By the mid-1990s, after decades of ricocheting between military- and civilian-led regimes, Thailand seemed finally enduringly “democratic.” Yes, the military still waited on the margins, and the king retained greater authority than is common among constitutional monarchies, but another coup seemed unlikely against the backdrop of economic progress, a growing middle class, and a liberalizing regional political trend. Alas, in 2006, the cycle of coups, mass protests, and elections started up anew with more messy intransigence than ever before. In this innovative and engaging study, Federico Ferrara seeks to make sense of this pattern by situating current developments within a longer-term trajectory, suggesting not only that today’s conservative efflorescence is to be expected, but that the prognosis for genuine liberalization is poor at best.
In 1932, a clique of just over one hundred military officers and civil servants from the People’s Party, known as the Promoters, seized power from King Prajadhipok. Yet this foundational revolution was less about transforming the masses from subjects to citizens than about slightly widening the ranks of decision-makers. Although some among the Promoters seem truly to have sought a more liberal political order, the group’s reconciliation with the palace and conservative reconsolidation were near-immediate. Since that time, and particularly under the military dictatorship of Sarit Thanarat (1958–1963), the monarchy has been re-sacralized and re-ensconced at the apex of a cosmo-political order. Key military leaders conjoin with king and henchmen in what Duncan McCargo has labeled the “network monarchy”; together, these fundamentally conservative actors have worked to manipulate, weaken, contain, or subvert the elected governments that have emerged. In consequence, from rule by elite cliques under a system of “factional constitutionalism” in the 1930s, to a less than fully legitimate or stable military order, to a military-royalist alliance starting in the late 1950s, to democratic stints in response to differing combinations of intra-elite divisions and pressures from below since the late 1960s, to the quagmire of today, Thai politics has run the gamut. Ferrara remains pessimistic about the odds for a more progressive future trajectory.
The fragility of democracy (and regimes more broadly) in Thailand hence is hardly surprising. What has made the challenge that Thaksin Shinawatra and his stand-ins have posed since he first became prime minister in 2001 so daunting has been less a question of institutional strength or material lures than an alternative vision of the nation and political legitimacy. Indeed, the real threat to military authoritarianism in Thailand over the years has primarily been inadequate legitimacy, not organized opposition or insurgency, mandating compensatory alliance with a revered, if sometimes profligate and self-interested palace. Meanwhile, the fabric of the polity continues to fray: Popular frustration with developments since 2006, as well as the much lesser stature of the heir apparent than the current king, imperil the position of the monarchy and sustain a platform for disputes over conceptions of nationhood to continue.
Ferrara’s overarching argument is that challenges to the political status quo from the end of absolute monarchy in the 1930s to the coups of today are “rooted in the juxtaposition of fundamentally different conceptions of the Thai nation” (p. xiii): specifically, an official nationalism that emphasizes ethnolinguistic homogeneity, deference to a quasi-divine king, Buddhism, and social hierarchy, versus a more egalitarian popular nationalism that situates sovereignty in the people rather than the palace and accepts a degree of diversity and social mobility. Over time, the monarchy, military, and bureaucracy have joined forces to impose the mutually beneficial first of these visions; (some) elected politicians have built support in terms of the latter.
Several critical junctures punctuate Thailand’s progress, charting a path to the present day: the Promoters’ overthrow of absolute monarchy in June 1932, which ushered in a period of institutional flux and factional uncertainty; Japanese defeat after World War II, which loosened structural constraints; the 1957 coup, which paved the way for Sarit’s “despotic patromonialism” and solidification of a monarchy-military-capitalist class alliance; and the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, the shock of which weakened existing power-holders and created opportunities for new contenders.
In this reading, Thailand’s political instability stems more from issues of “nationness” than “stateness”; the hierarchical, ethnoculturally uniform world of “official nationalism” and its defenders is incompatible with a modern democratic regime. Yet the durability of official nationalist ideology, a product of state- and nation-building efforts starting with King Chulalongkorn starting in the late 19th century that draws on tropes from Buddhism to equate the national interest with that of the palace, is not a given. Key members of the network monarchy have actively propounded, augmented, and substantially naturalized that worldview amidst challenges to the traits and membership of the identity category Thai, to the relative moral valuation and political treatment of subaltern social groups, and to prevailing patterns of political authority.
Ferrara’s substantive argument coheres well. I occasionally wanted to see more attention given to the genesis of the specific ideas in play, including the possibility of transnational ideological frames and discursive trends beyond the early stages of Thai nation-building; a less elite-centered discussion of how and why the king has been able to create and (thus far) sustain his “benevolent father” image, especially along the margins of the nation; and more explicit documentation of the relative coherence or explicitness of conservatives’ preference for weak, inchoate parties. The king, for instance, comes off as jealously power-hungry in this account, especially vis-à-vis Thaksin. While that reading may be correct, Ferrara’s discussion leaves open the possibility, too, that the military or other elite factions exploited the image of a king who was in fact increasingly disinterested or distracted—indeed, conservatives as a whole seem rather baldly vindictive and focused on “fomenting disorder and disunity” (p. 245), particularly amid the elite reshuffling post-1997. Moreover, Thailand’s ethnically distinctive southern provinces largely fall out of the analysis, however plausible the reason why the north and northeast support Thaksin (more for ideological and ethnoregional-identity motives than material or economic ones).
One jarring note is Ferrara’s somewhat heavy-handed discussion of methodological and theoretical literature. His rarefied discussion of the nature of explanation, for instance (p. 15–16) may be of limited interest beyond political science students, and his incorporation later of snippets from methodologists on the utility of process-tracing or from theorists on regime transitions, popular protest, and other dimensions, seems more defensive than illuminating. Moreover, his initial overview of the regimes literature fits awkwardly, except to reinforce just how much more insistently structural that literature is than the explanation offered here.
These critiques aside, Ferrara’s work offers a real contribution to works on authoritarian backsliding and persistence, on the more normative dimensions of political liberalization, on the specific challenges of weaning the military and other entrenched elites from politics, and on Thai political history (and possible future). The book will fit well in graduate courses in Political Science or History, particularly focused on Southeast Asia; while its appeal will be greatest among area specialists, the argument, however sobering, has much wider relevance.
