Globalization, Democratization and Asian Leadership: Power Sharing, Foreign Policy and Society in the Philippines and Japan by Vincent Kelly Pollard

Author:Vincent Kelly Pollard [Pollard, Vincent Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351932950
Google: m7ZBDgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 34477713
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

Lobbying ASEAN for Domestic support

In order publicly to advocate a more forceful pro-bases position, Aquino evidently needed support so as to offset the expected influence of committed anti-bases activists, especially in light of the less advantageous rules of the game being written into the new constitution. To be persuasive, moreover, such support, could not be exclusively American.

As quoted above, Salvador Laurel and other anti-Marcos politicians had signed a 1983 statement. Its anti-bases statement referred to ASEAN’s proposed Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality. The flexible language of ASEAN’s public statements, however, lent itself to other purposes, as well. ASEAN publicly emerged at the five-country Bangsaen-Bangkok foreign ministers meeting on 5–8 August 1967. Thereafter, ASEAN’s public declaration that foreign military bases are “temporary in nature” was hedged by understandings that Manila need not renege on its military and security agreements with Washington, particularly since RP diplomats successfully advocated softening the already non-self-enforcing Thai-Indonesian draft SEAARC/ASEAN language on the “temporary” nature of foreign military bases (Pollard 1989/1988:841; cf. Mata 1967:1–2; and Tatad 1967:1–2). RP Secretary of Foreign Affairs Narciso Ramos made this clear in statements to journalists shortly after the formation of ASEAN, as noted in Chapter 3.

Further and as predicted in a widely cited article, “in the development of the attitude of U.S. policymakers toward ‘regionalism’ and its logical correlate, ‘disengagement,’ can be found the ideological underpinnings for a continued U.S. presence and involvement in East and Southeast Asia” during the 1970s (Pollard 1970:255). Those understandings, subsequently reaffirmed and reinforced by two decades of ASEAN toleration for the bases, became a legacy that, during Aquino’s presidency, probably would made it extremely difficult for ASEAN to provide public support to pro-bases Filipino opinion makers who, in the view of some pro-MBA advocates, might otherwise have built an articulate, salient constituency for their cause.

At the same time, the notion that ASEAN should provide political support to the Philippines for continuing to host foreign military bases did not originate with Aquino and her advisors. The notion had achieved currency well before the Snap Election. Under Marcos, “Filipino policymakers….always felt that….it was incumbent upon ASEAN to support the Philippines[’] rationalizing the presence of the bases to the antibases constituency in the Philippines” (Leviste 1996:1).

Before, during and after the Constitutional Commission, Filipinos and other academics and security studies practitioners discussed whether or not to advocate a possible changed self-perception for ASEAN, that is, a public verification by ASEAN of the positive but privately expressed attitudes of ASEAN diplomats, even before 1986 and 1987, towards the American military facilities in the RP. Those discussions transpired at conferences held in the Philippines (Hernandez, Evangelista and Maranan 1987/1986), the United States (Manglapus 1991/1986b:418–420; 1987; 1995) and Korea (Leviste 1993/1987) during 1986 and in the daily newspapers of the RP during 1987.

For example, at the 30–31 May 1986 conference on “Issues in Socio-Political Transformation in Asia and the Pacific: The Recent Philippine Experience,” Sukhumband Paribatra of Chulalongkorn University’s Institute of Security and International Studies claimed, “As long as the Philippines wishes these bases to remain,….

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