As this is the SECOND in the series, if you haven't read the first you may read it here
Cracks in My Liberal Certainties
Rommel A. Curaming
In 2000, out of
curiosity about life beyond the usual, I applied for and had the fortune of clinching the ASEAN Graduate Scholarship at the National University of Singapore (NUS) to pursue another Master’s degree, this time in Southeast Asian Studies. It was a spur of the moment decision upon seeing a newspaper advertisement one lazy Sunday afternoon. NUS then held a stature far from what it holds today. It was almost unheard of within Philippine academic community. It did not matter to me as I just felt I needed a new experience to reenergize myself. It turned out to be a major turning
point not just for my intellectual pursuit but also for the life of my young family. It ushered us into two decades of itinerant life in the ‘diaspora’. I had no plan to stay long overseas, but one opportunity came after another and I just grabbed them as they came. I brought my young family wherever I went, so long
as finances allowed it—Yogyakarta, Canberra, Manila, Melbourne,
Singapore, Brunei.
Studying overseas for
the first time opened up possibilities that were hitherto unthinkable for me. My
early exposure to Southeast Asian history at UP did not spark my interest, perhaps
largely due to the dispiriting attitude of the professor who taught the subject.
The history of Islam and the Middle East, as well as of East Asia fascinated me.
When I decided to pursue graduate studies in Asian Studies, I opted to major in
East Asia, specifically Japan. In hindsight, my interest in Europe, Middle East
and East Asia—anything but the Philippines—reflected my attempts to escape from
what seemed to me a depressing trajectory of Philippine history. That of Japan
and the rising tiger economies of China, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore appeared in
stark contrast: they offered narratives of triumph, overcoming the odds and attained stunning
successes. Seeing for the first time how far the quality of life of ordinary Singaporeans
and Malaysians compared to Filipinos, I was seduced to rethink the supposed inherent
evils of authoritarianism that I came to learn as a UP student in the post-EDSA
years. I particularly remember the first time I went to Malaysia, taking a bus
from Singapore. Upon seeing the remarkable infrastructures, robust economy, clean,
safe and well-appointed towns and cities, I felt deeply sad. I was struck by
the thought that the Philippines could have been the same, if not ahead in
comparison. I was long prepared for how impressive Singapore was, but I was
jolted to my senses upon seeing how far Malaysia had gone. What went wrong in
the Philippines, I wondered. I was deeply disturbed. As authoritarianism worked in
Singapore and Malaysia, able to provide a better life for most of their citizens under
Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir, why it did not in the Philippines during the Marcos
years? If indeed democracy was better, how come the post-Marcos years proved
disappointing as well? Observing big but poor democracies such as India and Indonesia, I began
to wonder if poverty and instability were a necessary price to pay for
democracy.
It was in NUS where my interest in Southeast
Asia was nurtured. It was also there where I underwent a political re-awakening after
being exposed to ideas that re-set the trajectory of my intellectual
development. The module I took on Postcolonial Perspectives on Southeast Asia
was an eye-opening experience. The ideas of Foucault, Said, Spivak, Chakrabarty,
Bhabha, among others, that were critical of the Enlightenment Project and the European
rationality that underpinned it affirmed, so it seemed to me, the validity of
the alternative rationalities espoused by Asian philosophies like Taoism and Buddhism.
These are philosophies which I had long been fascinated with, as enthusiast and
a teacher of the history of Asian civilizations. I had begun to realize that
they were not truly anti-rational or irrational, but they offered a different
basis for rationality. Looking back, it was a major crack in my hitherto monolithic
and monochromatic conception of humanity based on liberal tradition. I’ll come
back to this point later, but for anyone interested in juicier details, I refer you to a reflective paper, "At Home in the World: Reflections on Home Scholarship, Theory and Area Studies", which I wrote and published last year (downloadable here)
It was also in
Singapore where I re-discovered that Philippine history and politics could be
immensely exciting once viewed from the comparative standpoint of neighboring
countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. Taking a country studies module on
Indonesia, I saw striking parallels and contrast between its experience and
those of the Philippines (more details on this are found in the piece I referred to earlier). My interest in Indonesia was boosted by the
fellowship grant I received from the Ford Foundation to further learn Bahasa
Indonesia while undertaking a research on Indonesian historiography soon after
my stint at NUS.
Living in Indonesia
for almost a year afforded me a chance to immerse in its culture and daily
life. I was struck by how similar in many fundamental ways Filipinos and
Indonesians were. The differences were also aplenty, but they clustered mainly around
religious and nationalist orientations, as well as the deeply traumatic impact
of the 1965-66 killings which had no parallel in the Philippines. Remove religion,
nationalism and hysterical anti-communism out of the equation and one can see
more clearly the basic and enduring similarities. The idea that foreign
influences in the region were no more than a “thin glaze” at the surface, an idea
that I had learned from Zeus Salazar and J.C. van Leur, among others, began to
make sense to me.
Staying in Indonesia three or four years after the demise of the Suharto regime, I heard frequently to my great
surprise ordinary Indonesians complaining how unsettled and tougher life had become. They longed for stability, cheaper goods, and security, the ‘good old days,’ of
Suharto’s New Order. As an outsider fed mostly by the mainstream, liberal Western and
Indonesian media with anti-authoritarian triumphalist narratives of democracy
and Reformasi and which were suffused with a fierce anti-Suharto rhetoric, it
made me wonder how things could be starkly different on the ground. I was hit
by the realization that perhaps what was happening in Indonesia then had a parallel in
the Philippines: sizable groups of Filipinos who persistently voted for the
Marcoses and they regarded the Marcos years with what seemed to me as perverse nostalgia.
How could they have thought of Martial Law years with longing, was beyond me! Since
the late 1980s during my UP days, I was among those who quickly dismissed those
groups as “Marcos loyalists”or “tuta ni Macoy.” These were labels that, in
hindsight, imputed questionable moral or
intellectual attributes upon them—blindly loyal, manipulated, ignorant, uncritical, irrational. How stupid that they allowed themselves to be misled by Marcos propaganda, so I had thought. Looking back, what I observed in Indonesia made me think if there were material basis for the nostalgia of the Marcos era among Marcos supporters. It also reinforced my earlier questioning about
liberal democracy wrought by my prior exposure to Singapore and Malaysia.
In learning about Indonesia,
I had found a psychological refuge, one that I could not in knowing more about Singapore
and Malaysia. If Singapore’s and Malaysia’s impressive progress made me feel
sorry and angry for the plight of Filipinos who, I had soon realized, were derided
and bullied overseas, Indonesia’s miserable state in the early post-Suharto
years provided a wicked but comforting assurance that Philippines was not
alone. Misery loves company, as cliché goes. This feeling would not last very long,
however, as by mid-late 2000s I had noticed that post-Suharto Indonesia’s political system seemed
more capable of reforming itself than the post-Marcos Philippines. The gains of the Reformasi indeed fell short of the expectations, but they seemed more impactful and
lasting than the post-EDSA reforms. The constitutional amendments that curtailed
the power of the military, altered the electoral politics, strengthened anti-corruption
body had far-reaching impact that Filipinos could only hope for in their country. The regimes of SBY and Jokowi succeeded to a significant extent in
economic recovery and restored the sense of national pride in a period much shorter than it was the case for the Philippines. My familiarity with
the challenges of democratic transition and consolidation in the Philippines
served as a template for pondering the trajectory of Indonesia’s political
and economic development in the past two decades. While foreign scholars of
Indonesia and Indonesian scholars themselves habitually harped on the "failures" of the Habibie, Gus Dur, Megawati and SBY administrations, it seemed to me that
the shortcomings of the post-Marcos regimes to provide a better life for Filipinos made those failures looked pale in
comparison.
-To be continued-
You may proceed to Part III here
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