A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  After May 2010

  The Democrats had been the most successful party of the 1990s but failed to ride the upsurge of politics from below around the turn of the millennium. The party had royalist roots and, especially under the leadership of Chuan Leekpai, was identified with the bureaucracy in style and conduct. By siding with the IMF over the 1997 crisis, it lost some of its traditional support among businesspeople and the middle class. As Thaksin crafted himself as a new type of popular leader, he ridiculed the Democrats as part of an old era and old elite.

  In 2005, Abhisit Vejjajiva became party leader with Korn Chatikavanij as his close colleague. Both came from Chinese-origin families that had immigrated in the 19th century, prospered in the official nobility, and become part of the social elite. Both had also been schooled in the UK at Eton and Oxford. Korn had pursued a successful career in finance, while Abhisit had been groomed by Chuan as his successor. At the very point when the people suddenly became more important in Thai politics, the Democrat leaders lacked popular appeal and a popular touch. The party not only set itself against the return of Thaksin, but also against the new political forces that seized on Thaksin as their leader. The Democrats positioned themselves as defenders of the monarchy and adopted the king’s ‘sufficiency economy’, an approach to life based on principles of restraint and prudence that was strongly promoted by the bureaucracy but had little mass appeal.

  Over 2007–08, Abhisit aligned the party with the Yellow Shirts’ attempts to overthrow the Thaksinite Cabinet. When Abhisit became prime minister in December 2008 following the intervention of the courts and the army, he bore the brunt of resentment against the overthrow of an elected government and twice suffered mob attacks on his car. His government engaged in suppression of the media on a scale not seen since the military era, with pro-red papers closed, radio stations threatened, the red television occasionally disrupted, thousands of websites blocked, and a flood of cases launched under the lèse majesté law. During the 2010 demonstrations, Abhisit sheltered inside an army camp. After the events, he repeated the army’s contention that soldiers had not killed any protesters. The Democrat Party’s identification with the old institutions of bureaucracy, military, and monarchy was now complete. Its few remaining faction leaders in the upper north and northeast had melted away.

  Since 2001, the party had reluctantly accepted the need to match the Thaksinite parties’ ‘populist’ policies. Abhisit’s government did not reverse any of Thaksin’s major innovations except on agricultural price subsidies, and added new measures on pensions and education. But the party could not shake off its paternalist habits. A policy package intended as a pre-election sweetener was presented as a ‘gift to the nation’.

  After the May 2010 events, Abhisit initially resisted pressure to hold a new election until emotions had settled, but then announced a poll in July 2011. The Thaksinite party had been resurrected as Pheu Thai (For the Thai) but had yet to announce a leader and possibly the Democrats hoped to profit from their opponents’ disarray. However, Pheu Thai immediately selected Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin’s youngest sister, as leader. Thaksin said she would be his ‘clone’. The party’s elections slogan was ‘Thaksin thinks, Pheu Thai acts’. Although Thaksin remained overseas, the election was clearly to be about his record and the popular reaction to events since the 2006 coup.

  The voting reflected the polarization in the politics of the street (see Map 7). Across the upper north and northeast, constituencies gave massive majorities to Pheu Thai. Across the south, constituencies gave massive majorities to the Democrats. Minor parties lost out. More than ever before, voting was determined by emotional identification with parties. There were significantly fewer violent incidents and less evidence of vote-buying than at earlier polls. Pheu Thai gained roughly 25 per cent more votes than in 2007 and won an absolute majority of 265 of the 500 seats. The Democrats trailed with 159.

  This decisive election result initially brought some reduction in tension. Yingluck devoted her maiden speech to emphasising loyalty to the monarchy, and soothed the generals with feminine charm, budget hikes, and promises of non-interference in military promotions. But opponents could not accept the return of Thaksin’s influence. Remnants of the Yellow Shirts launched campaigns to overthrow her government but failed to attract significant support until November 2013, when the lower house approved an amnesty that would annul Thaksin’s conviction and allow him to return. Bangkok office workers and businesspeople joined massive demonstrations in protest. Suthep Thaugsuban resigned from the parliament and Democrat Party to launch a movement to ‘shutdown Bangkok’ and force the Yingluck government to resign. Yingluck dissolved parliament but the Democrat Party again refused to cooperate in the subsequent elections in February 2014.

  Yingluck and her supporters argued that the government should remain in power to uphold the principle of elective democracy. The protesters demanded that the government step aside to allow ‘reform’ in the political process. After support for the protest dwindled and the army repeatedly refused to remove the government by force, the campaign was effectively abandoned in March 2014. Yet the protests had shown the strength of urban middle class feeling against Thaksin’s return and for measures to further limit the power of the parliament and executive.

  Yingluck became the country’s first female prime minister. She had worked earlier as an executive in the family companies and had no political experience, but she assembled a team of experienced politicians and advisers. Thaksin remained abroad but was actively involved in the selection of ministers and the framing of policy. The government returned to classic Thaksinite policies of raising incomes to stimulate demand and spending heavily on infrastructure.

  Conclusion

  The rate of change in economy and society accelerated from the 1970s onwards. The economy launched into a headlong boom and bust that transformed income levels, swelled urban areas, raised the status of business in the social order, and exposed Thailand more, both economically and culturally, to globalization.

  Society became much more complex, especially with the growth of the white-collar middle class and the ranks of shuttling urban–rural migrants. Local worlds were prised open by roads, buses, motorcycles, televisions, and the internet. A new mass society emerged, especially in the reflective panels of national media. Old unitary discourses of race, nation, history, national character, and culture were fragmented by the diversity of reality.

  Politics lagged behind these changes. In the absence of a nationalist movement, war, or massive social crisis, the old institutions of monarchy, military, and bureaucracy had continued to dominate the state. Progress towards a more inclusive and democratic politics was fitful. The student–worker–peasant revolts of the 1970s brought to an end the era of military rule but were then crushed. In the aftermath, a provincial business elite was drafted into the ruling oligarchy through a parliament where admission depended heavily on money. But the bureaucracy’s power was only slightly dented, while the monarchy was promoted to an expanded role as a symbol of national unity and a refuge in times of crisis, and the military continued to claim a right to political intervention, exercised in 1991 and constantly threatened at other times. Under these cosy arrangements, the economy boomed, the environment was ravaged, and social frictions multiplied.

  The financial crisis of 1997, which scythed down a third of big business groups and caused widespread social distress, undermined the legitimacy of both technocrats and provincial business politicians, opening the way to new political forces. The battered remnants of Bangkok big business wanted a state that would help them manage globalization. A largely rural mass with rising incomes, rising aspirations, and growing resentment of the society’s multiple inequities began to realize the potential of electoral politics to bring change. Thaksin Shinawatra rose to power promising to create a business-friendly state and waft Thailand into the first world. Once in power, he presented himself as a ‘leader of the people’ who would realize the d
reams of both the business elite and those clamouring for a better deal.

  Thaksin’s promotion of big capitalism, populism, and his own family business interests sparked a massive reaction by the old institutions of military, monarchy, and bureaucracy, joined by sections of Thailand’s insecure urban middle class. In 2006, the military again exercised its right of intervention, the judiciary was mobilized for the cause, and the middle class took to the street, leveraging the symbolic power of the monarchy. This in turn provoked Thailand’s first truly mass political movement, clad in red, demanding not the overthrow of state or capitalism, but better opportunities to benefit from capitalism and a fairer share of the resources managed by the state.

  Postscript: The strong state and the well-being of the people

  Since the foundation of Thailand’s nation-state in the late 19th century, two traditions have evolved over its primary purpose.

  The first of these began from the original formulation in the reign of King Chulalongkorn. The need for a strong absolutist state was justified to overcome external threats (colonialism) and internal disorder so that Siam could achieve ‘progress’ and become a significant country in the world. The right of the existing royal elite to rule this strong state was explained by history (the continuity of monarchy since Sukhothai), and by the elite’s selflessness, professionalism, and monopoly of siwilai. The role of the nation was to be unified, passive, and obedient.

  The formula was revived and updated by military dictators in the mid-20th century. Phibun and Wichit removed the monarchy from its central place, but kept the main elements of the formula intact. The need for a strong dictatorial state was justified to overcome external threats (communism) and internal threats (the Chinese) so that Siam could achieve progress/development and survive in a world of competing nations and ideologies. The right of the military elite to rule was explained by history (the Thai as a martial race), and by its selflessness, professionalism, and monopoly of force. Sarit, with help from the USA, reunited the royal and military strands of the tradition.

  In this reformulation, the role of the nation had to be adjusted because of the emergence of new urban classes with their own interests and aspirations. Wichit imagined the Thai as a free people in a free-market economy with opportunities to better themselves and change their social station. Whereas the nation was invisible in royalist history, Wichit gave it an active role in ‘great migrations’ from the north, the cultural achievements of Sukhothai, and deeds of martial heroism. Phibun and Wichit gave the new men and women of urban Siam roles as the vanguard of progress, especially as paternal officials overseeing the mass of society, which was still judged incapable of being modern and was thus expected to remain passive and obedient.

  At the start of the 21st century, Thaksin Shinawatra and his business party again revived the formula, and also adjusted it to reflect the emergence of a national economy and mass society over the prior quarter century. The need for a strong, authoritarian state was justified to overcome external threats (globalization) and internal threats (social conflict) so that Thailand could leapfrog into the ranks of first-world countries. The right of the new business–political elite to rule this strong state was explained by its selflessness (commitment to ‘the people’), professionalism (the use of business methods), and command of the wealth needed to win elections.

  Over its successive appearances, this tradition has acquired some distinctive features. It provides a cloak for rapid accumulation by the political elite – the absolutist monarchy’s accumulation of property and investments; the generals’ ability to exploit natural resources and favour business friends; and the overt and covert favours for big business under the Thai Rak Thai government. It portrays the nation both as a mystical unity (samakkhitham) and as a distinctly graded hierarchy in which some are more Thai, more ‘national’, than others. It tends to project a highly masculine and martial aura, and to license the exploitation of women through polygamy and its modern variants. The periods when this tradition dominates coincide with the use of state violence against the nation’s own people – the suppression of revolts in 1899–1902; Phao’s killings of political rivals in the 1950s; the massacres of 1973, 1976 and 1992; the drug campaign of 2003; and repeated violence in the peripheral areas of the hills, far south, and backward northeast.

  While changing in line with the expansion of the political nation, this idea of a strong state justified by external and internal threats and by the need to progress and be internationally prominent has become the dominant tradition of Thailand’s politics.

  The second, opposing tradition emerged in the aspirations of commoner intellectuals in the late 19th century, and took firmer shape in the public sphere of the early 20th. In this formula, the purpose of the nation-state is the well-being of the nation’s members. The desire to be a significant country in the world is of little or no importance. The enemy is not any threat, internal or external, but the strong-state tradition itself.

  This second tradition avoids attributing to the nation any mystical unity, but instead embraces its diversity. It has rewritten history to highlight the variety of peoples bundled together in the nation, and explode the myths of unity and continuity. It counters the assumptions of power and privilege in the strong-state tradition by promoting government based on principle, the rule of law, the importance of institutions, and especially the role of constitutions. This strategy was prefigured by the memorial of 1885 and first implemented by Pridi and the People’s Party in 1932. Subsequent reiterations of this tradition have returned to the same method in 1946, 1974, and 1992.

  This tradition has tended to look outwards for ideas to oppose the dominant, strong-state tradition. The commoner intellectuals of the late 19th century looked to Meiji Japan’s self-strengthening movements. The early 20th-century publicists and politicians absorbed ideas from European liberalism and socialism. The intellectuals, students, and nascent urban middle class of the Cold War era drew inspiration not only from communism but also from western ideals of liberalism and democracy. Reformers in the era of globalization have taken up discourses of human rights, civil society, the ideal community, and direct democracy. This internationalism gives both strength and vulnerability. Advocates of the strong state repeatedly revert to nationalist arguments to denigrate opposing ideas as ‘un-Thai’. In response, the second tradition often tries to domesticate its ideas by finding parallels within Buddhism.

  In the early 2000s, Thaksin tried to embrace both traditions. While retaining his commitment to the strong state, he also embraced the goal of the people’s well-being and projected himself as the only leader who could achieve this goal. But he was overstretched. His opponents shouldered him aside and reclaimed ownership of the strong state tradition. In their new formulation, the old institutions of bureaucracy, military, and monarchy needed to be re-empowered to overcome the twin threats of immoral capitalism and irresponsible populism so that Thailand would not face disaster.

  Each political culture builds its own traditions about the uses of the nation-state. In Thailand, the strong-state tradition inaugurated at the birth of the nation-state has remained so influential because it has been deeply embedded by decades of dominance, and remains available for future political generations. But the latest mobilization of the strong-state tradition has faced fierce opposition based on sustained popular support. Perhaps the second tradition is now coming into its own.

  Notes

  1 Before Bangkok

  1 Some scholars believe this famous inscription, ostensibly dated 1292, is wholly or partly a later creation. As an illustration of chaiyaphum, the dating is immaterial.

  2 Guy Tachard, A Relation of the Voyage to Siam (Bangkok: White Orchid Press, 1981 [1688]), pp. 180–1.

  3 Francois Caron and Joost Schouten, A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam, ed. John Villiers (Bangkok: Siam Society, 1986 [1671]), p. 128; Nicolas Gervaise, The Natural and Political History of the Kingdom of Siam, tr. and ed
. John Villiers (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1998 [1688]), p. 53.

  4 ‘Sakdina’ probably means ‘power over fields’ and may originally have referred to some kind of land grant. By late Ayutthaya, however, it had become a numerical ranking attached to each official post. Recently, the term has been adopted as a shorthand for the premodern social order, equivalent to ‘feudal’ in Europe.

  5 Alain Forest, Les Missionnaires Français au Tonkin et au Siam xviie – xviiiie Siècles. Livre I: Histoire du Siam (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), p. 115.

  6 Richard D. Cushman and David K. Wyatt, ‘Translating Thai poetry: Cushman, and King Narai’s “Long Song Prophecy for Ayutthaya” ’, Journal of the Siam Society 89, 1&2 (2001), pp. 7, 11.

  7 Khamhaikan chao krung kao (Testimony of the Inhabitants of the Old Capital) (Bangkok: Chotmaihet, 2001), p. 157.

  8 Luang Phraison Salarak, ‘Intercourse between Burma and Siam as recorded in Hmannan Yazawindawgyi’, Journal of the Siam Society 11, 3 (1915), p. 54.

  9 F. H. Turpin, A History of the Kingdom of Siam, tr. B. O. Cartwright (Bangkok: White Lotus, 1997 [1771]), p. 109.

  10 Henry Burney, 22 December 1826, in The Burney Papers, Vol. II, Pt IV (Bangkok: Vajiranana Library, 1911), p. 34.

  11 For 1911 onwards, this chart is based on census data, with smoothing. The earlier figures have been estimated with help from earlier calculations by B. J. Terwiel and L. Sternstein.

  2 The old order in transition, 1760s to 1860s

  1 Yotfa is an abbreviated form of his full official regnal name, Phraphutthayotfa Chulalok. For an explanation of regnal names, see ‘Reigns and prime ministers’.