The 2006 coup in Thailand has been described in terms of an ongoing struggle between the Thai military and the Thai citizenry. (See, for example, Chambers 2010.) According to this view, the military rose in power because of the coup, bringing with it various non-democratic changes to the political system. This model views the people of Thailand more-or-less as an amorphous whole. The divisions between Red Shirts and Yellow shirts are treated essentially as the transient political movements of the moment, and only passing attention is given to the predominant economic strata within these groups. I offer a different interpretation, one that introduces the concept of transcendent loci of political power. Political identities such as Pheu Thai or Yellow Shirts may come and go with the times, but immortal sociopolitical forces within Thai society have existed in some recognizable form or another for hundreds of years, and will survive all of Thailand’s modern-day political intrigues. When interpreted in terms of these transcendent loci, the Thaksin phenomenon and the political clashes that have continued are revealed to be aberrations, contrary to the ordinary structure and flow of Thai political life. The conflicts cannot last, because the opposing parties of today are, in the transcendent sense, natural allies; their reconciliation is inevitable. This interpretation suggests a profound stability to Thai political life, in spite of great bang and clatter at the surface.

Maritime, Coastal and Land-Based Powers

To identify our first transcendent locus, we turn to early Ayutthaya. Baker (2003) identifies two principle types of premodern Southeast Asian states, the hinterland and the coastal. Forward (2009), in describing modern Southeast Asia, distinguishes between maritime and coastal states. For Forward, a coastal state borders the ocean, but its maritime interests are preoccupied with national defense, and do not make international trade or shipping a priority. Modern Indonesia is an example of a coastal state. Both of these sets of designations are useful, but to bring them into accord, we will take what Baker calls coastal states and refer to them as maritime states.

And Ayutthaya, Baker claims, began as a maritime power. Maritime powers in premodern Southeast Asia possessed the following characteristics: they extracted resources from the ocean, and also from China via trade; They sometimes copied the tribute system; they favored trade over religious splendor; they were highly cosmopolitan, international centers; they typically paid little attention to land administration; few of their documents and little of their architecture survived to our time. Land-based powers were almost exactly the opposite: they extracted resources from land and forest via manpower; they built walled cities for protection; they used sacred good to attract pilgrims; they raided neighbors for manpower; they developed complex law codes and social hierarchies; their monuments and records have come down to us, due to the manner of their construction. (Baker 2003)

A maritime state is almost necessarily literate, and this is due to the nature of shipping. In order to engage in trade across the seas, one must have ships. Ships capable of traveling the ocean are large, complicated, and expensive. Ships are also subject to peril, as the seas they traverse are inherently hazardous. For an individual to own even one ship requires significant wealth, but to reduce the risks of the seas requires an entire fleet. For maritime trade to be economically feasible, the maritime state must find a way of spreading such costs around. (Ferguson 2008)

There are a few ways to do this. First, all shipping could be owned by the state, perhaps under the nominal ownership of the king. Short of that, all other options involve some form of joint ownership. Ships could be privately owned, with ownership spread among multiple shareholders. Joint ownership reduces an individual’s exposure to the risk of losing an entire ship; for the cost of a single ship, one might invest fractionally in, say, ten ships. Under fractional ownership, the random loss of one ship does not mean the loss of all; 90% of the investment is still safe. On the other hand, joint ownership complicates the process of fleet management; there may be ten owners with ten opinions instead of one.

Private insurance is yet another option, and in fact insurance first grew out of the needs of the shipping industry. With insurance, one person may own any given ship, but all ships are covered by insurance policies, and so the shipping industry as a whole absorbs random losses. (Ferguson 2008) Here we might say that it is risks, rather than ships, which are owned jointly.

However the problem of risk is settled, there are also economies of scale to consider. A larger ship is generally more economical to operate than a smaller one; though crews get larger as a ship’s size increases, they do not get proportionally larger; there is only one captain, no matter the size. Cargoes, naturally, increase with ship size, and this introduces a new difficulty. A ship’s capacity will eventually exceed the produce of a farmer, and even with the consolidation efforts of wholesalers, multiple owners may have their interests represented in the ship’s hold. A ship’s cargo is, effectively, a matter of joint ownership.

Joint ownership, whether of a ship’s cargo, or a ship itself, or of any other capital investment, is a complicated matter, and one that demands literacy. Joint ownership requires widespread literacy, and maritime trade is virtually to manage without joint ownership. It is for this reason that early civilizations throughout Southeast Asia which had active international trade are better known to us than those that did not. We can trace the step-by-step flow of goods throughout maritime Srivijaya, but we are unsure whether land-based Dwaravati was even a distinct political entity.

At the same time, writings from land-based powers are more likely to survive to our day. Land-based powers carved into stone inscriptions praising the greatness and power of their monarchs, and glorifying their gods. Maritime powers had less use for the theatrics of rule, and their monarchs tended to be successful businessmen rather than conquering warriors. While they almost certainly would have been more prolific, maritime state would also have tended to be more prosaic, and less worthy of permanence. (Baker 2003)

Therefore, we see that maritime powers are characterized by comparatively higher education levels and more international engagement than land-based powers. They are also less vertically structured than the highly stratified land-based powers. The character of a society is heavily influenced by whether it is predominantly maritime or land-based in its orientation, and Thailand (and Siam) has wavered between both identities throughout its history. At times it has been very outward-looking and trade-oriented. At other times, it oriented itself around an especially powerful king. This spectrum of land and maritime orientations, and a state’s moveable position on that spectrum, is an important transcendent locus, influencing the politics of the day while maintaining its own existence over centuries.

Armies and Navies

The next transcendent loci are both found within the military. To speak of the role of “the military” in Thai political affairs is to paint with too broad a brush, and prevents us from clearly seeing the military’s twin transcendent loci at work in Thai politics. A military has its own fine structure, and one major anatomical feature must always be borne in mind: an army is very unlike a navy, and in the political sphere, the two will often work at cross-purposes. This is due to differences in mindset inherent to the two forces, with the result that their political ideologies will tend to differ in predictable ways. This holds true in countries other than Thailand as well.

An army can draw its service members from any socioeconomic portion of the population. Any healthy male, whether rich or poor, educated or ignorant, can be made into a useful army soldier, if given the proper training. A navy, on the other hand, requires well-educated service members. There is no non-technical job in a navy, and training the uneducated for naval careers is considerably more difficult than similar training in an army. For this reason, the top ranks in a navy tend to over-represent the middle and upper-middle classes in a society. In an army, many of the top generals may have climbed up from humble, rural, and impoverished upbringings. (Heginbotham 2002)

The capitalization costs in an army are lower than a navy on a per-serviceman basis, because army equipment is rarely on the scale of naval vessels. Any given naval serviceman is likely to command more value in material assets and more destructive power than an army serviceman, and this leads to organizational cultures in which improvisation and individual judgment finds more tolerance in an army than a navy. An infantryman with a rifle faces fewer regulatory procedures and can inflict less damage if things go wrong than the navigator on a frigate—and yet both may be of the same rank and have comparable experience. Also, different navy personnel are more likely to have dramatic differences in the amounts of material they each command, while the distribution of material wealth in an army tends to be more uniform. (Heginbotham 2002)

A navy’s mission is fundamentally expeditionary, while armies either operate at home, or dominate and occupy a single place. This brings naval personnel into contact with numerous foreign cultures, and in a context of more-or-less equal footing; a cosmopolitan worldview is fostered. Armies rarely need to adapt to foreign cultures; it is usually the foreign culture which must adapt to the occupying army. The army experience is more insular for the individual serviceman than a similar career in the navy. (Heginbotham 2002)

These organizational differences have important political implications for the state. When all these factors are taken together, navies, by their nature, foster amongst their servicemen a liberal, outward-looking, and trade-oriented worldview. Armies tend to be inward-looking, they are more accustomed to uniform distributions of wealth, and they are likely to identify with the rural masses of their society. (For convenience, I label the two views liberal and integral.) This is reflected in the types of politicians that their officers tend to support. Liberal, trade-oriented politicians tend to attract the support of naval officers, while politicians with integral policies tend to attract supporters from the army. (Heginbotham 2002)

Upon reaching office, politicians remember where their support came from, and defense spending is allocated accordingly. Thus the Free Thai movement of World War II, which had a liberal parliamentary leader, attracted important support from the navy, and it introduced a constitution that was more democratic and less nationalist than the pre-WWII domestic policies of then-PM General Phibun Songgram. The navy budget soared in the following years, while the army budget sank, and this trend reversed when the army retook control in a 1947 coup. The army and navy wrestled for control of the country for years, until General Sarit came to power in a 1957 coup.

The lower-middle or middle-class backgrounds of Sarit and the other army officers who dominated the Thai government between 1957 and 1980 helped to shape the distinctive integral nationalist ideology held by those individuals. The army’s leadership defined the nation’s first task as narrowing regional and class disparities, while attempting to lift the national economy though coordinated state-led efforts. They devoted much of the state’s energies to developing the economy and infrastructure of the impoverished, landlocked northeast. They also shifted the emphasis of national education policies away from improvements in higher education (a pre-1957 priority) to guaranteed access to basic education. Throughout this period, the army’s leader were profoundly suspicious of free markets and entrepreneurs, whom they described in the 1980s as “dark influences” in the Thai countryside. (Heginbotham 2002)

For these reasons, to denote certain political forces simply as “the military” is too indistinct. Whether it is the army or the navy matters, because it is this which will determine the politics that follow.

Oligarchies and the Executive

Like the military, the general population has its own anatomical features that transcend contemporary politics. In any society, there is an upper class of one sort or another. We may call it an aristocracy, or an oligarchy, or the bourgeoisie, or any number of other names, depending on the details of their composition and character. But whatever the name, there is inevitably a segment of society that enjoys better-than-average economic privilege and some stability of position. These people are generally the ones best served by a society’s traditional culture and social order, and have the most to lose if that order and culture is radically changed. That is not to say that they are always opposed to any change, but they do tend to be the counterbalance to populist instability, and they moderate the speed at which change occurs. In the Constitution of the United States, this role is designed into the Senate, which acts as a brake on the more mercurial House of Representatives. For our purposes, we will label this transcendent political locus an oligarchy. (Hans-Adam 2009)

Oligarchical political power can have various bases, and it is frequently in the socioeconomic standing of the oligarchs themselves. Someone who commands great wealth can put that wealth to many uses, most of which will have greater or lesser implications for society at large. This alone gives them political power, regardless of whatever status as an elected official they may hold.  It is not in all places and all times based on this, because one other transcendent political locus is the executive, which may relate to the oligarchy in various ways.

Human history from the beginning of the agrarian revolution until the American Revolution at the end of the 18^th century shows that, at least in larger states, a combination of a hereditary monarchy with religious legitimation and an oligarchy was usually more successful than other models. There were different ways to become a member of the oligarchy. If the monarchy was strong, the monarch decided who would become a member of the oligarchy. If the oligarchy was strong, other methods decided on its membership: elections, casting lots, wealth, military achievements, education, or membership of certain families or classes of the population. A strong oligarchy was able to reduce the monarchy to a religious symbol, as was the case in Japan between 1615 and 1868. In that period political power rested not with the emperor, but with a kind of hereditary prime minister, the so-called shogun from the noble house of the Tokugawas. (Hans-Adam 2009)

The executive power typically brings with it a legitimacy that would be difficult for an oligarchy to possess. The executive may be a hereditary monarch with divine sanction, and in fact, such has been the arrangement in Thailand (and Siam) throughout its history. In modern Thailand, the power of the executive, as defined for the purposes of this paper, is divided, with some portions of it legitimized through democratic elections.

Due to particulars in the cosmology of Hinayana Buddhism, a king parallels Vishnu because a king sits in the palace, which mirrors Vishnu’s home on Sumeru. Theoretically, in the interpretations of some people in the past, anyone who sat on the throne would be king. Thus it came about that

(m)any Burmese and Siamese kings therefore were virtual prisoners in their palace which they did not dare to leave for fear it might be seized by an usurper. The last king of Burma, Thibaw, preferred even to forego the important coronation ritual of the circumambulation of the capital to offering one of his relatives a chance to make himself master of the palace while he was away. (Heine-Geldern 1942)

The extraordinary number of coups in Thailand suggests that little may have changed; the executive power, evidently, is perceived by the coup makers as being possessed by whoever occupies the geographic center of that power. That oligarchies are not subject to coups (by its nature, nothing short of a Rousseauian revolution can overthrow an oligarchy) illustrates an important difference in the character of oligarchies and the executive power.

The oligarchy of a society often has a semi-antagonistic relationship to the executive power. Oligarchies can attempt to limit the power of the executive through their top-down control of economic resources, social institutions, and the like. The executive power can often try to get around an uncooperative oligarchy by making bottom-up appeals directly to the people. In a broad sense, this pattern can be seen in virtually all societies: democratic and authoritarian, modern and primitive. (Hans-Adam 2009)

Thailand’s oligarchy is represented, in large part, by the Yellow Shirts. It is also to be found in the Parliament and among business leaders. The Thai monarchy, in this model, is not part of the oligarchy, but is viewed as an elaborate and rarified component of the executive power. (Most of the rest of the executive power lies with the Prime Minister.) The Red Shirts, it is proposed here, reflect interests not of the oligarchy or the executive, but of the mass of the people. That many Red Shirts are, like most Yellow Shirts, from Bangkok’s middle class should not distract us; transcendent political loci exist across an entire society and persist for centuries; they have existence only in terms of a population, and cease to exist at the level of individuals. The interests represented by the Yellow Shirts are the interests of an oligarchy, while the interests of the Red Shirts are the interests of a general population. How the individuals who make up these groups came to find themselves on whichever side they happen to be on depends on the personal stories of all those individuals, and need not concern us here.

The justification for identifying the Yellow Shirts as representatives of the oligarchy is an inference based on the fact that the Yellow Shirts come overwhelmingly from Bangkok. Bangkok, in turn, has some 15% of the country’s population but commands some 50% of the wealth; these are the people most invested in the country as we find it today. These are the people who have the strongest incentive to be wary of change. (Kraisak 2011)

The transcendent political loci identified above include maritime vs. local states, the differing ideologies of the army and the navy, and the tension between executive power and the oligarchy. Because maritime states are generally outward-looking, trade-oriented, and educated, there will generally be a natural affinity between such states and their liberal, middle-class, navies. We would expect oligarchs, too, to be somewhat maritime in their thinking and allied with naval officers—if for no other reason than because their wealth and power would bring them into contact with the foreign nations at their state’s borders. On the other side, there is a natural cohesion within an inward-looking land-based state between an exalted executive power and a rurally-recruited, redistributionist and nationalist army.

(Please note that the natural antagonism between the two sets of loci should not in any way be interpreted as some sort of Marxist class conflict. A transcendent locus, it should be obvious, possesses no class consciousness—or any other kind of consciousness. The antagonism is an unconscious tension between the process of becoming one type of state or another, and has little to do with power struggles between conscious actors. Significantly, any given individual could be a part of any or all of these loci simultaneously, which would be nonsensical under a dialectical interpretation.)

With these loci staked out, we are now in a position to understand the 2006 coup, and to judge the stability of Thailand’s current political order.

Thaksin Shinawatra

Telecommunications billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra became Prime Minister by appealing to the long-overlooked rural population of Thailand. He came to power at a time when the Thai PM was an especially powerful position, and he made the shifting of power from bureaucrats and professional politicians to business leaders a matter of stated policy. He was opposed by various wealthy and powerful elements in Thai society, he was accused of violating lese majeste laws, and he was eventually forced out of office by the army. Taken together, Thaksin neatly defies any easy categorization in terms of the loci identified by this paper. His strong pro-business orientation, difficulties with the army, and (supposed) antagonism to the monarchy would make him part of the oligarchy, while his appeal to the masses, identity as a strong executive, and displacement of various government apparatus in favor of his own people all speak to land-based sensibilities. Fortunately, categorizing Thaksin is not necessary; he is an individual, and individuals defy categorization all the time. What is important is how the transcendent loci responded to him.

Thaksin became Prime Minister in 2001, under a constitution (from 1997) that established a strong executive power. “Though well-intentioned, new rules under the 1997 Constitution inadvertently yielded negative impacts on Thai politics, resulting in democratic authoritarianism.” (Kitti 2007) For example, there was the 90-day rule, which had been intentioned to strengthen loyalty to political parties. Under this rule, a politician was required to be a member of a political party for 90 days before running in an election. However, the PM had the power to dissolve Parliament and call a snap election in 45 days—thereby freezing out troublesome opponents, under the right circumstances. This rule had the effect of preventing party defections, thereby reducing challenges to the PM.

Another introduction was the party-list system. Some districts had proportional representation, while some had only a single (“party-list”) member of parliament (MP). Previously, proportional-representation MPs won elections by cultivating relationships with powerful patrons local to their districts. These patrons were the local leaders within their communities. Through combinations of entrepreneurship and organized crime, patrons amassed power and influence that they used to both manage their districts and to earn the loyalty of the population; in exchange for license and loyalty from the people, the local patron was expected to help the population and protect them. A prospective MP sought out the support of his district’s patrons. Thus MPs rose from the bottom up, and were well known to their constituents. (This is scarcely different from traditional Siam’s power structure, in which local, provincial rulers were lords within their limited domains, but they were subsumed under and loyal to the chakravartin, the high king over all.) Party-list candidates were essentially assigned to their districts by the political party, and had less incentive to interact with their constituency. (Kitti 2007)

Additionally, an MP elevated to a cabinet position ceased to be an MP. This necessitated a by-election in the MP’s home district, and it also gave the new cabinet member a strong incentive to avoid dismissal or resignation from the cabinet; there was no returning to Parliament, except by getting elected all over again. This created a strong incentive to elevate only party-list candidates to cabinet positions; their loyalty in the cabinet was assured, and the party effectively chose their replacements in the Parliament. Later, Thaksin was able to weaken the cabinet rules in a way that allowed anyone, even non-politicians, to be members of the cabinet. (Kitti 2007)

Thaksin made it clear that he had little faith in the ability of politicians to govern Thailand in the era of globalization, often citing the 1997 financial crisis as evidence. What were needed were businessmen, who understood how businesses and economies worked, and who could design policies that would maximize Thailand’s economic competitiveness on the world stage. Thaksin brought into the government business leaders who were of the same mindset.

In their view, it would be anachronistic and harmful to leave the country in the hands of provincial politicians and bureaucrats, who were seen as incapable to deal with a globalized and competitive world. As noted by Dhanin Chearavanont, the head of the CP Group, “This is an age of economic war. It’s crucial that we have a prime minister who understands business and the economy.” Chatri Sophonpanich from Bangkok Bank shared a similar view. (Kitti 2007)

Thaksin also sought to undercut the state bureaucracy, claiming that it was too strong, and standing in the way of development.

Over time, a pattern emerged, and here is where Thaksin ran afoul of transcendent loci of power. The business leaders who entered politics under the Thaksin government saw their businesses make profits from government concessions far beyond those made by companies not involved in politics. The politically connected businesses often enjoyed a semi-monopoly status within their markets, and would see annual incomes from concessions alone in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. (Kitti 2007) According to the model put forward by this paper, this should be a windfall for the oligarchy.

But it was only for some of the oligarchy. Bureaucrats, professional politicians, and non-politically connected businesses were increasingly shoved aside by businesses and people loyal to Thaksin. This was not a windfall for the oligarchy, but rather upheaval within the oligarchy. Thaksin was extremely upsetting to the old order of things within this locus, and the locus convulsed and complained bitterly: it was the oligarchy, in the form of the Yellow Shirts, who most loudly opposed Thaksin.

If that interpretation is accurate, then why was it the army that pushed Thaksin from power? Thaksin’s popular appeal, easy to see among his Red Shirt supporters, should make him a natural ally of the army. In fact, the “watermelon” phenomenon—people who wear the green uniform of a soldier but are personally sympathetic to the Red Shirt cause—has been remarked on by other writers. (Chambers 2010)

The key is to understand the relationship between the oligarchy and the executive. The two may sometimes be semi-antagonistic, but not at all times; in fact, they need each other. The executive power brings a theatrical awe and emotional intensity to government that is difficult for an oligarchy to provide, while the oligarchy commands people and assets that an executive, in the absence of an oligarchy, cannot command. We should not be distracted by their occasional antagonism; these two loci are symbiotic. Thaksin threw the oligarchy locus into such chaos, that the executive locus was compelled intervene; the army was sent in to extirpate the malefactor, and order within the oligarchy was restored.

Going forward, we find Thailand today in the peculiar position of having its army, supposedly more-or-less on the side of the Yellow Shirts, and in opposition to the Red Shirts. Viewed through the prism of transcendent loci of power, we see that such an arrangement cannot possibly last; the oligarchy of a maritime state and its army are too ideologically distinct, and the affinities of the army will eventually lead it back to the support of a land-based rural populace. Throughout all of this, little has been heard from the Thai navy. Given all the trouble that Thaksin caused for the oligarchy, in is difficult to imagine that the navy would side with him, his pro-trade, pro-globalization policies notwithstanding.

Perhaps Thaksin’s best chance for a return to power would be to drop his liberal trade agenda, and use on his appeal to the masses to install himself as the strong executive of a land-based power. This, however, would bring him into conflict with the other component of Thailand’s executive locus, the monarchy. That institution is held in such high esteem that the army and the oligarchy will unite to protect it. There can be only one chakravartin, and it seems that Thailand will not allow it to be Thaksin.

 

Bibliography

Baker, Chris, “Ayutthaya Rising: By Land or Sea?”

Chambers, Paul, “Thailand on the Brink: Resurgent Military, Eroded Democracy.” Asian Survey. 50 no. 5 (2010): 835-858.

Ferguson, Niall. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. (New York: Penguin Press, 2008)

Forward, Chris, “Archipelagic Sea-Lanes in Indonesia—Their Legality in International Law.” Australia & New Zealand Maritime Law Journal. 23 (2009): 143-156.

Hans-Adam II, The State in the Third Millennium. (Liechtenstein: Van Eck, 2009)

Heginbotham, Eric, “The Fall and Rise of Navies in East Asia: Military Organizations, Domestic Politics, and Grand Strategy.” International Security. 27 no. 2 (2002): 86-125.

Heine-Geldern, Robert, “Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia,” The Far Eastern Quarterly. 2, no. 1 (1942): 15-30.

Kraisak Choohavan, Private lecture at his home in Bangkok, Thailand: August 26, 2011.

Kitti Prasirtsuk, “From Political Reform and Economic Crisis to Coup D’état in Thailand.” Asian Survey. 47, no. 6 (2007): 872-893.