To be free

Ever wondered why independence day celebrations in most countries are marked by parading military hardware down the streets?

I think it derives from the traditional idea about independence that emphasized territoriality. Independence was understood as a nation’s capacity to secure space for its community. Thus the military capability to secure that space was essential to the achievement of independence.

This has to be a European idea.

In that continent, for centuries, blood was shed and many battles were fought to secure space and make permanent shifting boundaries. Nations were born out of war and their survival rested on their ability to fight for their existence.

It is said that American manufacturers during the 19th century developed the rapid-firing gun to sell to the Europeans so that they may kill each other more proficiently.

In a Darwinian view of the world, nations were constantly endangered species. Strong nations gobbled up weak nations. Big nations dominated small ones. Rich nations impoverished poor ones.

This Darwinian view of the world was pervasive in the 19th century and continued on through much of the 20th. It was given flesh by colonial occupation, wars of intervention and beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies.

This was a primitive epoch when national power was measured by territory controlled. That is a quaint concept that Swiss bankers, Dutch brokers and Singaporean yuppies might have difficulty grasping today.

In a more primitive age, long before the Age of Information, the obsession with making boundaries impermeable through military capacity is understandable. In the past, it was difficult to understand nations as – in the words of Benedict Anderson – "imagined communities". Nations were large blocs of territory that both kept invaders out and residents in through the use of coercive power.

Like the first generation of nation-states in Europe, the new nations that emerged from the decay of colonialism had to fight wars of independence or settle territorial disputes through war. National sovereignty was an obsession. That obsession distorted everything else about nation-building.

Recall Manuel L. Quezon’s rhetorical flourish about preferring "a country run like hell by Filipinos than one run like heaven by Americans". He got his wish.

Since independence, we have been obsessed with keeping foreigners out, barricading our economy and cultivating all sorts of myths about our inherent cultural virtues. We mistook autarky for sovereignty. We mistook xenophobia for love of country. We mistook protectionism for economic strength.

These are mistakes that persist to this day, haunting our economic progress like so many goblins from the grave.

105 years ago, we ceremonially but not substantially claimed independence for a territory that was not yet a national community. We continue to celebrate that date as our Independence Day, allowing us – like some useless entry into the Guinness Book of Records – to claim we were Asia’s first republic.

105 years after we proclaimed our nation, a significant number of Filipinos continue to prefer another nationality. There is still an active movement seeking US statehood for the Philippines. A tremendously significant number of Filipinos have migrated, following the path of improved opportunities.

But these are minor traumas.

The major concern today is the need to rehabilitate our understanding about what nationalism means and about what it means to be a patriot in the modern age.

For too long, we thought that nationhood meant building walls to keep the rest of the world out, about keeping the imagined purity of our culture by blocking off influences from elsewhere. That is not nationalism. That is parochialism.

Of what use is independence if we misdirect our economy so that we depend on other countries for assistance, if we need other countries to absorb the surplus population we could not manage, if we continue to ruin ourselves by looting our own public sphere or by cultivating internecine wars that drive away investments and kill our own capacity for hope?

Of what use is independence if, in its name, we strangle our own economy with protectionist measures, compensate for our inability to trade by plundering our natural resources or reject the discipline of global best practices in order to conserve the inefficiencies that characterize our economy and politics?

Our independence day celebrations have hardly been contemplative events. We have not used the opportunity of a commonly recognized event in order to reflect on how we got to where we are and what we must do to get to where we want to be.

That is such a waste of opportunity.

There is so much we need to clear up among ourselves. We are heir to a tradition of nationalism that is driven more by low self-esteem rather than by a confident attitude of engagement with the world.

We have not fully appreciated independence as a responsibility. In means, as it does for young adults, recognizing the need to be fully competent in meeting our needs and propelling our progress without having to rely on the mercy of other nations. Others might call this self-respect.

It is naïve to imagine independence as an effort to shut out the rest of the world. We should imagine independence as a challenge to build our capacities and develop our institutions so that we may face the rest of the world as a nation equal to all others.

Independence day ought not to be an occasion for magnifying the differences between us and the rest of humanity. It ought to be a an occasion for examining the things that we do similarly and see where we are deficient in accomplishing the same things. The latter is a positive attitude of self-improvement; the former an insecure attitude of covering up our weaknesses.

In this light, the currently fashionable phrase "strong republic" seems to be a redundancy.

Every republic should be, by definition, strong. It should have functioning institutions that allow effective self-governance and a political system that allows the distillation of a commonly shared vision for the community.

Independence is not a final, perfected condition that needs to be obsessively defended at every turn – which is the attitude of defensive nationalism. Rather, independence is a continuing challenge to improve our domestic processes so that sovereignty becomes a means to bring prosperity and freedom to our people.