Freedom Incorporated by Colleen Woods

Author:Colleen Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Public Administration

In the context of decolonization and hardening Cold War battle lines, Southeast Asian foreign aid was unavoidably politicized, leading both Americans and Filipinos to manage its optics and messaging. In light of both contexts, the Philippines took on new meaning in U.S. foreign policies, and Americans acted accordingly by remaining attentive to questions of Philippine sovereignty. Members of the Bell survey mission, for instance, expressed concerns that technical assistance training programs might find themselves “on ticklish ground” because of how they would likely infringe on “the sovereignty of the Philippine government.” If policymakers wanted the solutions proposed through technical aid projects to be adopted, then it could not appear as if they had been entirely directed or controlled by the United States.46 Americans wanted to avoid accusations of imperial interference in the Philippines; but, ironically enough, when, in 1951, a group of U.S. policymakers gathered to discuss the Mutual Security Agency’s (MSA) “Action Plan in Asia,” they met in the Philippine city of Baguio, home to “the Mansion House,” built in 1908 to serve as the summer residence for the American governor general of the colonial state. The Philippine government had rehabilitated the mansion after it had suffered damage during WWII and used the mansion and its guesthouse as meeting venues, including for the second meeting of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization in 1948. Nonetheless, the fact that Quirino met U.S. officials at the site served as a reminder that the built environment of the U.S. colonial state remained visible in the independent state.

The MSA, a newly formed governmental division whose director served on the National Security Council (NSC), was modeled in part on the Marshall Plan in Europe, which U.S. policymakers believed, thanks to “their joint endeavors,” had “preserved Europe and its civilization from collapse.” Citing President Truman’s belief that U.S. foreign aid should support the “free nations of Asia in their efforts to strengthen the economic foundations of independence,” the Baguio group identified training in public administration as a primary goal of U.S. foreign aid dollars.47 The Bell Report had already recommended a program of technical assistance for the Philippines, and the MSA group in Baguio identified the specific priority of public administration education.

As an academic discipline and subfield of political science, public administration originated in the late nineteenth century when academics—including future president Woodrow Wilson—argued for the need to study, and educate about, the bureaucratic systems of increasingly complex governments.48 Advocates of public administration suggested that it made democracy possible through the efficient use of resources, scientific methods of management, and the enforced separation of politics from administration; put another way, they stressed the benefits of a government bureaucracy run by experts rather than political appointees. As a result, universities began developing academic programs in the subject.49 In 1917, the political science department at the University of Michigan, for example, began granting master’s degrees in municipal administration to promote efficiency in local governance; twenty-two years later, the university broadened its reach by founding the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.