Building a city: Korean capitalists and navy nostalgia in “overheated” Subic Bay

ABSTRACT

Over the course of just half a year, a catastrophic volcanic eruption and an unexpected political victory would come to act upon and dramatically alter the location of Subic Bay in the Philippines. As a consequence, the annus mirabilis of 1991 brought a (temporary) end to more than a century of US tutelage for the Philippines. Subic Bay, an area that had been economically, politically and socially dependent on the patronage of the US Navy, was now undergoing major transformations. The land and infrastructure left behind by the Americans were turned into the Philippines’ largest special economic zone, becoming the vanguard platform that allowed for the introduction of an “overheated” form of economic globalization into the Philippines. Amongst the foreign direct investors now active in Subic, a South Korean shipbuilder has become a new hegemon, building a giant shipyard inside the bay that today employs 34,000 Filipino workers. Paying particular attention to how contested gendered relations between foreign sailors and the local population have come “to build this city” during the cold war, the rapidly urbanizing Subic Bay area is analysed through what I call “navy nostalgia”: the widespread, yet rather equivocal longing for the return of the US Navy that needs to be read in light of the recent arrival of the South Korean shipbuilder.

KEYWORDS:

• Philippines
• nostalgia
• US military
• foreign direct investments
• capitalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As part of the ERC-Advanced-Grant project “Overheating. The three Crises of Globalisation”, I have conducted seven months of field research in Subic Bay, where between September 2013 and April 2014 I explored the impact of the South Korean shipyard on the communities nearby. Names of individuals—unless they are public figures—have been anonymized according to anthropological standards. I wish to thank Thomas Hylland Eriksen, David Henig and the anonymous reviewer for their incredibly useful comments on earlier versions of this article.

2 The speech was given in Tagalog, so I relied on the on-site translation of my research assistant here to capture his words.

3 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pictures/readers-poll-the-10-worst-songs-of-the-1980s-20111006/1-starship-we-built-this-city-0260875.

4 Subic Bay is a colloquial term, and does not correspond to an exact administrative unit. The actual bay encompasses two urban areas—Olongapo City and Subic town—which, while being adjacent to each other and nominally both part of the province of Zambales, fall under different jurisdictions, as Olongapo is governed independently.

5 A 42.4% population increase has been noted in Subic Town alone between 2000 and 2010, with the neighbouring areas of Castillejos and Olongapo having equally seen a rise in residents that can partially be attributed to the lure of the shipyard. Data found at National Statistics Office of the Republic of the Philippines (http://web0.psa.gov.ph/).

6 For other influential anthropological renditions of the term nostalgia, see, for instance, Stewart (1988), Rosaldo (1989) and Herzfeld (1997, 139ff).

7 In a brilliant passage of his book The Other Cold War, Kwon writes that

   in some regions, cold war politics was viewed primarily as the business of the state and their alliances, largely unconnected to the routines of the civic order, whereas in other places people had to live the cold war as part of their everyday lives in their most immediate, intimate domains. The history of the global cold war consists of a multitude of these locally specific historic realities and variant human experiences, and this view conflicts with the dominant image of the cold war as a single, encompassing geopolitical order. (2010, 7)

 Bayly's work (2007) on the complex interplay of (post-)socialism, (post-)colonialism and capitalism in today's Asia is equally of relevance here, as is Chari and Verdery's theoretical intervention (2009) on the connections between post-socalism and post-colonialism, in which they argue for the emergence of “a single analytical field—‘the (post) Cold War’” as a new lens, which in their view will allow us to ask “how Cold War representations have shaped and continue to shape theory and politics” (18).

8 The gendered histories of the US–Philippine meeting, and how the small-scale and intimate feeds into large-scale geopolitics can be exemplified by General Douglas McArthur's love affair with a young Filipina. McArthur, who is today still revered in both the Philippines and South Korea for the role he played in the liberation of both countries from Japanese occupation during the Second World War, would in 1930 meet a young Filipina actress called Elizabeth Cooper. Cooper, who was only sixteen years old at that time, became McArthur's mistress, and followed her 50-year-old lover to Washington D.C. The relationship lasted for three years, at the end of which McArthur allegedly handed Cooper 15 000 dollars and a ticket back home to the Philippines, which Cooper refused to make use of, choosing to stay in the United States instead.

9 Moon's book is a key contribution to a growing body of literature on the issue of prostitution proliferating nearby US military bases, much of which has been inspired by the pioneering work of feminist Cynthia Enloe (e.g. 1989). US imperialism, in this literature, is often seen as a project that is held in place by a form of virulent masculinity that is enacted by soldiers in the contact zones near US bases with the aim of dominating the local population via the bodies of women—an understanding of prostitution which runs rather contrary to notions put forward by “pro-sex work” scholars such as Agustin (2007), Kempadoo and Doezma (1998) or Weitzer (2000). In my own attempt to navigate these long-raging victimhood vs. agency debates around the subject of prostitution/sex work, I have sought to map out “the terrain where personal aspirations, collective imaginaries, and various temporal orientations come up against a local architecture (of prostitution) that has attached itself to the globe-spanning infrastructures of the US Armed Forces” (Schober 2016a, 90).

10 This is perhaps best epitomized in a joke about the Philippine anti-base movement that I heard in Olongapo: instead of simply saying “yankee go home”, like their Korean counterparts would, the Philippine activists are said to scream, “yankee go home, but take me with you”.

11 As with most so-called natural disasters, there seems to have been a human-made element to the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, too, as geothermal drilling taking place on the volcano shortly before the eruption has on occasion been blamed, a narrative I have explored further elsewhere (Schober 2016b). For an introduction into the rather large field of the anthropology of disaster, with which I cannot fully engage for the purposes of this article, see e.g. Oliver-Smith (1996) or Hoffman and Oliver-Smith (2002).

12 See “The Subic Bay Story. Rising Above the Storm” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYWtvUc604w&feature=relmfu.

13 Nearby Clark Air Base fell victim to massive looting after the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo—for an account of the looting, see Kirk (1998).

14 Comparable arrangements have also been observed by Jaesok Kim in his book Chinese Labour in a Korean factory (2013), some sections of which highly resonate with Korean labour management tactics I learned about in Subic Bay; tactics which, Kim similarly argues, “had been formulated through the Korean historical experiences of the Cold War, oppressive military government, and authoritarian work culture as a result of the military regime” (11).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Research Council [grant number 295843].