Models for development

It’s good to see President Aquino easing his aversion to foreign travel and visiting at least the country’s neighbors.

In the age of globalization, one must be a citizen of the world. While it’s refreshing to have a president scrimping on foreign travel expenses after the previous globetrotting one, and while one can now experience the world vicariously through information and communication technology, there is still no substitute for first-hand experience.

It’s particularly good that P-Noy is visiting Indonesia, because it’s one of the largest democracies in the developing world, and it is overtaking us in many aspects of economic development despite the violent political turmoil that led to the ouster of strongman Suharto only 13 years ago.

P-Noy can start the national comparisons upon landing at the 26-year-old Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta. I consider international airports as good indicators of a country’s state of development, and the Soekarno-Hatta is no different. It’s no Changi International, but Soekarno-Hatta is still better than our cramped Ninoy Aquino International Airport.

In India I was impressed by its airport facilities, and depressed as I inevitably compared it with our own premier airport.

The size of Indira Gandhi International in New Delhi befits the size of the subcontinent, and it has almost all the facilities found in the world’s leading airports – travelators, mini carts for carry-on luggage, clean lavatories at every gate (but no free wifi or broadband access).

The passenger traffic was also a source of envy for me. Even around midnight, the massive airport was packed with travelers from all over the world.

Transiting through Bangkok was just as depressing. Suvarnabhumi International, hounded by controversy since plans for it started in the 1960s, has recovered from its shutdown by anti-government protesters in 2008. Despite birth pains upon its opening in September 2006, including superstitious fears that it was haunted, the sprawling, modern airport is now Asia’s fifth busiest.

Thailand is another democracy in the developing world (OK, it’s a monarchic democracy) with which the Philippines, land of people power, should forge special ties – the type that is not possible with countries that do not share values of freedom and universal human rights.

Democracy has many warts, but several developing countries are showing that economic progress is possible even without curtailing civil liberties. The only son of Ninoy and Cory Aquino should forge special linkages between the Philippines and these countries, especially because a number of them have done better than us in terms of economic progress within a shorter period.

Four of them occupy huge land areas: Brazil, India, Indonesia and South Africa. Yet they are showing that even in multicultural societies, in a vast land, democracy can work, and economic liberation need not be placed ahead of civil liberties.

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The authoritarian model of economic progress at the expense of basic human rights is crumbling in the Arab world.

For this we have to give credit to advances in information and communication technology as well as the ease of traveling in a global village.

When people under authoritarian rule find themselves immersed or watch or read about life in a free society, those who do not benefit from the largesse of oppressive regimes will inevitably wonder why they cannot breathe the same free air in their own land.

They will wonder if they are paying too steep a price for stability and economic progress in their country, particularly if the fruits of progress are not distributed equitably.

When there are more people being deprived of the fruits of prosperity than those enjoying it, you have a recipe for the kind of discontent that can drive the oppressed to self-immolation and unseat long-entrenched regimes.

Singapore escaped this fate through a generally fair and equitable distribution of the fruits of progress. Singaporeans will tell you this is easy if you have their tiny population. It also helped that their autocratic founding father Lee Kuan Yew was not afflicted with kleptomania and laid the foundations for the rule of law. The city-state developed a meritocracy and a brutally efficient bureaucracy. In this context, the argument for putting economic liberation ahead of certain human rights can work.

This “Asian model” of national development has inspired other authoritarian regimes, but with less success. It’s hardly the model for the authoritarian regimes of the Arab world, where ordinary people can see that power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of only a few. 

Those behind movements for freedom now sweeping various parts of the globe need models for what to do next after they have achieved their main objective. They can look at the emerging economic powerhouses among the developing countries for inspiration.

Some can be more equal than others, but only up to a certain point. One day those who are less equal will declare (perhaps after watching the Hollywood movie that made the phrase popular): I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore.

In the beginning was the word, and the word was freedom. And then – as in Tunisia, as in Egypt, and as in the Philippines, circa 1986 – it’s the end of the road for despots who have ruled for decades.

After breathing in the clean, bracing air of freedom, the next difficult task is nurturing it, and achieving prosperity in a free society.

A quarter century after democracy was restored, Filipinos are still working to achieve this prosperity. In this task, P-Noy can get inspiration from the emerging democratic economies.