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THE EXCERPT

In the beginning, before the land was formed, there was just sky and water, and in the space in between, a kite flew continuously. With nowhere to rest, this bird became very tired. One day the kite flew up and told the sky that the sea was planning to rise up so high that it would fill the sky with water. Responding in anger, the sky threatened to throw rocks and islands down to punish the sea. When the kite told the sea of this, she too became very angry and began to throw herself upward with such energy and determination that she filled the sky with water. In fright, the sky retreated higher and began to place very large rocks in the sea, forming the first islands and causing the sea to subside. Finally, the kite had somewhere to land. As he was resting on one of the beaches, the kite noticed a cane being swept by the current of the sea until it knocked against his feet. The kite pecked at the reed, making two holes from which emerged a man and a woman. These were the first people ever to live in the world. The man was called Calaque and the woman Cabaye.1

This origin myth was recorded in the Boxer Codex—an anonymous manuscript dating from the late sixteenth century—and tells of the creation of the Visayan archipelago and of the Visayan people.2 It is just one of many Philippine origin stories that were passed down through song and storytelling and recorded within Philippine folklore.3 Landscape and the natural world are impor tant features in many of these stories, reflecting the impact that local

geographies and environments had on indigenous ontologies. In Mindanao, the Mandaya believed that their ancestors came from two eggs laid and hatched by the limokon bird.4 They also believed that the anger of the sun caused him to chase the moon and scatter the stars across the sky—accounting for the turn of the months—while the tides were caused by the submarine shuffling of a bad-tempered crab.5 The Igorot of the Cordillera Mountains in Northern Luzon believed that a Great Spirit named Lumawig fashioned the first people from many reeds, which he placed in pairs in different parts of the world.6 Elsewhere, Philippine communities spoke of a God who created the earth.7 In Samar, this God was called Badadum and was responsible for rewarding or punishing people, while another God, Macaobus, was responsible for the end of the world and would send a spirit called Tava as a harbinger of death.8 Both Spanish chronicles and modern anthropology reveal that every community in the Philippines had their own mythologies and spirits, with their own unique names and narratives.9 Although united by the common threads of animism and ancestor worship, the cosmology of the pre-Hispanic Philippines was exceedingly diverse. Communities believed that spirits inhabited the natural world that surrounded them, being present in trees and rocks, in birds and animals, and that these spirits could determine the fate of a community.

Colonial histories of the Philippines likewise continue to emphasize the importance of landscape and environment, focusing in par ticular on the role of the ocean as a conduit of peoples and goods, connecting the mangrove-lined shores of Manila Bay with the bustle of distant ports in Fujian and Acapulco. The crashing of waves amid violent tempests at sea upset these trade links, with broken crates and other debris from shipwrecks washing up on Philippine beaches, reminders of the power of the sea to disrupt as well as connect. Calms at sea were often as disruptive as storms, with the health of crews destroyed by the monotony of a stalled voyage, contributing to long-held colonial visions of the Pacific as “empty space” and the Philippines as a land that lay at the end of the earth. More locally, seas facilitated interisland trade, linking this archipelago of more than seven thousand islands to a larger maritime Southeast Asian world, rich with spices, sea raiders, and trade and migration pathways that extended across the Indian Ocean.

And yet, our perspective on Philippine history shifts if we begin not with the sea that crashed on island shores but within the rising lands that allowed the kite in the above origin myth to finally take his rest. We will begin, then, not in the streets of Intramuros Manila, as is customary, but in the center of the Cagayan Valley, some hundreds of miles to the north. If we stand on the Calvary Hills in the small Cagayan town of Iguig, the landscape unfurls around us in a sweeping panorama that stretches across the rice- and cornfields that

dominate the valley. Foothills begin to peek along the western horizon, providing the first hints of the rugged Cordillera mountain range behind them. Much closer to the east lies another set of mountains, the Sierra Madre, now a protected landscape and home to seminomadic Aeta communities. In between these two mountain ranges extends the vast plains of the Cagayan Valley, stretching for over three hundred miles from north to south and connected to the Luzon Strait by the slow meanderings of the Cagayan River, the longest river in all the Philippines.

From this vantage point, it is possible to see these geographies as intimately connected, flowing seamlessly into each other from mountain to valley to river to sea, along the line of sight. Despite this, these places are often disconnected within historical imaginings, as if they were located on two sides of a profound ravine. The mountains of Northern Luzon are the indigenous heartlands of the Philippines, spaces where Igorots, Ifugao, Ilongots, Aeta, and many others brazenly and successfully resisted Spanish colonization for more than three hundred years. They remain places where indigenous peoples continue to assert autonomy from their lowland neighbors, as uplands never colonized, where sovereignty was never ceded.10 The Cagayan Valley, by contrast, is located within a familiar Spanish colonial story that began in the Visayas in 1565 and ultimately saw the transformation of Philippine lowlands into colonized spaces.11 The Cagayan River was the conduit for this transformation, bringing missionaries, soldiers, settlers, and trade, while valley plains were devoted to productive rice agriculture and, later on, to extensive tobacco plantations.12

This divide between the indigenous uplands and the colonized lowlands has defined Philippine history and preoccupied Philippine historians for more than a century. The rapid and dramatic colonization of the lowlands led the nineteenthcentury nationalist revolutionary José Rizal to lament that Filipinos had been transformed by centuries of war, rebellion, and subjugation into mere shadows of their former prosperous and industrious selves.13 More than a century later, the anthropologist Fenella Cannell has argued that such historical perceptions have influenced how Filipinos view themselves, their history, and their culture. Colonization is seen as having destroyed all that was authentic and distinctive about lowland Filipino culture. She writes that “the recognition that the history of the lowland Philippines has been forcefully shaped by colonialism has been elided with something quite different; an anxious and discouraging notion in both the academic and non-academic literature, that the lowlands was perhaps nothing but the sum of its colonial parts, a culture without authenticity, or else was only to be defined in a series of negatives, by what it had failed to be.”14

Yet, returning to the Cagayan Valley, evidence for this all-pervasive colonization is surprisingly hard to find: etched into tiny plaques fixed to a small number

of eighteenth-century church facades, retold in legends about the miraculous statue of Our Lady of Piat, found among a handful of undated ruins of Spanishera brickworks and ovens, or, perhaps most evidently, found in the expansive cornfields that are the pride and economic backbone of Isabela Province. An enormous gulf of distance separates this history from the present-day realities of the Cagayan Valley; almost as if this history happened to other people, elsewhere.

And perhaps this is because it was a history that happened to other people. For the Cagayan Valley never fit into this neat divide between the subjugated lowlands and the independent mountains. The anthropologist Felix Keesing described the history of Cagayan as “rendered embarrassingly complex by the escapings of valley peoples” into upland spaces.15 Time and time again over the course of the seventeenth century, communities of Ibanags, Gaddangs, Isnegs, Kalingas, Itawis, and many others led rebellions against colonization attempts, burning down churches, desecrating religious icons, abandoning Spanish villages, and fleeing into the fastness of the neighboring Cordillera and Sierra Madre mountain ranges. From the vantage point of these mountains, these fugitives, apostates, and rebels continued to attack Spanish settlements, frustrating colonization and evangelization attempts, and delaying the advance of soldiers and missionaries into the southern half of the Cagayan Valley for more than 150 years.16 Cagayan has consequently often been left out of histories of the colonization of the Philippines: an anomalous place where communities resisted and evaded colonial rule, frustrating the aims of the colonial state and complicating an otherwise uncomplicated narrative of expanding colonial control. And what if Cagayan was not the only part of the archipelago with such a history?

This book starts from this premise: what happens if, rather than focusing on the processes that drove colonization—the ways the colonial state was formed and consolidated and the interests associated with this project—we instead focus on the limitations of the colonial state? How does this change our understanding of the story of colonization? The chapters that follow examine the myriad factors that placed limitations on the establishment and expansion of empire in this Southeast Asian environment. Histories of resistance, flight, evasion, conflict, and warfare are unearthed from across the breadth of this diverse archipelago. The limits of control were a result both of factors internal to the Spanish empire—including a lack of personnel, weak bureaucracies and financial crises, local corruption, imperial overreach, and the contingent accommodation of indigenous elites—as well as of factors that relate explicitly to the nature of Philippine society, including kinship-based social and economic structures, indigenous methods of warfare, and geographic and en-

vironmental factors. Crucially, what has sometimes been seen as the inherent weakness of Philippine precolonial society—intense social fragmentation and the lack of any established state-like structures—was in fact a real strength when confronting colonial expansion.

The narrative opens with an account of a rebellion: a moment of crisis that led, over the course of three years, to imperial contraction. Colonial rebellions such as these have at once been adopted as symbols of nationalist pride—often depicted within national monuments—while at the same time interpreted by historians as exceptional moments within an otherwise unbroken history of continuous colonization. Yet such moments also contain within them many of the signs of the quotidian nature of colonial rule: the strengths, the weaknesses, the breaking points that led to ruptures and crises. Chapter 1 challenges us to look beyond the exception to see within accounts of rebellion and resistance indications of the everyday unraveling of colonial authority.

At the same time, we need to be careful when using terms like “rebellion” and “resistance.” The Spanish used words like alzamiento, sublevación, rebelión, levantamiento among others—almost interchangeably to talk about very different events, actions, and responses by indigenous communities. Some of these instances—as with the rebellions outlined at the beginning of chapter 1—follow established patterns wherein once-loyal, once-pacified communities genuinely did rebel against colonial authority. But, in many other instances, these terms are less clear cut. The “Sangley revolts” of 1603, 1639, and 1662, for instance, were in reality state-sponsored pogroms of Chinese people. In this instance, the idea of a Chinese “rebellion” is used to justify the extraordinary, violent reaction by Spanish authorities that led to tens of thousands of deaths. Elsewhere, whole regions of the Philippines that were routinely described as “in rebellion”—as in the case of Cagayan—were parts of the archipelago where Spanish sovereignty had never been established or accepted. Spanish soldiers who attempted to collect tribute in such regions were often killed, while missionaries could not travel without armed escorts.

How useful then are terms like rebellion and resistance? Can we really describe the actions of communities who were never subjugated as “resistance?” Focusing on “flash points” like rebellions sometimes leads to overlooking far less dramatic and yet no less impor tant processes, while a focus on the concept of resistance creates a binary between colonizer and colonized leaving little room for moments of cooperation or collaboration.17 Equally, while granting agency to indigenous peoples, a resistance–dominance framework nevertheless frames all indigenous actions in relation to the actions of colonizers.18 The archaeologist Lee Panich proposes a per sistence framework instead, which “allows us to place colonialism in the long-term context of

indigenous histories through the exploration of how native peoples drew on existing yet dynamic cultural values to negotiate the colonial period.”19 Refocusing on indigenous persistence also necessitates a shift away from colonial settlements and sites of colonial domination toward indigenous spaces, viewing the empire from the outside in. This means critically interrogating research agendas that place the colonial state at the center of historical action.

This book adds a further concept to understanding these dynamics: that of limitation. The factor that unites all these actions by disparate communities— whether they were integrated into colonial structures or wholly outside of them, whether they were “accommodating” or “oppositional”—is that they limited colonial rule. Thus, as we chart the limitations of early modern imperial sovereignty, it is impor tant to remember that such limitations were not merely by-products of imperial overreach or weaknesses of the colonial state. They are also determinedly shaped by the actions of indigenous and other nonEuropean actors. As Pekka Hämäläinen argues, indigenous histories of empire need to do more than show “how native peoples countered and coped with colonial expansion. . . . Such an approach reinforces the view of European powers as the principal driving force of history and tends to reduce indigenous actions to mere strategies of subversion and survival.”20 Hämäläinen contends that in many cases the actions of indigenous people mattered more in shaping the course of events than did the actions of Europeans. And so this history of empire’s limits is determinedly a Southeast Asian history, driven squarely by fugitives, apostates, and rebels, by Chinese laborers, Moro slave raiders, native priestesses, Aeta headhunters, Pampangan woodcutters, and so many others.

Reexamining empire in the Philippines

The story of the colonization of the Philippines is by now a familiar one. Europeans first crossed the Pacific in 1521, when Magellan landed in the Philippines after months of drifting across the vast and calm expanse of ocean. Magellan was famously slain by Visayan warriors led by the datu Lapulapu, in the Battle of Mactan in April of that year.21 Despite this initial defeat, the archipelago remained within the sights of Spanish imperial ambitions, as a potential gateway for expansion into Southeast Asian waters with the promise of entry into the lucrative spice trade. After several transpacific voyages over the ensuing decades, eventually a conquering party was sent in 1565. Its leader Miguel López de Legazpi was instructed to establish a permanent Spanish settlement in the islands. In May 1571, Legazpi signed peace treaties with Rajahs

Three QuesTions wiTh BENJAMIN HEGARTY authors of Winning by Process

1. What is your favobrite anecdote from your research for this book?

In sharing her photographs from the 1980s with me, Mak Tadi, my close friend and interlocutor, introduced me to the worlds of friendship and love that sustain waria life then as now. They depict many warias on city streets, in homes, and in photographic studios. She would often repeat to me, “I didn’t stand in the dark like the others. I always stood in the light.” With grace and humor, waria contest the regulations that target their class and gender appearances to exclude them from public space. In these photographs, we can observe how public gender is not only a way for

waria was itself expressed as crafted through human action, out of a desire to articulate a relationship to the modern nation, and efforts to improve public presentation (and its reception).

The term waria, which combines one word for “female” and one word for “male,” draws on binary gender in a novel way. With a history dating back to 1968, the term is implicated in the globalization of psychiatric and medical ideas, the regulation of space, and political mobilization of warias themselves. What amazed me was how closely contemporary efforts to articulate “identity” as a universal form of political expression tied closely to the self, and

the state and other institutions to impose order – cis/trans, male/female – but an alternative route to recognition by family, kin, lovers, and neighbors.

2. How will your book make a difference?

When conceptualized in relation to the category “transgender” in Euro-American policy and theories, warias are often approached as though they are a priori a gender identity, one which is “traditional” (not modern), and in resistance to (modern) social norms. These are all the product of Euro-American anxieties rather than grounded in the experiences of warias themselves. Yet in the historical and ethnographic accounts I gathered, the term

the framing of waria as “authentic” – common in some progressive Euro-American framings of gender/sexuality – mirrors colonial ways of managing race in Indonesia.

3. What will attract your colleagues in the firld to this book?

As an anthropologist working across trans studies and Southeast Asian studies, I want to decenter assumptions about what counts as theory and who gets to produce it. I want to seek out gaps and spaces where we can work against dominant forms of knowledge production that are clearly entrenched in colonial structures.

The term waria, which combines one word for “female” and one word for “male,” draws on binary gender in a novel way.

The Cornell University Press Podcast an inTerview wiTh Arnout vAn der Meer, Author of Performing Power

arnouT

JonaThan

The following is a transcript of an episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice. If you wish to listen to the original, search 1869 podcast through whichever podcast service you prefer.

Welcome to 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Arnout van der Meer, author of Performing Power: Cultural Hegemony, Identity and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia. Arnout is an Assistant Professor in History at Colby College. His research explores the importance of material in visual culture, such as dress, architecture, deference rituals and symbols of power for both the legitimization of colonial authority, as well as its contestation in turn of the 20th century Indonesia. We spoke to Arnout about how a photographic collection of Dutch colonial officials in Java sparked his interest in researching the topic of his new book, how the use of cultural history has unveiled new insights on the development of Indonesia that have up to this point been missed by other more traditional historical approaches, and how individual acts of rebellion against Dutch colonial power by Indonesians helped subvert the state from the grassroots up. Hello, Arnout. Welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, Jonathan, thank you. Thank you for having me.

Well, we’re very excited about your new book, Performing Power: Cultural Hegemony, Identity and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia. It’s been published by our imprint Southeast Asia Program Publications. And thanks to the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and the Mellon Foundation, the book is available now for free as an open access ebook. So we encourage our listeners to go to our website, as well as JSTOR, Project Muse or even Kindle for that matter, you can download the free ebook, but it’s also going to be available as a paperback in August. We encourage our listeners to get both to have the ebook and then you can also have the hard copy, which is great. So tell us now How did this book come about? What’s the backstory to this project? That’s, you know, and that’s always such a intriguing question, because in hindsight, right, you start wondering, where did this project begin?

arnouT

As you know, and a lot of other scholars know, sometimes that’s not that clear to you, when you set out right when when is the moment you really embark on a project. But I do think for me, if there is a moment, it actually was in grad school, when you’re kind of you’re looking for what’s going to be your larger dissertation project. And in my case, that meant that I was talking to my academic advisor at the time, Michael Adas, Rutgers University. And he showed me this this great photographic collection of images in colonial Indonesia, of Dutch colonial officials, who are basically surrounded by a Javanese status symbols, who are being honored

in job with new Japanese etiquette, Japanese deference, traditional deference forms, but also pictures off the docks, living in houses that are clearly inspired by Javanese architecture that are wearing clothing that is very clearly mimicked. Or there’s very clear 30, mimicking Javanese dress styles. And his questions were very basic and simple, like, what is going on here? How do we make sense of these images? And illustrates does as well too is the fairgrounds as the plays a big part in one of my chapters, chapter six, and colonial fairgrounds were really intriguing places. During the late colonial era, the Dutch, basically stimulated D create the creation of large fairgrounds in most of our cities. And these were massive success. They drew a lot of visitors, for instance, in Batavia as fairgrounds, at its peak drew 500,000 visitors in about two weeks. So it run for only two weeks at these fairgrounds to Colonial state would offer a lot of our digital displays. Showing how, of course to the lodge after colonial state was beneficial to local artists and industries. It would show traditional performances of duration Performing Arts, but it would also have actually the majority of the fairgrounds would consist of stands for modern Western companies. And these are companies a lot of them from the Netherlands and from Japan, but also from United States, big companies that we still have with us today that are trying to sell consumer products. We also have a lot of modern entertainments for movie theaters to gas performances to modern restaurants. So these are really intriguing places where culture really serves to legitimize, but also contest power. And what we see here then is that visitors to these fairs use these fairgrounds then also as a way to experiment with their identity and also to challenge colonial hierarchies. So for instance, in 1907, that’s what is fair, I read in a European weekly, the frustration of a European journalist who basically was was angry with what he called the modernized Javanese, I think, ridicule, because that’s their initial response of the doctors to ridicule this. So he ridiculed the Japanese were wearing strange hats and a striped tie a, basically a chain, watch a dress shirt, perhaps a black jacket, but also at the same time, a traditional saddle. And they kind of ridiculed this as a way of almost disarming the attempt. But what we see here is really the emergence of experiments with appearance to become modern, also to separate people on your power. Because by the late 1920s, and 1930s, the modernized Javanese has become omnipresent at these fairgrounds. So what I’m describing a chapter of precisely how we go from that moment in 1907, when the Dutch are completely taken aback by this particular occurrence, to the late 1920s, where the modernized Japanese is, is everywhere. And there’s one great example in that chapter of how a Dutch woman there is a wooden submarine and a bus or Gumby or the Jakarta affair. And he she wants to basically lift up her son so that her son can look through the periscope. And at that particular moment, a Japanese man addresses her induction. He’s fully dressed in European clothes, and he dresses her in Dutch. And basically, he says, Well, you know, do you need a hand? But she says, No, no, it’s fine. She cleans the periscope with the handkerchief and the Japanese men said, Oh, that’s very smart. And that’s very hygienic. and European woman is kind of amazed by this,

because in her diary, she wrote down Well, it almost looked, they treated me and they almost spoke to me as if they were my equals. And she was really kind of taken aback by this, he was surprised by this. That was not how the Japanese or Tunisians behaved a few decades earlier. So I think it really shows how to fairgrounds art is a great kind of prison where we can look at the performance of colonial power in an intriguing way.

Wow. It makes me angry, do hearing these some of these stories, because you just see this inequality and this assumption that, you know, how dare they dress like a European? Yeah, how dare they dress, you know, or they have the pocket watch, or they’re trying to copy us and we have the power and they shouldn’t and any type of emulation of us is a threat.

Yeah, no, it’s what’s really fascinating and, and also how it develops. And I, you know, I haven’t even gotten to that particular part. But what happens is, of course, initially the 19th century to dodge kind of behave like Japanese lords, like Japanese aristocrats, but then around 1913, that starts to shift. And then suddenly, they go all in on their own maturity. So they want to contrast their own modernity with that of the Indonesians. So every Indonesian who starts to dress, let’s say, as a European is suddenly a threat, and ever needs to be ridiculed. Right? Because you want to put that down. And you want to kind of present yourself as ever more modern, which essentially, is the essence of the civilizing mission discourses, this notion of We Are The superior civilization, we’re gonna, we’re gonna bring you along, right. But of course, the racist element is a civilizing mission also means that the Dutch never truly believe that Indonesians can become as advanced as they are. And it’s that paradox. Fourth, that it’s very palpable, and all of these encounters. And that’s, that’s, that’s the thing, what makes this project so fascinating to me. But also, I think the parallels sometimes with other moments in time are really intriguing to not just in sort of the history of colonial societies, but I think Yeah, you can, you can look at, you can use the same framework to look at more contemporary societies as well. No, definitely, definitely. Yeah. I don’t know. That’s just a, it was a, it was a fun project to do. Also a pretty complex because you have to find all these individual examples, and nuggets and then tie them together. In a way that makes sense. And I think that was the hardest part. That was the hardest part of the project. Sounds like what’s next on the next project that you’re on? So that there are some some loose some loose change, as they say, right from this project? So there’s a short article, actually. So at Cornell, I don’t know maybe you need to guess the of course, there was a big conference on T two years ago, okay. And I gave a, I was one of the speakers there. And I gave a talk on tea in Indonesia. So I have an article on tea and Indonesia, where I basically also talk about how tea basically emerges as this colonial drink but it becomes a patriotic drink and I describe that process of how tea then becomes or is appropriate. By Indonesian nationals tea, you know what we’re going to not accept that the Dutch control this because it’s grown in Indonesian soil, it’s grown with Indonesian labor. This is

ours now. I’m describing that process of how do we move from seeing it simply as a colonial product to that’s one and the other has to do with mountain resorts in Indonesia, and how essentially the Dutchman basically mountain resorts created modern, basically more modern tourist destinations. And just raising the question of what is that problematic? or What does it mean that tourists today go to the same destinations that the colonial Dutch selected 100 years ago. And in many cases, they selected specific locations because it actually emphasized and helped legitimize their colonial power and their colonial rhetoric. So what does it mean that we as modern day tourists actually are following those same footsteps. We’re reinforcing that. Yeah. But the bigger project that comes after this is probably as it goes back to the fairgrounds, because I was so intrigued but a fairgrounds for this project. And I discovered that in the Philippines, something very similar was going on in Darien was called the Manila carnival. And in French Indochina, something similar was going on where I was called to Florida, Hanoi. And I also connected, I also found various connections between these events to so before of our step that would travel through Southeast Asia to visit all these events, for instance. So I think the next project is going to be on these fairs kind of as a vehicle both of so very much in the same theme, looking at culture, looking at these places of encounter, but I think also making a larger, larger argument about globalization, and consumerism. You know, I often talk to my students about this, and you know, all of these things, if you understand colonial societies from from the late 19th, early 20th century, and we really does help you understand societies today, right? You really need to, you really need to kind of study these to understand what is going on today. What are we talking here about the United States, clearly has a very different colonial history, but also very problematic one, but a lot of these narratives and discourses are very similar. And then it’s interesting to note you can apply to to African countries, Asian countries of European countries, it’s it’s really, yeah, I think, really key to understanding our modern world.

Yeah, I think it’s brilliant, tied in with globalization, those fairs. We see the ramifications of those now with all the advertising all the social media, all the consumerism that’s everywhere in the world now.

Yeah. So yeah, so deliberate. That’s the other thing, right? It’s that and I think that’s the other part about my book that I found so interesting. It’s all of these things are deliberate. I didn’t we didn’t just become consumers, right. We were made to be consumers. And it’s, it’s presented to us as a choice, but it’s not.

Oh, no. And even even the history within that within the United States of we’re after World War Two, the advertisers saying hey, we can create this whole system based on advertising. And the old way was, you have one item that you purchase, and you you fix it and repair it, and and hold on to it, as long as you can be very frugal. And we got it, they had to change

the culture to say no disposable, get the new thing, then improve thing. That’s all just within 60 70 years.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s no, no, that’s why well, you know, this is why history is amazing, because he thinks, and it’s also I think cultural history is so amazing, because it it approaches these kinds of questions from a different angle. So rather than looking at politics or economics, right, we are asking this question more from from the cultural realm, but also, I feel more from the perspective of the consumer and perspective.

Yeah, I think that’s, that makes this really fascinating. And it’s more relatable, is I’m just speaking for myself, you know, I can relate as a, you know, a consumer or someone who has experienced this type of cultural conditioning, versus the big theater, the big politicians, the Western governments are doing. It’s, it’s more accessible to the average reader. Because it’s double.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that’s it. That’s actually a great point about my Yeah, I’m gonna use that for my own book. Well, because as you were saying, It’s like when you when you read through, like, I haven’t, same with with whatever, first about summer, so no, and it was like dozens of pages and you read through his words about how he experienced that particular moment. And, and then, if that’s what it is, right, it is relatable because you could feel that anxiety and you could feel that, that that that uncomfortable moment. And, and I feel it without actually knowing how it must have failed in a colonial relationship and a power dynamic is so unequal, so it must have taken him incredible courage to actually because he stands up to his bus. He doesn’t show up for work for two months. He continued work, other part of his work as a public prosecutor, with a judge who is my more lenient. And he only comes back later on when the Governor General himself has intervened and basically scolded the European official for for, for his behavior. And it’s, yeah, for him. Yeah. And it sets in motion a whole series of offense, which eventually sees some more sono transferred by you a few months later to another station. But it also means that the Governor General has basically put out a new circular that decrees that all European civil servants need to behave with great respect to Indonesians that they can no longer demand traditional deference. And that if they will, that they will have to face the consequences from his office. And most importantly, that document that circular is picked up by the vernacular press by the Indonesian press, and they publish it in MLA as well. And then it’s being used as document, you know, at political rallies, but also, it’s read at just just, you know, local town halls. And then people are reading a document saying, civil servants are there to serve the people not to rule the people. And it becomes this this powerful moment. So out of that one, small encounter something really big emerges. And that’s what my what of course, I talked about in the book. That’s it becomes a really empowering moment.

JonaThan JonaThan

Yeah, unfortunately, example of civil disobedience. It’s a Rosa Parks moment for Yes, yeah. Yeah. A person’s action effects the whole group.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so far, this person has been unknown. Because our focus has always been on political parties, no political movements. And while he’s involved in some of those political parties and movements, in many ways, his actions led to this particular circle or an epic or circular, I argue is so important in seeing this and the circulars announced in August 1913. And in September and October 1913, the newspapers in Indonesia suddenly full with men with small messages of like, teachers in Jakarta are changing your saddle for trousers and railroad personnel in London are changing yourself and for trousers, and because one of the things that they figured out is if we’re going to trousers, we cannot be asked to sit on the ground anymore. So in 1913, in reaction to the circular, a lot of young Indonesians immediately begin wearing trousers of signaling their newfound basically self confidence of signaling their desire for respect to be treated with equality. And they do so unmask, which is 19, late 1932. Newspapers are filled with messages like this, and nobody has picked up on it.

That’s so powerful, so powerful. in plain sight, you reading this in newspapers, but it’s amazing, you know, you’re the first historian to pick up on this, you know.

Look, look at what’s going on, versus, you know, versus let’s looking at these officials in the government. It’s, the timing is so key, right, because it’s so tied to what happens with super Soto. And the timing explains them, this particular changing in dress. And in basically in reaction to this, a lot of the Dutch who were still wearing at least at home, dress akin to Japanese clothes. Suddenly, we’re now forced to Europeanized themselves. To keep that contrast between colonizer and colonized. The moment of colonized start wearing European clothes, Europeans cannot keep wearing Javanese clothes. So they have to stop. And I think this is great because it shows power. It shows that the colonial relationship is not just about power from the colonizer here is to colonize with power. They are forcing change in a cultural way, not a political way. And I think that’s,

Yeah, that’s one of the bottom up to grass roots from the bottom up. Yep, yep. Oh, that’s great. That’s great. Wow, we’re so we’re so honored that we’re publishing your book. This is cutting stuff. I hope so. I hope so. Yeah, it is it is. That’s fantastic. Well, again, so good talking with you. And congratulations on your new book. cultural hegemony, identity and resistance in colonial Indonesia. It was a pleasure talking with you.

I know. Yeah. That was all mine. Really, this was, this was a lot of fun. And, yeah, thank you so much, Jonathan. I really appreciate it.

THE EXCERPT

THEORY AND SCOPE

In January 1956, less than three months after the proclamation of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam), Ngô Đình Diệm’s government turned its attention toward surveilling civil society. Interior minister Nguyễn Hữu Châu requested an inventory of all voluntary organizations south of the seventeenth parallel. That survey revealed the existence of more than four hundred voluntary associations, ranging from labor unions and philanthropic groups to student associations and cultural clubs.1 According to the classifications used by the officials who compiled the inventory, there were 150 labor unions, 148 mutual-aid and friendly societies, 94 religious groups, 18 arts and culture organizations, and 17 philanthropic associations. Significantly, only thirty-five were operating with government permission. The officials flagged five organizations that were suspected of harboring communists or supporters of other political rivals.2 Also alarming to the interior minister was the lack of information the government had about these four hundred organizations beyond their names and their founders. This prompted the minister to instruct city mayors and provincial heads to be more vigilant in enforcing state regulations when dealing with voluntary organizations and to make sure only registered organizations could operate.

The new government’s concern about voluntary groups—an impor tant component of civil society—is revealing on two counts. First, the government was aware of civil society’s potential power and was therefore eager to control this social realm. As subsequent chapters show, while South Viet namese authorities wanted to harness the energy of voluntary associations to enhance state-building endeavors and supplement the state’s social welfare provisions,

government officials were also wary of civil society’s potential to challenge the state and create dissent. Second, Nguyễn Hữu Châu’s inquiry reveals that South Vietnam’s public life was robust. People’s associational activities were significant enough to attract state attention and surveillance. Over the next two decades, essentially the life span of the RVN, voluntary organizations continued to grow and South Viet namese citizens continued to participate in associational life. Many groups attended to the specific needs of their members, while others aspired to improve living conditions for their communities and to shape the life of the nation.

While there is no lack of books on Vietnam and its wars, few have examined South Vietnam’s civil society, and to my knowledge, none has made this important arena of social interaction in the Republican period its focus.3 This book examines South Vietnam’s extensive associational life and covers an array of groups, from mutual-aid societies and charities to professional and rights organizations. By examining people’s voluntary public activities, this book offers a unique glimpse into South Vietnam, a society grappling with postcolonial changes, territorial division, nation building, civil war, and foreign intervention. The underlying motivation of this book is to understand the wartime experiences of the South Vietnamese people in a way that does not reduce them to mere victims of violence. While many Vietnamese on both sides endured profound suffering and loss, they were not passive victims defined only by wartime adversities. The activities of voluntary organizations provide tangible evidence of how some residents of South Vietnam, mainly in the urban centers, articulated and responded to the dramatic events that shaped the history of the RVN (1955–1975).

Because of its origin, its dependence on US aid, and its eventual defeat, South Vietnam has been overlooked by historians both inside and outside Vietnam. The general view was that South Vietnam did not have a legal basis for governance or existence. Its establishment was supposed to be transitory, and the decision to divide the country was made without consulting the population in either the north or the south. Consequently, South Vietnam was often considered inconsequential in historical narratives of the Vietnam War (circa 1960–1975), or it has been depicted as a shell of a state without a constituency and without a nation.4 Any historical attention it received tended to focus on the corrupt and incompetent political and military leaders, who were dismissed as puppets of the United States.5

In the last twenty years, the scholarship on South Vietnam has been growing because of better access to archival material and because of the recognition that little is known about its people, particularly their motivations, aspirations, and actions. There is now consensus among historians that while the US played a critical role in establishing the RVN and in executing the war, the Vietnamese people were crucial actors who had a hand in shaping the fate of their short-lived state.

By using Vietnamese-language sources and paying attention to the decisions and actions of Vietnamese actors, research has provided a more nuanced treatment of South Vietnam and deepened our understanding of Vietnamese history and the Vietnam War. For the most part, these works focus on the South Vietnamese political establishment, the South Vietnamese military, and the communist-led insurgency and its supporters.6 A few offer glimpses into South Vietnamese society, shedding light on diverse and impor tant subjects such as South Vietnam’s antiwar movement, education system, and student activism.7 This book contributes to this growing body of literature by examining the South Vietnamese people’s voluntary social and civic activities. In addition to insights about wartime South Vietnam, the book explores state-society interactions, particularly how civil society navigated the demands of the war, the state, and competing political forces.

Civil Society, Associational Life, and the Public Sphere

By the standard definition, voluntary associations are those organizations that individuals join freely, without coercion. They are the manifestation of civil society, commonly conceived as “the constellation of associational forms that occupy the terrain between individuals and the state.”8 Another component of civil society is the public sphere, idealized as the site where critical, informed engagement about the common good transpires.9 There is still significant debate about the definition and nature of civil society and its components.

The general assumption is that civil society is relatively free from state control and is “an arena occupied by a fluid and loosely bundled assemblage of interests at various stages of institutionalization; civil society is, by nature, plural.” 10 Because it is plural and relatively unrestrained, civil society is sometimes conceptualized as inherently antistate, and its activities are perceived as contrary to the state’s interest. Some scholars, policymakers, and activists therefore believe that civil society can foster democratic development and protect society against authoritarianism. The experiences in Latin America, postcommunist eastern Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa seemed to support this positive view of civil society. In these places, voluntary and religious organizations played an instrumental role in spearheading democratic development.11 By virtue of being components of civil society, associational activities and the public sphere have also been theorized as being autonomous and supportive of democratization.

Within this positive assessment of civil society’s potential is the notion that not all associational activities fit within the realm of civil society. General criteria that determine whether an organization is a constituent of civil society include

independence from the state, civility toward those with different views, and willingness to “work and interact with the state.” 12 According to these measures, some groups fall outside of civil society, including organizations—such as the Ku Klux Klan—that use violence against those with opposing views and revolutionary organizations that do not recognize the legitimacy of the state and seek its overthrow. Some definitions also imply that civil society aspires to work for the collective good rather than selfish or parochial interests. In this schema, self-help and kin-based organizations would not be considered components of civil society.13 In other words, the quality of a group’s activities is a significant consideration in this positive conceptualization of civil society. These standards are important for theorists who consider civil society the basis for democracy, because to foster an open and democratic society, civil society needs to be “forward-looking and open to rational communication with groups different from themselves.” 14

There are theorists, however, who define civil society more broadly to include groups that do not explicitly set out to perform civic duties but focus instead on members’ shared interests. Robert Putnam, for example, evinces that voluntary associations, including those formed to serve narrow interests, have the capacity to build social trust, networks, and norms—known collectively as social capital— which in turn promotes and maintains economic development and effective governance.15 Influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville’s work that connected the vibrancy of American associational life to the country’s democratic tradition, Putnam suggests that voluntary tradition builds a foundation for trust and cooperation and develops “the ‘I’ into the ‘we.’ ” 16 In other words, associated participation encourages people to adopt a collective perspective, and the social capital that accrues from associational life can contribute to building a strong civil society.

Countering this positive assessment of civil society’s potential are scholars who contend that civil society has not always been independent, equal, or open. For example, Mary Ryan’s study of religious benevolent associations in nineteenthcentury US cities illustrates that while associational life can build trust and cooperation, it is also instrumental in reinforcing elite dominance and privilege.17 Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu shows that social capital has greater potential to reify hierarchical social relations than to promote horizontal social solidarity. According to Bourdieu, social capital is deeply implicated in the stratified economic and social structure because one needs adequate means and connections to accumulate social capital.18

Foremost among the sober critics of civil society’s emancipatory potential was Antonio Gramsci, who perceived civil society as neither separate nor independent from the state. For Gramsci and other advocates of this school of thought, civil society is an important component of a society’s superstructure wherein the state and the elite maintain hegemony through influence, inducement, and manipula-

tion.19 The other constituent of the superstructure is the political society, which the state dominates through the use (or threat) of violence and force. Civil society in this view includes a wide variety of associative forms that “are non-productionrelated, non-government and non-familial, ranging from recreational groups to trades unions, churches, and political parties.”20 These sociocultural institutions underpin and support the capitalist economy in many modern societies. As such, it cannot be assumed that civil society exists in opposition to the state; in fact, it should be expected that some sectors of civil society, such as the economic and political elite, will share some of the same interests and goals as the state and will cooperate with the state to achieve their common objectives. In addition, the elite depend on the state to protect their hegemony with an “armor of coercion.”21

On the surface, Gramsci’s view of civil society appears bleak, holding little promise for civil society to act independently, defend society’s interests, or oppose the state. Diving even a little below the surface, though, reveals that the dynamics within civil society offer many possible trajectories that could lead to a vast array of fates for any given society and its political system. Gramsci suggests that neither civil society nor the state is unified or uniform in its interests and views. As a result, many competing interests operate in civil society, with a complex and unpredictable constellation of alliances. The state itself “is engaged in a struggle with other actors to dominate popular ideas, values, and norms.”22 Because it is a domain of contestation, plurality, and coalition making, elite hegemony is never complete. The contestation may lead the state to intervene directly to reassert hegemony if the threat to its stability appears imminent. Meanwhile, the plurality and conflict within civil society also present opportunities and space for “counterhegemonic narratives” to be articulated and mobilized.23 Moreover, because the state’s moral authority depends on maintaining a functioning civil society, it may be necessary for the state, even an authoritarian state, to compromise at times.24

Similar limitations have been noted with regard to the democratizing potential of the public sphere. According to Jürgen Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere first emerged in eighteenth-century Europe as an arena of open and free debate. Because of its ability to keep the state in check, the public sphere was considered an important element in democratization.25 However, as critics have pointed out, the nature of this idealized public sphere was restrictive, making it inaccessible to marginalized peoples such as women and the working class.26 Historians of nonWestern societies have discovered that the public sphere did not necessarily promote democracy and can in fact coexist with authoritarian rule, as in the cases of French colonial Vietnam and pre–World War II Japan.27 To explain the apparent contradiction, Elizabeth Berry explains that Japan’s public sphere was not “the space where popular sovereignty was claimed but where leadership was scrutinized and disciplined by criticism.”28 In other words, to understand the public

sphere in societies outside of Western democracies, one needs to “detach the public sphere from the telos of democracy.”29 Shawn McHale similarly argues that the public sphere in French colonial Vietnam was not linked to democratization but was a hierarchical domain where “particularistic interests contested their views.”30

Informed by theories about the nature and potential of civil society, this book examines the associational life and public sphere of South Vietnam. In the RVN, many competing forces were at work to influence public life. The authoritarian governments of Ngô Đình Diệm (1954–1963), various military juntas (1963–1967), and Nguyễn Văn Thiệu (1967–1975) defined the limits of associational and public activities. The RVN’s police force closely monitored those suspected of supporting communists or other political opponents. The US government and foreign aid organizations also played a role in associational life by dispensing aid and advice in an attempt to win favor and influence. In addition, the Lao Động Party and its southern organizations, the National Liberation Front (NLF) and People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP), infiltrated some key organizations in an effort to proselytize members. Along with the multiple forces influencing South Vietnam’s civil society, the exigencies of war circumscribed the content and form of associational life. The war created massive numbers of refugees, orphans, and wounded, and assisting these wartime victims became the focus of many organizations. The interplay of these forces made civil society a highly contested domain, wherein diverse groups and participants vied for influence and advantage. Voluntary organizations had to learn how to navigate these dominant forces and circumstances, adjusting their activities, goals, and membership to ensure their survival.

Methodology and Scope

This book examines an array of voluntary associations and their activities in South Vietnam. The groups discussed include mutual-aid associations, cultural clubs, professional societies, charitable organizations, community development groups, women’s associations, student organ izations, and rights movements. Where possible, I utilized accounts from personal interviews and memoirs of participants.31 However, for the most part, I relied on archival and textual evidence. As such, my discussion focuses on officially registered and active organizations that left written records, such as registration applications, club charters, correspondence with government officials, and state surveillance reports. Although voluntary associations were required to apply to the government for permission to operate, many did so without official sanction. Moreover, many small and ad hoc groups operated throughout South Vietnam, particularly in small towns and villages, and left few documentary traces. Given the lack of pri-

Three QuesTions wiTh GERARD MCCARTHY author of Outsourcing the Polity

1. What inspired you to write this book?

Seeing how ordinary people found ways to support each other and try to deliver patchy public goods in the absence of the state, and witnessing the shocking lack of interest from elected decision-makers in expanding the social state, puzzled me into writing this book. The dynamics in Myanmar and other contexts where self-serving autocrats and leaders have offput state social responsibility is a massive missed opportunity to lift millions out of poverty, yet we barely understand why outsourcing was embraced and its complex afterlives

My blending of historical and contemporary approaches, enabled by my unique mixed methodology (archival and qual/quant fieldwork), is also rare within Political Science and I hope can move people into more eclectic and problem-driven research designs.

3. What will attract your colleagues in the field to your book?

My combination of comparative historical method – tracing taxation and welfare dynamics since the post-colonial period – and political ethnography of welfare politics since

decades down the line.

2. How will your book make a difference to the field?

The book challenges theories of inequality and path-dependency in Comparative Politics that tend to focus on the legacies of laws rigged by elites to prevent redistribution. I shake this up by bringing political culture and ideas into the discussion, examining how market reform can shape the sociology of welfare expectations and demand. This is a surprisingly new approach, particularly in literature on distributive politics in developing contexts, so I hope the book inspires others to embrace more finegrained studies of how social outsourcing distorts distributive politics comparatively.

the 2011 liberalization is unique and will interest many qualitative and mixed-methods scholars in Political Science, Area Studies, Development Studies, Anthropology and History. Combining a focus on institutions and ideology in the way I do in the book over such a long time period is particularly innovative (as noted by reviewers) and the interdisciplinary, mixed-method approach I adopt in the project will likely be of special interest to Comparative Political Science scholars.

I hope the book inspires others to embrace more finegrained sudies of how social outsourcing distorts distributive politics comparatively.

THE EXCERPT

There is an ominous feeling one gets when reading through Philippine newspapers from the late 1960s and early 1970s. No other period in Philippine journalism quite compares to it. A wide range of dailies and weeklies were in circulation, some of a very high caliber; the quality of their writing and the breadth of their opinions are striking. And then suddenly, abruptly—silence.

The date 22 September 1972 marks the last day of effectively every Filipino newspaper in the archives. Martial law had been declared, and the extraordinary ferment of the preceding period was over. The papers, as well as the radio and television stations, all ceased under executive fiat only to reemerge later, a quiescent media operated by the cronies of the dictator. It was not just the media, however, that were silenced. The streets fell silent as well. On 21 September, fifty thousand people had gathered in Plaza Miranda to denounce the threat of martial law. The day after it was declared, no one assembled and no one rallied; the nation seemingly acquiesced. Alfred McCoy wrote, “In declaring martial law . . . the president would ask the Filipino people to trade their democracy for stability. By their silence and compliance, the majority would tacitly accept his Faustian bargain.”1 That there was silence is irrefutable, but what was its origin? Was it truly tacit consent and the trading of democracy for stability?

Martial law came as a surprise to no one. It was easily the most anticipated event of the decade. People had been warning of it, advocating it, and denouncing

it in the daily press and in mass protests since before the First Quarter Storm of January to March 1970, and yet the opposition to martial law, which had a mass following among workers and youths, was utterly unprepared. It was, above all, this lack of political preparation that allowed Ferdinand Marcos to declare martial law. The responsibility for this rests squarely with the Communist parties of the Philippines, which tied the mass opposition to dictatorship to the interests of rival sections of the ruling elite, all of whom were vying to impose military rule.

The historian Donald Berlin details how “the roots of martial law lay in the Philippines’ long colonial experience and in the first decades of independence” and describes it as “a natural part of the fabric of the Philippine past.”2

The 1935 Philippine constitution clothed the exigencies of US colonial rule in the gaudy, scanty trappings of democracy. The spirit of the country’s democratic traditions, hard-won in mass anticolonial strug gles, never touched parchment. The Americans ensured that military dictatorship was written into the legal code and that trial by jury was not. Article VII, Section 10, granted the executive branch the power to “suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, or place the Philippines or any part thereof under Martial Law.” The most basic democratic rights, including that of habeas corpus, the right to challenge unlawful detention, could be stripped away by presidential fiat. Berlin argues that martial law under Marcos was a return to the normal character of civilian-military relations that had been established during the colonial period. In this he errs. While the seed of military rule had been planted by the office of the US governor general, the Marcos dictatorship was not the atavistic reemergence of a prior mode of rule. Martial law in 1972 was something qualitatively new and was an expression of global developments.

The impulse to impose military rule had existed within the ruling class since the formal granting of independence in 1946. Plots to that end had been drawn up by Elpidio Quirino, Carlos Garcia, and Diosdado Macapagal during their terms of office, but none of them succeeded. What distinguished Marcos’s machinations from those of his predecessors was neither his cleverness nor his will to power, but rather the international situation of social and economic crisis. Explosive class strug gles erupted around the globe from the middle of the 1960s to the middle of the 1970s, and the First Quarter Storm of Manila was presaged in the streets of Paris and followed in those of Athens. It is in this context that we see the rise of dictatorship as the preferred mode of bourgeois rule. Suharto and Marcos, Pinochet and Park shared a common geopolitical DNA. Washington facilitated and propped up these brutal regimes. Moscow and Beijing, looking to secure advantage against each other, followed suit. Moscow supported Suharto; Beijing, Pinochet.

The postwar order was collapsing. The restabilization of capitalism in the wake of the Second World War, funded by Washington and carried out on terms that it dictated, had established a temporary equilibrium that rested above all on the unprecedented level of global economic dominance exercised by one nation—the United States. This equilibrium could not be sustained. The economies of Europe and Japan, so necessary as buffers against both the Communist bloc and working-class unrest, had to be rebuilt, and the buffers rapidly became rivals. The hegemony of Washington was built on an economic superiority that, as the 1950s aged, eroded and was sustained by the machinations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which toppled, installed, and propped up leaders around the globe. The massive export of US capital, in conjunction with the establishment of the gold-backed US dollar as the world currency, gave a monetary expression to the relative decline of American capitalism in the early 1960s. Washington’s shrinking stake in the global economy could be assayed in gold at the rate of thirty-five dollars to the ounce and measured by its inability to pay. A crisis was in the offing, and the palace intrigues and little wars of US intelligence could no longer sustain its rule. The year 1965 was the tipping point. Economic dominance had eroded under US hegemony, and the entire edifice threatened to collapse. New forms of rule were required, a mass deployment of the military and a vast apparatus of social repression— war and dictatorship, Vietnam and Indonesia.

At stake in this violent rebalancing were not simply US interests. Capitalism around the globe, from the financial speculations in London to the sugar plantations on Negros, had been rebuilt out of the ashes of the war on the scaffolding of Bretton Woods. The sharp balance of payments crisis in Washington expressed the rot pervading the entire structure; the scaffolding groaned ominously. The British pound sterling was devalued in 1967, and in March of the next year, banks closed in the face of the gold crisis. A two-tier fiction was established by an emergency summit of world banks on 17 March: central banks would honor the thirty-five dollar convertibility; all other dealings would follow the free market price of gold. The transoms and braces had been removed. Massive inflation and a mad scramble to secure profits followed; the living standards of the working class around the globe were slashed to the bone. In August 1971, US president Richard Nixon ended dollar convertibility, and the framework of the postwar order collapsed.3

A component of the postwar hegemony of Washington was the entirely subservient and dependent economy that it chartered of its former colony, the Philippines. Under the terms established in par ticular by the Bell Trade Act (1946) and the Laurel-Langley Agreement (1955), the Philippine economy was

tied to the United States as a source of cheap raw materials and a market for finished goods. As the undisputed dominance of the US dollar declined and then spiraled into crisis, Filipino capitalists scrambled to secure their interests, seeking new markets and the renegotiation of the Laurel-Langley Agreement.

Crisis entailed unrest. Profits were imperiled and needed to be secured through the increased exploitation of workers. The ghetto uprisings in the United States of 1964–65, brutally suppressed, presaged a threatening future for world capitalism. Antiwar demonstrations followed. By 1968, the French working class had shut down the country in the largest general strike in history. As the new decade opened, these tensions compounded as the cost of basic necessaries soared; the price of rent and food expanded beyond the reach of an average worker’s pay.4 Immense social strug gles returned to the fore, and the question of revolution was in the air. This was sharply expressed in the Philippines. Mass anger at the brutality of the US war in Vietnam combined with rapidly worsening living conditions to produce a palpable sense that an explosion was imminent.5 In August 1967, Marshall Wright of the National Security Council wrote to National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, “It would be nearly impossible to overestimate the gravity of the problems with which our next ambassador to Manila must deal. It has become common-place for people knowledgeable on the Philippines to predict a vast social upheaval in the near future. There is widespread talk that the current president will be the last popularly elected Philippine chief executive. Many high-level American officials consider the Philippines to be the most serious and the most bleak threat that we face in Asia.”6

The rival sections of the ruling class, and their leading political representatives, agreed on the need for authoritarian rule, but they could not peaceably select the permanent occupant of the presidential palace of Malacañang. As Marcos took office as president in 1966, the quiet measured steps toward dictatorship commenced. The more astute observers, particularly the young opposition senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, noted this and began preparations of their own. By 1967, the imminent end of popular elections was “widespread talk” among the bourgeoisie. In August 1969, the economic crisis broke: an irremediable balance of payments deficit, massive inflation, and a devastating rice shortage. Months later, Marcos secured reelection, trouncing his opponent and becoming the first incumbent president to retain office in the postcolonial period. With their profits and political offices at stake, the opposition turned murderous. Social crisis and political crisis aligned; the curtain lifted on the drama of dictatorship.

Nixon took office deeply concerned that the United States had overextended itself in Vietnam; neither the bud get nor public opinion would sustain the United States’ current presence in Asia. The Nixon Doctrine, announced in

July 1969, sought to uphold Washington’s interests in the region while reducing its overhead by using targeted aid that “deliberately facilitated the construction and consolidation of repressive, exclusionary regimes in Southeast Asia.”7 Thus, when Marcos imposed martial law, the United States tripled its military aid to the Philippines.8 The mantra of modernization theory that economic development is the foundation of political stability, Camelot’s vision for the Third World, was upended. Political stability—authoritarian rule—was the bedrock to which existing economic interests would anchor. The United States boarded up the showcase of democracy in Asia.

Here the tale twists. The Soviet Union and China, in open conflict with each other, shifted policy in the same period in a manner akin to Nixon. Moscow began to promote the Non-Capitalist Path of Development, and Beijing the Three Worlds Theory. These were marketing pitches, theory as ad copy. They touted the geopolitical reorientations of the national bureaucracies in their pursuit of friendly relations with autocrats. The incentives they offered were extended through rival national Communist parties—in the Philippines, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) and Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). These parties proved instrumental in the imposition of dictatorship.

It was a profoundly contradictory affair, bitterly ironic in its development and tragic in its denouement. Communist Party leaders and anti-Communist politicos allied; US imperialism and the Soviet bloc aligned, hostile forces drawn together in plots against democracy. The Moscow-oriented PKP terrorized Manila with bombings, secretly coordinated with Marcos’s military, to justify the imposition of dictatorship. The Beijing-aligned CPP worked with forces tied to the CIA in an attempt to install a rival faction of the capitalist class—similarly bent on dictatorship—by coup d’état. The central pretext for martial law, cited by both Washington and Marcos, was the danger of Communism, and yet martial law was imposed with the support of a Communist party and with the backing of the Soviet Union. How does one untangle this snarl of contradictions?

The opportunism and duplicity of individual leaders doubtless played a role, but it possessed an accidental character, flotsam on the deeper currents of history. A satisfying explanation must account for why there were two Communist parties and not one. It must be rooted in concrete social developments in the Philippines and yet establish why diverging political tendencies in the country found their interests aligned with the positions articulated in the geopolitical rivalry of Moscow and Beijing. Finally, the explanation must, in a logical, causal fashion, demonstrate why these supposedly Marxist tendencies, when refracted through the prism of social upheaval and dictatorship, illuminated the interests of rival factions of the ruling elite. The answer lies in the program of Stalinism. A historical explanation is necessary.

stalinism

The 1917 October revolution created the world’s first workers state—a transitional form, no longer capitalist but not yet socialist. The questions posed and ideas raised by this revolution gripped the political imagination of the twentieth century. Russian Social Democracy—both its Menshevik and Bolshevik wings— grappled with the relationship between bourgeois-democratic and socialist revolutions.9 Georgii Plekhanov, head of the Mensheviks, argued as far back as the 1880s that Russian capitalism’s belated development would necessarily limit a revolution to measures deemed bourgeois and democratic in character, including the overthrow of the czar, the creation of the institutions of democracy, and the ending of feudal relations in agriculture. The objective economic conditions for a socialist revolution did not yet exist in Russia. Only when capitalism had adequately advanced could this second stage of revolution begin. The historically circumscribed character of the first stage assigned a progressive role to a section of the capitalist class; this was, after all, their revolution. The task of the working class in this first stage was to give critical support to the capitalists in their progressive strug gles.10

Plekhanov’s formulas, for all their clarity of thought, remained of an abstract and schematic character. The defeated revolution of 1905 tested his conceptions and showed them wanting. Confronted by a militant general strike of the working class and the formation of soviets, the bourgeoisie retreated; its right wing (the Oktobrists) supported the government crackdown, and its left wing (the Cadets) abandoned the call for a constituent assembly.11 That year, in the thick of developments, Vladimir Lenin elaborated what became the guiding principle of the Bolsheviks until April 1917. The agrarian question, to be resolved through the seizure and nationalization of the estates, was the central problem of the democratic revolution. These were bourgeois and not socialist measures, Lenin insisted, and yet the capitalist class, tied to landed property and threatened by the growing force of the working class, would oppose all measures of expropriation. History had moved on; the bourgeoisie would no longer play any progressive role. What was needed was the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.”12 Lenin’s phrase possessed a certain ambivalence, a half step between worlds. The bourgeoisie were excluded, but their separate stage remained.

Leon Trotsky, head of the Petersburg Soviet in 1905, imprisoned in 1906, brought the question to its logical conclusion in his article “The Results of the Revolution and Its Prospects.”13 The insistence on the exclusively democratic character of the revolution artificially constrained the organically developing strug gles of the working class within the limits of a historically

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