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Democratization and Military Reform in the Philippines
already receives extensive help from the US military and
there is an incentive for politicians at the national level to
work toward this objective for their own long-term security.
The Problem of State Incapacity
Charles Tilly’s work is a useful starting place in the study
of Philippine democracy as he focuses on interactions
between security and regime type. He argues that state
capacity is one of the primary influences on democratization,
however, there is not simply a positive linear relation
between capacity and democracy. The interaction between
democracy and state capacity is complex, with extremes of
high or low capacity contributing to dedemocratization.
Weak states are less likely to become democratic because
they generally lack strong trust networks, must deal with
social inequalities, and have to fight autonomous centers of
power (Tilly, 2007; 175). On the other hand, when the
government has too much power it can suppress popular
movements and control elections. Ideally, there should be
some balance of state capacity to ensure that government
can perform its duties without overstepping them. This
balance is precisely what The Philippines lack.
Security is one of the defining features of government
capacity, and perhaps even the most important one (Tilly,
1985). It is at the heart of the Weberian definition of state as
having a monopoly on legitimate use of violence (Weber,
2004; 33) that is widely used by political scientists. The
difficulty in dealing with capacity as a corollary of democracy
is determining exactly what kinds of increased state capacity
might be beneficial in a given context. The Philippines are in
desperate need of greater security, yet simply increasing the
size and power of the military would likely prove
counterproductive as it is one of the greatest threats to the
government. The problems of poor civil-military relations and
weak civilian control over the military are common among
new democracies (Bland, 2001), but few countries experience
such a complex interaction between military factions as the
Philippines.
The high capacity and low capacity threats to government
may be distinct in some countries, but in the Philippines,
they reinforce each other. Non-state violence gives politicians
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