In 2014, the Thai military, once again, staged a coup amidst a political crisis involving Yingluck Shinawatra, known more as the sister of deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a prior coup in 2006. This was the latest episode in a polarizing saga that started with the rise of Thaksin in power and the end of the reign of Thailand's longest-ruling and arguably most-revered monarch. Since the 2014 coup, a military junta has ruled Thailand under a new king. With each passing year, the military accumulates more power as there is growing skepticism with the future transition to a democratic and civilian-led government in the Southeast Asian kingdom.
The Thai military belongs to one of the most elusive security forces in the world. Conducting scholarly research on the armed forces in general presents its own difficulties, but unpacking the “blackbox” that is the Thai military is peculiarly challenging. It is commonly observed that there is a dearth of scholarship on Thailand's civil–military relations despite this institution's domineering presence in the nation's sociopolitical landscape. It is therefore particularly fascinating when there are new studies that further unmask this clandestine political actor.
But Gregory Vincent Raymond's Thai Military Power is not just another study on Thailand's civil–military relations. There are three ways in which this study distinguishes itself from the extant academic literature on the topic. First, it uses a culturalist lens in explaining the Thai military's strategic behavior and how it projects this onto Thailand's foreign and security policy. Culture-based arguments are often in the periphery in the subfield of civil–military relations as interests and institutions dominate this scholarly arena. Drawing from international relations scholarship, particularly the concept of strategic culture, Raymond argues that cultural elements such as historical events and narratives, ideological proclivities, and organizational dynamics within the Thai security sector guided the external posturing of the country. The blend of these cultural factors largely determined the nation's strategic behavior and responses to security threats that Raymond labels as one of “underbalancing” and accommodation. In other words, culture, defined by century-old history and institutional dynamics, is a powerful influence among Thailand's cabal of foreign and security policy elites as it decides how the kingdom comports itself in the international arena and deals with powerful neighboring states.
Second, Raymond combines international relations and area studies that are seldom seen in the current research on Thailand's military. Most studies have been fixated on the military's intervention in domestic politics. The author observes the saturation of this internal focus and instead adopts a different gaze: how the military actually projects power and employs force as the guardian of the kingdom's security. In adopting this “second image” explanation in international relations, Raymond uses domestic-level factors such as national strategic culture and military organizational culture to explain how Thailand conducted its foreign policy as a “subaltern” state. Most of the existing literature on strategic culture has focused on great powers such as the US and China. Therefore, Thai Military Power is a welcome addition to this body of scholarship as it examines the strategic culture found in small and middle powers.
Third, Raymond does a long sweep of Thai political and diplomatic history. Existing works on Thai studies tend to look at the pre-modern or the contemporary era, but this book successfully covers these two periods of time with ease. As a historical piece of work, it traces the origins of the Thai military and reminds its readers of its character prior to its history of coups and political intervention. Thai Military Power represents the most recent attempt to provide a history of the military as an institution and its inexorable linkage with the Thai monarchy. Raymond's goal is to persuade readers that the monarchy and the armed forces are the essential twin forces behind Thai politics. Thailand's history is not a narrative woven by civilian politicians and bureaucrats, but one in which the rulers of the realm and their guardians found themselves locked in an existential partnership.
The book can be divided into two main sections. The first section discusses the two-part theoretical framework of the study. Strategic culture is a function of Thai national strategic culture and the military's organizational culture. Raymond elaborates on the two concepts as comprised of several dimensions. National strategic culture has two elements: diplomacy (through the efforts of Chulalongkorn with the colonial powers) and unity (as a lesson from the fall of Ayutthaya in the hands of the Burmese empire). Military organizational culture has three aspects: royalism, army dominance, and factionalism. Royalism is an ideological position adopted by the armed forces in lieu of the nature of its origin: as a force to safeguard the king as a person and eventually the monarchy as an institution. This emphasis is in keeping with the literature on civil–military relations that stresses the lingering impact on the historical role of the military in the country and how it affects its political standing in modern times. For example, scholars have also studied how both the Burmese military as a liberation force against the British empire and the status of the Philippine armed forces as a colonial army of the United States had far-reaching repercussions in civil–military relations in those two Southeast Asian States. Army dominance and factionalism are also similar patterns seen in transitioning states where establishing civilian and democratic control of the military remains a difficult challenge. In these two aspects, Thailand shares the stage with most of the post-colonial world.
The second section constituted the empirical backbone of the book. In separate chapters, Raymond applies the elements of the strategic culture imbibed by the Thai military in three case studies: the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia (1979–1989), the Thai–Cambodian temple conflict (2008–2011), and defense expenditures of the Thai government. In all these cases, Thailand's strategic behavior was heavily informed by national strategic culture and military organization culture. For example, despite Thailand's fear of Vietnamese expanding power in mainland Southeast Asia, it did not militarily challenge it and instead resorted to diplomacy and coalition building. Heavy pressure from the civilian political elite did not push the Thai military to utilize force in settling its temple conflict with Cambodia. Raymond argues that Thai security establishments were influenced by the historical memory of Ayuttaya's fall that made it resort to diplomatic settlement via the International Court of Justice. Finally, while having a considerable number of years under military government, Thai defense spending overall remained low. This study argues that domestic political hegemony of the military in several periods in Thai political history did not automatically translate to more resources as it is an organization still under the helm of the monarchy and also beset with internal rifts and weak central control. All these case studies point to a counterintuitive finding that neither corporate interests nor relative institutional standing in the Thai political arena could account for the way in which the military projected its power abroad. In other words, its domestic political domination did not result in a commensurate external posturing and power projection proportional to its political standing at home.
I have three points of critique. Theoretically, Raymond's extensive description of the Thai case is the center of the study, but the reader is left wanting on the comparative implications of his findings of similarly situated militaries apart from Thailand. Aspects of strategic culture for the Thai case are over-specified, so that the study is deprived of explanatory appeal for other cases. Moreover, theoretical parsimony is sacrificed on the altar of complexity. The book treats all the aspects of strategic culture on the same standing, but also conveniently chooses some of its elements as applicable to the case studies. The logic of case selection is also not clear and entirely convincing. Are there cases in Thai political and diplomatic history where national strategic culture is a more powerful explanatory force than military organizational culture? Under what conditions do historical narratives, ideological positions, and organizational dynamics possess causal power relative to individual rational interests and institutional constraints?
Methodologically, I appreciated Raymond's mastery of the academic scholarship on Thai civil–military relations and diplomatic history. It heavily utilizes secondary literature and supplements it with interviews from military officials. Such a historical-oriented study could have benefited from more archival work and use of primary sources. This could have enriched the scholarship behind this book and make it less reliant on the analysis derived by other academics. Cultural studies are underpinned by interpretive ontologies that are often the call of the researcher and not others who may have their own unique interpretations of events.
Finally, the lack of differences in the outcomes of the case studies points to the usual vulnerability associated with studies using culturalist arguments. Have there been changes in Thai strategic culture? To assume that the past casts a long shadow can imply that there is behavioral inertia among the Thai military. As Raymond argued, it is not a monolithic institution. The study could have benefited from discussing deliberations among the members of the Thai defense establishment regarding the power of strategic culture in decision-making. There might be military officials and civilian politicians drawn toward these cultural elements more than others. What then explains this variation?
Thai Military Power has pushed the frontiers of civil–military relations research, particularly in Thailand. Scholars will benefit from its rigorous discussion of Thai diplomatic and military history, while those interested in Thai foreign policy will find its exposition of the role of the military quite insightful. It has also opened new doors for further research on this area of investigation. One interesting topic is the military's “coup culture” that Raymond tangentially and unsatisfactorily discusses. Perhaps this may account for a significant portion of the Thai military's behavior at home and abroad. Hopefully, there will come a time when conditions will be more conducive to empirically investigating this coup culture.
