Like hell you say

Lessons of nationalism

“I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans.”

So said Manuel Quezon, president of the Philippines in the 1930s. At the time the Philippines were an American colony and run by American officials. As colonial governance went, the American administration of the Philippines was fairly liberal and nonextractive. Quezon nodded to this in his statement. But it didn’t suffice. Filipinos wanted to run their own affairs.

Quezon’s adage rocketed around colonial Asia and Africa. Better home rule than foreign rule, regardless of the quality of either, it seemed to say. Quezon felt obliged to offer a corrective about his formula: “That is not an admission that a government run by Filipinos will be a government run like hell,” he said. “Much less can it be an admission that a government run by Americans or by the people of any other foreign country, for that matter, can ever be a government run like heaven.”

Quezon’s paean to nationalism also has to be discounted for the fact that he was the one most likely to benefit from a transition to home rule. When nationalist leaders in the Philippines, India and scores of other countries in Asia and Africa clamored for independence, they were often arguing their own personal cases. Nationalism and independence would benefit them. Would it benefit ordinary Filipinos, Indians and the rest? Would Filipinos and Indians really rather have a government from hell simply because Manuel Quezon and Jawaharlal Nehru, rather than some American or British bureaucrat, were in charge?

It was a hard question to answer. Rarely did honest referendums put it to a test.

Yet even allowing for the self-serving discount, nationalism became the most powerful force in world politics during the middle of the 20th century. Quezon’s argument persuaded the American Congress to cut the Philippines loose, with independence taking effect in 1946. Britain walked away from India in 1947. By the mid-1960s all the great colonial empires had been dismantled in the name of nationalism.

One might have expected that the nationalists, having won their fight, would retire their nationalist banners to places of honor in museums of national history. But they didn’t, not least because the end of empires didn’t produce an end of imperialism. The United States relinquished formal control over the Philippines but exercised informal power for decades. America’s power stretched to many other places as well, places that had never been within a formal American empire. And that power elicited the same kind of nationalist response formal power had.

At the time America annexed the Philippines, namely the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898, it conspicuously did not annex Cuba, the Spanish colony that triggered the war. America instead exercised a protectorate over Cuba, which afforded American officials power over Cuba without the responsibility of having to govern the place. This provoked a nationalist response that resulted in the Castro revolution of the 1950s.

Resenting Castro’s effort to break free of the American orbit, one American administration after another waged economic war against Castro and his successors. The current Trump administration has ratcheted up pressure by cutting off oil to Cuba from Venezuela and talking of military conquest.

During the six-plus decades of the American offensive, American leaders appear not to have realized that they became enablers of the Castroist regime. Fidel, Raul and their successors never had to govern Cuba on their own merits. They simply had to present themselves as nationalist defenders of Cuba against the Yankee aggressors. They might aptly have said better to be governed like hell by Cubans than like heaven by the Americans, for their government often was hell on Cubans. Yet they got away with it.

America fought a long war against Vietnamese communists. America lost that war, but it lost chiefly to Vietnamese nationalists. Ho Chi Minh and his cadres were both. Against the Americans, the nationalist identity was the more powerful. As in the case of Cuba, having an American enemy relieved Ho from having to govern well. He and his successors simply had to govern as Vietnamese.

Donald Trump isn’t a conspicuous student of history. So it isn’t surprising that the lessons of the Philippines, Cuba and Vietnam are lost on him. He’s started a war against Iran, apparently hoping to capitalize on the opposition to the regime in Tehran expressed by popular protests during the last several months.

Manuel Quezon could have told Trump a war was exactly the wrong approach if he wanted to weaken the hold of the Iranian regime. American forces collaborated with Israelis in the assassination of the supreme leader of Iran, but the regime has wrapped itself in the flag of Iran, branded protesters as agents of the enemies at the gate, and apparently made itself more secure than before.

History doesn’t have answers to all current problems. But sometimes it offers suggestions useful to those who pay attention.