Understanding Lese Majeste in Thailand - intent and crime
One of the most outstanding features of the masterful Truth on Trial in Thailand: Defamation, Treason and Lèse-majesté (London: Routledge, 2011) by David Streckfuss is its unprecedented attempt to lay bare the logic of thinking by those who protect Thainess through the monarchy (or the monarchy through Thainess). Streckfuss's idea of a "defamation regime" is not a casual shot at coining a nice easy term, but is a systematic rendering, informed by deep theory, of the logic of the Thai state.
I had the pleasure of interviewing David Steckfuss about his book and the edited transcript was published in Critical Asian Studies in 2011. As we ponder why people like labour and red-shirt activist Somyot Prueksakasemsuk and others are locked behind bars for what amount to thought and speaking crimes, the temptation is to blame the sheer callousness of the authorities. That doesn't add up. As commentator after commentator notes, the thoughtless and ruthless application of the lese-majeste law and the inhumane sentencing that occurs might sensibly be thought to diminish the position of the monarchy in Thailand - any cost/benefit analysis would suggest as much.
Something else is going on so that the lese majeste machine sentences and imprisons at will. And it has come recently in Somyot's case to more explicitly expand its rationale for imprisonment to the supposed "intention" of the accused. Sentencing doesn't go through a cost/benefit committee charged with protecting the image and reputation of the monarchy. There are other reasons behind what is happening other than sheer instrumental repression. Truth and Trial in Thailand is a conceptually rich that book gives us deep insights into this ghostly machine. Critical Asian Studies has made the full transcript and accompanying book review available here .
At a minimum government agencies such as Thailand's Office of the Attorney General, government and opposition spoke-persons and public intellectuals ought express a preference for bail, lighter sentencing and stricter thresholds for prosecution. The idea that the issue is too sensitive to address openly is a convenient infantilization of Thailand's public sphere and a misguided attempt to reconcile with something that isn't tangible.
Showing posts with label Monarchy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Monarchy. Show all posts
March 4, 2013
June 22, 2012
Stirring the dust under the feet
Just before the Thai July 2011 General election I was asked by Bloomberg: “What are the prospects of a power-sharing arrangement between Thaksin and his opponents?” My response in part was:
“Apart from hardline elements who mistakenly view Thaksin as the nadir of monarchist Thailand, my guess is the economic and political costs of protracted conflict is now weighing heavily on some of the incumbents who still want to steer Thailand to a prosperous and modern future. There must be considerable distress felt in royalist circles at the anti-royalist feeling that is emerging among rank and file redshirts and frankly the only genuine way to stop this growing is by bringing Thaksin back into the fold. Thaksin has time and time again shown his willingness to abide by most public protocols in relation to the monarchy. The inane propaganda efforts of the various security agencies are a lesson in blowback and the stupidity of force feeding people with "correct ideas". The more men in khaki wax lyrical about the royal family the more their standing is diminished. Thaksin has always signalled his willingness to do a deal and moreover is happy to deploy royalist imagery. This is what he offers and no one else can play this card. This will be the basis of any power-sharing arrangement.
In some senses the stark choice facing the rival camps is continued conflict at the cost of mutual destruction and seeing Thailand meltdown, or some step back from this and working out a formula for power sharing or at the very least a situation in which a "loyal opposition" has a credible chance of electoral victory at the following election. And should something be "agreed" this raises another question, how would such a historic anti-climax be received among those mobilised yellow and red -shirted citizens. This takes us to the final of the many unknowns of the post election period: the potential of a rising democratic mass in the face of this intra-elite bargaining and game-playing. Of all the possible game changers, this seems the least unlikely on the balance of probabilities. I'd like to be proven wrong.”
More recently I’ve been asked about the lack of support for amending Article 112 that concerns lese majeste. My response was:
“There is actually broad but muted support among some sections of the elite to amend the law, liberal royalists have come out in favour of amendment and of course red-shirt elements are strongly in support. The proposed amendment in the “people’s bill” are smartly pitched and in a situation where public policy was rationally debated you’d have to say the bill would go some way to answering the needs of both sides of the political divide.
But rational public debate is playing second fiddle to various political imperatives. These include constantly changing attempt to appease hardline royalists and not provoke mobilisation. You can see in the mobilisation against the amnesty bills what is possible. You’d expect greater mobilization to oppose the Campaign 112 Bill, given the monarchy’s place in Thailand’s symbolic politics.
Pheu Thai forces made it very clear in the days after the July 2011 election that the monarchy was their most vulnerable point and they would need to move slowly. They’ve lived up to that expectation, with people still in prison, and Chalerm’s war room to monitor lese majeste. But the plea by government sympathisers to understand Pheu Thai’s constrained political environment can also be self-serving - it creates a space for Thaksin forces to use anti-monarchy sentiment among supporters as their strongest bargaining point with the establishment to try and forge a power-sharing arrangement. “Deal with us, and we can stop this” is the message. This attempt largely defines the last year of political bargaining.
It is evident that while party-connected red shirts and those surrounding Thaksin do not totally control the red-shirt movement, they are in a position to largely shut down anti-monarchy discourse or at least alienate it from the more cautious elements of the movement. This is what they offer at the bargaining table. In some senses, the future of the monarchy depends on what agreements can be made to share power.
A final point to make would be that the reluctance to amend reflects a national condition of impending crisis. There is respect on both sides of politics for the king. This is a cultural condition that does not necessarily reflect agreement on the monarchy or the lese majeste law , but a sentiment that says so late in the reign it would be disrespectful to make these moves. For those who feel the king’s presence as the father and soul of the nation – and these ideas are really felt – amendment that is politically motivated appears as ingratitude. For that reason, amendment will likely quickly follow the passing of King Bhumiphol.
Amendment is only likely to happen in this reign under two conditions. Either a signal comes from the palace, so that the amendment is seen as part of the narrative of a democratic kingship or controversial amendment, even abolition, occurs as part of an increasingly polarised struggle for total power. Amendment based on rational debate is a distant possibility.”
“Apart from hardline elements who mistakenly view Thaksin as the nadir of monarchist Thailand, my guess is the economic and political costs of protracted conflict is now weighing heavily on some of the incumbents who still want to steer Thailand to a prosperous and modern future. There must be considerable distress felt in royalist circles at the anti-royalist feeling that is emerging among rank and file redshirts and frankly the only genuine way to stop this growing is by bringing Thaksin back into the fold. Thaksin has time and time again shown his willingness to abide by most public protocols in relation to the monarchy. The inane propaganda efforts of the various security agencies are a lesson in blowback and the stupidity of force feeding people with "correct ideas". The more men in khaki wax lyrical about the royal family the more their standing is diminished. Thaksin has always signalled his willingness to do a deal and moreover is happy to deploy royalist imagery. This is what he offers and no one else can play this card. This will be the basis of any power-sharing arrangement.
In some senses the stark choice facing the rival camps is continued conflict at the cost of mutual destruction and seeing Thailand meltdown, or some step back from this and working out a formula for power sharing or at the very least a situation in which a "loyal opposition" has a credible chance of electoral victory at the following election. And should something be "agreed" this raises another question, how would such a historic anti-climax be received among those mobilised yellow and red -shirted citizens. This takes us to the final of the many unknowns of the post election period: the potential of a rising democratic mass in the face of this intra-elite bargaining and game-playing. Of all the possible game changers, this seems the least unlikely on the balance of probabilities. I'd like to be proven wrong.”
More recently I’ve been asked about the lack of support for amending Article 112 that concerns lese majeste. My response was:
“There is actually broad but muted support among some sections of the elite to amend the law, liberal royalists have come out in favour of amendment and of course red-shirt elements are strongly in support. The proposed amendment in the “people’s bill” are smartly pitched and in a situation where public policy was rationally debated you’d have to say the bill would go some way to answering the needs of both sides of the political divide.
But rational public debate is playing second fiddle to various political imperatives. These include constantly changing attempt to appease hardline royalists and not provoke mobilisation. You can see in the mobilisation against the amnesty bills what is possible. You’d expect greater mobilization to oppose the Campaign 112 Bill, given the monarchy’s place in Thailand’s symbolic politics.
Pheu Thai forces made it very clear in the days after the July 2011 election that the monarchy was their most vulnerable point and they would need to move slowly. They’ve lived up to that expectation, with people still in prison, and Chalerm’s war room to monitor lese majeste. But the plea by government sympathisers to understand Pheu Thai’s constrained political environment can also be self-serving - it creates a space for Thaksin forces to use anti-monarchy sentiment among supporters as their strongest bargaining point with the establishment to try and forge a power-sharing arrangement. “Deal with us, and we can stop this” is the message. This attempt largely defines the last year of political bargaining.
It is evident that while party-connected red shirts and those surrounding Thaksin do not totally control the red-shirt movement, they are in a position to largely shut down anti-monarchy discourse or at least alienate it from the more cautious elements of the movement. This is what they offer at the bargaining table. In some senses, the future of the monarchy depends on what agreements can be made to share power.
A final point to make would be that the reluctance to amend reflects a national condition of impending crisis. There is respect on both sides of politics for the king. This is a cultural condition that does not necessarily reflect agreement on the monarchy or the lese majeste law , but a sentiment that says so late in the reign it would be disrespectful to make these moves. For those who feel the king’s presence as the father and soul of the nation – and these ideas are really felt – amendment that is politically motivated appears as ingratitude. For that reason, amendment will likely quickly follow the passing of King Bhumiphol.
Amendment is only likely to happen in this reign under two conditions. Either a signal comes from the palace, so that the amendment is seen as part of the narrative of a democratic kingship or controversial amendment, even abolition, occurs as part of an increasingly polarised struggle for total power. Amendment based on rational debate is a distant possibility.”
September 27, 2011
When the walls come crumbling down: Monarchy and Thai-style Democracy
The following is the extended introduction to my review of Saying the Unsayable: Monarchy and Democracy in Thailand, edited by Søren Ivarsson and Lotte Isager (2010) published by NIAS Press
Full reference Connors MK (2011) "When the walls come crumbling down: Monarchy and Thai-style Democracy," Journal of Contemporary Asia, 41, 4, pp. 657-673.
___________________________________________
Some observers may think that the Year Zero for contemporary critiques of the Thai monarchy begins in 2006 with Paul Handley's biographical The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej (Handley, 2006) Because of a single publishing gesture, the reading public glimpsed the king as a man concerned/perplexed with the knots and polish of ruling and power amidst a courtly world of intrigue and military fatigues. Far from the images of sacred humility proffered by state and private agencies alike, the decidedly human account of King Bhumibol was as shocking as it was treacherous to those invested in the psychological panaceas and legitimating prop of a benevolent monarch; publication had to be stopped (the government tried) and the book was banned in Thailand (Hewison, 2008). In his review, Duncan McCargo (2007) noted the book's cathartic effect; in “saying the unsayable” Handley had offered a “re-imagining of Thailand's modern political history.”
Saying the Unsayable: Monarchy and Democracy in Thailand, edited by Søren Ivarsson and Lotte Isager (2010), takes up this challenge of re-imagining. The contributors offer engaging reflections and critique, departing from Handley's biographical focus to survey a broader political and cultural world that the monarchy inhabits. In his review, historian Chris Baker (2011) avers this is a “careful book which has nothing personal or strident, no whiff of revolt.” Radical pamphleteering it is not, but there is revolt in the fashioning of wide-ranging and well-grounded arguments that carefully mould the unsayable into the sayable. This approach has ensured the book remains on sale in Thailand, despite its challenge to monarchical myths.
Handley's explosive biography and its wall-crumbling (not yet tumbling) effect were not totally unprecedented. Kevin Hewison's (1997) book chapter “The Monarchy and Democratization” critically expounded what he described as the “Standard Total View” of the Thai Monarchy (STVTM). Hewison's ironic riff on Michael Vickery's term “Standard Total View” announced both a very political critique of an institution that aspires to transcendence and the presence of a cult ideology which few had cared to name. His piece also touched on the Crown Property Bureau (Hewison,1997), the monarchy's stance during the events of 1973 and 1976, and on the conservative nature of Bhumibol's political outlook
.
To simplify, in its original and controversial usage, Vickery meant by Standard Total View that analysts were creating a one-dimensional picture – the standard total view – of various phases of the genocide in Cambodia (1975-79) that traced the death toll to evil intentions by the Khmer Rouge to purge the nation of former regime elements, its sympathisers and “intellectuals” (Vickery, 1999; originally published in 1984).
Absent from such accounts were accident, imperialism, war and contingency and a forensic accounting of the actual death toll. At the heart of Vickery's critique was the place of evidence, argument and motive in the presentation of controversial moments of brutal social change. His motive in coining the phrase was to point out how flawed and totalising narratives become accepted as fact. Notwithstanding the merits or otherwise of Vickery's account of Cambodia, the application of the idea to the Thai case is clear – how did the Thai monarchy come to have such an elevated and, until recently, largely unquestioned position?
Ivarsson and Isager (2010) following Hewison, describe the Standard Total View of the Thai monarchy in the following terms: as a protector of tradition, the nation and democracy; as an egalitarian development king who modernises as he instructs governments to care for the welfare of his subjects; and as an institution as natural to Thailand's political and social culture as rice is to the Thai diet. Clearly, Hewison's piece on the Thai monarchy was very contrarian, ensuring a limited impact. There was no open political disenchantment propelling widespread dissemination, but it was translated for a Thai audience and reportedly read in the palace. The monarchy was left alone by more cautious writers on Thailand. Even Hewison's modest success in opening up inquiry was not enjoyed by earlier pioneers. As few as they were, such works were ignored, most notably, the now eagerly ploughed work of Christine Gray. Her research showed how Buddhist ritual and kingship “played a central role in advancing western capitalist ideologies and practices in Thailand” (Gray, 1986). Among other things, Gray brilliantly depicted the Thai-ification and legitimation of Sino-Thai capital and the naturalisation of capitalism in general by their articulation to monarchical prestige, mediated by rituals such as merit making by capitalist elites in royally-sponsored ceremonies. This also provided a means by which the king could build up the royal treasury (Gray, 1986). From an anthropological view, Gray (1986) noted that the growth of ritual in the Chakri court was also the growth of the king's naming prerogatives and his ability to structure perceptions about life, production and power in the world. This power was a right by virtue of his kingly position as among the highest interpreters of the Buddhist dharma (Gray, 1991: 44-5). Gray also revealed the contradictory notions of kingship at play in the royal court: a bricolage of Hindu/Buddhist prescriptions that are ever-adaptive to a changing world order and in which even the blood lineage of the monarch requires obscuration because of the democratic temper of the times. During her fieldwork Gray was granted privileged access to court and ceremonial functionaries and she repays the gift with fine scholarship.
As Gray was exploring these issues from the early 1980s to early 1990s, a strident re-hegemonising of the Thai social field around the “democratic” monarchy was underway. This was no less than an attempt to conceal and gloss the brutal massacre of October 1976 at Thammasat University. The elevated status of the monarch derives from this ideological work; its proximity being so recent one wonders at the mechanisms of its success, and the cultural residues on which that success drew. Until Handley explicitly drew attention to Gray's “underappreciated dissertation” (2006: xi), most academics ignored her powerful critique of the monarchy. This, perhaps, evinces an academic caution all too familiar to scholars who worked on Indonesia during the Suharto period or indeed on any region where academics either obscure critique or accept certain matters as untouchable. The caution was odd given that Thailand was then becoming valorised as the beacon of democracy in Southeast Asia (even as it was given the qualifier “semi”). That there was room for critical engagement is evident. Towards the end of his widely acclaimed Siam Mapped, Thongchai (1994) writes excoriatingly of the monarchy's symbolic violence in promoting Thainess. Pasuk and Baker (1995) provided scholarly interpretation of Thailand's broad transformation and, in the process, examined the role of the monarchy with critical balance. My own account of the monarchy explored its ideological rehabilitation after the trauma of 1976, showing the very constructed nature of the idea of “democracy with the king as head of state” and the many agencies of state that sent it out into the world (Connors, 2001, 2003) McCargo (2005) confronted the issue of palace politics head on in his “network monarchy” article, anticipating current debates. He proved it was possible to be very controversial. It is true that all of the above largely played the institution, not the person.
A number of works have used euphemisms such as “establishment” in English or “sathaban” (institution) in Thai to indicate who or what was being spoken about, enabling probing if cautious accounts of the palace. In the 1990s, some Thai scholars wrote newspaper columns that deliberately avoided using, as is customary, Bhumibol's full title and instead simply referred to him as king (kasat), indicating at least a disenchanted stance towards the monarchy. One such scholar explained to this author that he chose not to bother with royal language (the verbal prefixes and nouns that sound very affected) in a deliberate attempt to demystify the institution. He explained his good fortune in not getting into trouble on the basis that he was not important. On that point, the then not so well-known Giles Ji Ungphakorn, at the Eighth International Thai Studies Conference (2002) in the north-eastern city of Nakhon Phanom, said that he preferred a republican form of government over the current system. This clearly contravened the constitutional prohibition on advocating for any political system that challenged “democracy with the king as head of state.” No action was taken against him although over 300 people heard his comments. As his prominence grew as an anti-coup activist and after he attached himself to the red-shirt movement in 2008, he was hit with charges of lèse-majesté for his book A Coup for the Rich (Giles, 2007). In exile and feeling free of the suffocating caution required when writing about the monarchy, his work has grown more critical both of the monarchy and of those who want to make it a central issue: as he sees it, the military is the might behind the throne (see Walker and Farrelly, 2009). Such overtly political prose that reaches a sizeable audience and that aims at political action is clearly not allowed. And it is the latter, of course, which is the more dangerous. But before recent events forced open the window for critical commentary, it was clear that academically critical works could be published and that there was no reason for silence. The silence was in part born of fear – reasonably held by Thais – of excommunication; but the silence was also purposeful in the sense that it represented a willingness to see the political world the way the national elite fashioned it (see Ockey 2005), and a reactive belief that if the monarchy could not be resisted then it could be harnessed to progressive purpose and that claims could be made upon it. This reactive response colours the last two decades, and it is this more than the STV which is now under threat.
That the work under review is not obscure, oblique, or pollyannaish about the monarchy bespeaks a new time when popular and intra-elite struggle has punched a hole through the quasi-consensus surrounding the monarchy, expanding the space for a more honest reckoning of Thai history. That such a point has been reached can be seen in several respects. Most obviously, there are the relentless attacks on the Privy Council which began very soon after the coup d'état that ousted Thaksin Shinawatra in September 2006. Since 2007, predecessors of the anti-coup red-shirt movement called for Bhumibol to remove several appointees to the Privy Council, including its President General Prem Tinsulanonda, for his apparent role in the coup of 2006. In July 2007, this author saw protestors at Sanam Luang throw ping-pong balls and darts at a caricature of General Prem, drawn with pursed pink lips and an ornate earring garnishing the side of his face. This was a shocking sight to anyone acclimatised to the obsequious behaviours solicited/elicited by social superiors. It was in its own way no less than a public death of deference: the constitution states that appointment or removal from the Privy Council is the sole prerogative of the monarch, but the red shirts continue to call for Prem's removal.
Critical, if oblique, works have emerged or re-emerged in the Thai language, with broadly constitutionalist interpretations of the monarchy in competition with reactionary accounts that assume unrestricted royal power. For example, against the proliferation of commentary on the king's royal prerogatives (see Pramuan, 2005), in 2008 a law press published a seemingly innocuous title, Exposition on the Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand 1968 and Governing Regulations 1972: Regarding the King. In a preface that recounts law specific to the monarchy, Worajet (2008) demonstrates that the monarchy's ascension during the post-1976 era comes with greater control over its own affairs. Previously, amendment to the Palace Law of Succession (1924) followed procedures relevant to any constitutional amendment, but in the 1991, 1997 and 2007 constitutions amendment to the succession law is the sole prerogative of the palace. On this Worajet (2008) observes: “there has never been any expert explanation of whether this is a case of legislative royal prerogative or not, or whether [the palace prerogative to amend the succession law] …conforms to democracy and the principle of division of powers.” The book is a reprint of the work of Yut Seang-uthai, the influential jurist and Secretary General of the Council of State from 1953 to 1968. Yut pressed for a constitutionalist interpretation of the monarchy until his death in 1979, earning accusations of lèse-majesté along the way. Just to take one example, Yut (2008) writes “royal addresses through radio must be done in accordance with recommendations by the cabinet, as there must be someone responsible for the speeches.” Such an interpretation almost reads like sedition to the present mentality of prerogative royalists. The king's speeches are largely palace affairs and are not directed or approved by the government. Such limitation as proposed by Yut would certainly strip the king of an important source of legitimacy that comes from his now conventional right to chide governments in public, and to define and interpret situations as if above them. It would lead, practically, to a secular kingship devoid of a mechanism to be the “Great Definer” of the nation's fate.
If the king's prerogative to speak remains intact, the impact has been dulled by the relatively widespread disillusion with the monarchy since the 2006 coup. It is now not uncommon to hear highly critical comments about the monarchy which often stem from what some red-shirts describe as an “awakening” (ta-sawang) when the Queen attended the funeral of a member of the yellow-shirted People's Alliance for Democracy in October 2008. This was interpreted as an endorsement of the movement to overthrow the pro-Thaksin government of the time. As one red-shirt protester explained to this author in 2009 at a demonstration in Bangkok, “how can a mother chose between her sons?” Some protestors also refer to being “orphans.” These family references are a response to the widespread promotion by state agencies of the king and queen as father and mother of the nation. Explicit reference to Thailand's wealthiest conglomerate, the Crown Property Bureau, can also be heard in conversation.(The work of Porphant (2008) has been influential in opening up discussion on royal wealth).
This broad willingness to speak openly about the monarchy contrasts with the adulation or enforced silence that prevailed a decade ago. The shift is best exemplified by the curious case of the brash and brave Thai historian Somsak Jeamteerasakul whose writings on Thai web-boards and in academic papers constantly trash any imposed code of self or socially-expected censorship in a quest for truth about the monarchy's historical and contemporary role. His work predates the current growth of commentary, and it was only in early 2011 that police moved to investigate charges against him of lèse-majesté.
Royalists, that is to say various state agencies, the military, the People's Alliance for Democracy, and the governing Democrat Party have responded to this fragmenting consensus by stoking fears of a movement to overthrow the monarchy and building up state and social surveillance, a topic explored by pseudonymous Han Krittian (Chapter 8). There has been a wave of unprecedented and unmanageable lèse-majesté cases, as chronicled in David Streckfuss' Chapter 5. From an average of five cases per year between 1992 and 2004, the total number of cases tried between 2006 and 2008 jumped to 231 (see pp. 107, 123). Streckfuss (2011) reports that a police source suggests that in 2009 some 3000 potential cases were being investigated. The lèse-majesté cases should not simply be read as state persecution – the vagaries of the law allow individuals acting as concerned citizens to play a role in launching a lèse-majesté case, as Streckfuss carefully outlines. However, Streckfuss (2011)) notes that the failure of an enduring ideology around the monarchy is largely behind the spate of lèse-majesté cases. The monarchy does have a strong conservative and opportunistic social constituency and that constituency, now seeing the wall of the STV crumble, is groping for ways of patching it together before the debris gathers at their feet.
Fear mongering has become rife. Numerous books on an alleged movement to overthrow the monarchy have appeared in the last year. One book, running into multiple editions, features Thaksin dressed in royal regalia and claims that the republican movement is inspired by the overthrow of monarchies in France, Russia and, more recently, Nepal (Kongbannathikan, 2010). Similar claims of republican intent are made on leaflets and banners. For example, in the 2007 election, campaign leaflets were discreetly distributed saying that a vote for the pro-Thaksin People's Power Party was a threat to the monarchy. These were secretive, unsigned leaflets distributed in the north-east, probably by security forces. The Phum Jai Thai party, composed of elements that defected from the pro-Thaksin forces in late 2008 to enter into a coalition government with the Democrat Party, makes such allegations on banners in some provinces with the slogan: “Resist the new Thai state.” This is a slant against the alleged anti-monarchical leanings of the red-shirted United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship and its parliamentary ally the Pheu Thai Party. Moreover, the Phum Jai Thai Party's control of the powerful Interior Ministry has led to the setting up of pro-monarchy networks, partly in response to the “red-villages for democracy” that spread across the north-east in defiance of the crackdown of May 2010 (Somphok, 2011: 24-5). These villages also pledge loyalty to the “democracy with the king as head of state.” Even so, some members explicitly await the return of Thaksin as prime minister (Somphok, 2011: 24-5). While many international supporters of the red shirts enthuse about the movement's apparent anti-royalism, a glance at the red-shirt press over the last two years demonstrates that the more tabloid elements, such as Red News and Truth Today, have attempted to promote a positive relationship to royalism, seeing themselves as more credible protectors of the Crown. Mainstream red-shirt attacks have mostly concentrated on individuals within the so-called network monarchy, or more discretely, the Queen. There are occasional renditions of the royal anthem at red-shirt demonstrations, and the republican element in the movement is a small minority. The movement has put the STV up for scrutiny, but it has yet to crack it (for a more optimistic view, see Glassman, 2011).
As might be expected, Saying the Unsayable advances an alternative to the STV. That it does this with unusual turns of argument and the tensions that form between the chapters makes reading this book a novel experience rather than one of déjà vu. Saying the Unsayable does not merely record what people have long been saying – as some wrongly assert of Handley's The King Never Smiles. Saying the Unsayable goes beyond easy sneers at the monarchy, and offers insights into cultural, political and governmental processes.
The full review of the book appears at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00472336.2011.610619
Full references in the original
Full reference Connors MK (2011) "When the walls come crumbling down: Monarchy and Thai-style Democracy," Journal of Contemporary Asia, 41, 4, pp. 657-673.
___________________________________________
Some observers may think that the Year Zero for contemporary critiques of the Thai monarchy begins in 2006 with Paul Handley's biographical The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej (Handley, 2006) Because of a single publishing gesture, the reading public glimpsed the king as a man concerned/perplexed with the knots and polish of ruling and power amidst a courtly world of intrigue and military fatigues. Far from the images of sacred humility proffered by state and private agencies alike, the decidedly human account of King Bhumibol was as shocking as it was treacherous to those invested in the psychological panaceas and legitimating prop of a benevolent monarch; publication had to be stopped (the government tried) and the book was banned in Thailand (Hewison, 2008). In his review, Duncan McCargo (2007) noted the book's cathartic effect; in “saying the unsayable” Handley had offered a “re-imagining of Thailand's modern political history.”
Saying the Unsayable: Monarchy and Democracy in Thailand, edited by Søren Ivarsson and Lotte Isager (2010), takes up this challenge of re-imagining. The contributors offer engaging reflections and critique, departing from Handley's biographical focus to survey a broader political and cultural world that the monarchy inhabits. In his review, historian Chris Baker (2011) avers this is a “careful book which has nothing personal or strident, no whiff of revolt.” Radical pamphleteering it is not, but there is revolt in the fashioning of wide-ranging and well-grounded arguments that carefully mould the unsayable into the sayable. This approach has ensured the book remains on sale in Thailand, despite its challenge to monarchical myths.
Handley's explosive biography and its wall-crumbling (not yet tumbling) effect were not totally unprecedented. Kevin Hewison's (1997) book chapter “The Monarchy and Democratization” critically expounded what he described as the “Standard Total View” of the Thai Monarchy (STVTM). Hewison's ironic riff on Michael Vickery's term “Standard Total View” announced both a very political critique of an institution that aspires to transcendence and the presence of a cult ideology which few had cared to name. His piece also touched on the Crown Property Bureau (Hewison,1997), the monarchy's stance during the events of 1973 and 1976, and on the conservative nature of Bhumibol's political outlook
.
To simplify, in its original and controversial usage, Vickery meant by Standard Total View that analysts were creating a one-dimensional picture – the standard total view – of various phases of the genocide in Cambodia (1975-79) that traced the death toll to evil intentions by the Khmer Rouge to purge the nation of former regime elements, its sympathisers and “intellectuals” (Vickery, 1999; originally published in 1984).
Absent from such accounts were accident, imperialism, war and contingency and a forensic accounting of the actual death toll. At the heart of Vickery's critique was the place of evidence, argument and motive in the presentation of controversial moments of brutal social change. His motive in coining the phrase was to point out how flawed and totalising narratives become accepted as fact. Notwithstanding the merits or otherwise of Vickery's account of Cambodia, the application of the idea to the Thai case is clear – how did the Thai monarchy come to have such an elevated and, until recently, largely unquestioned position?
Ivarsson and Isager (2010) following Hewison, describe the Standard Total View of the Thai monarchy in the following terms: as a protector of tradition, the nation and democracy; as an egalitarian development king who modernises as he instructs governments to care for the welfare of his subjects; and as an institution as natural to Thailand's political and social culture as rice is to the Thai diet. Clearly, Hewison's piece on the Thai monarchy was very contrarian, ensuring a limited impact. There was no open political disenchantment propelling widespread dissemination, but it was translated for a Thai audience and reportedly read in the palace. The monarchy was left alone by more cautious writers on Thailand. Even Hewison's modest success in opening up inquiry was not enjoyed by earlier pioneers. As few as they were, such works were ignored, most notably, the now eagerly ploughed work of Christine Gray. Her research showed how Buddhist ritual and kingship “played a central role in advancing western capitalist ideologies and practices in Thailand” (Gray, 1986). Among other things, Gray brilliantly depicted the Thai-ification and legitimation of Sino-Thai capital and the naturalisation of capitalism in general by their articulation to monarchical prestige, mediated by rituals such as merit making by capitalist elites in royally-sponsored ceremonies. This also provided a means by which the king could build up the royal treasury (Gray, 1986). From an anthropological view, Gray (1986) noted that the growth of ritual in the Chakri court was also the growth of the king's naming prerogatives and his ability to structure perceptions about life, production and power in the world. This power was a right by virtue of his kingly position as among the highest interpreters of the Buddhist dharma (Gray, 1991: 44-5). Gray also revealed the contradictory notions of kingship at play in the royal court: a bricolage of Hindu/Buddhist prescriptions that are ever-adaptive to a changing world order and in which even the blood lineage of the monarch requires obscuration because of the democratic temper of the times. During her fieldwork Gray was granted privileged access to court and ceremonial functionaries and she repays the gift with fine scholarship.
As Gray was exploring these issues from the early 1980s to early 1990s, a strident re-hegemonising of the Thai social field around the “democratic” monarchy was underway. This was no less than an attempt to conceal and gloss the brutal massacre of October 1976 at Thammasat University. The elevated status of the monarch derives from this ideological work; its proximity being so recent one wonders at the mechanisms of its success, and the cultural residues on which that success drew. Until Handley explicitly drew attention to Gray's “underappreciated dissertation” (2006: xi), most academics ignored her powerful critique of the monarchy. This, perhaps, evinces an academic caution all too familiar to scholars who worked on Indonesia during the Suharto period or indeed on any region where academics either obscure critique or accept certain matters as untouchable. The caution was odd given that Thailand was then becoming valorised as the beacon of democracy in Southeast Asia (even as it was given the qualifier “semi”). That there was room for critical engagement is evident. Towards the end of his widely acclaimed Siam Mapped, Thongchai (1994) writes excoriatingly of the monarchy's symbolic violence in promoting Thainess. Pasuk and Baker (1995) provided scholarly interpretation of Thailand's broad transformation and, in the process, examined the role of the monarchy with critical balance. My own account of the monarchy explored its ideological rehabilitation after the trauma of 1976, showing the very constructed nature of the idea of “democracy with the king as head of state” and the many agencies of state that sent it out into the world (Connors, 2001, 2003) McCargo (2005) confronted the issue of palace politics head on in his “network monarchy” article, anticipating current debates. He proved it was possible to be very controversial. It is true that all of the above largely played the institution, not the person.
A number of works have used euphemisms such as “establishment” in English or “sathaban” (institution) in Thai to indicate who or what was being spoken about, enabling probing if cautious accounts of the palace. In the 1990s, some Thai scholars wrote newspaper columns that deliberately avoided using, as is customary, Bhumibol's full title and instead simply referred to him as king (kasat), indicating at least a disenchanted stance towards the monarchy. One such scholar explained to this author that he chose not to bother with royal language (the verbal prefixes and nouns that sound very affected) in a deliberate attempt to demystify the institution. He explained his good fortune in not getting into trouble on the basis that he was not important. On that point, the then not so well-known Giles Ji Ungphakorn, at the Eighth International Thai Studies Conference (2002) in the north-eastern city of Nakhon Phanom, said that he preferred a republican form of government over the current system. This clearly contravened the constitutional prohibition on advocating for any political system that challenged “democracy with the king as head of state.” No action was taken against him although over 300 people heard his comments. As his prominence grew as an anti-coup activist and after he attached himself to the red-shirt movement in 2008, he was hit with charges of lèse-majesté for his book A Coup for the Rich (Giles, 2007). In exile and feeling free of the suffocating caution required when writing about the monarchy, his work has grown more critical both of the monarchy and of those who want to make it a central issue: as he sees it, the military is the might behind the throne (see Walker and Farrelly, 2009). Such overtly political prose that reaches a sizeable audience and that aims at political action is clearly not allowed. And it is the latter, of course, which is the more dangerous. But before recent events forced open the window for critical commentary, it was clear that academically critical works could be published and that there was no reason for silence. The silence was in part born of fear – reasonably held by Thais – of excommunication; but the silence was also purposeful in the sense that it represented a willingness to see the political world the way the national elite fashioned it (see Ockey 2005), and a reactive belief that if the monarchy could not be resisted then it could be harnessed to progressive purpose and that claims could be made upon it. This reactive response colours the last two decades, and it is this more than the STV which is now under threat.
That the work under review is not obscure, oblique, or pollyannaish about the monarchy bespeaks a new time when popular and intra-elite struggle has punched a hole through the quasi-consensus surrounding the monarchy, expanding the space for a more honest reckoning of Thai history. That such a point has been reached can be seen in several respects. Most obviously, there are the relentless attacks on the Privy Council which began very soon after the coup d'état that ousted Thaksin Shinawatra in September 2006. Since 2007, predecessors of the anti-coup red-shirt movement called for Bhumibol to remove several appointees to the Privy Council, including its President General Prem Tinsulanonda, for his apparent role in the coup of 2006. In July 2007, this author saw protestors at Sanam Luang throw ping-pong balls and darts at a caricature of General Prem, drawn with pursed pink lips and an ornate earring garnishing the side of his face. This was a shocking sight to anyone acclimatised to the obsequious behaviours solicited/elicited by social superiors. It was in its own way no less than a public death of deference: the constitution states that appointment or removal from the Privy Council is the sole prerogative of the monarch, but the red shirts continue to call for Prem's removal.
Critical, if oblique, works have emerged or re-emerged in the Thai language, with broadly constitutionalist interpretations of the monarchy in competition with reactionary accounts that assume unrestricted royal power. For example, against the proliferation of commentary on the king's royal prerogatives (see Pramuan, 2005), in 2008 a law press published a seemingly innocuous title, Exposition on the Constitution of the Kingdom of Thailand 1968 and Governing Regulations 1972: Regarding the King. In a preface that recounts law specific to the monarchy, Worajet (2008) demonstrates that the monarchy's ascension during the post-1976 era comes with greater control over its own affairs. Previously, amendment to the Palace Law of Succession (1924) followed procedures relevant to any constitutional amendment, but in the 1991, 1997 and 2007 constitutions amendment to the succession law is the sole prerogative of the palace. On this Worajet (2008) observes: “there has never been any expert explanation of whether this is a case of legislative royal prerogative or not, or whether [the palace prerogative to amend the succession law] …conforms to democracy and the principle of division of powers.” The book is a reprint of the work of Yut Seang-uthai, the influential jurist and Secretary General of the Council of State from 1953 to 1968. Yut pressed for a constitutionalist interpretation of the monarchy until his death in 1979, earning accusations of lèse-majesté along the way. Just to take one example, Yut (2008) writes “royal addresses through radio must be done in accordance with recommendations by the cabinet, as there must be someone responsible for the speeches.” Such an interpretation almost reads like sedition to the present mentality of prerogative royalists. The king's speeches are largely palace affairs and are not directed or approved by the government. Such limitation as proposed by Yut would certainly strip the king of an important source of legitimacy that comes from his now conventional right to chide governments in public, and to define and interpret situations as if above them. It would lead, practically, to a secular kingship devoid of a mechanism to be the “Great Definer” of the nation's fate.
If the king's prerogative to speak remains intact, the impact has been dulled by the relatively widespread disillusion with the monarchy since the 2006 coup. It is now not uncommon to hear highly critical comments about the monarchy which often stem from what some red-shirts describe as an “awakening” (ta-sawang) when the Queen attended the funeral of a member of the yellow-shirted People's Alliance for Democracy in October 2008. This was interpreted as an endorsement of the movement to overthrow the pro-Thaksin government of the time. As one red-shirt protester explained to this author in 2009 at a demonstration in Bangkok, “how can a mother chose between her sons?” Some protestors also refer to being “orphans.” These family references are a response to the widespread promotion by state agencies of the king and queen as father and mother of the nation. Explicit reference to Thailand's wealthiest conglomerate, the Crown Property Bureau, can also be heard in conversation.(The work of Porphant (2008) has been influential in opening up discussion on royal wealth).
This broad willingness to speak openly about the monarchy contrasts with the adulation or enforced silence that prevailed a decade ago. The shift is best exemplified by the curious case of the brash and brave Thai historian Somsak Jeamteerasakul whose writings on Thai web-boards and in academic papers constantly trash any imposed code of self or socially-expected censorship in a quest for truth about the monarchy's historical and contemporary role. His work predates the current growth of commentary, and it was only in early 2011 that police moved to investigate charges against him of lèse-majesté.
Royalists, that is to say various state agencies, the military, the People's Alliance for Democracy, and the governing Democrat Party have responded to this fragmenting consensus by stoking fears of a movement to overthrow the monarchy and building up state and social surveillance, a topic explored by pseudonymous Han Krittian (Chapter 8). There has been a wave of unprecedented and unmanageable lèse-majesté cases, as chronicled in David Streckfuss' Chapter 5. From an average of five cases per year between 1992 and 2004, the total number of cases tried between 2006 and 2008 jumped to 231 (see pp. 107, 123). Streckfuss (2011) reports that a police source suggests that in 2009 some 3000 potential cases were being investigated. The lèse-majesté cases should not simply be read as state persecution – the vagaries of the law allow individuals acting as concerned citizens to play a role in launching a lèse-majesté case, as Streckfuss carefully outlines. However, Streckfuss (2011)) notes that the failure of an enduring ideology around the monarchy is largely behind the spate of lèse-majesté cases. The monarchy does have a strong conservative and opportunistic social constituency and that constituency, now seeing the wall of the STV crumble, is groping for ways of patching it together before the debris gathers at their feet.
Fear mongering has become rife. Numerous books on an alleged movement to overthrow the monarchy have appeared in the last year. One book, running into multiple editions, features Thaksin dressed in royal regalia and claims that the republican movement is inspired by the overthrow of monarchies in France, Russia and, more recently, Nepal (Kongbannathikan, 2010). Similar claims of republican intent are made on leaflets and banners. For example, in the 2007 election, campaign leaflets were discreetly distributed saying that a vote for the pro-Thaksin People's Power Party was a threat to the monarchy. These were secretive, unsigned leaflets distributed in the north-east, probably by security forces. The Phum Jai Thai party, composed of elements that defected from the pro-Thaksin forces in late 2008 to enter into a coalition government with the Democrat Party, makes such allegations on banners in some provinces with the slogan: “Resist the new Thai state.” This is a slant against the alleged anti-monarchical leanings of the red-shirted United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship and its parliamentary ally the Pheu Thai Party. Moreover, the Phum Jai Thai Party's control of the powerful Interior Ministry has led to the setting up of pro-monarchy networks, partly in response to the “red-villages for democracy” that spread across the north-east in defiance of the crackdown of May 2010 (Somphok, 2011: 24-5). These villages also pledge loyalty to the “democracy with the king as head of state.” Even so, some members explicitly await the return of Thaksin as prime minister (Somphok, 2011: 24-5). While many international supporters of the red shirts enthuse about the movement's apparent anti-royalism, a glance at the red-shirt press over the last two years demonstrates that the more tabloid elements, such as Red News and Truth Today, have attempted to promote a positive relationship to royalism, seeing themselves as more credible protectors of the Crown. Mainstream red-shirt attacks have mostly concentrated on individuals within the so-called network monarchy, or more discretely, the Queen. There are occasional renditions of the royal anthem at red-shirt demonstrations, and the republican element in the movement is a small minority. The movement has put the STV up for scrutiny, but it has yet to crack it (for a more optimistic view, see Glassman, 2011).
As might be expected, Saying the Unsayable advances an alternative to the STV. That it does this with unusual turns of argument and the tensions that form between the chapters makes reading this book a novel experience rather than one of déjà vu. Saying the Unsayable does not merely record what people have long been saying – as some wrongly assert of Handley's The King Never Smiles. Saying the Unsayable goes beyond easy sneers at the monarchy, and offers insights into cultural, political and governmental processes.
The full review of the book appears at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00472336.2011.610619
Full references in the original
July 4, 2011
Questions on Pending Thai Election: Bloomberg
On 27th June I emailed responses to three questions from Bloomberg News about the pending election.
1. What's at stake for the military/monarchy in this election?
This is the election in which fundamental decisions about Thailand's future will have to be made. I do not mean by that the electoral choices of the Thai people which have long been subverted even before the 2006 coup, but how the incumbent royalist and militarist elite will react to the electorate's choice and, conversely, what strategies the pro-Thaksin counter elite will employ.
The key question should the Democrat Party not have sufficient numbers to form a coalition government, is whether its backers in the anti-Thaksin establishment will remain in denial about the recurrent rejection they face at the ballot box. This is a possibility. Should they choose that path, no doubt with splits along the way, they know that more violence will follow. The military-on-military and militia violence witnessed during April-May last year may return with greater intensity. So, it's a high cost strategy, so high its protagonists may not win over the less hawkish elements.
Undoubtedly, there will be some brinkmanship, as those most committed to the 2006 coup hold to the hope their long denied objectives of breaking Thaksin forces can still be executed. But the last five years prove otherwise, and they now confront a mobilised movement with depth well beyond anyone imagined. My guess is that even though there are elements willing to go for broke, the exhausting toll of the last five years weighs very heavily on those who rode with the coupsters, but who are dismayed by the securitisation of Thailand's politics and the repositioning of hardline military and royalist elements. The highly corrupt and repressive nature of elements of the current Thai regime, by which I different forces that are articulated to the state apparatuses not just the government, is not what they wished for when they tacitly supported the coup. They really did envisage an elite liberal outcome. But they bought into a logic of decisionist politics which meant embracing highly repressive politics rather than abiding by constitutional niceties, in order to to defeat a perceived enemy. But that repressiveness has almost become a norm, not the exception. These fellow travellers of the 2006 coup might be eating humble pie and make a conditional deal. Thaksin for his part will be happy to oblige. Bringing some kind of settlement together in the form of a smooth transition will be extremely difficult. At the same time, there might be an alliance of convenience among the authoritarians in both camps. Thus, think of the future as one of further mutations and splits.
2. What would a win for Pheu Thai mean for the establishment that backed the coup? What is the likelihood that Pheu Thai will be able to govern?
There is certainly a chance that Pheu Thai may have the numbers to form government in coalition. Such a prospect, for the anti Thaksin forces will be a loss of face, and will threaten their existing position. For some of them it will mean permanent marginalisation from the centres of political life. Thaksin is an astute coalition builder and one can expect that in the event of a Pheu Thai government being formed, the chairs will quickly be rearranged and space made available to everyone who plays the new game. But some soft payback can be expected; it will also be a time for the upper echelons to consider retirement. The other option facing the incumbent forces - to fight a Pheu Thai victory - would mean buying into a genuine rewriting of Thailand's constitutional settlement well beyond the electoral democracy it still adheres to (notwithstanding recent retreats). The charade of the Peoples Alliance for Democracy's "new politics" , of limiting the number of elected MPS and moving towards a form of selectocracy might be one outcome. Even though it has looked like a fanatical reactionary fringe stoking up war and hatred for the last year, the seemingly anti-political agenda of "new politics" has powerful backers, who are waiting for an opportune moment.
So, oddly, Thailand may face a situation in which the western-oriented royalist establishment, by refusing to accept a Pheu Thai victory, faces up to its failure to win in the game of elite liberal democracy by abandoning the facade of democracy and move towards a more transparently authoritarian politics.
Alternatively, should Thaksin finally emerge triumphant (and I see this as the long term scenario) you would have a government claiming a democratic mandate pursuing a look East and South policy, and merging populist rhetoric with authoritarian structures. Either prospect looks disturbing if your interest is in genuine democracy.
As for the movement of the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, the redshirts, will it be able to hold any new pro-Thaksin government to democratic standards? The sad fact is that for all its shedding light on double standards and political hypocrisy, it has only done so selectively. When will the UDD publicly be honest about the authoritarian nature of the Thaksin years?
That said, we can not discount the possibility that a Pheu Thai victory will reluctantly be accepted, and new energies will be put into using constitutional avenues (sanctioned by the 2007 military sponsored constitution) and political strategies to fight Thaksin at the next election. Such an extraordinary outcome would mean a public return of democracy, while various machinations take place behind the scenes. That is what most democracies amount to these days.
3. What are the prospects of a power-sharing arrangement between Thaksin and his opponents?
Apart from hardline elements who mistakenly view Thaksin as the nadir of monarchist Thailand, my guess is the economic and political costs of protracted conflict is now weighing heavily on some of the incumbents who still want to steer Thailand to a prosperous and modern future. There must be considerable distress felt in royalist circles at the anti-royalist feeling that is emerging among rank and file redshirts and frankly the only genuine way to stop this growing is by bringing Thaksin back into the fold. Thaksin has time and time again shown his willingness to abide by most public protocols in relation to the monarchy. The inane propaganda efforts of the various security agencies are a lesson in blowback and the stupidity of force feeding people with "correct ideas". The more men in khaki wax lyrical about the royal family the more their standing is diminished. Thaksin has always signalled his willingness to do a deal and moreover is happy to deploy royalist imagery. This is what he offers and no one else can play this card. This will be the basis of any power-sharing arrangement.
In some senses the stark choice facing the rival camps is continued conflict at the cost of mutual destruction and seeing Thailand meltdown, or some step back from this and working out a formula for power sharing or at the very least a situation in which a "loyal opposition" has a credible chance of electoral victory at the following election. And should something be "agreed" this raises another question, how would such a historic anti-climax be received among those mobilised yellow and red -shirted citizens. This takes us to the final of the many unknowns of the post election period: the potential of a rising democratic mass in the face of this intra-elite bargaining and game-playing. Of all the possible game changers, this seems the least unlikely on the balance of probabilities. I'd like to be proven wrong.
1. What's at stake for the military/monarchy in this election?
This is the election in which fundamental decisions about Thailand's future will have to be made. I do not mean by that the electoral choices of the Thai people which have long been subverted even before the 2006 coup, but how the incumbent royalist and militarist elite will react to the electorate's choice and, conversely, what strategies the pro-Thaksin counter elite will employ.
The key question should the Democrat Party not have sufficient numbers to form a coalition government, is whether its backers in the anti-Thaksin establishment will remain in denial about the recurrent rejection they face at the ballot box. This is a possibility. Should they choose that path, no doubt with splits along the way, they know that more violence will follow. The military-on-military and militia violence witnessed during April-May last year may return with greater intensity. So, it's a high cost strategy, so high its protagonists may not win over the less hawkish elements.
Undoubtedly, there will be some brinkmanship, as those most committed to the 2006 coup hold to the hope their long denied objectives of breaking Thaksin forces can still be executed. But the last five years prove otherwise, and they now confront a mobilised movement with depth well beyond anyone imagined. My guess is that even though there are elements willing to go for broke, the exhausting toll of the last five years weighs very heavily on those who rode with the coupsters, but who are dismayed by the securitisation of Thailand's politics and the repositioning of hardline military and royalist elements. The highly corrupt and repressive nature of elements of the current Thai regime, by which I different forces that are articulated to the state apparatuses not just the government, is not what they wished for when they tacitly supported the coup. They really did envisage an elite liberal outcome. But they bought into a logic of decisionist politics which meant embracing highly repressive politics rather than abiding by constitutional niceties, in order to to defeat a perceived enemy. But that repressiveness has almost become a norm, not the exception. These fellow travellers of the 2006 coup might be eating humble pie and make a conditional deal. Thaksin for his part will be happy to oblige. Bringing some kind of settlement together in the form of a smooth transition will be extremely difficult. At the same time, there might be an alliance of convenience among the authoritarians in both camps. Thus, think of the future as one of further mutations and splits.
2. What would a win for Pheu Thai mean for the establishment that backed the coup? What is the likelihood that Pheu Thai will be able to govern?
There is certainly a chance that Pheu Thai may have the numbers to form government in coalition. Such a prospect, for the anti Thaksin forces will be a loss of face, and will threaten their existing position. For some of them it will mean permanent marginalisation from the centres of political life. Thaksin is an astute coalition builder and one can expect that in the event of a Pheu Thai government being formed, the chairs will quickly be rearranged and space made available to everyone who plays the new game. But some soft payback can be expected; it will also be a time for the upper echelons to consider retirement. The other option facing the incumbent forces - to fight a Pheu Thai victory - would mean buying into a genuine rewriting of Thailand's constitutional settlement well beyond the electoral democracy it still adheres to (notwithstanding recent retreats). The charade of the Peoples Alliance for Democracy's "new politics" , of limiting the number of elected MPS and moving towards a form of selectocracy might be one outcome. Even though it has looked like a fanatical reactionary fringe stoking up war and hatred for the last year, the seemingly anti-political agenda of "new politics" has powerful backers, who are waiting for an opportune moment.
So, oddly, Thailand may face a situation in which the western-oriented royalist establishment, by refusing to accept a Pheu Thai victory, faces up to its failure to win in the game of elite liberal democracy by abandoning the facade of democracy and move towards a more transparently authoritarian politics.
Alternatively, should Thaksin finally emerge triumphant (and I see this as the long term scenario) you would have a government claiming a democratic mandate pursuing a look East and South policy, and merging populist rhetoric with authoritarian structures. Either prospect looks disturbing if your interest is in genuine democracy.
As for the movement of the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship, the redshirts, will it be able to hold any new pro-Thaksin government to democratic standards? The sad fact is that for all its shedding light on double standards and political hypocrisy, it has only done so selectively. When will the UDD publicly be honest about the authoritarian nature of the Thaksin years?
That said, we can not discount the possibility that a Pheu Thai victory will reluctantly be accepted, and new energies will be put into using constitutional avenues (sanctioned by the 2007 military sponsored constitution) and political strategies to fight Thaksin at the next election. Such an extraordinary outcome would mean a public return of democracy, while various machinations take place behind the scenes. That is what most democracies amount to these days.
3. What are the prospects of a power-sharing arrangement between Thaksin and his opponents?
Apart from hardline elements who mistakenly view Thaksin as the nadir of monarchist Thailand, my guess is the economic and political costs of protracted conflict is now weighing heavily on some of the incumbents who still want to steer Thailand to a prosperous and modern future. There must be considerable distress felt in royalist circles at the anti-royalist feeling that is emerging among rank and file redshirts and frankly the only genuine way to stop this growing is by bringing Thaksin back into the fold. Thaksin has time and time again shown his willingness to abide by most public protocols in relation to the monarchy. The inane propaganda efforts of the various security agencies are a lesson in blowback and the stupidity of force feeding people with "correct ideas". The more men in khaki wax lyrical about the royal family the more their standing is diminished. Thaksin has always signalled his willingness to do a deal and moreover is happy to deploy royalist imagery. This is what he offers and no one else can play this card. This will be the basis of any power-sharing arrangement.
In some senses the stark choice facing the rival camps is continued conflict at the cost of mutual destruction and seeing Thailand meltdown, or some step back from this and working out a formula for power sharing or at the very least a situation in which a "loyal opposition" has a credible chance of electoral victory at the following election. And should something be "agreed" this raises another question, how would such a historic anti-climax be received among those mobilised yellow and red -shirted citizens. This takes us to the final of the many unknowns of the post election period: the potential of a rising democratic mass in the face of this intra-elite bargaining and game-playing. Of all the possible game changers, this seems the least unlikely on the balance of probabilities. I'd like to be proven wrong.
January 21, 2009
Lèse majesté and Solidarity: the Case of Ji Giles Ungpakorn
On Freedom of Expression
Very few people are able or willing to fight lèse majesté charges in Thailand. Understandably. The prospect of a long term in gaol (any time is a long time in a Thai gaol), the chance of blowing a royal pardon if one pleads not-guilty, the breaking of social norms, such fates must weigh heavily on the minds of those charged with a crime that should have no place in modern law. This law is so morally politicised that its employment is equivalent to the imposition of a religious creed.
For some years the fear that has surrounded lèse majesté has been ebbing, and writings in the Thai language have ventured beyond royal hagiography. The future of Thai democracy will be more robust, in part, because of such work.
Most western academics working on Thailand who care about truth have probably, somewhere along the line, written something that could be construed as lese majeste if their writings were to fall into the wrong hands.
Western academics have been reasonably protected by the language barrier. Generally their work is not translated into Thai and it rarely reaches a Thai audience. Perhaps it is also because their work is not published in Thailand.
Thai Marxist Ji Giles Ungpakorn, an Associate Professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, for some time has been willing to test what can be said about the monarchy in both English and the Thai language.
Quite rightly, he is motivated by a desire to understand and explain the nature of Thai politics. You can not do that without talking about the monarchy.
In his fearless book "A Coup for the Rich" he makes some comments about the monarchy and the use of that institution by the military. His right to make those comments should be supported by anyone who cares about freedom of speech, regardless of whether they agree or not with his argument.
Yesterday, the 20th January 2009, he was charged with lèse majesté because of "offending" passages in that book. For this "crime", if proven guilty, he may be imprisoned for up to 15 years.
Liberals, in the classic sense, typically believe in free speech. They assume that the best argument emerges from the free deliberation of citizens. But most political liberals in Thailand have long believed that the monarchy is a safety valve, a para-political institution that can help smooth the processes of economic, social and political transition. They generally fear an unmediated democracy where all are equal. Their willingness to trade the freedom-principle for stability in the name of elite liberalism (and their willingness to pact with statist conservatives) means that they are unlikely to support free speech.
Indeed, some will be pressing for "due process" in this case; that means the application of a "law", the merits of which even the incumbent king, Bhumiphol, questioned in 2005.
If this case goes ahead and Ji Giles Ungpakorn contests it, much more than the very important freedom of one person will be at stake. It is important that anyone who supports freedom of speech opposes the politicised use of lese majeste. I can think of no use of lese majeste that is not politicised.
For more information on Ji's case go to
http://wdpress.blog.co.uk/
On Jakraphop's lese majeste case see here
Very few people are able or willing to fight lèse majesté charges in Thailand. Understandably. The prospect of a long term in gaol (any time is a long time in a Thai gaol), the chance of blowing a royal pardon if one pleads not-guilty, the breaking of social norms, such fates must weigh heavily on the minds of those charged with a crime that should have no place in modern law. This law is so morally politicised that its employment is equivalent to the imposition of a religious creed.
For some years the fear that has surrounded lèse majesté has been ebbing, and writings in the Thai language have ventured beyond royal hagiography. The future of Thai democracy will be more robust, in part, because of such work.
Most western academics working on Thailand who care about truth have probably, somewhere along the line, written something that could be construed as lese majeste if their writings were to fall into the wrong hands.
Western academics have been reasonably protected by the language barrier. Generally their work is not translated into Thai and it rarely reaches a Thai audience. Perhaps it is also because their work is not published in Thailand.
Thai Marxist Ji Giles Ungpakorn, an Associate Professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, for some time has been willing to test what can be said about the monarchy in both English and the Thai language.
Quite rightly, he is motivated by a desire to understand and explain the nature of Thai politics. You can not do that without talking about the monarchy.
In his fearless book "A Coup for the Rich" he makes some comments about the monarchy and the use of that institution by the military. His right to make those comments should be supported by anyone who cares about freedom of speech, regardless of whether they agree or not with his argument.
Yesterday, the 20th January 2009, he was charged with lèse majesté because of "offending" passages in that book. For this "crime", if proven guilty, he may be imprisoned for up to 15 years.
Liberals, in the classic sense, typically believe in free speech. They assume that the best argument emerges from the free deliberation of citizens. But most political liberals in Thailand have long believed that the monarchy is a safety valve, a para-political institution that can help smooth the processes of economic, social and political transition. They generally fear an unmediated democracy where all are equal. Their willingness to trade the freedom-principle for stability in the name of elite liberalism (and their willingness to pact with statist conservatives) means that they are unlikely to support free speech.
Indeed, some will be pressing for "due process" in this case; that means the application of a "law", the merits of which even the incumbent king, Bhumiphol, questioned in 2005.
If this case goes ahead and Ji Giles Ungpakorn contests it, much more than the very important freedom of one person will be at stake. It is important that anyone who supports freedom of speech opposes the politicised use of lese majeste. I can think of no use of lese majeste that is not politicised.
For more information on Ji's case go to
http://wdpress.blog.co.uk/
On Jakraphop's lese majeste case see here
November 10, 2008
King-People Mutuality and the Thaksin gamble
During his phone-in to the 80, 000 strong anti-coup rally of November 1 in Bangkok, organised by the United Front of Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra noted that after his conviction in the Rachadapisek land case and the imposition of a two year gaol sentence, only two things could bring him back to Thailand - the kindness of the king or the power of the people.
This has been interpreted in some quarters as a threat to force a royal pardon. But on the night of the phone-in Thaksin was asked if this reference to the king and the people touched the idea of Rachaprachasamasai. He replied in the affirmative. There is no correct way of translating Rachaprachasamasai; king-people-interdependency comes closest. I use king-people-‘‘mutuality’’ below to suggest something of the pacting nature between king and people inherent in the term.
The People's Alliance for Democracy has been attacked for its ultra-royalism. Yet, the pro-Thaksin camp is not without its strident royalists. There are various groupings within the anti-coup/pro-Thaksin camp, some more anti-royalist/royalist than others. A read of the pro-Thaksin Thai language press shows that the more mainstream elements of the pro-Thaksin forces are eager to play the royalier than thou card at times. While this may be opportunistic, as is PAD's use of royalism, it is not unworthy of analysis. Consider for example the attacks by Prachathat on PAD for suggesting a redirection of the royal funeral procession.
Different political forms can attach to the monarchy. It is wrong to think that the current struggle in Thailand is between royalists and republicans, just as it is wrong to think it is simply between democrats and anti-democrats. Attention to political discourse on the ground can reveal a lot more insight into what is being fought over.
If the pro-Thaksin camp is not anti-monarchy as such, and I would suggest on the whole it is not, it may be against forms of liberalism that have attached to the monarchy over the last generation. Moreover, this stance might also be informed by political confidence and the feeling that for too long economic meritocracy has suffered under a culture that is heavily aristocratic. Although Jakraphop Penkair’s speech to the Foreign Correspondent’s Club last year more than hinted at this antagonism, for the most part this element of the struggle has been muted and instead turned on individuals (such as Prem) and on abstractions such as the “the elite”.
However, as Thaksin faces further obstacles in his attempt to make a come back (loss of visa to the UK, among other things) it is possible that he will bring the more left-wing elements of his support base to the fore (note the mention that Thaksin is being considered for the Simon Bolivar medal in the press recently!) in an effort to put popular pressure behind constitutional amendments and a possible amnesty. In pushing beyond the populist pro-poor and politically ambivalent position that has so far characterised the pro-Thaksin camp, a more leftist strand might be mobilised. This would also entail a more openly critical approach to the monarchy and further investment in the idea of democracy. If politicians have been running the Thaksin rehabilitation campaign so far, we might now see those leftists activists who have banded behind him upgraded to HQ. Leftist support of Thai Rak Thai pro-poor policies and their antagonism to 'feudalists' has been a useful prop for Thaksin in the media, but has not really mattered greatly in the provinces where Thaksin has needed few ideological embellishments. It may now become more meaningful in the Grandmaster's play.
Certainly, many in the pro-Thaksin camp have been waiting for Thaksin to launch a more offensive war, and to mobilise popular sentiment against "elites". And Thaksin’s threat to “start naming names” (10 November 2008) after his UK visa was revoked, might see the abstract elite actually “named and shamed”. Much earlier than expected, Thaksin may well deliver on his post-flee promise to “tell all” .
The question for those who have backed Thaksin thus far is why it has taken two years after the coup to promise to "tell all". Since many Thaksin supporters attack the Bangkok elite as looking down on people in the provinces, and in this they are broadly right, it is reasonable to ask why Thaksin has not entrusted the truth to the provincial folk. Is it that they can not deal with the truth?
This of course points to one of the key features of the current conflict: both sides are mobilising political messages that are deliberately misleading. And the leadership of each sees popular support as if it were a piece on a chess board. Now seemingly facing a perpetual stalemate, Grandmaster Thaksin might well believe he can use his mass support base as so many pawns in an all out dash to the first rank whereupon a pawn can be promoted to a higher rank. Indeed, in linking a royal pardon to people's power, however unclearly, the pro-Thaksin forces were making an interesting statement that hints at a reversal of the balance of power in elite conceptions of rachaprachasamasai (see below).
Many people of course do not envisage themselves as pawns, and will be acting with their own interests in mind, lending a transformative potential to mass mobilisation from either side.
I wrote on the idea of king-people mutuality last year and I reproduce that discussion below for clarification.
************************************************************
Rachaprachasamasai and the Origins of Article 7
Taken from pages 148-150 Michael K. Connors "Article of Faith: the failure of royal liberalism in Thailand" Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 38, No. 1, February 2008, pp. 143 – 165.
"The calls to “return the royal powers” in 2005 and 2006 were premised on Article 7 of the 1997 Constitution. It states: “Whenever no provision under this Constitution is applicable to any case, it shall be decided in accordance with the constitutional practice in the democratic regime of government with the King as Head of the State” (Kingdom of Thailand, 1997).
Article 7 was originally used by anti-Thaksin forces in 2005 to support monarchical intervention to “kick start” a new round of political reform. As those forces grew into a broader movement in 2006, interlocking networks of individuals, political parties, professional associations, civic organisations and NGOs used Article 7 to call for a royally appointed interim government (see Kasian, 2006; Nelson, 2007). 3 The use of Article 7 was accompanied by the revival of the term rachaprachasamasai. These two elements enabled an intellectual argument and a political slogan to be built around returning power to the king. Before examining their application in political struggle, an examination of Article 7 and rachaprachasamasai offers insights into their political substance.
The Public Relations Department (1998) reports that in 1956 the king visited the north-east of Thailand and met people inflicted with leprosy, whereupon he initiated a royal project under the Ministry of Health. Royal funds established the Institute of Rachaprachasamasai and its eponymous foundation in 1960. From that time rachaprachasamasai has been associated with public health. The most significant political inflection to the term came in 1972, first in Siam Rat, and then in a seminar discussion featuring Kukrit Pramoj (Kukrit et al., 1972) concerning the possibility of democracy in then military-ruled Thailand.
Kukrit, having courted favour with the military regime, expressed concern that the divide between the people and the increasingly integrated and self-interested bureaucratic and business classes provided the Communist Party of Thailand with opportunities to win people's allegiance. Also at play was the fact that Kukrit's long-term ambition to forge a metaphoric unity between king and people/nation was being undermined by the rise of left-wing currents among students and intellectuals (Saichon, 2007: 181, 263-368). Kukrit noted that rural people, facing various injustices and disadvantages, lacked group identity and a “sense of belonging” (Kukrit et al., 1972: 30-1). To overcome this Kukrit proposed that the king undertake more rural visits to create a sense of belonging and, as a consequence, the monarchy would be identified as one with the people. Arguing that the king and the people were “outside the circle” of power, Kukrit envisaged an interdependency that strengthened them (Kukrit et al., 1972: 39). Importantly, Kukrit's stated ambition in strengthening the bond between the king and the people was to counterbalance the increasingly integrated bureaucratic and business circles, indeed to break them apart so that the bureaucracy could govern impartially (Kukrit et al., 1972: 34, 38). This mutuality he labelled rachaprachasamasai. Kukrit outlined a political project for reform that began with a rachaprachasamasai constitution: a directly royally appointed parliament that gradually opened up to popular election. A royally appointed parliament would have sufficient legitimacy and prestige to counter vested interests (Kukrit et al., 1972: 40-1). Kukrit envisaged the monarchy acting as a moral exemplar of the principles of public rule: this could discipline predatory elites by orientating them to the public good. This strategy requires seeing the monarchy in terms that are abstracted from its own institutional interests. This is precisely how Thai liberals and conservatives understand the monarchy today. The quid pro quo of this bargain, obscured by a mythic social contract, might be crudely stated as: you perform the legitimacy function of symbolic unity and assume power of last resort. In return you are eulogised and made sacral, your earthly endeavours will be ignored.
The term rachaprachasamasai was taken to a wider audience at a mass rally in November 2005 when Sondhi claimed that Thaksin was attacking the mutuality of king and people - their joint sovereignty - by usurping the relationship through constant reference to his majoritarian support of “19 million votes” (Khamnun, 2006: 336, 342). 4 He also called on officials and the military to break from the government. The use of Article 7, to return power to the king, was conceived as a practical expression of rachaprachasamasai- the people were active in returning power to the king, given that the constitution had been subverted. Rachaprachasamasai need not be consciously invoked by political forces, although it was in 2005-06; its utility lies in indicating that a form of “people's politics,” of whatever political persuasion, can attach to the monarchy.5
Rachaprachasamasai was the intellectual substance that lay behind the use of Article 7: it expressed the mythic belief of the mutuality of king and people. The question arises as to whether Article 7 was or was not originally formulated to give expression to this doctrine. While the 1997 draft constitution had been subject to many public hearings, Article 7, originally an amendment to Article 6, was exempt from this process and appears to have been introduced into the Constitution Drafting Assembly (CDA) in July 1997, after public hearings ceased. Internal CDA reports, however, record an interesting debate (CDA, 1997a). Controversy erupted when the CDA was presented with an amendment to Article 6 to add the wording that would become Article 7. Framer Somkhit Sirisangkhom argued that the amendment was taken from previous interim constitutions issued by coup groups; the brevity of those constitutions required an expansive article allowing the exercise of broad powers (CDA, 1997a: 58). 6 Perhaps Suni Chaiyarot offered the greatest challenge: “How to interpret democracy with the king as head of state? There have been many times when this was the system, and it was not really a democracy. So, how to interpret it?” (CDA, 1997a: 69-70).
Bowonsak Uwanno, the constitution's primary framer, replied that the amendment was required to guide the Constitutional Court's deliberations. The constitution could not anticipate all exigencies; the amendment would provide the required interpretative freedom, allowing the Constitutional Court to judge according to the traditions of “democracy with the king as head of state” (CDA, 1997a: 70-1). Hinting at rachaprachasamasai, Bowonsak noted that the right to petition the king was not in the draft constitution and yet this right could be invoked in terms of the amendment (CDA, 1997a: 72-3). However, Bowonsak principally presented the amendment as limited in scope - an attempt to avoid legal loopholes.
Bowonsak's explanation is not convincing. Internal documents of the CDA that record reservations within the drafting committee about each article make no mention of what was to become Article 7 (CDA, 1997b). Why had the drafter not considered the introduction of the Article during the committee stage months earlier? Why was it introduced in July? The answer may lie in controversial deliberations over Article 3 that preceded deliberations on Article 6. Article 3 stated that “sovereignty comes from the people.” Against the wishes of the CDA president, Anand Panyarachun - the doyen of Thai liberalism - the CDA debated a motion to change the wording of Article 3 to “sovereignty belongs to the people” in early July. Thongthong Chandarangsu argued against the amendment on the basis “of the principle of rachaprachasamasai” (CDA, 1997c: 110). A slim majority voted for the amendment (CDA, 1997a: 133). 7 Opponents lobbied for the CDA to overturn its decision (Bangkok Post, 11 July 1997). Conservatives and royal liberals were concerned that such changes, along with the very expansive rights written into the new charter, were moving away from traditional concepts of political order, in which the monarchy figured greatly. The newly worded Article 3 challenged some key aspects of juridical thought, in which the monarchy is said to have given sovereignty to the people, and that sovereignty in the last instance always resides with the monarchy. Article 3 raised fears that the king's power and prerogatives were being eroded and that the CDA was being too strident in its various articles relating to rights and freedoms. Here, perhaps, is the mystery of Article 7 unlocked: the effect of Article 7 was to limit the reach of all of these new claims by empowering a traditionalistic and royalist interpretation should one be so required.8 While Bowonsak's case to the CDA for amendment was quite limited, an examination of his influential juridical thought suggests a greater depth to his thinking.
Eager to re-affirm the role of the “traditional constitution” in Thailand in the context of the first political reform movement, Bowonsak (1994: 9) argued that “if one analyses deeply in all spheres … no one could deny that the Thai monarchy … and the people are the main institutions in the democracyness of Thai society.” By using the phrase “the king of the people, by the people, and for the people” (Bowonsak, 1994: 12), he elucidated what was meant by the term “traditional constitution.” 9 In this formula, the king is the mediator of democracy; it is through him that popular will is manifest. Sovereignty is seen as residing jointly in the king and the people, a condition that is said to have emerged when King Prajadhipok “bestowed” the 1932 constitution (Bowonsak, 1994: 25). So, what happens in the aftermath of a coup, an event sufficiently frequent to affect judicial principles and law? The modern Thai judicial system operates on the basis of judgements made from the 1950s onwards that condone coups as legally legitimate if they pruportedly win the acceptance of ''the people''; thus, law issued by coup groups is held to be binding. Speaking from this vantage point, Bowonsak argued that during a coup sovereignty returns to the king. In this state of suspension the coup group drafts a constitution upon which the king deliberates, and then, if the draft is accepted the king returns sovereignty to the people (Bowonsak, 1994: 25).10 Bowonsak explained that the king's customary powers must be interpreted in terms of traditions of government (Bowonsak, 1994: 28-9). This “traditional constitution” by convention, Bowonsak argued, supplements the king's right to warn and advise with extra powers. This included the ability, in the face of crisis “to dissolve parliament … he may even remove the prime minister in order to end a crisis because according to the constitution he is the owner of sovereign power with the people …” (Bowonsak, 1994: 29). Further, should the people petition the king (having been through various other procedures):
He has royal prerogative according to the traditional constitution to command that the civil service act, and the civil service must respect this and act accordingly. This royal deliberation is effectively law as He wields sovereignty for the people … he is the Supreme Ombudsman … (Bowonsak, 1994: 30).
Bowonsak made scant reference to these ideas in his defence of the amendment in the CDA, but that did not stop people arguing for Article 7 being used in its most expansive sense."
*************************************************
This has been interpreted in some quarters as a threat to force a royal pardon. But on the night of the phone-in Thaksin was asked if this reference to the king and the people touched the idea of Rachaprachasamasai. He replied in the affirmative. There is no correct way of translating Rachaprachasamasai; king-people-interdependency comes closest. I use king-people-‘‘mutuality’’ below to suggest something of the pacting nature between king and people inherent in the term.
The People's Alliance for Democracy has been attacked for its ultra-royalism. Yet, the pro-Thaksin camp is not without its strident royalists. There are various groupings within the anti-coup/pro-Thaksin camp, some more anti-royalist/royalist than others. A read of the pro-Thaksin Thai language press shows that the more mainstream elements of the pro-Thaksin forces are eager to play the royalier than thou card at times. While this may be opportunistic, as is PAD's use of royalism, it is not unworthy of analysis. Consider for example the attacks by Prachathat on PAD for suggesting a redirection of the royal funeral procession.
Different political forms can attach to the monarchy. It is wrong to think that the current struggle in Thailand is between royalists and republicans, just as it is wrong to think it is simply between democrats and anti-democrats. Attention to political discourse on the ground can reveal a lot more insight into what is being fought over.
If the pro-Thaksin camp is not anti-monarchy as such, and I would suggest on the whole it is not, it may be against forms of liberalism that have attached to the monarchy over the last generation. Moreover, this stance might also be informed by political confidence and the feeling that for too long economic meritocracy has suffered under a culture that is heavily aristocratic. Although Jakraphop Penkair’s speech to the Foreign Correspondent’s Club last year more than hinted at this antagonism, for the most part this element of the struggle has been muted and instead turned on individuals (such as Prem) and on abstractions such as the “the elite”.
However, as Thaksin faces further obstacles in his attempt to make a come back (loss of visa to the UK, among other things) it is possible that he will bring the more left-wing elements of his support base to the fore (note the mention that Thaksin is being considered for the Simon Bolivar medal in the press recently!) in an effort to put popular pressure behind constitutional amendments and a possible amnesty. In pushing beyond the populist pro-poor and politically ambivalent position that has so far characterised the pro-Thaksin camp, a more leftist strand might be mobilised. This would also entail a more openly critical approach to the monarchy and further investment in the idea of democracy. If politicians have been running the Thaksin rehabilitation campaign so far, we might now see those leftists activists who have banded behind him upgraded to HQ. Leftist support of Thai Rak Thai pro-poor policies and their antagonism to 'feudalists' has been a useful prop for Thaksin in the media, but has not really mattered greatly in the provinces where Thaksin has needed few ideological embellishments. It may now become more meaningful in the Grandmaster's play.
Certainly, many in the pro-Thaksin camp have been waiting for Thaksin to launch a more offensive war, and to mobilise popular sentiment against "elites". And Thaksin’s threat to “start naming names” (10 November 2008) after his UK visa was revoked, might see the abstract elite actually “named and shamed”. Much earlier than expected, Thaksin may well deliver on his post-flee promise to “tell all” .
The question for those who have backed Thaksin thus far is why it has taken two years after the coup to promise to "tell all". Since many Thaksin supporters attack the Bangkok elite as looking down on people in the provinces, and in this they are broadly right, it is reasonable to ask why Thaksin has not entrusted the truth to the provincial folk. Is it that they can not deal with the truth?
This of course points to one of the key features of the current conflict: both sides are mobilising political messages that are deliberately misleading. And the leadership of each sees popular support as if it were a piece on a chess board. Now seemingly facing a perpetual stalemate, Grandmaster Thaksin might well believe he can use his mass support base as so many pawns in an all out dash to the first rank whereupon a pawn can be promoted to a higher rank. Indeed, in linking a royal pardon to people's power, however unclearly, the pro-Thaksin forces were making an interesting statement that hints at a reversal of the balance of power in elite conceptions of rachaprachasamasai (see below).
Many people of course do not envisage themselves as pawns, and will be acting with their own interests in mind, lending a transformative potential to mass mobilisation from either side.
I wrote on the idea of king-people mutuality last year and I reproduce that discussion below for clarification.
************************************************************
Rachaprachasamasai and the Origins of Article 7
Taken from pages 148-150 Michael K. Connors "Article of Faith: the failure of royal liberalism in Thailand" Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 38, No. 1, February 2008, pp. 143 – 165.
"The calls to “return the royal powers” in 2005 and 2006 were premised on Article 7 of the 1997 Constitution. It states: “Whenever no provision under this Constitution is applicable to any case, it shall be decided in accordance with the constitutional practice in the democratic regime of government with the King as Head of the State” (Kingdom of Thailand, 1997).
Article 7 was originally used by anti-Thaksin forces in 2005 to support monarchical intervention to “kick start” a new round of political reform. As those forces grew into a broader movement in 2006, interlocking networks of individuals, political parties, professional associations, civic organisations and NGOs used Article 7 to call for a royally appointed interim government (see Kasian, 2006; Nelson, 2007). 3 The use of Article 7 was accompanied by the revival of the term rachaprachasamasai. These two elements enabled an intellectual argument and a political slogan to be built around returning power to the king. Before examining their application in political struggle, an examination of Article 7 and rachaprachasamasai offers insights into their political substance.
The Public Relations Department (1998) reports that in 1956 the king visited the north-east of Thailand and met people inflicted with leprosy, whereupon he initiated a royal project under the Ministry of Health. Royal funds established the Institute of Rachaprachasamasai and its eponymous foundation in 1960. From that time rachaprachasamasai has been associated with public health. The most significant political inflection to the term came in 1972, first in Siam Rat, and then in a seminar discussion featuring Kukrit Pramoj (Kukrit et al., 1972) concerning the possibility of democracy in then military-ruled Thailand.
Kukrit, having courted favour with the military regime, expressed concern that the divide between the people and the increasingly integrated and self-interested bureaucratic and business classes provided the Communist Party of Thailand with opportunities to win people's allegiance. Also at play was the fact that Kukrit's long-term ambition to forge a metaphoric unity between king and people/nation was being undermined by the rise of left-wing currents among students and intellectuals (Saichon, 2007: 181, 263-368). Kukrit noted that rural people, facing various injustices and disadvantages, lacked group identity and a “sense of belonging” (Kukrit et al., 1972: 30-1). To overcome this Kukrit proposed that the king undertake more rural visits to create a sense of belonging and, as a consequence, the monarchy would be identified as one with the people. Arguing that the king and the people were “outside the circle” of power, Kukrit envisaged an interdependency that strengthened them (Kukrit et al., 1972: 39). Importantly, Kukrit's stated ambition in strengthening the bond between the king and the people was to counterbalance the increasingly integrated bureaucratic and business circles, indeed to break them apart so that the bureaucracy could govern impartially (Kukrit et al., 1972: 34, 38). This mutuality he labelled rachaprachasamasai. Kukrit outlined a political project for reform that began with a rachaprachasamasai constitution: a directly royally appointed parliament that gradually opened up to popular election. A royally appointed parliament would have sufficient legitimacy and prestige to counter vested interests (Kukrit et al., 1972: 40-1). Kukrit envisaged the monarchy acting as a moral exemplar of the principles of public rule: this could discipline predatory elites by orientating them to the public good. This strategy requires seeing the monarchy in terms that are abstracted from its own institutional interests. This is precisely how Thai liberals and conservatives understand the monarchy today. The quid pro quo of this bargain, obscured by a mythic social contract, might be crudely stated as: you perform the legitimacy function of symbolic unity and assume power of last resort. In return you are eulogised and made sacral, your earthly endeavours will be ignored.
The term rachaprachasamasai was taken to a wider audience at a mass rally in November 2005 when Sondhi claimed that Thaksin was attacking the mutuality of king and people - their joint sovereignty - by usurping the relationship through constant reference to his majoritarian support of “19 million votes” (Khamnun, 2006: 336, 342). 4 He also called on officials and the military to break from the government. The use of Article 7, to return power to the king, was conceived as a practical expression of rachaprachasamasai- the people were active in returning power to the king, given that the constitution had been subverted. Rachaprachasamasai need not be consciously invoked by political forces, although it was in 2005-06; its utility lies in indicating that a form of “people's politics,” of whatever political persuasion, can attach to the monarchy.5
Rachaprachasamasai was the intellectual substance that lay behind the use of Article 7: it expressed the mythic belief of the mutuality of king and people. The question arises as to whether Article 7 was or was not originally formulated to give expression to this doctrine. While the 1997 draft constitution had been subject to many public hearings, Article 7, originally an amendment to Article 6, was exempt from this process and appears to have been introduced into the Constitution Drafting Assembly (CDA) in July 1997, after public hearings ceased. Internal CDA reports, however, record an interesting debate (CDA, 1997a). Controversy erupted when the CDA was presented with an amendment to Article 6 to add the wording that would become Article 7. Framer Somkhit Sirisangkhom argued that the amendment was taken from previous interim constitutions issued by coup groups; the brevity of those constitutions required an expansive article allowing the exercise of broad powers (CDA, 1997a: 58). 6 Perhaps Suni Chaiyarot offered the greatest challenge: “How to interpret democracy with the king as head of state? There have been many times when this was the system, and it was not really a democracy. So, how to interpret it?” (CDA, 1997a: 69-70).
Bowonsak Uwanno, the constitution's primary framer, replied that the amendment was required to guide the Constitutional Court's deliberations. The constitution could not anticipate all exigencies; the amendment would provide the required interpretative freedom, allowing the Constitutional Court to judge according to the traditions of “democracy with the king as head of state” (CDA, 1997a: 70-1). Hinting at rachaprachasamasai, Bowonsak noted that the right to petition the king was not in the draft constitution and yet this right could be invoked in terms of the amendment (CDA, 1997a: 72-3). However, Bowonsak principally presented the amendment as limited in scope - an attempt to avoid legal loopholes.
Bowonsak's explanation is not convincing. Internal documents of the CDA that record reservations within the drafting committee about each article make no mention of what was to become Article 7 (CDA, 1997b). Why had the drafter not considered the introduction of the Article during the committee stage months earlier? Why was it introduced in July? The answer may lie in controversial deliberations over Article 3 that preceded deliberations on Article 6. Article 3 stated that “sovereignty comes from the people.” Against the wishes of the CDA president, Anand Panyarachun - the doyen of Thai liberalism - the CDA debated a motion to change the wording of Article 3 to “sovereignty belongs to the people” in early July. Thongthong Chandarangsu argued against the amendment on the basis “of the principle of rachaprachasamasai” (CDA, 1997c: 110). A slim majority voted for the amendment (CDA, 1997a: 133). 7 Opponents lobbied for the CDA to overturn its decision (Bangkok Post, 11 July 1997). Conservatives and royal liberals were concerned that such changes, along with the very expansive rights written into the new charter, were moving away from traditional concepts of political order, in which the monarchy figured greatly. The newly worded Article 3 challenged some key aspects of juridical thought, in which the monarchy is said to have given sovereignty to the people, and that sovereignty in the last instance always resides with the monarchy. Article 3 raised fears that the king's power and prerogatives were being eroded and that the CDA was being too strident in its various articles relating to rights and freedoms. Here, perhaps, is the mystery of Article 7 unlocked: the effect of Article 7 was to limit the reach of all of these new claims by empowering a traditionalistic and royalist interpretation should one be so required.8 While Bowonsak's case to the CDA for amendment was quite limited, an examination of his influential juridical thought suggests a greater depth to his thinking.
Eager to re-affirm the role of the “traditional constitution” in Thailand in the context of the first political reform movement, Bowonsak (1994: 9) argued that “if one analyses deeply in all spheres … no one could deny that the Thai monarchy … and the people are the main institutions in the democracyness of Thai society.” By using the phrase “the king of the people, by the people, and for the people” (Bowonsak, 1994: 12), he elucidated what was meant by the term “traditional constitution.” 9 In this formula, the king is the mediator of democracy; it is through him that popular will is manifest. Sovereignty is seen as residing jointly in the king and the people, a condition that is said to have emerged when King Prajadhipok “bestowed” the 1932 constitution (Bowonsak, 1994: 25). So, what happens in the aftermath of a coup, an event sufficiently frequent to affect judicial principles and law? The modern Thai judicial system operates on the basis of judgements made from the 1950s onwards that condone coups as legally legitimate if they pruportedly win the acceptance of ''the people''; thus, law issued by coup groups is held to be binding. Speaking from this vantage point, Bowonsak argued that during a coup sovereignty returns to the king. In this state of suspension the coup group drafts a constitution upon which the king deliberates, and then, if the draft is accepted the king returns sovereignty to the people (Bowonsak, 1994: 25).10 Bowonsak explained that the king's customary powers must be interpreted in terms of traditions of government (Bowonsak, 1994: 28-9). This “traditional constitution” by convention, Bowonsak argued, supplements the king's right to warn and advise with extra powers. This included the ability, in the face of crisis “to dissolve parliament … he may even remove the prime minister in order to end a crisis because according to the constitution he is the owner of sovereign power with the people …” (Bowonsak, 1994: 29). Further, should the people petition the king (having been through various other procedures):
He has royal prerogative according to the traditional constitution to command that the civil service act, and the civil service must respect this and act accordingly. This royal deliberation is effectively law as He wields sovereignty for the people … he is the Supreme Ombudsman … (Bowonsak, 1994: 30).
Bowonsak made scant reference to these ideas in his defence of the amendment in the CDA, but that did not stop people arguing for Article 7 being used in its most expansive sense."
*************************************************
October 12, 2008
Getting into detail
It is not often that The Economist adds to the political literacy of a situation. Like the Wall Street Journal, certain fixed ideas direct interpretation in such a way that the nuances of a political struggle are reduced to the reflexes of western capital interest. The nébuleuse probably believe these publications are the most direct form of communication with Big Capital. Afterall, the mastheads of these esteemed tribunes are said to process global intelligence as if it were from God Himself (God with a capital M)
Allow me to draw attention to a recent article in The Economist on Thailand's turmoil. Instead of the lazy and repetitive mantra that has been bandied about in various newspapers and online that PAD is purely fascist and that it wants a parliament composed of 70% selected delegates (a position which changed a month or so ago), The Economist has rightly recognised PAD'S diverse make up. Yes, there are virulent rightwing streams in the organisation, but it also has a strand of "royal liberalism", which the Economist defines as " the idea that a powerful crown can act as a check on rapacious politicians." In the Thai literature the king has been called the Supreme Ombudsman.
I am of the opinion that the current struggle in Thailand is full of contradictions, and the position of royal liberalism is only one part of that contradictory whole. The point about royal liberalism, as it has developed in Thailand, is not that it defines the role of the monarch at all times, but rather it idealises what the monarchy might be in the face of corrupt electoral democracy. As a social force, royal liberalism is an attempt to direct the institution of the monarchy to a particular role. It neither countenances a Cambodian-style politicised monarchy, nor one completely identified with national security complexes. The Thaksin regime - in eroding the 1997 constitutional settlement - challenged both a liberal and conservative establishment.
I have written about this in "Article of Faith: the failure of royal liberalism in Thailand" in Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2008, 38, 1.
As long as the western media sees what is happening in Thailand as a struggle between a democratically elected government and a reactionary social movement with establishment backing, it will continue to interpret the events as if they were happening in Washington, Canberra or London. They are not. They are happening in Thailand.
Recognising that there is some tension in the anti-Thaksin movement is an advance. The next advance, given that the reactionary and undemocratic nature of some of PAD's support base has been well established, is to recognise the extradordinary reactionary and undemocratic nature of elements of the pro-Thaksin camp.
---------
Post edited for clarity and to remove rhetorical excess: on Sunday night at 7 PM.
Allow me to draw attention to a recent article in The Economist on Thailand's turmoil. Instead of the lazy and repetitive mantra that has been bandied about in various newspapers and online that PAD is purely fascist and that it wants a parliament composed of 70% selected delegates (a position which changed a month or so ago), The Economist has rightly recognised PAD'S diverse make up. Yes, there are virulent rightwing streams in the organisation, but it also has a strand of "royal liberalism", which the Economist defines as " the idea that a powerful crown can act as a check on rapacious politicians." In the Thai literature the king has been called the Supreme Ombudsman.
I am of the opinion that the current struggle in Thailand is full of contradictions, and the position of royal liberalism is only one part of that contradictory whole. The point about royal liberalism, as it has developed in Thailand, is not that it defines the role of the monarch at all times, but rather it idealises what the monarchy might be in the face of corrupt electoral democracy. As a social force, royal liberalism is an attempt to direct the institution of the monarchy to a particular role. It neither countenances a Cambodian-style politicised monarchy, nor one completely identified with national security complexes. The Thaksin regime - in eroding the 1997 constitutional settlement - challenged both a liberal and conservative establishment.
I have written about this in "Article of Faith: the failure of royal liberalism in Thailand" in Journal of Contemporary Asia, 2008, 38, 1.
As long as the western media sees what is happening in Thailand as a struggle between a democratically elected government and a reactionary social movement with establishment backing, it will continue to interpret the events as if they were happening in Washington, Canberra or London. They are not. They are happening in Thailand.
Recognising that there is some tension in the anti-Thaksin movement is an advance. The next advance, given that the reactionary and undemocratic nature of some of PAD's support base has been well established, is to recognise the extradordinary reactionary and undemocratic nature of elements of the pro-Thaksin camp.
---------
Post edited for clarity and to remove rhetorical excess: on Sunday night at 7 PM.
October 7, 2008
Conclusions: A Thaksin return can not be ruled out
Conclusions
Today's events in Bangkok when PAD blocked parliament and the police moved to disperse the protestors are a climax long in the making, delayed only by an uncertain balance of forces. Several outcomes are possible, none knowable: a coup could be launched from either side (even Thaksin considered a pro-government coup). Possibly, a coup could also move against both sides and enact a tough period of military rule to beat down both claimants on power in order to establish order - think Bonapartism. The government could finally mobilise a mass support base onto the streets to beat back an anti-government (Thaksin) coup. This base has so far failed to show itself other than at the ballot box and rallies of indifferent size. As always, predictions are always overtaken by reality.
What can be said is that at some point in the next week an enduring resolution to the stalemate may well emerge. Events of historic proportion are often dictated by a logic that defies transparent interest, and it is not unlikely that a number of realignments might emerge which no one can imagine. Below, I have reproduced the conclusion from an article I wrote a month ago "Four Elections and a Coup" to appear in Australian Journal of International Affairs at the end of the year. The excerpt "The King Can Do Wrong" in the last post also comes from that piece.
Conclusion
During the 1990s, liberal impulses emanating from within Thailand merged with the international discourse of good governance. This process was halted when Thaksin’s rise coincided with global security discourse in the wake of the ‘war on terror’ and the pressure to conform to international forms of political liberalism receded. This was a dynamic broadly reminiscent of geo-politics of the Cold War. Now, with the region and the globe entering a new phase of geo-political conflict in which China and Russia are highly assertive, and the US is in retreat, the liberal politics that have largely dictated Thai pro-western foreign policy inclination may retreat further as states in the region gravitate more decisively to China.
Thaksin’s emergent authoritarianism and political challenge to elite power centres influenced the convergence of rightist fear of disorderly electoral democracy and middle-class concern for ‘good governance’. It has left Thailand’s political system faltering under a mass of contradictions that are not easily categorised. The current trajectory of Thai politics is impossible to predict. As system level contradictions simultaneously implode, the resulting conflagration may give birth to odd formations. Alternatively, politics might return to a status quo ante of corruption, electoral mobilisation and capital capture of the state. Certainly, when all sides play with the rules of the game, the crisis will remain intractable, perhaps until a rupturing historical event provides relief. One thing, though, is certain: the future of Thai politics will be extremely uncertain, precarious and subject to momentous change once the current king’s interventionist role, on the side of conservatism, is absent. With that in mind, at the very least a Thaksin return in some form can not be ruled out.
Postscript (10th September)
On September 9, 2008, in a unanimous verdict the Constitutional Court disqualified Samak as prime minister on the relatively trivial grounds that his hosting of a television cooking show while prime minister, violated Article 267 of the constitution, relating to conflict of interest. In July, Samak had bemoaned the smothering nature of the constitution, noting, ‘In the past, it was considered an honour to join the Cabinet. Now being a minister is like having one's leg in jail already’ (The Nation, 2008). This latest development might enforce the idea – as propagated by the respective protagonists - that Thai politics is like a social laboratory pitting the ‘rule of law’ against ‘democratic majoritarianism’. In reality, venal and vested political interests mix with popular aspirations on both sides of this elite conflict. Those interests have historic roots and structural properties. They are unlikely to lie down before moral censure that demands conformity to the rule of law or submission to the ballot box. In taking politics back to year zero – establishing the rules of the game – the current Thai conflict is a reminder that most social and political orders are established by the right, first, to be dominant. Such a right necessarily involves contradiction, selectivity, and myth. Currently, that right is contested, leading to parallel contradictions, selectivities and myths.
Today's events in Bangkok when PAD blocked parliament and the police moved to disperse the protestors are a climax long in the making, delayed only by an uncertain balance of forces. Several outcomes are possible, none knowable: a coup could be launched from either side (even Thaksin considered a pro-government coup). Possibly, a coup could also move against both sides and enact a tough period of military rule to beat down both claimants on power in order to establish order - think Bonapartism. The government could finally mobilise a mass support base onto the streets to beat back an anti-government (Thaksin) coup. This base has so far failed to show itself other than at the ballot box and rallies of indifferent size. As always, predictions are always overtaken by reality.
What can be said is that at some point in the next week an enduring resolution to the stalemate may well emerge. Events of historic proportion are often dictated by a logic that defies transparent interest, and it is not unlikely that a number of realignments might emerge which no one can imagine. Below, I have reproduced the conclusion from an article I wrote a month ago "Four Elections and a Coup" to appear in Australian Journal of International Affairs at the end of the year. The excerpt "The King Can Do Wrong" in the last post also comes from that piece.
Conclusion
During the 1990s, liberal impulses emanating from within Thailand merged with the international discourse of good governance. This process was halted when Thaksin’s rise coincided with global security discourse in the wake of the ‘war on terror’ and the pressure to conform to international forms of political liberalism receded. This was a dynamic broadly reminiscent of geo-politics of the Cold War. Now, with the region and the globe entering a new phase of geo-political conflict in which China and Russia are highly assertive, and the US is in retreat, the liberal politics that have largely dictated Thai pro-western foreign policy inclination may retreat further as states in the region gravitate more decisively to China.
Thaksin’s emergent authoritarianism and political challenge to elite power centres influenced the convergence of rightist fear of disorderly electoral democracy and middle-class concern for ‘good governance’. It has left Thailand’s political system faltering under a mass of contradictions that are not easily categorised. The current trajectory of Thai politics is impossible to predict. As system level contradictions simultaneously implode, the resulting conflagration may give birth to odd formations. Alternatively, politics might return to a status quo ante of corruption, electoral mobilisation and capital capture of the state. Certainly, when all sides play with the rules of the game, the crisis will remain intractable, perhaps until a rupturing historical event provides relief. One thing, though, is certain: the future of Thai politics will be extremely uncertain, precarious and subject to momentous change once the current king’s interventionist role, on the side of conservatism, is absent. With that in mind, at the very least a Thaksin return in some form can not be ruled out.
Postscript (10th September)
On September 9, 2008, in a unanimous verdict the Constitutional Court disqualified Samak as prime minister on the relatively trivial grounds that his hosting of a television cooking show while prime minister, violated Article 267 of the constitution, relating to conflict of interest. In July, Samak had bemoaned the smothering nature of the constitution, noting, ‘In the past, it was considered an honour to join the Cabinet. Now being a minister is like having one's leg in jail already’ (The Nation, 2008). This latest development might enforce the idea – as propagated by the respective protagonists - that Thai politics is like a social laboratory pitting the ‘rule of law’ against ‘democratic majoritarianism’. In reality, venal and vested political interests mix with popular aspirations on both sides of this elite conflict. Those interests have historic roots and structural properties. They are unlikely to lie down before moral censure that demands conformity to the rule of law or submission to the ballot box. In taking politics back to year zero – establishing the rules of the game – the current Thai conflict is a reminder that most social and political orders are established by the right, first, to be dominant. Such a right necessarily involves contradiction, selectivity, and myth. Currently, that right is contested, leading to parallel contradictions, selectivities and myths.
September 29, 2008
"The King Can Do Wrong"
Excerpt from
Connors MK (forthcoming) "Four Elections and a Coup D’etat: Giving Democracy a Break in Thailand", Australian Journal of International Affairs.
The King can do wrong
It is sometimes claimed that Thailand’s current crisis is about the impending succession to the throne. The incumbent, King Bhumibol is 80 years old. The most likely but by no means certain successor to the throne is Prince Vajiralongkorn, rumoured to be, or to have been, close to Thaksin. The coup, in this account, aimed to block a Thaksin-influenced succession (Handley, 2006b 424-5; 2006a) Like much analysis surrounding the monarchy, this is speculative but also plausible. Given that the interests surrounding the crown are extensive and fan out from palace grounds, to military camps, to schools and the bureaucracy, it would be natural for there to be great concern about the succession. A life of socialised royalism through the education system has inculcated an immense respect for the monarchy. For genuine royalist liberals and conservatives, a Thaksin-influenced succession would be repugnant.
Official discourse on the Thai monarchy constantly invokes the idea that the king can do no wrong – indeed this has been one of the abiding elements of the ideology ‘democracy with the king as head of state’. Popularly, the idea of infallibility is understood to relate to the semi-divine nature of kingship in Thailand. But the phrase actually relates to the functions of a constitutional monarchy, namely that a monarchy signs into law legislation and executive decrees, but is not responsible for them. Likewise, court decisions under the authority of the crown do not entail any royal responsibility. It is in this constitutional sense that the ‘the king can do no wrong’. The Thai monarch’s role is to symbolically manifest, by royal imprimatur, the unified sovereignty of the people, through the three arms of government (the judiciary, legislature and the executive). But the Thai king’s role has expanded well beyond this.
In the last five years an incipient debate has emerged in the twilight years of King Bhumibol’s reign. There are those who believe that the monarchy and its interventions at crisis moments (1973, 1992, and 2006) are required in the current stage of Thailand’s political development: the monarchy acts as kind of para-political institution, it intervenes when the contradictions that have attended Thailand’s political transition break out into violence. The king is like an all seeing rational citizen able to adjudge, in times of crisis, the general interest. This view reflects that over two generations the monarchy has extended its role well beyond that of a constitutional monarch in a democracy (right to warn, consult etc.). Accounting for this expanded role, liberal royalist discourse portrays the incumbent as a supreme ombudsman, who has accrued powers by convention and wisdom. Moreover, in the foggy world of practice, liberal discourse merges with traditional Buddhist notions of monarchy based on righteousness (see Bowonsak 1994; Connors 2008a). The coup and the battle against Thaksin then might be seen, in part, both as a struggle to defend the expanded role of a Thai constitutional monarchy, and all the interests that have coagulated to it, and for control over succession.
Indeed, in 2005, the former was how the issue was framed in public debates about Thaksin’s alleged transgression of royal prerogative (Connors 2008a). In the political struggles of 2005-2006 the monarchy was used instrumentally by both anti and pro Thaksin forces in a bid to gain popular favour. But the monarch was more than eager to claim his own space at this time. In his annual birthday speech in 2005 Bhumibol chastised Thaksin for being sensitive to criticism (Thaksin had a penchant for defamation suits) and suggested that even the king could be criticised. This was an extraordinary statement, given the strict enforcement of lèse-majesté. In his speech, Bhumibol (2005) invited criticism of his own role – declaring that the idea that the ‘king can do no wrong’ was a form of condescension on his own person, as if he were not human. Indeed Bhumibol declared that that ‘the king can do wrong’, and welcomed criticism. By saying that he could do wrong, by explictly rejecting the constitutionalist interpretation that 'the king can do no wrong', Bhumibol may well have been expressing the view that his role extends well beyond the symbolic. In short then, the king’s speech might be interpreted as an attack on those who argue for a restricted palace role in administration of the nation. This is a belated public recognition that Thailand’s constitutional monarchy is an activist one. It is, in an oblique way, also a recognition that the king has enduringly headed a national power bloc intent on shaping the nature of Thai capitalism and society (Connors 2007: 131). Thus, in as much as a struggle over succession and the role of the monarchy are to be understood as central to the current crisis, these elements must be mapped on to the broader struggle over regime form.
(CITATIONS IN THE ORIGINAL)
************************************
Comment: this is from a larger article about the events of the last year. Bhumipol's speech on 'doing wrong' was actually a restatement of his December 2003 speech(see below). I can only guess that people simply couldn't comprehend what he was saying the first time round. Even the second time round, the idea didn't sink in: if I remember correctly Matichon Sutsapda, several days after the December 2005 speech, had on its front cover in English "THE KING CAN DO NO WRONG".
Just as the struggle against Thaksin was hotting up in September 2005 I wrote about the 2003 speech thus (published in 2007 Democracy and National Identity in Thailand, pp. 259-260):
"In some respects, the great energy expended in the last decade on democracy promotion, civic education and anti-vote buying campaigns (in short - when tens of thousands of people acted as the shock troops for liberal democrasubjection) has done little to abate the influence of money and power in the political system. Indeed, it might be argued that promoting ‘good citizenship’ in Thailand has led to a moralistic type of politics that permanently displaces questions about power and structure in determining political outcomes. Self-organization is what can transform these democratic institutions into instruments that serve the interests of ordinary people, workers and peasants. Civic politics needs to be complemented with class-based activism in trade unions and farmers federations. Only this can ensure that national politics is not subject to the whims of aggrandizing elites.
In the interests of elite liberalism, and to forestall political instability, action from above may preempt the emergence of a mass progressive movement; and Thaksin may fall in front of a jury of his peers.
Indeed, there is considerable concern about the current political situation among elements of the Thai establishment. The king himself has expressed some cogent concerns that indicate fear of mass disaffection with the political system. In late 2003, the king raised some interesting questions about the future implications of Thaksin’s mode of rule. Offering sympathetic comments on the ‘war on drugs’, the king nonetheless suggested that more had to be done to satisfy critics who claimed the government was responsible for thousands of deaths. The king noted that responsibility was continually shifted from the ‘superman’ prime minister through to ministers, civil servants and through to the people and law, who then might shift responsibility on to the king, ‘which is against the constitution, as the constitution says the king has no responsibility at all… so we agree that none of us are responsible for the nation’. In the same speech the king notes that those responsible in government should accept criticism when it is warranted:
[If] they are right then thank them, if they are wrong tell them, quietly…The person who is greatly troubled by this is the king, because no one can reproach him… We did not tell those who wrote the constitution that no one can reproach or violate the king. Why this was written, I do not know. If one can not be violated how can one know if one is right or wrong?
A system of no accountability is a volatile system, and it is clear that the king’s comments relate not just to the war on drugs but extend to the style of governance that Thaksin has embraced. By implication, if the king is open to criticism, although it is not allowed, Thaksin should also be able to tolerate it. By reprising his role as a cautious liberal king, Bhumipol furthers royal mythology.
Whether a popular movement, a push from above, or an implosion from within TRT removes Thaksin is a matter for speculation, as is his longevity. But if Thailand is to break from the familiar tug of war between authoritarian nationalism, which draws on the three pillars of national identity, and royal liberalism, a movement from below that transcends both streams will need to emerge. Otherwise, a return to the royal embrace will be yet one more historical impasse for Thailand’s poor."
************************************************
Connors MK (forthcoming) "Four Elections and a Coup D’etat: Giving Democracy a Break in Thailand", Australian Journal of International Affairs.
The King can do wrong
It is sometimes claimed that Thailand’s current crisis is about the impending succession to the throne. The incumbent, King Bhumibol is 80 years old. The most likely but by no means certain successor to the throne is Prince Vajiralongkorn, rumoured to be, or to have been, close to Thaksin. The coup, in this account, aimed to block a Thaksin-influenced succession (Handley, 2006b 424-5; 2006a) Like much analysis surrounding the monarchy, this is speculative but also plausible. Given that the interests surrounding the crown are extensive and fan out from palace grounds, to military camps, to schools and the bureaucracy, it would be natural for there to be great concern about the succession. A life of socialised royalism through the education system has inculcated an immense respect for the monarchy. For genuine royalist liberals and conservatives, a Thaksin-influenced succession would be repugnant.
Official discourse on the Thai monarchy constantly invokes the idea that the king can do no wrong – indeed this has been one of the abiding elements of the ideology ‘democracy with the king as head of state’. Popularly, the idea of infallibility is understood to relate to the semi-divine nature of kingship in Thailand. But the phrase actually relates to the functions of a constitutional monarchy, namely that a monarchy signs into law legislation and executive decrees, but is not responsible for them. Likewise, court decisions under the authority of the crown do not entail any royal responsibility. It is in this constitutional sense that the ‘the king can do no wrong’. The Thai monarch’s role is to symbolically manifest, by royal imprimatur, the unified sovereignty of the people, through the three arms of government (the judiciary, legislature and the executive). But the Thai king’s role has expanded well beyond this.
In the last five years an incipient debate has emerged in the twilight years of King Bhumibol’s reign. There are those who believe that the monarchy and its interventions at crisis moments (1973, 1992, and 2006) are required in the current stage of Thailand’s political development: the monarchy acts as kind of para-political institution, it intervenes when the contradictions that have attended Thailand’s political transition break out into violence. The king is like an all seeing rational citizen able to adjudge, in times of crisis, the general interest. This view reflects that over two generations the monarchy has extended its role well beyond that of a constitutional monarch in a democracy (right to warn, consult etc.). Accounting for this expanded role, liberal royalist discourse portrays the incumbent as a supreme ombudsman, who has accrued powers by convention and wisdom. Moreover, in the foggy world of practice, liberal discourse merges with traditional Buddhist notions of monarchy based on righteousness (see Bowonsak 1994; Connors 2008a). The coup and the battle against Thaksin then might be seen, in part, both as a struggle to defend the expanded role of a Thai constitutional monarchy, and all the interests that have coagulated to it, and for control over succession.
Indeed, in 2005, the former was how the issue was framed in public debates about Thaksin’s alleged transgression of royal prerogative (Connors 2008a). In the political struggles of 2005-2006 the monarchy was used instrumentally by both anti and pro Thaksin forces in a bid to gain popular favour. But the monarch was more than eager to claim his own space at this time. In his annual birthday speech in 2005 Bhumibol chastised Thaksin for being sensitive to criticism (Thaksin had a penchant for defamation suits) and suggested that even the king could be criticised. This was an extraordinary statement, given the strict enforcement of lèse-majesté. In his speech, Bhumibol (2005) invited criticism of his own role – declaring that the idea that the ‘king can do no wrong’ was a form of condescension on his own person, as if he were not human. Indeed Bhumibol declared that that ‘the king can do wrong’, and welcomed criticism. By saying that he could do wrong, by explictly rejecting the constitutionalist interpretation that 'the king can do no wrong', Bhumibol may well have been expressing the view that his role extends well beyond the symbolic. In short then, the king’s speech might be interpreted as an attack on those who argue for a restricted palace role in administration of the nation. This is a belated public recognition that Thailand’s constitutional monarchy is an activist one. It is, in an oblique way, also a recognition that the king has enduringly headed a national power bloc intent on shaping the nature of Thai capitalism and society (Connors 2007: 131). Thus, in as much as a struggle over succession and the role of the monarchy are to be understood as central to the current crisis, these elements must be mapped on to the broader struggle over regime form.
(CITATIONS IN THE ORIGINAL)
************************************
Comment: this is from a larger article about the events of the last year. Bhumipol's speech on 'doing wrong' was actually a restatement of his December 2003 speech(see below). I can only guess that people simply couldn't comprehend what he was saying the first time round. Even the second time round, the idea didn't sink in: if I remember correctly Matichon Sutsapda, several days after the December 2005 speech, had on its front cover in English "THE KING CAN DO NO WRONG".
Just as the struggle against Thaksin was hotting up in September 2005 I wrote about the 2003 speech thus (published in 2007 Democracy and National Identity in Thailand, pp. 259-260):
"In some respects, the great energy expended in the last decade on democracy promotion, civic education and anti-vote buying campaigns (in short - when tens of thousands of people acted as the shock troops for liberal democrasubjection) has done little to abate the influence of money and power in the political system. Indeed, it might be argued that promoting ‘good citizenship’ in Thailand has led to a moralistic type of politics that permanently displaces questions about power and structure in determining political outcomes. Self-organization is what can transform these democratic institutions into instruments that serve the interests of ordinary people, workers and peasants. Civic politics needs to be complemented with class-based activism in trade unions and farmers federations. Only this can ensure that national politics is not subject to the whims of aggrandizing elites.
In the interests of elite liberalism, and to forestall political instability, action from above may preempt the emergence of a mass progressive movement; and Thaksin may fall in front of a jury of his peers.
Indeed, there is considerable concern about the current political situation among elements of the Thai establishment. The king himself has expressed some cogent concerns that indicate fear of mass disaffection with the political system. In late 2003, the king raised some interesting questions about the future implications of Thaksin’s mode of rule. Offering sympathetic comments on the ‘war on drugs’, the king nonetheless suggested that more had to be done to satisfy critics who claimed the government was responsible for thousands of deaths. The king noted that responsibility was continually shifted from the ‘superman’ prime minister through to ministers, civil servants and through to the people and law, who then might shift responsibility on to the king, ‘which is against the constitution, as the constitution says the king has no responsibility at all… so we agree that none of us are responsible for the nation’. In the same speech the king notes that those responsible in government should accept criticism when it is warranted:
[If] they are right then thank them, if they are wrong tell them, quietly…The person who is greatly troubled by this is the king, because no one can reproach him… We did not tell those who wrote the constitution that no one can reproach or violate the king. Why this was written, I do not know. If one can not be violated how can one know if one is right or wrong?
A system of no accountability is a volatile system, and it is clear that the king’s comments relate not just to the war on drugs but extend to the style of governance that Thaksin has embraced. By implication, if the king is open to criticism, although it is not allowed, Thaksin should also be able to tolerate it. By reprising his role as a cautious liberal king, Bhumipol furthers royal mythology.
Whether a popular movement, a push from above, or an implosion from within TRT removes Thaksin is a matter for speculation, as is his longevity. But if Thailand is to break from the familiar tug of war between authoritarian nationalism, which draws on the three pillars of national identity, and royal liberalism, a movement from below that transcends both streams will need to emerge. Otherwise, a return to the royal embrace will be yet one more historical impasse for Thailand’s poor."
************************************************
August 5, 2008
Thailand’s Media and Law Wars: the hijacking of state media.
Thailand’s Media and Law Wars: the hijacking of state media.
When you take up Sondhi’s Manager newspaper or watch ASTV “protest TV” you know what you are getting: the politics of the People’s Alliance for Democracy. I am not sure, but my guess is that ASTV is probably a first in history: a television channel dedicated to broadcasting ongoing protests and making those protests, and its stage entertainment and addresses, its full content. These outlets are private concerns, and while they probably violate every rule of objectivity (such as it is), they are not media instruments of the state.
Some weeks ago Prime Minister Samak indicated he would expand his weekly television address to a nightly show to answer his critics. That idea was dropped, but for the last two weeks “Truth Today” has been broadcast on a nightly basis on NBT, the national broadcaster.
The program is fascinating viewing. It is unashamedly pro-government. It declares itself against PAD and the Democrat Party (describing this as the party that works with dictators); it wages a relentless attack on the Constitution Court, the National Counter Corruption Commission, the constitution and the Auditor General.
Truth Today’s basic premise (also argued for in the pro-Thaksin paper Prachathat) is that the coup was illegitimate and therefore everything that has flowed from the coup is illegitimate, including the cases against Thaksin. The constitution is a child of a dictatorship. What makes the tv program absolutely fascinating is its decidedly politicised nature. It holds no punches, being hosted by leading members of the pro-Thaksin Democratic Alliance against Dictatorship, or the DAAD: Veera Musikapong (former Democrat Party member who led a defection from the party in the 1980s and who was found guilty of lese majeste for rather innocent comments), Nattawut Saikue (former deputy spokesperson for the Thaksin government), and Jatuporn Prompan (People’s Power MP).
Truth Today is firebrand television. Veera is one of the leaders of DAAD who moved protestors to General Prem’s (President of the Privy Council) residence in mid 2007, accusing him of being behind the 2006 coup against Thaksin.
The three presenters were also involved in the formation of the pro-Thaksin PTV channel that faced opposition from the coup group in 2007. They have now graduated to state television for an hour each evening, waging a war of accusations and argument in the manner of PAD.
Last night (August 3) the presenters launched an assault on the opposition Democrat Party as a party that supports dictators. The presenters discussed plans to try and appoint Democrat Party leader Aphisit as prime minister after the December 2007 election, but they noted that the numbers made it impossible for the Democrats to form government. They spoke of electoral fraud, and the unclear issue of excessive ballot papers (on that matter, no one has ever explained the party list vote of December which initially gave the the Democrat Party and the People’s Power Party 14 million votes each, in the end both got around 12 million). On the same evening Veera read an announcement of PAD, and paid especial attention to PAD’s professed support for democracy with the king as head of state. Ah, “we are on the same side” he declared.
The presenters have also spoken about Article 309 and the need to abolish it (this is an Article that Samak has reserved judgement on). It declares as legal all actions of the 2006 coup group. His reticence on that question may have something to do with when Samak served as Interior Minister after the massacre at Thammasat University in October 1976. Following that event he served in a government formed by the coup group and governed under a temporary constitution that had a very similar article (Article 29 of the 1976 Constitution basically states that all that the 1976 coup group did was legal).
Indeed, so common is this kind of article that to declare coup law as illegitimate is indeed to wage a war against the body of law of Thailand. That war is long overdue, and just as the embedding of the rule of law in the cases against Thaksin have found a strange handmaiden, so to one might reflect on the oddity of a government led by Samak being the one to launch a reform of Thai law (if indeed it goes beyond a mere consitutional amendment).
By the way, this evening’s episode of Truth Today (4th of August) ended with a reading of one of the king’s addresses on the role of justice. It seems that both sides support democracy with the king as head of state. Each is attempting to present itself as loyal to the monarchy.
When you take up Sondhi’s Manager newspaper or watch ASTV “protest TV” you know what you are getting: the politics of the People’s Alliance for Democracy. I am not sure, but my guess is that ASTV is probably a first in history: a television channel dedicated to broadcasting ongoing protests and making those protests, and its stage entertainment and addresses, its full content. These outlets are private concerns, and while they probably violate every rule of objectivity (such as it is), they are not media instruments of the state.
Some weeks ago Prime Minister Samak indicated he would expand his weekly television address to a nightly show to answer his critics. That idea was dropped, but for the last two weeks “Truth Today” has been broadcast on a nightly basis on NBT, the national broadcaster.
The program is fascinating viewing. It is unashamedly pro-government. It declares itself against PAD and the Democrat Party (describing this as the party that works with dictators); it wages a relentless attack on the Constitution Court, the National Counter Corruption Commission, the constitution and the Auditor General.
Truth Today’s basic premise (also argued for in the pro-Thaksin paper Prachathat) is that the coup was illegitimate and therefore everything that has flowed from the coup is illegitimate, including the cases against Thaksin. The constitution is a child of a dictatorship. What makes the tv program absolutely fascinating is its decidedly politicised nature. It holds no punches, being hosted by leading members of the pro-Thaksin Democratic Alliance against Dictatorship, or the DAAD: Veera Musikapong (former Democrat Party member who led a defection from the party in the 1980s and who was found guilty of lese majeste for rather innocent comments), Nattawut Saikue (former deputy spokesperson for the Thaksin government), and Jatuporn Prompan (People’s Power MP).
Truth Today is firebrand television. Veera is one of the leaders of DAAD who moved protestors to General Prem’s (President of the Privy Council) residence in mid 2007, accusing him of being behind the 2006 coup against Thaksin.
The three presenters were also involved in the formation of the pro-Thaksin PTV channel that faced opposition from the coup group in 2007. They have now graduated to state television for an hour each evening, waging a war of accusations and argument in the manner of PAD.
Last night (August 3) the presenters launched an assault on the opposition Democrat Party as a party that supports dictators. The presenters discussed plans to try and appoint Democrat Party leader Aphisit as prime minister after the December 2007 election, but they noted that the numbers made it impossible for the Democrats to form government. They spoke of electoral fraud, and the unclear issue of excessive ballot papers (on that matter, no one has ever explained the party list vote of December which initially gave the the Democrat Party and the People’s Power Party 14 million votes each, in the end both got around 12 million). On the same evening Veera read an announcement of PAD, and paid especial attention to PAD’s professed support for democracy with the king as head of state. Ah, “we are on the same side” he declared.
The presenters have also spoken about Article 309 and the need to abolish it (this is an Article that Samak has reserved judgement on). It declares as legal all actions of the 2006 coup group. His reticence on that question may have something to do with when Samak served as Interior Minister after the massacre at Thammasat University in October 1976. Following that event he served in a government formed by the coup group and governed under a temporary constitution that had a very similar article (Article 29 of the 1976 Constitution basically states that all that the 1976 coup group did was legal).
Indeed, so common is this kind of article that to declare coup law as illegitimate is indeed to wage a war against the body of law of Thailand. That war is long overdue, and just as the embedding of the rule of law in the cases against Thaksin have found a strange handmaiden, so to one might reflect on the oddity of a government led by Samak being the one to launch a reform of Thai law (if indeed it goes beyond a mere consitutional amendment).
By the way, this evening’s episode of Truth Today (4th of August) ended with a reading of one of the king’s addresses on the role of justice. It seems that both sides support democracy with the king as head of state. Each is attempting to present itself as loyal to the monarchy.
January 11, 2008
Thailand: Coup by Stealth or Something Else?
A pre-edit copy of piece that appears in Asia Sentinel (11 January, 2008).
Coup by stealth or something else
Michael Connors
Last week the international media was awash with stories of a ‘Thai stealth coup’. They portrayed the Council for National Security, the military grouping that deposed the care-taker government of Thaksin Shinawatra in September 2006, as thwarting the formation of a government by the People’s Power Party (PPP) which won a plurality in the December 23 elections.
In news coverage and commentary, the Election Commission of Thailand (ECT) was presented as a stooge of the Council of National Security (CNS). The Thaksin PR machine could not have hoped for more.
Various commentators, and the PPP itself, have claimed that the investigation of 83 cases of potential electoral irregularity, 65 by the PPP, is nothing more than an attempt to disenfranchise the Thai electorate by disqualifying PPP winners, thereby allowing an anti Thaksin Democrat Party-led coalition to be formed. They also point to the various cases that are currently working their way through the courts that may see PPP dissolved, just as its predecessor Thai Rak Thai (TRT) was in 2007. All of this, they claim, is in line with a ‘secret’ CNS four-step plan to eliminate Thaksin
The capitalist and political forces in PPP that showed little regard for the rule of law during the Thaksin period (2001-2006), now find themselves at the end of a very unpleasant stick; it is understandable that they should seek the very real protections offered by the rule of law.
Is the ECT a stooge?
The ECT is most likely being pressured to act in the interests of the coup group and its allies. It is also likely that it is being pushed to act in the interests of PPP. ECT Commissioner Sodsri Sattayatham said as much on Thai national television on 6 January, when she spoke of “being caught between two poles of power”. The ECT also has officials, as do most Thai state agencies, who will be trying to discharge their duties without fear or favour.
People with a short memory assume the current ECT commissioners were chosen by the CNS. The current commissioners were actually appointed to the ECT while Thaksin was acting as care-taker prime minister. In early September 2006, pro-Thaksin members of the care-taker Senate voted as a bloc to select the five commissioners from ten forwarded by the judiciary. The bloc-vote ensured that anti-Thaksin nominations for the ECT were eliminated.
For reasons that remain unclear, a day after the 19 September 2006 Coup d’etat the military endorsed the Senate selection of the ECT commissioners. One might surmise, rather generously, that the coup group acted thus because the ten nominees forwarded to the Senate by the judiciary were chosen in the shadow of the king’s appeal to judicial integrity, and thus they could be expected to act with caution and impartiality. Of course, in the conditions of post-coup Thailand such integrity is entirely contingent on a range of threats, beliefs, and professionalism.
Now, given this history, and the fact that the ECT is a conflicted organization in which there remain many Thaksin supporters, one might ask whether it is accurate to claim that it is an instrument of a ‘stealth coup’.
It may be preferable to see the situation in different terms. The coup remains a work in progress inasmuch as those who launched it still wield power. Its objectives are transparent (elimination of Thaksin) and are hardly advanced in a secretive mode. Consider for example that Samak Sundaravej, leader of the PPP, sought to pre-empt CNS machinations by declaring himself ready for government on the last day of 2007, claiming 254 seats. Yet the CNS remains in place as does its appointed government, and Samak has gone to ground. Whatever one thinks of the PPP and its spurious claim to represent the democrat will of the people, its claims of a plot against it surely have some substance.
But why should it be otherwise? In a war, one force uses the instruments open to its influence. From this perspective, it is indeed surprising that not more has been done to eliminate the Thaksin threat. In these circumstances it is obvious that the Council for National Security (CNS) might seek to influence the ECT. However, whether the CNS succeeds is a matter for empirical investigation.
Democracy?
Although the struggle between strategically relevant opposing forces in Thailand is presented through the idiom of democracy, the opposing forces are actually an inter-sectoral mix of business, bureaucracy, police, military and royalists who care little for genuine democracy. As these inter-sectoral forces fight for state control they do so in a partial “state of exception” whereby, for the most part, force determines outcomes rather than law, persuasion or a democratic mandate. This is actually the same situation that held in the later Thaksin years, although the balance of forces has reversed.
The acute state of Thai politics at this present time has little to do with democracy. An elite struggle that goes back at least a decade is manifest: a new brand of capitalism that seeks to break from the quasi-feudalistic hold of monarchy is in motion, but it is a force that dares not declare its name. Enlightened Thaksin forces want a bourgeois revolution against the current way the monarchy and networks surrounding it work, but they dare not declare their mission. These forces – a mix of the old left, old right, capitalists and technocrats - mobilise forces under a banner of right wing populism, including Buddhist chauvinism, but they have yet to elaborate any genuinely ideological position to challenge the force that thwarts their emergence. They are also hostile to liberal forms of democracy.
So where is the ‘left’ in all of this? Some serve the stealth bourgeois revolution of the pro-Thaksin forces. They are beholden to a version of objective history that pits “progressive capitalism” against quasi-feudalistic monarchy and aristocracy. They have been unrelenting in their claim of Thaksin’s democratic mandate, willing to ignore that democracy means so much more than a mark on a ballot paper. Such belief in the march of objective history has led to many historical calamities and it is not hard to see Thaksin as one of them. The killings of Tak Bai and the War on Drugs surely count as modern equivalents of the descent into governmental barbarism.
Others on the left and a range of political liberals have sought to use the monarchy as a buffer against the political authoritarianism represented by Thaksin. In doing so they have found comfort in myths about the monarchy, tradition and elite democratization. They have supported the use of extra-constitutional power to overthrow the Thaksin regime. Beholden to a subjectivist view of history (good versus evil), such forces are willing to turn a blind eye to the palace’s history, and its privileged economic position. They seek the return of ‘royal liberalism’, in which the monarchy stands as the supreme ombudsman, supporting the emergence of constitutional rule.
At this moment in time it appears that the contending fractions of the Thai elite are about to enter the final round of a long struggle. It remains to be seen if they will step back from the brink and instead embrace compromise. One thing, however, is certain: as long as contending elites fail to agree to any rules of the game and instead wage open political warfare for complete victory, Thailand’s chance of returning to some form of liberal democracy are slim.
Coup by stealth or something else
Michael Connors
Last week the international media was awash with stories of a ‘Thai stealth coup’. They portrayed the Council for National Security, the military grouping that deposed the care-taker government of Thaksin Shinawatra in September 2006, as thwarting the formation of a government by the People’s Power Party (PPP) which won a plurality in the December 23 elections.
In news coverage and commentary, the Election Commission of Thailand (ECT) was presented as a stooge of the Council of National Security (CNS). The Thaksin PR machine could not have hoped for more.
Various commentators, and the PPP itself, have claimed that the investigation of 83 cases of potential electoral irregularity, 65 by the PPP, is nothing more than an attempt to disenfranchise the Thai electorate by disqualifying PPP winners, thereby allowing an anti Thaksin Democrat Party-led coalition to be formed. They also point to the various cases that are currently working their way through the courts that may see PPP dissolved, just as its predecessor Thai Rak Thai (TRT) was in 2007. All of this, they claim, is in line with a ‘secret’ CNS four-step plan to eliminate Thaksin
The capitalist and political forces in PPP that showed little regard for the rule of law during the Thaksin period (2001-2006), now find themselves at the end of a very unpleasant stick; it is understandable that they should seek the very real protections offered by the rule of law.
Is the ECT a stooge?
The ECT is most likely being pressured to act in the interests of the coup group and its allies. It is also likely that it is being pushed to act in the interests of PPP. ECT Commissioner Sodsri Sattayatham said as much on Thai national television on 6 January, when she spoke of “being caught between two poles of power”. The ECT also has officials, as do most Thai state agencies, who will be trying to discharge their duties without fear or favour.
People with a short memory assume the current ECT commissioners were chosen by the CNS. The current commissioners were actually appointed to the ECT while Thaksin was acting as care-taker prime minister. In early September 2006, pro-Thaksin members of the care-taker Senate voted as a bloc to select the five commissioners from ten forwarded by the judiciary. The bloc-vote ensured that anti-Thaksin nominations for the ECT were eliminated.
For reasons that remain unclear, a day after the 19 September 2006 Coup d’etat the military endorsed the Senate selection of the ECT commissioners. One might surmise, rather generously, that the coup group acted thus because the ten nominees forwarded to the Senate by the judiciary were chosen in the shadow of the king’s appeal to judicial integrity, and thus they could be expected to act with caution and impartiality. Of course, in the conditions of post-coup Thailand such integrity is entirely contingent on a range of threats, beliefs, and professionalism.
Now, given this history, and the fact that the ECT is a conflicted organization in which there remain many Thaksin supporters, one might ask whether it is accurate to claim that it is an instrument of a ‘stealth coup’.
It may be preferable to see the situation in different terms. The coup remains a work in progress inasmuch as those who launched it still wield power. Its objectives are transparent (elimination of Thaksin) and are hardly advanced in a secretive mode. Consider for example that Samak Sundaravej, leader of the PPP, sought to pre-empt CNS machinations by declaring himself ready for government on the last day of 2007, claiming 254 seats. Yet the CNS remains in place as does its appointed government, and Samak has gone to ground. Whatever one thinks of the PPP and its spurious claim to represent the democrat will of the people, its claims of a plot against it surely have some substance.
But why should it be otherwise? In a war, one force uses the instruments open to its influence. From this perspective, it is indeed surprising that not more has been done to eliminate the Thaksin threat. In these circumstances it is obvious that the Council for National Security (CNS) might seek to influence the ECT. However, whether the CNS succeeds is a matter for empirical investigation.
Democracy?
Although the struggle between strategically relevant opposing forces in Thailand is presented through the idiom of democracy, the opposing forces are actually an inter-sectoral mix of business, bureaucracy, police, military and royalists who care little for genuine democracy. As these inter-sectoral forces fight for state control they do so in a partial “state of exception” whereby, for the most part, force determines outcomes rather than law, persuasion or a democratic mandate. This is actually the same situation that held in the later Thaksin years, although the balance of forces has reversed.
The acute state of Thai politics at this present time has little to do with democracy. An elite struggle that goes back at least a decade is manifest: a new brand of capitalism that seeks to break from the quasi-feudalistic hold of monarchy is in motion, but it is a force that dares not declare its name. Enlightened Thaksin forces want a bourgeois revolution against the current way the monarchy and networks surrounding it work, but they dare not declare their mission. These forces – a mix of the old left, old right, capitalists and technocrats - mobilise forces under a banner of right wing populism, including Buddhist chauvinism, but they have yet to elaborate any genuinely ideological position to challenge the force that thwarts their emergence. They are also hostile to liberal forms of democracy.
So where is the ‘left’ in all of this? Some serve the stealth bourgeois revolution of the pro-Thaksin forces. They are beholden to a version of objective history that pits “progressive capitalism” against quasi-feudalistic monarchy and aristocracy. They have been unrelenting in their claim of Thaksin’s democratic mandate, willing to ignore that democracy means so much more than a mark on a ballot paper. Such belief in the march of objective history has led to many historical calamities and it is not hard to see Thaksin as one of them. The killings of Tak Bai and the War on Drugs surely count as modern equivalents of the descent into governmental barbarism.
Others on the left and a range of political liberals have sought to use the monarchy as a buffer against the political authoritarianism represented by Thaksin. In doing so they have found comfort in myths about the monarchy, tradition and elite democratization. They have supported the use of extra-constitutional power to overthrow the Thaksin regime. Beholden to a subjectivist view of history (good versus evil), such forces are willing to turn a blind eye to the palace’s history, and its privileged economic position. They seek the return of ‘royal liberalism’, in which the monarchy stands as the supreme ombudsman, supporting the emergence of constitutional rule.
At this moment in time it appears that the contending fractions of the Thai elite are about to enter the final round of a long struggle. It remains to be seen if they will step back from the brink and instead embrace compromise. One thing, however, is certain: as long as contending elites fail to agree to any rules of the game and instead wage open political warfare for complete victory, Thailand’s chance of returning to some form of liberal democracy are slim.
November 21, 2007
Thailand: Article of Faith
Article of Faith: The Failure of Royal
Liberalism in Thailand
MICHAEL K. CONNORS
Introduction from article that appears in Journal of Contemporary Asia, 38, 1, 2008.
It seems inevitable that the 2005-06 protests against the elected right-wing populist,Thaksin Shinawatra, will be remembered for the sea of pro-monarchist yellow
t-shirts worn by some protestors and the slavish rhetoric of the slogan to ‘‘return
the royal powers.’’ Any plausible account of those protests must proceed from the
premise that behind the deployment of royalism lay a rational strategy. This article
unpacks the politics of a number of actors who mobilised against Thaksin and
argues that their appeal for monarchical intervention was intended for liberal
purposes. I do this for the purpose of analytically separating the anti-Thaksin
movement (up until the end of April 2006) from the royalist coup d’e´tat that finally
felled the Thaksin government in September 2006.1 The mass mobilisations of 2005
and 2006 were a genuine historical movement and should not be conflated with the
illiberal military and palace networks that eventually ended Thaksin’s rule.
The support by various ‘‘progressive’’ actors for the 2006 coup has given rise to
much soul-searching and polemic. Giles Ji Ungpakorn’s (2007: 30) memorable
phrase ‘‘tank-liberals’’ calls to account those progressive actors who legitimated the coup by participating in the post-coup political institutions. However, Thaksin’s rise to power through the ballot box should not be allowed to disguise his fundamentally anti-democratic politics. The elected Thaksin regime (2001-06) was authoritarian in inclination even if the formal institutions of democracy were in place.
Despite Thaksin’s arguably pro-poor policies, the depth and quality of Thailand’s democracy was greatly diminished under his rule (for a more qualified interpretation see Case,(2007). A basic premise underlying the analysis that follows is that left-wing critiques of authoritarian democracies should proceed from the position that majorities which serve authoritarian ends are hegemonically and coercively structured and do not reflect the free conditions upon which a genuine democracy may be embedded. Of course, the same can be said – substituting ‘‘majorities’’ with ‘‘vanguard elites’’ –of the illegitimate assumption of power by the 2006 coup group.
With this premise in mind, this article analyses the mobilisation of royal ideology
and the call to ‘‘return the royal powers’’ (thawaikheun phrarachaamnat) that
emerged in 2005-06. In the first part of this article, I briefly look at what may be
termed ‘‘royal liberalism’’ – a liberalism shaped by fear of an uneducated citizenry
unschooled in appropriately restrained democratic practice and manipulated by
demagogues, otherwise known as the ‘‘tyranny of the majority.’’ The political rise of
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra gave life to these fears. In the second substantive
part of the article I address how the intervention of a one-time Thaksin supporter,
opportunist media tycoon Sondhi Limthongkul (The Nation, 29 November 2005),
bolstered the fading fortunes of Thai liberalism, giving rise to calls, on the basis of Article 7 of the 1997 Constitution (see below), for power to be returned to the king.
To examine the elite liberalism behind this strategy, I look at the origins of Article 7. Relatedly, it is necessary to look at the revival of the neologism rachaprachasamasai (royal-people-mutuality), which was used to demonstrate how calls for royal intervention were in accord with ‘‘the traditions of Thai democracy.’’2 It will be argued that this mobilisation reflected a long-term project to establish a liberal state based on the ideological power of the monarchy. I then discuss how key actors differentially invoked Article 7. Finally, I consider the implications of royal liberalism’s failure to solve the crisis.
Before I begin, a qualification: it may be argued that monarchy and liberalism are
dichotomous, given that conservative monarchists understand rights in terms of
cultural heritage rather than something given to the universal nature of the
individual as in classical forms of liberalism. All ideologies, more so than doctrines, contain contradictory strains. My interest here is in the adaptation of monarchy and ideals around it to the emergence of a Thai liberal political settlement out of messy institutional, political and ideological struggles: that is, political liberalism not philosophical liberalism.
Liberalism in Thailand
MICHAEL K. CONNORS
Introduction from article that appears in Journal of Contemporary Asia, 38, 1, 2008.
It seems inevitable that the 2005-06 protests against the elected right-wing populist,Thaksin Shinawatra, will be remembered for the sea of pro-monarchist yellow
t-shirts worn by some protestors and the slavish rhetoric of the slogan to ‘‘return
the royal powers.’’ Any plausible account of those protests must proceed from the
premise that behind the deployment of royalism lay a rational strategy. This article
unpacks the politics of a number of actors who mobilised against Thaksin and
argues that their appeal for monarchical intervention was intended for liberal
purposes. I do this for the purpose of analytically separating the anti-Thaksin
movement (up until the end of April 2006) from the royalist coup d’e´tat that finally
felled the Thaksin government in September 2006.1 The mass mobilisations of 2005
and 2006 were a genuine historical movement and should not be conflated with the
illiberal military and palace networks that eventually ended Thaksin’s rule.
The support by various ‘‘progressive’’ actors for the 2006 coup has given rise to
much soul-searching and polemic. Giles Ji Ungpakorn’s (2007: 30) memorable
phrase ‘‘tank-liberals’’ calls to account those progressive actors who legitimated the coup by participating in the post-coup political institutions. However, Thaksin’s rise to power through the ballot box should not be allowed to disguise his fundamentally anti-democratic politics. The elected Thaksin regime (2001-06) was authoritarian in inclination even if the formal institutions of democracy were in place.
Despite Thaksin’s arguably pro-poor policies, the depth and quality of Thailand’s democracy was greatly diminished under his rule (for a more qualified interpretation see Case,(2007). A basic premise underlying the analysis that follows is that left-wing critiques of authoritarian democracies should proceed from the position that majorities which serve authoritarian ends are hegemonically and coercively structured and do not reflect the free conditions upon which a genuine democracy may be embedded. Of course, the same can be said – substituting ‘‘majorities’’ with ‘‘vanguard elites’’ –of the illegitimate assumption of power by the 2006 coup group.
With this premise in mind, this article analyses the mobilisation of royal ideology
and the call to ‘‘return the royal powers’’ (thawaikheun phrarachaamnat) that
emerged in 2005-06. In the first part of this article, I briefly look at what may be
termed ‘‘royal liberalism’’ – a liberalism shaped by fear of an uneducated citizenry
unschooled in appropriately restrained democratic practice and manipulated by
demagogues, otherwise known as the ‘‘tyranny of the majority.’’ The political rise of
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra gave life to these fears. In the second substantive
part of the article I address how the intervention of a one-time Thaksin supporter,
opportunist media tycoon Sondhi Limthongkul (The Nation, 29 November 2005),
bolstered the fading fortunes of Thai liberalism, giving rise to calls, on the basis of Article 7 of the 1997 Constitution (see below), for power to be returned to the king.
To examine the elite liberalism behind this strategy, I look at the origins of Article 7. Relatedly, it is necessary to look at the revival of the neologism rachaprachasamasai (royal-people-mutuality), which was used to demonstrate how calls for royal intervention were in accord with ‘‘the traditions of Thai democracy.’’2 It will be argued that this mobilisation reflected a long-term project to establish a liberal state based on the ideological power of the monarchy. I then discuss how key actors differentially invoked Article 7. Finally, I consider the implications of royal liberalism’s failure to solve the crisis.
Before I begin, a qualification: it may be argued that monarchy and liberalism are
dichotomous, given that conservative monarchists understand rights in terms of
cultural heritage rather than something given to the universal nature of the
individual as in classical forms of liberalism. All ideologies, more so than doctrines, contain contradictory strains. My interest here is in the adaptation of monarchy and ideals around it to the emergence of a Thai liberal political settlement out of messy institutional, political and ideological struggles: that is, political liberalism not philosophical liberalism.
October 28, 2007
Thailand: Educating for Democracy: Elites and Political Development Plans
From Democracy and National Identity in Thailand: A section from Chapter 8. Text taken from pre-proof copy. Citations available in book version.
I am placing this here as an indication of how historically repetitive are the current concerns among bureaucrats, educationalists, the military and scholars for providing "democratic education" to Thai citizens.
Institutions and planning democracy
One manifestation of the collaboration of politicians and liberal academics was the establishment of the King Prachatipok’s Institute in 1994. This was initially located within the secretariat of the House of Representatives and later became an independent body by an act of parliament in 1998.
Its aim was to promote an understanding of the ‘parliamentary democratic system with the king as head of state’. The addition of ‘parliament’ in this formulation is significant, for it marked the permanence and connection of parliamentary democracy with the older ideology of democracy with the king as head of state, propagated by the bureaucracy. King Prachatipok’s Institute was also required to assist in the legislative process, research democratic development and to make its research public. Marut Bunnag, then Parliamentary President and one-time education minister, claimed to have had a hand in the setting-up of KPI precisely because of his distrust of the Interior Ministry and its dubious capacity to carry through democratic education.
The range of the institute’s first curriculum was extensive, covering the principles of democratic government, labour and environmental issues under the conditions of globalization, policy formation and political ethics. The instructors included many familiar faces from the Thai political science scene, including Chai-Anan Samudavanija, Prudhisan Jumbala, Suchit Bunbongkarn, Kramol Thongthammachart and Anek Laothamatas. Specific curricula were also designed for community leaders, political party members and youth. In effect, with a larger budget, greater recognition and hence greater participation of academics, KPI might be seen as the indirect prodigy of IPPS.
Bowonsak Uwwano, the key framer of the reform constitution, who became Director of KPI in 1999, sees it as playing a crucial role in promoting democratic education for all strata of society from top-level bureaucrats to politicians and right down to villagers. In assuming this new position Bowonsak perhaps sees himself as an intermediary actor between society and the state. Speaking of his role in political reform, Bowonsak observed that
NGOs, they know only the suffering of the people but they don’t know how to cure the suffering, meaning that they know the problems of the people and they suffer with the people but they cannot find anyway out, just to protest, protest and protest. And apart from that, political power and state power in Thailand is very strong. This power more or less ignores the NGO movement. Sometimes they blame the NGOs for threatening the national security by receiving funds from foreign countries—the gap is very strong. As academics you have one challenging problematic, how you can bridge that gap. You cannot take sides by jumping into NGOs and being activists yourselves, because doing so you are going to share the suffering without finding the way out...you cannot jump into the state power either—doing so you would ignore the suffering of the people. So the role of the academics should be the bridge between the two and that bridge, in order to be strong, has to generate a way out…I try to do so.
In the grand tradition of liberal academics exemplified by Chai-Anan, Bowonsak exudes the optimism of one who has the ear of the elite, one who is called on, by the elite, to clean up the stables of government. And yet, in a familiar reversion to the people problem, of organizing them productively, KPI’s strategic focus is largely on building civic capacity for responsible participation. Thus the rationale of the institute is rooted very much in the same manner of Interior Ministry propagation projects; that is, the people do not have democratic consciousness, and this acts as an obstacle to further democratic development:
Government in a democratic regime, even though it began some sixty years ago, has faced the constant problem of people’s understanding of that system of government, in realizing their rights and duties as a citizen of the nation that is governed with a parliamentary democratic regime with the king as head of state…if this cannot be created it will lead to setbacks in the system of government as in the case of Thailand. This truth may be seen by looking at Western societies which have been able to develop government in all dimensions.
Another manifestation of the new political liberalism was the call for a political development plan among members of the DDC. Among the recommendations of the DDC (see previous chapter) was the establishment of a Political Development Council. This was acted on by the Political Reform Committee, the body established in 1996 by the Banharn government. A number of prominent political development theorists were involved in drafting a political development plan, and while it remains pretty much a white paper, the plan gives an indication of how liberal democratic structures were to relate to the development of a new political culture in Thailand.
The idea for the plan was first aired after the crisis of 1992, when the political science and public administration branches of the National Research Council were called on to develop a plan in order to stabilize political development. Presenting an analysis of the vicious cycle of Thai politics (constitution—parliament—crisis—coup—interim constitution- constitution—parliament—crisis—coup, etc.) rooted in the failure of political parties to develop, in the bureaucracy acting as blocks to political development and the lack of political ethics, the plan sought to map out an orderly progress for political development.
One central objective of the plan was to produce ‘democratic personalities’, meaning ‘individuals realizing their own potential and the potential of others such that they would respect the rights and freedoms of themselves and others’. This would be assisted by the creation of a National Ideology Committee. The vision presented of Thailand in 2555 (AD 2012) was that the bureaucracy and military would have no political role, the bureaucracy itself would be decentralized, political parties would have a mass base and ideology, there would be a guarantee of universal human rights including the right to full participation in the political process, and there would be a high level of democratic culture among the people. As for the role of the monarchy in this new democratic culture, it would ‘remain’ above political conflicts and would continue to act as a role model for society by ostensibly abiding by the ten virtues of a Buddhist king.
In 1996 the Political Reform Committee selected Likhit Dhiravegin, a political development theorist, to lead the drawing-up of a political development plan. This plan, based on the NRC version, basically sought similar institutional outcomes as those proposed by the political reform lobby. It also took a longer-term view, seeing the need to root democratic culture as the only guarantee of stability. Political development was seen as a long-term and dynamic intervention responding to societal and economic change. It was hoped that in the short term planners could help ‘bring into being a political culture that is facilitative of developing and preserving democracy with the king as head of state’. This would be achieved by engineering change through a series of educational measures, intervention into the mass media and creating role models. In the long term a fully developed democratic culture would emerge. In this new culture political participation was expected, but would be guided by the liberal principle of respect for the rights of the minority, and would be within the rule of law. Citizens would live life in a democratic way, which is to say they would be disciplined and responsible. In struggling for their own rights and interests they would be mindful of the common good. In disputes they would act rationally and use ‘scientific logic’ in order to solve problems peacefully. While much of the rhetoric of democratic education is the same as that preached by LAD, as is the reverence shown to the monarchy, what is significant is that the new agents of political socialization, proposed in this plan, are the family, parliament, political parties and interest groups. The apparatus of the bureaucratic-capitalist state had been dethroned, but its moral projects of citizen construction survived.
Liberal mouthpieces
Prominent individuals have popularized the liberal position. One important latecomer to the cause of political liberalism was Anand Panyarachun. His joining the bandwagon needs to be seen both as a result of the failure of the existing political system as well as his engagement, as a leading representative of globally engaged capital, with the world market. Anand is a member of Transparency International, that agent of ‘good governance’.
The economic imperative of the new democrasubjection is best highlighted by a speech made by Anand on the eve of the March election in 1992. In this speech Anand speaks of the end of communism and the success of democracy:
As for Thailand we do not need to copy anybody’s democracy, we only need to uphold the principle of democracy which is that the government must come from the people, it must be of the people, and it must be for the people.
Anand goes on to argue that elections are only one point in the democratic process, and argues that the people, with democratic hearts, need to struggle to take part in policy determination. This struggle and participation is defined by the boundaries of the rules of the game, being the law and the constitution. In linking economy and polity, Anand continues:
In the last 13 months the policy of the government, whether it be in economic or other dimensions, if it is analyzed well, it will be seen that the policy was open. I had an open economic policy, that was transparent, that was competitive that…also had a tax system that was just. These things are important factors in leading towards complete democracy…. Any country that uses an open economic system…history tells us that the political system must follow also, the political system must have competition.
It was imperative, Anand considered, that the open economy in Bangkok be spread to the provinces:
If and when this takes place, we can see an emergence of a rural middle class that can make better and more effective use of their greater autonomy in managing local affairs and issues.
For Anand, then, a free market economy was the basis of democracy, and, given that this had been established, he urged people not to be demoralized but to be patient with the gradual progress of democracy. Importantly, the growth of democracy would be supported by broadening the participation of ‘the young, the learned, and the middle, white-collar and managerial classes in political parties’. For Anand, ‘[t]hese groups of persons are some of the most important constituent parts of our economic machine.’
The participation of these classes in the provincial politics would support the process of decentralization and help in addressing the economic disparities, which were seen as threat to a stable democracy. Anand adopts the seminal analysis of the problem of Thai democracy developed by Anek Laothamatas regarding transforming peasants into urban citizens (see below). This, presumably, would then provide them with a stake in the system. Anand argued that the cycle whereby rural people elected vote-buying MPs and ‘middle-class’ Bangkokians brought down governments with cries of corruption and incompetence, would end when the status of the rural population was lifted. Presently, the people were not ‘interested in whether the government is good or not’, rather they were just interested in a government that ‘digs wells and makes roads’. Education and higher social-economic status would lead to a broader social vision, one which would provide rural people with the ability to differentiate between good and bad governments.
The ‘democracy’ expressed here is an urban one—dependent on an educated middle class and their assumed rationality. The economic task is how to develop the rural areas so that this form of middle-class citizenship can be made real. To this question, Anek Laothamatas, Anand’s apparent inspiration, provides an answer. If the perennial problem of urban/rural split in Thai politics is to be overcome then the rural sector, he argues, needs to be thoroughly commercialized with the consequence of either the embourgeoisment or proleterianization of the Thai peasants. Only on this economic basis can the middle-class rational citizen arise. In this frame, then, economics precedes politics, the subjects of democracy do not yet really exist, and the peasants in the countryside are the ghosts of underdevelopment waiting to be buried. Indeed, it is only by engagement with the liberal regime that the new people will be constructed. Participation becomes a mode of transformation—but this does not rule out the need for democratic instruction.
It would be wrong to imagine that the aims of the liberal project could be confidently achieved in economic processes alone. Many liberals see civic politics and education as a means to ideologize the proposed process from peasant to citizen. Just as state democrasubjection provides concrete steps towards citizen construction, so does the emergent liberal discourse—in its commentary on civic competence—provide steps towards liberal democrasubjection. It should be clear here that the intellectual elites have premeditated the meaning of democracy, its function and its processes. The central task was simply how to make this meaning tangible. This entailed, in part, working on the raw material of the people, making the subjects into citizens in the narcissistic self-image of the virtuous, public-minded and rational intellectual. It is thought that democracy without a ‘rational’ political culture is unworkable. Anand put it more eloquently:
Democracy is a reflection of the level of the people who vote…if they vote for bad persons, democracy will deteriorate. If people still vote as if they were 2,000 year old turtles, who then should take the blame except the people themselves?
Similarly, Anek argues that one problem for Thailand has been the absence of a long period of democratic development. His basic point is that Western democracy arose gradually as the franchise widened to assimilate lower classes who had been appropriately educated to perform their democratic responsibilities. According to Anek, the Westernized revolutionaries who came to power in 1932 ‘gave’ democracy to all people instantaneously. This premature designation of the democratic franchise, he argues, has been the root problem facing Thailand ever since: democracy has been taken like technology, ‘before the order of our historical development’. The premature embracing of democracy leads, according to Anek, to the prevalent practice of vote-buying as well as the poor quality of politicians and the strength of the military. For him, then, the project of reconstruction of citizenship becomes a societal revolution of mind and economy. While the economy leads, there is the need for education on citizen virtue in a liberal space (see below).
After the rise of the political reform movement, both Anand and Anek became prominent proponents of liberal democratic development. This has included praising the idea of a ‘non-ideological civil society’ and the idea of ‘good governance’. For Anand capitalism, with a human face, is the wave of future. Ideological questions are now seen as obsolete, with new questions being focused on how governments can best serve their citizens. The central question for Anand is no longer any doctrine of government, but its capability and legitimacy. On this matter he is full of praise for the practice of governance in Singapore, which is said to have responded well to people’s needs. This tension between democracy and good governance, regardless of form, was resolved by linking the instruments of good governance to democracy: transparency, freedom of information, scrutiny, balance of power and rule of law. This is the liberal project writ large, ensuring that any excessive demos and its mutations of freedom are constrained by a properly designed liberal democracy. New channels of communication and institutionalized participation would ensure this.
What of the king in this new liberalism? If the symbol of the monarchy functioned to consubstantiate a nation of difference around embodied Thai identity in the old order, the question now arises of what might the symbol mean in the liberalizing ‘democratic’ regime. Coming from a prominent spokesperson of the liberal current in Thailand, Anand’s speeches on the king reflect the continued importance of this institution in a liberal Thailand.
Anand’s writings on the monarchy are far-reaching and not merely ritualistic. He adheres to the royalist version of the king governing not on the basis of divine right but on fulfilling the role of a Buddhist king. He notes the king’s ‘nearly two thousand projects’ have assisted the poor and that the king himself has approached local communities pragmatically by tapping into local wisdom and culture. Such work with the poor has led to the strengthening of the ‘social fabric of our society and fortifying our national cohesion and identity’. Anand’s speeches on the king are an attempt to constructively integrate the monarchy around the new liberal political project. In one interview he recounts the king’s following of the legislative programmes of the parliament and notes that he is ‘strict’ about using his rights to warn, encourage and to be consulted. Indeed, Anand considers the king as Thailand’s ‘number one public servant’, and furthermore, one who is accountable: ‘what he does is seen by the people. Not accountable in the legal sense of the word, but…there is transparency in what he does.’ Finally, Anand presents a picture of a monarch who has reached the highest stage of wisdom, a position of detachment where the ego is erased. According to Anand, the king has achieved this and is thus able to serve as Thailand’s ‘guiding light’: a king for a liberal society.
Liberal civic education and civil society
If the liberal current recognizes the primacy of economic factors in spawning new historical subjects of democracy—the ‘middle class’—this is not left to chance. Hence studies of political culture are part of the liberal project of instilling in would-be citizens liberal dispositions and the capacity for self-rule. This brings forth the necessary project of liberal civic education. As a disciplinary aspect of the new liberal democrasubjection, civic education should be understood by reference to the developmental metaphor and its privileging of subject/object relations between the rulers and the soon-to-be rulers. An examination of the thought of Anek Laothamatas reveals a strong normative bias on the nature of citizenship that requires acquisition of virtue.
Anek is a strong proponent of civic education and a leading liberal intellectual in Thai society. A proponent of political reform, he has also been involved in KPI and civic education programs. For him civic education should be an ongoing process from primary school to university. Speaking of the mass of students in the education system and the purpose of civic education, Anek says: ‘Let these people have dignity, even though they have less economic status than others, but they do not have less rights, duties and political respect.’ Anek sees such civic education as being bound by the treasured civic culture of Thailand. Anek, however, argues that the official ideology is not ‘authentically Thai’ but rather has been adapted from other cultures. This is not quite apostasy of the essential ‘Thainess’ examined in Chapter 6. Certainly, the body of work that deconstructs and challenges the meanings of official ideology, such as Thongchai’s, is apostate. However, Anek is disturbing, or nudging, the apperception of the Thai ideology to its constructedness, in order to bolster it. He grasps the developmental metaphor that has haunted ‘Thai authenticity’ as an unspoken and ideologically productive contradiction, and turns it into the essential virtue of Thainess: Thai identity is marked by its ingenious assimilation of other cultures for its own needs. It is a moving historical body premised on becoming rather than being, or rather on being-in-becoming. This strategic reading by Anek unceremoniously provides liberalism with an entry point into the powerful symbolism of the triad, while not surrendering to the Thai chauvinism of the National Identity Board.
In a book surveying the Western tradition of civil society and citizenship, Anek clearly endorses notions of negative freedom, the minimal state and citizen self-reliance. In an extended discussion on the meaning of civil society, as if it were a living organism, Anek characterizes it as all those associations, groups, forums, foundations and institutes that mediate between the individual and the state and which are characterized by two dispositions:
1)[Civil society] dislikes and does not accept state hegemony, even though it will accept assistance from the state and will cooperate with the state, but it is able to appropriately control and resist the state. 2) It does not like the doctrine of extreme individualism, which promotes selfishness…and non-recognition of the common good.
Thus, even though the three elements of society—‘the state, civil society, the individual’—were independent of each other they were also connected in a simultaneous activity of conflict and unity.
The rise of civil society as a counterbalance to the state required a shift from subject consciousness to citizen consciousness. He argues that simply providing the mechanisms of local democracy will not be enough:
We should not just stress the structure of local government but local civil society as well, by training the people to be citizens; even when they vote they should vote like a citizen, not a client.
He then criticizes the electoral practices of the people as premised on their own private interest rather than the public interest. In his view, elites need to develop ‘enlightened self-interest’, which is an attitude that disposes one to the pursuit of self-interest without destroying the public interest. This would ultimately foster a more beneficial cooperative environment for the further pursuit of one’s interest. Self-described as a ‘left-wing liberal’, Anek considers one of the duties of civic education as doing away with dependence on the state and developing an ethic of self-reliance, particularly among the poor who, he says, consider democracy as being simply a matter of welfare. The task then was to give new meanings to democracy as ‘self-government, or political expressions with dignity’. This would be aided by the fostering of civility, of manners, of a willingness to listen, learn and share. In regard to civic virtue, Anek revisits the Greek polis, in search of the characteristics of the ‘full human’ (a person with civic virtue), and also finds some examples in Thailand of the polis where people are directly involved in issues, freely sacrificing themselves, being responsible and using their own resources. While interest groups were part of civil society, for Anek greater emphasis was to be given to groups that stress the public interest.
I am placing this here as an indication of how historically repetitive are the current concerns among bureaucrats, educationalists, the military and scholars for providing "democratic education" to Thai citizens.
Institutions and planning democracy
One manifestation of the collaboration of politicians and liberal academics was the establishment of the King Prachatipok’s Institute in 1994. This was initially located within the secretariat of the House of Representatives and later became an independent body by an act of parliament in 1998.
Its aim was to promote an understanding of the ‘parliamentary democratic system with the king as head of state’. The addition of ‘parliament’ in this formulation is significant, for it marked the permanence and connection of parliamentary democracy with the older ideology of democracy with the king as head of state, propagated by the bureaucracy. King Prachatipok’s Institute was also required to assist in the legislative process, research democratic development and to make its research public. Marut Bunnag, then Parliamentary President and one-time education minister, claimed to have had a hand in the setting-up of KPI precisely because of his distrust of the Interior Ministry and its dubious capacity to carry through democratic education.
The range of the institute’s first curriculum was extensive, covering the principles of democratic government, labour and environmental issues under the conditions of globalization, policy formation and political ethics. The instructors included many familiar faces from the Thai political science scene, including Chai-Anan Samudavanija, Prudhisan Jumbala, Suchit Bunbongkarn, Kramol Thongthammachart and Anek Laothamatas. Specific curricula were also designed for community leaders, political party members and youth. In effect, with a larger budget, greater recognition and hence greater participation of academics, KPI might be seen as the indirect prodigy of IPPS.
Bowonsak Uwwano, the key framer of the reform constitution, who became Director of KPI in 1999, sees it as playing a crucial role in promoting democratic education for all strata of society from top-level bureaucrats to politicians and right down to villagers. In assuming this new position Bowonsak perhaps sees himself as an intermediary actor between society and the state. Speaking of his role in political reform, Bowonsak observed that
NGOs, they know only the suffering of the people but they don’t know how to cure the suffering, meaning that they know the problems of the people and they suffer with the people but they cannot find anyway out, just to protest, protest and protest. And apart from that, political power and state power in Thailand is very strong. This power more or less ignores the NGO movement. Sometimes they blame the NGOs for threatening the national security by receiving funds from foreign countries—the gap is very strong. As academics you have one challenging problematic, how you can bridge that gap. You cannot take sides by jumping into NGOs and being activists yourselves, because doing so you are going to share the suffering without finding the way out...you cannot jump into the state power either—doing so you would ignore the suffering of the people. So the role of the academics should be the bridge between the two and that bridge, in order to be strong, has to generate a way out…I try to do so.
In the grand tradition of liberal academics exemplified by Chai-Anan, Bowonsak exudes the optimism of one who has the ear of the elite, one who is called on, by the elite, to clean up the stables of government. And yet, in a familiar reversion to the people problem, of organizing them productively, KPI’s strategic focus is largely on building civic capacity for responsible participation. Thus the rationale of the institute is rooted very much in the same manner of Interior Ministry propagation projects; that is, the people do not have democratic consciousness, and this acts as an obstacle to further democratic development:
Government in a democratic regime, even though it began some sixty years ago, has faced the constant problem of people’s understanding of that system of government, in realizing their rights and duties as a citizen of the nation that is governed with a parliamentary democratic regime with the king as head of state…if this cannot be created it will lead to setbacks in the system of government as in the case of Thailand. This truth may be seen by looking at Western societies which have been able to develop government in all dimensions.
Another manifestation of the new political liberalism was the call for a political development plan among members of the DDC. Among the recommendations of the DDC (see previous chapter) was the establishment of a Political Development Council. This was acted on by the Political Reform Committee, the body established in 1996 by the Banharn government. A number of prominent political development theorists were involved in drafting a political development plan, and while it remains pretty much a white paper, the plan gives an indication of how liberal democratic structures were to relate to the development of a new political culture in Thailand.
The idea for the plan was first aired after the crisis of 1992, when the political science and public administration branches of the National Research Council were called on to develop a plan in order to stabilize political development. Presenting an analysis of the vicious cycle of Thai politics (constitution—parliament—crisis—coup—interim constitution- constitution—parliament—crisis—coup, etc.) rooted in the failure of political parties to develop, in the bureaucracy acting as blocks to political development and the lack of political ethics, the plan sought to map out an orderly progress for political development.
One central objective of the plan was to produce ‘democratic personalities’, meaning ‘individuals realizing their own potential and the potential of others such that they would respect the rights and freedoms of themselves and others’. This would be assisted by the creation of a National Ideology Committee. The vision presented of Thailand in 2555 (AD 2012) was that the bureaucracy and military would have no political role, the bureaucracy itself would be decentralized, political parties would have a mass base and ideology, there would be a guarantee of universal human rights including the right to full participation in the political process, and there would be a high level of democratic culture among the people. As for the role of the monarchy in this new democratic culture, it would ‘remain’ above political conflicts and would continue to act as a role model for society by ostensibly abiding by the ten virtues of a Buddhist king.
In 1996 the Political Reform Committee selected Likhit Dhiravegin, a political development theorist, to lead the drawing-up of a political development plan. This plan, based on the NRC version, basically sought similar institutional outcomes as those proposed by the political reform lobby. It also took a longer-term view, seeing the need to root democratic culture as the only guarantee of stability. Political development was seen as a long-term and dynamic intervention responding to societal and economic change. It was hoped that in the short term planners could help ‘bring into being a political culture that is facilitative of developing and preserving democracy with the king as head of state’. This would be achieved by engineering change through a series of educational measures, intervention into the mass media and creating role models. In the long term a fully developed democratic culture would emerge. In this new culture political participation was expected, but would be guided by the liberal principle of respect for the rights of the minority, and would be within the rule of law. Citizens would live life in a democratic way, which is to say they would be disciplined and responsible. In struggling for their own rights and interests they would be mindful of the common good. In disputes they would act rationally and use ‘scientific logic’ in order to solve problems peacefully. While much of the rhetoric of democratic education is the same as that preached by LAD, as is the reverence shown to the monarchy, what is significant is that the new agents of political socialization, proposed in this plan, are the family, parliament, political parties and interest groups. The apparatus of the bureaucratic-capitalist state had been dethroned, but its moral projects of citizen construction survived.
Liberal mouthpieces
Prominent individuals have popularized the liberal position. One important latecomer to the cause of political liberalism was Anand Panyarachun. His joining the bandwagon needs to be seen both as a result of the failure of the existing political system as well as his engagement, as a leading representative of globally engaged capital, with the world market. Anand is a member of Transparency International, that agent of ‘good governance’.
The economic imperative of the new democrasubjection is best highlighted by a speech made by Anand on the eve of the March election in 1992. In this speech Anand speaks of the end of communism and the success of democracy:
As for Thailand we do not need to copy anybody’s democracy, we only need to uphold the principle of democracy which is that the government must come from the people, it must be of the people, and it must be for the people.
Anand goes on to argue that elections are only one point in the democratic process, and argues that the people, with democratic hearts, need to struggle to take part in policy determination. This struggle and participation is defined by the boundaries of the rules of the game, being the law and the constitution. In linking economy and polity, Anand continues:
In the last 13 months the policy of the government, whether it be in economic or other dimensions, if it is analyzed well, it will be seen that the policy was open. I had an open economic policy, that was transparent, that was competitive that…also had a tax system that was just. These things are important factors in leading towards complete democracy…. Any country that uses an open economic system…history tells us that the political system must follow also, the political system must have competition.
It was imperative, Anand considered, that the open economy in Bangkok be spread to the provinces:
If and when this takes place, we can see an emergence of a rural middle class that can make better and more effective use of their greater autonomy in managing local affairs and issues.
For Anand, then, a free market economy was the basis of democracy, and, given that this had been established, he urged people not to be demoralized but to be patient with the gradual progress of democracy. Importantly, the growth of democracy would be supported by broadening the participation of ‘the young, the learned, and the middle, white-collar and managerial classes in political parties’. For Anand, ‘[t]hese groups of persons are some of the most important constituent parts of our economic machine.’
The participation of these classes in the provincial politics would support the process of decentralization and help in addressing the economic disparities, which were seen as threat to a stable democracy. Anand adopts the seminal analysis of the problem of Thai democracy developed by Anek Laothamatas regarding transforming peasants into urban citizens (see below). This, presumably, would then provide them with a stake in the system. Anand argued that the cycle whereby rural people elected vote-buying MPs and ‘middle-class’ Bangkokians brought down governments with cries of corruption and incompetence, would end when the status of the rural population was lifted. Presently, the people were not ‘interested in whether the government is good or not’, rather they were just interested in a government that ‘digs wells and makes roads’. Education and higher social-economic status would lead to a broader social vision, one which would provide rural people with the ability to differentiate between good and bad governments.
The ‘democracy’ expressed here is an urban one—dependent on an educated middle class and their assumed rationality. The economic task is how to develop the rural areas so that this form of middle-class citizenship can be made real. To this question, Anek Laothamatas, Anand’s apparent inspiration, provides an answer. If the perennial problem of urban/rural split in Thai politics is to be overcome then the rural sector, he argues, needs to be thoroughly commercialized with the consequence of either the embourgeoisment or proleterianization of the Thai peasants. Only on this economic basis can the middle-class rational citizen arise. In this frame, then, economics precedes politics, the subjects of democracy do not yet really exist, and the peasants in the countryside are the ghosts of underdevelopment waiting to be buried. Indeed, it is only by engagement with the liberal regime that the new people will be constructed. Participation becomes a mode of transformation—but this does not rule out the need for democratic instruction.
It would be wrong to imagine that the aims of the liberal project could be confidently achieved in economic processes alone. Many liberals see civic politics and education as a means to ideologize the proposed process from peasant to citizen. Just as state democrasubjection provides concrete steps towards citizen construction, so does the emergent liberal discourse—in its commentary on civic competence—provide steps towards liberal democrasubjection. It should be clear here that the intellectual elites have premeditated the meaning of democracy, its function and its processes. The central task was simply how to make this meaning tangible. This entailed, in part, working on the raw material of the people, making the subjects into citizens in the narcissistic self-image of the virtuous, public-minded and rational intellectual. It is thought that democracy without a ‘rational’ political culture is unworkable. Anand put it more eloquently:
Democracy is a reflection of the level of the people who vote…if they vote for bad persons, democracy will deteriorate. If people still vote as if they were 2,000 year old turtles, who then should take the blame except the people themselves?
Similarly, Anek argues that one problem for Thailand has been the absence of a long period of democratic development. His basic point is that Western democracy arose gradually as the franchise widened to assimilate lower classes who had been appropriately educated to perform their democratic responsibilities. According to Anek, the Westernized revolutionaries who came to power in 1932 ‘gave’ democracy to all people instantaneously. This premature designation of the democratic franchise, he argues, has been the root problem facing Thailand ever since: democracy has been taken like technology, ‘before the order of our historical development’. The premature embracing of democracy leads, according to Anek, to the prevalent practice of vote-buying as well as the poor quality of politicians and the strength of the military. For him, then, the project of reconstruction of citizenship becomes a societal revolution of mind and economy. While the economy leads, there is the need for education on citizen virtue in a liberal space (see below).
After the rise of the political reform movement, both Anand and Anek became prominent proponents of liberal democratic development. This has included praising the idea of a ‘non-ideological civil society’ and the idea of ‘good governance’. For Anand capitalism, with a human face, is the wave of future. Ideological questions are now seen as obsolete, with new questions being focused on how governments can best serve their citizens. The central question for Anand is no longer any doctrine of government, but its capability and legitimacy. On this matter he is full of praise for the practice of governance in Singapore, which is said to have responded well to people’s needs. This tension between democracy and good governance, regardless of form, was resolved by linking the instruments of good governance to democracy: transparency, freedom of information, scrutiny, balance of power and rule of law. This is the liberal project writ large, ensuring that any excessive demos and its mutations of freedom are constrained by a properly designed liberal democracy. New channels of communication and institutionalized participation would ensure this.
What of the king in this new liberalism? If the symbol of the monarchy functioned to consubstantiate a nation of difference around embodied Thai identity in the old order, the question now arises of what might the symbol mean in the liberalizing ‘democratic’ regime. Coming from a prominent spokesperson of the liberal current in Thailand, Anand’s speeches on the king reflect the continued importance of this institution in a liberal Thailand.
Anand’s writings on the monarchy are far-reaching and not merely ritualistic. He adheres to the royalist version of the king governing not on the basis of divine right but on fulfilling the role of a Buddhist king. He notes the king’s ‘nearly two thousand projects’ have assisted the poor and that the king himself has approached local communities pragmatically by tapping into local wisdom and culture. Such work with the poor has led to the strengthening of the ‘social fabric of our society and fortifying our national cohesion and identity’. Anand’s speeches on the king are an attempt to constructively integrate the monarchy around the new liberal political project. In one interview he recounts the king’s following of the legislative programmes of the parliament and notes that he is ‘strict’ about using his rights to warn, encourage and to be consulted. Indeed, Anand considers the king as Thailand’s ‘number one public servant’, and furthermore, one who is accountable: ‘what he does is seen by the people. Not accountable in the legal sense of the word, but…there is transparency in what he does.’ Finally, Anand presents a picture of a monarch who has reached the highest stage of wisdom, a position of detachment where the ego is erased. According to Anand, the king has achieved this and is thus able to serve as Thailand’s ‘guiding light’: a king for a liberal society.
Liberal civic education and civil society
If the liberal current recognizes the primacy of economic factors in spawning new historical subjects of democracy—the ‘middle class’—this is not left to chance. Hence studies of political culture are part of the liberal project of instilling in would-be citizens liberal dispositions and the capacity for self-rule. This brings forth the necessary project of liberal civic education. As a disciplinary aspect of the new liberal democrasubjection, civic education should be understood by reference to the developmental metaphor and its privileging of subject/object relations between the rulers and the soon-to-be rulers. An examination of the thought of Anek Laothamatas reveals a strong normative bias on the nature of citizenship that requires acquisition of virtue.
Anek is a strong proponent of civic education and a leading liberal intellectual in Thai society. A proponent of political reform, he has also been involved in KPI and civic education programs. For him civic education should be an ongoing process from primary school to university. Speaking of the mass of students in the education system and the purpose of civic education, Anek says: ‘Let these people have dignity, even though they have less economic status than others, but they do not have less rights, duties and political respect.’ Anek sees such civic education as being bound by the treasured civic culture of Thailand. Anek, however, argues that the official ideology is not ‘authentically Thai’ but rather has been adapted from other cultures. This is not quite apostasy of the essential ‘Thainess’ examined in Chapter 6. Certainly, the body of work that deconstructs and challenges the meanings of official ideology, such as Thongchai’s, is apostate. However, Anek is disturbing, or nudging, the apperception of the Thai ideology to its constructedness, in order to bolster it. He grasps the developmental metaphor that has haunted ‘Thai authenticity’ as an unspoken and ideologically productive contradiction, and turns it into the essential virtue of Thainess: Thai identity is marked by its ingenious assimilation of other cultures for its own needs. It is a moving historical body premised on becoming rather than being, or rather on being-in-becoming. This strategic reading by Anek unceremoniously provides liberalism with an entry point into the powerful symbolism of the triad, while not surrendering to the Thai chauvinism of the National Identity Board.
In a book surveying the Western tradition of civil society and citizenship, Anek clearly endorses notions of negative freedom, the minimal state and citizen self-reliance. In an extended discussion on the meaning of civil society, as if it were a living organism, Anek characterizes it as all those associations, groups, forums, foundations and institutes that mediate between the individual and the state and which are characterized by two dispositions:
1)[Civil society] dislikes and does not accept state hegemony, even though it will accept assistance from the state and will cooperate with the state, but it is able to appropriately control and resist the state. 2) It does not like the doctrine of extreme individualism, which promotes selfishness…and non-recognition of the common good.
Thus, even though the three elements of society—‘the state, civil society, the individual’—were independent of each other they were also connected in a simultaneous activity of conflict and unity.
The rise of civil society as a counterbalance to the state required a shift from subject consciousness to citizen consciousness. He argues that simply providing the mechanisms of local democracy will not be enough:
We should not just stress the structure of local government but local civil society as well, by training the people to be citizens; even when they vote they should vote like a citizen, not a client.
He then criticizes the electoral practices of the people as premised on their own private interest rather than the public interest. In his view, elites need to develop ‘enlightened self-interest’, which is an attitude that disposes one to the pursuit of self-interest without destroying the public interest. This would ultimately foster a more beneficial cooperative environment for the further pursuit of one’s interest. Self-described as a ‘left-wing liberal’, Anek considers one of the duties of civic education as doing away with dependence on the state and developing an ethic of self-reliance, particularly among the poor who, he says, consider democracy as being simply a matter of welfare. The task then was to give new meanings to democracy as ‘self-government, or political expressions with dignity’. This would be aided by the fostering of civility, of manners, of a willingness to listen, learn and share. In regard to civic virtue, Anek revisits the Greek polis, in search of the characteristics of the ‘full human’ (a person with civic virtue), and also finds some examples in Thailand of the polis where people are directly involved in issues, freely sacrificing themselves, being responsible and using their own resources. While interest groups were part of civil society, for Anek greater emphasis was to be given to groups that stress the public interest.
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