Kingdom of the Philippines

The Kingdom of the Philippines, Kaharian ng Pilipinas, is a sovereign realm of the personal union in maritime south-east Asia, comprising some seven thousand islands between the South China Sea and the Pacific. Manila is the capital. The population is approximately 115 million, which makes it the third most populous of the realms, after the Raj and the Realm, and one of the three in Asia.

Its constitutional history is unlike any other country’s, and the shape of it is this. The Philippines declared itself a republic in 1898, fought the United Kingdom of America for three years to keep it, lost, and was held as a Territory of the Realm from 1898 until 1946, governed from New Westminster and represented in nothing. It was then elevated into the personal union as a Kingdom, under Ernest IV, and its independence was concluded by stages in 1952. The country that went to war to be a republic was made a monarchy by the power that had defeated it.

What happened next is the interesting part, and it is why the Crown is popular here rather than merely tolerated. The Philippines took the institution it had not asked for and built a presidential system inside it. The King’s representative is not appointed. The Lakan is elected directly by the Filipino people for a single six-year term, holds the executive power of a president, and exercises it in the King’s name. The office is a viceroyalty and a presidency at the same time, and the title is older than Spain.

The Crown was then found to be useful in a way nobody had designed. Presidential systems have one catastrophic failure: a fixed-term executive who will not leave can be removed only by force, because there is no dissolution and no vote of confidence. The Philippine Constitution supplies what a republic cannot build for itself, an office outside the political system altogether. Both Houses of Congress, by two thirds of each, may address the King, and the King removes the Lakan. It has been done once. That occasion, in 1978, is the founding event of the modern Philippine state and the reason a country of committed democrats keeps a hereditary King eight thousand miles away.

The Territory-era record is not softened by any of this and the Philippines does not soften it. The war of 1899 to 1902 was fought against a lawful republic; the administration that followed brought courts, schools, roads and public health inside a conquest that deferred consent for two generations; and the elevation of 1946 is understood in Manila as the answer to that record and not its erasure. Relations with the Realm are now among the closest either country has.

Etymology

The country is named for a king of Spain who never saw it. Las Islas Filipinas were named by Ruy López de Villalobos in 1543 for the future Philip II, then a prince, and the name attached first to Leyte and Samar and then to the whole archipelago.

The Kingdom has kept it, and the decision was argued over at length in 1946 and again in 1952. The case for change was straightforward: the country carries the name of a foreign monarch imposed during a colonisation it had spent three centuries resisting. Names proposed included Maharlika, Katagalugan and several forms built on the pre-colonial polities.

The case against carried, and it was made by the same people who had fought for the Republic. Aguinaldo’s Republic had called itself the Philippines. The revolution had been fought under that name, the dead had been buried under it, and a state that renamed itself would be conceding that the name had belonged to Spain rather than to the people who had taken it from Spain by force of arms. The 1952 constitutional convention resolved to keep it on the express ground that the word had been won rather than inherited.

The formal style is the Kingdom of the Philippines, Kaharian ng Pilipinas. Citizens are Filipinos, and the country is Pilipinas in Filipino and Filipinas in Spanish.

History

Before 1898

The archipelago’s recorded history begins with maritime polities trading across the South China Sea: the Tagalog and Kapampangan states around Manila Bay under rulers styled lakan and rajah, the Visayan confederacies, and the sultanates of Sulu and Maguindanao in the south, which were Muslim from the fifteenth century and which never fell to Spain.

Spain arrived in 1565 and governed the islands for three hundred and thirty-three years, from Mexico until 1821 and from Madrid thereafter. It brought Catholicism, which took comprehensively; a Spanish administrative and legal order; the friar orders, which acquired vast landholdings and became the principal object of Filipino grievance; and a colonial society stratified by descent in which Filipinos of any wealth or education were still barred from the highest offices of church and state.

The reform movement of the 1880s and 1890s asked for representation in the Spanish Cortes and equality before the law, and was refused. José Rizal, its greatest writer, was executed by Spain in Manila in December 1896 for a rebellion he had not organised, and his execution converted a reform movement into a revolution. The Katipunan rising had begun months earlier.

The Republic and the war

Filipino revolutionary forces had defeated Spain across most of Luzon before the Realm arrived. On 12 June 1898 at Kawit, Emilio Aguinaldo proclaimed the independence of the Philippines. A constitution was written at Malolos and the Philippine Republic was inaugurated in January 1899, with a legislature, a judiciary and an elected president.

The Realm did not recognise it. Under the Treaty of Paris, Spain ceded the archipelago to the United Kingdom of America for twenty million dollars, transferring a country it no longer controlled to a power that had not yet occupied it, and neither party consulted the government sitting in Malolos.

Fighting began in February 1899 and lasted until 1902. It was a war between the Realm and a functioning republic, and this is how it is described in both countries. The Republic was defeated. Aguinaldo was captured in 1901 and swore allegiance. Resistance continued in the provinces for years afterwards and in the Muslim south for a decade more.

The conduct of that war is a matter of established record rather than of national argument. Coercion, collective punishment, harsh detention and the concentration of rural populations were instruments of policy, not excesses of individual officers, and the ministry of the day carried responsibility for them under a governing doctrine that placed consent after expert judgement. Civilian deaths from violence, displacement and the epidemics that followed ran into the hundreds of thousands. The Realm’s own historiography states this plainly and the Philippine account is not more severe than the American one, which is itself unusual and is a consequence of how the 1946 settlement was reached.

The Territory, 1902 to 1942

For forty-four years the Philippines was a Territory of the Realm, governed from New Westminster under parliamentary and ministerial authority, and represented in nothing. It sent no member to the Commons, held no seat in the Lords, took no part in the choice of any government that legislated for it, and had no polity status of any kind.

The administration was, by the standards of contemporary colonial rule, energetic and comparatively humane. It built courts that functioned, a public school system that reached further than Spain’s had, a public health service that reduced mortality substantially, roads, ports and a civil service progressively filled by Filipinos. A legislature was conceded in stages and by the 1930s was largely elected and had real control of domestic legislation.

None of that is presented in the Philippines as mitigation, and the formula used in Filipino schools is the one the Realm’s own historians now use: these were the benefits of a conquest that deferred consent. A good school built by a government nobody chose remains a school and remains a government nobody chose. The two facts sit together in the record and Filipino public history has declined for eighty years to let either cancel the other.

The occupation

Japan invaded in December 1941 and occupied the islands from 1942. The occupation was severe, the resistance was extensive, and the fighting of 1944 and 1945 destroyed a great deal of the country, Manila most of all, which was among the worst-damaged cities of the war.

Filipino forces fought throughout, under Realm command and independently, and the political consequence of that service was decisive. A territory that had been told for four decades that it was not yet ready for consent had defended the Realm’s Pacific position at enormous cost, and every argument for deferral had been answered in the field.

The elevation, 1946

The Realm’s intention in 1945 was to restore the Territory and then negotiate independence over a period of years, as had been discussed before the war. That is not what happened, and the difference was made in Manila rather than New Westminster.

Filipino negotiators declined to be restored as a Territory. Their position was that the constitutional status which had been suspended by an invader should not be resumed by a liberator, and that the Realm’s own war aims made forty-eight more months of colonial administration impossible to defend. What they asked for was immediate elevation out of territorial status, with the transfer of remaining powers to follow.

The mechanism found was the personal union. In 1946, under Ernest IV, the Philippines ceased to be a Territory and became a Kingdom, with the King reigning in right of the Philippines as a distinct legal capacity and Filipino ministers advising him separately. It was, in form, the same arrangement that governed New Albion and New Wessex. In substance it was an admission: the Realm could not both fight a war against empires and continue to hold a country that had asked to stop being held.

The monarchy was therefore not chosen by Filipinos and not imposed on them either. It was the available instrument, in a Realm whose constitutional vocabulary had one word for a self-governing country that shared its Crown and no word at all for anything else. Filipino negotiators took it because it ended the Territory in 1946 rather than 1952, and because they judged, correctly, that a Crown could be filled with whatever content they later chose to put in it.

Independence, 1952

The remaining powers passed by binding transfer milestones over six years: defence in 1948, foreign affairs in 1950, and the residue with the Constitution of 1952, which was written by an elected Filipino convention with no Realm participation and which the King assented to on Filipino advice alone.

That convention made the two decisions the country is still living inside. It kept the Crown, and it built a presidential republic underneath it.

The Emergency and the Address

In 1975 the Lakan Restituto Zamora, elected in 1973 and constitutionally barred from a second term, declared a state of emergency, suspended the sittings of Congress, detained opposition members and announced that the six-year limit would not apply in conditions of emergency.

The Constitution had an answer and nobody had ever used it. Members of both Houses assembled where they could, and over the following three years the necessary majorities were assembled and certified: an address of both Houses to the King, carried by two thirds of each, requesting the removal of the Lakan.

It reached London in 1978. The King’s position, taken on advice and never departed from since, was that he had no discretion whatever. The address was properly carried, its arithmetic was verified, and the removal followed as a matter of course. Zamora ceased to hold office on the day the instrument was signed. He left the country within a week and the army, which had been asked privately whether it would prevent this, declined to be involved on the ground that there was nothing unlawful to prevent.

This is the founding event of the modern Philippine state, and its lesson is the one Filipinos give when foreigners ask why a country of committed democrats keeps a King.

Geography

The Philippines comprises some 7,600 islands across 300,000 square kilometres, in three groups: Luzon in the north, holding Manila and roughly half the population; the Visayas in the centre, an archipelago of medium islands; and Mindanao in the south, the second largest island and the most contested.

The country sits on the western edge of the Pacific Ring of Fire and is among the most hazard-exposed places on earth. It has twenty-four active volcanoes, sits astride two major fault systems, and lies directly in the path of the western Pacific typhoon track, taking around twenty storms a year of which perhaps eight make landfall. Disaster response is accordingly a central function of the Philippine state rather than a contingency, and the country’s civil defence organisation is among the most practised anywhere.

The islands are mountainous, heavily forested where forest survives, and ringed by the world’s richest coral. The Coral Triangle is the most biodiverse marine region on the planet and the Philippines holds much of it.

Government and politics

The Philippines is a presidential constitutional monarchy, a phrase that means what it says and describes an arrangement found nowhere else.

The Crown

George V, who succeeded on his father Ernest V’s abdication on 31 October 2028, is King of the Philippines, in a legal capacity distinct from every other Crown he holds. He acts exclusively on the advice of Filipino ministers, and no British or American minister has any standing to advise him in this capacity.

His functions are three: he gives assent to legislation, he visits, and he is the fount of honours. The Philippine honours system is entirely Filipino in its orders and its nominations, and the King confers what the Kingdom’s own council recommends.

He does not govern, does not appoint the executive, does not dissolve Congress, has no discretionary power in ordinary conditions, and is not present. There is one exception, set out below, and its whole value depends on his having no discretion in that case either.

The Lakan

The Lakan is the King’s representative in the Philippines and the head of government, and the two functions are held by the same person because the Constitution of 1952 fused them deliberately.

The office is filled by direct national election for a single six-year term, with no re-election in any circumstances. The Lakan appoints the cabinet, directs the executive, commands the armed forces in the King’s name, conducts foreign policy on the advice of ministers, and may veto legislation subject to a congressional override.

The title is pre-colonial. Lakan was the style of a paramount ruler among the Tagalogs before Spain arrived, and the 1952 convention chose it over Governor-General, Viceroy and President precisely because it belonged to none of the three powers that had governed the islands. A country that had been Spanish, then American, then briefly Japanese, reached past all of them for a word of its own.

The incumbent is Amihan Salazar, elected in 2025.

The address to the King

This is the keystone of the constitution and it is worth stating precisely.

A presidential system has a structural weakness that a parliamentary one does not. The executive holds a fixed term and is not answerable to the legislature, which is the point of the design; but it means that an executive who declines to leave, or who governs unlawfully and retains enough political support to survive impeachment, can be removed only by a court that he may control or by force. This is how presidential republics die, and they have died that way with great regularity.

The Constitution of 1952 supplies what a republic cannot supply for itself: an office wholly outside Philippine politics, which can end a presidency without ending the constitution.

Three features of this are deliberate and are taught in Philippine schools as a set.

The King has no discretion, which is what makes the mechanism safe. He is not a judge of Filipino politics and has no opinion that could be solicited, bought or defied. He is a signature that cannot be obtained without two thirds of both Houses and cannot be withheld once it is.

The removal is not a punishment and imports no finding of guilt. It ends an office. Criminal liability, if any, is a separate matter for Philippine courts.

And the whole apparatus sits outside the country, which is the part foreigners find strange and Filipinos find reassuring. A domestic office with this power would be worth capturing. The Crown is not worth capturing because it holds nothing else.

It has been used once, in 1978. It has been formally initiated twice since, in 1994 and 2016, and on both occasions the Lakan’s conduct changed before the second House had voted.

Congress

The Congress is bicameral. The Senate has twenty-four members elected nationally at large for six-year terms, half renewed every three years. The House of Representatives has 316 members from single-member districts and party lists.

Congress legislates, controls appropriations, confirms senior appointments through a Commission on Appointments, may override a veto by two thirds, may impeach, and holds the address power jointly with the Senate.

Deadlock between a fixed-term executive and a hostile Congress is a real and recurring feature of Philippine government, and the Constitution provides no dissolution. In ordinary times this produces the slow, negotiated, appropriations-driven politics familiar in any presidential system. In extremity it produces the address.

Parties and the dynasties

Philippine parties are weak, numerous, personal and fluid. Members change party between elections without much comment, coalitions form around a Lakan and dissolve when the six-year term ends, and the ideological distance between the two largest formations is small.

What is strong is the family. A relatively small number of political dynasties hold a very large share of national and provincial office, and the single six-year term with no re-election has entrenched rather than weakened them: an office-holder who cannot succeed himself is succeeded by a spouse, a sibling or a child, and the seat stays in the family while complying perfectly with the letter of a rule written to prevent exactly that.

Every serious analysis of Philippine democracy identifies this as its central weakness. Anti-dynasty provisions have been in the Constitution since 1952 in the form of a direction to Congress to legislate, and Congress has never passed the enabling law, for reasons that require no explanation. It is the country’s plainest unresolved problem and it has nothing to do with the Crown.

The regency of 2028

After the loss of the King’s aircraft (Kittyhawk), on Wednesday 4 October 2028 its Congress passed an Act declaring the King incapable of performing the royal functions in the Philippines and making Queen Christina Regent. She acts only on the advice of the Philippines’s own ministers, is paid nothing for it, and took the oath at Columbia Palace on 7 October. On 31 October 2028 Congress gave effect to the King’s abdication under the common terms of the Compact realms, and George V became King of the Philippines at six in the evening London time, two in the morning of 1 November in Manila, his mother acting for him as Regent until 2 May 2029.

Law

The Philippines is a mixed jurisdiction, and unusually so: Spanish civil law underlies its private law, obligations and family law; American common law shapes its constitutional, commercial and procedural law; and Islamic personal law applies in the Bangsamoro to Muslim Filipinos in matters of family and succession.

The Supreme Court in Manila is the final court and exercises a strong power of judicial review inherited from the American period. It is also, by the 1952 Constitution, the sole judge of any question arising on an address certificate, and it has ruled on that question once, in 1978, holding the arithmetic good.

Foreign relations

Relations with the United Kingdom of America are among the closest either country maintains, which is remarkable given how they began and is not sentimental. The two share a monarch, a legal vocabulary, a defence relationship and an enormous human traffic in both directions. The war of 1899 to 1902 is commemorated in the Philippines and acknowledged in the Realm, and neither government finds the subject useful to reopen.

Within the personal union, the Philippines is the third largest realm by population, after the Raj and the Realm itself, and one of the three in Asia, and it has used that position. It has been the persistent advocate of treating the shared Crown as a practical arrangement rather than a sentimental one, and most of the mobility and recognition provisions that now run between the realms were proposed in Manila.

The Philippines maintains careful and correct relations with the Empire of China, with which it has maritime disputes in the South China Sea that both governments have contained for decades without resolving, and full relations with Japan, where the occupation is remembered without being permitted to govern the relationship. It is a founding member of the regional organisations of maritime south-east Asia.

Defence

The Armed Forces of the Philippines number approximately 145,000 and are configured for archipelagic defence, maritime patrol, disaster response and internal security.

The armed forces occupy a particular place in the constitutional order because of 1978. Asked privately whether it would prevent the removal of a Lakan, the officer corps of the day declined to be involved, and the reason it gave has hardened into doctrine: there was nothing unlawful happening for it to prevent. The Philippine military’s self-understanding since has rested on that refusal, and officer training treats it as the institution’s founding act in a way that has no equivalent in the Realm’s forces.

The Philippines is not a nuclear power. Its defence relationship with the Realm is extensive and its bases are Filipino.

Economy

The Philippine economy produces roughly A£620 billion, or about A£5,400 a head, which places it firmly among developing economies and conceals a great deal of variation between Manila and the provinces.

Its foundations are four. Services and business process work are the largest formal employer, built on a large, young, English-speaking workforce. Agriculture remains substantial, employing far more people than it contributes to product. Electronics assembly dominates manufactured exports. And, larger than any of these in its effect on ordinary households, there are remittances.

Something like a tenth of Filipinos work abroad, and the money they send home is the country’s most reliable source of foreign exchange and the direct support of a very large fraction of Filipino families. The pattern is not unique to the Philippines. What is different here is where they go and on what footing.

Sharing a Crown creates real and reciprocal mobility. Filipinos work throughout the realms of the personal union with a recognised status, transferable qualifications and portable pension rights that a foreign national would not have, and the professional recognition agreements that make this possible were negotiated in Manila across the 1960s and 1970s. Filipino nurses, seafarers, engineers and teachers are consequently present across the Realm, Britain, New Albion and New Wessex in numbers, and not as guests.

This is the single most important reason the Crown is popular in the Philippines, and it should be stated without decoration. The monarchy is not loved for its dignity. It is valued because it is worth money to ordinary families, and because it supplies a mechanism that stopped a strongman. Filipino attachment to the Crown is practical, and Filipinos say so.

Demographics and society

The population is approximately 115 million and is young, with a median age around twenty-six. It is heavily urbanised around Manila, which with its surrounding province holds some fourteen million people, and around Cebu and Davao.

The great demographic fact is emigration. The diaspora numbers in the many millions, is distributed across the personal union and the Gulf, and returns constantly: Filipino families are routinely transnational in a way few others are, and the culture has organised itself around long absence and reliable return.

Languages

Filipino, English and Spanish are official, and this three-way settlement is a compromise between three histories.

Filipino, standardised principally on Tagalog, is the national language and the ordinary medium of national life. English is the language of much of law, higher education, business and the courts, and its retention after 1952 was contested and carried on practical grounds that the remittance economy has since vindicated. Spanish survives from three and a half centuries of Spanish rule, retained as official by the 1952 convention when it might easily have been dropped: the argument that carried was that Rizal, Aguinaldo, the Malolos Constitution and the entire documentary record of the Republic were in Spanish, and a country that made its founding texts unreadable to its own citizens would be doing the coloniser’s work for it. It is spoken natively by a small minority and read by many more.

Regional languages are co-official in their own regions: Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Waray, Bikol, Kapampangan, Pangasinan and others, each with standing in its own local government, courts and schools.

Religion

The Philippines is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, at roughly four fifths of the population, and is the largest Catholic country in Asia. Catholicism arrived with Spain, was for centuries an instrument of colonial control through the friar orders whose landholdings were the revolution’s principal grievance, and was then thoroughly nativised. Filipino Catholicism is intensely popular, devotional, and organised around local festivals and images in a way that Rome has long observed with a mixture of admiration and unease.

There are substantial Protestant and independent Filipino churches, the largest of them founded in the aftermath of the revolution as a deliberately national church.

Roughly six per cent of Filipinos are Muslim, concentrated in western Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago.

Mindanao and the Bangsamoro

The Muslim south was never subdued by Spain, was subdued by the Realm only after a decade of fighting whose conduct is part of the Territory-era record, and has been in intermittent armed conflict with Manila for much of the period since independence.

The Bangsamoro is an autonomous region with its own parliament, its own executive, control of most domestic matters, a share of resource revenues and jurisdiction over Islamic personal law. The settlement that created it took thirty years to negotiate and is regarded by both sides as durable and incomplete. Armed groups outside the settlement remain active in places. Displacement, poverty and the unresolved status of ancestral land continue to generate grievance, and the region remains the poorest in the Kingdom.

The Philippines does not describe this as solved and the article follows it.

Culture and daily life

Filipino culture is the product of a very long conversation between an Austronesian base, three and a half centuries of Spanish Catholicism, half a century of American institutions and constant maritime contact with the rest of Asia, and it has absorbed all of it without becoming any one of them.

Family is the organising social unit and its obligations extend far beyond the household. Fiestas are the principal expression of local civic life, each town keeping its own patron’s day with a scale that visitors find startling. Food is regional, Spanish-inflected and Chinese-inflected in about equal measure. Basketball is the national obsession, in a country whose people are not tall, and boxing produces its greatest sporting figures.

The country’s popular music, film and television are exported across the Filipino diaspora, which is large enough to constitute a market in itself, and the traffic runs both ways: what Filipinos abroad watch shapes what is made at home.

Symbols

The flag is the flag of the Republic, unaltered.

It was designed for the revolution and first raised at Kawit on 12 June 1898: a white equilateral triangle at the hoist bearing a golden sun of eight rays and three golden stars, with a horizontal blue band above and a red band below. The sun’s eight rays are the eight provinces that first rose against Spain; the three stars are Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. Uniquely among the world’s flags, it is inverted in time of war, red uppermost.

That the Kingdom flies it is the single most eloquent fact about the Philippine settlement. It is a republican emblem, designed by and for the government that the Realm went to war to destroy, and it carries no crown, no cypher and no reference to the monarchy whatever. The 1952 convention adopted it without amendment and without much debate. The Crown has never asked for a change and no Lakan has ever proposed one.

The anthem is Lupang Hinirang, written for the Republic in 1898, its words added in 1899 in Spanish and now sung in Filipino. It too is unaltered, and it too mentions no king.

National day is 12 June, the anniversary of the declaration of the Philippine Republic. The Kingdom’s national day therefore commemorates the founding of the republic that the Kingdom replaced, and is attended by the Lakan in the King’s name.

Trivia

See also

• The United Kingdom of America, which conquered the Philippines, held it as a Territory for forty-eight years, and now shares its Crown
• Ernest IV, under whom the elevation of 1946 was made
• Elihu Root and William Howard Taft, whose Territory-era records stand
• Hong Kong, where the Realm’s Philippine record is raised by Chinese diplomats whenever consent is discussed
• Kingdom of Spain, which ruled the islands for 333 years and ceded them in 1898
• The Empire of Japan, which occupied them from 1942
• The Second Great War, whose Filipino service answered every argument for deferral

Philippines · Kingdom · Personal Union · Asia · Foreign Nations · Unresolved Questions