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.”
June 22, 2012
April 23, 2012
Two-timing China
On the politics of two-timing: China, the U.S. and Australia. Hear the clinking of glasses? Hardly. It’s a celebration that must be muted for fear of raising the ire of the Chinese government. Even so, there must have been many a quiet toast to the profound intensification of the Australia-US alliance marked by the arrival this week of US Marines in the Northern Territory, whose rotating ranks will swell to several thousand in coming years.
With a little bit of the Pentagon now firmly on Australia’s northern shores, the impulse is further expansion. Last week reports re-surfaced of possibly extending US presence in Australia to ports in Western Australia and even Queensland, and of locating drones and surveillance facilities on Cocos Islands, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean (unknown to most). This comes on top of the United States’ increased engagement with states such as the Philippines and Singapore in what is a thinly disguised balancing of a rising China’s power.
Hear the thud of protesting feet? Hardly. No Eureka nationalists have taken to the streets against these militarist developments. Even for some anti-war veterans, Midnight Oil’s anti-militarist anthem “US Forces” looks lamely juvenile, penned for a less complicated era. Where have all the flowers gone, indeed. Still there will be those who bemoan these developments as yet more evidence that Australia might as well apply for status as an American state. Some will shudder at the utterly banal reality of Australia’s two-timing between Chinese markets and American warships and wonder how a better future was lost. It is small comfort to observe that sooner or later two-timers get caught out.
These developments come at a significant moment in debates about Australia’s role in international politics. Several years ago in his 2010 Quarterly Essay Power-Shift ANU Professor Hugh White was honest enough to let his simplistic realism lead him to a terrifying conclusion: Australia should advise the United States that its top-of-the-pops post-Cold War run was soon to be over and that it needed to accept China as a Great Power. That meant, among other things, respecting China’s legitimate regional interests and non-interference in its internal affairs. White is no star-striper ingrate. He values the US’s military presence in the region, especially in Japan and South Korea, as allowing relative peace to endure. That time is now over.
Some Japanese are itching to be “normal” and transform the Japanese Self Defense Forces into a proper military. The Chinese for their part are eyeing a world of enlarged military and security possibilities on the back of massive economic growth. In this context, White and others advance a position that with US unipolarity in decline it is necessary for countries in the region to avoid war by planning a careful power transition. That transition must allow a Concert of Powers, in which China sits as an equal, to replace US unipolarity. A Concert of Powers, functioning to prevent any Great Power from predominating, presumably will ensure balance and restraint. At its table will be the predictables: China, the U.S., South Korea, Japan, Russia, India, and other states. They will respect each other’s legitimate interests, which is to say they can play around in their own backyards as long as they don’t seek primacy against others.
This message was not the kind of thing Australian diplomats want to deliver to their great and powerful American friends over cocktails. White earned rebuke and insult for his efforts, with The Australian’s Greg Sheridan calling White’s paper “the single, stupidest strategic document ever prepared in Australian history by someone who once held a position of some responsibility in our system.”
Well, now it seems that the Australian government has chosen a smart path. In expanding the presence of the U.S. military Australia appears to support and defend the U.S. position in the Asia Pacific into the future. It signals, some would argue, a shared strategic conception of the world that aims at maintenance of U.S. unipolarity. Maybe not.
Many analysts will read the expansion of the US presence here as vindication of the insurance doctrine that underlines Australia’s relationship with the U.S. That doctrine holds that Australia must do whatever it can to keep the US engaged and present in the region. This can involve exaggerating threats, offering incentives, being a hyper loyal ally by fighting wars of no conceivable national or international interest, and pleading common values. There is no greater insurance than a deepened presence by the US, one which potentially involves massive infrastructure of great strategic significance. Counter-intuitively, having the US more firmly anchored here, will give Australia a vantage point from which to disagree and counter US direction when this is judged to be contrary to national, regional or international interest.
The day may come when the diplomatic cocktail party is upset and Australia advises the U.S. government that its position at the top of the pops is no longer tenable. U.S. reliance on a deepened Australian security role will give weight to the unwelcome argument that security in the region will be best managed by a Concert of Powers. Two-timers celebrate, it seems you may have your China and be with the U.S., as well.
Michael Connors teaches politics at La Trobe University. He is the co-author of New Global Politics of the Asia Pacific, Routledge, Second Edition (2012). A shorter version of this article appeared at http://newmatilda.com/2012/04/11/twotiming-china
With a little bit of the Pentagon now firmly on Australia’s northern shores, the impulse is further expansion. Last week reports re-surfaced of possibly extending US presence in Australia to ports in Western Australia and even Queensland, and of locating drones and surveillance facilities on Cocos Islands, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean (unknown to most). This comes on top of the United States’ increased engagement with states such as the Philippines and Singapore in what is a thinly disguised balancing of a rising China’s power.
Hear the thud of protesting feet? Hardly. No Eureka nationalists have taken to the streets against these militarist developments. Even for some anti-war veterans, Midnight Oil’s anti-militarist anthem “US Forces” looks lamely juvenile, penned for a less complicated era. Where have all the flowers gone, indeed. Still there will be those who bemoan these developments as yet more evidence that Australia might as well apply for status as an American state. Some will shudder at the utterly banal reality of Australia’s two-timing between Chinese markets and American warships and wonder how a better future was lost. It is small comfort to observe that sooner or later two-timers get caught out.
These developments come at a significant moment in debates about Australia’s role in international politics. Several years ago in his 2010 Quarterly Essay Power-Shift ANU Professor Hugh White was honest enough to let his simplistic realism lead him to a terrifying conclusion: Australia should advise the United States that its top-of-the-pops post-Cold War run was soon to be over and that it needed to accept China as a Great Power. That meant, among other things, respecting China’s legitimate regional interests and non-interference in its internal affairs. White is no star-striper ingrate. He values the US’s military presence in the region, especially in Japan and South Korea, as allowing relative peace to endure. That time is now over.
Some Japanese are itching to be “normal” and transform the Japanese Self Defense Forces into a proper military. The Chinese for their part are eyeing a world of enlarged military and security possibilities on the back of massive economic growth. In this context, White and others advance a position that with US unipolarity in decline it is necessary for countries in the region to avoid war by planning a careful power transition. That transition must allow a Concert of Powers, in which China sits as an equal, to replace US unipolarity. A Concert of Powers, functioning to prevent any Great Power from predominating, presumably will ensure balance and restraint. At its table will be the predictables: China, the U.S., South Korea, Japan, Russia, India, and other states. They will respect each other’s legitimate interests, which is to say they can play around in their own backyards as long as they don’t seek primacy against others.
This message was not the kind of thing Australian diplomats want to deliver to their great and powerful American friends over cocktails. White earned rebuke and insult for his efforts, with The Australian’s Greg Sheridan calling White’s paper “the single, stupidest strategic document ever prepared in Australian history by someone who once held a position of some responsibility in our system.”
Well, now it seems that the Australian government has chosen a smart path. In expanding the presence of the U.S. military Australia appears to support and defend the U.S. position in the Asia Pacific into the future. It signals, some would argue, a shared strategic conception of the world that aims at maintenance of U.S. unipolarity. Maybe not.
Many analysts will read the expansion of the US presence here as vindication of the insurance doctrine that underlines Australia’s relationship with the U.S. That doctrine holds that Australia must do whatever it can to keep the US engaged and present in the region. This can involve exaggerating threats, offering incentives, being a hyper loyal ally by fighting wars of no conceivable national or international interest, and pleading common values. There is no greater insurance than a deepened presence by the US, one which potentially involves massive infrastructure of great strategic significance. Counter-intuitively, having the US more firmly anchored here, will give Australia a vantage point from which to disagree and counter US direction when this is judged to be contrary to national, regional or international interest.
The day may come when the diplomatic cocktail party is upset and Australia advises the U.S. government that its position at the top of the pops is no longer tenable. U.S. reliance on a deepened Australian security role will give weight to the unwelcome argument that security in the region will be best managed by a Concert of Powers. Two-timers celebrate, it seems you may have your China and be with the U.S., as well.
Michael Connors teaches politics at La Trobe University. He is the co-author of New Global Politics of the Asia Pacific, Routledge, Second Edition (2012). A shorter version of this article appeared at http://newmatilda.com/2012/04/11/twotiming-china
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
September 11, 2011
Thinking about authoritarianism in an ambivalent state
The full paper with tables, matrix and references may be read here
In the context of a fascinating surge in discussions on the nature of the Thai state at various forums, I reproduce a section of my attempt to think about unpacking the nature of authoritarianism in the ambivalent Thai state. The full paper may be read by clicking the link above. A much shorter version of this paper was published in Pacific Review as "Liberalism, Authoritarianism and the Politics of Decisionism". That version did not contain my attempt to think about authoritarian power.
_______________________________________
This paper is an attempt to think through the nature of authoritarianism in Thailand by arguing that the focus of analysis should be on the exercise of political power, rather than regime form, in the context of the failure to settle on forms of legitimate power at the state and regime level. It first offers a way of thinking about authoritarianism, markers of its existence and, importantly in the Thai context, its articulation to liberalism. It advances this argument by noting the synchronicity of liberal and authoritarian modes of power across a range of regime forms in Thailand since 1976. Rather than situating authoritarianism in specific institutional sites (though it surely resides there – see Table 1), attention is given to the failure to establish and consolidate rules for the exercise of power as a consequence of Thailand’s specific ‘democratic transition’ that entailed a liberal and security settlement based on repression of progressive democratic forces, and the entrenchment of the monarchy at the centre of a national power bloc. Consequent to that settlement, competing groups of strategic elites in Thailand exist in a permanent state of insecurity and revert to authoritarian modes to secure their position, even as liberalism progressively deepens its reach.
Liberal and authoritarian regime framers, those forces that on balance support liberal or authoritarian forms of social order, are not exclusively identifiable in specific institutions, they are trans-institutional and trans-social class, and manifest in political exigencies. The contest and co-existence between the two currents reflects competing agendas for social order that are formed around different and changing coalitions of social forces. Since 1976 the complex pattern of forces that have come to occupy each current has shifted, their realignment contingent on a range of factors that come to bear on the task of social order and capital accumulation. As much as Hewison can speak of ‘contingent democrats’, to indicate the shifting position on democracy of the Thai bourgeoisie and the middle class, one may also speak of ‘contingent authoritarians’, to recognise those liberal regime framers who will utilise power, or condone its use, for the purposes of stemming power from below or in the struggle against authoritarian regime framers. Indeed, the contemporary situation (post-2006) is marked by a suspension of liberal modes of conduct at a national level, implicitly sanctioned by liberal regime framers, as different political forces compete to establish dominance in the Thai state, mobilising various resources and legitimating strategies.
Authoritarianism of power, not of regime.
Rather than viewing the 2006 coup and the resulting political fallout as ushering in new forms of authoritarianism in Thailand, this paper will speak of continuities and repetitive pathologies of state power, encased in the different regime forms since 1976. It will argue that the failure to settle the pattern of domination that lies at the heart of state structure requires that we think less of distinct regime forms (semi-democratic, democratic, authoritarian) and more of an ambivalent state of power in which shifting and differential patterns of liberalism, electoralism and authoritarianism have momentarily congealed as regimes.
This approach entails moving beyond the prevalent dichotomous models of regime form in democratization literature that posits authoritarian or post-totalitarian and democratic endpoints as opposite poles on a transition-continuum. As Thomas Carothers has argued, those regimes whose ‘transition’ to democracy has seemingly stalled may not have stalled at all, rather they are stubbornly squatting somewhere tangentially forked-off the linear continuum. The existence of hybrid regimes is now widely accepted: seemingly in temporary holding positions of their authoritarian leaders in “democratic transitions”, these “hybrids” have become embedded regime forms around which political behaviour is structured.
Moving beyond regime form at a macro level requires recognition that the yielding of power in state agencies, through political institutions, and in collaboration with business interests, may be remarkably similar whatever regime formally holds. This insight can often be lost as a consequence of giving too much credence to formal regime appellation. I have argued at length elsewhere that a significant force shaping the modern Thai state (understood both as an institutional apparatus concerned with the making and enforcing of public decisions and as a relationship of power that reaches into society) is liberalism, this despite the hold of the military and the bureaucracy over important state resources. I would extend my argument to note that within liberalism generally, and Thai liberalism specifically, it is possible to detect moments of authoritarianism that are not contradictory to the liberal project, but inhere in it (and this is so of liberalism in general). And, conversely, within authoritarian regimes one will find liberal moments of pluralism, intra-regime opposition and tolerance that would belie a harsh exterior. I would argue that it is these ambivalences (“contradictions” only if we accept ideal types) that can best illuminate recent Thai politics and its apparent authoritarian backsliding.
No one definition of an authoritarian regime will suffice to make sense of the existence of authoritarianism in Thailand. Rather than offer a definition, I offer, drawing from Linz, four angles from which authoritarianism may be examined and diagnosed. The angles are designed purely for heuristic purposes relevant to this paper, and do not claim universal relevance. For the purposes of understanding current Thai politics it seems to me that it is important to capture the spirit of authoritarianism as an approach to the exercise of power and the mechanisms to secure it, rather than as a specific type of regime. In this way, authoritarianism may be understood as present across many regime types.
An authoritarian state is one in which an apparatus of arbitrary power (what may be called an ensemble of dictate) exerts control, and often undirected influence, over physical life and/or a social field defined by imposed limited, hierarchical pluralism. Although patterned, the deployment of power is arbitrary by virtue of its relative unaccountability/un-responsibility, and though pluralism is sometimes controlled (it is always hierarchical) in contradistinction to ideal-type totalitarianism, it is not obliterated. An authoritarian state tends to exert coercive force in the extension of its quasi-legitimacy. To elaborate:
1. Un-responsible power/unrestricted restriction of freedoms.
An authoritarian state may be defined as that which, through internally ill-defined institutional patterns, exercises arbitrary and unaccountable power over the spheres of human existence and association, and which, by dictate, restricts free movement in those spheres. The former exercise of power concerns the derogation of the life of individuals and “natural” communities, while the latter entails the perversion of the relatively free range of collective political possibilities that might exist in an open public field. Both spheres are potentially subject to unrestrained power and power’s neglectful indifference, and are likely to mutate under both.
2. Universal claims.
When applied to national level state-society formations, which is what concerns us here, the term “authoritarianism” entails that on balance the exercise of power is illiberal and based on the authority of those who hold the centre (either formally or obscurely), and to those they delegate or defer. That authority is often legitimated by democratic, authoritative and mythic claims to universal representation, or some combination of all. Such universal claims are not matched by institutional arrangements. Those who exercise power at the centre are enabled by this legitimating claim to demobilize opposition through mechanisms of repression, cooption, and toleration, enduring strategies of depoliticisation, or even electoral mandates and parliamentary majorities.
3. Hierarchy of linkages.
Authoritarian states that are not edging towards totalitarian control will be differentially marked by vertical and sectoral linkages between different levels of power, mediated by actors who react to and shape the institutional features of the regime, according to prevailing incentive and disincentive patterns and the domain of intervention (health, education, industry policy etc.). This provides room to move. Authoritarian state institutions can articulate to regimes of various colours: bureaucratic-authoritarian, institutionalised one-party rule; competitive authoritarian, electoral populist, developmental liberal. While political typologists will rightly characterise regimes according to the dominant impulse at work in the centre (democratic, authoritarian, totalitarian etc) most regimes are complex multi-level systems of considerable institutional overlap; different and even contradictory impulses may be found within and across their respective state levels. An authoritarian state, in any particular regime form, may be, in restricted domains, articulated to a liberal imperative.
4. Propensity to coercion.
The deployment of coercive force is not unique to the authoritarian state, but it does have a marked propensity to coerce under the logic of exclusion by which it operates. Authoritarian states are rarely wholly legitimate ones. They tend to work on the principle of a dual exclusion. Firstly, there is the exclusion of the dissident or oppositional forces that are subject to significant constitutional/legal and extra-legal pressures in the conduct of their affairs. At best, it is the power of bureaucratic and technical coercion that is used to frustrate the formation of oppositional blocs or agendas. At worse, violence is employed. Secondly, there is is the exclusion of some social element by virtue of which the national citizenry may be formed over and over again. Authoritarian states - shaped as bureaucratic authoritarian regimes, as formally democratic regimes, as military regimes - are apt to communicate exclusion by public or hidden coercive measures extending from control to violence. In such a state, when resources, power or status are at stake the possibility of extra-legal coercion or violence is ever present, and shapes decisions. Authoritarianism gives free rein to a politics of fear.
This loose matrix of four features may be used to propose that while individual actions may be labelled authoritarian - as might particular policies, decisions, and ideologies - authoritarianism only emerges as an ensemble of dictate when on average a state’s organization of power over the social body it claims to represent, and its actions on it, are un-responsible and coercive by direction or consequence. To speak of “averages” allows that in any ensemble of dictate, particular instances of sub-regime liberalism are entertained and may be functional to the enduring nature of authoritarianism. It is also possible to speak of an apparatus of dictate in regard to sub-regime levels, much the same as Schmitter suggested that in looking at democratic consolidation a better picture was available by paying attention to the multiple sites in which different structures of behaviour were processed in relations between the state and society; these he called “partial regimes”.
In the context of a fascinating surge in discussions on the nature of the Thai state at various forums, I reproduce a section of my attempt to think about unpacking the nature of authoritarianism in the ambivalent Thai state. The full paper may be read by clicking the link above. A much shorter version of this paper was published in Pacific Review as "Liberalism, Authoritarianism and the Politics of Decisionism". That version did not contain my attempt to think about authoritarian power.
_______________________________________
This paper is an attempt to think through the nature of authoritarianism in Thailand by arguing that the focus of analysis should be on the exercise of political power, rather than regime form, in the context of the failure to settle on forms of legitimate power at the state and regime level. It first offers a way of thinking about authoritarianism, markers of its existence and, importantly in the Thai context, its articulation to liberalism. It advances this argument by noting the synchronicity of liberal and authoritarian modes of power across a range of regime forms in Thailand since 1976. Rather than situating authoritarianism in specific institutional sites (though it surely resides there – see Table 1), attention is given to the failure to establish and consolidate rules for the exercise of power as a consequence of Thailand’s specific ‘democratic transition’ that entailed a liberal and security settlement based on repression of progressive democratic forces, and the entrenchment of the monarchy at the centre of a national power bloc. Consequent to that settlement, competing groups of strategic elites in Thailand exist in a permanent state of insecurity and revert to authoritarian modes to secure their position, even as liberalism progressively deepens its reach.
Liberal and authoritarian regime framers, those forces that on balance support liberal or authoritarian forms of social order, are not exclusively identifiable in specific institutions, they are trans-institutional and trans-social class, and manifest in political exigencies. The contest and co-existence between the two currents reflects competing agendas for social order that are formed around different and changing coalitions of social forces. Since 1976 the complex pattern of forces that have come to occupy each current has shifted, their realignment contingent on a range of factors that come to bear on the task of social order and capital accumulation. As much as Hewison can speak of ‘contingent democrats’, to indicate the shifting position on democracy of the Thai bourgeoisie and the middle class, one may also speak of ‘contingent authoritarians’, to recognise those liberal regime framers who will utilise power, or condone its use, for the purposes of stemming power from below or in the struggle against authoritarian regime framers. Indeed, the contemporary situation (post-2006) is marked by a suspension of liberal modes of conduct at a national level, implicitly sanctioned by liberal regime framers, as different political forces compete to establish dominance in the Thai state, mobilising various resources and legitimating strategies.
Authoritarianism of power, not of regime.
Rather than viewing the 2006 coup and the resulting political fallout as ushering in new forms of authoritarianism in Thailand, this paper will speak of continuities and repetitive pathologies of state power, encased in the different regime forms since 1976. It will argue that the failure to settle the pattern of domination that lies at the heart of state structure requires that we think less of distinct regime forms (semi-democratic, democratic, authoritarian) and more of an ambivalent state of power in which shifting and differential patterns of liberalism, electoralism and authoritarianism have momentarily congealed as regimes.
This approach entails moving beyond the prevalent dichotomous models of regime form in democratization literature that posits authoritarian or post-totalitarian and democratic endpoints as opposite poles on a transition-continuum. As Thomas Carothers has argued, those regimes whose ‘transition’ to democracy has seemingly stalled may not have stalled at all, rather they are stubbornly squatting somewhere tangentially forked-off the linear continuum. The existence of hybrid regimes is now widely accepted: seemingly in temporary holding positions of their authoritarian leaders in “democratic transitions”, these “hybrids” have become embedded regime forms around which political behaviour is structured.
Moving beyond regime form at a macro level requires recognition that the yielding of power in state agencies, through political institutions, and in collaboration with business interests, may be remarkably similar whatever regime formally holds. This insight can often be lost as a consequence of giving too much credence to formal regime appellation. I have argued at length elsewhere that a significant force shaping the modern Thai state (understood both as an institutional apparatus concerned with the making and enforcing of public decisions and as a relationship of power that reaches into society) is liberalism, this despite the hold of the military and the bureaucracy over important state resources. I would extend my argument to note that within liberalism generally, and Thai liberalism specifically, it is possible to detect moments of authoritarianism that are not contradictory to the liberal project, but inhere in it (and this is so of liberalism in general). And, conversely, within authoritarian regimes one will find liberal moments of pluralism, intra-regime opposition and tolerance that would belie a harsh exterior. I would argue that it is these ambivalences (“contradictions” only if we accept ideal types) that can best illuminate recent Thai politics and its apparent authoritarian backsliding.
No one definition of an authoritarian regime will suffice to make sense of the existence of authoritarianism in Thailand. Rather than offer a definition, I offer, drawing from Linz, four angles from which authoritarianism may be examined and diagnosed. The angles are designed purely for heuristic purposes relevant to this paper, and do not claim universal relevance. For the purposes of understanding current Thai politics it seems to me that it is important to capture the spirit of authoritarianism as an approach to the exercise of power and the mechanisms to secure it, rather than as a specific type of regime. In this way, authoritarianism may be understood as present across many regime types.
An authoritarian state is one in which an apparatus of arbitrary power (what may be called an ensemble of dictate) exerts control, and often undirected influence, over physical life and/or a social field defined by imposed limited, hierarchical pluralism. Although patterned, the deployment of power is arbitrary by virtue of its relative unaccountability/un-responsibility, and though pluralism is sometimes controlled (it is always hierarchical) in contradistinction to ideal-type totalitarianism, it is not obliterated. An authoritarian state tends to exert coercive force in the extension of its quasi-legitimacy. To elaborate:
1. Un-responsible power/unrestricted restriction of freedoms.
An authoritarian state may be defined as that which, through internally ill-defined institutional patterns, exercises arbitrary and unaccountable power over the spheres of human existence and association, and which, by dictate, restricts free movement in those spheres. The former exercise of power concerns the derogation of the life of individuals and “natural” communities, while the latter entails the perversion of the relatively free range of collective political possibilities that might exist in an open public field. Both spheres are potentially subject to unrestrained power and power’s neglectful indifference, and are likely to mutate under both.
2. Universal claims.
When applied to national level state-society formations, which is what concerns us here, the term “authoritarianism” entails that on balance the exercise of power is illiberal and based on the authority of those who hold the centre (either formally or obscurely), and to those they delegate or defer. That authority is often legitimated by democratic, authoritative and mythic claims to universal representation, or some combination of all. Such universal claims are not matched by institutional arrangements. Those who exercise power at the centre are enabled by this legitimating claim to demobilize opposition through mechanisms of repression, cooption, and toleration, enduring strategies of depoliticisation, or even electoral mandates and parliamentary majorities.
3. Hierarchy of linkages.
Authoritarian states that are not edging towards totalitarian control will be differentially marked by vertical and sectoral linkages between different levels of power, mediated by actors who react to and shape the institutional features of the regime, according to prevailing incentive and disincentive patterns and the domain of intervention (health, education, industry policy etc.). This provides room to move. Authoritarian state institutions can articulate to regimes of various colours: bureaucratic-authoritarian, institutionalised one-party rule; competitive authoritarian, electoral populist, developmental liberal. While political typologists will rightly characterise regimes according to the dominant impulse at work in the centre (democratic, authoritarian, totalitarian etc) most regimes are complex multi-level systems of considerable institutional overlap; different and even contradictory impulses may be found within and across their respective state levels. An authoritarian state, in any particular regime form, may be, in restricted domains, articulated to a liberal imperative.
4. Propensity to coercion.
The deployment of coercive force is not unique to the authoritarian state, but it does have a marked propensity to coerce under the logic of exclusion by which it operates. Authoritarian states are rarely wholly legitimate ones. They tend to work on the principle of a dual exclusion. Firstly, there is the exclusion of the dissident or oppositional forces that are subject to significant constitutional/legal and extra-legal pressures in the conduct of their affairs. At best, it is the power of bureaucratic and technical coercion that is used to frustrate the formation of oppositional blocs or agendas. At worse, violence is employed. Secondly, there is is the exclusion of some social element by virtue of which the national citizenry may be formed over and over again. Authoritarian states - shaped as bureaucratic authoritarian regimes, as formally democratic regimes, as military regimes - are apt to communicate exclusion by public or hidden coercive measures extending from control to violence. In such a state, when resources, power or status are at stake the possibility of extra-legal coercion or violence is ever present, and shapes decisions. Authoritarianism gives free rein to a politics of fear.
This loose matrix of four features may be used to propose that while individual actions may be labelled authoritarian - as might particular policies, decisions, and ideologies - authoritarianism only emerges as an ensemble of dictate when on average a state’s organization of power over the social body it claims to represent, and its actions on it, are un-responsible and coercive by direction or consequence. To speak of “averages” allows that in any ensemble of dictate, particular instances of sub-regime liberalism are entertained and may be functional to the enduring nature of authoritarianism. It is also possible to speak of an apparatus of dictate in regard to sub-regime levels, much the same as Schmitter suggested that in looking at democratic consolidation a better picture was available by paying attention to the multiple sites in which different structures of behaviour were processed in relations between the state and society; these he called “partial regimes”.
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.
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