External assistance has been a continuous and pervasive influence on the dynamics of all of Cambodia's post-independence political regimes. It has likewise been critical to the emergence, consolidation and perpetuation into the post-Cold War period of a regime in which two former mid-level Khmer Rouge officials, Hun Sen and Chea Sim, have come to hold pre-eminent political positions. In considering the People's Republic of Kampuchea's moves towards economic and political liberalisation that commenced in the mid to late 1980s, Ronald Bruce St John has highlighted the longevity of this external support:

External support was crucial to the installation of a new ruling elite in the wake of the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia at the end of 1978, was crucial to ensuring its survival during the 1980s, and has functioned to promote the consolidation of what can be considered an eclectic ruling class in the period since the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) organised election in 1993. However, while external assistance has been indispensable it has not been all determining. The current, notionally democratic, political regime would almost certainly not exist today without external support, past and present. However, its paramount leaders and their ruling class have successfully navigated a variety of external pressures so as to maintain space for autonomous action.

In considering the external factors that have played into the endurance and consolidation of a distinctive ruling group, this article engages at a sharp tangent with the bulk of the scholarship on the evolution of the post-1989 Cambodian polity. Much of that scholarship has been preoccupied with the economic and political dimensions of Cambodia's so-called transition. Numerous studies of politics since the Cambodian peace settlement was signed in 1991 have been devoted to analysing the factors facilitating and impeding the shift from authoritarianism to democracy, and towards a liberalised market economy.Footnote ³ As a result, a fixation of much scholarship has been on the significance of the UN sponsored peace process and the presumed shift in regime type that this entailed. Key dynamics of the Cambodian polity concerning the ruling elite's interaction with domestic and international economic and political forces have received much less attention.Footnote ⁴ The interplay of Cambodia's distinctly patrimonial political system with the inflow of foreign aid has not received the consideration that it should. This is despite the purposeful provision of much of this aid so as to ensure the continued viability of the Cambodian state and the central role that aid continues to play in shaping the country's political economy.Footnote ⁵ As Thomas Carothers has lamented, once a country was labelled as a ‘transition country’, ‘their political life was automatically analyzed in terms of their movement toward or away from democracy’.Footnote ⁶ Instead of hinging an analysis of the Cambodian political system on the issue of transition between regime types, the focus of this article will be on the endurance of a ruling elite that came to power in the context of Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia during the 1980s. The central question it will address concerns how this elite has managed to endure in the context of a nominal political and economic transition that might have been expected to undermine the bases of its power. Key to answering this question is consideration of the patrimonial features of the Cambodian state, the inter-linkage between state-building and the emergence of a ruling class, and the involvement of external actors in the provision of foreign aid and the promotion of policy reform.

In order to consider the significance of external forces to the elite's bases of power, the sections that follow seek to dissect the systemic underpinnings of political power in contemporary Cambodia. It will be argued that the elite's success in positioning itself so as to benefit from the interplay of external and internal forces has been crucial to its ability to endure. In developing this argument, the first section introduces Cambodia's contemporary political economy and provides a conceptual framework for conceiving of the ruling elite's space for autonomous action. It points to the evolution in the post-UNTAC period of a capitalist form in the context of a state structure exhibiting stark patrimonial features. The second section examines the strategies for state-building pursued by Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen and the structure of the eclectic ruling class through whom he has come to exercise almost unassailable power. This section also provides an overview of this sundry group. It considers the nature of the interaction between Cambodia's post-1979 ruling elite and other elite groups arguing that ostensible political competitors, including some from opposition parties, have been accepted as part of a broader ruling class to the extent they have not sought to challenge the patrimonial structures through which power is consolidated. The third section then examines the agendas of external actors and how they have been navigated by the ruling elite. The final section argues that Cambodia's contemporary political regime is a hybrid of largely rhetorical and symbolic acquiescence to democratic norms built on the foundation of a patrimonial and highly predatory state structure.

Cambodia's contemporary political economy

Though the Cambodian state is widely considered to be scantly capable of meeting the basic infrastructural needs of the economy, state agents involve themselves in every possible facet of economic interaction.Footnote ⁷ This is partly because holding a senior position within the state apparatus has been one of the major avenues of private capital accumulation, with senior government officials actively seeking to advance their individual and network's interests through the powers they exercise in the holding of governmental office. For the ruling strata this penetration of economic transactions ensures wealth and power, making the political elite largely synonymous with the economic elite.Footnote ⁸ At lower levels, it functions to tether the state apparatus to vertically integrated private networks that limit the ability for autonomous state action or decision-making on the basis of law or policies in support of some notion of the ‘public interest’. It is thus often bewailed that the Cambodian state is in need of fundamental reform if it is to shift from being a predatory impediment to economic growth towards playing a supportive role for the development of a more advanced market-based economic system. Institutional changes that seek to promote a shift in the operation of the state through administrative reform aimed at ‘rationalising’ the operation of the bureaucracy and judicial reform aimed at strengthening the rule of law are largely unquestioned centre-pieces of governance related policy reform agendas.Footnote ⁹ These reforms are considered essential in order that the Cambodian state can become the foundation for productive investments necessary for ensuring broad-based and sustained economic growth. This section considers the linkages between the ruling elite and the Cambodian state, and offers a conceptualisation of the ruling elite's relative autonomy.

In seeking to understand the structure and administrative machinery of Third World states, scholars have often turned to the Weberian concept of ‘patrimonialism’. Most traditional polities had patrimonial features.Footnote ¹⁰ In a patrimonial state, the ruler's power depended on his capacity to win and retain the loyalty of key sections of the political elite. Lacking sufficient coercive capacity to enforce acceptance of his rule, the ruler sought to win voluntary allegiance by satisfying the aspirations, particularly the material interests, of his supporters through the distribution of fiefs and benefices in exchange for tribute and loyalty.Footnote ¹¹ A key element conveyed by the Weberian formulation was that of political administration operating as a personal affair. No clear distinction existed between the public and private domains, with the state apparatus as a matter of norm directed towards the personal whims and discretions of those holding power. The patrimonial state thus contrasts with the notion of predictable, rule-governed behaviour of the archetypal legal-rational bureaucratic state.

Weber's formulation, taken outside or at least beyond the range of contexts within which he devised the concept, has been deployed by scholars to capture the particular dynamics of some contemporary state structures. These are states that are formally modern in the sense of being structured as, and claiming to operate as, legal-rational bureaucratic entities, but where the public–private divide necessary for their operation as true bureaucracies is blurred. In this ‘neo-patrimonial’ context, the lack of a clear public–private division results in the state apparatus being crippled by an incentive structure that promotes administration directed towards particularistic interests and personal benefits. This may entail some combination of decision-making directed towards the interests of specific groups able to exercise influence over the state apparatus, and decision-making calculated towards maximising the personal benefits of the office holder. The type of rule-governed behaviour expected of a rational-legal administrative apparatus is subsumed by discretionary and particularistic considerations.Footnote ¹² In the ‘neo-patrimonial’ setting this phenomenon entails the channelling of state-controlled privileges to particular groups who are either the decision makers themselves or those able to gain access to them. However, the state is also incapacitated by the particularistic way in which it functions, with decision-making slowed and rendered incoherent.

The patrimonial framework can help us understand two important dynamics of attempts by the ruling elite to exercise discretion over economic transactions in Cambodia. One is their persistent and often highly creative attempts to craft rent-generating economic opportunities. The other is an ongoing attempt to ensure the state is unable to act as an independent arbiter of rules and regulations. State power is directed at channelling rents to the ruling class, commonly in the form of monopolies, concessions, licensing arrangements, and the purchase or lease of state property on favourable terms. Few if any other social groupings are in a position to contest the ruling class's economic dominance and the penetration of the state by patrimonial networks ensures its capacity for playing an autonomous role is restrained.Footnote ¹³ Its coercive apparatus is commonly deployed against perceived threats and is one of the few parts of the Cambodian state that has long been well resourced, if closely controlled.Footnote ¹⁴ But mostly the state operates as the major extractor of resources from society and may be likened to a conveyer belt for channelling wealth upwards to the ruling class. It thus operates as the pliant, if inefficient, tool of the dominant economic actors. Its focus on predation and the dysfunction associated with a ‘gummed up’ administrative apparatus that is caused by pervasive patrimonialism means that its continued viability rests on ongoing support by providers of foreign aid.Footnote ¹⁵

Conceiving of the Cambodian ruling elite's relative autonomy

Notions of the relative autonomy of the ruling elite have been informed by the application of the concept of ‘relative autonomy’ in Marxist varieties of political economy to understanding the state.Footnote ¹⁶ Nicos Poulantzas put forward the concept of ‘relative autonomy’ as an explanation for states that acted in a manner that could not be understood as simply an instrument of the capitalist class. Instead, the state was able to carve out its own political space. In doing so, it could act in a way that seemed to violate the short-run interests of capital even if this ultimately ensured the class's long-run hegemony.Footnote ¹⁷ For our purposes the concept of ‘relative autonomy’ is suggestive in two senses. On one level it points to the Cambodian ruling elite's ability to carve out a space for autonomous action in relation to the external political and economic environment in which it operates. At another level, the term captures the sense in which a ruling group is able to act in a manner autonomous from the broader ruling class so as to ensure the endurance of the political regime.

The Cambodian elite's ability to maintain scope for autonomous action can be discerned in terms of the implications of patrimonialism and the politics embedded in the international aid regime. The patrimonialism that pervades the Cambodian state is intertwined with the proclivity of the ruling class to engage in rent seeking rather than true entrepreneurialism involving taking the risk of profit and loss. Also important are the particularistic ways in which various external actors define their interests. External actors tend to be unable to coordinate their positions sufficiently, and over a long enough span of time, to limit the ruling elite's manoeuvrability in the face of external pressures.

External actors rarely adopt the same perspective toward the Cambodian government for any significant period of time, nor do they generally define their interests in the same way. However most have an imperative to provide aid as a central plank of their foreign relations with Cambodia. This combines with the operation of multilateral institutions whose continued existence is predicated on their acting as conduits for a continuous and preferably increasing flow of financial resources.Footnote ¹⁸ The multiple perspectives of state, non-governmental and inter-governmental external actors involved in these resource flows are a vital element of the ruling elite's autonomy.

The contemporary Cambodian regime, by which is meant the regime that has emerged in Cambodia since the 1993 UN sponsored election, has dynamically drawn upon the legitimating role of external support efforts, deploying these both within the international arena, and domestically. Hun Sen as paramount leader has frequently taken steps to portray the regime in a favourable light. He has represented it as democratic, an upholder of human rights, as fighting corruption, as seeking to reduce poverty, as upholding labour standards, and more recently, as a willing participant in the war on terror.Footnote ¹⁹ He has acquiesced, verbally at least, to a range of externally induced changes in order to increase his legitimacy with Western states, international organisations and foreign investors. But in a manner reminiscent of rulers in comparable patrimonial contexts, Hun Sen has done only what was judged necessary to obtain this external support. When new issues shifted the focus of key providers of foreign aid, or the composition of external support coalitions could be altered, he has backed away from changes that threaten the ruling elite's bases of political and economic power.Footnote ²⁰

This external dimension combines with the way in which the regime's power is based upon the ties between the state and the ruling elite. As increased state capacity can be channelled towards the reinforcing of the ruling elite's patrimonial networks, the leadership aims at both bolstering the state apparatus and tightening its grip on the state. While the state's ability to penetrate and mould societal groups is limited, its energy is often effectively devoted to ‘disorganising’ civil society. Emergent social groupings are almost invariably viewed as a threat to be undermined through a chipping away at their coherence.Footnote ²¹ Ambivalent towards the implementation of programmes that promote the types of social and economic transformation that could lead to an incremental shift in the distribution of political power, the ruling elite has sought to neutralise transformative agendas emanating from society. The state's energies are thus directed towards preventing the emergence of social groupings that might have an interest in transformation.

Externally, the state navigates linkages to the global economy, where possible pursuing commercial arrangements whose terms can be directly controlled. At the same time, the ruling elite has proven reluctant to cultivate productive activities and trade patterns that might facilitate the creation of an autonomous commercial class able to challenge their own power.Footnote ²² Politically, with many of the ‘empirical’ attributes of statehood absent, the external recognition of its territorial identity and international status becomes a key basis on which a distinctive ‘Cambodian’ economic and political entity can be conceived.Footnote ²³ From external recognition, flows foreign aid. In the 1980s military and economic aid from Vietnam was indispensable, as was economic aid from the Soviet Bloc. This has been replaced by aid from international organisations, Western states, and increasingly from China. This assistance ensures the state continues to perform the minimum of public functions so as to dampen internal discontent.Footnote ²⁴ It is the structure of the international system, with the interplay of disparate agendas, organisations and non-state groupings each pursuing their own ideal and material interests, that provide scope for the ruling elite's autonomy.

Hun Sen and the Cambodian state: Patrimonialism, state-building and class formation

We have already examined the basis of the ruling class's penetration of the state, deploying the Weberian concept of patrimonialism. State actors have combined patrimonial relationships with emerging bureaucratic administrative functions. However, and with the exception of the security apparatus, the Cambodian state has a limited administrative capacity and limited transformational capabilities. Particularly in rural areas, pre-UNTAC forms and structures of authority have continued to operate. These include localised patterns of asserting control at a village level and substantial latitude in the exercise of political power by district and provincial officials. This is the underlying structure of the Cambodian political system. Constitutionally embracing political pluralism, its more tangible features include an overwhelmingly dominant ruling party (the Cambodian People's Party) and a diverse but largely depoliticised civil society.

Within this context, Hun Sen has, over the post-UNTAC period, increased his personal discretion. He has expanded his scope for political action beyond the confines of both ‘traditional’ (pre-civil war) restraints associated with monarchical rule and modern legal ones. He has, however, drawn upon elements of both for legitimation purposes. Using the coercive and administrative apparatus, Hun Sen has sought to whittle down the pluralistic practices and revamped institutions that emerged out of the UN sponsored peace process.Footnote ²⁵ In rural areas, centralised administrative control over land and key natural resources has increased, but is constrained by the patrimonial nature of the state. The security apparatus quells dissent when directed by state leaders but, mostly unsupervised, pursues its predatory ambitions as the norm.Footnote ²⁶

In the post-UNTAC context, Hun Sen's strategy of state-building has entailed:

1. (1) the consolidation of control over the security apparatus to build a political order dominated by the Cambodian People's Party, and to prevent or contain political unrest and the development of party infrastructure by opposition groupings;Footnote ²⁷

2. (2) the personalisation of power through off-the-budget financing of development projects;Footnote ²⁸

3. (3) an incremental recentralisation of power through the restructuring of state agencies controlling key resources (including the Forest Administration and the Cambodian National Petroleum Authority) to bring them under more direct prime ministerial control;Footnote ²⁹

4. (4) the channelling of foreign aid contributions into infrastructure projects such as road construction and plantation developments that have facilitated access to and control over the population of peripheral areas;Footnote ³⁰

5. (5) the emasculation or elimination of alternative sources of autonomous authority including the role of the monarchy and the Buddhist clergy;Footnote ³¹

6. (6) the channelling of political participation (i) into largely depoliticised civil society groupings engaged in a ‘technical’ dialogue over various aspects of government policy, and (ii) into elections where access to the media, and the operation of political parties in rural areas is highly skewed towards the Cambodian People's Party;

7. (7) the establishment of a quasi-ideology combining various Hun Senisms, with the mantra-like repetition of various elements of external reform agendas in the state-run media;Footnote ³²

8. (8) policies designed to increase the economic and political power of the leadership and broader ruling class, including agricultural plantation schemes where the land, or marketing rights are under the ruling class's direct control.Footnote ³³

These elements are held together by a personalistic rulership and politics. The result is a patrimonial administrative structure controlled by the Prime Minister, legitimised by a minimal level of state service provision that is almost entirely externally financed, the trappings of democracy and pluralistic critique from which the rural population is largely immunised, and idiosyncratic doctrines of development based on external reform agendas. In pursuing this state-building strategy, Hun Sen has relied heavily on external support, while seeking to limit external influences when they have impinged on his interests or those of the ruling class.Footnote ³⁴

The evolution of the state since 1979 has been closely tied to the nurturing of a ‘ruling class’ which consists primarily of the progeny of the communist party that held power during the 1980s.Footnote ³⁵ Access to the state is the primary means through which this ruling class generates its substantial wealth. The Cambodian state has over time created its own relatively stable elite, which in turn supports its creator. The state is composed of three main groups. The first are top level administrative, political, police and military officials, close prime ministerial advisors, ministers (including secretaries and undersecretaries of state), departmental heads, provincial and municipal governors, and senior party officials. This group also includes relatives of Hun Sen, Chea Sim and other senior party officials some of whom hold diplomatic postings, or pseudo politico-administrative positions. Within this group, those closest to Hun Sen and other senior party officials have an almost unlimited licence to plunder. For the rest, the opportunities for appropriation are vast, and the material perquisites that flow from their status and connections are substantial. Most members of this group operate or create their own patronage networks and are part of others.Footnote ³⁶

The second major state group comprises middle level administrative officials, and members of the military and security apparatus that may be tied by family or property ownership to both Phnom Penh and the provinces. Some, at least, of this group aspire to rise into the ranks of the ruling class, and are usually clients in the networks of those who are in it. They also participate in various avenues of appropriation but to a lesser degree as accords their rank, and often as part of a larger network entailing the passing up to their superiors of income generated from their positions.Footnote ³⁷

The third group is lower level state officials in Phnom Penh and the provinces. Most eke out a marginal existence based on the opportunistic supplement of inadequate formal salaries through moonlighting and petty corruption.Footnote ³⁸ Targeted, are those with even less power, which generally means the visibly vulnerable or the unmistakably needy (of some type of state service) members of the broader society.Footnote ³⁹ The next section considers the ‘ruling class’. Based on the first of the three state groupings listed above, it is a consolidating, if sporadically unstable elite held together by shifting patron-client networks, factional alliances and family ties. There are variable criteria for entry, the principal of which seems to be a willingness to accept the status quo. This, we shall see, accounts for the current rank of most members of the royal family and many opposition politicians.

Antecedents of the elite

The political elite in Cambodia can be considered to approximate a ruling class due to its emerging self-conscious identity, the barriers of entry to which seem to be growing. It blurs any distinction between an economic and political elite because its basic values, its power and its economic base stem from its relationship with the state. It has a distinctly prebendal character. Rather than operating as an entrepreneurial, productive social class, it is largely predatory in aim and mercantilist in economic outlook. Its predatory character partially explains why it needs external resources and assistance to ensure that its primary prop, the state, continues to be viable. To a limited extent, its income entails tapping into the flows of aid provided by external actors to supplement what can be internally captured.Footnote ⁴⁰ It is rarely, and usually only with a foreign business partner, involved in entrepreneurial activity that entails the generation of new sources of wealth.

Cambodia's ruling elite emerged via Vietnam's removal of the Khmer Rouge from power in early 1979. A new regime was installed based to an extent on mid-level Khmer Rouge officials who had earlier fled to escape being purged.Footnote ⁴¹ Among those brought back were Hun Sen, Chea Sim, Sar Kheng and Heng Samrin. Together with other Cambodian communists who had spent much of the post-World War Two period in Vietnam, they formed the backbone of the new administration that came to be called the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). Opposing it, throughout the 1980s, were Khmer Rouge remnants based on the Thai border and supported by China and Western states, royalists and republicans, some of whom had remained along the Thai–Cambodian border since the Khmer Rouge seizure of power in 1975. In the early 1980s, the disparate resistance groups fell under the umbrella of three internally divided factions: the Khmer Rouge; the royalist FUNCINPEC (French for the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful, and Cooperative Cambodia) led by Prince Sihanouk, and the republican KPNLF (Khmer People's National Liberation Front). With Western, Chinese and ASEAN support for the resistance groups and Soviet Bloc support for the People's Republic of Kampuchea, civil war continued throughout the 1980s. Fighting was particularly focused on the northern and western provinces.

The mid-1980s reduction in Cold War tensions, and the growing interest of key external actors such as the Soviet Union and France in resolving the Cambodia conflict, led to pressures on the resistance factions and the PRK regime to reach some sort of political settlement. In the lead up to this settlement, the PRK leadership, the People's Revolutionary Party of Kampuchea (PRPK), moved to modify the political system they had sought to build since 1979 as a means of adapting to a foreshadowed withdrawal of Vietnamese military forces stationed in Cambodia; a reduction in Soviet Bloc economic assistance; and an economic reform programme initiated by the regime's main sponsor, Vietnam. After Vietnam withdrew its military forces in 1989, the PRK renamed itself the State of Cambodia (SOC), formally abandoned socialism, and declared its support for democracy.

The subsequent UN sponsored peace process served to neutralise the international dimensions of the Cambodia conflict in that the backers of the royalist, the Khmer Rouge and the PRK factions agreed to terminate the military, diplomatic and economic assistance that they had provided to their Cambodian proxies. This was central to ‘normalising’ Cambodian politics, to an extent allowing political contestation to be focused back on the domestic arena and permitting a return to neo-traditional patterns of rule.Footnote ⁴² But it also opened a degree of political space through its activities in the lead-up to elections. It encouraged the development of institutions, independent of the state, that were intended to generate and perpetuate political engagement and debate by societal groups in a manner anticipated to lead to an incremental increase in political accountability.Footnote ⁴³ Although limited by many constraints inherent to UNTAC, and pressures particularly from the SOC and the Democratic Kampuchea faction, it did represent, in the eyes of many observers at least, the re-emergence of civil society.

In practice, ‘normalisation’ of Cambodian politics entailed the post-1979 ruling elite acquiescing to the re-incorporation of the various resistance factions with which they had fought during the 1980s so that these competing factions could transform themselves into political parties to compete electorally.Footnote ⁴⁴ The reincorporated political parties were, however, significantly hobbled by having to compete in the context of state structures that remained closely wedded to the post-1979 ruling elite's electoral vehicle, the Cambodian People's Party. For this pre-existing elite, the opening of Cambodia to electoral competition was part of a deliberate if unavoidable strategy directed towards harnessing Western sources of aid as a substitute for the withdrawal of Soviet Bloc economic assistance. In bolstering its international legitimacy it sought to curtail the possibility of being swept from power through the type of popular uprising it had seen occur in eastern Europe. Hun Sen shared his concerns in this regard in a December 1989 conversation with the Laotian Minister of Justice. According to Hun Sen:

The prospect of following Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife's steps to execution by firing squad was a stark lesson in the imperatives of regime adaptability.

The constitution and apparent contradictions of the ruling class

In the post-election period, the newly formed coalition government inherited a state whose operation remained interlocked with the dominant coalition party — the CPP. Newly integrated elements of the coalition included a disparate mix of those whose vision was of a government implementing a programme of reform directed towards the establishment of an archetypal bureaucratic state, those eager for the status and wealth that could flow from holding state positions, and those intent on ensuring the existing power structure endured.Footnote ⁴⁶ Many newly inducted state officials, particularly at lower levels, were either incapable or unwilling to fulfil the functions necessary for the operation of the state apparatus in a manner envisaged by dominant conceptions of ‘policy reform’. This meant that the impulses of state actors barely extended beyond the maintenance of basic order and the extraction of resources. Role performance of officialdom became largely ritualistic, particularly as the external threat faced by the state apparatus during the 1980s had vanished.Footnote ⁴⁷

Extraction was (and is) expected of state officials and has on only the rarest of occasions led to disciplinary action or dismissal. It became, in many respects the benchmark of ‘bureaucratic’ competence.Footnote ⁴⁸ In this context, the line between private and state property has remained illusive, with embezzlement, fraud, theft and illicit economic ventures, including widespread smuggling and export swindles, all common.Footnote ⁴⁹ This situation has continued, and if anything become more deeply ingrained over the 18 years following the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements.Footnote ⁵⁰ External efforts to control and reform this system have invariably failed. Indeed, these efforts must fail as success would amount to the rupture of both the normative (status) and material aspects of rule.

As befits a self-conscious ruling class, the trappings of wealth are everywhere apparent. Areas of Phnom Penh feature grandiose villas, luxury cars and other exotic consumables. Together with security escorts around town, special arrangements for aircraft boarding and customs clearance, and shopping sprees to neighbouring states, they constitute the highly visible signs of membership of this social grouping. The non-visible advantages are also considerable with high officials, upon purchase of their positions, licensed to freely embezzle massive sums. This tapping of state property, and taxing of all manner of commercial transactions, is so ritualistic, and indeed expected, that top political leaders almost certainly are aware of it. Such embedded ‘corruption’ helps to consolidate this social group. It functions as an effective mechanism of regulating those holding positions of political responsibility as the loss of a particularly lucrative position can be decreed by paramount leaders to keep the overly ambitious in check.Footnote ⁵¹

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the ruling class does not normally invest in productive, as opposed to short-term profitable ways. The group is not an emerging ‘bourgeoisie économique’ that could constitute a capitalist class funding Cambodia's future economic expansion.Footnote ⁵² Rumours of overseas bank accounts and overseas property purchases are rife. Phnom Penh real estate is inexplicably expensive, yet villas sit empty for months at a time, and hotels erected in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh seem more designed to capture the majesty of their owners than to operate on commercial terms.Footnote ⁵³ Such a system intensifies predation, and reliance on the clientelistic ties necessary for any hope of fulfilling one's economic aspirations. United Nations Special Representative for Human Rights, Yash Ghai, pointed to these aspirations in his observations on the Cambodian judiciary. He noted:

In this context, every possible state property is potentially for sale or lease given whim, crisis and or opportunity.Footnote ⁵⁵ While the rate at which this occurs varies with the degree to which the elite feels secure, the system is perpetuated because it works to limit scope for the creation of entrepreneurial alternative sources of wealth.

Foreign investment is welcomed, and may be used to achieve foreign policy objectives such as the favourable perspective of an important state. More commonly, however, foreign investment, with its encouragement of domestic partners, is part of the system of prebendal remuneration. It ensures that members of the elite can appropriate wealth without having to play any substantive role in producing it.Footnote ⁵⁶ That is, without having to perform true bourgeois entrepreneurial functions of more advanced capitalist forms.

That a Cambodian ruling class exists does not mean that it is a completely coherent or unified group. Competing factions jostle for wealth and power, usually composed of partially interlocking, partially competing, patron-client networks.Footnote ⁵⁷ Maintenance of one's position within the elite is often precarious, with individuals compelled to hedge against uncertain prospects by securing foreign passports, arranging for their children's education overseas, and maintaining clientelistic ties upon which they may be able to fall back. To a degree, this ‘insecurity dilemma’ has continued to confound Hun Sen. In addition to a substantial security apparatus and a compound located far enough from Phnom Penh as to be able to reduce the risks of a forcible removal from office, Hun Sen has sought to hedge his reliance upon the state and collaboration with the elite's other leading members through the cultivation of a more personalised network of clients that have been given access to lucrative contracts, licences, concessions, subsidies and monopolies. Additionally, he is both the seemingly indispensable international face of an otherwise publicity-shy leadership group, and has ensured ties of marriage and kinship bind him to key controllers of the security apparatus including to police chief Neth Savoeun.Footnote ⁵⁸

Because the benefits of membership in the ruling class are so great, factional disputes revolve more around obtaining lucrative state positions than over ideological stances or policy. Therefore, despite internal divisions (which in any case are rarely publicly aired), the elite can aptly be described as consolidating itself as a coherent relatively fixed grouping, and doing this by establishing patron-client ties and kinship alliances within itself. More and more, it can be said to be conscious of its own generalised class interests and identity, and therefore conscious of its existence as a class for itself.

Included in this class are members of the royal family and political elites leading parties in formal competition to the ruling party. Conservatism, as in acceptance of the status quo, is everything. Only those who challenge the structure of power are a threat. When such threats arise, they are commonly dealt with through forced passage into exile, a restriction of the dissident's avenues of domestic expression,Footnote ⁵⁹ and sometimes through a bizarre process of political signalling involving the assassination of more vulnerable associates in a manner ambiguously attributable to some unfortunate event such as to ‘robbery’, ‘personal dispute’ or ‘car accident’.Footnote ⁶⁰

The elite does not have any serious internal competitors for control of the state. A multiplicity of societal groups, however, pose occasional problems and difficulties for it, but they have no prospect of transforming the existing political order. Pervasive material scarcity and marginalisation of rural Cambodia serve to constrain political activism. From time to time, various external actors have tried to alter the nature of the Cambodian state, the actions of its leadership and the ruling group. Paradoxically, these interventions generally entail the carrot of external financial support as an inducement for reform, and this works to consolidate the position of the ruling class. There are two elements to this. One relates to the multifarious positions of external actors vis-à-vis Cambodia, and the second is that reforms can often be harnessed to increase the efficiency with which the patrimonial features of the state operate, rather than changing their basic character.Footnote ⁶¹

External agendas and pressures for reform

The nature of the highly personalised, authoritarian but insecure, conservative and patrimonial regime and its ruling class limits the chances of major reform, particularly in the operation of the state. Economic ‘liberalisation’, and particularly privatisation, is actively promoted as long as the bulk of the benefits are channelled into the hands of the elite.Footnote ⁶² Elections continue to be held, and limited forms of criticism continue to be permitted, while attempts to cultivate nodes of political opposition in the regime's heartland – particularly rural areas – are dealt with ruthlessly. The enduring paradox of external involvement in patrimonial settings is captured by Callaghy with reference to the former Zaire's ruling elite:

To implement the bureaucratic changes demanded by these actors would undermine the very basis of the ruling elite's power — access to and free use of state resources. As a result, the ruling elite uses control of the state apparatus to weaken initiatives for change while manipulating the external actor's partially competing interests and strategic and humanitarian fears about the consequences of their withdrawal to fend off effective and sustained cooperation between them.Footnote ⁶⁴ But resource inflows, in bolstering the resources available to the state, give the elite the economic latitude to enhance the patrimonial features of their system of rule. As the delivery of minimal levels of service is predominantly externally financed and managed, state actors have greater freedom from domestic pressures that might compel the use of their offices for public benefit. The elite can instead focus on private accumulation. Additionally, technical advice and improved management systems may help senior state officials capture a greater proportion of the streams of revenue to which the state has access.

This also highlights the major point of external leverage for reform, which is the fragility of the Cambodian financial system. The financial system is the ‘Achilles heel’ of the regime, given the decentralised nature of revenue collection, the propensity of officials at all levels to appropriate, and the operation of most Departments, Ministries, and Provinces as personal fiefdoms. Within the context of this ‘systemic anarchy’ the regime faces the constant search for access to more revenue through which the formal state structure can continue to operate so as to be able to prey on the revenue streams to which it has access.Footnote ⁶⁵ The maintenance of the ‘neo-patrimonial’ state entails the maintenance of this critical balance, for without the formal state, the informal revenue flows begin to dry up and the power structure breaks down. Maintaining this critical balance has come to depend on the fungible sources of foreign assistance such as macroeconomic support credits provided by the IMF and World Bank and other financial instruments that provide budgetary support. China has more recently become critical in this regard.

China as a buffer against external pressures for reform

China's growing economic and political ties with the Third World are increasingly conceived by the Chinese state and at least some of its key aid recipients as entailing a permanent complementarity of economies.Footnote ⁶⁶ It is in this context that the relationship between China and Cambodia can be analysed.

A central aspect of China's pre-colonial and post-World War Two relations with Southeast Asia has related to preventing the growth of a preponderant power on its southern periphery and keeping the area free of potential strategic challengers. This longstanding interest has influenced contemporary patterns of investment in Southeast Asia and the political and economic relationship with Cambodia. As foreign investment in China has risen, Chinese state-controlled and private business entities have themselves sought to invest overseas, including in Southeast Asia.

China's ties to the Cambodian ruling elite began to expand in 1997. Aid flows from the World Bank and the IMF had at that point been curtailed. The scarcity of Western sourced aid was compounded when aid from many bilateral sources was cut in the wake of the July 1997 coup that led to Ranariddh's removal as co-Prime Minister. Claiming that FUNCINPEC had received support from Taiwan, Hun Sen forced the closure of the Taiwanese trade office. He subsequently undertook a private visit to Beijing during which Premier Li Peng reportedly told him that China would ‘never interfere’ in Cambodia's internal politics and that Cambodia's problems ‘must be resolved by the Cambodian people’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Subsequently, during a February 1999 visit by Hun Sen to China, the government was rewarded with $18.3 million in aid and a $200 million line of commercial credit.Footnote ⁶⁸ In the context of a subsequent string of visits by Chinese officials (including then President and Party Secretary General Jiang Zemin in November 2000), China has emerged as one of the largest sources of foreign aid and the largest source of foreign investment.Footnote ⁶⁹

At the 2002 ASEAN Summit, held in Phnom Penh, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji announced that China was writing off all old Cambodian debts, including those incurred as early as the 1960s.Footnote ⁷⁰ This announcement was made as lending continued to rise.Footnote ⁷¹ From the Chinese government's perspective, Cambodia likely offers reasonably lucrative prospects for returns on investments in agro-industrial schemes and the possibilities of an enhanced political and strategic relationship with an ASEAN state.Footnote ⁷² For Cambodia's ruling elite, economic ties with China offer opportunities for reshaping the space within which to navigate and deflect pressures from reform promoting external actors.Footnote ⁷³ This includes external pressures related to human rights and has aimed at increasing the elite's latitude in relation to the implementation of components of various reforms that conflict with the parameters of the elite's strategies of rule. During a November 2000 visit, Jiang Zemin seemed to speak to these aspirations of Cambodia's rulers in noting: ‘China and Cambodia … share extensive consensus on many issues such as opposing hegemonism and power politics, safeguarding the sovereignty, territorial integrity and national unity of their respective countries, devoting themselves to the economic development, and promoting the stability and prosperity in the region.’Footnote ⁷⁴

Compared to other parts of Southeast Asia, levels of Chinese investment in Cambodia have been particularly high.Footnote ⁷⁵ Trade, direct investment, foreign aid, and cultivation of ties with the Chinese-Cambodian community have all come to play a significant part in this trend.Footnote ⁷⁶ In addition to Chinese investment in the garment sector, a focus of interest has been agro-industry. The nature of this investment has been influenced by China's ‘unique method of dispersing its official aid entirely through contracts to Chinese firms’ and the predominance of state-owned enterprises and other government entities in financing and implementing large projects.Footnote ⁷⁷ Chinese investment in agro-industry has in this context come to be an important element of the Chinese-Cambodia bilateral relationship.Footnote ⁷⁸

China's provision of aid and investment funds has contributed to the development of plantation schemes in forest areas, assisting the ruling elite in furthering their project of control and extraction in Cambodia's periphery. What China's emerging influence suggests is that the underlying aim of the policy reform agenda in promoting Cambodia's integration with a world economy structured in fundamental ways by dominant Western states may be being reshaped. Patterns of governance generated out of external attempts to promote policy reform, in the context of China's growing importance, have established conditions that are assisting the incumbent elite in consolidating themselves as a rentier class.

Regime adaptability

The broader regime feature, of which China's growing economic and political ties with Cambodia add to the possibilities, is the pragmatism and adaptability of the leadership in harnessing and, when necessary, neutralising reform pressures. Hun Sen, Chea Sim and other leading members of the elite are largely political, rather than economic in their governmental focus. They understand what it is to durably exercise power and have come to cherish their quasi-royal status.Footnote ⁷⁹ As such, they depend on money, but they do not want to be seen to be overly concerned with the ‘details’ and consequences of managing it.Footnote ⁸⁰ Hence their ambivalence to the economic realities of Cambodia's precarious international financial position. Events such as the 2008 global financial crisis, the 2003 burning of the Thai embassy, or the 1997 coup are of political concern, but not sufficiently an economic concern to inspire more than sporadic bouts of rhetorical fervour for reform.Footnote ⁸¹ Reform pronouncements are, in any case, mostly timed to the schedule of meetings with donors of foreign aid, rather than some coherent strategy of political and economic transformation.

Two consequences flow from this economic ambivalence. The first is a reliance on ‘extraordinary’ financial measures, such as the fire-sale of state assets to key clients during times of acute financial desperation and, a more general negligence in considering the substance of business deals that are almost always quickly shown to have little or no discernable public benefit despite initial claims as to their importance for the ‘development’ of Cambodia.Footnote ⁸² The second is an addiction to large-scale borrowing with little regard to its formal purpose or concordance with the government's formal policies. Weber's description is apt:

Growing debts and the distant prospect of default are a future political concern that the multilateral development banks, the Russians, the Japanese, and increasingly, the Chinese may eventually be called upon to help alleviate.Footnote ⁸⁴

In terms of access to external financial resources, the ruling class manage their dependence for survival, not for the development and the welfare of most Cambodians. Hun Sen and his colleagues have come to understand the politics of international finance and play Western aid donors astutely. The ruling elite have blocked all efforts by international lenders to control their financial practices. The manoeuvres to do this have been creative, and they have persistently waited out the patience of external actors ever eager for loan dispersal and the completion of the project cycle. As Human Rights Watch's Asia director Brad Adams observed, ‘Hun Sen continues to run circles around the donors, making the same empty promises every year and laughing all the way to the bank.’Footnote ⁸⁵ The more combative and stubborn of donor representatives must eventually move on to more promising postings, and in any case in-country representatives of aid agencies can not be seen to perpetuate a ‘non-cooperative’ relationship with their governmental counterparts if they wish career advancement through their own bureaucratic structures. In this context, a formal willingness of the ruling elite to implement effective measures for reform comes and goes. Substantial, coordinated pressure from external actors, and the perception by the ruling elite that they have no other alternative may elicit commitments and acts that can be construed as signs of reform. However, when external pressures ease, when the initiatives of pro-active external actors are worn down, or disputes between external actors can be manipulated, the willingness of the ruling elite to move forward with these reform measures quickly declines.

To carry out the externally demanded reforms effectively would undercut the foundations of the ruling elite's power in relation to the state. These are based on, and necessitate, the personal discretion of the ruler and the financial largesse and patrimonialism which cement the system together. It is worth emphasising that reforms which change how the state operates are a direct threat to the elite.Footnote ⁸⁶ Because of their non-productive nature, any threat to the viability of patrimonial networks that are central to the regime's survival, including discretionary access to financial resources, must be avoided. The flexibility of external actors, and their ultimate acquiescence to ‘delays’ and rhetorical observance are critical.Footnote ⁸⁷

This is not, however, to say that no reform is permitted. A rationalisation of state agencies, an improvement in efficiency, knowledge and resources that increase the state's capacity to penetrate and extract from society, can be directed towards making the patrimonial system function more effectively. Christopher Clapham captures this in noting, ‘so long as aid was provided through the state, and could be associated with it, it was broadly state-strengthening’.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the patrimonial context, state strengthening entails the strengthening of predation — an increasing of the state's capacity to contribute to not only ‘official goals’ but also the personal goals of the leadership.Footnote ⁸⁹ The state can always be improved so as to channel resources to the ruling elite more quickly and with less leakage.

A hybrid system

The Cambodian state is a set of predatory mechanisms for the private exploitation and accumulation of the country's human, natural and financial resources. The discriminatory enforcement of laws and regulations, discretionary provision of monopoly franchises, concessions and contracts, and the diversionary collection of public revenues and disbursement of state lands, funds and employment have served as essential instruments of this state-based predation. In this sense, it is of a state type that was considered a necessary if unfortunate outcome of Cold War competition that entailed the propping up of Third World proxy states. However, it is commonly assumed that the end of the Cold War has diminished the ability of such deficient political entities to navigate what Callaghy terms the ‘interstices created by these multiple sets of interests…’Footnote ⁹⁰ The assumption is that a greater degree of consensus now exists over the nature of legitimate statehood and that this has come to lessen competition for influence over aid reliant states.

In the post-Cold War international system, legitimate statehood entails state institutions that are steered by governments chosen via electoral competition. In this sense, democracy has become a key norm that frames how states make claims as to their domestic and international legitimacy. Regimes that refuse to acquiesce to some form of electoral competition often face international sanction in relation to recognition of their legitimacy and face restrictions in relation to the flow of foreign aid and foreign investment. More common are attempts by ruling elites to adapt to external pressures by learning to convincingly articulate their rule in relation to the discourse of democracy and reform, whilst seeking out more subtle mechanisms for the exercise of power.

This adaptability is evident in Cambodia's political evolution since the 1993 election. A major external constraint within which the ruling elite continues to operate has been the need to be seen internationally to be governing via the institutional structures of a pluralist political system. Key leaders in the CPP are undoubtedly aware of the imperative to be seen to be supportive of democracy in order to retain the international legitimacy with which Cambodia had been endowed as an outcome of UNTAC. Legitimacy has brought aid and foreign investment which, given deft management, has provided the regime with many opportunities to strengthen its control. As a consequence, a vocal civil society has been permitted to flourish in Phnom Penh and to a lesser degree in the provinces. Human rights organisations have been allowed to operate with few constraints and a diverse press exists, including some papers highly critical of the government. Labour unions play a role in organising garment factory workers and NGOs, donor and government officials regularly discuss social, political and environmental problems. But pre-UNTAC power structures remain in place. At least 80 per cent of the population resides in rural areas with many barely entering the monetary economy. These rural dwellers continue to be subject to the control of village chiefs, commune officials and district governors who may have held these positions since early in the post-1979 regime. They also rely for information on TV stations all of which are under the regime's control. Human rights organisation Licadho noted in a 2008 report:

This makes Phnom Penh's consumerism and ostensible political pluralism somewhat unreal. The regime's adaptation to external pressures, and the elite's ability to articulate itself in the language of pluralism and accept the imperative of conveying the perception of an open polity has not entailed a willingness to allow for the possibility of relinquishing power.Footnote ⁹²

Cambodia prior to 1991 resembled neighbouring authoritarian regimes in that it enforced a ban on opposition political parties and severe restrictions on dissent and opposition within civil society. In the contemporary era, democracy is the only broadly legitimate regime form, and the CPP has adapted to this pressure to mimic the democratic form.Footnote ⁹³ Within the bureaucracy, however, civil servants serve their political patrons and party interests. In the provinces, officials often exercise power with scant regard to the political rights of local residents.Footnote ⁹⁴ Local elections, to appoint commune councils, which were conducted in 2002 and 2007, had little impact on that status quo. As a result of the 2007 election, the CPP shared commune councils with opposition figures but retained control of the chairmanship of all but 30 of the 1,621 councils and the Ministry of Interior continues to have the right to appoint supposedly apolitical administrators.Footnote ⁹⁵