Imagining Modern Democracy: A Habermasian Assessment of the Philippine Experiment by Ranilo Balaguer Hermida (review)

Exemplifying the current trend in the Philippine philosophical community, Imagining Modern Democracy: A Habermasian Assessment of the Philippine Experiment fuses political theory with a sustained practical assessment of Philippine democracy, which is one of Asia’s oldest. In examining the Philippine democratic experience, Ranilo Hermida divides the book into two parts. The first part lays the overall framework culled from the Habermasian concept of discursive/communicative democracy. The author utilizes this concept to assess the Philippine experience of what Hermida calls as “imagined modern democracy,” the main substance of the second part. By drawing from the requisites of facticity and validity that Habermas expounded in Between Facts and Norms (1992), the author clearly extracts the epistemological grounding and theoretical formations of the conduct of the state in modern societies with diverse goals, cultures, and interests. For Habermas, as Hermida explicates well, the laws that govern modern societies must constitute more than a form of a compelling instrument but also “serve as medium of social integration” (35). Such social integration can be realized if the proceduralist paradigm embedded in the democratic process “would allow the free play of autonomy whereby all citizens by themselves can come to a consensus about the nature of their problem and the solution of their choice” (100).

With this framework, Hermida assesses the present political structures, systems, and processes enunciated in the fundamental law, the 1987 Constitution of the Philippines. In particular he highlights how the citizens’ political autonomy allows them to participate actively in democratic processes, such as lawmaking and other national and local political exercises, and not simply exercise their right to suffrage. Through critical analysis of the Habermasian theory of deliberative democracy, coupled with a substantial historical mapping of how the 1987 charter was drafted and the circumstances surrounding it, the book concludes that “the desire to deepen democracy is embodied in provisions that pave the way for greater popular engagements in various political avenues” (120). Of these political avenues, Hermida specifies four modes that he claims should have encouraged greater political participation among the citizenry; i.e., the system of initiative and referendum, the party-list system, civil society and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and local government autonomy and decentralization.

Despite these constitutional innovations for political participation, the book concludes that Philippine democracy is far from the flourishing democracy that Habermas envisions of a modern state. Such an unfortunate consequence, according to the author, owes partly to “problems with . . . implementation” (229), the lack of commitment of public political leaders “to a truly democratic politics” that translates into “the everyday policies and programs of the Philippine government,” and the “resistance to change by the political elites who mostly benefit from the status quo” (227).

Indeed, the book is a great contribution to the current literature on the conduct of democracy in the Philippines. It offers a new and refreshing perspective that focuses on the conduct of constitutionally guaranteed avenues of participation instead of formulating a discourse on personality politics. It interrogates the Philippine democratic experience through a careful textual analysis, coupled with historical contextualization that strengthens his claims. The study is also timely. Nearly three decades after the promulgation of the current constitution and more than a century after the emergence of Philippine democracy, first instituted through the establishment of the Malolos Republic in 1899, an assessment of the constitution’s applicability in Philippine society and effectiveness to increase political participation among its citizens is desirable, if not totally necessary. The book contributes particularly in gauging how the political structure, which is supposedly the center, accommodates those in the periphery.

Although the book is successful in analyzing the constitutional avenues for greater public participation such as the party-list system and the involvement of NGOs in the political arena, Hermida’s arguments can be strengthened further through an examination of the existence in the Philippines of a strong public sphere, a claim that Habermas presupposes in...