Introduction

It was former President Ferdinand Marcos who boldly declared that his emergency measures aimed to reform society. He claimed that he wanted not just to quell a rebellion but to remedy the social inequalities that fuelled it. He still invoked every positivist cover for his dictatorship, constitutional text as well as manipulated referenda masquerading as the people's voice, but he did not shirk from fundamentally reconceiving the notion of emergency, shifting from a preservative ‘national security’ purpose to a transformative and ‘revolutionary’ rationale. The post-Marcos Constitution of 1987 rejected Marcos's ideological challenge by reiterating the tried and tested liberal formula, reinstating the national security rationale as the sole basis for emergency rule and instituting procedural checks-and-balances that cabined the national security powers. The 1987 Constitution was designed deliberately to forestall a return to a Marcos-style dictatorship, and allowed emergency powers only under several layers of institutional safeguards.

Yet the real irony is that whatever was left of those powers was not invoked during the truest emergency in recent history, the January 2001 uprising that actually toppled a sitting President, Joseph Estrada. Worse, his successor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, has since faced several actual threats and has thrice declared one or another sort of emergency triggered by the endless corruption scandals that elsewhere – as with Thaksin in Bangkok – would have sufficed to topple a leader who – in contrast to Thaksin – did not enjoy a popular mandate.