Freedom Incorporated: Anticommunism and Philippine Independence in the Age of Decolonization by Colleen Woods (review)

In Freedom Incorporated, a readable and engaging book, Colleen Woods argues that U.S. imperial exceptionalism in the post–World War II period had a healthy "entanglement" or symbiosis with Cold War anti-Communist ideology and policies. Using the Philippines as a case study, Woods highlights how the United States formally "freed" the Philippines from colonial rule but in reality continued to exercise significant power and influence in the country. U.S. and Filipino political elites worked closely together in an ideologically driven, global standoff against Communism and suppressed local insurgencies in the name of this effort. The United States wielded extensive influence in the Philippines and used the country as both an ideological justification and a practical asset to expand U.S. influence in other countries in the region (in the name of anti-Communism). Meanwhile, many Filipinos suffered human rights abuses at the hands of regimes backed by the United States. Neither the Philippines government nor its U.S. ally ever effectively addressed the roots of internal radicalism. Persistent grievances in the country, fueled by social, political and economic injustices, were repressed until 1986 and never adequately dealt with afterward.

The turn of the 20th century marked a pivot in U.S. philosophy and policy toward expansion. Wars with Spain across the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean yielded American territories in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines. U.S. officials repudiated the idea of European-style imperialism and territorial expansion but were not averse to empire as such. As Woods argues, the Philippines was in reality "a lynchpin [sic] in the construction of a decolonized U.S. empire" (p. 2). In the age of decolonization after World War II, the expansion of American power relied on anti-Communist ideologies and political projects throughout the Western Hemisphere and across the Pacific Ocean. In the Philippines, U.S. anti-Communism and imperial exceptionalism were supported by the idea that the Philippines could become a "modern, model, postcolonial democracy on the global stage" (p. 3), hence characterizing U.S. imperialism as a benevolent enterprise.

Military and political officials from the United States and the Philippines worked together to fuse U.S. capital development projects and military base expansions with the predominant need to stop the spread of Communist ideologies across the globe. The rationale for continued U.S. influence—even dominance—in Philippine domestic and foreign policy was also used to justify U.S. infringement on the sovereignty of countries across Latin America and throughout the Pacific Ocean. Both the State Department and the U.S. Army maintained a public narrative that transitions to independence throughout South America and the Pacific were heralded by peaceful and orderly changes in government. In the Philippine case, Woods writes that to do otherwise "could have tarnished the 'enlightened' colonial policies that U.S. policymakers encouraged other empires to emulate and would have undercut the legitimacy of the U.S.-influenced Filipino political class in control of the post-independence state" (p. 84). In an interesting vignette, Woods narrates how, at one point, the U.S. embassy in Manila sent a diplomatic cable to the State Department explaining that "'colonial imperialism' was not a relevant topic for a library's collection … because it 'was not experienced here' under the U.S." (p. 148).

The problem with the narrative of enlightened U.S. imperialism is that it was not enlightened. Many Filipinos welcomed "U.S. liberation" from Japanese occupation in 1945, and Communist rebels (the Hukbalahap movement or Huks for short) even fought alongside U.S. forces in World War II. But Filipino hopes for a more economically just and more broadly democratic transition from colonial rule to independence were not realized. Labor movements, worker unrest, and anti-imperial activism were already growing in the Philippines in the interwar period, continuing into the period after independence in 1946. Filipino elites, entrenched in their privileges, welcomed U.S...