The context discussed above reinforced the idea of statism among the rebels. The conceived territory which is the archipelago was to be governed by a uniform centralized political power that later expounded a statist Pan-Germanic form of nationalism.

The term Tagalog, used by Bonifacio, refers to the entire archipelago. It represents our early concept of a nation. The concepts of inang bayan(motherland) and haring bayan(sovereign nation) are the earliest representations of the idea of nationhood (imagined large-scale communities) among the Katipuneros and their supporters. “Imagined,” because the face-to-face process of barangays was replaced by highly centralized political organizations based on the idea of republicanism and representative democracy, generally derived from the principles of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizenof the 1789 revolutionary National Assembly of France.

Filipino Identity, a Product of Coercive Processes

As history shows, the idea of the Philippines as a nation is due to long coercive processes of colonization that continue to this day. Physically, the colonizers are gone, but their supremacy deeply and profoundly penetrates our values and prejudices, our culture and our developmental perspective.

Anderson considered nationalism a pathology in our modern developmental history. The Philippines as a nation is indeed a pathology that decayed our autonomous traditions and interdependent relations of mutual cooperation.

Nationalism and statism are illnesses that destroyed the desirable conditions of the primitive communities in the archipelago. Primitive barangays did engage in warfare among themselves. For instance, inhabitants of Mindanao and Panay exchanged attacks on a regular basis.