The morning after

My family and I were Filipinos abroad in the first Edsa people power revolution. We lived our political exile in London during those days and were therefore out of the loop of mainstream opposition who were in the US — the Aquinos, the Lopezes, Manglapus et al. We were isolated even if we had carried the brunt of organizing opposition groups in Europe and served as resource persons for European media.

We learned that a people power revolution means you have to be physically present as part of a mob storming the gates to matter. We may not have been in Edsa but we contributed to it. The presumption is that the massing of people in the streets is all it takes to renew a country. There are good things that can be said about people power movements but there are also bad. It fails to recognize the substance of nation building. It does not happen in one day but from day to day.

Massing in the streets is not the substance of political reform. Nowhere was the irony of people power at odds with a working nation than what happened in the Philippines where, despite all the celebrating and feasting of victory in the streets, on those days there was little reform accomplished. Indeed, it has become worse.

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I won’t be a killjoy. By all means, have all the celebration but I am more concerned with what happens the morning after. Celebration can blind and disable us from separating what is important from what is trivial.

I don’t begrudge the new Aquino government for presiding over a showbiz type of celebration for Edsa. I hope the celebrants will be reminded that celebrations are ephemeral and symbolic. Without understanding the substance of what is being celebrated it is no more than a party with plenty of booze to keep it going. Showbiz celebrations will not rekindle the EDSA spirit. I am afraid it misses the point.

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The grand celebration of EDSA’s 25th anniversary coincides with similar people power protests breaking out in other parts of the world.

Something tells me that with people power protests breaking out like dominoes in the Middle East we are moving to a dangerous zone.

As a recent editorial in the New York Times said about Iran “We don’t know what will happen next. We are cheered by the news that the Iranian people are still willing to stand up and truly frightened by the government’s capacity for brutality.”

“Egypt’s revolution has inspired people across the region and deeply frightened autocrats. But the truth is no one knows even how Egypt will turn out. The army says it ‘hopes’ to hand power to an elected civilian leadership by August. To make good on that pledge, it needs to lift the state of emergency now and begin working with opposition groups to plan for a credible vote.” cautions the New York Times.

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From Philip Bowring comes the article “Asian History”. It compares what happened in Egypt with the people power revolutions in the Philippines and Indonesia.

He says “all three had something in common. They followed rigged elections, suggesting that phony democracy can be more dangerous for dictators than none at all (a thought that may give hope in Myanmar). In all three, the military was an important factor but not the driving force, which in each case was the populace in the streets.”

There is also another danger in the Egyptian crisis. “There is the danger that a reaction against the corruption under Mubarak will lead not just to attempts to recover ill-gotten gains from Swiss banks, but to an attack on the credibility of all business that have prospered under the ousted regime. For the longer term, Egypt might just get a new set of cronies, or the gradual return of old ones, as has happened in Indonesia and the Philippines. But that is another issue.”

Interestingly he notes that efforts in the Asian countries to prosecute past misdeeds soon lost steam, and appears to be a bad reflection on good governance. The upside was it allowed “an atmosphere of forgiveness that contributed to political stability.”

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Daniel Bell in “Moving Eastward” speculates if all this might lead to China as the next domino. He disagrees.

“In China, it is not so simple. Pro-democracy forces are not absent — the most famous is the imprisoned Nobel Peace laureate, Liu Xiaobo — but they are not widespread. Many social critics and political reformers in China do not endorse multiparty democracy as the solution to China’s political problems.”

Moreover, the “democracy is not so good” camp is itself divided into two different groups. He divides them into Pessimists and Optimists.

“The Pessimists point to a serious problem with democracy: The will of the people may not be moral — it could endorse racism, fascism or and imperialism. Hence, Pessimist reformers say that China should implement measures to combat corruption and abuses of government power and open the society in other ways — but without going the route of electoral democracy.

On the other hand the Optimists point to another key problem with democracy: “There is no formal representation for non-voters who are affected by the policies of the government. Hence a democratic form of government may be counter to the interests of future generations and people living outside national boundaries.”

“Both Pessimists and Optimists have good reasons to doubt the benefits of competitive, direct elections for the country’s top political leaders.

“Let’s hope that democracy succeeds in Egypt. But in China, the ‘freedom agenda’ for now need not include support for full electoral democracy.”

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For those who are looking for explanations on recent events I find Kishore Mahbubani’s “Can Asians Think?” most helpful. He says that “We live in an essentially unbalanced world. Westerners cannot see that they have arrogated to themselves the moral high ground from which they lecture the world. The rest of the world can see this.

“Western intellectuals are convinced that their minds and culture are open and self-critical and in contrast to ossified Asian minds and cultures have no sacred cows.” Not true he said.

Sacred cows also exist in the Western mind. Several American professors cite Mahbubani’s essays for “providing one of the antidotes to the sweet, syrupy sense of self congratulations that flows through Western writing on contemporary issues.”