Monday, June 14, 2004
'Jasmine Trias and foreign policy'
By Jeffrey J. Roden
BusinessWorld 06.14.2004
Thank you, Jasmine, for offering a fresh face in foreign policy. Yes, Jasmine, foreign policy.
There is a lesson from your success in "American Idol" that runs deep in the archipelago of problems besetting the Filipino nation. It exposed a black hole. This black hole is what scholars ordinarily call a research gap.
Any keen follower of the show "American Idol" would realize the immense potential of a Filipino diaspora acting in concert. It has shown that overseas Filipinos moving with one purpose can influence events and advance a cause. Sure enough, it wasn't just this young lady's guts that brought her to the final stages of the contest. The millions of votes from a very supportive overseas Filipino community in the United States buoyed her through. The result, until recently: the mighty American nation had a Filipina for an idol -- a paradigmatic black hole that begs to be explained.
The claim of state patent on foreign policy, and hence over the conduct of diplomacy, is a neo-realist credo invalidated by the Cold War's end. The collapse of the old balance-of-power system revised a bipolar world mono-dominated by states. This, along with erstwhile dormant developments such as access to technology, satellite communications, modern transportation, and the internationalization of capital, penned a new script called Globalization.
Our foreign policy, however, has failed to grasp the shifting sands of globalization. We still think of confronting this strange alien force head-on when we should grapple it from within. We lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of diplomacy: foreign policy should always be forward-looking in ensuring national security and outward-looking in its search for creative openings. The state, we are reminded, is not an end but a means -- and certainly not the only one -- of pursuing our international priorities. As a result, we have a foreign policy, which knows its limits but hardly its goals.
Some consequences of globalization such as porous borders, unprecedented human mobility, global capitalism, and cultural interpenetration have made contact between private citizens miles apart possible (such as Filipinos e-mailing their relatives to vote for Jasmine).
In the Philippines, the large-scale exodus of Filipinos, now known as the Filipino diaspora, has been the most sweeping sociological phenomenon during the last 30 years. There are already eight million overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) out of a total 84 million population. In effect, this exodus has shipped one-tenth of our society abroad.
Sadly, however, the country has not gone far in honoring OFWs beyond mash accolades as "modern-day heroes." Many as they are, they have yet to translate their numbers into diplomatic, political, economic, cultural and social fulcra.
Any nation unable to employ the ingenious energy of its hardworking people will only have to watch as foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) reap the fruits of market liberalization, and stare helplessly as its most potent resource -- its own people -- march to distant places. For as MNCs scan the developing world for cheap labor, workers from Third World countries are being impelled to seek jobs elsewhere.
And since the Filipino people could no longer wait for a development policy that would arm them in facing globalization, they had to achieve their aims by looking elsewhere, like Hawaii and the "American Idol". Such boldness and daring to go to far-away lands will hopefully infuse youth and vigor to their outmoded foreign policy. For youth is not properly definable by age, but by a spirit of daring, creating.
In recent years, OFWs have finally been banding as seen in the growth of their organizations. Likewise, various activities such as the recently concluded 2nd Overseas Filipinos Trade Show manifest the kind of dynamism emerging from their ranks. Filipinos have, in a manner of speaking, trooped to the frontlines of diplomacy and taken the cudgels for foreign policy.
Notwithstanding these developments, however, there is still a pressing need for an overarts their importance in nation-building and foreign affairs. What we urgently need is a change of weltanschauung - - a paradigm shift. We must learn to look at them not as clients but as partners, as prospective entrepreneurs rather than mere consumers.
The present framework views OFWs as objects, rather than exponents, of our foreign policy agenda. The prevailing weltanschauung is spelled out in the Annual Philippine Foreign Policy Overview for the Diplomatic Corps, thus, "extending consular assistance to our nationals remains a central function of the department..."
The operative word, "assistance", suggests the passive mind-set that pervades our foreign policy apparatus. For though help is important, it alone is not enough.
When one-tenth of a country's population is situated overseas, they do not just need assistance. They need a cohesive rallying pivot around which they can converge. Moreover, they need vision, impetus, and direction. From a policy standpoint thus, the existing paradigm is essentially and fundamentally inadequate.
While we maintain that protection of our OFWs is a basic concern, we must realize that they themselves, if organized and mobilized, can become the country's foreign policy exponents. As such, they should be our paramount overseas priority, as well as our greatest asset in articulating Philippine interests abroad.
"But we're already doing that," any foreign policy zealot would riposte.
Not enough. It is not enough to pass laws on Overseas Absentee Voting (OAV) and Citizenship Re-acquisition or Retention. It does not suffice that we create legal assistance teams, dole-out Gulf War reparations, and establish reintegration programs.
These staple accomplishments, along with bilateral agreements here and there, are not disparate fragments but rather incoherent responses to emerging patterns of interaction between overseas Filipinos and the domestic Philippine population political theoreticians call complex interdependence.
Indeed, Jasmine is just a symbolic dot in the spatial tide of complex interdependence. There are other such cases like the successful California Public Employees' Retirement Retirement System (CalPERS) campaign waged by our ambassador to the US with lobbying from overseas Filipinos, the increasing number of family network-assisted migration, the growth of offshore OFW cooperatives and organizations. But Jasmine stands out because we're fond of showbiz. Of course, the most glaring proof is the $8.1 billion in OFW remittances last year (and steadily rising), excluding money coursed thru informal channels.
The Philippines, therefore, must now conceptualize a foreign policy framework, which flows from the strategic importance and crucial role of OFWs. We must be able to elaborate the mechanisms through which they can become stakeholders of foreign policy by introducing diaspora governance. We must weave network linkages by forming "diplomacy communities" that would galvanize them into action in terms of capital mobilization, tourism development, investments promotion, technology transfer, cooperative development through a "global bayanihan" culture, and opening export markets thru the concept of "suki" trading, among others. In other words, we must empower OFWs.
We must, in fine, find a way for a graduated, multilevel application of diaspora governance in foreign policy as a form of soft power diplomacy. For while developed nations have their MNCs, we have an eight million-strong "diaspora army" waiting for the general order of mobilization from their commander-in-chief, calling them for active duty to serve the Motherland in designated "diplomacy communities." If we do this, then, and only then, will we step forward from diplomatic cocktails to diplomacy creativity.
Unfortunately, our foreign policy elites will no longer hear of Jasmine Trias as she already bowed out of the contest (Fantasia Barrino was proclaimed the "American Idol"). And they may have just lost a chance to fathom the arcane implications of the Filipino diaspora. Nevertheless, thank you, Jasmine, for teaching us foreign policy -- with an attitude.
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This is a layman precis of an unpublished scholarly work, titled: "Diaspora Governance and Foreign Policy", by the same author. The author studied Political Science in UP-Diliman and observes foreign policy. Readers may send comments via e-mail.
