State ambivalence and the struggle between liberal and authoritarian regime framers Draft Michael K.

Connors School of Social Sciences La Trobe University [email protected] Paper presented to workshop on Workshop on Contemporary Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: Structures, Institutions, and Agency City University, Hong Kong, May 9 -10, 2008

In the last generation Thai politics has been witness to overlapping and intersecting struggles waged by democratic, liberal and authoritarian forces. The democratic struggle has largely been waged by non-state and non-regime actors who have sought substantive political, social and economic equality. At times a protean force, the democratic mass has risen to break authoritarian or liberal centres, or to temper anti-democratic agendas. This paper brackets that on-going struggle to focus on the struggle between liberal and authoritarian regime framers over the last thirty years. Foregoing a substantive ideological study of these forces and their articulation to democracy something I have attempted elsewhere this paper attempts to present a framework for interpreting this struggle and its outcome. The struggle between framers is ongoing, overlapping, and involves the attempt to influence state institutions and to erect mechanisms of control over them. The struggle has witnessed many seemingly contradictory alliances and defections as each force has sought to advance, tactically retreat, or launch an offensive strike against the other. While institutional sites can be correlated to each force, these blur not so much at the edge but at their very core because the network nature of regime framers and political groupings extends into them. In what follows, I try to capture something of the complexity of these struggles and their blurred nature. The main argument advanced is that neither force has succeeded and the state remains in an ambivalent condition, able at times to counteract regime framer intentions, and at times to suspend the political order. That state, which remains solidly sovereign, comprises of the strategically relevant elements of the bureaucracy, military and palace. Anyone observing Thai politics since the 1970s would perhaps accept that Thai regime forms have remained in a state of flux. No enduring pattern of decision-making, enforcement and sovereignty at the national level has been framed by a robust legitimacy, rendering the institutional apparatuses of the state subject to fundamentally antagonistic claims by their inhabitants and by social forces. The ground upon which a relatively autonomous state a regulating public interest regime might be established has been constantly eroded. The result and the immediate cause, in a circular process of reinforcement, is political insecurity and the neo-patrimonial nature of public institutions. In this context, whatever the emergent regime form, authoritarian exercise of power, or support thereof, has been a persistent habit of state actors, regime framers and those occupying political office. Authoritarian modes of power are regularly deployed by networks within the state (bureaucracy, military, police and judiciary, the palace), and by regime/government actors including the political executive and political parties of capitalnetworks and professional politicians. In the complex interplay between actors across the state, regime and government 1 the exercise of authoritarian power is directed not simply at the
1

In his review of the nature of state, regime and polity relations in Thailand Ockey notes: There is a complex interplay within the state, between bureaucracy and regime, with each having resources it can employ, either in cooperation or resistance. Ockey effectively concludes that the attempt to draw too

targets of government (the people), but also against usurpers, rivals, and potential destabilisers of incumbent position. When regime form is unsettled, and when networks are fluid and cross-cutting, the flow of authoritarian power is never uni-directional or uni-logical, it exists as an inter-relational strategy for security of position and to advance forms of order. Absent any national regulator of power, actors exist in a field of insecurity. This failure to settle on a legitimating pattern of power requires an explanatory recourse to the structural conditions that set the parameters of regime possibility - that is, the use and reform of state institutions in a particular pattern - and upon which actors have sought to build. This paper is an attempt to think through the nature of authoritarianism in Thailand by arguing that the focus of analysis should be on the exercise of political power, rather than regime form, in the context of the failure to settle on forms of legitimate power at the state and regime level. It first offers a way of thinking about authoritarianism, markers of its existence and, importantly in the Thai context, its articulation to liberalism. It advances this argument by noting the synchronicity of liberal and authoritarian modes of power across a range of regime forms in Thailand since 1976.2 Rather than situating authoritarianism in specific institutional sites (though it surely resides there see Table 1), attention is given to the failure to establish and consolidate rules for the exercise of power as a consequence of Thailands specific democratic transition that entailed a liberal and security settlement based on repression of progressive democratic forces, and the entrenchment of the monarchy at the centre of a national power bloc.3 Consequent to that settlement, competing groups of strategic elites in Thailand exist in a permanent state of insecurity and revert to authoritarian modes to secure their position, even as liberalism progressively deepens its reach. Liberal and authoritarian regime framers, those forces that on balance support liberal or authoritarian forms of social order, are not exclusively identifiable in specific institutions, they are trans-institutional and trans-social class, and manifest in political exigencies. The contest and co-existence between the two currents reflects competing agendas for social order that are formed around different and changing coalitions of social forces. Since 1976 the complex pattern of forces that have come to occupy each current has shifted, their realignment contingent on a range of factors that come to bear on the task of social order and capital accumulation. As much as Hewison can speak of contingent democrats,4 to indicate the shifting position on democracy of the Thai bourgeoisie and the middle class, one may also speak of contingent authoritarians, to recognise those liberal regime framers who will utilise power, or condone its use, for the purposes of stemming power from below or in the struggle against authoritarian regime framers. Indeed, the contemporary situation (post-2006) is marked by a suspension of liberal modes of conduct at a national level, implicitly sanctioned by liberal regime framers, as different political forces compete to establish dominance in the Thai state, mobilising various resources and legitimating strategies. Authoritarianism of power, not of regime. Rather than viewing the 2006 coup and the resulting political fallout as ushering in new forms of authoritarianism in Thailand, this paper will speak of continuities and repetitive

strict a line between different actors is problematic, I concur. James Ockey, State, Bureaucracy and Polity in Modern Thai Politics, of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 34, 2004, pp. 157. 2 Michael K. Connors, Goodbye to the Security State: Thailand and Ideological Change, Journal of. Contemporary Asia, 33, 4, 2003, pp. 431-448. 3 Michael K. Connors, Citizen King: Embodying Thainess in Democracy and National Identity in Thailand, NIAS Press, 2007, pp. 128-152; Duncan McCargo, Network monarchy and legitimacy crises in Thailand, Pacific Review, 18, 4, 2005, pp. 499-519; Kevin Hewison, The Monarchy and Democratisation, in K. Hewison (ed.), Political Change in Thailand, London, Routledge, pp.58-74. 4 Kevin Hewison, A Book, the King and a Coup Journal of Contemporary Asia, 38, 1, 2003, pp. 190211, p. 202.

pathologies of state power, encased in the different regime forms since 1976. It will argue that the failure to settle the pattern of domination that lies at the heart of state structure requires that we think less of distinct regime forms (semi-democratic, democratic, authoritarian) and more of an ambivalent state of power in which shifting and differential patterns of liberalism, electoralism and authoritarianism have momentarily congealed as regimes. 5 This approach entails moving beyond the prevalent dichotomous models of regime form in democratization literature that posits authoritarian or post-totalitarian and democratic endpoints as opposite poles on a transition-continuum. As Thomas Carothers has argued, those regimes whose transition to democracy has seemingly stalled may not have stalled at all, rather they are stubbornly squatting somewhere tangentially forked-off the linear continuum.6 The existence of hybrid regimes is now widely accepted: seemingly in temporary holding positions of their authoritarian leaders in democratic transitions, these hybrids have become embedded regime forms around which political behaviour is structured. 7 Moving beyond regime form at a macro level requires recognition that the yielding of power in state agencies, through political institutions, and in collaboration with business interests, may be remarkably similar whatever regime formally holds. This insight can often be lost as a consequence of giving too much credence to formal regime appellation. I have argued at length elsewhere that a significant force shaping the modern Thai state (understood both as an institutional apparatus concerned with the making and enforcing of public decisions and as a relationship of power that reaches into society) is liberalism, this despite the hold of the military and the bureaucracy over important state resources. 8 I would extend my argument to note that within liberalism generally, and Thai liberalism specifically, it is possible to detect moments of authoritarianism that are not contradictory to the liberal project, but inhere in it (and this is so of liberalism in general). And, conversely, within authoritarian regimes one will find liberal moments of pluralism, intra-regime opposition and tolerance that would belie a harsh exterior. I would argue that it is these ambivalences (contradictions only if we accept ideal types) that can best illuminate recent Thai politics and its apparent authoritarian backsliding. No one definition of an authoritarian regime will suffice to make sense of the existence of authoritarianism in Thailand. Rather than offer a definition, I offer, drawing from Linz, four angles from which authoritarianism may be examined and diagnosed. 9 The angles are designed purely for heuristic purposes relevant to this paper, and do not claim universal relevance. For the purposes of understanding current Thai politics it seems to me that it is important to capture the spirit of authoritarianism as an approach to the exercise of power and the mechanisms to secure it, rather than as a specific type of regime. In this way, authoritarianism may be understood as present across many regime types. An authoritarian state is one in which an apparatus of arbitrary power (what may be called an ensemble of dictate) exerts control, and often undirected influence, over physical life and/or a social field defined by imposed limited, hierarchical pluralism. Although patterned, the deployment of power is arbitrary by virtue of its relative unaccountability/un-responsibility,
5

If the exercise of authoritarian power in the formal realm looks the same despite regime form, and if the persistence of informal authoritarian structures of resource allocation remain present, one may nevertheless see different social bases at play in the exercise of authoritarian power. I have left these fairly explored in this paper. 6 Thomas Carothers, The end of the transition paradigm Journal of Democracy, 13, 1, 2002, pp. 5-21. 7 Steven Levitsky, and Lucan Way, The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism Journal of Democracy, 13, 2, 2002, pp. 51-65. 8 Connors, 2007, 2003, op.cit. 9 Linz, Juan J. Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, Rienner, 2000.

and though pluralism is sometimes controlled (it is always hierarchical) in contradistinction to ideal-type totalitarianism, it is not obliterated. 10 An authoritarian state tends to exert coercive force in the extension of its quasi-legitimacy. To elaborate: 1. Un-responsible power/unrestricted restriction of freedoms. An authoritarian state may be defined as that which, through internally ill-defined institutional patterns, exercises arbitrary and unaccountable power over the spheres of human existence and association, and which, by dictate, restricts free movement in those spheres. The former exercise of power concerns the derogation of the life of individuals and natural communities, while the latter entails the perversion of the relatively free range of collective political possibilities that might exist in an open public field. Both spheres are potentially subject to unrestrained power and powers neglectful indifference, and are likely to mutate under both. 2. Universal claims. When applied to national level state-society formations, which is what concerns us here, the term authoritarianism entails that on balance the exercise of power is illiberal and based on the authority of those who hold the centre (either formally or obscurely), and to those they delegate or defer. That authority is often legitimated by democratic, authoritative and mythic claims to universal representation, or some combination of all.11 Such universal claims are not matched by institutional arrangements. Those who exercise power at the centre are enabled by this legitimating claim to demobilize opposition through mechanisms of repression, cooption, and toleration, enduring strategies of depoliticisation, or even electoral mandates and parliamentary majorities. 3. Hierarchy of linkages. Authoritarian states that are not edging towards totalitarian control will be differentially marked by vertical and sectoral linkages between different levels of power, mediated by actors who react to and shape the institutional features of the regime, according to prevailing incentive and disincentive patterns and the domain of intervention (health, education, industry policy etc.). This provides room to move. Authoritarian state institutions can articulate to regimes of various colours: bureaucratic-authoritarian, institutionalised one-party rule; competitive authoritarian, electoral populist, developmental liberal. While political typologists will rightly characterise regimes according to the dominant impulse at work in the centre (democratic, authoritarian, totalitarian etc) most regimes are complex multi-level systems of considerable institutional overlap; different and even contradictory impulses may be found within and across their respective state levels. An authoritarian state, in any particular regime form, may be, in restricted domains, articulated to a liberal imperative. 4. Propensity to coercion. The deployment of coercive force is not unique to the authoritarian state, but it does have a marked propensity to coerce under the logic of exclusion by which it operates. Authoritarian
10

My understanding of authoritarianism is obviously indebted to Linz, who defines authoritarianism in the following terms Authoritarian regimes are political systems with limited, not responsible, political pluralism; without elaborate and guiding ideology (but with distinctive mentalities); without intensive nor extensive political mobilization (except some points in their developments); and in which a leader (or occasionally a small group) exercises power within formally ill-defined limits but actually quite predictable ones. (Linz, ibid. p. 159 (orig, 1975, pp. 255). 11 James Malloy, Contemporary Authoritarian Regimes in Mary Hawkesworth and Maurice. Kogan (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Government and Politics, p. 232.

states are rarely wholly legitimate ones. They tend to work on the principle of a dual exclusion. Firstly, there is the exclusion of the dissident or oppositional forces that are subject to significant constitutional/legal and extra-legal pressures in the conduct of their affairs. At best, it is the power of bureaucratic and technical coercion that is used to frustrate the formation of oppositional blocs or agendas. At worse, violence is employed. Secondly, there is is the exclusion of some social element by virtue of which the national citizenry may be formed over and over again. Authoritarian states - shaped as bureaucratic authoritarian regimes, as formally democratic regimes, as military regimes - are apt to communicate exclusion by public or hidden coercive measures extending from control to violence. In such a state, when resources, power or status are at stake the possibility of extra-legal coercion or violence is ever present, and shapes decisions. Authoritarianism gives free rein to a politics of fear. This loose matrix of four features may be used to propose that while individual actions may be labelled authoritarian - as might particular policies, decisions, and ideologies authoritarianism only emerges as an ensemble of dictate when on average a states organization of power over the social body it claims to represent, and its actions on it, are unresponsible and coercive by direction or consequence. To speak of averages allows that in any ensemble of dictate, particular instances of sub-regime liberalism are entertained and may be functional to the enduring nature of authoritarianism. It is also possible to speak of an apparatus of dictate in regard to sub-regime levels, much the same as Schmitter suggested that in looking at democratic consolidation a better picture was available by paying attention to the multiple sites in which different structures of behaviour were processed in relations between the state and society; these he called partial regimes. 12 Table 1: Authoritarian features of state institutions Institutional Monarchy Military Bureaucracy Site (adjacent) Authoritarian Features (below) UnResponsible Power

Law

Capital

Unscrutinised exercise of power. Council of Elders (Privy Council) acts on its behalf

High in operational fields, martial law, opaque economic interests

Increasingly administered by process; neopatrimonial elements permeate the system; subparliament regulations govern functions; technocratic expertise legitimates in some domains

Self-governing elements in judiciary, but largely act by legal dictate, in a context of poorly established rule of law. Police: rampantly corrupt and unaccountable.

Structural power effect on state; large degree of impunity to advance interest in labour regime; opaque relations with institutions of state that are not scrutinised

12

Philippe C. Scmitter, The Consolidation of Political Democracies: Processes, Rhythms, Sequences, and Types, in Transitions to democracy: comparative perspectives from Southern Europe, Latin America and Eastern Europe, Geoffrey Pridham Ed. Aldershot ; Brookfield, USA : Dartmouth, in association with the Centre for Mediterranean Studies University of Bristol, pp. 535-569, pp. 556-558, 1995.

Universal Claims

Embodiment of Thainess, mythic social contract with the people. Quasireligious infallibility.

Security and development claims; development liberalism.

(Council of State; economic policy). Security and development claims; development liberalism.

Hierarchy of Linkages

Propensity to Coercion

Sits at the top of a national power bloc. Network monarchy activates its interests but it is also articulated to liberal interests engaged in a graduated democratic transition Ideological structural coercive power, legal support, economic and political interests backed by state actors

Works with networks of politicians, bureaucracy, and palace.

Spilt allegiance to regime framers.

Weak claims to rule of law norms, though 1997 instruments gradually establishing new relations between state and subjects (Administrative Court). Across the social spectrum

Performanc e and well being claims for national wellbeing.

Extensive web of interests across state and regime actors.

High, legal amnesty and indifference, corporate interests safeguarded by opaque state support

Politically derived or bribed judgements are a form of coercion: power in law. Police at centre of coercive practice.

Structural and actual in labour relations.

Additionally, it is necessary to recognise a fundamental distinction between an authoritarian regime by design and the prevalence of authoritarian modes of power in a formally nonauthoritarian regime. In the former, regime structures are intentionally made to serve the coalition of interests embodied in the regime. In the latter the ambivalent nature of state power, its openness to different purpose, and its manipulation by authoritarian and liberal currents creates a political landscape of insecurity which reinforces authoritarian choice. The opportunity cost of following strict constitutional rule and the rule of law is so high as to be prohibitive; it would mean loss or giving advantageous ground to an adversary. The above elaboration of authoritarianism has been developed in order to account for a state that is conflicted, in which liberal and authoritarian elements are in contest and where the

dominant impulse has yet to be settled. On surface the dominant impulses of such a state can seem at once liberal and authoritarian depending on where one looks. The argument for ambivalence, of a see-sawing balance between liberalism and authoritarianism, does not entail a dissolution of their difference; but it is to say that in situations where no one form has come to predominate as the publicly lived style of politics with enduring consequences for the structuring of everyday life and process, their dual presence more adequately captures the insecurity of citizens living under the regime ambivalence of formal liberal democracy with authoritarian tendencies or bureaucratic authoritarianism with democratic pretensions. How that ambivalence expresses itself, and is structured in the constitutional structure of the state is the stuff of regime analysis at various levels and across different domains. The balance between authoritarian and liberal and the promiscuous variable of democracy that can attach to either is a matter of empirical investigation not categorical analysis and absolutism. The continuum between liberalism and authoritarianism, or more commonly between democracy and authoritarianism is a simplifying tool that obscures more than it illuminates. Authoritarianism: Structures, Institutions and Actions. If authoritarian moments in the Thai state are present across a range of regime forms, to what extent can these moments be related to structural conditions, institutions and actors? It is evidently possible to delineate broad structural features (class structure, international order, and state formation) that have given succour to authoritarianism. It is also possible to note institutional sites of authoritarianism (military, bureaucracy, palace, capital, constitution). Forms of action and ideas can also be discerned which contribute to the persistence of authoritarian patterns (nationalism, developmentalism, royalism, corruption, repression, propaganda, imposition) and the existence of these actions and ideas can be related to the interaction of institutional sites and structural parameters that they, in turn, structure and transform. While a detailed accounting of their interaction is outside the scope of this paper, each of them may be provisionally conceived for this analysis. This exercise will provide the background necessary to move to the question of the sources of the authoritarian resurgence in contemporary Thailand. Adapting the structural approach presented in Capitalist Development and Democracy13 the following analysis of Thai authoritarianism takes as broad background the changing nature of key structural features of the Thai social formation over the modern period, including the hegemonic international order and counter-hegemonic moments, state formation, the nature of capitalist development, class formation, and cultural ways of being. A bureaucratic-authoritarian state with neo-patrimonial characteristics was birthed from the absolute monarchy of the late 19th Century and the attendant struggles over regime form (1930s-1950s).14 During the early and middle Cold War period the consolidated military regime, with considerable US support, was typical of many dictatorships, conforming to the political development inspired Huntington premise that before liberty there must be order. 15 Within the state a technocratic elite was given relative freedom to plan and regulate capitalist

13

Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992. 14 Norman Jacobs, Modernization without Development: Thailand as an Asian Case Study, New York: Praeger, 1971. 15 See James Glassman on the role of the US in building the Thai state, Thailand at the Margins: Internationalization of the State and the Transformation of Labour, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

economic growth. 16 Partly because of the resulting transformations in the dominant class structure, both elite and popular, and because of the emergence of insurgency and student activism, a liberal and democratic opening occurred in the mid 1970s, which momentarily usurped dictatorial rule. However, against the background of international counter-hegemonic victories (Vietnam), in 1976 reactive forces in the Thai state, centred in the palace, military and bureaucracy, resorted to extraordinary repression to re-establish order.17 It is at this point that the modern ambivalent state in Thailand takes shape, by a realignment of its significant elements, with the monarchy ascendant, enmeshed with military power, and the reideologisation of Thailand around democracy with the king as head of state. A significant element in the structuring of this state was the crushing of class organizations of farmers and workers, and the privileging of capital that occurred in the post 1976 reconstruction of social order. This condition enabled an increasingly confident liberal current to emerge among Thai elites who did not have to contend with a radical and powerful redistributive democratizing force that might challenge their objective of market liberal democracy with Thai characteristics, a settlement that required contingent consent of politicians acting under conditions of bounded uncertainty. 18 The bounds against which there could be no transgress were the monarchy, property, and in a process of embedment, constitutional law. The relative weakness of redistributive coalitions also reduced liberal reliance on the authoritarian security arms of the state for the purposes of repression, making them more willing to compete for power, up to a point. As liberal regime framers moved into positions of influence in the 1980s, the resulting settlement possessed an elemental authoritarianism premised on a development ethos that had long been ingrained in the ideological articulations and practises of state agencies in Thailand.19 The graduated nature of the settlement, persistent concerns about security, and the periodic willingness or requirement of governments to cede power to unaccountable state agencies and legal legacies of past military regimes ensured that the institutional sites of authoritarianism, including palace networks, military, police and bureaucracy continued to possess and deploy exceptional power throughout the liberalising period of the 1980s. Nevertheless, the liberal regime framers attempted to devise a national strategy of power deployment based on graduated liberal constellations of power, while in every day life the institutions of the state continued to work in their old manner over subject populations. In this period a constitutional legislative process was entrenched that enacted law in various policy spheres, but political power was not wholly patterned in a regulatory fashion; it was often instrumentally deployed to serve the interests of those who deployed it. Law was passed, but those who passed it were rarely subject to law. Chai-Anan Samudavanija noted in 1990 that Thai constitutions were not about the provision of neutral rules of the game to regulate participation and competition between political
16

Christensen and Ammar speak of an implicit deal between technocrats and governments over sphere of operation: technocrats should not encroach on the sectoral and microeconomic mismanagement which benefits the political masters, while the latter should allow the technocrats to keep control over the macro economy p. 7. See S.R. Christensen and A. Siamwalla, Beyond Patronage: Task for the Thai State, a paper prepared for the Thailand Development Research Institute, Dec., 1993, p. 7. 17 Despite intentions of introducing a phased twelve year plan towards democracy (the Chulachomklao Project) under the palace-favoured prime minister Thanin, political change was much more rapid (The Nation 26/7/77, p. 1, 3,9,77 , 1,12) 18 PC Schmitter, TL Karl What Democracy isAnd is Not Journal of Democracy, 2, 3, 1991, 75-88, pp. 82. 19 Michael K. Connors Democracy and National Identity in Thailand, Copenhagen, NIAS Press, revised edition, 2007, pp. 60-127. Liberalism requires a certain kind of self-regulating citizen that the state, liberal regime framers, and organic intellectuals of the project try and produce, leading to forms of democrasubjection.

groups, but served to codify existing actor power relations. 20 But it was evident well before then that a constitutionalist element was emerging in Thai semi-democracy. Developing episodically, it can be seen in the push to make ministers declare assets in the 1980s, the successful struggle against constitutional amendments that attempted to further entrench military and bureaucratic rule in 1983-1984, and the successful 1989 constitutional amendment that made the speaker of the House of Representatives, rather than the Senate, the parliamentary president. This process of liberal constitutionalism gathered pace after the massacre of pro-democracy protestors in May, 1992, with constitutional amendments requiring that the prime minister be an elected member of parliament. And while the liberal constitutional amendments struggle of the 1993-1994 constitution was largely lost, it returned in expanded form with the passing of the 1997 constitution. Thus, the 1990s liberal thrust went beyond constitutionalism. Liberals of various colours attempted to extend the liberal settlement into everyday life, promoting significant shifts in state-society power, and ideological conceptualisations of that relationship. 21 Despite their comprised position and relative weak density in institutions, liberal regime framers possessed an extraordinary optimism that with proper sequencing and gradual expansion, the liberal imperative once secured at a national level, could fan outwards and downwards. 22 That liberal regime-framers had a conservative reliance on existing social institutions (the monarchy, a reformed bureaucracy, and the judiciary) should not diminish recognition of their broader intent to remake society - state relations. As with all forms of universal claims to rule, the liberal and security settlement that expanded into the 1990s had its share of self-interest, exceptional privilege (the monarchy, military and capital), and personalistic structuration that compromised its attempt to establish a regime of law, representation and security. Notwithstanding these qualifications, it is possible to trace the embedding of a liberal-constitutionalist settlement and its uneven advance even into the early Thaksin period (2001-4). Then, at a determinate point (the Constitutional Court ruling that upheld Thakins appeal against a guilty verdict for malfeasance), a process of disembedding (2002-2006) signalled a significant shift at the heart of political power in Thailand, and new social base of authoritarianism that articulated to centres of power in a different manner than development liberalism. The failure of the liberal and security settlement of development liberalism and its expanded societal expression as royal liberalism was most obviously marked by the emergence of the so-called populism of the Thai-Rak-Thai party led by Thaksin Shinawatra. Although formally democratic, the illiberal nature of the Thaksin government led to some of the worst human rights abuses in contemporary Thailand. 23 By contrast, the military coup group that overthrew Thaksin in September 2006 and the formally authoritarian, civilian government that it installed in October 2006 were liberal-regarding despite their efforts to control proThaksin elements by the imposition of martial law and other measures. 24

Regimes

20

Chai-Anan Samudavanija Thailand: A Stable Semi-Democracy in L. Diamond et. al. Political Culture and Democracy in Developing Countries, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, pp. 271-312, pp. 286. 21 Michael K. Connors Ministering Culture Critical Asian Studiespp? 22 Connors, Democracy and National Identity in Thailand, pp. 182-211. 23 See Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Overview: Thailand, http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/01/18/thaila12251.htm accessed 6/7/06. 24 The description liberal regarding should not be understood as a positive normative judgement on the CNS, but be understood rather from a historical perspective that structured the circumstances in which the CNS acted.

In the following we retrace the brief account given above through the various regime forms that framed the actions and events mentioned. Somewhat schematically, it is proposed here that the Thai state has been operationalised in four distinct regime forms in the post 1976 political landscape. Firstly, decisionist regimes (1976, 1977-1978, 1991-1992, 2006-2007), occasioned by coups detat; secondly, the liberalising bureaucratic-authoritarian regime of 1980-1988; thirdly, the emergent liberal-conservative regimes of 1988-1991, 1992-1995 and (more problematically) 1997-2000; and the electoral populist regime of 2001-2006. Each of these forms has comprised a particular constellation of organization, institutions and ideological emphasis. And each has its liberal and authoritarian moments in different measure. Liberalising bureaucratic authoritarianism During the period of the liberalising bureaucratic authoritarianism (1978-1988), the historical role of the modern state as an organiser of internal order and in part as a client-state financed by the United States continued to be felt. The conservative-bureaucratic elements that had built strategies of counter insurgency and order in the 1960s and 1970s continued to sit in ministries, actively resisting the liberal and pluralist imperatives of a more complex national and global order, evident in the growing liberal bridge-head in Thailand. Their interests were also represented in the appointed and military dominated Senate, which became a battleground throughout the 1980s. They sought to entrench their position, first by extending constitutional provisions to allow sitting military officers and bureaucrats to continue serving in the senate and secondly by proposing representation of the professions in the upper house. 25 General Chavalit later an elected politician and prime minister in 19961997 - explained his support for this position: If we dont develop it along the right path [it] might turn into a system of monopolistic capitalism. 26 The picture is further complicated by the fact that high level figures in the military were themselves top brass capitalists with institutional and personal interests in a range of enterprises including the Thai military bank and state enterprises. 27 While building their own clandestine and open economic empires, in part enabled by border fragility and regional conflict, they hovered like a still-cloud over the political-transition landscape, their shadow circumscribing the constrained political space available to reformist and liberalising actors. Their monopoly of national ideology not yet broken, the dominant idiom of state political discourse was the state as representative of society, and a leading role for the military, and in effect the powerful Interior Ministry.28 The three pillars ideology and democracy with the king as head of state was their ideological mantra. The Thai semi-democracy that emerged in this period took as given the directive political role of the bureaucracy and military and the liberalisation of political space. This was the base from which authoritarian regime framers would incessantly emerge. Recognising the emergence of new political forces and the need for more complex policy deliberation, state actors allowed the liberal corporatist Joint Public Private Sector Consultative Committee to function, providing peak business groups with direct access to shape relevant economic policy.29 But liberalisation also entailed an expanded and
25 26 27

The Nation, 18/2/1983 p. 1.

The Nation, 3/3/1983, p. 3. See Thangmai (New Way) 6, 5, 1992, pp. 2-3. 28 Khwamsang samnakgnan naiyokratthamontri thi 66/2523 reuang naiyobai kantosu peua owchana khommunit [Order of the Prime Ministers office no. 66/1980 on the policy of struggle to defeat communism], in Phan. ek. Chavalit Yongjaiyut, Yutthasat kantosu peua owchana khomnunit [Fighting strategy to defeat communism], n.pl., n.p., 1989, pp. 1769. 29 Anek Laothammatas, Business Associations and the New Political Economy of Thailand, Singapore: West View Press, 1992.

10

institutionalised legislative process in parliament that became the basis for extending political liberalism further than some state actors were willing to go. Moreover, a process of interpenetration of bureaucratic-military apparatuses and political parties, each into the other, witnessed odd formations emerge, defying classification along institutional lines.30 General Prem, the unelected prime minister (1980-1988) survived throughout the 1980s not simply because of military backing but because key political parties such as Chat Thai, the Social Action Party and the Democrats supported him, and the institutions he represented (military and palace) as a force for order, and were in turn rewarded with significant cabinet presence, notwithstanding the occasional spats.31 At the political level, the transition towards more liberal forms of rule was largely an internal battle between elites, taking place within parliament and centred on constitutional amendment and strengthening parliamentary functioning and parliamentary relations with society at large. Popular forces still largely traumatised by the brutal repression of the 1970s had no significant direct bearing on regime form, although liberal segments of the state were beginning to devise means of state-society partnerships that would eventually take shape as the new civil-society orthodoxy of Thai liberalism, and which would come to have great ideological implications in 1990s. If in this period liberalism coloured business-state corporatism, trade unions faced great repression, both by employers and state. Those that were formed were heavily regulated in a nominally tri-corporatist labour relations regime that had incentive structures for economist unionism and employer yellow unionism. Military political interference in State Enterprise Unions was also common. These broad patterns have persisted to the present, but through struggle gains have been made, including social welfare insurance, minimum wage standards and legislative standards of occupational health and safety (poorly policed). 32 While farmer organizations organised around livelihood questions, prices, and tariffs and influenced state policy and pricing mechanisms, the highly-politicised Peasant Federation of the 1970s was a distant memory. . In this conjuncture, a finely balanced authoritarian-liberal order was symbolised by the emergence of institutionalised political parties, NGOs, a press that was establishing new standards of openness, and the relatively open political competition for power in the lower house: at the top, however stood General Prem, representing the conservative-bureaucratic state, closely associated with the palace. Emergent Liberal-Conservative Regime 1988-1990/1992-1995/1997-2000 The term liberal-conservative is used here to define a regime that is characterised by a pattern of liberal political institutions but which remains (in part) conservative in its social outlook (ideologically) and its use of relevant social institutions (the monarchy, cultural forms) that may advance the liberal principle. Use of the term emergent signals that these
30

After the promulgation of the 1978 Constitution the deputy leader of the Chat Thai party explained that the party would support the military because we are military people The Nation 13, 2, 1979. Also, elements in the army called for an elected prime minister in the early Prem period (see Fourth Army Commander Lt. General Harn Leenanond, The Nation, 9/11/1982, p. 3). 31 In Prems first cabinet of 37 members, 25 came from political parties, members coming from Kukrits SAP, Chart Thai and the Democrat party (Nation, 13/3/80, p. 8). The liberal-military-palace pact that emerged to overthrow Thaksin in 2006 can trace its recent history to the Prem period. The democrats might be seen as a party of loyal opposition to the Thai conservative state. 32 Andrew Brown, Labour and Modes of Participation in Thailand Democratization, 14, 5, 2007, pp. 816 833.

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institutions were in a state of expansion, but remained subject to countervailing pressures. They also developed a semi-hegemonic reach into the NGO sector. Structurally, a number of factors can explain the greater pressure to liberalise during this period: firstly, the gathering forces of economic globalization and the challenges it threw up were transforming the relationship of capital and state, requiring a stronger enforcement of contract, conformity, and new constitutionalism; secondly, the wave of democratisation and the emerging norms of liberal international order consequent to the end of the cold war emboldened the liberal movement in the political arena. Thirdly, the intervention of workers and progressive elements of the middle class in opposition to the military coup of 1991 restricted the movement of authoritarian centres of the state. The liberal pluralist forces that had made tentative steps during the 1980s now found a broader support base among reformist elements in the political classes, bureaucracy, nongovernmental sector, the media and among segments of the middle class. Although resistant, the military and the bureaucracy were unable to block this shift. Liberal parliamentarism was broadly supported by progressive elements within a Thai localist communitarian movement that had grown from the 1980s onwards and also from an internationally influenced and partly financed NGO liberal-rights and clean government movement that shaped the political discourse of the times. Segments of these articulated to popular struggles over resource rights, labour rights and citizenship rights. Institutionally, the liberal-conservative regime was, in its later period, located both in parliamentary arenas, and independent agencies of the state (then in construction) and in a growingly robust rule of law discourse. Its ideological idiom was royal liberalism, socialised by a growing civil society advocacy that strategically mobilised monarchical discourse. Undoubtedly, the period was also marked by familiar features. Corruption remained endemic, and the military and bureaucracy retained corporate identities with a capacity to shape the social field. Liberals were caught in the cross fire between the battling capitalist politicians and predatory state elites, and political parties remained dependent on old-time party bosses and illiberal modes of electoral mobilisation.33 Additionally, authoritarian regime framers active within the military, the senate, the Council of State and most significantly the Interior Ministry actively organised against the liberal settlement. Their continued existence was most evident in efforts to derail the passing of the 1997 constitution. 34 The co-existence of liberal and authoritarian modes of power continued in this period. As the government devised and promulgated the organic laws that made concrete the checks and balances that were at the core of the 1997 liberal constitution of the 1997, it also embedded market rule according to IMF dictate after the 1997economic crisis and the billion dollar bailout. The Democrat party led-coalition governments enforcement of IMF letters of intent stands as an act of stark and draconian power that reconfigured on a massive scale the nature of Thai capitalism with little regard for consultative process or deliberation. Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai regularly failed to engage with popular grievances, resorting to the rhetoric of due process, both bureaucratic and liberal. A number of activists were killed during this period, subject to the whim perhaps of local notables protected by state officials; the law could only offer a resigned hand. 35 Thus, authoritarian structures of capitalism and the routine
33 34

(Pasuk and Rangsan on political parties).

Michael K. Connors Framing the Peoples Constitution in Duncan McCargo (ed.) Reforming Thai Politics, NIAS Press, Copenhagen, 1992: pp. 53-54. 35 Khannakammakan sithimanutsuchon haeng chat 21 nak do su pheau sithi manutsuchon [21 Human Rights Activists] Bangkok, Samnakngan, Khannakammakan sithimanutsuchon haeng chat, 2004. In 1999-2000, 9 activists were killed.

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abuse of human rights accompanied the difficult project of institutionalising liberal forms of power and embedding the rule of law, the hegemonic project that elements in the Democrat Party sought to implement.36 The liberal regime framers promised, but failed to deliver, the structuring of a new logic of political action circumscribed by a universally applicable rule of law. Transformative Electoral Populism (1996-199737; 2001-2006) I use the term electoral populist to indicate the limited democratic credentials of the Thaksin regime. Its electoral mobilisation occurred in a social field marked by massive disparities of power. I use the term populist not specifically to refer to the Thai Rak Thais popular policies but, following Pasuk and Baker, to refer Thaksins political idiom in his relationship with the informal mass of Thailands workforce and farmers.38 The structural circumstances of the rise of Thaksin and his willingness to forge a new political direction for Thailand have been widely explored.39 These include the post-crisis recovery of the Thai economy and the emergence of a dual economy of export liberal capitalism and domestic mercantile capitalism and a global agenda that, notwithstanding democratic imperialism in the Middle East, retreated from the liberal democratising agenda of the 1990s in part because of the securitisation of foreign policy. 40 It was in this broadly hostile environment that Thaksin Shinawatra launched an assault on the fragile liberal-conservative settlement. Institutionally, Thaksin Shinawatras regime reduced the available political space by transforming liberal institutions from within rather than from outright destruction. His politicisation (which is to say his instrumentalist use rather than system use of the collective state) of the formal institutions of the 1997 settlement re-introduced in a new form the shadow of authoritarianism that circumscribed the space for liberalism premised on regular and universal rules of application. This was evident through the partisanship of the Electoral Commission, the disablement of the National Counter Corruption, the marginalisation of the
36

In a speech to FCCT Chuan presented the full liberal view articulating political structures and economic liberalism in a system in which there is equality before the law, free and fair competition and a government that serves the national rather than vested interest. Human rights were to be based on Buddhism. See Bangkok Post, 4/5/93 p. 4. This vision largely accorded with Thailands iconic liberal Anand Panyarachun. A year after the May 1992 events, Anand was still holding out the possibility that Thailand would become a democracy meaning he thought it was still not present, Bangkok Post 6/7/93, p.4. 37 The suggestion that the Chavalit government pre-figured the Thaksin regime is unexplored here. I have argued elsewhere that in some senses Chavalits own ruminations on the need for Thailand to develop a Thai version of the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (a party of coalition factions), in part influenced Thaksins own political party conception of one-party government. This is a point that obviously needs further exploration, given the direct capitalist base of the Thaksin regime in contradistinction to the mixed military, bureaucratic-capitalist, and capitalist base of Chavalit government. Chavalit was in his own way a potential populist leader, his mumbling ideological utterances on the Thai people and his intended redistributive policies indicating a shift in this direction. The point is that elements in the state were already moving towards the need to secure stable rule by one party government one of Thaksins main achievements. The economic crisis changed the terms upon which this project could be advanced. 38 Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thaksins Populism Journal of Contemporary Asia, 38, 1, pp. 62-83. 39 McCargo, Duncan and Ukrist Pathmanand, The Thaksinization of Thailand, Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2005, Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand, Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 2004; Kevin Hewison "Crafting Thailand's New Social Contract," The Pacific Review, 17, 4, pp. 503-22, 2004. 40 Michael K. Connors, "Beyond Hegemony: Thailand and United States," in M. Beeson (ed.), Bush and Asia, London: Routledge, pp. 128-44, 2006.

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National Human Rights Commission, and the war of attrition against the Auditor General.41 Perhaps most ominous was the Emergency Decree on Public Administration in Emergency Situations, gazetted in July 2005 without parliamentary debate. Thaksin claimed This is a decree which makes Thailand a full democracy because we don't use martial law any longer."42 While ostensibly designed for the insurgency in the deep south, the Decree enabled the prime minister to proclaim an emergency situation when public order or security was in danger. The Decree, replacing the 1952 Emergency Decree, directly attacked the 1997 Constitution by removing the right to hold accountable, though the Administrative Court, state personnel involved in the prosecution of the Emergency Decree. 43 The nature of the Decree and the means of its proclamation was simply the highpoint of Thaksins legal authoritarianism. Thaksins direct repoliticisation of the military by appointing loyalists also played its part in ripping up the liberal-conservative settlement that had come to terms with the military in a corporatist form and which aimed at graduated emergence of appropriate civil-society relations as the rule of law became more robust. It also, it must be said, usurped the palace networks within the military.44 The electoral populist regime of Thaksin Shinawatra was, at least in terms of consequences, the most illiberal in terms of direct measurable consequences (human life) of the three nondecisionist regimes that traverse the post- 1976 period. In the major massacres in the South of Thailand in April and October 2004 (as well as the existence of unexplained mass graves), and the normalisation of extra-judicial killings consequent to the governments declaration of the war on drugs, the security and policing apparatuses of the power, already habituated to deploying unscrutinised modes of power, carried out some of the worst excesses of state power in modern Thai history. These episodes were, as far as human rights were concerned, the nadir of a regime marked by progressive erosion of the liberal settlement of 1997. Nevertheless, this regime and its authoritarian inclinations were decidedly popular with a population long subject to non-delivering governments that were heavily biased towards central development objectives and big business.

41

Hicken, A. "Party Fabrication: Constitutional Reform and the Rise of Thai Rak Thai," Journal of East Asian Studies, 6, 3, pp. 381-407, 2006. 42 International Herald Tribute, August 26, 2005. 43 Royal Thai Government, Emergency Decree on Public Administration in Emergency Situation, B.E. 2548 (2005) Government Gazette Vol. 122, Part 58a, 16th July B.E. 2005. The Administrative Court, is one site of the extension of the rule of law in Thailand. Since 2001 it has heard 35, 570 cases (with over 26, 000 resolved). Close to three thousand cases have related to administrative issues, thousands related to property and human resource management issues. Some see it as extending the rule of law and setting new precedents in citizen-state relations, Khon Mi Si, January 2008, pp. 11-12. The Emergency Decree was opposed by the opposition Democrat Party on the basis of its threat to civil liberties. The Decree, in a critical summary provided by Human Rights Watch, involved lack of appropriate judicial supervision of arrests and detentions and summons, which heightens the risk of torture, the lack of appropriate judicial authorization or supervision of searches and seizures the removal of jurisdiction of the Administrative Court and its procedures for human rights violations committed by state agents; unnecessary restrictions on the fundamental rights to freedom of expression, assembly, association, and movement; the broad provision allowing the Prime Minister to issue a notification not to perform any act or to perform an act to the extent that this is necessary for maintaining the security of the state, the safety of the country or the safety of the people. This apparently can be applied to any person or institution. This is a broad and shocking assertion of governmental power in a free society, more reminiscent of totalitarian regimes than a democracy. Human Rights Watch Emergency Decree Violates Thai Constitution and Laws http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/08/04/thaila11592.htm accessed 26 April, 2008. 44 Ukrist Pathmanand A different coup d'tat? Journal of Contemporary Asia, 38, 1, 2008 , pages 124 142.

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Despite Thaksins dominance of the political executive, the liberal impulse that had emerged from processes of transition and which had influenced sections of the bureaucracy continued (especially in the Ministry of Justice, Public Health and the Ministry of Culture). And, despite authoritarian inclination Thaksin was unable to control or disperse a royally-liberal mass movement that emerged against him and which eventually was his undoing.45 Although state media largely ignored the early protests against the Thaksin government in late 2005, and a massive presence of riot police and special police was mobilised to create intimidation, the regime did not move to out-right repression. In that sense, Thaksins dismantlement of the liberal settlement should not be overstated. In contending with competing social forces in a still relatively open system of state power, he was not able to out-rightly repress opposition. Decisionist phases Decisionist regimes are authoritarian in their suspension of the existing order and their assumption of sovereignty in states of exception. The latter term is drawn from Carl Schmitt whose work on the political underpinnings of law challenges the legal objectivist fictions of liberalism. As Heiner Bielefeldt notes, the state of exception in which the entire legal order is at stake, reveals the factual primacy of rule of man over rule of law. The state of exception is the breakthrough of political sovereignty, that is, a sovereign decision uninhibited by any normative principles. 46 In rupturing the messy and emergent expressions of political legitimacy (such as it precariously exists) by a political decision that suspends existing order, the decisionist phase is the moment when all political actors can see the regulation of social order through the eyes of direct political power, the Leviathan. 47 They are state-making and regime-breaking interventions. It is only when the political decision recedes or transforms into a habituated norm of order that the founding-decisionism retreats into mythic notions of social contract. In some senses, the regularity of decisionist interventions in Thai politics has meant that the state of exception is in part seen by the political classes as one more component of the arsenal of state power that lies above regime form. Whether welcomed or not, it forms a kind of overarching possibility that structures political behaviour, and also explains the structural compulsion forcing Thaksin to staff the military with loyalists. Decisionist possibilities and military and palace reserve veto mean that while a state of exception is far from the norm, the founding moment of political order is never far from sight in the Thai political realm. 48 Decisionist phases are not particularly amenable to structural analysis, but are rather impelled by the particular mix of institutional and voluntarist elements that play themselves out at crisis moments (in some senses, these may be seen as pent up demand from structuralist pressures) when state actors utilise positions to usurp regime forms. Most decisionist phases will be marked by the cause of their intervention, The 1991-1992 decisionist phase that attempted to restore the liberal bureaucratic-authoritarian status quo of the 1980s, was occasioned by military actors threatened by the rise of capitalist control over the state. State
45

Michael K. Connors, Article of Faith: The Failure of Royal Liberalism in Thailand Journal of Contemporary Asia , pp. 143-165. 46 Heiner Bielefeldt, Carl Scmitts Critique of Liberalism in David Dyzenhaus and Ronald Beiner (eds) Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism, pp. 23-36, p. 26. Duke University Press, 1998. 47 Paul Hirst, Carl Schmitts Decisionism, in Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Scmitt, London: Verso, 1999, pp. 7-17. 48 I am of course using the ideas of Carl Schmitt, whose ideas have influenced the thinking of political economist Kanishka Jayasuriya in his writing on Asian States. Whereas Jayasuriya notes that East Asian regimes take the state of exception as the norm, I would argue that in Thailand, recent states of exception works in the manner envisaged by Schmitt, which is to take political intervention to return to constitutional order. Of course the exact nature of that constitutional order and its state support - is what is in contest. See Kanishka Jayasuriya The Exception Becomes the Norm: Law and Regimes of Exception in East Asia Asia Pacific Law and Policy Journal, 2, 1, 2001, pp. 108 -129.

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forces utilised the networks of village heads around the nation to support its re-entrechment.49 This ended with the persistence of cross-class protests demanding an expanded democratic space and a non-political role for the military.50 Blocked and defeated, the military withdrew, but not until the massacre of May, 1992. In this period the military installed government passed numerous laws favouring business interest and regulation. At the head of that government was Thailands most renowned liberal, Anand Panyarachun, who was the main protagonist of an authoritarian legislative process for the purpose of capital interest. The decisionist regime of 2006-2007, which re-activated the social base of authoritarian regime framers, involved the wholesale suspension of the 1997 settlement, the imposition of martial law across the country, draconian restriction on political activity, overwhelming media control and the mobilisation of state resources for the political objectives of destroying the electoral populist regime of Thaksin Shinawatra. This objective entailed direct deployment of power by circumvention of the formal process in the representative realm. Yet how is the regimes liberal regarding position to be understood? The regimes interim constitution of October 2006 declared a commitment to the international norms of human rights, while ensuring the process of governing and re-constitutionalisation was in its hand. The permanent constitution of 2007 - put to a highly manipulated referendum and passed in August 2007 - sanctioned the reproduction of key elements of the 1997, including the liberal agenda of rights and the independent agencies of the state. In effect, notwithstanding the odious curtailing of political activity and its flagrant abuse of human rights and the international norms it pledged to uphold 51, the regime put in a place a constitution that maintained liberal historic gains, but opportunistically re-asserted the position of the bureaucracy and military, most obviously through a semi-appointed senate and the passing of a new Internal Security Act. It also enhanced the power of judicial oversight, by powers of selection, of the judiciary over the independent agencies of state. The regime returned the country to electoral rule in just over a year, and reluctantly accepted the outcome of an election that largely returned to power those forces associated with the Thaksin regime. This decisionist regime is best understood as a pragmatic tacit alliance between erstwhile competing liberal and authoritarian regime framers. The Constitutional settlement is recognised as a ground upon which new contests will be played out once the transformative electoral populist regime is dealt with. Table 2. Indicative matrix of regime features in terms of authoritarian power Regime Features Predominating Centre Authoritarian Matrix at the Centre. 1. Unresponsible power Regime Type 2. Universal claims 3. Hierarchy of linkages 4. Propensity to coercion 1.Liberalising Bureaucratic-military 1. medium high exercise of Bureaucratic centres of power, business arbitrary power Authoritarian Regime groupings, and palace. 2. medium-high nationalism 3. highly
49

The military and bureaucracy often mobilise their rural base. For example, in the petition campaign organized by the military and the Interior Ministry to support the National Peace Keeping coup groups 1991 constitution, which gathered close to 7 million signatures (Amon Rak, Prachathipatai nai meu man [Democracy in the Hands of Devils] Samnak phim Thammnithi, 1992, p. 82. 50 Hewison, Kevin, Of Regimes, State and Pluralities: Thai Politics Enters the 1990s, in K. Hewison, R. Robison and G.Rodan [eds] Southeast Asia in the 1990s: Authoritarianism, Democracy and Capitalism, Melbourne: Allen and Unwin, 1993, pp. 16189. 51 Asian Human Rights Commission Thailand: The Human Rights Situation in 2006 The return of the army & the maintenance of impunity December 21, 2006.

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2. Emergent Liberal Conservative Regime

Parliament and Executive, legal centres of the state, palace, business groupings.

3. Consolidating Electoral Populist

Political Executive, Party executive, electoral support base.

4. Decisionist Regime

State apparatus held by junta and supported by social base accepting the state of exception, palace.

centralist/securitising 4. medium high 1. low-medium exercise of arbitrary power 2. low-medium development of rights and citizenship framework 3. liberal decentralizing/security imperatives on borders 4. low-medium on specific issues 1. medium-high exercise of arbitrary power (in context of liberal political framework) 2. medium nationalist and populist idiom 3. manageralism of the state, securitization of the border, pockets of liberalism in ministries/economy 4. medium-high in specific domains 1. high exercise of arbitrary power 2. high nationalist/royalist idiom 3. highly centralist 4. high propensity to coercion across a range of domains.

The State of Exception and Competing Authoritarianisms. I have attempted to look at some of the structural shifts that accompanied the emergence of four distinct regime types, indicated some of the key features of each, as well as canvass the mix of authoritarian and liberal elements in each. In the following section I want to explore the sources for the persistence of authoritarian power in Thailand, and to bring this argument to bear on the current struggle. In the immediate present (late April, 2008) it is difficult to designate current Thai regime form as the situation is in a profound flux and the politics of the state of exception have not fully settled. While politics has shifted from the decisionist phase engendered by the royalist coup, to the electoral redux of the pro-Thaksin forces, the post-coup constitutional order is now fundamentally split. The elected Samak government faces serious questions about its legitimacy from strategic elites placed within institutions of the state, political parties and the media. The current state of Thai politics brings into greater focus the existence of an ambivalent state that traverses post-1976 Thai history, in which competing modes of legitimation, forms of leadership and the exercise of power have not settled into any enduring pattern of dominance. The incumbent state forces that have at times articulated to the liberal project and against it, are now decidedly fighting a battle within and without state institutions to re-assert themselves. The contesting power blocs are mobilising different idioms, with

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elements of the bureaucracy and military and judiciary opting for rule of law discourse, virtue and liberal problematics (this is an extended version of a discourse already deployed in the 1980s), and finding support among the opposition Democrat Party and the Peoples Alliance for Democracy. The pro-Thaksin forces, including left wing elements supportive of democratic mandate accorded Thaksin in various forms, are mobilising democratic legitimacy, a subversive anti-privilege campaign , and performance legitimacy. As Thailand potentially hurtles towards a replay of past forms of political violence, it is apposite to ask why authoritarianism has often been an element of Thai politics and why now the struggle is between three competing poles of authoritarianism (transformative populist, liberal regime framers who have accepted the decisionist phase , and authoritarian regime framers who enacted the phase). A reasonable response would be that the realm of political action is defined by uncertainty, informal structures of power and constant insecurity. In those conditions formal obedience to a poorly established rule of law is a risky strategy. If it is true that there are institutional sites for authoritarianism in Thailand which articulate to correlate ideologies that resisted the rise of the pluralist and liberal society of the 1980s and 1990s, it is also true that the existence of authoritarianism in Thailand did not rest there alone, for in a generalised sense authoritarianism by default - as a particular form of the exercise of power owed more to a certain existential anxiety of order in a political field that was structured by fluid clientelist networks, an undercurrent of criminality, the persistence of old power centres, and electoral mobilisation requiring enormous economic resources. Liberal and authoritarian regime framers alike need access to authoritarian power. With no enduring universal centre regulating political conflict, a moderated version of the politics of survival and accommodation so astutely observed by Midgal elsewhere, has obtained and structured political behaviour in Thailand. 52 This is now more so the case in the current state of exception as different fractions of the elite compete to hold the centre and engage in all manner of survival strategies of doubtful legitimacy and legality. In the last two decades two basic strategies have emerged to deal with this persistent condition of insecurity among the capitalist, state and political elite who want to take Thailand into the globalised period and build social order. Each strategy has brought into being its own pattern of authoritarianism. The first strategy is to push for an end to insecurity, to make meaningful the constitutional settlement, to bring into being a system of predictability. At its best this would bring into being the relatively autonomous state and constitutional regime that regulates and provides the terrain for rights based struggles and citizenship, structured by the authoritarian structural power of a state and economy premised on capital. This is the location of reform politics across all relevant domains and in all relevant institutions. This liberal strategy and its objectives had modest legitimacy and support throughout the 1990s, but important conservative and politico-capitalist elements were resistant, preferring a more authoritarian mode of rule based on the bureaucratic state (these forces have been an important source of opposition to Thaksin and to liberalism). The liberal current was also undermined by its willingness to attach to institutional sites of authoritarianism. Further, its failure to build a social base for this project has meant mass support migrating to its illiberal adversary. The second strategy is to work within this system of insecurity - and the sites of authoritarianism - to entrench a mode of neo-patrimonial and clientelist politics mixed with democratic rhetoric (military-democratic, populist-democratic). This is on the whole a status quo position that finds comfort in many sub-regime domains, and persists no matter what partial regimes fall under liberal logic. But under Thaksin it manifested as a new hegemonic
52

Joel Migdal, Strong States, Weak States: Power and Accommodation, in Samuel Huntington and Myron Weiner (eds)., Understanding Political Development, (Boston: LittleBrown, 1987), pp. 391437.

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project that transgressed dominant ideological forms, and offered a new mode of social order that was decidedly illiberal, and which also mobilised an electoral mass to support its own fractional capital battles with the bureaucratic and palace associated capitalists. 53 It is in the impasse of these modes of social order their failure to settle that leads to the resurgence of a more acute authoritarian impulse expressed in the decisionist politics of the present, and to which the liberal current is attached. As liberal regime framers were confronted with new forms of authoritarianism represented by the Thaksin government, they have largely sought comfort in the devil they know. The liberal current has enabled the resurgence of conservative-authoritarian state structures in their willingness to ally in the battle with raw capitalist power of authoritarian populism. Liberalism, in the present conjuncture, has articulated to these elements through rule of law discourse and the judicialisation question, which in the current circumstance can only be decisionist rather than regulatory. The pending issues on party dissolution, constitutional amendment,electoral fraud are now fundamentally political questions that will be determined by balance of forces (partly indicated by the great rotation of senior civil servants currently underway) rather than legal rationale. In the absence of another coup, the judiciary are being asked to determine which mode of social order and its respective social base will prevail. Its judgments will be pragmatic and possibly self-defensive. Asked if he could guarantee judgements free of favour (towards those close to Thaksin) the current serving Attorney General responded: The situation is critical and conflicts are everywhere. We have to be cautious. We must be able to justify our decision. What can I do? If I favour powers that be today, the government is changed in the next two days, how can I survive then?54

The withdrawal of the military from the decisionist phase in late 2007 and the shift to discourses of law (party dissolution, electoral fraud, constitutional amendment as illegitimate) should only be seen as a tactical retreat, for it remains unclear how much the relinquishing of power by the 2006 coup group represents a dissolution, or a gradual regrouping under crisis conditions occasioned by the slow death of the Samak government.

Conclusion The authoritarian paradox in Thailand. Why is it that, in combination and contest, the liberal and democratic (electoral) positive aspects of Thailands history, result in negatively expressed authoritarian modes of power? Thailand has a rich liberal and democratic heritage, the deepening discourses of these currents in the last generation represents a societal gain occasioned by mass struggle and incremental emergence by liberal regime framers. While the democratic forces of popular society have often been willing to ally with liberal elites to extend the political space upon which they can work on distributional and identity issues, elite liberal forces have not sanctioned an expansion of democratic space into substantive economic questions viewing civil society as a place of tempered civic virtue and a place of social learning and political socialisation. In the 2000s, the historical failure of Thai liberalism to deal with fundamental class grievances was grasped as an opportunity by an instrumental populist who sought to mobilise electoral weight to break through the liberal-bureaucratic compact and shift the terms of Thailands political economy. His populism dramatised by the three narratives of giving, being of the people and acting on their will,55 was made concrete by extraordinary measures to address
53

INN Editorial Board (2006) Patiwat 49 [The 2006 Revolution], Bangkok: Samnakngan phum ruam duay chuay kan, pp. 34-37. 54 It is Thai tradition to lobby : Attorney General The Nation, April 28, 2008. 55 Pasuk and Baker Thaksins Populism pp. 68-70.

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grievances geared not simply at redistribution and alleviation. Thaksins wielding of the democratic gains of Thai politics, his willingness to enter the competitive fray, led to the disarticulation of an already precariously balanced liberalism and democracy (electoralism). That move laid open the possibility of the potential emergence of an electoral authoritarian regime that might permanently quash the politically liberal current, pushing such currents back into the soft-authoritarian arms of the noble state. The clash of these modes of power laid the basis for the current authoritarian paradox in Thailand. In the battle between modes of order, each force competed with the other and attempted to restrain the other, ultimately resorting to authoritarian methods. Each force has failed to become institutionalised, leaving strategic elites to play games of absolute advantage, further enforcing the authoritarian impulse. Each force necessarily articulates to existing state institutions or supportive elements therein, whose substance is neither liberal nor democratic. The two positives in a tortured historical process - have produced a negative a decisionist authoritarianism of state and liberal regime framers.

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