Contextualizing the Pattaya summit debacle: four April days, four Thai pathologies.

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Author: Montesano, Michael J.
• Date: 01 August 2009

"A Great Calamity" in Progress?

Glossing the consequences of the invasions that swept over Europe during the second half of the first millennium, the French medievalist Marc Bloch noted: "Just as the progress of a disease shows a doctor the secret life of a body, so to the historian the progress of a great calamity yields valuable information about the nature of the society so stricken." (2)

Next to the bands of hardened Vikings and Magyars of which Bloch wrote, the crowd of some 3,000 red-shirted supporters of Thailand's United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship who succeeded, under the leadership of a pop-singing heart-throb turned politician, in bringing to an abrupt end the ASEAN Plus Three and East Asian Summits in the Thai tourist town of Pattaya during the second week of April 2009 had scant ability to cause a "great calamity" on their own. (3) However, this invasion did provoke, first, immediate suspension of the joint summits and, second, the move of elements of the Thai military, in force, into central Bangkok two days later to quell urban unrest provoked by red-shirts and to end their protest at Government House. (4) But even these latter events represented only symptoms of a Thai disease now long in progress.

During the months leading up to the events of the four days of 11-14 April, and despite the apparent belief of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to the contrary, few observers of the Thai body politic believed that it was on the path back to good health. Abhisit had come to power the previous December following the sustained occupation of Government House by the yellow-shirted supporters of the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) and their much briefer invasion of Suvarnabhumi Airport. Designed to force the government of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's brother-in-law Somchai Wongsawat from office, the PAD's demonstrations during late 2008 highlighted several disturbing political trends. (5)

First, Thai society appeared to suffer extreme polarization. While this polarization long predated the final months of 2008, it contrasted with the optimism of just over a decade earlier, when the country adopted an ambitious reformist constitution. (6) Winning the first elections held under the 1997 Constitution in early 2001 and the subsequent 2005 elections, Thaksin succeeded in undermining its most important provisions. Marrying authoritarian tendencies to a raft of policies to benefit Thailand's less affluent, he found himself confronted by mounting calls for his removal from late 2005 and ousted by coup d'etat in September 2006. The willingness of Thailand's most recent junta to hand power back to a Thaksinite government under the leadership of Samak Sundaravej following elections in December 2007 in no way reflected a healing of the divisions that had appeared during Thaksin's 2001-06 premiership. September 2008 saw Somchai replace Samak, but it brought no let-up in anti-Thaksin pressures or activities.

Second, the country lacked both institutions with strength and leaders with stature. It presented a marked contrast to the Thailand that seemed emergent during the late 1980s, through most of the 1990s, and indeed until the time of Thaksin's first government. Those decades witnessed the apparent institutionalization of a parliamentary order. If a slowly changing cast of venal political opportunists dominated this order, at least they competed with one another and chose elections and parliament as the sites of that competition.

Third and fourth, the PAD's campaign underlined the propensity for outbreaks of real violence in Thai politics, while the inability of the governments of both Samak and Somchai to bring those demonstrations to an end made clear the Thai military's continued feeling of entitlement to act according to its own prerogatives in the political arena. (7)

The decision on 2 December 2008 by Thailand's Constitutional Court to disband the three most important parties in Prime Minister Somchai's coalition brought the result for which the PAD had campaigned. (8) Abhisit assumed the premiership as at the very least nominal leader of a coalition government apparently brokered by Suthep Thaugsuban, secretary-general of Abhisit's own Democrat Party; Sanan Kachornprasart, advisor to the Chart Thai Pattana Party and one of the shrewdest tacticians in Thai money politics; and Thai Army commander General Anupong Phaochinda. This coalition scored an important coup by inducing the infamous long-time Thaksinite Newin Chidchob and the slate of members of parliament (MPs) loyal to him to join it. (9)

The design of the Abhisit government was elegant and sound. Democrats took the premiership, the foreign and finance ministries, and several other portfolios. They left other ministries, by and large, to creatures of Thailand's well developed political spoils system, with little regard for competence or policy priorities. (10) Suthep and Sanan became deputy prime ministers, well positioned to conduct coalition maintenance and other trouble-shooting. In a pinch, Anupong could serve as a back-stop. By-elections held in early January to replace MPs who had served as executives of the recently disbanded parties demonstrated the effectiveness of this formula. Boosted not least by the strong performance of one of its spoils-hungry parties, the coalition did well. (11)

While it was possible to imagine those latter parties' growing too strong and confident and, at the urging of interests who remained behind the scenes, deciding that they could do without the Democrats, Abhisit was serious about staying in power. He appeared to view his path to the premiership as entirely legitimate, notwithstanding the roles played by airport occupiers, helpful Constitutional Court justices and the Army commander in preparing that path for him. Realizing the need to focus on being able to win the general elections that would inevitably come, he hunkered down to pursue what he viewed as normal politics. If he recognized or others plotted the possibility that interests backing his coalition might abandon him and his Democrats to work with Newin or another such figure, that possibility also conformed to a certain elite understanding of business as usual in Thai politics.

This vision of normalcy represented a willful public denial that the political crisis that had engulfed Thailand since late 2005 and early 2006 continued, and that it had pushed Thailand into far from normal, into even "revolutionary", times. Well before the events in Pattaya on 11 April had made a mockery of that denial, those times offered the historian-as-diagnostician an opportunity for just the insight into "the nature of the society so stricken", into its particular pathologies, that Marc Bloch noted.

Beyond "Polarization": Four Thai Pathologies

The polarization and turmoil that had come to afflict Thai politics and society by April 2009 grew out of a number of underlying pathologies. Four of these pathologies merit particular examination: Thailand's post-1997 economic "recovery", the figure of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the implications of the conflict in the far south of the country and concern over the end of the ninth Chakkri reign and the almost indistinguishable issue of lese majeste.

The Post-1997 Thai Economy

Talk of Thailand's "recovery" from the financial crisis of 1997 never made sense. That the crisis left the corporate sector scrambled beyond recognition has long been apparent. (12) Some business concerns weathered 1997 and its aftermath well. Others succumbed to their difficulties. Control of the country's once-dominant commercial-banking sector fell into foreign hands to an unprecedented degree. (13) The crisis accelerated the displacement of that sector's leading institutions from their long-term positions of centrality to the country's political economy. It allowed other business groups to begin to fill the resultant vacuum. These groups included, not least, those of Thaksin and of many of his political allies, whose companies emerged from the financial crisis of a dozen years ago in relatively strong positions. (14)

What proved true for corporate Thailand proved no less true for Thai society as a whole. The shape of the post-crisis economy altered structures of economic opportunity. Economic growth during the boom years between 1985 and 1997 often seemed like a rising tide that lifted all ships, if not at all to the same degree. In contrast, the pattern of Thai growth during the most recent dozen years has proved very different. Foreign firms have penetrated the Thai economy more deeply than ever before. Urban Thais of even modest talent, from families able to send them to third-tier universities overseas, leverage their English and veneer of "global" polish to command out-sized salaries from these firms.

During this same period, the competitiveness of much of the Thai agricultural sector has collapsed with uncommon suddenness. In contrast to even twenty-five years ago, Thailand as a rural society has lost its viability. (15) Whither, then, the "ex-peasant" or his or her offspring? Ineffectual investment in education going back many decades represents a pathology within a pathology for Thailand. (16) The country's much-needed expansion of secondary education has come at the cost of a substantial, though easily avoidable, sacrifice in quality; much the same is true of tertiary education, where the over-expansion and commodification of Thai university and quasi-university education contribute to the country's general squandering of human capital. One canny observer has noted that, should two-thirds of Thailand's workforce vanish tomorrow, their disappearance would have but minimal impact on the country's macro-economy. (17)

Surely that observer spoke at least partly in jest. Thailand has enjoyed gains in employment since 1997. (18) But extreme risk aversion on the part of local enterprise has meant...