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Last week Marcos was busy with preparations for his most ambitious foreign-policy move to date: the seven-nation Manila Conference of Asia's non-Communist allies, which opens next week. Marcos released $190,000 to patch Manila's perennially potholed roads, and the city throbbed to the passing of earth movers and dump trucks. Paintbrushes slapped and lawn mowers clattered up and down stately Roxas Boulevard as hotels and nightclubs indulged in a hasty face lifting. U.S. Presidential Press Secretary Bill D. Moyers bustled from airport to embassy to Malacanang Palace (the Filipino White House) making arrangements for everything from protocol dinners to a Lyndon-and-Lady Bird tour of nearby Corregidor. Marcos' aides wrote hurried position papers, while his First Lady, lovely Imelda Romualdez Marcos, supervised a hurry-up renovation of the palace itself. The twittering of sparrows in the upper reaches of the palace reception hall was drowned in the rattle of hammers and snarl of saws.
Articulate Ambivalence. Though the Manila Conference will deal mainly with the war effort in Viet Nam, it symbolized the rebirth of a 15-year-old Asian desire for concerted unity that has long eluded the region. The Baguio Conference of 1950, called by Philippine President Elpidio Quirino and held in the craggy, cool highlands north of Manila, brought together such disparate neighbors as Australia, Ceylon, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Thailand, and ended with agreement on joint action for the region. The principle of "Maphilindo," endorsed by Marcos' predecessor, Diosdado Macapagal, idealized the hope of Asia's Malay nations (Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia) to regroup ethnically after ages of European-imposed fragmentation. Marcos himself has led the Philippines into a new Asian grouping, the nine-nation ASPAC— and simultaneously he has revived the long dormant Association of Southeast Asia (an economic union of Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines).
During his visit to Washington last month, Marcos articulated the ambivalence of many non-Communist ex-colonials who now stand on their own. "The challenge to America is to extend to Asia the defensive shield of American power in forms consonant with Asian freedom and self-respect," Marcos told a joint session of the U.S. Congress. "The challenge to Asia is to discard the dry, meatless bone of mysticism and fatalism."
The surge of new nationalism throughout Asia is aimed at precisely that second challenge. "The young Filipino looks around him," says one old Manila hand, "and remembers that his grandfather spoke Spanish; yet his parents and he speak English better than Tagalog. He sees the conglomeration of Spanish and native architecture, spruced up with American modern. His system of government is tailored after that of the U.S.; yet he does not feel truly American. So he stands there, bewildered, asking himself: 'What am I? Do I belong to Asia, the Pacific? Or am I closer to the West than either of these?'"