Winning the Case, Losing the Narrative: Why the Philippines Needs More Than a Legal Verdict
- museomaritimo
- Jun 27
- 9 min read
June 27, 2026 – Quezon City, NCR, Philippines
Article by Whesley Samar
Policy and Governance Review | West Philippine Sea
A decade after the 2016 Arbitral Award, China’s historical counter-narrative continues to hold ground internationally. The Philippines has the empirical evidence to fight back, but it lacks the state machinery to deploy it effectively.
Policy Analysis
On July 12, 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration issued a ruling that should have settled matters on paper. The Tribunal found that China’s expansive historical claims under the so-called "nine-dash line" had no legal basis under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and that the Philippines held exclusive sovereign rights over its exclusive economic zone in the West Philippine Sea (Permanent Court of Arbitration, 2016). It was a decisive Philippine victory by any legal measure, and it remains the most significant UNCLOS arbitral ruling in maritime history. Yet nearly a decade later, China continues to assert its claims with remarkable, frustrating effectiveness. Its coast guard maintains a permanent presence at Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal), its warships routinely harass Philippine vessels during resupply missions, and its state-funded research institutes produce a steady stream of scholarship asserting ancient Chinese sovereignty over the sea. Meanwhile, the Philippine government’s response to this ongoing counter-narrative has remained largely reactive, and it is overwhelmingly legalistic in character. The Philippines has relied almost exclusively on a courtroom strategy, while China operates simultaneously on two distinct registers. Beijing fights on both the legal front and the historical-civilizational front, but Manila operates on only one. Closing this gap does not require inventing new history, but it does require building the state institutions to project the history the Philippines already possesses.
Territorial legitimacy is not only won in courtrooms
To understand why a legal award alone is insufficient, it helps to examine how territorial legitimacy actually functions in global politics. The dominant view that court rulings dictate legitimacy reflects a Westphalian assumption that a legal title deed is the ultimate factor in a dispute. However, scholars working in the constructivist tradition of international relations theory offer a much more complete picture. Alexander Wendt’s foundational work in constructivist theory reminds us that state identities and interests are not fixed by material circumstances or legal texts alone, but they are shaped through social processes, shared meanings, and sustained narrative interaction (Wendt, 1999). Applied to volatile maritime disputes, this means that what a regional audience views as a legitimate claim is a product of continuous cultural assertion rather than raw legal documentation. A state can hold an immaculate legal title and still lose the broader legitimacy contest if it fails to sustain a coherent, living historical narrative. This is precisely the trap the Philippines now occupies. The 2016 Award settled the legal arithmetic, but it did not answer the deeper civilizational question that China has spent decades constructing: Who has the deeper historical relationship with this sea? That question is fought on a psychological terrain, and it is a terrain the Philippines has largely left uncontested.
China’s strength is not the empirical quality of its history; it is the institutional capacity to project that history consistently. The Philippines can match this without fabricating evidence because its actual evidence is simply underdeployed.
The Ancestral Deep: Early Seamanship and Living Heritage
Long before European colonization or modern legal regimes drew maritime boundaries on maps, these waters were the living tissue of regional life. For the ancient peoples of the Philippine archipelago, the sea was never an empty void or a hard border. It was a shared highway, an economic lifeblood, and an ancestral home. Centuries before foreign dynasties claimed absolute sovereignty over the open ocean, Austronesian master mariners navigated these waters using sophisticated star paths, wave patterns, and bird migrations. Early inhabitants relied on advanced local ship craftsmanship, utilizing highly specialized vessels that defined early Southeast Asian maritime prowess (Scott, 1982). These included the balangay, which were edge-pegged plank boats built for long-distance, open-ocean voyages, and the karakoa, which were sleek outrigger warships that carried over a hundred rowers and easily outpaced early European vessels. This deep-seated maritime culture meant that local communities were trading across these waters with neighboring regional states as early as 982 AD (Scott, 1982). Because of this continuous presence, indigenous fishing practices around the disputed shoals became multi-generational traditions. These waters were ancestral fishing grounds woven into local oral histories and customary use long before modern geopolitical definitions ever emerged.
The Cartographic Paper Trail
When the Spanish colonial state established administration over the archipelago, it did not create new territory from scratch; it systematically mapped and documented this existing maritime footprint. The most definitive piece of visual evidence from this era is the landmark 1734 Murillo Velarde Map, widely regarded as the mother of Philippine cartography. This map is historically critical because it provides precise, pre-colonial names for features that foreign states now claim as ancient territory (Carpio, 2017). It explicitly labels Scarborough Shoal as "Panacot," an old Tagalog word meaning threat or danger, showing that local sailors knew, feared, and named this feature long before the British tea clipper Scarborough ran aground there in 1748. Furthermore, the map charts the Spratly Islands as "Los Bajos de Paragua," explicitly tethering them to the geographic and administrative footprint of the Philippine archipelago under Spanish rule.
Lesser-known Administrative and Judicial Evidences
Beyond old maps, concrete administrative and legal actions demonstrate that successive governments in Manila have historically exercised active, recognized governance over these features. Two specific historical events illustrate this continuous exercise of authority.
First, in April 1800, the Spanish naval frigate Santa Lucia was formally dispatched from Manila to survey the waters around Panacot (Carpio, 2017). Following this systematic hydrographic survey, the feature was mapped in 1808 and eventually renamed Bajo de Masinloc. This name directly tied the shoal to the municipal administration of Masinloc, Zambales, solidifying it as a formal domestic administrative district rather than an unmapped, ownerless landmass.
Second, a pivotal but frequently overlooked piece of evidence occurred during the American colonial era. In 1913, a Swedish steamship named the SS Nippon ran aground directly on the rocks of Scarborough Shoal (Carpio, 2017). The United States Coast Guard, acting as the governing authority of the Philippine archipelago, conducted the rescue operations, salvaged the ship's cargo, and maintained a presence on the feature.
Crucially, the subsequent legal battle over the salvage proceeds and cargo rights was tried and settled entirely within the Philippine Supreme Court (Carpio, 2017). The court’s exercise of absolute judicial jurisdiction over an incident occurring on the shoal was fully recognized by the involved international parties and the ship’s flag state, providing a clear historical record of the Philippines executing sovereign administrative and judicial authority long before mid-twentieth-century disputes began.
China’s Institutional Narrative Infrastructure
Understanding the Philippine gap requires a candid assessment of the narrative infrastructure China has constructed. The nine-dash line is often treated by Beijing as ancient scripture, but its actual blueprint is surprisingly modern and sloppy. It was first sketched in 1936 by a nationalist Chinese geographer named Bai Meichu, who inscribed eleven dashes on a map that served more as an expression of political anxiety than accurate cartographic science (Hayton, 2014). The Communist government simply removed two dashes in 1953 to form the current nine-dash configuration, which was formally submitted to the United Nations in 2009. Bill Hayton’s historical analysis demonstrates that China’s territorial claims rest on this modern, error-prone foundation rather than any unbroken line of ancient sovereignty (Hayton, 2014). The Arbitral Tribunal reached the same conclusion, finding no legal basis for historic rights within the line, and historical records confirm that no Chinese official had ever set foot in the Spratly Islands before December 1946 (Hayton, 2014).
Yet, a bad story told a thousand times through a state megaphone can easily drown out a quiet truth. China has transformed this cartographic myth into a secular religion, teaching it in primary school classrooms and funding massive research bodies like the National Institute for South China Sea Studies (Hayton, 2014). The institutional machine is what makes the claim durable, not its historical accuracy.
What have Vietnam and Indonesia done differently?
The Philippines can find clear, practical models within its own neighborhood. Vietnam has long pursued a layered approach to its maritime claims by advancing legal, historical, and diplomatic tracks simultaneously. Hanoi regularly unrolls 18th-century imperial records from the Nguyen dynasty to justify its presence in the Paracels and Spratlys, weaving these historical documents directly into national school curricula and state media (Pedrozo, 2014). They understand that historical memory is an active instrument of maritime defense (Chemillier-Gendreau, 2000). Vietnam does not hold a stronger post-2016 legal position than the Philippines, but it maintains a far more institutionalized historical framework.
Indonesia offers an even punchier lesson in narrative warfare. In 2017, the Indonesian government formally renamed the waters north of the Natuna Islands as the "North Natuna Sea," wiping the shadow of the South China Sea off its national maps to assert its sovereign identity (Putra, 2023). This renaming was formalized through national geospatial authorities and reported directly to the United Nations. The act was not merely symbolic; it was backed by naval patrols, infrastructure support, and diplomatic assertiveness. Indonesia used language to redraw the psychological boundaries of the dispute, proving that strategic narrative acts carry immediate political consequences on the world stage (Putra, 2023).
Neither Vietnam nor Indonesia has a stronger legal position than the Philippines in the wake of the 2016 Award. Both, however, have invested far more deliberately in historical-cultural institutional frameworks. This comparison makes it clear that the Philippine gap is a policy choice rather than an inevitability.
Why has this evidence not been mobilized?
Why has the Philippines left its best weapons in storage? The answer lies in structural fragmentation. Excellent research happens at the National Historical Commission, the University of the Philippines, and within the Coast Guard, but these entities operate as isolated island fortresses. There is no central conveyor belt to turn academic data into diplomatic ammunition. This fragmentation is worsened by a profound legalist bias within the Department of Foreign Affairs. Decades of operating within international rules-based institutions have trained generations of Philippine diplomats to speak exclusively in the sterile dialect of legal briefs. Legalism won the 2016 Award, but legalism alone cannot win a war of ideas. When a claim lacks cultural weight in the domestic consciousness, it becomes dangerously fluid, leaving the state open to the exact kind of strategic flip-flopping witnessed during the Duterte years.
What needs to be built?
To fix this, the state must build a dedicated narrative engine. A National Maritime Heritage and Historical Commission could serve as the central nervous system for this effort, coordinating research across universities and feeding it directly to our diplomats. This body must be insulated from the chaotic pendulum of electoral politics so that the national story remains steady across administrations. Our public diplomacy needs to stop reading from a dry legal script. When a Philippine diplomat stands before the United Nations, they should lean on the law, but they must also evoke the 1734 Murillo Velarde map, the lived reality of the Zambales fishermen, and other possible cultural-historical anchors. These are human stories that project an unyielding moral legitimacy. Finally, protecting the fishing communities of Pangasinan and Zambales must be treated as a core national security priority. They are not just economic actors; they are the living, breathing proof of Philippine sovereignty on the water.
The award is a ceiling, not a foundation
The 2016 Arbitral Award was a monumental triumph, but a legal verdict is a shield, not a sword. In a historical marathon that spans generations, legal titles must be sustained by a living, institutionalized national memory. The Award solved our legal calculus, but it did not settle the psychological terrain of the West Philippine Sea. The Philippines has the truth, and China has the machinery. It is time for Manila to build a machinery worthy of its truth.
References
Carpio, A. T. (2017). The South China Sea Dispute: Philippine Sovereign Rights and Jurisdiction in the West Philippine Sea. Published by the author.
Chemillier-Gendreau, M. (2000). Sovereignty Over the Paracel and Spratly Islands. Kluwer Law International.
Hayton, B. (2014). The South China Sea: The struggle for power in Asia. Yale University Press.
Pedrozo, R. (2014). China versus Vietnam: An Analysis of the Competing Claims in the South China Sea. Center for Naval Analyses.
Permanent Court of Arbitration. (2016). In the Matter of the South China Sea Arbitration (The Republic of the Philippines v. The People's Republic of China) (Arbitral Tribunal Constituted Under Annex VII of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea).
Putra, R. A. (2023). How Does Language and Culture Form One Unique National Identity? A Case Study of Renaming the South China Sea to North Natuna Sea in Indonesia's Foreign Policy Since 2016. Global Strategis, 17(2), 443-466.
Scott, W. H. (1982). Boat-Building and Seamanship in Classic Philippine Society. Philippine Studies, 30(3), 335-376.
Wendt, A. (1999). Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge University Press.
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