ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that the project to formulate a ‘Philippine IR’ or ‘Southeast Asian’ IR theory as either an academic analogue for the ‘ASEAN Way’ of inter-governmental interaction or a conceptual hybrid that could be attributable to a ‘Southeast Asian School of IR’ may exceed the scope of IR and policy studies in their current form. This is because such a project conflates the normativity of theory on the conduct of social scientific investigation with the ideological normativity that state authorities expect to have over their constituencies. In the Philippines, foreign policy functions primarily as a tool with which the politically privileged tighten their grip on their constituencies and only secondarily as a means to condition global perceptions about their state. However, the normalization of ‘small state’ discourse in the political language of the Philippines likely indicates that Filipinos intend only to cope with international pressure rather than to gain influence over international affairs.
