The legitimacy game : the persistence of colonial patterns in U.S.-Philippines relations, 1972-86

Abstract

Scholarship on the U.S.-Philippines relations often focuses on the pre-1945 period. Even though there is an increasing number of works related to the post-1945 period, those works mainly situate around anti-Marcos activism without paying much attention to the bilateral relations of the two countries. This thesis attempts to analyze U.S.-Philippines relations between 1972 and 1986, situating the work within the beginning of martial law in the Philippines and the end of Ferdinand Marcos’s 21 years rule of the Philippines. This paper contends that the U.S.-Philippines relations during the 1970s and 1980s was a period where both governments sought to manufacture their own, as well as each other’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public. The paper shows that the final decades of Marcos’s rule actually fell in line with salient patterns of U.S.-Philippines colonial relationship and that the creation of legitimacy was not a contemporary creation. In fact, analyzing the continuity is the big takeaway from an understudied period of this history as it shows that U.S. intervention in the Philippines during the 1970s and 1980s was because of U.S. colonial patterns that persisted, and not merely based on access to their military bases in the Philippines, as commonly suggested.