On
May 22th 2014, the Army Commander
General Prayut seized power, completing the 12th successful military
coup in Thailand since 1932 and the second one in the last eight years. The
junta presented the coup as a solution to the wheel of crisis that has
encompassed the country since 2005. What the coup, however, has achieved is nothing more than the dusting off a political strategy—that of direct military intervention—that not
only has already failed to bring an end to the crisis in 2006, but has
entrenched it as it will, unquestionably, do once again.
Beside
the junta’s boastful and grotesque attempt to bring peace and happiness through
silence and repression, almost everybody, among both opposite sides of the political
spectrum and academics, agrees that the never-ending crisis is an epiphenomenon
of a deep drift in Thai society, one that may shift the role of the monarchy,
the future of democratic politics, and the reciprocal position of Thai elites
and popular masses.
My
argument is that this drift is the product of an oscillation between two social
structures. By this I mean, following Edmund Leach, “a set of ideas about the
distribution of power between persons and groups of persons” (Leach 1954: 4)
and, I add, of concrete techniques for mobilizing people and governing the
nation. On one side, a social structure that conceptualizes power as springing
from barami, a charisma that comes
from moral conduct and reside with “good people” (khon dī). On the other, a structure that conceives power residing in the ability to mobilize masses, whether through loyalty and patronage or through democratic elections, as in the case of Thaksin Shinawatra. The former way of legitimizing power lies
behind the Yellow Shirts’ and traditional elites’ rhetoric and practices, their
call for moral leaders, their distrust for electoral democracy, and hate for
the “Thaksin system” (rabop Thaksin). The latter, instead, animates the Red Shirts’
demands to respect electoral results and to question established economic,
political, and legal inequalities.
As
in Leach’s analysis of the Kachin Hills Area, however, these two social
structures do not exist as actual totalizing realities but as “ideal models”
or, as Leach would have said, “as if
descriptions—they relate to ideal models rather than real societies” (Leach
1954: 285). In other words, barami
and popular support, have coexisted, and will coexist in Thai society but their
balance is always in a flux, and the present crisis is a struggle over what
this balance may look like in the present and the foreseeable future.
Up
until the early 2000s, the equilibrium between these two ways of organizing
power revolved around the figure of King Bhumibol as the center and ultimate source of barami
while also the holder of unmatched popular support and “a ‘super-mandate’ from the
people, one that trumps the electoral mandates of political leaders” (Mc Cargo
2005: 505). This position has been clear in the political turmoil that
unsettled the Thai polity in the 1970s and the 1990s. In both cases, Bhumibol
was able to cast himself as the arbiter and ultimate power broker, overseeing which way the social structure would oscillate, either toward democratic
politics after the 1992 crisis, or toward the dictatorship of “good people”
after the 1970s. However, due to the King weakening health, the rise of political
consciousness among Thai population, and the palace uncharacteristic choice of
clearly taking side since 2005, this role has entered into question. The surge
of lese majesty charges since 2006 to silence critiques and questioning of
the palace’s role in politics is just one sign of the palace’s growing weakness
and the breaking down of previous social structures. The Yellow shirts’
repulsion for the Thaksin’s system, which they see as replacing “moral
authority” with corrupt electoral populism, is another.
Similarly,
the idea that power should spring from popular support, rather than moral
stamina, has been gaining momentum around the figure of Thaksin Shinawatra. A
media tycoon, son of a fairly wealthy political family from northern Thailand,
Thaksin was able to become the first elected Prime Minister in Thai history to
complete a full mandate. After this he confirmed his position through highly
popular policies, obtain an unprecedented one-party victory in the 2005
elections, and, through proxy leaders, in every single democratic election
since. Even though many of his supporters would acknowledge the Yellow
Shirts’ claim that Thaksin had been involved in corruption while in office, they maintain that electoral victory should be respected and that these
accusations should be persecuted through a fair legal process and not through
military and judiciary coups with the purpose of replacing him with supposedly
“moral” leaders.
While
existing analyses acknowledge this shift in ways of organizing power in contemporary
Thailand they often focus on the specific actors, social groups, and strata—whether
elites, bureaucrats, or social masses—rather than on the shift in social
structures which is activating all of their reactions. In so doing, these
readings take trees for the forest and obscure the larger struggle. Once again
Edmund Leach comes to our help and reminds us that “when we refer to structural
change we have to consider not merely changes in the position of individuals
with regard to an ideal system of status relationships, but changes in the
ideal system itself: changes, that is, in the power structure” (Leach 1954: 10).
Such changes, I argue, are the engine behind the Thai wheel of crisis, an
engine that runs through oscillations and not in a linear progression.
A
linear view of structural change, in fact, has been the other shortcoming of
present analyses. Even scholars as Michael Nelson and Björn
Dressel, who take a more holistic approach and recognize the emerging struggle
between “the traditional
conception of a stratified paternal-authoritarian state where power emanates
from the king” (Dressel 2010: 446) and “claims [of] popular
sovereignty as the basis of legitimacy” (Dressel 2010: 447), assume a
teleological progression from one to the other. Children of democratization
theory, such views, are part of
the political arsenal used in this conflict more than actual analytical
construct. However, as James Stent has argued, “since the
revolution of 1932 […] the political history of Thailand has been a history of
gradual swings of the pendulum, with dictatorial conservatism, generally backed
by the Army, alternating with more democratic rule” (Stent 2012: 22). What we are witnessing now is one of such oscillation, as violent as what happened with
the end of absolute monarchy in 1932 and with the bloody struggle of the 1970,
but equally uncertain and impermanent. As the endless circle of elections, protest,
military coup, counter-protest, judiciary coups, and once again military coup that
have taken over Thailand demonstrates, the outcome is up-for-grabs and the
conflict risks to tear apart the unstable equilibrium that has dominated
Thailand since its transformation in a constitutional monarchy.
REFERENCES
Dressel, Björn,
“When Notions of Legitimacy Conflict: The Case of Thailand,” Politics and Policy, Vol. 38, 2010: 445-469,
Leach, Edmund, Political Systems of Highland Burma,
G.Bell & Sons, 1954
McCargo, Duncan, “Network
monarchy and legitimacy crises in Thailand,” The Pacific Review,
Vol. 18 No. 4, December 2005: 499–519
Nelson, Michael H.,
“Some Observations on Democracy in Thailand,” Hong Kong: Southeast Asia
Research Centre, City University of Hong Kong, 2012
Stent, James,
“Thoughts on Thailand’s Turmoil, 11 June 2010,” in Bangkok May 2010: Perspectives on a
Divided Thailand, ed. by Michael J. Montesano, Pavin Chachavalpongpun and
Aekapol Chongvilaivan, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012:
15-41.
