Nation-Building and Integration Policy in the Philippines
| Author | Kazuya Yamamoto |
| Published date | 01 March 2007 |
| Date | 01 March 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0022343307075122 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
195
Introduction
This article investigates the success or fail-
ure of the national integration policy in post-
independence Philippines. The integration
policies implemented by states can be classi-
fied into two types. The first type refers to the
policies through which the ruling group in a
state attempts to assimilate other ethnic groups
into a single nation; this is usually done by
creating a common language and education
system and establishing modern political/social
institutions that destroy the traditional mech-
anisms of coordination between ethnic groups.
The second type refers to the policies through
which the ruling group attempts to create sys-
tems of power-sharing between ethnic groups
and/or the institutions that promote dialogue
among the leaders of these groups; this results
in the coordination of the interests of each
group instead of coercive assimilation.
Although both of these types of policies
have been implemented in Asian and African
countries, Southeast Asian countries that
achieved independence soon after World War
II implemented a number of the first type of
policies, which were reflective of their opti-
mistic views on ethnic assimilation at that
© 2007 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 44, no. 2, 2007, pp. 195–213
Sage Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi
and Singapore) http://jpr.sagepub.com
DOI 10.1177/0022343307075122
Nation-Building and Integration Policy in the
Philippines*
KAZUYA YAMAMOTO
Future Research Institute (WFI), Waseda University
The Philippines can be considered a country where successive governments have sought to create a sin-
gle nation by implementing integration policies. In this article, two formal models are developed – the
modernism model and the historicism (primordialism or essentialism) model – to suitably analyze the
national integration policy of the Philippines. The analysis reveals that (1) the post-independence
national integration policy of the Philippines cannot be regarded as being successful; (2) national inte-
gration in the Philippines will continue to be difficult; (3) no deterministic argument can be made
regarding the relationship between mobilization and national cleavage; and (4) the modern nation
should not be regarded as an extension of pre-modern ethnic groups but as a new identity group that
is formed through the process of modernization. In addition, the mathematical implications of the two
models are derived. The modernism model implies that (1) in some cases, a ruling group that is in the
majority at the time of independence can maintain its position even if it cannot assimilate a majority
of the underlying people after independence; (2) in some cases, a ruling group that is not in the major-
ity at the time of independence cannot attain a majority even if it is able to assimilate a majority of the
underlying people after independence; and (3) a larger ruling group is not always capable of promot-
ing greater integration than a smaller one can. On the other hand, the historicism model implies that
the size of the underlying ethnic group that will comprise the ruling group when mobilized is the key
to the success or failure of national integration.
* I thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their
comments and help in the development of this study. The
data used in this article can be found at http://www.prio.
no/jpr/datasets. The author may be reached via e-mail at
yamamoto@ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp.
time. The Philippines, from among these,
was a country that had been administered by
the United States for approximately half a
century, with an interruption by Japanese
occupation, before its official independence in
1946. After independence, the Philippines
was governed by leaders who were strongly
inspired by American thoughts and fervently
promoted assimilation policies, such as the
establishment of a national language.
In scholarly terms, the modernization the-
ory (or political development theory) of the
United States in the 1950s and 1960s pro-
vided theoretical grounds for the first type of
integration policy. However, since the 1970s,
this theory has lost its appeal, because many
of the newly independent countries were con-
fronted with difficulties in assimilative inte-
gration. As the defects in the modernization
theory became obvious, political science grad-
ually ceased to deal with this matter, and inter-
est in how a single nation is formed in a state
was mainly taken up by sociology and history
in the 1980s.
During this decade, the arguments that
took place in sociology and history consider-
ably enhanced the quality of studies on nation-
formation in modern states. However, the
correspondent formal models remain under-
developed from the 1950s, the time that
Deutsch (1953/1966: 235–239) put forth
the seminal model. Moreover, although the
Deutsch model contains the basic elements
of nation-formation and is well formulated,
he did not formulate a state power itself in
the model. As a result, it becomes necessary
to modify his model to incorporate a state
power if the effect of the national integration
policy implemented by a state is to be assessed;
this policy has firmly been implemented by
countries like the Philippines.
On the other hand, from the second half
of the 1970s, political science turned its atten-
tion to new theories that were in support of
the second type of integration policy (coor-
dination policy), for example, consociational
democracy (Lijphart, 1977). New theories
for the second type of integration policy were
greatly elaborated upon since the 1980s
(Varshney, 2002), and, in contrast with the
theories for the first type of policy, many for-
mal models were also constructed since the
1990s, in particular (see also Miguel, 2004:
330–331).
In order to investigate the integration pol-
icy in the Philippines, therefore, I first develop
new formal models that enable us to evaluate
the first type of assimilative policy imple-
mented by states. Using these new models, I
then examine the success or failure of the inte-
gration policy in the Philippines in which the
first type of policy has long been implemented
by the government.
The next section reviews the literature on
national integration and highlights that the
formal model for analyzing a single nation-
formation by a state is insufficient, compared
with those for analyzing the second type of
policy. The third section draws attention to
the problem pertaining to the pioneering
Deutsch model as a model for analyzing
national-integration policies implemented
by states. In the fourth section, I develop new
models that are suitable for analyzing the
first type of integration policy by taking into
account the discussion of the literature review
in the second section. Section five describes
a short history of national integration in the
Philippines and demonstrates how the mod-
els developed in this study are suitable for
analyzing national integration in the Philip-
pines. Finally, in the sixth section, I investi-
gate the national integration policy of the
Philippines by using the developed models.
Theories of National Integration
As mentioned above, the modernization the-
ory (or political development theory) in the
United States was the primary proponent of
the first type of policy in the 1950s and
1960s. Nation-building in post-independence
journal of PEACE RESEARCH volume 44 / number 2 / march 2007
196
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