A universalist history of the 1987 philippine constitution (I)

Resumen

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This paper traces universalism - the vision of international public order built upon rights and values shared by all individuals and peoples - as a purposely-embedded ideology in the history and evolution of the Philippine Constitution. As the postcolonial and post-dictatorship founding document of the post-modern Philippine polity, the paper contends that 1987 Philippine Constitution enshrines nearly a century of constitutional text and practice which has led towards the present institutionalization of universalist rights-democratic theory in the Philippines' constitutional interpretive canon.

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Extracto

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A universalist history of the 1987 philippine constitution (I)

"To be non-Orientalist means to accept the continuing tension between the need to universalize our perceptions, analyses, and statements of values and the need to defend their particularist roots against the incursion of the particularist perceptions, analyses, and statements of values coming from others who claim they are putting forward universals. We are required to universalize our particulars and particularize our universals simultaneously and in a kind of constant dialectical exchange, which allows us to find new syntheses that are then of course instantly called into question. It is not an easy game."12

- Immanuel Wallerstein in EUROPEAN UNIVERSALISM: The Rhetoric of Power3

"Sec.2. The Philippines renounces war as an instrument of national policy, adopts the generally accepted principles of international law as part of the law of the land and adheres to the policy of peace, equality, justice, freedom, cooperation, and amity with all nations.

Sec. 11. The State values the dignity of every human person and guarantees full respect for human rights."

- art. II, secs. 2 and 11, 1987 Philippine Constitution4

I. Introduction

Any legal scholar contends with several hazards in attempting to present a reorientation of our reading of the Philippine Constitution. Apart from the task of balancing usual tensions between formalist (verba legis) and teleological (ratio legis) schools of Constitutional interpretation, one has to surmount archaeologic and analytical challenges. Constitutional intent must be rigorously discerned and situated alongside its contextual nexus to Constitutional norms and their application to specific controversies. Expectedly, "textual, historical, functional, doctrinal, prudential, equitable, and natural" methods, otherwise known as the traditional canons of Constitutional interpretation, will be used in this process to illuminate our Constitution's normative moorings.5 More importantly, before departing from the primary reference to text and canon, the legal scholar must provide substantial theoretical validation to lend purchase to an 'alternative' Constitutional reading.

It is not my intention to attempt each of the foregoing intellectual tasks. That has already been more copiously and critically illuminated upon by a host of prominent (and certainly most authoritative) Philippine Constitutional scholars.6 I am more concerned with the last intellectual task --- deriving substantial theoretical validation --- to submit a reorientation in (if not a redescription of)7 Constitutional reading. As I emphasize later at the conclusion of this work, it is in the nature of a 'categorical imperative' to our cognitive process of constitutional balancing of individual rights and state power that we identify both our implied and articulated philosophies.8 Only after we have fully exposed the underlying logic of the Constitution can we make a credibly-informed critique of the scholarly empirical characterization of the Philippines as a "renewed constitutional republic" that is "probably stable and generally viewed as at or near the performance criteria" of a functioning constitutional democracy.9

I submit that the basis for a more open-textured reading of the Constitution rests on the theory and philosophy of universalism ---nomenclature that is unspecified in our Constitution but whose fundamental concepts are replete throughout its written text and corresponding jurisprudential practice. Both the historical evolution and subsequent interpretation of the postcolonial 1987 Philippine Constitution reflect many of the precepts of universalism---- from the emphasis on the centrality and fundamental equality of individuals, the primacy of rights discourse and the contractarian legitimacy of political institutions, to Kantian conceptions for perpetual peace.10 As I will show later, Kant's three 'Definitive Articles' for perpetual peace (republicanism, foedus pacificum or a pacific federation among states, and the establishment of a cosmopolitan law affirming the shared value of human dignity11) are clearly reflected in the language and underlying philosophy of the Philippine Constitution. This result is expected, since even prior to its achievement of independence from colonial rule from Spain and the United States,12 the Philippines had already been envisaged as a liberal and democratic republic. This intent and interpretation is consistently traceable to the genesis of the present 1987 Constitution from the 1899 Malolos Constitution (post- liberation from Spanish colonial rule), the 1935 Constitution (drafted during the Commonwealth period under American colonial rule) and even to the 1973 Constitution (which preserved many universalist norms in the Constitutional text, despite having been ratified shortly after th...

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