ABSTRACT
The centennial of Philippines independence had to be carefully crafted to suit the political, social and cultural requirements of the nation in the late twentieth century posed by the ongoing processes of globalisation. As a project, it was very much a program of the Ramos administration (1992-8) and owed much to the support and patron age of the president.1 Despite the formation of a small committee under Corazon Aquino in 1988, it was not until the creation of the National Centennial Commission in October 1993 (by Executive Order 128) that planning for the event began in earnest. For the new ad ministration, the future was one of promise - indeed of vision, or what came to be known as ‘Philippines 2000’. The twenty-first cen tury was heralded as that of the Pacific and the objective was to transform the Philippines into a newly industrialised country by the year 2000 through the implementation of economic restructuring as proposed in the Medium Term Philippine Development Program. As Ramos noted on a state visit to the United Kingdom in 1997: ‘We no longer bow our heads in embarrassment at the abject poverty and demoralization that used to seep through the core of our na tional soil. We are no longer considered the Sick Man of Asia but [are] seen as Asia’s Tiger Cub.’2
