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The U.S. interest in the fate of the Philippines goes much deeper, however, than geopolitics. It derives from the fact that from 1898 to 1946, the archipelago was a U.S. colony. While there were some shameful aspects to the colonization, notably the violence that accompanied the consolidation of American rule, no other country in Southeast Asia has received such a profound and mostly progressive transfusion of purely American values, attitudes and democratic institutions, reflected superficially in the continuing use of English as the lingua franca of the islands.
The weight of the common U.S.-Phil
ippine heritage is symbolized by the 17,000 white headstones of the American Cemetery at Fort Bonifacio, overlooking Manila. Many thousands of other Americans are also interred in the Philippines, their lives lost in the < Spanish-American War, the U.S. war of colonial domination and World War II.
The living ties between the two countries are also vibrant. In addition to at least 18,000 Americans who serve at Clark and Subic Bay, an additional 50,000 Americans, including many of local descent, live and work in the country; meanwhile, about 1 million Filipinos live and work in the U.S. Some 500 U.S. firms operate in the Philippines, representing about $2.5 billion in U.S. private investment. They provide 10% of all the economic activity in the Philippines and directly employ some 50,000 people. Multinational corporations, most of them with such familiar names as Dole, Procter & Gamble and Firestone, generate 20% of the sales of the top 1,000 firms in the Philippines, but they pay roughly 30% of all Philippine corporate taxes. Says a U.S. businessman in Manila: "We're a natural part of the community here, which we are not in the rest of Southeast Asia."
A Spanish, then American, colonial heritage (sometimes known as "400 years in a convent followed by 50 years in Hollywood") gave the Philippines something else: a sense of Western-style unity. But even today that cohesion can be fragile and sometimes misleading. The sense of national purpose is strongest around Manila (pop. 8 million) and other urban centers. Roughly 70% of Filipinos, however, still live in rural areas. A scattering of more than 7,000 islands spanning 1,150 miles from north to south, the republic is still a ramshackle agglomeration of people speaking 86 languages and dialects. Its citizens range from the animistic Badjao tribe of the Sulu islands to the Tagalog-speaking natives of Batangas province on the island of Luzon to the wealthy, Chinese-mestizo clans, which form a substantial portion of the country's economic oligarchy.
In such a melange, family ties and the traditional Philippines system of reciprocal obligations between individuals, known as utang na loob (literally, inner debt), count for as much as the trappings of Western modernity. Regional identities are also important. Says Fred Whiting, 47, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Manila: "There is a great desire here to make democratic institutions work, but it is mixed with a liking for strong leaders."