An Analysis On The Anti-US Military Base Social Movement In The Philippines: Its Origin, Process And Effect

The US military base in the Philippines, had been an important issue between Philippine-US relations for half of century. After the two country's negotiation on the base status in 1991, Philippine Senate voted down the treaty of expanding the presence of US military base, and Philippine truly achieved its sovereignty independence.Most of the studies on this event take a realism and geopolitical perspective, and seldom pay attention to the role of Philippine domestic politics and social factors in this event. Therefore, this thesis tries to emphasize and analyze the factors in domestic social level, to supplement the deficiency of the analysis model which regard state as an unitary rational actor. This thesis tries to investigate why the Philippine Senate would say no to the US military base from the perspective of social movement in the Philippine domestic political process. Based on the social movement theory model of sociology, this thesis sets up an interpretation frame to study the origin, process and effect of anti-base social movement in the Philippines.Under the primary analysis frame of state-society relationship, this thesis analyzes how the three factors, which are social transformation, social-political structure and discourse of the social movement, had played important roles in the development of the Philippine anti-base social movement. Then the thesis analyzes how the anti-base social movement had played an important role in the process of negotiation on the US military base treaty and the Philippine Senate's vote on the treaty. This thesis also takes a comparative study of these anti-US military base movements in Japan, Korea and the Philippines and tries to find the efficiency and deficiency of role of social movement in the process of foreign policy's decision making. In the conclusion this thesis discusses the different functions of the social movements under different conditions and makes an expectation of the anti-US military base movements in Japan and Korea.