HISTORY: Rizal Favors Federalism

In an essay published in La Solidaridad in 15, June 1889 to 1, February 1890, titled “Las Filipinas Dentro de Cien Años (The Philippines a Century Hence)” Dr. Jose P. Rizal made a bold prediction, which fell short in time. Rizal predicted that after a hundred years, the Philippines might become a federal republic. It is much like the movie “Back to the Future,” where time travellers Marty Mcfly and Dr. Emmett Brown journeyed from 1985 to 2015 to find hover boards and flying cars, which in 2015 until today have yet to exist, but is soon coming. Similarly though, the Philippine Federal Republic is now in sight with the election of President Rodrigo Duterte, as hover boards and flying cars are today.

The American federal traditions must have inspired Rizal when he travelled in the United States on his way to Europe in 1888. However, it could be Rizal’s association with Francesc Pi y Margall, which gave him a full vision of how federalism could work in the Philippines.

Francesc Pi y Margall was the President of the first Spanish Republic in 1873-1874. He was a federalist who played a prominent role in calling for a federal republican constitution for Spain in the 1883 Republican Congress of Zaragosa. Rizal met Pi Y Margal in 1882 while in Spain. Pi was involved in Spanish politics since 1854 but had retired to return to literature. He wrote about his experiences on the republic in La República de 1873, his concept of the nation in Las Nacionalidades, and on the history of America in Historia General de America. Although Pi Y Margall was 37 years older than Rizal was, they immediately become intellectual allies. The Spanish political leader became Rizal’s mentor. They deliberated on a wide range of socio-political inconsistencies of life and the changes of government in Spain.

With mutual confidence, they pondered on various issues confronting the Philippines under the Spanish rule during the period. In these encounters, Rizal saw the difference between a centralist constitutional monarchy and a federal republic, which could have admonished Rizal to predict a federal republic for the Philippines. Pi Y Margall’s political philosophy must have attracted Rizal. Pi Y Margall opposed constitutional monarchy and fought for the adoption of a federal republican form of government. Federalism in Pi’s view would ensure the autonomy of regions, each with a distinct history, language, and culture in contrast to a unitary republican form that would recreate a highly centralized system governed from Madrid to the peripheries. It was the best alternative for Spain at that time because the mother country was facing the multifarious challenges of autonomy in the regions, the ineffectiveness of administrative structure, nationalist separatism in Cuba and social reforms. The Philippines, in the 1883 draft of Spanish federal constitution, which Pi Y Margall had a hand in, could assume to become one of the regions of the so-called Spanish federation but Rizal knew in 1889 that it was impossible. Thus, he thought that it could only happen once the Philippines is liberated. What he meant by República Federal de Filipinas must have consisted of autonomous regions from Luzon to Sulu forming a federal republic.

Six years later in 1896, while Rizal was incarcerated at Montjuic Castle in Barcelona, Cataluña, Spain, prior to his execution in the Philippines, Francesc Pi y Margall pleaded with the then Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas to spare Rizal’s life “for the sake of Spain.”