The State's Capacity to Change: The Case of Poland and the Philippines.

The article presents perceived similarities between the Polish and the Philippine cases, and focuses on significant divergencies in order to illustrate some theoretical hypotheses or to suggest new ones. One of these differences is found in the pattern of organization of collective actions due to various state structures and activities. According to the state-imposed convention, the opposition countered its power. In the Philippines, President Marcos has been still playing democratic cards and by allowing election he somehow opened the possibility to formulate legal platform that unified the opposition. In Poland, the collective action had to be as homogenic, integrated and totalist, as the socialist state itself. A second difference lay in the way civil society developed in Poland and the Philippines. Civil society, in its classic form, emerged in the West during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Philippine civil society is comparably weaker and less autonomous than a civil society in core Western countries. On the other hand, due to the relatively early expzmsion of the state, its repressive apparatus and the late industralization, it is considerably stronger than in peripheral capitalist countries.