THE guile of current incantations supported by campaigns to educate and create a base of political chorus to imbed federalism, will not create required founding/settled history to plant what is synthetic and convenient events birthing a new form of government. A government alien to easy comprehension, bankrupt of any real national clamor, because it has no strong roots in our people. Our national hero Jose Rizal counsels, “To foretell the destiny of a nation, it is necessary to open the book that tells of her past…it is unwise to trust in the fortuitous; there is an imperceptible and incomprehensible logic at times in historical events”. Today’s superior intelligence, if any, foisting what is theoretical construct for government, untried and untested by our domestic experience, attempting to win current discourse, citing the vogue and successes of foreign experience, is disjointed from Rizal’s book that tells of our past.
Attempts to link federalism in our long history, to justify shifting to this form of government, is at best, slim and controversial. Jose Rizal as narrative regarding said government in “The Philippines a Century Hence”, never directly advocated the American model. Rizal’s treatise was a philosophical query to the style of governance preferred by Filipinos, limited to Colonial Spain’s imperial administration or the US brand of democracy. The 5 articles written in La Solidaridad, Madrid Spain, Sept.30, 1889-Feb. of 1890. Note, the time period had not yet established the Philippine Republic and a unitary government in 1898. There was the coquettish and cantonal Federal State of Negros formed in Bacolod, November 1898, with notice sent by its president Aniceto Lacson, to President Emilio Aguinaldo. In 4 months, this succumbed to American protection. A Visayas Federal government attempted by Roque Lopez with Iloilo as capital but absorbed by a ‘Decree Abolishing Federal States on April 27,1899 by Aguinaldo. A Partido Federalista Dec. 23, 1900 endorsing US Statehood, defeated by the Nationalista Party pushing for independence.