Restoration

The return of an order that a rupture had interrupted. Applied to the Philippines it names what followed the four days of February 1986: not a new republic, but the system as it stood before martial law, run again by the families who had run it then, minus the one family that had subordinated the others.

The word does work that “failure” does not. Nothing failed in 1986. A dictatorship was removed by unarmed civilians and the world copied the template. What returned was the arrangement underneath the dictatorship, which had never been the target.

Source: Benedict Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams,” New Left Review I/169, 1988, free PDF, written two years after the events as a warning about exactly this. His argument is carried in his own subtitle: the dream restored the origin. This course has read the essay’s opening pages and not its full treatment of Marcos and the restoration, and says so rather than implying otherwise.

First used in: 1.8 · Four days, and then the same families came back