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What is the key to success or failure in foreign affairs? Foreign policy making case studies from the Philippines in the 1960s and 1980s demonstrate that power sharing—willing and unwilling—is more critical than previously suspected. To understand how society and foreign policy interact in globalizing countries like the Philippines, a clear definition of foreign policy is essential. In this study, foreign policy is the preferences of government officials or of civil society organizations for one or more of the  following objectives: 1) maintaining the status quo in domestic or international aspects of world politics, 2) modifying current power arrangements somewhat, or 3) overturning them. These preferences may be explicit, or they are inferable from evidence at hand.
Foreign policy making is no longer the exclusive domain of presidents, foreign ministers and other elected and appointed government officials. Despite the distaste of diplomats and classical political theorists like John Locke (1632-1704) and Locke’s elitist disciples for citizen power in world politics, they often fail to turn back the clock. Indeed, plural social governance in foreign policy making has shaped a variety of issues in the Philippines, especially since the 1960s, as well as at other times. In the case of the Philippines, examples include regional intergovernmental cooperation in South East Asia in the 1960s and Philippines-United States military relations in the 1980s. But under what circumstances do the foreign policies of governments and of social movement organizations succeed or fail?
Overview: Below, the most important lessons of cases from the Philippines and Japan are summarized from Chapters 3-6 of Globalization, Democratization and Asian Leadership*. Finally, I will suggest broader cross-national implications of foreign policy power sharing in the Republic of the Philippines.
Innovations and Contributions: Attention to organizational pluralism sparked development of the foreign policy case histories used throughout the book. Chapter 1 traces the empirical and theoretical roots of organizational pluralism in twentieth-century democratic theory. Elected and appointed government officials in representative democracies typically exercise authoritative foreign policy making power. However, these executives are often unable maintain a monopoly over foreign policy making in the presidential Republic of the Philippines.
Organizational pluralism enables—and is susceptible to—power sharing. The quality of power sharing is the key to success and failure in foreign policy making. Attentiveness to the power sharing made possible by organizational pluralism leads to better explanations of causal links in the social process of foreign policy making. A focus on organizational pluralism encourages development of narratives of how well—or how poorly—power has been shared. Narrative summaries for the Marcos and Aquino presidencies are documented by primary and secondary public sources, by private and once-secret research, and by journalism, videos, interviews and scholarly reports in several languages, which were written in the Philippines, the United States and elsewhere. The resulting policy narratives underscore the conditions and initiatives leading to failure—and the limits to success. In a nutshell, power sharing is standard operating procedure in foreign policy making. By sharing power inside and outside the government—or even inside and outside the society, foreign policy executives sometimes expand their effectiveness.
By the same token, non-state actors with long-term political commitments, expert knowledge, media savvy and organizational nimbleness have thrust themselves into foreign policy making. At the same time, foreign policy executives have learned from those interactions. Indeed, governments have become adept at channeling the energies of nongovernmental organizations and civil society organizations toward attainment of objectives sought by presidents and foreign ministries. Thus, while political and telecommunications globalization may have speeded up this process, it probably has not yet fundamentally altered power relations between governments and adversarial citizen groups.
What kind of power sharing has been most effective in the Philippines? Under what types of circumstances was it exercised most effectively? And, as a result of the type of power sharing in each case, what were the alternatives not followed? Thus, the book examines the domestic politics of foreign policy making, as well as bilateral or multilateral intergovernmental relations. Linkages between democratization and foreign policy making have received the attention they deserve. And hidden processes, costs and outcomes have been brought to the surface. The importance of these linkages is highlighted by political and telecommunications globalization.
Reprise: Intermestic politics is the linkage of domestic and international politics. This framework helps one focus on the interaction of the domestic, intergovernmental and transnational politics of foreign policy. In the intermestic politics of foreign policy making, executive foreign policy makers share power in the pursuit of their preferences. They do so willingly and unwillingly, inside and outside the government, and within or beyond the society. Stretching beyond legislative-executive relations and other government focused interest group pluralism and bureaucratic infighting to social and organizational pluralism, this book opens a window into broader social processes leading to intended and unintended foreign policy outcomes in the Philippines, Japan and elsewhere. A power sharing window sometimes opens up when non-state or nongovernmental actors influence governmental foreign policy making and, also, when the force of precedent is very strong. Thus, foreign policy case studies from the Philippines help us explain with relative certainty why presidents, foreign secretaries and nongovernmental organizations did or did not succeed in realizing their respective foreign policies.
Social Process of Foreign Policy Making: Foreign policy making has been traced in detail for the Philippines during the 1960s and 1980s. From these cases, one infers that nothing is preordained about power sharing outcomes.
Chapter 3 is a policy narrative telling how President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines adroitly sidestepped partisan infighting in 1967 by sharing credit with elected and appointed officials as well as non-state actors, most notably several usually hostile newspapers. As sources of information and as social agents that framed policy issues for interested publics, English-language newspapers and their Filipino readers were crucial political actors in the Philippines in the 1960s. With their assistance, Marcos draped himself in the mantle of the advisory Foreign Policy Council, involved key opposition politicians, and furthered the Philippines’ ongoing commitment to intergovernmental South East Asian regional cooperation. Originating in previous administrations, that commitment was reinforced by the participation of Marcos's two immediate predecessors as the Foreign Policy Council met in Malacaņang Palace. Meanwhile during August-November 1967, a Senate election campaign doubled as a devastating political springboard for Marcos's future presidential re-election campaign two years later.
By convening the usually quiescent Foreign Policy Council in early August 1967, Marcos showcased current and former political opponents and allies. The Foreign Policy Council meeting became the venue for publicly announcing and co-marketing the decision to send Secretary of Foreign Affairs Narciso Ramos (Marcos’s uncle-in-law) and other diplomats to a meeting of other foreign ministers from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand in Bangkok, Thailand. There they would discuss a proposed South East Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SEAARC). Although SEAARC’s intermediate role (and that aggressive acronym!) has too often conveniently been forgotten, it was SEAARC that publicly became known as the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) on 8 August 1967. Marcos thereby immunized the SEAARC/ASEAN diplomatic process from partisan attacks on his well-documented tendencies to concentrate executive power. Marcos did so by bringing the advance story of “The Philippine Draft” for SEAARC/ASEAN to middle-class and upper-middle class readers of English-language newspapers. The Marcos-led media campaign danced through an early phase of a high-stakes domestic election campaign in 1967, sharing the stage of international politics with his domestic political opponents, and obviating political controversy.
Marcos confined domestic power sharing to narrow, sometimes nonpartisan elite settings. Accordingly, his commitment to regional cooperation was equivocal. A focus on the social process of foreign policy making reveals the opportunity cost Marcos would have incurred in 1967 if he had taken the logical next step in furthering intergovernmental regional cooperation with Malaysia that year. If Marcos had been consistent, dropping the claim to Sabah (North Borneo) in Eastern (peninsular) Malaysia would have been his logical next step. Casting a shadow of doubt on his commitment to regional cooperation in South East Asia and limiting the scale of his achievement, Marcos did not take that step. Twenty years later, President Aquino’s attempt to withdraw the claim in anticipation of an ASEAN Heads of State Summit was publicly rebuked by the Senate of the Philippines. None of the subsequent presidents have been able to do so, evidently preferring to allow the issue to fade away.
In a different set of case studies from the Philippines, Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of Globalization, Democratization and Asian Leadership delineate and document the range, interconnections and intended audiences for seven distinct elements of Aquino's military relations preferences with the United States during her late 1985-early 1986 presidential campaign, as well as her successful extra-constitutional effort to take power after the presidential election of 7 February 1986 failed (with 25% of the votes never counted, not to mention widely publicized intimidation, murder and vote fraud). The repercussions of Aquino’s road to power reverberated in the Constitutional Commission of the Philippines (June-October 1986), in the run-up to the referendum of 2 February 1987, and in the Senate of the new Congress elected later that year.
Eleven months before Aquino’s candidacy in the 1985-86 "Snap Election," she had been pressured into signing the famous anti-bases Convener's Group Statement of 26 December 1984. The degree to which Aquino was pressured and what she thought she actually agreed to continues to be a matter of contention. After all, it affects judgments about whether or not Aquino broke a pre-campaign pledge to her supporters.
In a retrospective discussion of that dramatic period with Pollard in 1995, former President Aquino spontaneously referred to the United States as possibly “the best friend” of the Philippines. In 1985 and 1986, however, she did have other priorities. And she publicly expressed vague opposition to an indefinite extension of the Military Bases Agreement (MBA). As a result, she preferred not to advocate for the Americans but rather that the US argue the case for any extension of the MBA beyond 1991. Examining the social process of foreign policy making supports a reinterpretation of President Aquino's military relations policy towards the United States. In particular, it refutes the myth that Aquino’s memorable “open options” phrase adequately summarizes the full range of her military relations policies. For example, she successfully ignored NDF pressure for immediate abrogation of the MBA and the other two Philippines-United States military security treaties.
If that inference appears counterintuitive and is resisted by Aquino’s erstwhile supporters and opponents, there is a reason: The formulation of Aquino's military relations preferences was undeniably scattered. The resulting domestic and bilateral information asymmetry misled journalists, scholars and activists to over-focus on her “open-options” to the exclusion of any sense of how narrowly she phrased it—and as if it were not imbedded among other elements of her military relations policy. In turn, that narrow vision has led to misinterpretations of Aquino's preferences and her military relations foreign policy making effectiveness.
Attention to expected benefits for Aquino's foreign policy partners provides a sense of the obligations she felt necessary to respect. The changing domestic circumstances of Aquino's "near-dictatorial" rule during the sixteen months in 1986-87 after she dismissed the legislature affected her appointed Constitutional Commission, the pre-Congressional period and the early Congressional period with different degrees of adeptness on Aquino's part during the first two years of early re-democratization under her presidency in 1986-87.
Earlier, candidate Aquino briefly manipulated her supporters during the election campaign of 1985-86, as former Minister of Information Teddy Locsin pointed out in a taped interview ten years later. But after Aquino took power, those supporters were unusually adept in deriving value from the bargain. And they did so effectively during the deliberations of her appointed 1986 Constitutional Commission where procedural, policy and diplomatic preconditions later narrowed the President’s ability to push through a new MBA. That was precisely the point at which the opportunity cost for pursuing her longer-term preference for facilitating the post-1991 future of the MBA became too high. Maintaining and extending MBA was a single element of Aquino's broader set of military relations preferences towards the United States. If one fails to recognize that fact, formulating concise verifiable generalizations about Aquino's preferences concerning the Philippines-United States Military Assistance and Mutual Defense Treaties, nuclear weapons, possible futures of the U.S.-Philippines MBA, and related issues become difficult.
Thus, as President Aquino later edged toward eventual public advocacy of extending the MBA (in 1991), she achieved her short-term military relations preferences in the short run. But she did so only to find herself increasingly vulnerable in her efforts to advocate a new MBA. And in late 1987, Indonesia and Malaysia—then ASEAN’s most influential ASEAN members—left an irritated Aquino in the lurch to face energized Anti-Nuclear Weapons and Anti-Bases Movements. At the December 1987 ASEAN Heads of State Summit in Manila, President Suharto of Indonesia and Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia refused publicly—or even privately—to acknowledge their earlier secretly expressed preferences for continued U.S. military presence in the Philippines. Thus, although the Marcos-era ASEAN's Bangkok Declaration of 8 August 1967 had proclaimed that foreign military bases would be "temporary in nature," this foreign policy case history also confirms ASEAN's hospitable accommodation of foreign military bases in the Philippines during ASEAN’s third decade. The unwillingness of Malaysia and Indonesia to say so undercut Aquino’s efforts to get the MBA renewed later in her presidency.
Indebted to US President George H.W. Bush for assistance in intimidating the 1989 military coup leaders, President Aquino fumbled his request for a new MBA. But whether one supports or opposes U.S. bases, there is no excuse for letting personal differences with Aquino's agenda blind oneself to the evidence at hand. Aquino's failure to keep the United States military facilities in the Republic of the Philippines has led both the supporters and opponents of those bases to make parallel errors. Supporters of the bases mistakenly tend to claim either that she had no coherent set of preferences or was actually opposed to a continuation of the MBA. Instead of pointing out that Aquino rarely if ever communicated the full range of her military relations preferences for a single public audience, opponents of the bases sometimes erroneously infer that Aquino lacked a coherent set of preferences or that she temporarily opposed retaining the bases only later suddenly to reverse herself. Except for a brief deviation discussed in Chapter 4, close scrutiny of available documentary, journalistic and interview evidence warrants the following conclusion: Even during 1985-86, candidate Mrs. Corazon Aquino and, later, President Aquino was always at least mildly open to a continuation of the MBA. However, her prolonged public silences mystified pro-bases and anti-bases forces alike.
Focusing on that untidy but crucial earlier period of Aquino's military relations policy making, a substantial body of overlooked and newly discovered documentation, for example, U.S. Embassy cablegrams declassified in response to this author’s request, is summarized in Globalization, Democratization and Asian Leadership. This evidence refutes both interpretations.
Throughout “Cory” Aquino’s 1985-86 election campaign, during the 1986 military/Roman Catholic Church-led EDSA uprising and on into the first two years of her presidency, she subordinated discussion of the possible futures of U.S. military bases in the Philippines to two more pressing strategic political tasks. At the time, these were well known. Aquino's first goal, of course, was to drive Marcos from power. Secondly, her campaign statements reiterated her intentions to reintroduce a version of constitutional democracy closer to that in the 1935 Constitution (but with restraints on presidential prerogatives to declare martial law).
Aquino’s first biennium as President of the Philippines was punctuated by intermittent civil wars with the Moro National Liberation Front, the Cordillera People's Liberation Front and the New People's Army. She was threatened by mutinies of the “New” Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and, in August 1987, by a major coup attempt by dissenting AFP officers. In light of Aquino's extra-constitutional road to presidential power, understandable questions about her legitimacy lingered on throughout the first two years of her presidency. Thus, retraction or clarification of the "open-options" concession to her former electoral coalition partners would have cost Aquino heavily during the Constitutional Commission's deliberations of June-October, 1986 and the subsequent ratification campaign of October 1986-February 1987. Had Aquino openly moved closer toward the public position desired by U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the astounding 80 per cent "Yes" vote for the February 1987 referendum for a new post-Marcos Konstitusyon would have been unthinkable. Aquino further compounded her difficulties with other tactical errors in 1986-87. These mistakes further narrowed her constitutional options. And they cost her dearly in 1991 when she failed to convince the Senate to ratify a new MBA.
Presidential Democracy in Asia: Since the middle 1970s, representative democracy has become more popular in many regions of the world. Countries in East and South East Asia have also experienced political democratization during the past thirty years. This democratization is better understood as a process rather than a finished product. Thus, the collapse of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines in February of 1986 was followed, in 1987, by ratification of a new Konstitusyon.
Developments in the presidential Philippines under Marcos (1965-1986) and Aquino (1986-1992) were accompanied by dramatic events in the People's Republic of China and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, as the two “communist,” that is, state capitalist, societies continued to find their own path and pace towards social change.
Official governments often do not lead democratization processes, and citizen groups alone are rarely able to effect massive social change. Instead, for foreign policy actors in the Philippines, the domestic and international news media are a potential ally and opponent. In contrast to the SEAARC/AASEAN case of 1967, in the 1980s oppositional domestic newspapers were more numerous. And they played an essential role as effective allies of civil society groups in the Philippines that opposed presidential foreign policy.
Similarities observed across different cases are interesting. In the foreign policy making case histories outlined and discussed in Chapters 3-8, the density of nongovernmental organizations in the Philippines is much greater than in most other countries.
Yet, official governments remain very much in the saddle. As an antidote to exaggerating the effectiveness of NGOs, different foreign policy executives in contrasting circumstances all have learned, with variable effectiveness, to manage the activity of non-state actors. Again, the examples include Marcos in the second year of his first elected term (1965-69) and Aquino in the first two years of her presidency (1986-92). NGOs whose members had scorned elections only a few years earlier campaigned for Aquino, attracted international press for eliciting a police response to their militant street tactics, and participated in the 1986 Constitutional Commission proceedings, promoting anti-nuclear weapons and anti-bases language prior to campaigning for a "Yes" vote on the new Konstitusyon.
Reviewing the SEAARC/ASEAN regional cooperation and military relations with the U.S. for the Republic of the Philippines, one is struck by the impact of the different political contexts for nongovernmental organizations in the Philippines. In the 1960s and in the 1980s, popular Filipino politics was marked by greater popular affection for representative democratic values, especially as involvement with democratization, nationalism and anti-imperialist sentiment blended the Anti-Bases Movement in the Philippines. The cross-national implications are astonishing. At almost every level of analysis, policy-relevant similarities and differences have emerged between the Anti-Bases Movement in the Philippines and the Movement to Demilitarize Okinawa. Both the similarities and the differences between the two movements are instructive for those who prefer the total demilitarization of Okinawa.
Further Conclusions: Thus, before scholars, journalists and politicians discovered globalization, mass communications news media became the organizational glue in intermestic executive foreign policy making. These processes were in place in the Philippines and Japan before the collapse of the Soviet Union. After that dramatic event, pundits began bandying "globalization" about with self-congratulatory intensity.
Finally, analytic policy narratives in Globalization, Democratization and Asian Leadership are not necessarily representative of every aspect of foreign policy making in the Philippines. Each of these cases is simply important enough to deserve intensive description and analysis on its own merits.
But more than that, developments highlighted in this book are emerging or continuing indicators of foreign policy making trends in an age of political and telecommunications globalization. In a variety of ways, this book has shown how the power of mass communications media is used by relatively small groups of concerned citizens inside and outside government as they share power with others inside and outside their societies to achieve their objectives. And sometimes, their achievements have fallen short of their preferences.
This book has asserted linkages between plural governance, power sharing, democratization, re-democratization and foreign policy making in the Philippines. But one should not overstate the conclusions. Despite occasional participation by civil society organizations and mass movements, the value derived from my use of pluralist theory and plural governance does not imply a high degree of popular democracy. It matters which individuals and organizations do or do not have the power to participate. By way of analogy with earlier initiatives of nobles who challenged English monarchs, plural governance often is highly elitist in the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and elsewhere. Thus, the use of organizational pluralism is double-edged: As an application of democratic theory, it also implies a critique of the theory.
As Asian foreign policy executives draw on resources of precedent and executive initiative in pursuing foreign policies in the face of political and telecommunications globalization, opportunities for political change from below will continue to emerge. Concerned, educated and organized citizens will strive effectively to make their voices heard and to grasp foreign policy making with their own hands. And the richness or poverty of working relationships between and among transnational social movements in two or more countries associated with issues directly related to an executive foreign policy maker's decision will enhance or hinder the formulation and implementation of foreign policy.
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