The State, the Dead, and the Record: How the Philippines is Still Arguing With Duterte's War on Drugs

 The State, the Dead, and the Record: 

How the Philippines is Still Arguing With Duterte's War on Drugs

By Kat Ulrike

Photo from ICC

The difficulty with political violence is that it rarely ends when the violence itself subsides. Governments change, policemen are reassigned, slogans disappear from official speeches and the emergency vocabulary of one administration gives way to the managerial vocabulary of the next. Yet the arguments that justified the violence, the grievances of those who suffered from it and the loyalties formed around those who ordered or defended it tend to survive. What had once been a contest over policy becomes, in time, a contest over memory.

The Philippines has entered precisely such a period over Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. The raids and nightly casualty reports that defined much of his presidency no longer occupy the center of national political life, but the country has not arrived at an agreed understanding of what happened. Thousands of deaths remain embedded in police records, court complaints, family recollections and human-rights investigations. At the same time, a substantial political constituency continues to remember the campaign not principally as an episode of abuse but as a period in which the state recovered an authority that previous governments had seemed unwilling or unable to exercise. The disagreement is therefore not simply over Duterte. It concerns the older Philippine question of how much coercion a weak or frustrated state may employ in the name of restoring order.

The appearance of Duterte before the International Criminal Court has given this argument a new institutional setting without resolving it. The Hague can determine criminal responsibility within the limits of the charges and evidence before it. An independent Truth Commission in the Philippines has begun the broader work of documenting cases that may never reach an international courtroom. Between them remains the political nation itself, still divided over whether the drug war should be remembered primarily as a campaign against criminal disorder or as a period in which the state permitted violence to outrun law. That division was visible even before a single witness at Duterte’s trial had been called.

Two Audiences

There were at least two Philippine audiences watching Rodrigo Duterte when he appeared in person before the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and the distance between them was considerably greater than the miles separating Manila from the Netherlands. Duterte, now 81, sat in a dark suit and white shirt behind his lawyers while the judges discussed witnesses, evidence, scheduling and the practical arrangements for a trial expected to begin on Nov. 30. It was his first physical appearance before the tribunal since he was taken into ICC custody in March 2025. He did not address the court. For much of the hearing, the drama lay less in what Duterte said than in the fact that he was physically there at all.

For his allies, the images revived a familiar political language. Robin Padilla posted photographs of Duterte accompanied by the word Tatay—“Father”—while Christopher “Bong” Go, his aide for more than two decades, used the affectionate “Father Digong.” The vocabulary was revealing. Duterte was not presented merely as a former chief executive awaiting trial but as the paternal figure around whom a political family and constituency had long organized their loyalties. His own public response was more explicitly political: “Everything I did, I did it for my country.” The sentence compressed into eleven words the defense that had surrounded much of his presidency—that whatever harshness attended the anti-drug campaign had to be understood through the purpose his supporters attributed to it: the restoration of order and the protection of the public.

Another audience had gathered in Quezon City. Families of people killed during the anti-drug campaign watched the proceedings with lawyers, church representatives and human-rights advocates. Their attention was directed toward the same face and movements, but they drew from them almost the opposite reassurance. Llore Pasco, whose sons Crisanto and Juan Carlos Lozano were killed in a police operation in 2017, said she had been surprised but pleased to see Duterte appear. Translated into English, her reaction was practical rather than triumphant: “We were surprised, but of course we were happy that he finally appeared, and we saw that he looked well. He even gained weight. So we expect that he really is capable of facing trial.”

Dahlia Cuartero, whose son Jesus Cuartero III was also killed during the drug war, expressed a similar hope in the language of prayer. “Our prayer was answered—that he would remain strong so that all his victims could be given justice,” she said. “We were happy to see that he was strong.” The peculiar moral geometry of the moment was difficult to miss. These relatives were not hoping to see an accused adversary diminished by illness. They wanted him healthy enough to remain before the judges, understand the proceedings and stay alive long enough for the judicial process to run its course.

Neri Colmenares, who represents some alleged victims, converted those impressions into a legal argument. In his view, Duterte’s behavior in court suggested that he understood what was happening and recognized supporters in the gallery. Translated into English, Colmenares said: “It showed that President Duterte can do this, that he is fit for trial because he understands what is happening. He still knows how to wave to his supporters. He knows where in the gallery his supporters are.” He added that forgetfulness alone should not automatically be treated as proof that a defendant cannot stand trial. That is an advocate’s interpretation rather than a clinical finding, but it demonstrates how an ordinary human gesture could immediately acquire evidentiary and political meaning.

The defense has presented a sharply different picture. Duterte’s lawyers say significant memory impairment prevents him from reliably retaining recent information and from giving meaningful instructions about a complicated criminal case. Prosecutors, relying on a three-member medical panel, have argued that he remains capable of exercising his procedural and fair-trial rights. The question belongs properly to medicine and law rather than to photographic interpretation. An accused person’s fitness cannot depend upon whether relatives of the dead want a trial to continue or whether his admirers see an elderly statesman enduring detention with dignity. Yet outside the chamber politics had already done what politics normally does: it had given the same image several meanings.

Even politicians who did not speak as either prosecutors or unconditional defenders found themselves responding to the human image. JV Ejercito said he felt sadness at seeing Duterte after a long absence, describing him as extremely thin and frail. Translated, Ejercito said: “I felt sad when I saw him for the first time in a long time because he was very thin and very frail, with his hair grown long.” But when asked about the families of those killed during the drug campaign, he stopped short of converting personal sympathy into a judgment on the proceedings. “Let justice take its course,” he said.

The multiplicity of these responses matters because there was no single Rodrigo Duterte visible on the screen. There was the accused before an international tribunal, the aging former president who elicited ordinary human sympathy, the paternal political figure remembered by loyalists, and the architect of an anti-drug campaign associated with thousands of deaths. One audience saw endurance. Another saw the possibility of accountability. Neither image, by itself, tells us what the court will decide. Together, however, they tell us why the drug war has remained politically unsettled long after Duterte ceased to exercise presidential power.

What Was the “War”?

The most important division is not over Duterte’s present condition but over the past that placed him in The Hague. Nearly a decade after the anti-drug campaign became the organizing drama of his presidency, Filipinos continue to disagree not only about individual killings but about what the campaign represented. To its critics, it became a period of unlawful violence, institutional impunity and the erosion of due process. To many of its defenders, it remains a necessary response to a narcotics and criminality problem that ordinary institutions had failed to contain.

Ronald dela Rosa, Duterte’s first national police chief, has stated the second position more candidly than most. In October 2024, asked whether he regretted implementing the campaign, he replied: “No regrets. If you are going to give me the chance to do it again, I will do it again. The same approach.” He went further, arguing that a campaign against drug personalities could not succeed through gentleness. “You have to be forceful enough,” he said, for the government’s message to reach criminals unmistakably.

Three months later, dela Rosa offered a more qualified but substantively similar defense. Loss of life was regrettable, he said, including the deaths of police officers during operations, but that did not mean the campaign itself should never have been undertaken. Without it, he claimed, the Philippines might have become a “narco-state,” with powerful drug lords exercising influence over provinces, cities and politicians. His conclusion was emphatic: “We have to do that. We had to do that.”

Such statements are significant because they show that severity was not merely an accidental embarrassment later disowned by the campaign’s principal implementers. Severity formed part of the governing argument. Dela Rosa’s defense begins from the premise that criminality had become emboldened because the state had ceased to command sufficient fear. The solution was therefore not simply better police administration or more efficient prosecution but a restoration of the psychological asymmetry between government and those it regarded as lawbreakers. The criminal was to understand, in unmistakable terms, that the state had recovered its capacity to punish.

Dela Rosa has also insisted that the campaign was not designed selectively to spare one class of offender while targeting another. “We didn’t discriminate as to who we are going to arrest,” he said in 2024, arguing that drug lords, pushers, traffickers and users were all targets of enforcement. He has acknowledged that human-rights violations occurred in some cases and argued that these should be investigated individually rather than used to classify the entire campaign as a crime against humanity. That distinction is central to the defense mounted by many Duterte supporters: abuses may have occurred, they say, but abuses committed within a policy do not necessarily define the legal or moral character of the policy itself.

This interpretation cannot be understood merely as the retrospective self-defense of officials facing international scrutiny. Duterte’s rhetoric possessed a genuine constituency because it answered frustrations that preceded his presidency. Many Filipinos experienced the criminal-justice system as slow, unequal and vulnerable to local influence. Police could appear corrupt or ineffective; prosecutors and courts moved at a pace far removed from the immediacy of neighborhood crime; wealthy or politically connected defendants could seem capable of manipulating procedure. Within such circumstances, a politician promising uncomplicated force could present himself not as the destroyer of government but as the man finally willing to make government work.

The political attraction of Duterte therefore lay partly in the collapse of distinctions that liberal institutions normally try to preserve. He spoke about narcotics, crime, corruption, weak policing and cumbersome legal process as aspects of a single disorder requiring executive will. What his critics heard as contempt for procedure, supporters frequently heard as impatience with institutional paralysis. What critics interpreted as menace could be heard by supporters as reassurance.

Dela Rosa later accused legislators of opportunism for having praised the anti-drug campaign while Duterte was politically dominant and condemning it after circumstances changed. In his recollection, lawmakers had once thanked the administration for restoring peace, tranquility and safer streets, only to reverse themselves later. The accusation is partisan, but it points toward a historical fact that should not be overlooked: the drug war did not initially exist outside respectable Philippine politics. It enjoyed substantial public and institutional support. Any serious reconstruction of the period must explain that support rather than treating it merely as an embarrassing national aberration.

This is what makes the language of “war” important. Calling anti-drug enforcement a war was not merely colorful rhetoric. War has enemies, casualties, sacrifices and emergency measures. Criminal law has suspects, warrants, evidence, defendants and trials. Once policing is imagined as warfare, the restraints associated with ordinary criminal procedure can begin to look like impediments placed upon those defending society.

Duterte’s supporters can reasonably object that the metaphor did not automatically suspend the law. Police still operated under statutes, arrests still occurred, courts continued to function, and officers retained a lawful right to defend themselves when confronted by armed suspects. Forcefulness and illegality are not synonymous. But critics begin from the opposite institutional concern: a suspected dealer remains a citizen, suspicion does not amount to conviction, and precisely because the state possesses overwhelming coercive power, restraints upon lethal force become more rather than less important.

The argument is therefore more substantial than the familiar opposition between “security” and “human rights.” Both sides claim an idea of order. The defenders of Duterte emphasize the capacity of government to protect ordinary people from criminal disorder. His critics emphasize the legal restraints necessary to protect ordinary people from arbitrary state power. One camp fears a state too weak to govern; the other fears a state powerful enough to escape accountability.

The Archive of the Dead

The families watching in Quezon City carry another archive of the drug-war years. It is composed not principally of crime statistics or political speeches but of bodies, wakes, disputed police reports, exhumations, witnesses and the long bureaucratic aftermath of violent death. Where a defender of the drug war may remember a neighborhood dealer disappearing from a street corner, a mother may remember a son who never returned home.

The phrase nanlaban became one of the essential words of the period. Literally, it meant that a suspect “fought back.” In police reports it could describe an officer responding to armed resistance during an operation. Among many families and human-rights advocates, however, it became shorthand for an official explanation they believed was repeatedly used to justify killings after the fact. The significance of the word lay precisely in this collision of narratives. A police report and a family testimony might describe the same death in incompatible ways, and the issue became not merely whether a person had died but whether the state’s own record could be trusted.

It is in this unresolved space that the independent Philippine Truth Commission has begun its work. Formally launched in May 2026 by Church leaders, lawyers, academics and human-rights advocates, the commission describes itself as independent, civilian-led, survivor-centered and trauma-informed. Raul Pangalangan, a former ICC judge, chairs it; its commissioners include forensic pathologist Raquel Fortun, trauma specialist Al Fuertes, theologian Daniel Franklin Pilario and human-rights advocate Carlos Conde. Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David serves as adviser. Its stated mission is to document and preserve evidence of violations associated with the anti-drug campaign while providing spaces in which victims and witnesses can place their experiences on the public record.

The commission says it has documented more than 7,500 incidents. That number must be understood with care. It describes the scope of the commission’s documentation; it is not a judicial determination that 7,500 crimes have been legally established. The distinction is essential because a truth process earns authority not by converting every testimony into a finding but by separating allegation, corroboration and conclusion.

The commission’s first public truth-telling session concerned Luzviminda Siapo and her 18-year-old son Raymart, who had a congenital clubfoot that affected his ability to walk and run. According to the commission’s account, Raymart was taken hours after a neighbor accused him of selling marijuana and was later shot. The hearing sought not merely to establish the circumstances of his death but to restore the biography that death had eclipsed: he was a son and brother, was preparing to work with an uncle and had discussed continuing his education. The session combined family testimony with documentary and forensic material in an attempt to create a record that would survive beyond the emotional force of recollection.

Its second session examined the death of 17-year-old Darwin Hamoy in Payatas during a 2016 police operation. His family disputed the police claim that Darwin and others had fought back during a buy-bust operation. Years later, according to the commission, examination of his exhumed remains documented injuries consistent with gunshot wounds and classified his manner of death as homicide. The inquiry extended beyond the instant of death into the family’s attempts to find the body, complaints against police officials and the psychological, social and economic consequences of the killing.

These are questions a criminal indictment may never need to answer. A court asks whether the prosecution can establish the elements of a crime and connect them to the accused. A broader historical inquiry may ask what happened to a family after the funeral, how children understood the disappearance of a father or brother, how barangay officials compiled lists of suspected drug personalities, what policemen believed their superiors expected of them and how repeated presidential rhetoric changed the range of violence that citizens were willing to tolerate.

Pangalangan’s argument for the truth-telling sessions rests largely upon this difference. Many victims and survivors, he has said, will never have cases before the ICC. Their stories therefore cannot depend upon whether an international prosecutor finds them necessary to proving a particular charge against Duterte. The court and the commission are not substitutes for one another because they are engaged in different kinds of inquiry.

Yet the commission’s historical burden extends beyond giving the dead back their names. If it is to explain the period rather than merely memorialize one side of it, it must also take seriously the experience of citizens who insist that the anti-drug campaign improved their lives. Their testimony cannot determine whether a particular killing was lawful, but neither should it be excluded from the social history of the policy. A resident who says the street became safer after a dealer disappeared is describing a political experience. That claim may be compared with crime data, surveys and local evidence, but it remains part of the reason Duterte’s program acquired democratic support.

The important distinction is between recording a claim and accepting it. A policeman who says a suspect fired first makes a claim that may be tested against ballistics, autopsy findings, witnesses and scene evidence. A family alleging execution makes another claim requiring corroboration. A politician who says crime fell because of the campaign makes an empirical assertion that can be tested against data. A supporter who says the campaign restored dignity or peace to a neighborhood makes a more subjective statement but one that nevertheless belongs in the historical record.

Listening broadly does not require concluding that every account is equally well supported. Indeed, a truth commission becomes useful precisely when it refuses the lazy convention by which journalism sometimes places two contradictory statements beside each other and calls the resulting symmetry balance. Evidence can strengthen one account, weaken another or leave matters genuinely unresolved.

What The Hague Can Decide

The ICC operates under a different discipline. It is not writing the final history of the Duterte presidency. It must determine whether specified charges against a particular accused have been proved according to the Rome Statute while preserving the accused’s procedural rights. Duterte faces crimes-against-humanity allegations connected with killings during periods in which the court says it possessed jurisdiction. He denies the charges. The upcoming trial will be governed by rules of evidence, legal responsibility and proof rather than by the larger political question of whether Filipinos approve or disapprove of the drug war.

The status conference itself illustrated the practical narrowness of the task. Presiding Judge Joanna Korner discussed the prosecution’s witnesses, evidence, disclosures and the sitting schedule. The chamber is also considering arrangements shaped partly by Duterte’s age and health. The problem facing the judges is not whether the entire Philippine drug war was morally acceptable; it is how to conduct a manageable and fair criminal trial concerning the charges before them.

The dispute over Duterte’s mental fitness reinforces the distinction. Families may reasonably interpret his courtroom behavior as indicating awareness. Supporters may reasonably interpret the same scene as the stoicism of an old man determined to acknowledge them. Neither observation settles the medical question. The judges must examine expert reports and decide whether Duterte possesses the capacity required to understand proceedings and meaningfully assist his defense.

This is also why the rights of the accused and the interests of victims should not be treated as competing moral luxuries. A proceeding in which an incapable defendant could not understand or answer the case would satisfy little beyond vengeance. Conversely, a system in which age, political stature or loyal public support shielded an otherwise capable accused from trial would hardly satisfy the principle of accountability. Fair process is not a concession granted to Duterte by his critics; it is part of what gives any eventual judgment legitimacy.

The same caution will be necessary once the trial ends. A conviction would establish criminal responsibility for charges proved to the court’s standard. It would not prove every allegation ever made about every police operation under Duterte. An acquittal would mean that the prosecution failed to establish the particular charges to the required standard; it would not retroactively declare every contested drug-war death lawful.

Courts necessarily exclude more history than they include. Prosecutors select representative incidents, documents and witnesses because no trial can become infinite. Some deaths will fall outside jurisdictional dates. Others may lack evidence. Still others may be unnecessary to a prosecution theory already supported by stronger cases. This is not indifference; it is the architecture of adjudication.

The danger lies in asking the judgment to carry a political meaning it cannot logically bear. Duterte’s supporters may be tempted to interpret an acquittal as vindication of the entire drug war. His opponents may be tempted to interpret a conviction as judicial confirmation of every accusation ever made against the administration. Neither conclusion follows automatically. The law is more precise, and therefore in some respects less emotionally satisfying, than political memory.

Truth Without Monopoly

The Truth Commission faces almost the reverse problem. The court must narrow; the commission must broaden without losing rigor. It is attempting to construct a record capable of containing personal testimony, police documentation, forensic examination, public rhetoric and institutional behavior without collapsing these different forms of evidence into a single moral narrative.

The presence of Fortun is especially important because forensic evidence imposes a discipline upon both state narrative and family memory. A bullet trajectory cannot explain why Duterte won an election or why citizens supported aggressive policing, but it may indicate whether a particular account of a shooting is physically possible. Exhumed remains cannot establish the moral legitimacy of the drug war, but they may recover information neglected or concealed in an original investigation. The physical record is limited, but it is often resistant to rhetoric.

The commission’s trauma-informed procedures address another problem. Participants are not merely sources of data. They may remain vulnerable to intimidation, political abuse and renewed psychological distress. Its media rules therefore restrict unsolicited interviews around truth-telling sessions and emphasize the privacy, security and well-being of participants. This may appear to be a peripheral procedural matter, but it reflects an important difficulty of public truth processes: suffering can be exploited even by those who believe themselves to be documenting it.

The commission must nevertheless avoid becoming an institution whose conclusions are determined by the political identities of those who created it. If it appears to Duterte supporters simply as the organized voice of people who had already decided that the former president was guilty, its findings will persuade mainly those who required no persuasion. Conversely, if calls for “balance” become a demand that documented evidence always be offset by an unsupported denial, then balance becomes another mechanism of obscuring fact.

The harder standard is openness without false equivalence. Dela Rosa’s assertion that the campaign was necessary belongs in the record because it reveals the governing logic of the policy. His claim that the Philippines risked becoming a narco-state can be examined historically. His acknowledgment that some human-rights violations occurred can be placed alongside his insistence that those cases should be investigated individually. Duterte’s statement that everything he did was for the country belongs in the record as an assertion of political intention. None of these statements proves the lawfulness of a particular killing, but excluding them would impoverish an account of why the campaign happened and why it retained adherents.

The same principle applies to Pasco, Cuartero and other relatives. Their testimony explains the human meaning of accountability to those who have waited years for formal proceedings, but testimony is not automatically a judicial finding. Their accounts become historically stronger when connected to independent witnesses, documents and physical evidence.

This is what distinguishes truth seeking from merely collecting narratives. A society may possess many memories, but evidence gives those memories different weights.

The Politics of Remembering

The Philippines has never suffered from a shortage of narratives. Governments manufacture them, oppositions construct counter-narratives and political families transmit selective memories from one electoral generation to the next. A fact invoked solemnly while one coalition holds power can become propaganda after a realignment, only to be rediscovered when political usefulness changes again. History often functions less as a public archive than as an arsenal from which present factions select convenient weapons.

The drug war is unusually vulnerable to this tendency because it remains recent and most of its protagonists are still politically active. Duterte’s children and allies remain in public life. Police officers who implemented the policy can still defend it. Families of the dead continue to campaign. Human-rights organizations remain engaged in litigation and documentation. The institutions being asked to interpret the period are institutions that themselves lived through it.

There has therefore been no clean historical distance between the event and the argument over the event. The same citizens who once voted during the drug-war years are being asked to interpret their own choices. Some former allies have become critics; some critics have entered alliances with former supporters. The facts consequently compete not only with ignorance but with changing political interest.

Dela Rosa has complained precisely about this instability. His recollection of politicians once thanking the administration for safer streets and later condemning the campaign is intended as an accusation of opportunism. It is also an inadvertent reminder that political memory is frequently retrospective. Policies that appear normal while power is consolidated can acquire very different meanings after power disperses.

A useful historical record must therefore preserve what political actors said at the time, not merely how they explain themselves later. Duterte’s speeches, police directives, legislative hearings, contemporaneous surveys, crime statistics, autopsy reports, court records and accounts from poor communities must all be treated as part of the record. The post-Duterte reinterpretation of the drug war is itself historically relevant, but it cannot substitute for contemporaneous evidence.

Here the continuing loyalty of Duterte supporters also matters. Padilla’s and Go’s use of “Father” is not evidence in the ICC case, but it is evidence of the paternal political relationship Duterte cultivated. Dela Rosa’s refusal to repent is not proof that the campaign was lawful, but it is evidence that the governing philosophy of the drug war survives its presidency. Those reactions prevent the historian from writing a convenient story in which the entire country awoke after 2022 and unanimously repudiated what had occurred.

Likewise, the testimonies of families prevent the story from becoming an uncomplicated tale of popular order restored. They demonstrate that the same policy experienced as security by one household could be experienced as terror by another. The question is not which emotion should be deleted from history but what happened in the specific cases from which those emotions arose.

This is why the best description of the conflict may not be between law and order, or even between rights and security. It is between different fears. The Duterte constituency feared the failure of the state: drugs, criminality, corrupt institutions and the apparent immunity of offenders. Many victims’ families came to fear the success of an unrestrained state: armed officers, lists, accusations, raids and official explanations they believed they had no power to challenge.

Neither fear should be romanticized. Fear of crime can become a justification for arbitrary authority; fear of authority can obscure the real violence criminality inflicts upon communities. A serious account must be capable of holding both propositions simultaneously without allowing either to predetermine the facts of individual cases.

The War After the War

The anti-drug campaign no longer occupies the Philippine presidency in the form it did between 2016 and 2022. Subsequent police leadership publicly shifted emphasis toward supply chains and high-value targets rather than street-level users, explicitly describing the recalibrated policy as less bloody and more attentive to human rights. The Marcos administration has itself contrasted its approach with lethal enforcement, emphasizing large drug seizures in operations in which no one was killed.

But the political conflict created by the Duterte years has not disappeared with the policy’s alteration. It has changed arenas. The first war was conducted through police operations, presidential speeches and the language of emergency. The second is being conducted through court filings, testimony, forensic reports, historical documentation and struggles over public memory.

For the ICC, the final question will be bounded: what has been proved against Rodrigo Duterte under the law governing the charges? For the Truth Commission, the question is broader: what happened to people and institutions during the anti-drug campaign, including those whose cases will never enter an international courtroom? For the Philippine public, the unresolved question is broader still: what relationship between authority, legality and social order did the country accept during those years, and how should that acceptance be remembered?

The responses to Duterte’s courtroom appearance reveal why no single institution can provide all three answers. Pasco and Cuartero saw a defendant apparently strong enough for proceedings to continue. Colmenares saw behavior he believed relevant to fitness. Ejercito saw the physical decline of a former president and felt sadness while still insisting that justice should proceed. Padilla and Go saw the political father they continued to recognize. Dela Rosa, in his repeated defenses of the campaign, has made clear that he regards its central methods as necessary and would not repudiate them merely because the political climate has changed.

These statements belong in the same history, but they do not perform the same evidentiary function. A mother’s account of losing a son is testimony about a death and its consequences. A former police chief’s declaration that the campaign was necessary is evidence of governing philosophy. A senator’s sadness is a political and human reaction. A former president’s claim that he acted for his country is an assertion of intention. None can replace forensic evidence, documentary proof or a judicial finding, but each helps explain the political world in which those forms of evidence must now be interpreted.

That distinction may be the most important protection against turning the aftermath of the drug war into another partisan mythology. The task is not to find a sentence capacious enough to make one side disappear. It is to construct a record sturdy enough that neither loyalty nor hatred can easily rewrite it.

The same photograph from The Hague may continue to mean different things. One viewer can see an old leader enduring confinement; another can see an accused finally present before judges. Those are interpretations. What happened during particular operations, who gave particular orders, what police reports omitted or accurately recorded, what the forensic evidence shows and what responsibility the law ultimately assigns are questions susceptible, at least in part, to proof.

The first drug war was justified by its architects as a struggle to restore order. The struggle that follows concerns the order of memory itself: which facts survive, which testimonies are tested, which claims are corroborated and whether the historical record can resist the recurrent Philippine habit of changing with the government presently in power.

The ICC trial may eventually produce a judgment. The Truth Commission may eventually produce an archive and a set of findings. Neither will abolish political disagreement, nor should either be expected to do so. Their more modest but more durable contribution would be to make future disagreement answerable to evidence.

That may be the real war after the war. It is less dramatic than midnight raids, presidential threats or courtroom photographs, but it is likely to last much longer. It will determine not whether Filipinos are permitted to admire or condemn Rodrigo Duterte, but whether the period over which they continue to argue can eventually be remembered as history rather than indefinitely recycled as political ammunition.

Of Empty Chairs and Full Powers

Of Empty Chairs and Full Powers

Sara Duterte’s Impeachment, the Senator-Judges,
and the Constitutional Burden of Attendance

(Photo from the Manila Times)

The constitutional controversy now confronting the Senate impeachment court has been presented, perhaps inevitably, as a dispute over arithmetic. Article XI of the 1987 Constitution requires the concurrence of two-thirds of all members of the Senate for conviction in an impeachment trial. Since the Senate is constitutionally composed of twenty-four members, the conventional calculation produces sixteen votes. Presiding Officer Francis Escudero adopted that construction when the trial of Vice President Sara Duterte began. Yet the subsequent inability or failure of several senators to participate has exposed a problem which arithmetic alone cannot answer: whether the Constitution intended the numerical composition of the Senate to remain wholly detached from the legal and practical capacity of its members to perform the judicial function assigned to them.

The four retired Supreme Court justices invited as amici curiae did not merely provide competing formulas for determining the denominator. Their respective positions disclosed several different theories of constitutional government. Retired Associate Justice Adolfo Azcuna defended what may be called the institutional-textual view: membership itself determines the denominator, and so long as a senator remains legally a member of the Senate, that senator continues to count in computing the two-thirds requirement. Retired Chief Justices Hilario Davide Jr., Artemio Panganiban and Reynato Puno, though differing among themselves in important respects, questioned whether constitutional interpretation could stop at that formal proposition when certain members are legally restrained, physically unavailable or substantially absent from the very proceedings in which they are expected to exercise judgment.

Azcuna’s proposition is intellectually stronger than its critics sometimes admit. “As long as they are members of the Senate, they constitute the denominator in computing the threshold of two-thirds because all means all,” he said. The argument is founded upon an essentially conservative understanding of constitutional safeguards. A supermajority requirement was not placed in the Constitution for decorative purposes. It exists precisely to make removal difficult and to prevent impeachment from being converted into an instrument by which an ordinary legislative majority disposes of a constitutional officer whom it dislikes. Azcuna therefore warned that “the supermajority rule protects against factional and partisan abuse,” because conviction should rest upon an agreement wider than the combination ordinarily sufficient to legislate, organize the chamber or control its committees. In this reading, twenty-four is not merely the number of chairs physically occupied on a particular afternoon; it is the constitutional size of the institution whose extraordinary power is being exercised.

There is an important principle here. Constitutional safeguards should not become variable quantities whenever their application causes political inconvenience. If two-thirds of the Senate means sixteen when the chamber is complete and politically tranquil, it would be dangerous to permit a temporary configuration of absence, detention, illness or political estrangement automatically to produce a smaller constitutional threshold. Such a doctrine could itself become susceptible to manipulation. A faction interested in conviction might discover that strategic nonattendance by several members conveniently reduces the votes required. Any interpretation which permits the constitutional protection of an accused official to depend upon attendance tactics must therefore be approached with considerable caution.

Yet the opposite construction produces difficulties no less serious. If every sitting senator must count regardless of whether he is legally capable of performing the functions of a senator-judge, absence itself may begin to exercise political force. A member who hears no witness, examines no exhibit and participates in no proceeding may nevertheless increase the number of affirmative votes required from those who actually do. The empty chair would not formally vote for acquittal, but it could have an equivalent numerical consequence. What was designed as a supermajority safeguard could then become something different: a system under which incapacity, evasion or deliberate nonparticipation acquires the constitutional value of a negative vote.

It is this difficulty which gives Davide’s intervention particular significance. His position was that the phrase “all the Members of the Senate” cannot be interpreted as though membership were an abstraction unaffected by legal disability. Senators who have resigned or been expelled plainly cannot count. More controversially, Davide argued that those who are detained, suspended, beyond the jurisdiction, missing or otherwise legally incapable of exercising their senatorial functions may likewise have to be excluded from the denominator. He invoked jurisprudence stating that “the performance of legitimate and even essential duties by public officers has never been an excuse to free a person validly in prison.” From this he drew a broader proposition: public office does not suspend the ordinary operation of law merely because the detained official happens to possess important responsibilities.

That proposition has substantial republican pedigree. Philippine political life has too often encouraged the opposite understanding—that election converts office into a species of personal property, accompanied by privileges which survive even when the officer is unable or unwilling to perform the corresponding duties. The constitutional language of public office, however, points in another direction. Office exists for the performance of public functions. Its authority is fiduciary rather than proprietary. The citizen elected to the Senate receives extensive powers precisely because those powers are to be exercised for constitutional purposes; he does not acquire a private entitlement to deploy the prestige of his position whenever useful while asking the state to disregard circumstances that make the performance of that position impossible.

The issue becomes particularly important because attendance is not foreign to the constitutional understanding of legislative duty. In ordinary legislative proceedings, the Constitution permits a smaller number of members to compel the attendance of absent colleagues in such manner and under such penalties as the chamber may provide. The Senate also possesses disciplinary authority over its members. These provisions do not by themselves resolve an impeachment question, because the Senate sitting as an impeachment court performs a function distinct from ordinary legislation. They nevertheless demonstrate that Philippine constitutionalism has never regarded attendance as a matter of purely private discretion. Membership carries an institutional expectation of presence, and the chamber has been given means by which that expectation may be enforced.

Panganiban brought this question into sharper relief by moving beyond the denominator and asking what judgment itself requires. His argument was not merely that some absent senators should be excluded because their presence is numerically inconvenient. He asked whether it is fair, or even faithful to the adjudicative character of impeachment, for senators who have not attended the proceedings to exercise the same final voting power as colleagues who have heard the evidence and studied the submissions.

“Thus the Senate must hear the prosecution and the defense witnesses as it already does, allow their counsels to argue verbally and in writing, and study their presentations deeply,” Panganiban said. “Only thereafter should it issue its orders and decisions. In this connection, is it truthful and fair to allow senators to cast their votes despite being absent from the proceedings?”

His examples were deliberately vivid. He referred to senators who might be “looking at the pyramids along the Nile,” shopping in Paris or riding gondolas in Venice while their colleagues remained inside the chamber performing the tedious work of adjudication. He extended the problem to those who are hiding, detained, hospitalized, abroad or otherwise unable to examine documentary evidence or observe witnesses. Behind the picturesque imagery lay a conventional judicial principle: the authority to decide derives not simply from possession of office but from engagement with the record upon which the decision is supposed to rest.

“You are tasked with a constitutional duty that cannot always be reduced to abstract arithmetic, neither can such duty be performed in the shadows of absence nor from legal impediments,” Panganiban said. “Indeed, meaningful adjudication requires active participation in the search for truth and fairness.”

This should not be mistaken for the crude proposition that only a senator physically present at every moment of testimony may vote. Puno’s observations are important precisely because they prevent such an argument from becoming doctrinaire. Judges in ordinary courts sometimes decide matters from transcripts, affidavits and records even when they did not personally hear every witness. Modern adjudication could scarcely function otherwise. Davide similarly emphasized that a senator’s failure to interrogate witnesses is not evidence of nonparticipation, observing that judges should often refrain from questioning except where clarification is necessary. A senator who has quietly attended, read the record and considered the arguments may have participated more seriously than one who has filled hours with questions intended principally for political display.

The relevant distinction therefore lies not between physical visibility and invisibility, nor between senators who speak and senators who remain silent. It lies between genuine performance of adjudicative duty and the attempt to retain adjudicative power without undertaking the work necessary to exercise it responsibly. The Senate must eventually determine how much participation satisfies that duty, but it cannot avoid defining the relationship altogether.

The controversy becomes politically more charged because the absent senators are not neutral abstractions. Rodante Marcoleta and Jinggoy Estrada are detained while facing plunder cases. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa has remained beyond the reach of the impeachment proceedings while facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant arising from alleged crimes against humanity in the drug war. These circumstances are separate from the accusations against Duterte and do not establish the guilt of any senator concerned. They nevertheless create a practical constitutional question because the chamber must decide whether members constrained by criminal process, international process or voluntary absence continue to exercise the same impeachment powers as colleagues who are present and participating.

Marcoleta has insisted upon his continued status and voting authority as a senator-judge despite detention and has favored the retention of the sixteen-vote requirement. His position can be defended in institutional terms: he was elected, has not been removed from office, and therefore remains constitutionally part of the Senate. Yet the same facts inevitably invite a political interpretation, especially because the mathematical consequence of retaining all twenty-four members in the denominator makes conviction more difficult. Critics therefore see the claim of institutional completeness as politically convenient to Duterte’s defense.

A similar partisan reading surrounds other senators identified, fairly or unfairly, with positions sympathetic to the vice president. Imee Marcos has repeatedly adopted positions which Duterte’s critics interpret as favorable to the defense. Members of the Villar family have likewise been associated with political formations and procedural positions viewed as friendly to Duterte. Loren Legarda has raised institutional and evidentiary objections which some partisans interpret in the same fashion, although it would be unwarranted to conclude from those interventions alone that every question she raises is reducible to support for acquittal. Political alignment, procedural skepticism and legal interpretation may overlap without being identical.

The distinction matters because a constitutional rule cannot be responsibly constructed upon allegations of motive. A senator may sincerely believe that twenty-four must remain the denominator and simultaneously prefer Duterte’s acquittal. Another may sincerely favor excluding legally incapacitated members and simultaneously desire conviction. The coincidence between legal interpretation and political advantage does not by itself prove bad faith. Indeed, most constitutional disputes arise precisely because principled arguments have distributive political consequences.

What the Senate must guard against is not political preference as such—politicians are not expected to cease having political commitments—but the adaptation of constitutional rules to produce a desired partisan result. The proper test of any proposed doctrine is whether its advocates would continue to defend it if the political alignments were reversed. If several absent senators were firmly opposed to Duterte, would those who now insist that every member must count still insist upon twenty-four as the denominator? If an administration used dubious criminal proceedings to detain hostile senators on the eve of an impeachment vote, would proponents of excluding detained members remain equally comfortable with reducing the threshold?

Those counterfactuals demonstrate why the question cannot be settled by determining which interpretation presently favors which faction. Constitutional law worthy of the name must be capable of surviving a change of government.

This returns the discussion to the concept of institutional completeness. There is an understandable desire within the Senate to maintain the proposition that it remains a twenty-four-member constitutional body notwithstanding the legal difficulties of particular members. Institutions depend upon continuity, and the temporary incapacity of individual officeholders should not casually dissolve the structure of the chamber. Yet institutional continuity cannot be reduced to maintaining a complete list of names while disregarding whether those names correspond to functioning members capable of performing the duty at issue.

A Senate which insists upon being counted as complete must confront what completeness requires in practice. If all twenty-four members remain constitutionally relevant because membership continues despite detention, absence or other impediments, then the institution has reason to insist with equal seriousness that members who can lawfully participate actually do so. Otherwise the concept becomes asymmetrical: membership remains absolute when it increases the threshold for conviction but becomes optional when attendance, study, deliberation and submission to lawful process are considered.

This asymmetry becomes especially difficult where members are themselves under accusation or restraint by the state. No democratic legal order should presume guilt from accusation. Detention before conviction must remain subject to judicial scrutiny, and criminal process must never be manipulated merely to alter legislative arithmetic. A government capable of neutralizing opposition senators through convenient prosecutions would pose an obvious danger to impeachment as an independent constitutional mechanism.

But the converse is equally troublesome. Election cannot create an automatic exemption from the consequences of valid legal process. A senator detained pursuant to lawful judicial authority cannot simply say that his constitutional importance requires the ordinary rules applicable to other detainees to be relaxed whenever an important vote arises. Ordinary citizens in detention also possess employment, dependents, contractual responsibilities and public obligations which confinement prevents them from fulfilling. Representative government would be difficult to defend if election alone transformed this general consequence of detention into a privilege from which legislators were uniquely exempt.

The same principle applies, although in a different form, to a senator who avoids legal process. The existence of an accusation or warrant does not establish guilt, and the rights of the accused remain intact. But due process does not logically entail that a legislator may remain outside the effective reach of legal institutions while simultaneously demanding that his office be treated as fully operative for every constitutional calculation. If voluntary absence has no consequence for membership, participation or the denominator, political actors may acquire an incentive to convert evasion itself into a procedural strategy.

The solution therefore cannot simply be the mechanical exclusion of inconvenient members. The categories of absence must be distinguished. Serious illness is different from deliberate flight. Hospitalization differs from political travel. Detention under judicial order differs from unexplained nonattendance. Suspension differs from resignation. A senator who has participated substantially but misses several hearings presents a different case from one who has never attended at all. Constitutional interpretation is weakened, not strengthened, when all these circumstances are collapsed into the single word “absent.”

A workable institutional rule would accordingly have to address both attendance and legal capacity. If the Senate determines that all twenty-four members remain within the constitutional denominator until death, resignation, expulsion or formal vacancy, it should consider corresponding rules governing compulsory attendance, justified absence, access to the record and the minimum participation necessary before a senator may cast a final impeachment vote. Where members can lawfully be compelled to attend, institutional completeness may reasonably demand compulsion. Where they are legally detained, the chamber must determine whether participation can be accommodated without granting privileges incompatible with the ordinary operation of criminal justice. Where attendance is genuinely impossible, the rules should identify whether the member nevertheless remains entitled to vote after reviewing the complete record.

Conversely, if the Senate adopts Davide’s functional interpretation and concludes that certain legally disabled members do not belong in the denominator, the grounds for exclusion must be defined with similar care. A vague doctrine allowing the presiding officer or a temporary majority to decide who is “capable” of voting would be more dangerous than the problem it seeks to solve. Any rule of exclusion must be narrow, objective and prospective enough that the majority could not manipulate it merely to obtain the required number.

The old case of Avelino v. Cuenco remains useful mainly because it reminds us that constitutional language about membership and quorum has always had to contend with the untidy circumstances of actual legislators. The Senate contemplated by constitutional text is stable and complete; the Senate encountered by history is composed of men and women who become ill, travel abroad, resign, are detained, refuse to attend or disappear from effective jurisdiction. Avelino does not mechanically resolve impeachment under the 1987 Constitution, as the amici broadly recognized, but it demonstrates why literalism and institutional reality cannot be wholly separated.

There is consequently an element of both conservatism and egalitarianism in the more demanding understanding of legislative duty. The conservative element insists that constitutional procedures cannot be rewritten in the middle of a political conflict simply because one faction dislikes their consequences. The egalitarian element insists that election does not create a privileged legal caste entitled to enjoy authority without exposure to the obligations and restraints applicable to public officers and citizens generally.

These principles are not contradictory. They become compatible once public office is understood not as property but as an institution whose powers exist for defined purposes. A senator does not lose legal rights merely because he holds office; neither does he acquire an unrestricted constitutional immunity from the ordinary consequences of his conduct. The protection of senatorial independence should preserve the capacity of legislators to deliberate and vote without intimidation. It should not be enlarged into a doctrine under which an officeholder may disregard lawful restraints while continuing to insist that the Republic count his absent seat whenever the arithmetic is politically useful.

This is why the present controversy should ultimately be treated as an institutional problem rather than merely a Duterte problem. The vice president will eventually be convicted or acquitted according to the evidence and whatever threshold the Senate determines the Constitution requires. The amici’s debate does not properly answer that substantive question. Its importance lies elsewhere: it has exposed the absence of a sufficiently developed doctrine connecting senatorial membership with senatorial participation when the chamber exercises its impeachment power.

Those who insist that the Senate must appear complete are therefore entitled to demand the preservation of its full constitutional identity. But that demand carries a reciprocal obligation. If twenty-four senators must be counted because twenty-four senators constitute the institution, then the Senate must explain what it expects those twenty-four senators to do. It cannot indefinitely maintain that every member has full constitutional significance for determining the denominator while treating attendance and participation as matters left almost entirely to political preference.

The issue becomes particularly sensitive when the senators concerned are identified with one side of the impeachment dispute. Marcoleta’s insistence upon participation from detention, dela Rosa’s continued absence, and the positions taken by senators regarded as sympathetic to Duterte will understandably be read by opponents as efforts to preserve a defensive bloc around the vice president. Their supporters will answer that excluding those senators would itself amount to manipulating the institutional composition of the court. Both interpretations are politically intelligible, but neither supplies a sufficient constitutional rule.

What the Senate requires is a doctrine which makes such partisan calculations less important. Members should know before the next impeachment, and regardless of the identity of the accused, whether unjustified nonattendance can be sanctioned; whether a senator legally detained remains entitled to vote; whether a member who has never participated may enter only for judgment; whether examination of transcripts can cure substantial absence; and whether legal incapacity alters the denominator. Clear rules would not remove politics from impeachment, which is impossible, but they would narrow the field within which political convenience may masquerade as constitutional interpretation.

The deeper question raised by the amici is therefore not simply whether sixteen votes are required. It is whether the Constitution’s grant of power to senator-judges presupposes an enforceable conception of duty. The constitutional authority to compel attendance in ordinary Senate business suggests that the answer cannot be that presence is wholly voluntary. The judicial character of impeachment suggests that participation cannot be entirely nominal. The principle of equality before the law suggests that detention, legal restraint and criminal accusation cannot be neutralized merely because the person affected possesses an electorally valuable office.

At the same time, those principles must be administered in a manner which prevents the executive, the prosecution or a Senate majority from manufacturing incapacity in order to change the result. The institutional objective should therefore be neither to preserve sixteen votes at all costs nor to reduce the denominator whenever absence becomes inconvenient. It should be to ensure that no faction gains an artificial advantage from either strategic absence or opportunistic exclusion.

A mature Senate would address this problem by making the obligations of membership as definite as the privileges of membership. Senators who can attend should ordinarily be required to attend proceedings in which they exercise the power of judgment. Those unable to attend should fall within clearly defined categories of justified absence, legal incapacity or substantial participation through the official record. Those subject to lawful detention should not receive extraordinary privileges solely because political arithmetic makes their presence desirable, although procedures consistent with judicial orders may be considered where the law permits them. Those who deliberately remain outside lawful process should not be allowed automatically to convert that circumstance into an indefinitely consequence-free constitutional position.

Such an arrangement would preserve Azcuna’s legitimate concern that impeachment not be made easier through casual manipulation of the denominator while taking seriously Davide’s insistence that legal capacity matters, Panganiban’s demand for meaningful participation and Puno’s warning that adjudication need not depend upon theatrical physical presence at every moment. Properly understood, the four positions are not merely mutually exclusive answers to a numerical puzzle. Together they reveal the elements of a more coherent institutional doctrine.

The Republic would gain little from settling this dispute merely by declaring either that “all means all” or that sixteen is not immutable. Those formulations are beginnings rather than conclusions. The more durable settlement would define the constitutional relationship between membership, capacity, participation and legal accountability, so that future senator-judges cannot select whichever understanding happens to protect their faction at the time.

If the Senate wishes to insist upon its completeness as an institution, it must be willing to require completeness in function as well as in enumeration. The point is not to punish absence as though physical presence were itself a moral virtue, nor to treat accusation as guilt. It is to prevent public office from becoming a peculiar arrangement in which the holder may invoke every privilege attached to membership while declining, evading or becoming legally unable to perform the duty for which that membership is constitutionally important.

That question will remain after Sara Duterte’s trial is over. It concerns not merely the fate of one vice president or one alignment of senators, but the older republican problem of whether legislative power is something an officeholder owns or something he is obligated to exercise under law. A constitutional order which answers that question clearly will be better protected both against partisan prosecution and against partisan evasion, because it will have established in advance that the authority to judge carries with it a corresponding obligation to be present in law, to engage seriously with the record, and to accept the legal consequences which attach to the officeholder as surely as the constitutional privileges of office do.

The Gospel According to Capital: The Moralized Market and the Philippine Illusion

 The Gospel According to Capital: The Moralized Market
and the Philippine Illusion

A political economy of the attempts
for a "Social Market Economy" in the Philippines

By Kat Ulrike

Few economic doctrines have travelled to the Philippines with a more respectable passport than the Social Market Economy. It arrived clothed in the language of constitutional democracy, private initiative, Christian humanism and concern for the poor. It offered the business community a vocabulary in which profit could coexist with stewardship, while offering a post-dictatorship state a way to defend markets without appearing indifferent to social justice. The formula was politically attractive precisely because it seemed to avoid both the discredited dirigisme of the Marcos years and the revolutionary socialism that frightened the property-owning classes. It promised enterprise with conscience, competition with solidarity and growth disciplined by moral purpose.

Economist Bernardo Villegas became one of the doctrine's best-known Philippine advocates, but the argument should not be reduced to one economist or one school. It became part of a wider post-1986 common sense shared, in different proportions, by technocrats, business associations, Catholic intellectuals and governments seeking credibility with creditors and investors. In public, this common sense spoke of subsidiarity and the common good. In practice, it placed much greater confidence in privatization, tariff reduction, deregulation, foreign investment and the moral self-restraint of owners than in organized labor, public enterprise, industrial coordination or redistribution before the market had completed its work.

The result was not a faithful copy of Germany's Social Market Economy. Nor was it pure laissez-faire. The Philippine state remained deeply involved in granting franchises, rescuing banks, building infrastructure, negotiating concessions, supplying incentives and protecting property. What emerged was more selective and more contradictory: a market order whose hard institutions were liberal, whose social obligations were often pastoral, and whose developmental direction was substantially delegated to investors responding to global demand. It appeared to observe the encyclicals while practicing Hayek and Mises, with Friedman supplying much of the managerial confidence that private ownership would outperform bureaucratic direction.

This is the Philippine illusion examined here. The issue is not whether individual businessmen are sincere Catholics, whether private enterprise is legitimate, or whether every state corporation deserves preservation. The issue is institutional. A Social Market Economy is not established by attaching a moral adjective to a liberalized economy. It exists only when competition is defended against private concentration, labor is treated as an economic citizen, social rights are enforceable, and public authority possesses enough autonomy to direct markets toward purposes that markets cannot select for themselves.

A German Doctrine and a Manila Adaptation

The original German conception was born from distrust of two concentrations of power: the total state and the private cartel. Walter Eucken and the ordoliberals did not imagine a competitive order arising spontaneously from the withdrawal of government. Competition had to be constituted and preserved through law. The state was to be strong enough to prevent monopolies, establish stable rules, restrain abuses of economic power and maintain the conditions under which prices could perform their coordinating function. Alfred Müller-Armack's phrase Soziale Marktwirtschaft added the social purpose: a market economy embedded within institutions capable of securing social balance, political legitimacy and human freedom (Feld et al., 2021).

The postwar German settlement accordingly became more than private ownership plus charity. It included competition law, social insurance, collective bargaining, codetermination, works councils and a state capable of coordinating long-term reconstruction. Its several elements arose from different political traditions and were frequently contested, but they shared a conviction that economic freedom would become socially destructive if concentrated capital could write its own rules. The market was not the constitution. It operated inside an economic constitution.

The Manila adaptation took the least troublesome portions of this settlement and left much of the institutional burden behind. Private property, entrepreneurship, price signals, monetary stability and subsidiarity travelled well. Codetermination, organized countervailing power, public development finance, sectoral coordination and the active construction of domestic productive capabilities travelled less comfortably. The result was a Social Market Economy interpreted less as an architecture of power than as an ethic of personal conduct. Owners were asked to be socially responsible; workers were urged to become productive; families were encouraged to save; corporations were praised for philanthropy; and the state was instructed to create the conditions in which responsible private initiative might flourish.

This difference is not semantic. It marks the point at which an institutional doctrine became a moralized market. The German question was how public law could prevent political and economic domination. The Philippine version too often asked how private actors could be persuaded to behave well after the distribution of property, bargaining power and opportunity had already been settled. One approach attempted to structure economic power. The other placed unusual weight upon virtue among those who possessed it.

The distinction also separates an idealist reading from a historical-materialist one. The idealist begins with intentions: the entrepreneur as steward, the manager as servant leader, the firm as social institution. The materialist begins with incentives, ownership and power: who controls credit, land, technology, franchises, supply chains and the state. The first asks whether capitalists possess a conscience. The second asks what happens when conscience is costly and competitors are not obliged to share it. In the Philippines, where wealth and political access have long reinforced each other, the second question is not ideological discourtesy. It is the elementary test of whether a doctrine can survive contact with the society it claims to govern.

Subsidiarity Without Solidarity?

The theological argument is particularly revealing because subsidiarity has often been treated in Philippine economic discourse as though it were a Catholic synonym for privatization. If a family, community, association or business can perform a task, the higher authority should refrain from doing it. From this correct beginning, however, an incorrect conclusion is sometimes drawn: that the normal duty of government is withdrawal and that public provision is presumptively an intrusion upon civil society.

Quadragesimo Anno, the classical source, says something more demanding. Pius XI warned higher bodies not to absorb functions that smaller associations could perform, but he also required social activity to furnish help rather than destroy those associations. He then described the responsibilities belonging to public authority alone as “directing, watching, urging, restraining” whenever necessity demanded (Pius XI, 1931, paras. 79–80). Subsidiarity is derived from subsidium, assistance. It protects lower institutions from unnecessary absorption, but it does not abandon them when they lack the resources to meet a social need.

The wider Catholic tradition is equally inconvenient for theological laissez-faire. Rerum Novarum rejected the proposition that a formally voluntary labor contract necessarily produced a just wage. Laborem Exercens treated just remuneration as a principal test of whether the socioeconomic system itself functioned justly. It developed the concept of the “indirect employer”: the network of state policies, institutions, contracts and international relationships that shapes the bargaining conditions within which a direct employer sets wages. John Paul II's point was structural. Justice could not be reduced to the private morality of the employer because the employer also operated within an institutional order (John Paul II, 1981, paras. 17–19).

The same pope's qualified defense of capitalism in Centesimus Annus is frequently remembered more clearly than its qualification. A market economy was legitimate when it recognized business, private property and human creativity, but not when economic freedom escaped a “strong juridical framework” and ceased to serve the whole of human freedom (John Paul II, 1991, para. 42). Pope Francis sharpened rather than invented this institutional criticism. Fratelli Tutti states that the marketplace cannot resolve every problem and calls for proactive policy favoring productive diversity and job creation (Francis, 2020, paras. 168–169).

Catholic Social Teaching therefore recognizes markets without canonizing their outcomes. It recognizes property while insisting upon its social function; enterprise while defending worker organization; subsidiarity while requiring public support; and charity while distinguishing it from justice. A system in which liberalization is enforceable but solidarity is exhortative cannot claim the full tradition merely because businessmen attend Mass or corporate foundations build classrooms. It may be market liberalism accompanied by Catholic pastoral language.

The Philippine Sequence

The market turn did not begin at EDSA. The World Bank approved the first Philippine structural adjustment loan in 1980; a second followed in 1983. The program promoted tariff reform, import liberalization, export orientation and changes intended to encourage private industrial investment. These measures operated alongside International Monetary Fund stabilization and were overwhelmed by the debt and political crises of the early 1980s, but the institutional direction preceded the fall of the dictatorship (World Bank, 1985).

The Aquino government inherited an economic wreck: insolvent state corporations, behest loans, captured monopolies, weakened banks and a public sector compromised by crony appropriation. Privatization was not therefore a simple act of doctrinal submission. It was also an effort to dispose of failed assets, restore financial credibility and separate the democratic government from the corporate machinery of the dictatorship. Yet Proclamation No. 50 of December 1986 established a presumption that would outlive the emergency. It declared that the private sector should be given “primacy” while government assumed a “supplemental role” in entrepreneurial activity, and created the institutions through which state assets would be disposed (Republic of the Philippines, 1986).

Under Fidel Ramos, this presumption broadened into a modernization program covering telecommunications, aviation, oil, water, infrastructure and power. Many reforms answered real failures. Manila's water system suffered inadequate coverage, high leakage, weak collection and chronic underinvestment. The National Water Crisis Act of 1995 explicitly listed privatization of state-run water facilities among the policy options and authorized the reorganization or privatization of MWSS segments where necessary (Republic of the Philippines, 1995). The case for change was substantial. What matters here is the chosen direction: public incapacity was answered primarily through private participation and concession rather than through the construction of a more capable public utility.

Power reform followed the same trajectory. The Electric Power Industry Reform Act of 2001 was not a crude deregulation statute; it included consumer protection, lifeline rates, independent regulation and public-interest language. Its desired structure was nevertheless unmistakable: private capital, competition where feasible, and the orderly privatization of the National Power Corporation's assets and liabilities (Republic of the Philippines, 2001). By 1998, a Philippine memorandum to the IMF reported that average nominal tariffs had fallen from 28 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 1997 and committed the government to continued trade and investment liberalization, capital-market development, privatization and power-sector restructuring (Government of the Philippines, 1998).

Across administrations, the vocabulary varied—globalization, competitiveness, democratization of capital, public-private partnership, good governance—but the operational sequence was stable. Ownership was liberalized, barriers were lowered and public assets were transferred or concessioned. Social correction and competitive discipline were expected to follow.

Liberalization Before Competition

This sequence reveals one of the sharpest contradictions in the Philippine claim to ordoliberalism. An ordoliberal does not regard privatization as equivalent to competition. A transfer from public to private ownership changes the proprietor; it does not necessarily change the structure of the market. Where entry costs are high, infrastructure is naturally monopolistic, franchises are exclusive or regulation is capturable, privatization may replace a public monopoly with a private one, or a government oligopoly with a private oligopoly.

The Philippines liberalized major sectors long before it created a comprehensive national competition regime. The Philippine Competition Act became law only in 2015. Its declaration of policy almost reads as an official acknowledgment of the sequencing problem: earlier measures liberalizing key sectors, it states, needed to be “reinforced by measures that safeguard competitive conditions” (Republic of the Philippines, 2015, sec. 2). For decades, then, the country opened, privatized and deregulated without an economy-wide authority fully equipped to police anticompetitive agreements, abuses of dominance and anticompetitive mergers.

Rafaelita Aldaba reached the same conclusion before the statute was enacted. Trade liberalization, deregulation and privatization might be necessary, she found, but they were insufficient to generate effective competition without attention to structural, regulatory and behavioral constraints (Aldaba, 2008). The World Bank later described Philippine markets as more concentrated than those of regional peers, linking restricted competition to weaker job creation and slower poverty reduction (World Bank, 2019).

This is nearly the reverse of the ordoliberal sequence. The German tradition insisted that competition must be legally protected against concentrations of private power. The Philippine tendency was to assume that reducing the state's direct economic role would itself create a competitive market. That expectation ignored the society into which liberalization was introduced. Capital, land, credit, political influence and access to professional expertise were already distributed unequally. Opening the auction did not make the bidders equal.

The Market in an Oligarchic State

Philippine political economy cannot be understood through the elementary opposition between state and market. Paul Hutchcroft's “booty capitalism” describes a weakly autonomous state penetrated by powerful private interests, especially in finance. Alfred McCoy's An Anarchy of Families documents the durability with which family wealth converts into public power and public power reproduces wealth across political regimes (Hutchcroft, 1998; McCoy, 2009). The problem is not merely too much government or too little market. It is the relationship between concentrated capital and a state whose decisions are repeatedly available for private appropriation.

In that setting, “less state” does not automatically mean “more market.” When public authority retreats from production without gaining the capacity to regulate concentrated private capital, political leverage is not abolished; it is privatized. A franchise, concession, tariff decision, land conversion, infrastructure contract or fiscal incentive becomes another arena in which incumbent firms possess advantages over hypothetical entrants. Established conglomerates bring capital, banking relationships, legal teams, administrative experience and political access. The small entrepreneur brings the formal liberty to compete.

This is why an authentic ordoliberal critique can sound unexpectedly left-wing in Manila. Its central concern is not the nationality or nominal ownership of the enterprise but the concentration of power. A private monopoly is no more competitive because it is listed on the stock exchange. A concession is no more socially accountable because the state retains legal title to the pipes or rails. The relevant tests are whether consumers possess real alternatives, regulators possess independence, workers possess voice and the public possesses the power to demand investment and performance.

Philippine conservatives have often feared a strong state because oligarchs may capture it. The fear is historically justified. Yet weakening public authority does not dissolve the oligarchy; it can remove one of the few institutions theoretically capable of disciplining it. What the country required was not a larger state in every activity, but a stronger and more autonomous one: constrained by law, staffed by competent bureaucracies, able to enforce competition and capable of negotiating with capital from a position other than dependence. That is closer to Eucken than simply selling the assets.

Labor Without Economic Citizenship

The distance from the German settlement becomes wider on labor. The Philippine Constitution recognizes labor as a primary social and economic force, guarantees organization and collective bargaining, and commits the state to social justice. Yet Philippine corporate governance contains no general equivalent of German board-level codetermination, nor a comprehensive works-council system through which employees participate inside the governing structure of the enterprise. Labor rights exist, but worker influence generally remains outside the room where investment, automation, restructuring and profit distribution are decided.

The Wage Rationalization Act of 1989 created regional wage boards and a tripartite process for setting minimum wages according to regional conditions. It cannot fairly be called laissez-faire. It recognizes labor representation and authorizes public intervention. But its institutional logic balances subsistence and social policy against regional competitiveness, employment effects and employers' capacity to pay (Republic of the Philippines, 1989). Labor consequently enters policy as both citizen and cost, but the second identity often dominates when investment promotion becomes the overriding objective.

Catholic Social Teaching poses a more severe standard. Laborem Exercens describes a just wage as a “key means” of verifying the justice of the socioeconomic system, not as a desirable residual payable after competitiveness is secured (John Paul II, 1981, para. 19). Its indirect-employer concept also prevents government from disclaiming responsibility by pointing to a private payroll. Trade policy, education, infrastructure, monetary policy, labor regulation and international agreements shape the field in which wage bargains occur. A low-wage outcome is not merely a contract between two private parties; it is partly the product of the economic order that made one side more dispensable than the other.

The Manila model frequently moralized this imbalance. Workers were urged to improve skills, accept flexibility, save, acquire credentials and become globally competitive. Education was presented as emancipation through employability. Yet when the structure of production offered too few advanced domestic jobs, schooling could become a system for sorting citizens into external labor markets rather than enlarging national capability. Market participation pacified political discontent by promising individual mobility: learn the demanded skill, accept the available work, become relevant abroad. The object subtly shifted from national uplift to the management of a surplus population whose ambition had to be made compatible with the existing economy.

Liberalization Without Industrial Transformation

The industrial question exposes the moralized market most clearly. Trade liberalization can discipline inefficient firms. Foreign investment can provide capital, technology and market access. Export manufacturing can become a ladder toward industrialization. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore and, more recently, Vietnam all used external trade and foreign capital. None simply opened and waited for comparative advantage to issue instructions.

Their institutions differed, but their governments coordinated some combination of credit, procurement, technology acquisition, education, infrastructure, export performance and domestic enterprise formation. Even the United States, long the principal sponsor of liberal economic rules, deploys subsidies, domestic-content provisions, public research, strategic procurement and technology controls when national capability is at stake. The advanced economies advise comparative advantage most confidently in sectors where earlier public policy has already made them competitive.

The Philippine post-1980s settlement adopted not monetarism in the narrow technical sense, but a broader American-led market liberalism associated with the Washington Consensus. Monetary stabilization was joined by tariff reduction, deregulation, privatization, openness to foreign capital and reliance on investor choice to determine specialization. This was where the appropriation of the Social Market Economy became selective. Private initiative, subsidiarity and opposition to excessive state ownership were accepted. The German insistence upon constituted competition, labor participation and public power capable of directing reconstruction was weakened. The encyclicals supplied the language; Hayek and Mises supplied the suspicion of planning; Friedman supplied confidence that private ownership and open markets would expose inefficiency and allocate resources more rationally.

Liberalization without productive direction was itself a direction. It channeled capital toward opportunities offering the highest private return within the existing structure: property, utilities, retail, finance, importation, consumer goods, low-risk franchises, export assembly and internationally traded services. None of these activities is inherently unproductive. The problem is that their profitability did not necessarily construct the capabilities needed to transform the economy.

Philippine development discourse repeatedly oscillated between an agrarian image of the nation and a service-oriented image of modernity. Agriculture was treated as a natural comparative advantage; tourism, overseas employment, finance, real estate and business-process outsourcing were later presented as evidence that the country could leapfrog the difficult stages of industrial deepening. Modern agriculture and sophisticated services can be powerful components of development. They become evasions when used to argue that the archipelago need not build the machinery, transport equipment, electrical systems, materials industries, engineering firms and technological institutions upon which both agriculture and services ultimately depend.

Persistent demands for industrialization were not ignored so much as accommodated within narrow limits. Manufacturing was welcome when tied to consumer markets, assembly lines, subcontracting, semiprocessing and the schedules of multinational production networks. The country could assemble rather than design, package rather than control the process, fabricate a component rather than own the platform, and host a factory without creating the system around it. Production was organized according to “global demand” before the state asked what industrial capacities were necessary for national needs.

A factory is not yet an industrial system. An export platform may contain technically advanced plants while remaining dependent upon imported machinery, foreign patents, external design centers and sourcing decisions made elsewhere. An industrial economy develops a dense domestic ecology of engineers, toolmakers, component suppliers, standards laboratories, development banks, research institutions and firms capable of retaining knowledge when a multinational changes its location.

Aldaba's review after two decades of liberalization found weak manufacturing performance, limited contributions to value added and employment, and an industrial structure that remained “hollow” or “missing” in the middle. Medium-sized enterprises had not seriously challenged entrenched incumbents, linkages between large firms and local SMEs were limited, and major export groups remained concentrated in lower-value segments (Aldaba, 2013). Rene Ofreneo described the larger pattern as deindustrialization without a prior complete industrial transformation: openness proceeded without the institutions required for domestic integration, technological upgrading and broadly rooted employment (Ofreneo, 2015).

The policy substitution was subtle but decisive. Market access became industrial policy. Foreign investment became technology policy. Participation in global value chains became evidence of structural transformation. Education became a means of supplying the skills multinational employers or foreign labor markets presently demanded. The state did not cease making choices; it chose to let external demand define the feasible horizon.

This was often defended as realism. Government need not choose industries, build difficult technical bureaucracies or confront importers, conglomerates and foreign investors. It needed only to secure stability, improve infrastructure and human capital, and allow entrepreneurs to reveal the economy's future. But markets reveal profitable opportunities under existing conditions. They do not automatically disclose the productive capabilities a nation must acquire to electrify its islands, build railways and ships, house its population, mechanize farms, process minerals or maintain strategic equipment twenty years later. That intertemporal and political judgment is what industrial policy exists to make.

Crony Capitalism as Explanation and Alibi

The strongest objection to purposeful industrial policy is also the most historically serious: Marcos attempted state-directed capitalism and produced cronyism. The dictatorship abused government banks, guarantees, monopoly franchises, import licenses, commodity funds and public corporations for favored business groups. Any later proposal for directed credit or protection therefore entered debate shadowed by behest loans and presidential favorites. Post-1986 reformers reasonably asked why a state lacking bureaucratic autonomy should be trusted to choose national champions.

The warning gradually hardened into an alibi. The state should not direct development because oligarchs could capture it; because the state was not strengthened enough to discipline those oligarchs, their continuing influence became further proof that public authority must remain weak. An emergency diagnosis became a circular doctrine.

Cronyism did not arise simply because government intervened. It arose because concentrated property, family-based electoral power, weak bureaucracy and access to the presidency enabled particular interests to capture intervention. Removing one policy instrument did not remove the interests. They migrated. A group denied a protected industrial monopoly could acquire a privatized utility, dominate commercial banking, obtain an infrastructure concession, enter property development or partner with foreign capital. Lower tariffs did not redistribute land. Asset sales did not equalize finance. Deregulation did not prevent wealthy families from financing candidates and cultivating regulators.

The distinction between crony capitalism and oligarchic capitalism is essential. Cronyism describes privileged proximity to a ruler. Oligarchic capitalism describes a distribution of wealth sufficiently concentrated that large families and conglomerates reproduce influence under different rulers, parties and economic doctrines. A democratic administration can replace the cronies without transforming the oligarchy. Indeed, established groups may be best positioned to purchase privatized assets because they already possess capital, credit and political knowledge.

The use of crony capitalism as a universal objection to industrial policy therefore disregards the deeper system that created cronyism while preserving the foothold of the oligarchy. Japan did not answer corruption by abandoning industrial strategy. South Korea did not answer chaebol favoritism by concluding that technological upgrading was illegitimate. Taiwan did not treat every inefficiency in directed credit or state enterprise as proof that capability-building should cease. These states revised instruments, imposed performance requirements and, with varying success, disciplined recipients.

The choice is not between Marcosian discretion and passive openness. Development policy can be rules-based, transparent, conditional and temporary. Firms receiving credit, tariff support, procurement preferences or fiscal incentives can be required to meet targets for exports, localization, productivity, research, training and wages. Support can expire; audits can be published; procurement can be competitive; beneficiaries can be barred from related-party abuse; and the state can withdraw assistance from firms that fail. The historical lesson of cronyism is the need to build institutions capable of disciplining capital, not the impossibility of national direction.

The OFW as a Macroeconomic Institution

Where domestic industrial employment failed to absorb labor, overseas migration expanded from emergency valve into macroeconomic institution. Remittances stabilized household consumption, foreign exchange and external accounts. They financed tuition, housing, medicine and small businesses, and millions of families gained opportunities that the domestic economy could not provide. It would be perverse to dismiss those achievements or blame migrants for the conditions that made migration rational.

The developmental question is different. Ernesto Pernia observed that labor export began in several Asian countries as a stopgap response to unemployment, poverty and foreign-exchange shortage but became a durable Philippine policy plank even as neighboring economies transformed their domestic employment structures (Pernia, 2011). The persistence of migration is not mechanically caused by liberalization, but it reveals the productive deficit that services and remittances were asked to manage.

The family absorbed risks that a developmental economy might otherwise confront collectively. A nurse in London, seafarer on a foreign vessel, engineer in the Gulf or caregiver in Hong Kong constructed a private welfare and foreign-exchange system for relatives at home. Remittances supported consumption and property, stimulated retail and finance, and reduced the immediate political pressure created by insufficient domestic employment. What began as a response to underdevelopment became one of the mechanisms through which underdevelopment remained socially tolerable.

Subsidiarity acquired an unintended meaning. The state did not need to solve the employment problem completely because the Filipino family internationalized itself. Education increasingly prepared citizens for outside relevance, sometimes regardless of whether the resulting occupational structure met national needs. The worker was celebrated as globally competitive, and the nation praised his sacrifice, while the economy continued to export the human capabilities it had paid to develop.

Charity After Distribution

The same institutional weakness appears in the prominence of corporate social responsibility. Philippine business foundations have built classrooms, funded scholarships, supplied disaster relief, financed community organizations and provided health services where the state has failed. These activities accomplish real good. The criticism begins only when philanthropy is asked to substitute for distributive institutions.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is discretionary; a wage law is enforceable. A donation can be redirected; social insurance creates a claim. A feeding program relieves deprivation after income has been distributed; collective bargaining changes the distribution produced by the enterprise itself. Research on CSR warns that corporate benevolence can legitimize managerial power without altering the structures from which it arises (Banerjee, 2008). Philippine scholarship similarly finds that philanthropy often becomes prominent where public institutions have not adequately addressed unemployment, hunger and poverty (Habaradas, 2013).

Catholic doctrine does not allow a charitable act downstream automatically to cancel an injustice upstream. Its recurring concern with wages, associations, property obligations and public authority places justice within production rather than appending benevolence after profit. A company may fund schools while resisting a union; sponsor housing while benefiting from land concentration; distribute relief while demanding contractualization; or proclaim stewardship while lobbying against regulation. The good performed remains good, but it cannot settle the prior question of power.

The moralized market reverses this order. It treats the distribution generated by property and bargaining power as economically objective, then treats redistribution as a matter of conscience. Structural advantage becomes invisible because generosity is visible. The corporation appears as benefactor precisely where citizens lack enforceable rights against it or against the state.

Ritual Catholicism and Social Calvinism

The elite culture produced by this arrangement may be described, deliberately and metaphorically, as ritualistically Catholic but socially Calvinist. This is not a theological account of Calvinism. It is a Weberian description of a social psychology in which success becomes evidence of discipline, foresight and merit while poverty is interpreted through deficient savings, education, productivity, planning or character.

Catholic forms remain everywhere: corporate Masses, Marian devotions, chapels, religious schools, papal quotations, foundations and the language of stewardship. The contradiction is not that Catholics make profits. Catholic teaching has never prohibited legitimate profit. The contradiction arises when market outcomes acquire moral authority simply because those who benefit from them appear industrious and charitable.

The poor household is advised to economize, reskill, endure congestion, accept flexible work, start a small business and educate its children for global competition. Each recommendation may be individually prudent. Together they relocate political economy inside personal behavior. Wages, transport costs, rent, land ownership, public services and bargaining power retreat from view. Social failure is translated into a deficiency of household management.

Philanthropy can then resemble a modern economy of indulgence—not in the literal ecclesiastical sense, but as political metaphor. The wound created upstream by unequal power is treated downstream by a donation. The firm may become exceptionally generous without surrendering control over investment, wages or the workplace. The moral ledger is privatized with the economy.

Hayek Friedman and Mises Without Saying So

The Philippine model's philosophical identity is slippery because its language and mechanisms come from different traditions. Its vocabulary invokes solidarity, stewardship, subsidiarity and the Social Market Economy. Its operating assumptions often resemble twentieth-century market liberalism.

From Hayek comes suspicion that administrative direction will replace dispersed knowledge and impersonal prices with political discretion. From Friedman comes the belief that private ownership and competition generally allocate resources more effectively than bureaucracy, along with the proposition that corporate managers should pursue profit within the rules of the game rather than exercise public functions on their own authority (Friedman, 1970). From Mises comes the stronger warning that intervention generates distortions that invite further intervention.

These thinkers should not be caricatured. Hayek accepted a social minimum and a legal order; Friedman accepted public rules and some income support; Mises's argument concerned the cumulative logic of intervention rather than the abolition of law. Nor does every privatization prove their influence. The family resemblance lies in the presumption that public economic direction is epistemically dangerous, that state ownership is normally inefficient and that voluntary exchange carries a strong claim to legitimacy.

Catholic Social Teaching begins from a different moral threshold. It does not ask only whether exchange is voluntary, but whether the institutions surrounding exchange are just. Property is legitimate but social; work is not a commodity; unions are legitimate counterweights; public authority must protect the weak; and distribution cannot be understood solely as the retrospective outcome of market productivity. Economic freedom is one element of human freedom, not its governing principle.

The Philippine settlement attempted to inhabit both worlds. It sought the discipline of markets, security of property, attractiveness to foreign capital and legitimacy of Catholic solidarity. When the two sides conflicted, however, the hard mechanisms usually belonged to the liberal side. Privatization, debt contracts, concessions, property rights and investment agreements were enforceable. Solidarity was a value, stewardship an exhortation, a living wage an aspiration, corporate responsibility voluntary, and technology transfer something foreign investment was expected eventually to deliver. The result was not a synthesis but an asymmetry between law and sermon.

The Technocratic Calculus of the Lesser Evil

The arrangement endured because it answered the fears of a particular historical moment. After Marcos, state banking evoked behest loans, industrial policy evoked cronies, and public enterprise evoked debt. Communist insurgency remained powerful enough that redistribution appeared to important sections of the elite as an existential threat. Foreign creditors demanded stabilization, while the democratic government urgently needed capital, legitimacy and recovery.

Liberalization could therefore be understood as the lesser evil. If officials could not be trusted to choose industrial champions, let competition choose them. If state corporations became patronage machines, privatize them. If bureaucrats manipulated prices, deregulate prices. If protected firms grew complacent, expose them to imports. If planning had become synonymous with dictatorship, replace discretion with rules. There was genuine rationality in this response.

Its weakness was the conversion of a historically contingent cleanup into a permanent theory of development. A policy suitable for dismantling a crony monopoly is not automatically an industrial strategy. Selling an insolvent corporation does not prove that public enterprise is always undesirable. Removing a tariff protecting an inefficient producer does not prove that performance-conditioned protection can never create a capability. Inviting foreign investment does not ensure domestic technological absorption. Decentralization does not decentralize property.

The avoidance of state failure gradually took precedence over the construction of state capacity. Philippine policy became sophisticated at stating what government should no longer do and uncertain about what productive transformation it should accomplish. This negative industrial policy became self-confirming. Weak manufacturing justified a turn toward services. Overseas labor proved the international competitiveness of Filipino skills. Imported consumer and capital goods demonstrated the benefits of openness. Assembly exports demonstrated participation in global value chains. Each response could be individually rational while the combined economy remained technologically shallow and externally directed.

Education and market participation performed a political function within this settlement. They promised that the individual could escape structural scarcity by becoming employable, entrepreneurial or internationally relevant. The promise did not need to transform the nation so long as it provided enough routes of private advancement to reduce the appeal of subversion. Social mobility became a form of pacification: not a collective alteration of the economic structure, but an invitation to succeed within it, even when the training offered bore only a weak relationship to national productive needs.

This helps explain why the Philippine Social Market Economy could be neither genuinely ordoliberal nor wholly neoliberal. The state remained active in producing market society—guaranteeing contracts, building roads, offering fiscal incentives, training workers and negotiating access—while reluctant to direct the purposes toward which private accumulation should move. It was strong in the defense of claims and weak in the reorganization of power.

A Social Market Worth the Name

A Philippine Social Market Economy worthy of the name would be more institutional and less sentimental. It would begin with competition policy rather than assuming market opening creates competition. Regulators would possess the salaries, information, technical competence and political protection required to discipline utilities, banks, platforms and conglomerates. Merger review would be integrated with an understanding of family ownership, cross-directorships and control over credit. Public concessions would contain measurable investment and service obligations, with credible penalties and reversion when contractors failed.

It would treat labor as an economic citizen. The Philippines need not reproduce German codetermination mechanically, but it can accept the underlying principle that workers are not merely inputs whose future is decided solely by owners. Sectoral bargaining, stronger protection for organization, employee representation, works councils, profit-sharing and worker ownership- even that of self-management can move labor from the exterior of the enterprise toward its constitutional center. A living wage would be connected to productivity policy, housing, transport and social insurance rather than debated as an isolated cost imposed upon employers.

It would treat healthcare, education, transport, housing, social insurance and basic infrastructure as institutions of freedom. Universal provision is not necessarily a violation of subsidiarity. It can be the subsidium that allows families, cooperatives, local governments and small firms to act. A commuter cannot exercise entrepreneurial freedom while losing hours to congestion; a small manufacturer cannot compete without reliable power; a family cannot accumulate capital when illness destroys its savings.

It would restore industrial policy without restoring crony privilege. The starting point should be a national inventory of productive requirements: electrification, inter-island transport, rail, shipbuilding and repair, mass housing, agricultural machinery, food processing, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications equipment, mineral processing and climate resilience. Not every item should be produced domestically, but the decision should follow an assessment of capability, scale, security and learning rather than passive acceptance of current comparative advantage.

Support for chosen sectors would be conditional. Development banks and public procurement could lower the cost of learning; tariffs and incentives could be time-limited; joint ventures could be required to develop suppliers, train engineers and place research locally. Public enterprises could operate where natural monopoly, strategic need or capital intensity makes private provision inadequate, while facing professional management, transparent accounts and legislative oversight. Cooperatives and employee-owned firms could receive institutional support rather than praise alone.

Foreign investment would remain welcome, but as an instrument inside a domestic accumulation strategy. An assembly plant would be evaluated not only by exports and jobs but by supplier development, technical training, local research, domestic value added and the capacity retained when the investor leaves. The aim would not be autarky. It would be the ability to choose interdependence rather than experience it only as dependence.

Most importantly, the country would take seriously the doctrine it quotes. Subsidiarity would empower lower institutions rather than excuse higher ones. Solidarity would receive budgets, laws and bargaining machinery. The social function of property would become an operational principle. The common good would occasionally override private return not because profit is sinful, but because markets are political institutions whose legitimacy depends upon outcomes citizens can live with.

The Moralized Market

The deepest problem is not personal hypocrisy. Many businesspeople sincerely believe in stewardship. Many technocrats sincerely believe that openness expands opportunity. Many Catholic economists genuinely seek a reconciliation between enterprise and social justice. Sincerity does not resolve the contradiction because an economy cannot depend upon the moral excellence of those occupying its commanding heights.

Managers answer to owners, creditors, customers and competitors. A firm that voluntarily assumes costs its rivals do not bear will face pressure from firms that do not share its conscience. Charity can moderate consequences but cannot rewrite incentives. Civilization developed labor law, taxation, competition policy, social insurance and public regulation precisely because virtue is unreliable as an economic constitution.

The original Social Market Economy understood that markets possess productive virtues only inside a prior legal and political order. Catholic Social Teaching goes further: economic life must serve the human person, and the justice of work, property and distribution cannot be postponed until after profit is calculated. The Philippine illusion reversed the relationship. It sought to construct the market first and moralize its consequences afterward.

Thus the peculiar architecture: liberalized sectors accompanied by seminars on values; privatized infrastructure accompanied by corporate foundations; labor flexibility accompanied by lectures on human dignity; overseas employment accompanied by praise for family sacrifice; oligopolistic concentration accompanied by appeals to entrepreneurship; and low-value assembly accompanied by declarations that the Philippines had industrialized because factories stood inside export zones. The rhetoric says Müller-Armack, solidarity and Catholic Social Teaching. The operating instinct too often says Hayek, Friedman and Mises. Beneath both lies the older Philippine reality: concentrated property working through a state too weak to discipline capital consistently yet strong enough to protect its claims.

If the Philippines truly intends to build a Social Market Economy, it does not need more moral instruction addressed to the market. It needs institutions through which moral claims and material basis become economic law. Until then, the social in the Philippine social market will remain chiefly an adjective attached to a market economy, and the Gospel According to Capital will continue to promise that what structure has denied, conscience may someday provide.

***

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