‘Minsan isang gamu-gamo…’

The irony of it is so in-your-face that it cannot be missed: a small country emerging as victor in the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, as it seeks to reclaim fishing rights within its exclusive economic zone, and a giant country belligerently ignoring the ruling and continuing to behave as if the former were a vassal state being allowed to fish in its waters.

Subsequent events have shown a decided drift by the present administration toward making this country once again a satellite, this time not of the US projective power in the region, but of China’s ambition to remake Asia, in fact the world.

The cultural backdrop, while complex, can be summed up thus: national self-image.

Recent studies in strategic security have brought back to the surface the importance of beliefs and values that shape a people’s psychological environment. In contrast to realpolitik approaches that put emphasis merely on economic forces and military muscle, this line of thinking revisits the effect of ideas on national policy. It shows how deeply rooted concepts of how the world works can determine how a society’s institutions are likely to behave when faced with strategic choices.

President Duterte’s pivot to China is of a piece with the durable self-image that this country has acquired through centuries of a history dominated by foreign powers: a mentality of being inferior, small, and therefore should align with whoever has the goods and guns if we are to survive. The ranting and raving against the United States and the European Union is not, at bottom, an assertion of national independence. What drives this reckless burning of our bridges with old allies is the survivalist mindset that the West is finished and we better line up behind Xi Jinping’s vision of a “One Belt, One Road” presided over by China as a rising power.

China, on the other hand, is showing signs that it is once again the Middle Kingdom, an ideological construct based on a myth created during the Zhou period that the Central States, whose ruler held a mandate from heaven, has a civilizing influence that is to be extended to all the world. Since then, this has been at the core of Chinese self-identity.

Unlike our short-term memory, which usually dates back no farther than 1521, China’s three millennia of written history continue to shape its behavior in relation to the world. “Despite its increasing prominence among modern developed nations,” says a strategic analyst, “China continues to seek guidance from a past characterized by Confucian notions of hierarchical political order and a ‘moral geography’ that places China at the center of the civilized world.”

One Belt, One Road is an initiative driven by the impulse to centralize power through commercial and civilizational influence. While sounding futuristic, it is in fact anachronistic, a throwback to Cold War rhetoric and a bipolar world, at a time when small cells of terror can cause multistate conflicts, and global economic integration is no guarantee against political fragmentation.

At this juncture, we are faced with at least two options: to behave according to our “heritage of smallness,” as National Artist Nick Joaquin once put it, or to take our place among those nations who, while small, have made significant footprints in the world’s history.

Britain is an island about the same size as us, yet through upheavals that brought about political reforms and industrial innovation, it has managed to build an empire. The Netherlands is much smaller, but its mercantile power was such that by the 18th century the Dutch East India Company had captured half of the world’s trade. Vietnam’s mosquito army, by sheer fighting spirit, forced US troops to turn back, licking their wounds from the trauma of war.

Bullied by a giant neighbor, we presented our case to the arbitral tribunal—and won. This shows we can write a new script in our history by following the story line of a film in the recent past, of a firefly that challenged a hawk: “Minsan isang gamu-gamo ang lumaban sa lawin…”

Dr. Melba Padilla Maggay is a social anthropologist and author of “Rise Up and Walk, Culture and Religion in Empowering the Poor,” published in Oxford, UK.