Issue of Today

Making Democracy Work for the People

By Fidel V. Ramos

When the Philippines began self-government in July 1946 as America's "showcase of democracy in Asia," our average individual incomes then were second only to those of the Japanese. But instead of becoming the next Japan, we turned out to be East Asia's example of an oligarchic democracy's failure to bring about economic development and social reform.

Because of that failure we became vulnerable to authoritarian rule starting in 1972. In the name of development, for 14 years we suffered from the severe curtailment of political and civil rights. The result of the Marcos martial rule from 1972 to 1986 was the increase of mass poverty, official corruption and rural insurgency. By the early 1980s--while our neighbors were reaching the peak of their export-oriented growth--our own economy was collapsing.

Finally, in February 1986, through a peaceful "People Power" revolution which became a model for other captive peoples--we overthrew the dictatorship. This has since become known as EDSA I, in honor of the highway where a million Filipinos converged against tanks, cannons and helicopter gunships to overthrow the dictatorship.


After the "People Power" Revolution

Since that time, the Philippine economy has been responding to structural reforms that opened the country to world markets and shifted its development strategy to export-based growth, while successive governments have tried to ensure that people at all levels of society share in the benefits of development. 

Seventeen years after EDSA, after yet another "People Power" revolution that threw out a corrupt and incompetent president (EDSA II), we Filipinos have come to realize that replacing an authoritarian or non-performing regime with a representative system was the relatively easy part, and making democracy work for the common people is the much tougher job. 

As Dr. Amartya Sen teaches: democracy's success depends on the vigor of its practice. Democracy's trappings--elections, parliaments, free newspapers, independent judiciaries--are relatively easy to assemble. But technocrats with their fancy blueprints can easily preempt--and supplant--people's participation. Local pockets of authoritarianism--political dynasties, business cronies, influence peddlers and the unreformed military--may persist many years after an open political system has been established at the national level.

Since my early years as an infantry captain in the 1950s, I have come to realize that the symbiotic connection between democracy and human development is quite complex. Democracy does not automatically ensure development, and neither does sustained development reliably guarantee people's freedom. Yet, democracy does reinforce human development, and human development strengthens democracy. The two reinforce each other. 

As Filipinos sought to institutionalize "people empowerment," many of us began to realize that human development is the key measure of the progress we make in empowering ordinary citizens. In my honest belief, human development cannot be complete without democracy--without people empowerment--without people being placed at the center of development. It is this job of making democracy work--and insuring democratic governance--for the common people that I see as Asia's biggest challenge over the next 20 years. 


The Market System

Among the strongest forces for shoring up democracy is the market system--which has changed East Asia dramatically over this last generation. And just as early capitalism brought down feudalism in Western Europe, so has the commercial way of life eroded strongman regimes and centralized political control in East Asia. Free markets have not only brought faster and more sustained growth but have also been a liberative political force. 

Democracy thrives with a healthy economy and vice versa. When people are poor and laboring 16 hours a day, seven days a week, they have no time or energy to defend their basic rights as free men and women who have a say in their country's policies and in the choice of their leaders. In order to vote, citizens who are illiterate must suffer the indignity of having to ask for help because their lack of education is due to their poverty, and does not come from their lack of motivation to learn.

While economic growth may begin without democracy, democracy is possible only under the market economy, which helps create the private realm--called civil society--that enables political and social freedoms to flourish. In turn, democracy, as it develops, consolidates development. The sense of self-worth that democracy nurtures in ordinary people sustains civil society and liberates the entrepreneurial spirit--which is likely to lift development to peaks of innovation and creativity. Democracy is what makes human development happen.


Empowering People and Reducing Global Poverty

After 9/11, we began to realize how precarious the process of globalization really is. We have learned the cost of cultural resentments and grievances over poverty, exploitation, oppression, inequity and isolation. These conditions--in any country--we now know are the breeding grounds of violence, extremism and terrorism.

The challenge is for us to reconcile market forces with equal opportunity and to reconcile capitalism with social equity. We must find ways to make global markets work for everyone--to enable the world's poorest peoples to take part in humankind's adventure of development.

The fact is that the rules which have governed the global environment for the past 150 years no longer work. Technological and cultural revolutions are creating a virtually borderless world. To suit this emerging new world we need to restructure the relationships between the rich and the poor economies. We need to reform the market system, so that it begins to care for those whom development leaves behind. We need to level the playing field in international trade by opening still-protected rich-country markets. And we need, above all, a concerted effort to ease global poverty--which gives rise to envy, alienation, resentment and violence.


Intellectual Property

One way in which rich countries should help ease global inequalities is by sharing with the poor countries their intellectual property, meaning inventions, innovations, creations and R&D products. As a founding member of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Policy Advisory Commission (WIPO-PAC), this is a policy that I have strongly advocated. 

WIPO, of course, recognizes the need to protect inventions and innovations, and to reward the individuals and institutions, which are largely from the affluent countries, that discover them. But those discoveries and technologies vital to improving public health, increasing life expectancy, facilitating education, enhancing the environment and reducing mass poverty should be transferred expeditiously, concessionally, affordably--better, at cost--"pro bono" even--to the "have-not" peoples.


Poor People Are Creditworthy

In the Philippine experience, the availability of microcredit for working capital has proven to be one of the do-able solutions to poverty by fueling radical change in the lives of the poor. Fifty dollars, 500, 1,000--depending on the nature of the micro-business--when made available to a poor family and managed under a system of self-help and trust can produce a steady improvement in nutrition, health, education, housing and, most of all, dignity and self-esteem.

Celso Balderama used to beg for food to feed his family. Thanks to assistance from Opportunity International and the Opportunity Microfinance Bank, he now owns a thriving carpentry business in Manila.  [Tim Wimbourne 2002]

Trickle-down economics has worked only partially at best--because of leakages on the way down. Microcredit inverts the paradigm of "helping the poor with a handout." Microcredit invites the poor into a "way-out."

Walk through a community that has a well-managed microcredit program up and running, and you will see schoolchildren in clean uniforms and parents buying little treats for their kids. And you will see the pride and self-confidence of people who are earning enough to meet their basic needs.

In 2001, I was honored to sponsor, together with President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the launching of the Opportunity Microfinance Bank (OMB), the first non-collateral microfinance thrift bank to be licensed to operate under the authority of the Central Bank of the Philippines.

The Opportunity Microfinance Bank extends microloans, opens interest-bearing savings accounts, and provides basic business training and other practical support services for people so poor that a $128 business loan can, and usually does, transform their lives.

After four months, OMB was serving nearly 9,000 group loan clients who are the poorest of the poor--people who would not normally be let in the door of a regular bank--not even to deposit their savings. Happily, further rapid growth is expected on the part of the bank and more importantly on the part of its client-borrowers who have recorded an astounding 98.6% repayment rate.

In the 20th century, why was it easier to put a man on the moon than it was to lend $128 to 100 million poor people around the world so that they could get into a sustainable business?


Confronting the Inequities of the Global Order

On a macro scale, it is only by recognizing the common bonds of humanity linking us that we can mitigate the resentments generated by the narrow but lethal mind-sets of the Al-Qaeda kind--the ignorance that breeds isolation, ethnic conflict, religious extremism and international terrorism.

So, while we agree this is a critical time for our world, we believe it need not lead to the apocalyptic violence that terrorists and their right-wing counterparts are trying to provoke.

This is why, like many other developing countries, we of the Philippines believe the global community must look beyond the war on terrorism and confront, once and for all, the inequities that remain in the global order.

Such inequities or "divides"--in per capita income, health conditions, life expectancy, literacy and education, job opportunities, productivity and efficiency, connectivity, digital proficiency, etc.--are the long-standing kinds of terrorism which, to me, are more dangerous than the Al-Qaeda kind. 

We must recognize how empty our vision for a better future can be without a moral purpose--how rootless society can be without some transcendent ethical foundation.

And if we are to discover the correct response, I believe we must first recognize how much we ourselves, as individuals and as nations, have contributed to the deconsecration of human life.

It is this quality of CARING, SHARING and DARING for each other that is the defining quality of what is called "civic responsibility."

Caring and sharing may be easy enough to do. But daring to commit oneself to civic tasks; daring to give more than to take; daring to reform oneself to make a difference; daring to take collective action for the common good--these are the real and the ultimate tests of people empowerment and of responsible citizenship.

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