[BRIEF NOTE] On the coup in Thailand

[rfmcdonald]

I was quite surprised by today's military coup in Thailand.

Thailand's army chief vowed on Wednesday to clean up the country's political landscape and return "power to the people" as soon as possible after a bloodless coup against Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Commander-in-chief General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, who had repeatedly dismissed a coup as a way out of a prolonged political stalemate, took the reins of power late on Tuesday as head of an interim Political Reform Council run by the military.

"I would like to assure that the Council has no intention of running the country by itself and will return power, under the constitutional monarchy, to the people as soon as possible," he said in a national television address on Wednesday morning.

I shouldn't have been. Today's coup, outlined here at Wikipedia, is the product of a long history of political instability in Thailand centered around the person of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who can briefly be described as a Southeast Asia version of Italy's departed Berlusconi. Thaksin, fortunately, is somewhat more competent in economic matters, presiding over a revival of Thai economic growth. Unfortunately, his populist brand of politics, besides relying heavily on patronage, has contributed to the marked deterioration of conditions in Thailand's far south, where the local Malay Muslim population is being drawn into a terrorist conflict against the Thai state. Jonathan Edelstein's analysis of the dynamics of today's coup is adroit.

At the time the Bangkok protest movement began in February, Thailand was a functioning democracy, and there were mechanisms available by which unpopular or corrupt prime ministers could be replaced. Whatever may be said about Thaksin's authoritarian tendencies, he was in office because he won a free election, and there was no sign that he would refuse to respect the results of the next one. Thaksin's opponents could, in the normal course of events, have sought to remove him by defeating him at a general election, sponsoring an intra-party challenge to his leadership or submitting their corruption allegations to a public prosecutor.

The trouble, from the opposition's standpoint, was twofold. Replacing Thaksin by democratic means would take too long, and more to the point, his continuing popularity in the countryside meant that such methods were unlikely to succeed. So instead of going the constitutional route, the opposition changed the rules. The street protests, rather than being a means of effectuating democracy, were a method of replacing democratic legitimacy with a form of revolutionary legitimacy based on control of the capital city. This is the true weakness of Orange-style mass politics: that it depends on mobilization of the capital rather than any valid measurement of public will throughout the country, and that it can be abused by factions that represent a minority position nationwide but use their control of the capital as leverage.