Parliamentary system not for Philippines: The wherefores

( Second of three parts )

The advocates of a parliamentary system lie shamelessly when they claim the Asian "economic miracle" was nurtured and engineered by this unicameral legislature which originated in Britain in the 18th century. Almost all international authorities on the issue of Asia’s phenomenal economic performance are however agreed that what brought about the "miracle" were three essential factors. The first was the predominant role of "Asian values". The second was the Confucian culture embedded in these "miracle" countries. The third was the government’s reliance on authoritarian or strongman rule or even dictatorial methods to speed up economic progress.

Actually, the system of government varied in ritual from country to country. But even as the ritual varied, the orders always originated from above where the "leader" dictated the agenda and program of government. Disciplined work brigades vied with each other to break performance records, and the best were amply rewarded with decorations and even material awards. Parliaments and congresses existed in some countries, but they were largely docile, toothless rubber stamps whose membership was decided by the government. In all instances, they were one-party organizations. This did away with unnecessary, time-consuming debates and florid discussions. The road ahead was cleared by skilled bureaucrats.

It was this full-fisted, no-nonsense government that brought about change in Asia. Democracy and the parliamentary system were of no concern to Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, China’s Deng Xiaoping, Japan’s dynamic Meiji elite, Malaysia’s Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, South Korea’s Park Chung-hee, Thailand’s first ruling crop of nationalist and entrepreneurial generals, Taiwan’s Chiang Ching-Kuo. It was they, and their culture wrapped in Asian values that changed their way of life for the better. And changed Asia.

The voice that mattered was that of the respected leader – strong intrepid, highly intelligent, compelling, commanding. Lee Kuan Yew is the archetype. The issues that mattered were cocooned in ideas and concepts that, however, innovative, stuck to party ideology. The ethic that mattered most was unrelenting work. The emotion that overrode everything else was love of country. They had to succeed, catch up with the West.

The Asian values that mattered were sympathy, distributive justice, duty consciousness, ritual, public spiritedness, willingness to delay gratification, honesty, thrift, trustworthiness, ample savings, respect for education, respect for authority and elders and group orientation. Take the case of Malaysia. Dr. Mahathir, the prime minister, espoused the cause of the Bumiputra (Malay Sons of the Soil). Through a series of draconian laws and decrees, Mahathir gave them every opportunity to catch up with the Chinese and the Indians. This could not have happened under a democratic system, parliamentary or presidential.

Take the case of South Korea in the late ’50s. Gen. Park Chung-hee smashed his knuckles into the crazy-quilt free enterprise system spawned by his predecessor Syngman Rhee and favored by the US. He set up a dictatorship which first decreed land reform. He then got the leading capitalists, entrepreneurs, economists, policy planners together win to something like a ruling national council. He drove them to excel, meet or exceed targets. Or else. The story goes that a prominent businessman complained, said he couldn’t meet his target. Park Chung-hee simply replied he would be executed at dawn. The businessman relented and met his target.

That was iron discipline. But it was that discipline that forged the new South Korea and today it is the 12th biggest economy in the world. It was only many decades later, after the corrupt governments of Choon Doo-Huan and Roh Tae Woo were busted, and the two presidents charged and imprisoned, that South Korea had its first real democratic elections under Kim Young-sam. The parliamentary system was a complete stranger to South Korea’s rapid thrust into a tiger economy.

In the aftermath, the "Asian miracle" roared for three decades together with Hong Kong and Taiwan. That was shock and awe.

The Philippines couldn’t join that phenomenal economic onslaught, a highly "Westernized" country, it was outside the loop of Asian values and Confucian family and community tradition. Our country was an outsider. In an ample sense, it had the religious and social culture of Latin America – Ramon Catholic, impoverished, submissive, patient, resigned. Lawrence D. Harrington of Harvard, an international authority on this issue, wrote about the Latino: "Resignation of the poor. To be poor is to deserve heaven. To be rich is to deserve hell. It is good to suffer in this life because in the next life, you will find eternal reward." He could have been writing about the Filipino. By the way, failed parliamentary governments are strewn all over Latin America, an economically backward continent.

I better explain that Confucian culture in more detail. More than anything else, that culture fueled – in greater or lesser measure – the sensational economic drives of, aside from China, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia. And now Vietnam.

Lucien Pye, another professor emeritus at Harvard, liberally quotes Max Weber whom he calls the "unsurpassed master of the origins of capitalism." Weber analyzed Chinese culture and saw similarities with Puritanism. The Chinese character, Weber said, "would in all probability be quite capable, probably more capable than the Japanese, of assimilating capitalism which has technically and economically been fully developed in the modern culture area." Imagine! Weber wrote his masterpiece The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1903-07.

Even that early Max Weber forecast that China "might indeed be able to emulate capitalistic practices in time." Weber also shared the (French Enlightenment’s (18th century) positive views about China. So Napoleon was right after all in mid-19th century. He said China was a "sleeping giant" that would wake up one day and stun the world.

The Confucian "need for achievement", according to Lucien Pye, is a constant "drive for excellence". He added: "Chinese children are taught the importance of striving for success and the shame of not measuring up to parental expectations." Pye stresses "the key values of reliance on the social networks (guanxi), of taking the long-run view, of seeking market share rather than profits, of delaying gratification, and of aggressively saving for the future." All these have to do with getting the economy to perform like the blazes. Today, China is on the verge of becoming an economic superpower. The Philippines is the laggard of Asia.

I have purposely resorted to the varied works of renowned world authorities on the issue and the lessons of history. As I emphasized earlier, the aim was to propagate the truth and debunk Con-Ass propaganda that a parliamentary government in the Philippines would lead us to the biblical land of Canaan, flowing with milk and honey. Nothing is farther from the truth.

This is the mother of all lies.

Let me refer the reader to another best-selling book, The Commanding Heights, written by award-winning authors Daniel Yergin and Joseph Estanislaw. At one point, they write: "Most of the Asian success stories involved, at some point, dictatorship, authoritarianism, or at least regulated politics and a de facto one-party system. Yet at the same time, they built a consensus around the imperative of survival and the visible returns of growth, indeed what has been called shared growth. Most Asian governments did intervene – sometimes quite drastically. But they did so to influence the shape of market outcomes. The paradox of Asia, then, was that in many ways it was government knowledge, enforced by political structures, that helped bring about market-friendly outcomes."

Parliamentary? It didn’t even come as a sneeze.

The lesson to be drawn by the Philippines is that the British parliamentary system or other like systems is hardly the political model for our country. It took "law and order" 200 years to mature in England. Its laws were drawn from many revolts, many wars, myriad political clashes, the granite rebel face of Oliver Cromwell, as history came like a tempest, where British culture shifted with the changing faces of the economy. There is another thing. The records state there is no country in the world with a presidential system of government that ever switched to parliamentary. It is the other way round. Parliamentary switching to presidential. We could become the first.

The other lesson to be drawn is that our survival and eventual progress as a nation will have to keen to the Asian model. Or models. The Western parliamentary model will not succeed here. Their ethos is not ours, their culture is not ours, their history is not ours. We are a special breed, drawn from the tribal culture of Lapu-Lapu in the 16th century, christianized but nonetheless abused by Spain, then our ilustrado elite brainwashed to accept the free trade blandishments of an imperial America.

Asia has moved rapidly forward. We have hardly grown since then. (To be continued)