The Durability of Empire: Decolonization and the Maintenance of U.S. Sovereignty in the Philippines

• In Event: 3554 - States and Political Power

Abstract

This is the final empirical chapter of my book project. In the project as a whole, I explain the emergence legal ambiguity and the possibilities it enables for racialized state rule in the United States. The first two chapters focus on why and how U.S. state actors institutionalize ambiguity in legal status. The next three chapters look at what ambiguity allowed future politicians to accomplish in the imperial rule and decolonization of the Philippines. In the chapter below, I argue that institutionalized ambiguity in legal status facilitated U.S. state actors in abandoning formal sovereignty over the Philippines while maintaining U.S. global influence. This occurred immediately after the end of WWII, when formal empire was, on the one hand, no longer politically necessary and, on the other, disfavored in global public discourse. Drawing on records of U.S. Congress, U.S. and Philippine government correspondence, and secondary sources, I show how the United States secured territorial control (in the form of natural resource rights and military bases) over the Philippines as the colony became independent. U.S. state actors and Filipino elites drew on notions of Filipino dependency, familial ties, and fraternity. The option of defining the Philippines in this way—as domestic to the United States—dates back to the ambiguous classification of the Philippines in the 1901 Supreme Court decision Downes v. Bidwell. By continuing to treat the Philippines as an extension of the United States’ territory, U.S. state actors maintained territorial sovereignty over the archipelago and expanded U.S. geopolitical influence in Asia.

Author

• Katrina Quisumbing King, University of Southern California