges against Davide have distended to include "malfeasance", "breach of public trust", and "thoughtless extravagance". The complaint has prospered despite having been railroaded through the House, despite the Commission on Audit having already found the funds to have been properly used, and despite a constitutional prohibition against impeaching the same official twice within a year (the first complaint against Davide had been filed by former president Joseph Estrada for the chief justice's "illegal participation" in the swearing-in of current President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo). The complaint has prospered, despite the law and normative procedure, because of politics. <br><br>Its sponsors and most of the 87 representatives constituting the one-third of the House needed to lodge the complaint hail from the political opposition. In particular, they hail from businessman Danding Cojuangco's Nationalist People's Coalition (NPC). And Cojuangco, it would seem, has an ax to grind with the chief justice. <br><br>Under Davide's watch, the Supreme Court declared public the funds Cojuangco had used to buy P100 million worth of shares in the San Miguel Corp. In a separate decision, the court voided a lucrative land-development contract that Cojuangco's business partner had been positioned to control. There are, of course, other reasons to explain opposition ire against Davide, although none figure so centrally as his inauguration of the Arroyo presidency. <br><br>Evidence of conspiracy aside, what matters in this case, as in the Jose Pidal case, is that a political grudge is being pursued with the veneer of legality - that is, under the pretense of being the legitimate work of a democratic institution. This is law being used as a force of disorder, in order to undermine the rule of law. <br><br><b>A transplanted democracy</b><br>President Bush's acclaim of Philippine democracy cannot help but be a sly pat on the United States' back as well. It was the Americans, after all, who, during their administration of the Philippines (1899-1946), established its democratic institutions after the image of their own democracy. On Philippine soil, however, these institutions took on a distinctly Filipino character, one not always consonant with democratic ideals. <br><br>Ironically, the introduction of a US Congress-style bicameral legislature led to the consolidation of a national oligarchy. Sociologist Benedict Anderson points out that a Philippine Congress "proved perfectly adaptable to the ambitions and social geography of a mestizo nouveau riche", a class fostered under Spanish colonial rule. Through their interactions in Congress, these caciques, who heretofore controlled only their respective local political fiefdoms, now enjoyed national-level exposure and access. Consciousness of themselves as a ruling class deepened. At the same time, by helping themselves to the opportunities at their fingertips, they defined their relationship to the state. The character of post-independence cacique democracy is revealed by the liberties it allowed itself: the manipulation of exchange rates, the sale of monopolistic licenses, huge defaulted central-bank loans, a sprawl of pork-barrel legislation, and an enormous, ineffectual bureaucracy that doubled as a family employment agency. The effects of cacique parasitism soon became apparent as the Philippine state slid into decrepitude; Anderson notes: "from being the most 'advanced' capitalist society in Southeast Asia in the 1950s, [the Philippines became] the most depressed and indigent in the 1980s". <br><br>Only sustained US aid, investment and support held the enfeebled state together. Political scientist Paul Hutchcroft writes that "the Philippine status as an ex-colony and post-colonial client of the United States ensured the survival of the central state ... wrapping it in a cocoon that insulated it both from the need to guard against external threat and (because of a steady flow of external resources) from the need to develop a self-sustaining economy". Hence, the marriage of American electoralism to Spanish caciquism enabled oligarchy-building at the expense of state-building. <br><br><b>Between democracy and disaster</b><br>The complaint against Davide demonstrates that Philippine democracy still lacks the backbone of a state strong enough to regulate its rambunctiousness. For the past three weeks, the House and the Supreme Court have been at loggerheads over the constitutionality of impeaching Davide. One would think the constitution is self-evident on the matter, and, were it not for lawyers, it is: it explicitly prohibits the initiation of impeachment proceedings against public officials twice within a year. Pro-impeachment lawyers have muddled the waters, however, by questioning the meaning of the words "initiated" and "proceedings". <br><br>In no time at all, a political witchhunt has become a turf war, with each side brandishing the constitution. Last week, the Supreme Court issued a status quo order blocking the transmittal of the impeachment complaint to the Senate until its constitutionality had been resolved (by - who else? - the Supreme Court). Congress chafed under the injunction, countering that impeachment proceedings fall under its purview. The court went ahead anyway, and early this week found the impeachment complaint unconstitutional. Thankfully, Congress voted to junk the complaint, although most of its initial supporters from the NPC remained stalwart in their position. They lamented their defeat as a breach of the constitution. Representative Jacinto Paras remarked ominously: "The people will have to resort to other measures to effect a regime change." <br><br>Paras may have been more prescient than he intended. All this legal wrangling is missing the point. This is more than a legal question; it is a moral one. The fact that an impeachment complaint without solid legal basis got to the point it did - to the point, very nearly, of real destabilization - suggests that laws can be scuttled or twisted to serve malicious designs. Given the law's promiscuity, then, how authoritative can it really be? True, the House ultimately respected the Supreme Court's decision, and thus, one could say, upheld the rule of law, but had the pro-impeachment forces greater moral support, it is not unimaginable that they would have imposed their will despite the law - and legalized their move after the fact. One need not even imagine it; one need only recall the events that installed Arroyo as president in 2001. This is, no doubt, precisely what has tortured the opposition's imagination. <br><br>This sense, that laws lack sufficient moral authority, is nowhere more clearly expressed than in each side's resort to drumming moral support from that fourth and most authoritative branch of Philippine government: the masses. People power has been mobilized both for and against the impeachment. They even have their colors: red for impeachment, black against. The massing of a crowd in black in front of the Supreme Court days after the impeachment complaint was made known proved irresistible even for President Arroyo, who discarded her neutrality to come out in support of Davide - and perhaps to cash in on the cachet of his support. <br><br>Furthermore, the excitement over the issue has been so frenzied and unreflective that a largely fabricated grievance has become more real. Court employees have been on the cusp of staging a mass walkout since the controversy began but have wavered because, according to Jojo Guerrero, president of the Alliance of Court Employees Associations of the Philippines, "We are still asking ourselves: Are we just being used or are we really not getting enough of the JDF?" <br><br>While shows of people power curry moral weight for one side or the other, they displace it from exactly where it should inhere: the law. Resorting to extra-legal rah-rah squads undermines the authority of democracy's legitimate conflict-resolution mechanism and licenses the politics of perpetual crisis. <br><br>The Davide case well illustrates political scientist David Apter's observation that "the moral basis of politics determines the meaning of legitimate authority". It would seem that it takes more than just the right institutions to found a civil democratic polity. A social consensus effectively defining normative behavior is essential as well. <br><br>The opportunity to build this consensus is what the American colonial regime denied Filipinos by building their institutions for them and calling it democracy. Democracy cannot be given. Nothing spares a nation the tasks and tumult involved in building its state, which, ultimately, is held together more by the process of state-building than by the institutions that have been built up. This process endows its institutions with authority. This is the very process that the Philippines is now undergoing as it walks the tightrope between democracy and disaster. George W Bush, overweening in his eagerness to plant democracy in Iraq, would do well to consider not just the light but the shadows cast by the first democratic nation in Asia. <br><br>(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20031203093124/mailto:content@atimes.com"><font color="#0000ff">content@atimes.com</font></a> for information on our sales and syndication policies.)</font> </td> </tr> <tr> <td align="left" valign="top" width="392"> </td> </tr> </table> </td> <td width="105" align="middle" valign="top"> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr> <td height="44" align="middle" valign="center"><font class="time"><strong> Nov 13, 2003 </strong></font> </td> </tr> </table> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr> <td height="75"><img height="75" src="/web/20031203093124im_/http://www.atimes.com/images/f_images/1pix.gif" width="1"></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="middle" valign="center"><a href="javascript:atprint();"><img height="26" src="/web/20031203093124im_/http://www.atimes.com/images/f_images/print.gif" width="91" border="0"></a></td> </tr> <tr> <td height="5" align="middle" valign="center"><img 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