A leap of faith

Last Wednesday, after nationwide consultations, Concom voted to recommend to President GMA and Congress to shift to parliamentary government. The vote did not go as smoothly as would have been expected. Those who were against it fought virulently till the end even if they ‘were so few’. Commissioners Gerry Espina, Rene Azurin, Jose Villanueva et al used all their skills to waylay a final decision. Espina, for one seemed to have a bottomless bag of parliamentary tricks. At the end he and his group attempted a last minute ‘compromise’. Since we were all for charter change anyway, we could dispense with ‘nomenclature’ meaning remove the names of parliamentary and presidential from our vocabulary of debate and just agree on proposed reforms. It was a brilliant ploy and one, I concede, seductive enough to sway the ‘parliamentarians.’ Espina and co. deserve our gratitude for the exciting debate that certainly benefited both sides struggling to arrive at a principled consensus. Salamat to all of you.

It is regrettable that because there were two differing positions it often seemed like it was a contest and prone to the regrettable use of such words as winning or losing. Let me say using the words was unfortunate. I think this is what Gerry Espina meant by the difficulty of nomenclature. In a way, we were all prisoners of nomenclature. It forced us to use combative terms to articulate our ideas often clouding the serious duty before us to recommend reforms in our political system.

Recommending parliamentary government is very much like recommending a new arrangement of the furniture in a house that has become too small and needs to make room for its growing number of occupants. It is a response to specific problems at the same time that it does not pretend that human nature and its capacity for evil will cease once the furniture has been rearranged. It is the same with the shift to parliamentary form of government. We are making a blueprint to improve governance, not to solve the iniquities of human nature. But come to think of it, even a seemingly harmless act of re-arranging furniture is not immune from conflict.

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Democracy, contrary to the way we have come to understand it, is less of an ideal that we seek to attain, than it is an ‘invention’ drawn from particular conditions. It was the Greeks who invented it and it had the particularity of a response to their problems. So also is it with the proposal to shift to a parliamentary form of government. It is a response to the particularity of Philippine problems here and now, among the most visible is flawed elections that are no more than popularity and money contests among a largely apolitical electorate. It is not a recommendation for some wooly concept of an ideal form of government, even if it sometimes seems so when we propose and defend such a shift.

It helps to recall that democracy was invented in sixth century B.C. in Athens (Attica, in ancient Greece) through a series of reforms that were proposed by Cleisthenes, a Greek solon (a congressman, in other words). He so passionately believed in these reforms and he persisted against virulent opposition. He offered to his countrymen an invention, a creation if you wish.

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We miss its real meaning when we look at it as an unreachable ideal, rather than as a response to a given set of conditions. In Cleisthenes’ time Attica was ruled by individual tyrants and groups (oligopolies) drawn from the aristocracy. The term used for them was phylae. These oligarchies were defined by kinship and geography and not unlike what has come down to us, were prone to coalitions for the purpose of rent seeking. It pitted tribe against tribe, city against countryside, economic interest (agriculture then) against economic interest – patterns that we are familiar with in the Philippines today. So is it in other times and places.

Cleisthenes proposed a set of reforms, a constitution, to destroy these patterns. His solution was to redefine the ‘phylae’ and transform them from narrow tribal, geographic and economic interests into collations that included a broad cross section of the interests of the citizens of Attica. A modern day political analyst would call these ‘encompassing organizations.’ Instead of narrow interests, the newly defined ‘phylae’ were organized to make them more concerned about the common interests of all citizens in Attica. In revamping the political structure, Cleisthenes’s constitution reached out to all the elements of society and guaranteed concord and welfare of the community. Rules that were set up on how to select the assembly of all citizens played an important role.

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Charter change is the same. We need to respond, indeed invent a system more responsive to our needs, whether political or economic. Like the people of Attica who had to be convinced to abandon their traditional modes of political organization, so also is the challenge to us. What made the ancient Greeks change their mind? What made Cleisthenes, himself, an aristocrat, propose reforms even if it endangered his own class?

That question can also be asked of the President and her allies, politicians all who have come forward to give their support to charter change. In effect changing our form of government would open government to more players, certainly to those less moneyed and less popular but eminently qualified. It may not happen immediately but in time, it will happen in a parliamentary system.

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Unfortunately we will have to deal with politicians because it is they that the Constitution empowers to propose changes. If we do not wish to have anything to do with politicians to achieve reforms and seek instead for an ideal situation with spotless persona to do this, then we might end up taking the route of the Khmer Rouge. It was a modern day political disaster brought about by a group of Cambodians who thought they could remake society by eliminating the ‘ruling class’ and starting from Pol Pot’s ground zero.

But to go back to the Athenians who made such a success of their democratic experiments. They did so because they gambled. They gambled on an entirely new set of proposals to depart from old ways of thinking. In our consultations we are often asked if we can give a guarantee that life would be better for our people if we did make the shift. I say to them that like the Greeks, we will gamble on a new set of proposals. There are beautiful Tagalog words for this: Makikipagsapalaran tayo.

That is the difference between theory and practice. We can debate endlessly on the theories but in the end, we will have to make up our minds, leap to reality and put our ideas into practice as the Greeks did centuries ago. I think we should ask ourselves the same question. Given our present predicament are we better off just having more of the same or should we make the bold shift to parliamentary government and at the earliest practicable time adopt a federal structure? That is the question before us.

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My e-mail is [email protected]