‘A sense of country’

W.W. Rostow believes that “a reactive nationalism” is as important as the “profit motive” as a driving force to transform societies from traditional to modern. Historically, men in authority, paraphrasing Rostow, have been willing to undertake radical changes out of a wounded national pride or as a cover against humiliation by foreigners who left them behind in the competition for modernization.

I do not presume to possess the intellectual insights of Rostow but somehow I have also written that two key ingredients for a successful nation building are: a “sense of country” (words I borrowed from Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Condrado de Quiros) and “vigorous entrepreneurship,” particularly on the part of the nation’s economic elites.

I underscored too the need for a Bayanihan Pact (among capital, labor, the community and the government) “so that each may come out with something while preserving the survival of the State” and further posed this challenge: “whether the gateway to equitable accumulation and ultimately national development could also be accessed by way of the power of consensus of people power democracy that’s willing to learn from the best practices that work and, based on ongoing experience and rising above ideologies, eschew things that don’t, or change even established notions and practices when concrete realities and the complex necessities for change in the service of the common good require.”

Rostow, on the other hand, wisely pinpointed the transformational requirement of a “transitional coalition” dictated by a singular and “solid common conviction”: that they (the coalition-participants) are fully aware of their roles as stakeholders in the “creation of an independent modern state.” Rostow’s prescription can however be differentiated by his elitist perspective pointing out that an efficacious coalition had “a political (or military) wing and an economic wing” of a “new elite” or among “soldiers, merchants and intellectuals” maintaining a “balance of power within the coalition” as well as a policy balance in the pursuit of the various nationalist objectives of the modernized state whenever so established.(Certain of my own thoughts about this transition are here.)

By the examples of Japan and South Korea, and now China, the pace of modernization through the convergence of nationalism and the profit motive is apparently quickened if the society is more or less homogeneous.

In United States, it was the business brainpower and, in some way, the skewed patriotism of men like Carnegie, Harriman, Morgan and Rockefeller driven essentially by profit motives, not a slue of mediocre White House occupants, that led to the transformation of America from what today would be a Third-World status to a modern industrialized nation.

To an extent, the Filipino reformists in Rizal’s time saw parallel hindrances during their movement against Spanish colonial rule but presented not so much by the heterogeneous groupings of peninsulares (Spaniards from Spain), criollos (Spanish born in the Philippines), the Spanish mestizos and Chinese mestizos as by the regionalism of the land-based elites.

Today, among the what ifs in Philippine history is whether the bruised egos of the Los Indios Bravos at the turn of the last century would have been enough (had Commodore Dewey’s fleet not come out of the blue in Manila Bay) to transform what would have been a newly independent nation (from Spain) into an urbanized modern society. It is my view that Jose Rizal’s nationalist visions prefigured a modern Philippines in the short-term if not so nipped in the bud by America’s ambition and misadventure in imperialism.

It should be remembered that Rizal while in Europe, given the state of world economy of his time, spent time studying ceramics, leather tanning and cement manufacturing to prepare for the establishment of indigenous factories and industries in the Philippines because he believed “a people cannot have liberties without having first material prosperity.” He also organized La Liga Filipina “to unite the Archipelago into one compact, vigorous and homogeneous body”; aspired for the “equality” of the Philippines “as far as possible to the provinces of Spain in order not to be called a colony,” while advocating for the expulsion of the unpatriotic friar communities which he denounced as forming “conspiracies against the progress of the Philippines”; and “put as a premise the education of the people so that through education and work, they might have a personality of their own.”

Jose Rizal was a scion of a wealthy merchant family and a Chinese mestizo who chose to die an Indio Natural.