Messy path

The Germans, who celebrated 20 years of reunification on Oct. 3, feel a “spiritual kinship” with Filipinos, according to German Ambassador Christian-Ludwig Weber-Lortsch.

Filipinos like to think that the land that gave the world the original people power revolt in 1986 helped inspire similar pro-democracy movements in Poland and Hungary, and a weakening of the former Soviet bloc that led, among others, to the fall of the Berlin Wall three years later.

The Philippine and German circumstances were of course different, but Pinoys could identify with the euphoria of newfound freedom when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.

“We are one people,” Weber-Lortsch recalled East Germans chanting at the time as they surged into the West. Unified Germany’s first female chancellor, Angela Merkel, grew up in the communist East.

The Philippines’ educated elite during the Spanish colonial era must have also felt a strong kinship with Germany. National hero Jose Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere (featuring the vile friar Padre Damaso) was printed in Berlin.

Filipinos also liked the brew concocted in Manila, by virtue of a Spanish decree, starting in 1890 by La Fabrica de Cerveza de San Miguel, which had a German brew master, Ludwig Kiene, as technical director. The brewery that still produces San Miguel beer was the first of its kind in Asia.

These days Germany is the Philippines’ fourth single largest source of foreign aid, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs.

But Filipinos remain largely US-centric, with not enough attention paid to other parts of the world such as Europe. The average Pinoy’s impressions of Germany are shaped by Hollywood movies about World War II and the Holocaust.

Those impressions were softened by the ascent of a German as spiritual leader of over a billion Catholics worldwide, although the Pope’s image could be affected in this country by the hard-line stance of the Church on contraception.

In recent years, Germany also entered Pinoy consciousness largely by way of a scandal: the Fraport AG-Piatco construction of the NAIA Terminal 3.

In the final months of the Arroyo administration, there was also the curious announcement that Delia Albert had been recalled as Philippine Ambassador to Germany and replaced by taipan Alfonso Yuchengco. The taipan was never formally nominated for Germany’s agrement and Albert was not recalled. She was among the guests at the German Unity Day celebration last Monday at the Dusit Thani in Makati.

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Many other oppressive systems around the world have collapsed since Pinoy people power in February 1986, and replaced by democratic governments. As Pinoys know only too well, democracy can be a messy path to national progress.

For all the difficulties of reunification, Germany has done better than most new democracies in making freedom work.

It was easier for them partly because East Germans were ready to get rid of a discredited system, communism, and embrace democracy.

In our case, the factors affecting the development of democratic institutions are more complex: a feudal system whose beneficiaries cannot be expected to change the status quo, the concentration of power and wealth in a fraction of the population, and a Church that is also unwilling to lose its grip on political power. Some will add the existence of an irresponsibly free mass media as a hindrance to national progress, but of course my opinion here is biased.

All these factors are wreaking havoc on the way we do business, and making us lag behind almost all our Asian neighbors in most human development indicators. Every year or two, it seems, a neighbor overtakes the Philippines in terms of economic growth, competitiveness and other factors.

For a long time after the NAIA-3 contract was scrapped, Germans and other Europeans often told me that the controversy soured investor interest in the Philippines. Never mind corruption, which is a problem that European investors already factor into their business costs in Asia; the Germans said the NAIA-3 case highlighted the unpredictability of the business environment in the Philippines.

At the height of the controversy, several foreign diplomats told me that their investors preferred to set up shop in Vietnam.

Earlier this year, in a courtesy call on then President-elect Noynoy by the European Union delegation, Ambassador Weber-Lortsch had expressed hope that the NAIA-3 controversy would finally see closure during the Aquino administration.

At the German Unity Day celebration, the ambassador expressed the same optimism of the rest of the international community over Philippine prospects under new management.

Pinoys love democracy, warts and all. The election to the presidency of the only son of democracy icons Ninoy and Cory Aquino, 24 years after the collapse of the Marcos dictatorship, is proof of this.

Hope springs eternal for freedom-loving Pinoys. This time the hope is that Benigno Cojuangco Aquino III will make democracy work.