Imagine if you dated your birthday, somehow, to the moment when you, as an embryo, made the transition from having pharyngeal arches, the relict of ancient gills, to your having throat, jaw, and ears formed from those arches. You could argue it marks, in your embryonic and indeed, in human, evolution, where you symbolically went from being a fish to a terrestrial mammal. Still, wouldn’t that be weird? It would make more sense to try to figure out the moment of your conception—your true anniversary as a living creature—or, what everyone else does, the day you popped out of the safety of your mother’s womb and entered the wild, scary world: your birthday.
Similarly, we remain unhealthily fixated on what we call the First Republic in 1899-1901 while ignoring the government that proclaimed and began the revolution in 1896, also while understating to the point of ignoring what we (inaccurately) call our Third Republic, recognized by the world in 1946, which itself had its origins in the Constitution approved by the Filipino people in 1935. It was in that year that Filipinos finally drafted a Constitution not merely theoretical, but practical, born of actual experience and in near-continuous use, in terms of its principles, ever since.
When we declared, in the 1935 Constitution and all its inferior replacements, that we would renounce war as an instrument of national policy and that, furthermore, we pledged to adopt international law as part of the law of the nation, we laid down enduring principles. Those were born, in turn, of a particular world event: World War I, which gave birth to two concepts that proved invaluable to our national development. The first was the articulation of the principle of national self-determination; the second was the creation of an international body to resolve differences between nations.
Both were put forward by Woodrow Wilson, who’d signed the Jones Law, which aimed to settle the question of when, and no longer if, Philippine independence would be achieved. While Wilson failed to get the United States to join the League of Nations, Franklin D. Roosevelt learned from the experience and put in place an improved institution known as the United Nations: it is the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Unclos, on which our assertion and defense of the territorial sea and so forth, hinges on.
The whole idea of things like Unclos is you have to get beyond an antiquarian fussing over old maps and historical claims—because both are rabbit holes with no exit—and rely, instead, on modern principles and means of measurement to define the rights of nations, and the means to arbitrate when inevitable disagreements arise.
Here, Ferdinand Marcos Sr. with his petty imperialist fantasies, was an outlier, and his decisions as dictator have continued to complicate matters because they may have been delusional but he convinced many of his countrymen to share in his delusions. He embarked on the conquest of Sabah, and he annexed part of the Spratlys. The former led to a generation of Malaysian-sponsored separatist warfare in Mindanao; the latter has complicated—even clouded—our foreign policy.
Marcos wasn’t the first president to be interested in either topic. The Sabah claims date to the Roxas administration while the Quezon administration was the first to assert a Filipino claim to the Spratlys. The difference, however, between Marcos and his predecessors and successors was fundamental: when Elpidio Quirino, as secretary for the interior and finance, first started officially pursuing the Filipino claim in 1946, he pursued it in the same manner that our other claims, such as to the Turtle Islands, were being pursued: through diplomacy, and the invocation of international law, and, when Quirino became our first real secretary of foreign affairs and then president, by invoking the mechanisms of international arbitration. Similarly, the Sabah claim from Manuel Roxas to Diosdado Macapagal was pursued according to the mechanisms of the global body of which the Philippines was a founding member: the United Nations. When we lost a plebiscite in Sabah, we reverted to native type and cried foul over losing the election (Ninoy Aquino, then in his glib era, sort of got the gist of the fundamentals without being able to precisely articulate it, which made his logical and principle opposition to Marcos’ Sabah adventurism messy and hard to follow as a result).
Marcosian fantasies, as dictatorial fantasies tend to do, have become hard-wired into our fundamental laws. So the now-obsolete principle of claims by historical title still haunts our Constitution, as kind of legal appendix to symbolize our Sabah claim; as does the presidential decree annexing part of the Spratlys we call the Kalayaan Island Group (the “micronation of Freedomland” invented by Tomas Cloma Sr. who ended up jailed and who then handed over his claims to the government).
To reassert Sabah would be to help China, relying as that claim did, on the same arguments being made by China to uphold its nine-dash-line claim; while no president can untangle the complications in the Spratlys so long as they can’t muster the will to get Congress to take a fresh look at Presidential Decree No. 1596.
Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3