Long before European maps drew sharp lines across the oceans, the ancestors of modern Filipinos sailed across an interconnected maritime world. As part of the vast Austronesian expansion, they traded, migrated, intermarried, and interacted with Southeast Asian peoples, China, the Pacific Islands, and the Indian Ocean rim. These waters were not rigid borders but cultural bridges, fluid, shared, and alive. A vibrant “sea of connectivity” existed then, underpinned by mutual respect and commercial coexistence. Maritime identity was defined not by exclusive territorial claims, but by movement, exchange, and coexistence.
However, after centuries under Spanish and American rule, Filipino political consciousness emerged with a sacred reverence for sovereignty. This is understandable: sovereignty and independence were hard-won and long denied. But sovereignty today is often interpreted in Westphalian terms, as the exclusive right to control, patrol, and militarily defend fixed territories.
This framing, however, obscures older ways of imagining the sea. Before colonization, the Philippine archipelago existed within a fluid, trans-local maritime sphere, where coastal communities engaged in trade, diplomacy, and seasonal migration with their Asian neighbors. The sea was not a wall; it was a bridge. It was a space of belonging, rather than of exclusion.
Colonial Inheritance
Indeed, colonialism disrupted this indigenous seascape. Spain introduced land-centric governance, centralization, and legal codification, erasing communal and customary marine rights. The Americans completed the transformation by embedding the Philippines into a U.S.-led maritime security architecture. Military bases like Subic and Clark, as well as legal regimes underpinned by American jurisprudence, reframed the Philippines not as a sovereign sea power but as a semi-colonial strategic military outpost in the Asia Pacific before and now.
Even after the U.S. granted the Philippines nominal independence in 1946, its foreign policy remained tethered to that of its former colonizer. The Mutual Defense Treaty (1951), the Visiting Forces Agreement, and, more recently, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) exemplify a pattern of outsourcing maritime security to the U.S. These arrangements reveal a lingering colonial dependence, a national psyche still seeking security validation from a patron (colonizer).
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, this colonial legacy has left the Philippines in a strategic bind. As far as the SCS is concerned, it invokes international law (UNCLOS, the 2016 arbitral ruling) and frames itself as a peace-seeking actor. However, it hosts nine US-EDCA bases and escalating U.S.-led military exercises near contested waters (SCS), and even near the volatile Taiwan Strait, undermining its diplomatic posture. This dualism is not simply incoherence. It’s symptomatic of an identity struggle: the Philippines is a post-colonial nation navigating between a deep cultural memory of maritime coexistence and the complex and hard realities of inherited Western legal-military frameworks.
Source: The Lobbyist
https://www.thelobbyist.biz/perspectives/article-details/prime%20insight/the-sea-as-a-bridge-not-a-wall-it-is-not-a-line-to-defend-but-a-space-to-belong
