Juan Gabriel L. de Leon
2006-07148
Mrs. Anna Felicia C. Sanchez
English 10 MHW
Position Paper [Final Draft]
Going With the Flow: Globalization and the Philippines
Going With the Flow: Globalization and the Philippines
“We the Peoples of the United Nations Determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, And for these Ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, Have Resolved to Combine our Efforts to Accomplish these Aims” (“Charter” pars. 1-11).
Agreed and signed upon by the governments of its member nations, the United Nations Charter was made official at the city of San Francisco on June 26, 1945 (par. 397). From then on, the organization became the largest, most recognized, and most powerful modern-day alliance in our world, aiming to establish unity, peace, and social justice among all nations, after an era marked by bloodshed and regression. Existence of such alliances have marked the world’s integration into a one united society, a trend most aptly called globalization, “a set of processes leading to the integration of economic, cultural, political and social systems across geographical boundaries” (“Globalization”). It is an age-long process, dating back from Genghis Khan’s Mongol Empire and the Silk Road to the Dutch East India Company and the United States of America (“History”). Not that it is something new to us Filipinos – we already know about the contributions of China, Spain, Europe, America and Japan in enriching our history and culture; now we have the UN, ASEAN, and APEC as our international partners and friends. Seemingly, globalization (through the aid of these international organizations) is the way to go if we want our country out of its current state of turmoil, a statement I deeply regretted once it came to my attention.
But going over it once more, I think of those words as most appropriate. A quick glance at the Philippines’ current condition would tell one that millions of people go hungry daily and about the same number of them are malnourished, despite claims that its economy is gaining; journalists and activists die in twos everyday, and are simply waved off as threats to national peace; educational facilities are literally rotting to oblivion, though the national literacy rate remains high; major infrastructural developments come only during election campaign periods, mainly because the “elected” government almost always prioritizes the payment of our foreign debt’s interest. However, as stated earlier, globalization apparently has answers for each of these problems.
According to Wikipedia, globalization would allow international free trade and direct foreign investments by highly developed countries into developing countries (par. 11). In a sense, the First World countries become the producers of the needs of the Third World countries, who become the consumers. Such policies could enable governments to push for a better allocation of their country’s resources (“Free Trade”). Meanwhile, these developed countries also keep on developing their own needs, and thus, in quoting World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn, “making globalization work for all” (qtd. in “Financing”).
Then there is the issue of unadministered justice. The Philippines’ human rights group KARAPATAN reported that the number of extrajudicial killings have risen to 874 since President Arroyo held office in 2001 (1 par. 6). In response to this alarming rate of deaths, an international forum condemned the Philippine government as guilty of human rights violations, and also accused US President George W. Bush of supporting it. The head of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, Mr. Francois Houtart, said that “the systematic nature of the violations of the rights of the Philippine people committed by the government of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, with the support and full awareness of the government of George W. Bush, qualify as the same violation as crimes against humanity" (“Guilty” pars. 1-3). The aforementioned Tribunal was only conceived and formed independently; how much more could an official and international court do?
And that does not end there. Globalization could improve the standard of living of the citizens of the world, to say the least. Pro-globalists have the statistics to back their claims up; surveys and reports collated by Wikipedia tells us that due to the efforts of international organizations in pushing for globalization,
The percentage of people in developing countries living below US $1 (adjusted for inflation and purchasing power) per day has halved in only twenty years, with the greatest improvements coming in economies rapidly reducing barriers to trade and investment... Life expectancy has almost doubled in the developing world since WWII and is starting to close the gap to the developed world where the improvement has been smaller. Infant mortality has decreased in every developing region of the world. Income inequality for the world as a whole is diminishing. Democracy has increased dramatically from almost no nation with universal suffrage in 1900 to 62.5% of all nations in 2000. The proportion of the world's population living in countries where per-capita food supplies are less than 2,200 calories (9,200 kilojoules) per day decreased from 56% in the mid-1960s to below 10% by the 1990s. Between 1950 and 1999, global literacy increased from 52% to 81% of the world. Women made up much of the gap: Female literacy as a percentage of male literacy has increased from 59% in 1970 to 80% in 2000. The percentage of children in the labor force has fallen from 24% in 1960 to 10% in 2000. There are similar increasing trends for electric power, cars, radios, and telephones per capita, as well as the proportion of the population with access to clean water (par. 30).
A preview of the world’s future in globalization could be seen in the existence of the European Union. In Europa’s most recent online database, the numbers posted by each of the 25 member-nations of the EU marked improvement in their citizens’ welfare and standard of living in all major sectors: wealth, education, health, technology, labor and employment, trade and economy, environment, and peace (“Key facts”).
This holds true for the EU and other highly developed states such as the United States because they uphold a rich tradition and history. However, this is not the case for the Philippines, whose people are drowned in colonial mentality. Quoting a Wikipedia article, “Filipino culture is largely a fusion of the indigenous traditions of the Philippines, Hispanic and American cultures. It has also been significantly influenced by Chinese and Indian cultures” (“Philippines” par. 26). History books also say the same thing about the Filipino culture, as if there were no Filipino culture, no original Filipino identity to begin with. It would be easy to think that way; our names came from the Spanish tongue, our country is ninety percent Roman Catholic, we take pride in the afridata, menudo, and pansit canton, we regularly consume food from McDonalds, KFC, and Burger King, basketball is our national sport, Hollywood is shown in our moviehouses, and even our national hero Jose Rizal wrote his obra maestras in Spanish (pars. 27-31).
Worse, we Filipinos could not even take pride in our languages. Many people casually dismiss the Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Ilocano, Kapampangan, and other ethnic tongues as dialects, “a regional variety of language distinguished by features of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation from other regional varieties,” when we know that these ethnic tongues sound way too different from the Tagalog language . But we hail those who could speak in their most construed version of Taglish. The geography of the country would not help either, us being in an archipelago of 7,107 islands. This has been a problem of our ancestors during their series of revolutions against foreign invaders – they just could not establish any semblance of unity. As a result, while the Muslims kept on resisting foreign entry, up north in Luzon the insurgents have succumbed to Western rule (Agoncillo 247-60). One could not expect a country that does not have a sense of itself to survive when the imposing forces of globalization come over.
Furthermore, globalization will not entirely help the Filipino economy and people. In fact, instead of it “working for all,” free trade and foreign investments will only work for the investors, which would be the highly developed countries, making “the rich richer and the poor poorer.” Their economies are the ones which will grow in strength, they will be the ones who will get to use their state-of-the-art technology, and their countries are the ones whose standards of living will dramatically increase. On the other hand, the growth of the economies of Third World countries will remain dependent on those of the First World, resulting to relatively minimal, if any, gains in their economical strength, just like poor-stricken Philippines (“Threat or Opportunity” pars. 9-11). A certain organization of Filipino migrants stressed that after this, Filipinos will then be forced to migrate to other more stable countries because of
extreme poverty, underdevelopment and joblessness in the country, rooted in the uneven distribution of land and wealth that has benefited a handful of rich landlords, big business, cronies, and multinational companies… The Philippines is a country rich in natural resources and has an educated work force, but Filipinos are driven abroad since the government cannot provide jobs. This is not surprising since the Philippine economy is backward, primarily agrarian, and without basic industries. With landlessness and poverty in the countryside, and without basic industries to generate jobs, the Philippines has become a source of cheap raw materials and labour for multinational companies (“Migration” pars. 5-6).
That way Filipinos can contribute to the “betterment” of our economy, as about than one-tenth of the population (8 million) now work outside of their mother country “in search of greener pastures.” The organization said that Filipino migrants remitted about 4.8 billion US dollars every five years (pars. 7-8).
However, that leaves local industries and institutions in big losses because the ones who are able to leave the country are the competent laborers and employees. Add to that the increase in the number of foreign investors in the Philippines, and the local industries are virtually bound to die someday, leaving these foreigners some openings to exploit the nation’s resources. They have been successful, so far – they had Dole Philippines and 124 other agribusiness firms here as of 1985, and I have not mentioned yet the mushroom-like sudden appearnces of McDonalds and Pizza Huts throughout the nation.
After all that, it remains clear that we could not follow pre-modern Japan and declare a closed-door policy towards other nations – we are too dependent on outside influences to do that. But for a good start, we ought to know ourselves as Filipinos first. And we ought to look at ourselves as Filipinos, in a viewpoint that is purely Filipino. Again, we have been miseducated about ourselves, the Western man telling us that we did not have a culture until they helped us; because we do have a culture, and we do have an identity that is very distinct from the Spaniards, the Chinese, the Americans, and from everyone else who told us that we are only a bunch of influences molded together. Our true history can tell us that, as long as we enrich our culture and look through the same perspectives; in doing so, who knows, but we Filipinos could establish a kind of unity that could enable and even empower us as the process of globalization unfolds right in front of our eyes.
List of Works Cited
Agoncillo, Teodoro A. “The Continuing Resistance.” A History of the Filipino People. Quezon City: Garotech, 1990.
“Charter of the United Nations.” Human Rights Web. 25 Jan. 1997. 26 March 2007 <http://www.hrweb.org/legal/unchartr.html>.
“Dialect.” IClasses.org. 27 March 2007 <http://www.iclasses.org/assets/literature/literary_glossary.cfm>.
“Filipino Migration: A Brief History.” Pilipinong Migrante sa Canada. 27 March 2007
“Financing the Monterrey Consensus.” The World Bank. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development & International Development Association. 27 March 2007 <
“Foreign Investment.” Country Studies. U.S. Library of Congress. 27 March 2007
“Free trade.” Wikipedia. 26 Mar. 2007. GNU Free Documentation License. 27 March 2007 <
“Globalization.” HSE Web Depot. Global Environment Management Initiative. 26 March 2007 <http://www.hsewebdepot.org/imstool/GEMI.nsf/WEBDocs/Glossary?OpenDocument>.
“Globalization.” Wikipedia. 27 March 2007. GNU Free Documentation License. 27 March 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization>.
“History of Globalization.” Wikipedia. 20 March 2007. GNU Free Documentation License. 27 March 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_globalization>.
IMF Staff. “Globalization: Threat or Opportunity?” International Monetary Fund. Jan. 2002. 27 March 2007
KARAPATAN. “2005 Human Rights Report.” Stop the Killings in the Philippines. 30 May 2006. 27 March 2007 <
“Key facts and figures about Europe and the Europeans.” EUROPA. 27 March 2007 <http://europa.eu/abc/keyfigures/index_en.htm>.
“Philippines.” Wikipedia. 27 March 2007. GNU Free Documentation License. 27 March 2007 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines>.
“Philippines ‘guilty of violations.’” Australian News Network. 26 Mar. 2007. 27 Mar. 2007 <http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21446232-1702,00.html>.
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