Federalism Mon Amour

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

One mind-boggling development during recent weeks, prior to the installation of what has been promised  as a government of change, is the announced participation of the communist left headed by its leader, Jose Ma. Sison, in the incoming Duterte administration.

Neither the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), The National Democratic Front (NDF), nor the New People’s Army (NPA) has issued any statement to justify this move which effectively ranks them as part of the so-called Coalition for Change, an assortment of political parties of various shades and colors. Well, indeed, not unlike the proverbial rainbow.

From red to mixed colors seems to be an apt description for this rather unexpected transformation of the party of the proletariat to a united front of the country’s economic and political elites who have ruled the country since the first Republic under Emilio Aguinaldo.

In signing up as part of the Duterte regime the Left has taken the reformist path for which it has maligned the old Communist Party whose leaders were buried in oblivion by the Sison-led Mao Tse Tung-inspired movement starting in the late Sixties. Sison’s CPP has been invited by President-elect Duterte to name appointees for the departments of social welfare, labor, agrarian reform and environment and natural resources.

The President-elect attests the CPP has considerable experience in these sectors. To be sure, the CPP has sacrificed lives in efforts to achieve reforms in these areas.  

It look like both sides, the Government and the Left, are poised to announce the happy ending to more than 30 years of conflict. The involvement of the Left in the Duterte administration will necessarily end the protracted struggle against feudalism, bureaucrat-capitalism and imperialism, which the Left the basic problems of Philippine society.  

These are the key problems that any activist in the Sixties and Seventies would be ready to swear and scream against at the drop of a placard. Or die, if need be. Many actually died, most of them young, more as victims of their idealism and the massive recruitment of the Left to fight a war in which the young heroes of my generation were unprepared to wage.

Meanwhile, the nation waits with bated breath,  to use a cliché, for a justification from the Sison’s camp on why it is now shifting strategy from the armed struggle what it used to refer to as the parliamentary road.

It will be quite a stretch of the imagination to believe that the CPP will be allowed to engage in the armed struggle while its sympathizers and allies are running key departments of the Government. Nothing like it in the world, but it looks like everything has become possible under the new dispensation.

Many people believe that in aligning with the new Administration, Sison’s group is actually taking the smart move to revitalize its own ranks. In recent years, the movement has had to   contend with loss of prestige and credibility among the people on account of the misadventures of its military arm. It has also lost its appeal among the youth, who are preoccupied with other causes, definitely unrelated to the attainment of national democracy in the country.

It will be an unprincipled move if the left will join forces with the Duterte government simply because the President-elect was once a student of Professor Sison in San Beda. Surely there must be a more substantial reason other than this for abandoning a cause for which thousands of lives have been sacrificed and has caused untold miseries among families and local communities.

I assume that a significant number of the 16 million or so who voted for the President-elect would like also to hear from Sison and his fellow revolutionaries about their support to Federalism, one of the pillars of the Administration’s program aside from its announced policy to pay bounties to government-paid police and military for the arrest or shooting down of drug lords and pushers.

It will be good to know if the leaders of the communist Left think that feudalism, bureaucrat capitalism and imperialism can be more effectively done away with in decentralizing political and fiscal authority to component States or subnational levels of governance. I remember a UP student leader – I think his name was Samuel Tan from Diliman, getting a lot of attention and contrary opinion by opposing decentralization on the ground that it may actually reinforce the elites in their exercise of political and economic power.

He says the decentralized system will actually favor the elites because they do not have to contend with opposition on a national scale. In his analysis, the ruling elites can actually consolidate their hold on the country’s political and economic life by federalism which weakens rather than strengthens opposition to their rule and the abuses that usually accompany the exercise of almost absolute power politically and economically.

I will be interested to find out how Mr. Sison and the national democrats view Federalism in the context of the struggle against Feudalism, Bureucrat Capitalism and Imperialism. Their shift to parliamentary struggle will confirm the popular view that at this time and age, armed revolution cannot possibly win against massive State power bolstered by alliances with either Russia or the US, as well as with emerging superpower, China.

The emergence of terrorist groups with capacity to launch military attacks to do extensive  damage to what they perceive as enemy population groups and nation-states will further hamper efforts to mobilize support to national liberation and revolutionary forces. To achieve  much-needed structural reforms in Third World countries, which include the Philippines, will not be top priority among the superpowers who are involved in a war of attrition against terrorist groups.  

In our country,the question of the hour is: will Federalism be the way to go to effect radical changes that will result in meaningful agrarian reforms and in the process, create of more opportunities for education, employment, enterprise development and other components of equitable and sustainable human development among the less privileged sectors of society?

It is also timely to ask what type of Federalism will the Coalition for Change vote for that will fit our needs at this stage of the country’s development given basic structural problems and the challenges posed by illegal drug use, prevalence of crimes, a significant percentage of which are drug-related.

Let me now share with you some notes from Chapter 7 of the book, Driving Democracy, published by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government:

-Parliamentary republics and proportional electoral systems generate horizontal checks and balances in the core institutions of state. By contrast, federalism and decentralization lead towards vertical power-sharing among multiple layers of government.

-Contemporary debates about decentralized governance have arisen in many plural democracies, notably among the Francophone majority living in Quebec, the Basques in Spain, and the Scots in the UK.

These arguments have been particularly influential in fragile multinational states afflicted with deep-rooted civil wars where decentralization has been advocated as a potential constitutional solution aiming to reduce conflict, build peace, and protect the interests of marginalized communities.

Decentralization is understood as the devolution of power and responsibilities from the national to sub-national level.

-Federal constitutions which strengthen state’s rights and regional autonomy represent some of the most important strategies, as these safeguard some guaranteed areas of self-government for geographically-concentrated minorities.

Other common approaches include :

-devolution of powers to elected and non-elected regional and local government bodies; 

-shrinking the state through the privatization of public assets;

- private-public partnerships, and the contracting out of services to the non-profit and private sectors;

-delegation of central departmental responsibilities; and

-decision-making to local managers in field offices; and the use of traditional village councils or urban communities for consultation and planning processes.

Encouraged by international agencies, many industrialized and developing societies have been experimenting with these strategies.

-For example, the World Bank reports that in 1980, sub-national governments around the world collected on average 15% of revenues and spent 20% of expenditures. By the late-1990s, those figures had risen to 19% and 25%, respectively, and had even doubled in some regions and countries.

A comparison of trends in West European government during the last three decades noted a widespread shift from direct control and intervention by central government to more indirect control exercised primarily through regulation.

-Fiscal decentralization has expanded among most industrialized nations during the last three decades, notably with growing regional autonomy controlling taxation revenue and public expenditure in Spain and Belgium, but also in other nations such as France, Italy and Denmark.

- Proponents argue that decentralization has many potential advantages for bringing decisions closer to the community, for policy flexibility, innovation, and experimentation, and for ensuring government responsiveness to local needs.

-Nevertheless no consensus surrounds the impact of these reforms and the assumed benefits of this strategy have come under vigorous challenge. Skeptics charge that many of the theoretical claims advanced in favor of decentralized governance have not been sustained by careful empirical analysis.

- Indeed some have detected evidence of a backlash against this movement occurring in Western Europe, with some recentralization happening in the Netherlands and Sweden. Most seriously, far from maintaining stability and unity in multination states, critics argue that federalism and decentralization strategies risk the serious dangers of rigidifying community differences, encouraging partition or even succession and thus the ultimate break-up of fragile nation-states.

-Formal constitutional structures in all nations around the world are classified as ‘unitary states’, ‘federal states’, or an intermediate category of ‘hybrid unions’. Each of these categories can be further sub-divided according to the degree of decentralized governance, where fiscal, administrative, and political powers and functions are transferred to provincial and local levels.

I find these extracts from the Harvard paper extremely interesting. I hope the think tanks from the Cabinet and the PDP-Laban Party or the Coalition for Change have taken upon themselves to study what type of Federal arrangement best suits our country given its characteristic as multi-ethnic and  diverse religious faith, a land with well-defined majorities and specific minorities which will have to be taken into account in deciding the shift towards a more suitable type of Federalism and decentralization.

Indeed we may all love Federalism but we must avoid a “blind leading the blind” situation and fall into a sink-hole from which it will be difficult to claw our way back. The incoming Duterte Administration must provide leadership as it has promised to do o this vital component of its program for change.

Let us begin from determining where we are and making sure where we want to go and decide which type of Federalism can best help us in our quest for lasting peace and prosperity.. ###

NMP/10 June 2016/2.11 p.m.