The Case for Gratitude: Why American Colonialism Served the Philippines

By Marcial Bonifacio

10/12/26

My friends and countrymen, there is a fashionable argument circulating among Filipino academics, activists, and social media commentators which holds that the American colonization of the Philippines was an unqualified evil, a mere extension of Western imperialism that exploited our people and distorted our national development. This argument is not entirely without merit; the Philippine-American War claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, and the economic arrangements imposed during the colonial period often served American commercial interests at the expense of Filipino self-sufficiency. These are historical facts, and no honest commentator should deny them.

However, an honest commentator must also do what the anti-American critics consistently refuse to do: examine the full record. A nation's colonial history cannot be judged solely by its worst chapters any more than a man's character can be judged solely by his worst day. The question is not whether American colonialism was perfect. It was not. The question is whether the Philippines, on the whole, emerged from the American colonial period with stronger institutions, broader freedoms, and greater capacity for self-governance than it would have possessed under any plausible alternative. The evidence, when examined without ideological prejudice, answers that question decisively.

In this commentary, I will present that evidence across six dimensions of national life: constitutional governance, mass education, linguistic opportunity, military security, the counterfactual alternatives, and the legitimate grievances themselves. I do this not to excuse every American action during the colonial period, but to demonstrate that the net result of American involvement in the Philippines has been, by any measurable standard, beneficial to the Filipino people.

The Constitutional Framework

The full constitutional inheritance that the American period gave the Philippines, including the 1935 Commonwealth Constitution drafted by 202 elected Filipino delegates, the Bill of Rights under Jose P. Laurel's committee, and the deliberate choices the framers made within and beyond the American model, is examined in The Founders You Erased: How the Anti-American Narrative Denies Filipino Agency in the 1935 Constitution. For the purposes of this commentary, what matters is the counterfactual: what would Philippine governance have looked like without it?

Consider what this replaced. Under three centuries of Spanish rule, the Philippines had no democratic institutions, no tradition of popular elections, no independent judiciary, and no legally enforceable individual rights. The friar orders held effective veto power over civic life in the provinces. The Malolos Constitution of 1899, drafted by the revolutionary government of Emilio Aguinaldo, was a remarkable document for its time, but it drew primarily from French, Belgian, and Latin American constitutional traditions. It established a unicameral legislature with supreme authority over the executive, a structure that concentrates power rather than distributing it. It contained no equivalent of judicial review, the mechanism by which courts can strike down laws that violate constitutional rights.

Without the American constitutional model, the Philippines would have entered the 20th century with a parliamentary or quasi-parliamentary system derived from European civil law traditions, with weaker checks on executive power and no institutional tradition of courts protecting individual citizens against the state. The American insistence on regular elections, flawed as they were under colonial oversight, established the democratic habit that Filipinos carry to this day. It is precisely because Filipinos have internalized the expectation of free elections that they have repeatedly resisted authoritarian overreach, from the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. in 1986 to the ongoing vigilance against executive abuse in the present day.

The anti-colonial critics who denounce the American period rarely pause to explain what constitutional framework they would have preferred. The Spanish system offered none. The Malolos Constitution, had it survived, would have concentrated legislative power without judicial check. The question is not whether the American model was imposed. Indeed, it was. However, the question is whether the Philippines is better governed today because of it. The answer, measured by the institutional resilience that has sustained Philippine democracy through multiple crises, is a resounding yes.

Education and Mass Literacy

Before the American period, formal education in the Philippines was controlled almost entirely by the Spanish religious orders. Schools were few, instruction was conducted in Spanish, and access was restricted overwhelmingly to the children of the principalia and the ilustrado class. The vast majority of Filipinos received no formal schooling. Thus, literacy was a privilege of the elite, not a right of the citizen.

The scale of the American educational project in the Philippines, from the Thomasite teachers of 1901 to the founding of the University of the Philippines in 1908, the rise of Filipino literacy from single digits to over 60 percent, and the opportunities it created for Filipino women in business and the professions, is documented in full in The Full Ledger: Why America Remains the Philippines' Greatest Ally. For the purposes of this commentary, what matters is the counterfactual: what would Philippine education have looked like without it?

Without the American public education system, the Philippines would have entered independence with a tiny, Spanish-speaking educated class and a vast, illiterate majority. The democratic institutions transplanted by the Americans would have been hollow without an educated citizenry capable of exercising them. Education was not a secondary benefit of the American colonial period. On the contrary, it was the mechanism by which every other benefit became sustainable.

Language and Economic Opportunity

The establishment of English as a national language has proven to be one of the most economically consequential outcomes of the American colonial period. Today, the Philippines is the largest English-speaking nation in Southeast Asia, and this linguistic capacity has directly enabled its most important modern industry: the business process outsourcing sector. The Philippine BPO industry, now one of the country's largest employers and export earners (documented with current figures in The Full Ledger), exists because of widespread English fluency.

This industry exists because of widespread English fluency. It does not exist in Vietnam, Thailand, or Indonesia at comparable scale precisely because those nations lack the depth of English-language education that the Philippines possesses. The connection is not incidental; it is causal. American colonial education policy created the linguistic infrastructure upon which an entire modern industry was built, more than a century after the policy was implemented.

Without American colonization, the Philippines would have remained linguistically fragmented. Spanish would have persisted as the language of the elite, while the regional languages of Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, and Hiligaynon would have dominated daily life among the general population. The Philippines would today resemble the linguistic landscape of many Latin American nations that gained independence from Spain: a single elite language layered over deep regional variation, with no widely shared second language connecting Filipinos to the global Anglophone economy.

The cultural consequences are equally significant. The deep familiarity that Filipinos have with American culture, institutions, and professional norms has made the Philippines one of the most globally connected nations in Asia. Filipino professionals work in American hospitals, serve in the United States Navy, and occupy positions in multinational corporations worldwide. This global mobility is a direct downstream effect of the educational and linguistic infrastructure that the American colonial period established.

Military Security and the China Question

The United States and the Philippines are bound by the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty, reinforced by the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which together constitute the single largest deterrent to Chinese territorial aggression in the West Philippine Sea. The full architecture of this alliance, from the Visiting Forces Agreement to the nine EDCA sites, is documented in The Full Ledger.

In 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled decisively in the Philippines' favor, declaring China's nine-dash line claims to have no legal basis, and China has ignored that ruling entirely, a pattern of coercion documented incident by incident in The Full Ledger. The question for this commentary is not what China has done, but what it would do without the American deterrent.

The only reason China has not acted with even greater aggression is the risk of triggering a direct military confrontation with the United States. Remove the American alliance from the equation, and the Philippines becomes strategically defenseless against a nuclear-armed superpower with the largest navy in the world by sheer vessel quantity. On the other hand, the Armed Forces of the Philippines, while capable and professional, do not possess the naval or air assets to deter Chinese expansion unilaterally.

Without the American alliance, the Philippines would face the same dynamic now visible in Cambodia, Laos, and Sri Lanka: economic dependency on Chinese infrastructure loans, political deference to Beijing on matters of sovereignty, and the gradual erosion of national autonomy through debt-trap diplomacy. The Belt and Road Initiative has already demonstrated China's willingness to leverage economic investment as a tool of political control. Hence, a Philippines without the American security guarantee would be profoundly vulnerable to precisely this pattern.

The anti-American critics who advocate severing ties with the United States on grounds of colonial grievance have never adequately answered the question of who would replace America as the guarantor of Philippine sovereignty. The answer, absent any credible alternative, is no one.

The Counterfactual Test

The most revealing exercise in evaluating the American colonial period is to ask the question that its critics rarely confront honestly: if not America, then who? The historical context of 1898 does not permit the comfortable assumption that the Philippines would simply have governed itself in peace. Spain's grip was failing, but the revolutionary republic under Aguinaldo was fragile, underfunded, and internally divided. Multiple imperial powers were actively competing for territories in the Pacific.

Germany maintained a naval squadron in Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War and had explicit ambitions to acquire Pacific territories. Had the United States not taken the Philippines, Germany was positioned and motivated to do so. German colonial administration in its existing territories, including German New Guinea and German Samoa, was extractive and authoritarian, with no tradition of preparing colonized peoples for self-governance.

Japan, which would eventually invade the Philippines in 1941 regardless of American presence, was the other plausible colonial power. Japan's colonial record in Korea (1910 to 1945) and Taiwan (1895 to 1945) included rapid industrialization in certain sectors but also the systematic suppression of local languages, forced cultural assimilation, conscription of colonial subjects into the imperial military, and the exploitation of forced labor. The Philippines under Japanese colonization would have experienced modernization on Japanese terms, which is to say, modernization designed to serve the economic and military interests of the Japanese Empire, not the civic development of the Filipino people.

The most optimistic alternative scenario is that the First Philippine Republic survives, consolidates power, and governs independently from 1899 onward. This scenario, while appealing to national pride, must contend with several realities: the republic had no revenue base sufficient to fund mass education, infrastructure development, or military defense. It had no established judiciary. It had no diplomatic recognition from any major power. Its leadership class, the ilustrados, were themselves products of Spanish colonial education and held economic interests that were not always aligned with the welfare of the broader population. Whether this republic would have survived the first two decades of the 20th century without being absorbed by another imperial power is, at best, an open question.

Every plausible alternative to American colonization resulted either in colonization by a less benevolent power or in a fragile independence that would have left the Philippines without the institutional, educational, and security foundations it possesses today (possibly giving rise to dictatorship or tyrannical government). This is not a defense of colonialism in the abstract; it is an honest accounting of the specific historical alternatives that existed in 1898.

An Honest Accounting of Grievances

Intellectual honesty requires that the legitimate grievances against the American colonial period be named and acknowledged, not as concessions to the anti-American position, but as evidence that the case for American interests does not depend on denying the costs.

The Philippine-American War, fought from 1899 to 1902, was brutal by any measure, and the full accounting of its costs, from the atrocities on Samar to the hundreds of thousands of Filipino dead, is presented without omission in The Full Ledger. Those costs are not denied here. They are weighed against the institutional inheritance that followed.

The economic arrangements of the colonial period also deserve scrutiny. The Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909 and the subsequent free trade agreements oriented the Philippine economy toward the export of raw agricultural commodities to the American market, creating a dependency that stunted industrial development. The Americans preserved the hacienda system inherited from Spain rather than redistributing land, which cemented the economic dominance of the landed elite and left the agrarian majority without ownership of the land they worked. This failure of land reform continues to haunt the Philippine economy to this day.

These are real costs, and they must be weighed honestly. However, the critics who present these costs as the totality of the American colonial record are committing the same intellectual error they accuse the pro-American side of making: they are selecting evidence to fit a predetermined conclusion. The full record includes the democratic institutions, the public education system, the linguistic infrastructure, the military alliance, and the postwar reconstruction assistance that rebuilt the Philippines after Japanese occupation. A nation that acknowledges only the wounds and ignores the foundations is not engaging in honest history. It is engaging in disingenuousness.

The measure of a colonial period is not whether it was free of injustice. No colonial period in human history meets that standard. The measure is whether the colonized nation emerged with greater capacity for self-governance, economic development, and national defense than it possessed before, and whether it emerged in a stronger position than it would have under the available alternatives. By both of those measures, the American colonial period served the Philippines, and the current exceptional nation (which I wrote about in 8 Reasons America Remains Exceptional) continues to serve the Philippines.

My friends, the fashionable rejection of the American colonial legacy is not a sign of intellectual maturity or honesty, but a sign of intellectual dishonesty or ignorance. To condemn the United States for the sins of the Philippine-American War while ignoring the constitutional democracy, the public education system, the English language, and the military alliance that have sustained the Philippines for over a century is not scholarship. It is selective memory dressed as patriotism.

The honest Filipino does not deny the suffering of 1899. He honors it by ensuring that the institutions built in its aftermath are preserved, strengthened, and defended against those who would replace American partnership with Chinese dependency. The honest Filipino does not pretend that colonialism was a gift. He recognizes that among the colonial powers competing for the Philippines in 1898, the United States was the one that built schools instead of only extracting resources, that established courts instead of only imposing order, and that, however imperfectly, prepared a people for self-governance rather than permanent subjugation.

Therefore, my friends and countrymen, let us be honest with our history, complete in our accounting, and clear in our convictions. The American alliance is not a relic of colonial submission. It is the most consequential strategic partnership in Philippine history, and it deserves to be defended with the same vigor with which our forefathers defended our independence.

Long live the Philippines, and long live our alliance with America!