I continue to see the picture of [the] Cambodian monarchy how [I see] the Japanese Emperor before the Meiji Reforms. In those days, [the] Shogun Prime Minister was running the country. A dictator. The Emperor was just a figurehead. To lend legitimacy to the Shogun regime. “Don’t mess around with us. You go and live in your palace in Kyoto. We in Tokyo, we are running the country. You want any budget, okay. We [will] allocate [it].” Like a Chess king: “When we need you, yes. We invite you, to officiate, to function to legitimise our rule.” The same here. Hun Sen went to Beijing to invite the king back. Organised a huge welcoming, greeting ceremony. And then after that, he went into the royal palace and was locked up there. “When we need you, okay, you can come out.” (Anonymous Political Analyst)
If these foreigners can’t “help” us, we address, “for lack of something better,” the old Khmer King named Sihanouk the Pitiful! (King Norodom Sihanouk, 2003)
1. Introduction
One of the defining features of Cambodia’s 1993 Constitution is the return to a system of constitutional monarchy, similar to that which had been drafted shortly before the country’s independence from France in 1953 and lasted until the military coup of 1970.Footnote 1 With the royalist political party, French Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifique, et Coopératif (FUNCINPEC)Footnote 2 narrowly taking the largest number of votes in the UN-administered elections of 1993, the resulting Constituent Assembly eventually settled on a Constitution promising that Cambodia’s liberal, multiparty democracy—as required by the Paris Peace Accords, signed two years earlier—would be overseen by a monarch who “shall reign but shall not govern” (Article 7). Yet, the heavily limited, ostensibly ceremonial role imagined for the king in such provisions sits in awkward tension with others that provide the king with a role either as (1) “guarantor” of Cambodia’s independence and sovereignty (Article 8), the rights of its citizens (Article 8), and the independence of its judiciary (Article 132); or as (2) “arbitrator” to ensure the regular functioning of government (Article 9). In practice, I explain in this paper, this tension appears to crystalize in instances where the king—whether the late King Norodom Sihanouk or his son, the sitting monarch King Norodom Sihamoni—has been called upon to sign controversial legislation into law. Facilitated by a 1994 constitutional amendment that provides for legislation to be promulgated by designated holders of public office in instances where the king is abroad for medical purposes (Article 28), the late King Sihanouk and the present King Sihamoni appear to have expressed their displeasure at political developments in Cambodia through strategic, and highly symbolic, absences at these key junctures. While King Sihanouk appears to have set this precedent quite explicitly, King Sihamoni is nonetheless understood by many political actors and laypeople in Cambodia to have followed in his father’s footsteps, albeit in a less outspoken fashion. In recent years, this paper will demonstrate, the meaning of the king’s absence has itself been a source of political intrigue and contestation.
Any account of the practical role of the monarchy in Cambodia’s contemporary constitutional order must begin with a recognition of the institution’s limitations. In a formal sense, the role of the king is subject to significant constitutionally-enshrined constraints. Article 7’s promise that “[t]he King of Cambodia reigns but does not govern” is not only a prominent provision of the Constitution; it is—along with Article 1’s commitment to “the basic principles of a liberal multi-party democracy”—one of two unamendable features of the Constitution.Footnote 3 On an informal level, meanwhile, the monarch’s oversight role—as guarantor of judicial independence (Article 132) and chair of the Supreme Council of the Magistracy (Article 134)—has been further restricted in practice by a political context in which the Cambodian Peoples’ Party (CPP) has been increasingly able to exert unmatched influence and control over national institutions (including the judiciary).Footnote 4 In this context, the role of the monarch is widely—and rightly, for the most part—understood to be entirely ceremonial. This view, which is succinctly summarized by the political analyst quoted at the outset of this paper, lends itself to a conclusion that the role of the king is only symbolic. While this paper does not seek to disagree with such a conclusion, it nonetheless seeks to highlight the extent to which that symbolic role has been and continues to be used for political ends. Similarly, although starting from an understanding that—as the analyst quoted above explains—the very existence of a constitutional monarchy can be understood to provide a useful source of political legitimacy for the CPP, even amid the increasing consolidation of single-party rule in Cambodia, it seeks to highlight the isolated but symbolic moments of royal resistance.
This paper begins by providing a brief overview of the modern history of Cambodia’s monarchy, noting the extent to which members of the country’s royal family—especially but not exclusively King Norodom Sihanouk—have played central roles politics since independence. This account leads into a discussion of the 1993 Constitution, wherein I will highlight the key features of Cambodia’s constitutional monarchy, before focusing specifically on the tension that exists between the explicit limitations on the power of the monarchy and the political oversight role that is concurrently afforded to the king. Finally, this paper will hone in on the way in which the ostensibly ceremonial role of the king in signing legislation into law has ultimately become a site at which the extent of the king’s role as “guarantor of the rights and freedoms of all citizens and of international treaties” (Article 8) has come into question. In doing so, this paper draws from a diverse range of data and employs a mixed-methods approach. Specifically, I combine data gathered from almost two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia, conducted between 2016 and 2018, with a close reading of the constitutional text, a wealth of archived newspaper reports from 1993 onwards, and social-science scholarship on Cambodia. The result is a fresh recognition of the symbolic significance of the role of the king in Cambodia’s constitutional monarchy.
2. Cambodia’s constitutional monarchy in historical perspective
Cambodia’s present-day constitutional monarchy is largely based on that which was created in 1947, during the twilight years of French colonial rule in the country, and which evolved in the years immediately after independence in 1953.Footnote 5 King Norodom Sihanouk, who had been placed on the throne ahead of his father—Norodom Suramarith—by the administrators of the protectorate at the tender age of 18, apparently in the (misplaced) hope that he would prove more malleable to French designs in Indochina, would play an instrumental but characteristically unorthodox role in this regard. Reviewing a draft constitutional text prepared by a Franco-Khmer Commission in 1946, King Sihanouk is said to have demanded the replacement of a hereditary monarchy with an elected one, as well as the inclusion of a National Assembly elected by universal suffrage.Footnote 6 However, the draft created by the Franco-Khmer Commission was ultimately displaced by one developed by the National Assembly after the 1946 elections (the first universal democratic elections in the country). While King Sihanouk ultimately acquiesced to this draft, it was in fact another member of the royal family who was at the forefront of its drafting. Founded earlier that same year by Prince Sisowath Yuthevong, the Democratic Party swept the National Assembly, winning 50 of the 67 available seats. As such, the 1947 Constitution is often referred to as “Yuthevong’s Constitution,” as it reflected the ideals of liberal, multiparty democracy of which he was the most prominent champion at the time.Footnote 7
Regardless of its authorship, the 1947 Constitution laid the foundations for a constitutionally defined and limited monarchy in which public powers were delegated to elected officials, who in turn exercised those powers in the name of the Crown. Article 21 of the 1947 Constitution, for instance, stated that “[a]ll powers emanate from the King” but should be “exercised as it is stated in the present Constitution,” while Articles 22, 23, and 24 explained that public powers were to be “exercised in the name of the King” by the occupants of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, respectively. Though Article 25 declared that the throne was “the heritage of the male descendants of King Ang Duong” and, meanwhile, Article 26 gave the king the right to overrule such decisions, Articles 27 and 28 made the appointment of a sovereign subject to a majority vote of the Crown Council.Footnote 8
This latter process would be put to the test soon after the country’s independence, when—in 1955—King Sihanouk abdicated the throne to pursue a career in civilian politics. After effectively conferring the throne to his father, Norodom Suramarith, Sihanouk immediately established the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (People’s Socialist Community) (Sangkum), which he modelled as an inclusive political movement rather than a political party in an apparent (and seemingly successful) attempt to engulf or outflank his potential political opponents (including Yuthevong’s Democrat Party).Footnote 9 Sihanouk would be elected as prime minister, with Sangkum sweeping more than 80% of the votes and assuming all available seats in the National Assembly. Sihanouk would reign from and reassume the role of prime minister on multiple occasions over the second half of the 1950s. Upon the death of King Suramarith in 1960, Sihanouk would also reassume the throne, but with the title of Prince rather than King, allowing his mother (and Queen Consort) Sisowath Kossamak to remain as Queen.Footnote 10 While Queen Kossamak continued to serve many of the ceremonial functions of the Crown (which she was prevented from ascending to by Article 25 of the Constitution, cited above), then Prince Sihanouk soon initiated a series of constitutional amendments that created the position of head of state, and which—having received overwhelming public approval in a referendum—would enable him to assume many of the other ceremonial roles of the Crown. Hence, Sihanouk continued through the 1960s in a dual role as president of the Sangkum party/movement and as head of state, while a succession of prime ministers came and went.Footnote 11
Prince Sihanouk and the system of constitutional monarchy were ultimately overthrown in 1970 by a coup initiated in the National Assembly by Lon Nol, who had himself succeeded Sihanouk as prime minister in 1960, only to later resign. However, it appears that the driving force behind Lon Nol’s decision to call a parliamentary vote to strip Sihanouk of his position and powers as head of state while he was abroad was in fact Lon Nol’s deputy prime minister, Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak.Footnote 12 A new republican Constitution was promulgated in 1972, after receiving 97.5% support in a national referendum (with two previous drafts having been rejected by Lon Nol, and the National Assembly responsible for developing them having been dissolved). Unsurprisingly, the new regime was opposed by Sihanouk, who—from exile in Beijing and Pyongyang—called for Cambodians to join an armed resistance movement against the new Khmer Republic government. This move would ultimately help to propel to power the Khmer Rouge, who eventually seized Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 and invited Sihanouk to return to Cambodia.
After being nominally named as Democratic Kampuchea’s head of state, only to resign the position a within a year (apparently after having seen the dire situation of the country under Khmer Rouge rule), Sihanouk was ultimately confined to house arrest.Footnote 13 This remained the case until the Khmer Rouge were overthrown by Vietnamese forces on 7 January 1979, after which a new government, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), was formed. While two members of Cambodia’s royal family were in fact involved in the Hanoi-backed PRK government between 1979 and 1989,Footnote 14 Sihanouk and his followers took up arms against the new regime, establishing FUNCINPEC for this purpose in 1981 and then joining Khmer Rouge and the anti-communist Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF) to form a united resistance movement, known as the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK), a year later.
It was along these lines that a bloody civil war was fought throughout the 1980s, until the end of the Cold War permitted the negotiation of the Paris Peace Accords, which were ultimately signed in 1991. While geopolitical shifts certainly made negotiations between the warring factions possible, particularly as Western countries sought to distance themselves from the Khmer Rouge, it was ultimately the reproachment between Sihanouk and the PRK prime minister, Hun Sen, that proved to be the catalyst. Once signed, of course, the Paris Accords provided the mandate for an international peacekeeping and democracy-building experiment of unprecedented size and ambition in the country, wherein the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia oversaw the everyday functioning of government for an 18-month period in 1992–93.Footnote 15 During this time, elections were held and the resulting National Assembly was tasked with writing a new Constitution, albeit with much of the content—including a commitment to liberal, multiparty democracy; judicial independence; and human rights—already outlined in advance in Annex 5 of the Peace Accords.Footnote 16 Nevertheless, it appears to have been the significant outpouring of support for the returning Norodom Sihanouk and the electoral victory this conferred to the royalist FUNCINPEC party that he had founded (but which was now led by his son, Norodom Ranariddh) that ensured the reinstatement of a constitutional monarchy in Cambodia.Footnote 17
Despite having won the elections in 1993, FUNCINPEC were forced into coalition with the CPP. Lacking the two-thirds majority in the National Assembly needed to form a government, and recognizing that the CPP still held considerable political leverage by virtue of their de facto control over the civil service and the military, FUNCINPEC formed a government with the CPP in which they split control of key ministries and even judicial appointments.Footnote 18 Prince Ranariddh and Hun Sen would become co-prime ministers (with the former being “first co-prime minister” and the latter being the “second”)—a formula that was replicated and alternated at ministerial level. This uneasy equilibrium did not last the full mandate, as Ranariddh and several FUNCINPEC leaders were ousted from office (and many more senior party figures were killed) in a CPP-led coup in 1997. Elections nevertheless took place as planned the following year—albeit marred by both pre- and post-election violence—with the much-disputed results showing a CPP victory.Footnote 19 In 1998, as in 2003, post-election stalemates prevented the formation of a government until eventually—following significant interventions by the King—FUNCINPEC agreed to be the junior partner in CPP-led coalitions.Footnote 20 A comprehensive defeat for the royalists in the 2008 elections and the subsequent failure to win a single parliamentary seat in 2013, just a year after the death of Norodom Sihanouk had seen an outpouring of sentiment for the former monarch, led to an inevitable conclusion that the “demise of Cambodian Royalism” had arrived.Footnote 21 This decline, Astrid Norén-Nilsson has explained, demonstrates “the difficulty of transposing royal legitimacy to the party-political context,” as the movement failed, on the one hand, to reconcile the contradiction “between royalism as a supra-political force and the imperative to take a particular political stand,” while its opponents, on the other hand, succeeded in appropriating “some of the royal aura.”Footnote 22 Torn between the idea of monarchism as a neutral, apolitical force embodied by the king and competing conceptions of monarchism as a political ideology (one based on the royal family as a unifying force and the other drawing on its heritage as a democratizing force), royalism faded relatively quickly into electoral insignificance.
3. The contours of constitutional monarchy in Cambodia’s Second Kingdom
As one would expect from a constitutional monarchy, the Cambodian Constitution is replete with references to—and attempts to delineate the role of—the monarch. First and foremost, the symbolism of the return to a monarchy is evident in the renaming of the country as The Kingdom of Cambodia (preamble), and the return of the triad “Nation, Religion, King” (Article 4). As noted above, the king is described as one who “reigns but does not govern” by paragraph 1 of Article 7, alongside the commitment that he “shall be Head of State for life” and “shall be inviolable” in paragraph 2. This notion of the king’s inviolability in fact resurfaced in public discourse in 2018, when the ruling party made amendments to the Criminal Code that introduced the crime of lese majesté, and justified these amendments as protecting the king’s constitutionally mandated status as “inviolable.”Footnote 23 Meanwhile, although Article 17 proclaims Article 7 to be unamendable, it does so only for paragraph 1, while Article 154 makes the regime of constitutional monarchy (as well as that of liberal, multiparty democracy) immune from amendment. Importantly, this nuance allowed King Sihanouk to abdicate in 2006 and, in doing so, forfeit his role as head of state. More extensive constraints still are placed on the role of the queen. While Article 15 allocates the title of “Queen of the Kingdom of Cambodia” to the wife of the king, Article 16 states that she “shall not have the right to engage in politics, to assume the role of Head of State or Head of Government, or to assume other administrative or political roles.” Instead, the role of the Queen is confined to serving “social, humanitarian and religious interests” as well as “assist[ing] the King with protocol and diplomatic functions.”
In something of a modification on Cambodia’s 1947 Constitution, the Constitution drafted in 1993 established an entirely elected monarchy. Specifically, Article 10 states that the king “shall have no power to appoint his successor to reign,” whereas Article 13 re-established the Crown Council, which is tasked with electing a new monarch within seven days of the death of the previous one.Footnote 24 In another slight deviation from the 1947 version, the 1993 Constitution specifies that the Crown Council must choose from members of the royal family who “descend from the bloodline of King Ang Duong, King Norodom or King Sisowath.” Articles 11 and 12, meanwhile, delimit the process by which the powers of the king can be temporarily delegated in case of the king being taken ill or passing away, respectively. These Articles were amended in 1999, following the creation of the senate, to allow the power of the king to pass first to the president of the senate instead of the president of the National Assembly (with the latter being second in line). Likewise, Article 30 allows the president of the senate to assume the title and role of “acting head of state” in instances where the king is “absent.”
In Cambodia’s Second Kingdom, there are also various ceremonial roles that are constitutionally reserved for the king. Amongst such ceremonial duties, a number are central to the formation and formal legitimation of government. Within 60 days of the date of an election, for instance, the king is responsible for convening the National Assembly and the Senate (Articles 88 and 111, respectively). Thereafter, according to Article 119 of the Constitution, once the duly convened National Assembly is in session, the king is mandated to designate a parliamentarian from the political party with the most votes in that election with the task of forming a government (i.e. a council of ministers or cabinet). Should the proposed cabinet receive a vote of confidence from the National Assembly, the king is to then issue a royal decree, appointing the proposed prime minister and their council of ministers as the royal government. Between elections, the king remains responsible for formalizing the appointment and dismissal of public officials, as recommended by the council of ministers (Article 21). The king is also responsible for conferring ambassadorial credentials (Article 25); establishing and conferring national medals, as well as military and civilian ranks (Article 29); and issuing pardons or amnesties, although in practice this tends to be done on the recommendation of the council of ministers. Finally, the king is also responsible for the ratification of international treaties, once they have been approved by the legislative branch, and is similarly responsible for promulgating new legislation and amendments to laws through the signing of royal proclamations. While Article 28 appears to differentiate the responsibility for promulgating legislation and legislative amendments from the king’s other responsibilities as head of state, by specifying that it is the king’s prerogative to delegate this function if he is abroad for medical treatment (unlike other responsibilities whose delegation appears to be assumed in the king’s absence), in reality it appears that the king retains the right to delegate each of the above-mentioned functions of his role independently. In other words, in practice, the king will often delegate certain powers to an acting head of state while abroad but continue to fulfil other roles from abroad. The significance of this nuance will become increasingly clear later in this paper.
The Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia also imbues the king with a number of other roles, in which the king nominates members to comprise part of a decision-making body, has a direct say (even an effective veto power) in the political process, or personally sits at the apex of an oversight institution. While such roles potentially extend beyond the merely symbolic or ceremonial, they can be understood to follow from the king’s mandate as “the guarantor of national independence, the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Cambodia and the guarantor of the rights and freedoms of all citizens and of international treaties” (Article 8) and from his “supreme role as arbitrator to ensure the regular execution of public powers” (Article 9). In other words, though these two provisions are significant in and of themselves, they can largely be understood to delineate a “safeguarding” role for the king that is ultimately given practical meaning elsewhere in the document. One area where this is not the case, however, is in the extent to which Article 9 has been read literally as calling for the king to “arbitrate” political disputes. As mentioned above, post-election stand-offs have occurred in 1993, 1998, 2003, and again in 2013. In the first two instances, then King Norodom Sihanouk played a central role in brokering an eventual resolution between the leaders of the political parties involved.Footnote 25 Meanwhile, it appears that failure to mediate a solution immediately after the 2003 elections led not only to him leaving the country and refusing to return until the parties involved in the stalemate had found a compromise between themselves,Footnote 26 but also to his eventual abdication once a government had been formed.Footnote 27 Finally, as the opposition, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), disputed the results of the 2013 elections and thus boycotted the National Assembly, King Sihamoni was called upon to fulfil a similar role to that which his father had played, albeit to no avail.Footnote 28
For the most part, however, the role of the king as “guarantor” and as “arbitrator,” as well as his role as a stakeholder in or constituent of certain institutions, is elaborated on specifically in the text. As such, the king is responsible for selecting two of the 62 members of the senate (along with 58 indirectly elected members and two who are nominated by the National Assembly), as well as for selecting three members of the nine-person Constitutional Council. With regard to the former, the King appears to have played a direct role in defining his own role during the 1998 debates that surrounded the creation of the upper house. As the CPP and FUNCINPEC negotiated over the composition of the body, amid a post-election stand-off, King Sihanouk wrote directly to the leaders of both parties in a letter that was subsequently made public. “I would like to request you to follow a model of the first Kingdom,” Sihanouk wrote, “where the King appoints only two members of the Senate and the rest [are] chosen by, based on their agreement, the government and the National Assembly.”Footnote 29 Such a position cut against the prevailing opinion within the royalist party ranks—a greater role for the King was seen as advantageous to FUNCINPEC’s cause.
In other instances, the king is imbued with an active role, or treated as a stakeholder, in the political process by the Constitution of Cambodia’s Second Kingdom. Only the king (or the delegated interim head of state), for instance, can declare a state of emergency or war, although such a decision is subject to the joint approval of the prime minister, the president of the senate, and the president of the National Assembly for the former (Article 22), and to a vote of the National Assembly and senate for the latter (Article 23). Similarly, if the government has twice been removed by a vote of no confidence, the king can, at the request of the prime minister, call for the dissolution of the National Assembly (Article 78). With the support of two-thirds of the members of the senate, the king is also solely responsible for extending the term of the senate (by one year at a time) during times of war. The king has the right to request extraordinary sessions and closed sessions of the National Assembly (Articles 83 and 88, respectively) and the senate (Articles 107 and 111, respectively). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in this regard, as well as nominating one-third of the members of the nine-person Constitutional Council, the king is also charged with the power to trigger both a priori and the a posteriori reviews of legislation by the Constitutional Council (Articles 140 and 141), as well as having a right (equivalent to that of the prime minister or the president of the National Assembly) to propose a constitutional amendment (Article 151). While many of these functions are ceremonial in character, they nevertheless provide the king with an opportunity to exercise discretion over political processes in Cambodia (such as whether to declare a state of emergency), while the latter examples provide the king with the opportunity to be a proactive participant in politics.
The role of the king as “guarantor” and “arbitrator,” meanwhile, is particularly evident from instances in which the Constitution imagines the king as the figurehead with oversight of national bodies. As Supreme Commander of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (Article 23), sitting above the commander-in-chief, for instance, and as chair of the Supreme Council of Defence (Article 24), the king is responsible for overseeing the functioning of Cambodia’s military apparatus. This oversight function is even more clear with regard to the judiciary, in fact. While Article 132 explicitly makes the king “the guarantor of the independence of the Judiciary,” and tasks the Supreme Council of the Magistracy with assisting him in this function, Article 134 makes the king the chair of that body, responsible for hearing proposals on the appointment of judges and prosecutors. In practice, however, neither King Sihanouk nor his successor, King Sihamoni, is understood to have been able or willing to exert much influence over the trajectory of Cambodia’s judicial system. Despite (or perhaps because of) the well-documented dysfunction of Cambodia’s courts, and the widely held perception that the judiciary is firmly under the CPP’s control,Footnote 30 the role of the king as guarantor of judicial independence and as chair of the body overseeing the judiciary appears to have been largely underutilized. As one interviewee, who himself had been an adviser to the King, explained to me in 2017:
And the Supreme Council of the Magistracy: when I was at the Parliament and he was in Siem Reap because he didn’t want to stay in Phnom Penh, he asked the Permanent Committee of the Parliament to meet him in Siem Reap. He hosted a luncheon, and he explained to us that he’s like a monkey … no hear, no see, no say, concerning the Supreme Council of the Magistracy, because he did not know who are these judges and what they are doing. He refused to preside over the Council. … He said: “no need to preside, because I don’t know anything about these people.” So, the whole time of his life as king, he never presided [over the Supreme Council of the Magistracy].Footnote 31
Despite being formally afforded a mandate to guarantee the independence of Cambodia’s judiciary, King Sihanouk—and by most counts his successor, King Sihamoni—has taken a hands-off approach to the job of safeguarding this vital institution. This appears to be either out of disinterest (as the above quote implies) or out of a sense of political helplessness and futility, as many other interviewees and informants suggested.
Finally, and in many ways most intriguingly, Cambodia’s 1993 Constitution imagined the resuscitation of the National Congress, although this promise has not come to fruition (and now seems unlikely to do so). Tracing its formal heritage to the 1947 Constitution and the Sihanouk era, but with informal forebears in Cambodia’s ancient and pre-colonial practices of petitioning), the National Congress is imagined as a body for direct democracy, wherein citizens can raise requests and complaints for state authorities to resolve (Article 147). Although the body is to be convoked by the prime minister, it is chaired by the king (Article 148). Resolutions of the National Congress are to be submitted as recommendations to the executive or the legislative branch. In practice, however, the institution has not materialized since 1993, as its creation appears to have been consistently blocked by a CPP that has sought to co-opt or foreclose any institutional pathways for challenging its increasingly hegemonic rule.
Nevertheless, the inclusion of provisions for a National Congress in the 1993 Constitution is indicative of a nostalgia on the part of royalists at the time of the document’s drafting. This, in turn, reflects both a genuine belief that the king was best placed to hear the complaints and champion the causes of his subjects, and a more calculated desire to capitalize on the cultural legitimacy of the monarchy to hold the government to account. Since the promulgation of the Constitution in 1993, however, the National Congress has featured in royalist political discourse not so much as a means to achieve democratic ends, but rather as an opportunity to expand the powers of the king and, thus, the political influence of royalism more generally. That FUNCINPEC politicians regularly campaigned for election on the promise that they would convene the National Congress for the first time, according to Norén-Nilsson, demonstrated the ultimate hollowness of royalism as a political movement in Cambodia. By 2010, Norén-Nilsson writes, “[r]oyalism had eroded to the point that it referred merely to protecting the constitutional powers of the King.”Footnote 32 Having brought Cambodia’s constitutional monarchy back to life through their success at the ballot box in 1993, in other words, royalist politicians spent a large amount of political capital and electoral energy seeking to bring to fruition the Constitution’s promise to imbue the monarch with a safeguarding role over the following decades, with precious little success. As a result, the limited de facto role of the king in political life continues to be emblematic of the failure of royalist politics and, for many, the unfulfilled potential of the constitutional order that was established in 1993.
4. Legitimate absences or absent legitimacy?
With King Sihanouk and King Sihamoni having struggled to effectively fulfil their safeguarding roles, either to act as a guarantor of “rights and freedoms” and “judicial independence,” or to arbitrate workable solutions to post-elections stand-offs, both kings appear to have resorted to more symbolic means of demonstrating disapproval. Specifically, on a number of occasions, both King Sihanouk and King Sihamoni have been widely understood to have avoided signing into law legislative acts of which they disapproved by intentionally being absent from the country for medical purposes. Of course, without an explicit acknowledgement from the palace that this was the purpose of the king’s absence, it is impossible to demonstrate categorically that this is the case. However, such an act is largely symbolic: while it is theoretically possible for the king to withhold is signature while abroad and at the same time refuse to delegate his power to promulgate legislative acts to the interim head of state in his absence, in practice this does not seem politically feasible or prudent. As such, the question of how the king’s absence is understood by his subjects is in many ways as important as the question of whether that understanding can be substantiated. In order to further explicate this phenomenon, I draw on three specific incidents: first in 2004, under the reign of King Sihanouk, and the others in 2015 and 2017, under the reign of King Sihamoni.
Before turning to these examples, however, it is worth noting that questions around the symbolism of the king’s delegation of the power to promulgate legislation was a recurring (and unprompted) theme in discussions of Cambodia’s constitutional monarchy during my fieldwork, conducted between 2016 and 2018. A great number of my informants, whether in formal interviews or off-record conversations, made implicit reference to a belief that the king’s absence was a symbolic indicator of his disapproval. None, however, did so as succinctly as a lawyer I spoke with in February 2017, as he explained: “The king has no power; he only acts as a symbol. But if the king doesn’t sign a particular law, it shows the people that he is not happy with it. He can avoid signing a law by going abroad.”Footnote 33
Despite being hamstrung by the de jure limitations imposed by constitutional monarchy and by the de facto limitations implicit in Cambodia’s political system, in other words, this interviewee understood the king as using his ceremonial role to send a direct signal to the Cambodian public when he disapproves of a piece of legislation, often by going abroad in advance of being called upon to sign that legislation into law. While the interviewee went on to make specific reference to King Sihanouk’s absence in 2004, to which I will now turn, it is significant that they, like many others I spoke with, understood this practice as one that continued into the present day.
It was King Sihanouk’s absence in 2004, however, that can be understood as the most striking example of a king’s symbolic absence. Amid the post-election stand-off mentioned earlier in this paper, with the King having failed to broker a resolution to the tripartite stalemate—between the CPP, FUNCINPEC, and the Sam Rainsy Party—King Sihanouk left the country, ostensibly for a medical check-up in China. As the political impasse continued, the King wrote publicly that he would “have to stay outside the Motherland for a while until they [the three parties] solve the political crisis 100 percent.”Footnote 34 However, as a solution emerged, King Sihanouk was characteristically both outspoken and cryptic about his disapproval of the plan. Specifically, to overcome their mutual distrust, the CPP and FUNCINPEC had devised a plan to pass what would come to be known as “the Additional Constitutional Law:”Footnote 35 a legislative act purporting to be of constitutional stature to be passed by the National Assembly after its swearing-in but before a vote to elect its president or to form a government. The text of the law which would allow leadership positions in the National Assembly and the formation of the government to be decided together, in a “Package Vote,” despite Article 82 of the Constitution’s explicit directive that the Assembly “vote separately” in such instances.
“Each invention is more anti-democratic and anti-Constitutional than the next,” the King wrote from his palace in North Korea in July 2004, attributing the opinion to an anonymous lady whom he claimed to have spoken with about the proposed resolution.Footnote 36 “The recommendations are a real work of art to disguise a repeated rape of the Constitution and the principles of democracy.”Footnote 37 Unsurprisingly, then, King Sihanouk did not return to Phnom Penh to convene the first session of the National Assembly, or to oversee the proceedings wherein a new National Assembly and government were formed in a controversial and constitutionally questionable “package vote.” In a letter to president of the senate and the CPP, Chea Sim, the King also apparently expressed his dissatisfaction with the imminent passage of the Additional Constitutional Law, as well as expressing his concerns about its constitutionality, before urging him (as prospective interim head of state) to consider his conscience before signing. “The request is a matter that leads to severe friction in our nation,” King Sihanouk wrote in the letter which he subsequently publicized online, “[and] I cannot take any responsibility for such an enormously grave affair.”Footnote 38 Perhaps in response, on the morning of the National Assembly’s convention, Chea Sim appears to have refused to go ahead with the planned vote and instead flew (or was flown) to Bangkok, with an armed escort, for medical reasons.Footnote 39 Though the Additional Constitutional Law was nevertheless passed, with the signature of the second vice president (and thus fourth in line), Nhiek Bun Chhay, ultimately replacing that of the King, this event appears to have left a lasting legacy for public understandings of the symbolic significance of the King’s decision to delegate his power to promulgate legislation.
As a result, an additional layer of public speculation, political manoeuvring, and even advocacy, has surrounded King Sihamoni’s decisions about whether to personally promulgate specific legislative actions initiated by the ruling party. As the CPP-dominated National Assembly and senate passed a draft law regulating civil society organization in 2015, in fact, a number of prominent local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) took the unprecedented—not to mention ultimately unsuccessful—step of lobbying the King. The draft Law on Associations and Non-Governmental Organisations (LANGO) had been widely criticized by both local and international NGOs, as well as being the subject of expressions of concern by international donors, many of whom saw its stringent financial rules, expansive reporting requirements, and vaguely worded prohibitions as an existential threat to the country’s previously “vibrant” civil society.Footnote 40 Dissatisfied with the government’s attempts at public consultations, and realizing that international pressure had not stopped the advance of the Bill, a group of some 26 NGOs turned to writing an open letter addressed to King Sihamoni on 30 July 2015. “If promulgated,” the letter asserted:
the LANGO will lead to serious restrictions of the rights to freedom of association, expression and assembly and the right to participate in public life, including by expressing dissent, in clear violation of what is established in the Cambodian Constitution and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.Footnote 41
Finally, after arguing that the passage of the law would be “to the detriment of Cambodian people and the international credibility of this country,” the letter requested the King to “exercise [his] constitutional role as guarantor of the constitutional rights and freedoms of all Cambodians, and of the international human rights treaties to which Cambodia is a party, and not to sign the Royal proclamation promulgating this law.”Footnote 42 It seems unlikely that the NGOs involved believed that, by lobbying the King, they would be able to completely derail the passage of the LANGO; rather, it appears that the aim was to win at least a moral or symbolic victory. It is similarly unclear how the letter itself was received by the King; however, the fact that he ultimately signed the Bill into law on 13 August 2015 shows that there is some limit to the practice of symbolic absence.Footnote 43
This unsuccessful attempt by NGOs to lobby the King, and to call upon his role as “guarantor,” is susceptible to a number of possible interpretations. From one perspective, the King’s decision to sign the LANGO into law can be understood in a straightforward way to reflect a belief that either (1) the LANGO did not pose the dire threat to “rights and freedoms” that many onlookers and academics had argued it did or that (2) the King does not see the promulgation of legislation as an appropriate venue in which to play out his role as “guarantor.” From another perspective, however, it is possible that the decision to overtly lobby the King may itself have backfired. Specifically, out of a shortage of political sensitivity in pursuit of a high-profile, symbolic victory, NGOs turned the spotlight onto the King and may have raised the political stakes of his decision, thus making it impossible for him to take such a stand without straining relations with the government. Either way, the decision to lobby the King in such a way demonstrates a clear understanding both of the potential for the King to apply his role as “guarantor” in such a way, and of the symbolic importance that follows from a king’s decision about whether or not to personally sign into law any given legislative proposal.
It is hardly surprising, then, that an additional layer of public speculation came to surround the passage of two sets of amendments to the Law on Political Parties in 2017 (both in the months following my interview with the informant quoted at the start of this section). In both instances, the CPP-dominated National Assembly and senate passed sweeping changes to the existing law: with the first round of amendments precipitating the immediate resignation of co-president of the CNRP, Sam Rainsy, and the second laying the foundations for the dissolution of the party altogether, in a trial that followed the arrest of the party’s other co-president, Kem Sokha.Footnote 44 The changes, then, were pivotal to Cambodia’s shift from competitive to hegemonic authoritarianism, wherein the CPP removed any effective electoral competition ahead of the 2018 elections. For his part, King Sihamoni left the country for a medical check-up in Beijing on Friday, 3 March, the same day that the Constitutional Council reviewed the constitutionality of the first round of draft amendments, which then reached the palace on Monday, 6 March.Footnote 45 Likewise, it seems that the King and the Queen Mother left for a routine medical visit to China just two days before the Constitutional Council considered the second set of amendments to the Law on Political Parties, although in this instance it appears that the trip had been planned in advance.Footnote 46
Short of directly and publicly lobbying the King to ensure his symbolic abstention, opposition political leaders instead attempted to frame the King’s absence in both instances as politically symbolic retrospectively. Within days of the first round of amendments being signed into law by senate president Say Chhum, acting as interim head of state, Sam Rainsy wrote publicly that “King Norodom Sihamoni has recently left Cambodia for China in order to avoid signing off the undemocratic amendment to the law on political parties which practically allows the CPP to dissolve the CNRP any time.”Footnote 47 It is not clear on what basis Sam Rainsy was able to make such a claim with absolute certainty. However, it does appear that the statement reflected a widely held belief that the King had sought to avoid lending the legitimacy associated with his signature to the legislative amendments, or that he had at least sought to avoid being associated with legal changes that would fundamentally change Cambodia’s political landscape. Meanwhile, in relation to the second instance, the CNRP’s Prince Norodom Thomico told journalists that “[he could not] say whether it [was] another coincidence as this trip was also planned a long time ago,” before noting that the King had—in both periods of absence—still managed to sign royal decrees bestowing titles on senior CPP figures.Footnote 48 While some political figures have been more willing to make categorical claims to the intended meaning of the King’s actions, in other words, most opposition-aligned politicians have understood the King’s delegation of the power to promulgate legislation, as well as his physical absence from the country, as a symbolic gesture of his disapproval.
Finally, in 2018 and 2020, two additional legislative changes raised the spectre of the King’s symbolic absence. Both examples, in fact, appear to lend credence to the notion that the King’s absence from the country, and his subsequent delegation of the power to promulgate legislative changes, is in fact a symbol of his disapproval of the changes rather than his desire to avoid being seen as “political.” Specifically, and perhaps poignantly, the King was abroad when changes to the Criminal Code that introduced the crime of lese majesté reached the palace.Footnote 49 The King had made no public statements in favour or against the changes as they were being discussed by the National Assembly or senate, although it is notable that the changes do appear to have been made at the behest of Hun Sen rather than anyone associated with the palace. In this regard, it is possible to see more notable parallels between Cambodia’s new laws prohibiting insults against the monarchy and those that exist in Thailand, since—in the latter instance—the King also appears to be reluctant to have the laws enforced in his name. Meanwhile, in 2020, a hurriedly written Law on Nation Management in a State of Emergency passed both houses of Cambodia’s legislature, only to be signed into law by senate president and interim head of state Say Chhum. Here, again, the law had been widely criticized in advance by both local and international civil society organizations, who saw its vague language, its sweeping derogation of rights, and its lack of effective safeguards as open to abuse and therefore potentially damaging to the “rights and freedoms” of Cambodian citizens. While still affording the King the role of declaring a state of emergency, pursuant to Article 22 of the Constitution, then, this highly controversial piece of legislation can be understood to have triggered the King’s role as “guarantor,” as the King—though stopping short of formally or openly objecting to the draft law—appears to have been symbolically absent from its promulgation.Footnote 50 As such, while both King Sihanouk and King Sihamoni have in practice been prevented from fulfilling the safeguarding role with which the monarch is formally imbued by the 1993 Constitution, both are understood to have used what little discretion they are afforded by the political climate in which they operate to signify their concern or disapproval.
5. Conclusion
Under Cambodia’s restored constitutional monarchy, the role of the king in Cambodia’s Second Kingdom appears to contain a fundamental paradox. Defined first as one who “shall reign, but shall not govern,” the king is to be the symbol of the nation, playing an entirely ceremonial role. This, of course, reflects the international and domestic expectations placed on constitution-makers. As part of an internationally sponsored, UN-administered transition, the 1993 Constitution was tied to promises of liberal democracy made in the Paris Peace Accords, while the victory of a royalist political party—FUNCINPEC—in the 1993 elections made the return of a king close to inevitable. Yet, short of neutral national political institutions in which all parties to Cambodia’s new democratic—particularly those opposed to the incumbent CPP—could put their trust, the return of a constitutional monarch also lent itself to a certain safeguarding role, in which the king was imagined to act as a protector of the country’s peace and unity, as well as its newfound status as a liberal democracy. As such, the king was provided with a number of more directly political roles, under the twin mandates as “guarantor” and “arbitrator.”
In reality, by most accounts, Cambodia’s political trajectory has not been conducive to a monarch who might proactively protect “rights and freedoms” or “judicial independence.” Attempts by royalist political parties to create greater room for the king to play this role suffered, just as the plight of royalism as a political project did. Faced with such an environment, both King Norodom Sihanouk and King Norodom Sihamoni have been unable (or at times unwilling) to take the safeguarding role assigned to the king to its furthest extent. Instead, both appear to have interpreted the role as being similarly symbolic; short of disrupting the political process, the only option available appears to have been to take symbolic stances against certain developments to which they have been (or can be) assumed to disapprove. King Sihanouk was characteristically outspoken, if somewhat cryptic, about this disapproval in 2004, when he refused to return to the country to oversee the passage of a constitutional amendment that he had implicitly described as “anti-democratic and anti-constitutional” in nature. King Sihamoni’s approach, meanwhile, to the extent that it can be understood to continue that of his father, has been more subtle. After signing the widely criticized LANGO in 2015, he has subsequently been absent from the country for the promulgation of two rounds of amendments to the Law on Political Parties, the introduction of lese majesté to the Criminal Code, and passage of the Law on National Management of the State of Emergency. There is, of course, little way of knowing the intention behind such absences, or of proving that there is anything more at play than a series of coincidences. However, the fact that King Sihanouk explicitly used such absences as a means of expressing disapproval, as well as of withholding of royal legitimacy, has meant that King Sihamoni’s somewhat similar pattern of absence has taken on the same symbolic meaning.
The political constraints that have prevented successive monarchs from fulfilling the role formally outlined for them in the Cambodian Constitution, then, have certainly precipitated something of a decline in the sort of popular legitimacy that was vested in the Crown immediately upon its reestablishment in 1993. The subsequent demise of royalists politics, meanwhile, can also be understood as both a cause and a symptom of this decline in prestige. Nevertheless, an element of cultural legitimacy certainly still adheres in the Crown, as the historic symbolism of the Cambodian monarchy continues to be a central feature of Cambodia’s post-conflict nation-building project. The symbolic significance that this—albeit largely ceremonial—role has afforded the monarch has still been mobilized, if only discreetly and within the truncated boundaries afforded by political reality, by successive kings to signify their dissatisfaction. As such, the safeguarding role that is formally assigned to the king has ultimately been fulfilled only symbolically, through ceremonial absences that have denied royal legitimacy to controversial legislative acts.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Maartje de Visser and Andrew Harding for their work in bringing together this Special Issue, as well as my co-participants at both of the workshops from which this and the various other contributions emerged. I am also very grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments. The research that underlies this article was made possible by the guidance of Victor V. Ramraj, Simon Springer, and Pooja Parmar; the support of the Leverhulme Trust and the Centre for Asia Pacific Initiatives (University of Victoria); and—most importantly—the generosity and bravery of the many Cambodians who agreed to speak with me during fieldwork.
