When we think about Thailand, we tend to think about the crystal-clear waters of Maya Bay, the busy streets of Bangkok, legal marijuana, muay thai, sex tourism, and exotic food. Indeed, Thailand is one of the world’s leading travel destinations and is well-known for the variety of experiences it can offer, but did you know that over the last 90 years the country has seen 13 successful coups d’état?
To Western eyes, it is puzzling how Thailand has been able to grow its touristic sector and its economy while experiencing high levels of political instability. Nevertheless, with a development model similar to other Asian states, it has been able to flourish economically while maintaining an authoritarian rule.
To understand better the Thai path towards a fast-developing economy, it is useful to go back to the starting of Thai legal path to modernity. In 1868, King Rama V, inheriting his father modernizing project, has implemented reforms in the legal system to foster development and reject the risk of Western colonization. In fact, at the time, Thailand was surrounded by colonies exercising political and economic pressure on the country.
At the time, the priority of the monarch was to conserve the Thai identity while implementing the reforms that would have allowed him to deal with the colonized neighbors. In fact, the reforms were designed to foster the Buddhist ethic and social order rather than a transplantation of Western norms. Rama V reforms strengthened Thailand’s bureaucratic and military apparatus shaping a ruling class composed by legal scholars and military elite members that were formed in the same Academies.
After a first period of relative stability, in 1932, the country’s economic conditions deteriorated due to the Great Depression. Amid this critical economic condition, a right-wing nationalist general and a left-wing law professor have led a successful coup that brought an end to the absolute monarchy and led to the drafting of the first Thai Constitution. The professor’s Marxist ideology with the State as primary economic actor, combined with the general’s authoritarianism, led to a top-down development model that continued to endure under the following authoritarian governments. This development model assimilates Thailand to “the Asian development State”, where the ruling regimes prioritize economic growth over democracy and constitutional development.
Differently from other development states, Thailand development has not been characterized by political stability and predictability, with its numerous coups and constitutional changes.
Even though the political system of the last century looks unstable at first glance, with its 13 coups d’état and 20 different constitutions, it conceals a mostly invariant power structure that has long maintained its interest in preserving economic growth. The intentions of the coups d’état and therefore of the constitutions drafted under their makers, were consistent throughout history and they were always led by the same (military) forces with the objective to restore the nation-religion-monarchy trinity and “Thai-ness traditional values”. The constitutions have indeed been promulgated on the authority and with the consent of the king, not claimed by the people in expression of their political will, as conceived in Western terms.
The demand for modernization and democratization has its roots in the emergence of a low-middle class in urban settings around the 1990s. In this period, the “royal patrimonial state” ruled by the alliance between the pro-sovereign military and the legal system has started to be questioned by the people.
To tackle the demand of the emerging class, the businessman Thaksin Shinawatra got into politics with a populist rhetoric that allowed him to gain a lot of consent. His popularity rose during the economic crisis of 1997, which had highlighted the fragility of an export-led development model in which the benefits were concentrated, and capital-intensive industries did not employ enough workers. As a matter of facts, three-quarters of all Thai households were still outside the manufactured-export sector and worked in rural areas or in the urban informal sector. These peasants were hit hardest by the economic crisis and represented Thaksin’s electoral pool.
The contrast between the elite and the people led to the rising of two political factions: the Yellow shirts on one side, conservative-minded supporting the traditional military-monarchy rule, and the Red shirts on the other, more liberal-minded and attentive to the economy.
In a first moment, Thaksin’s promises of economic redistribution and restoration of growth satisfied voters’ expectations despite the lack of democratic reforms, and he was elected Prime Minister in 2001. In 2006, though, protesters from the pro-monarchy faction (the Yellow shirts) took the streets and the military staged a coup while Thaksin was in the US for an official visit. The military junta suspended the 1997 constitution, dissolved the Parliament, abolished the Constitutional Court and quickly drafted a new constitution.
The instability caused by the Red-Yellow political tensions, with intervals of violent clashes, ultimately translated into the coup of 2014 that brought to life the actual Thai constitution (2017) which includes a fully military-appointed Senate.
Thailand does not have a tradition of mass protests since it did not experience anti-colonial movements and during the Vietnam-era the presence of American military bases repressed any dissent. Furthermore, no constitution ever changed its most recently debated law: lese majeste, which makes it illegal to be critical of the king. Regardless of its poor tradition, the last two decades have seen an uprising of street protests.
While few people might have heard about the many coups d’état, some might remember the protests during COVID19 in which the Thai people used as a symbol the three-fingers gesture used by the protagonist of the popular “Hunger Games”. In fact, 2020 has been characterized by youth protests against lese majeste and monarch sovereignty with the motto “#whydoweneedaking?”. Young generations, immersed in a globalized environment, have manifested their will to abolish the hierarchical traditional structure that blocks any reform towards a liberal democratic regime. The May 2023 elections have signaled that most of the people are eager for a radical change. The young reformist leader of the newborn “Move Forward” party, Pita Limjaroenrat won an outstanding number of seats with its proposals to amend lese majeste and to implement other major systemic reforms. Under the 2017 Constitution, to elect their party leader Pita Limjaroenrat as Prime Minister, the parliamentary majority needed 63 votes from the military-appointed senate, which refused to collaborate. In August 2023, Thaksin Shinawatra, self-exiled in Germany since 2008, came back to Bangkok. Hours after his return, the two traditional opposing parties (the former Thaksin’s party Pheu Thai and its traditional enemy, the military-backed United Thai Nation) found an agreement and elected Srettha Thavisin, founder of one of the country’s biggest real estate developers, as Prime Minister. Mr. Thaksin was jailed, but immediately transferred to a luxury hospital, thus raising voices of some form of agreement with the new elites.
Just over a week after his admission to the hospital-jail, the King has reduced Thaksin’s prison sentence from eight years to one after the billionaire have requested a royal pardon
The Justice Minister Tawee Sodsong has recently announced that Thaksin is among the 930 inmates that have been given parole on Tuesday February 13 and that he is expected to be released after February 17. The PM Srettha Thavisin has declared “Once released he will be a normal citizen. What’s in the past is in the past.”
I'm Chiara Todesco, I live in Milan where I'm attending the first year at Bocconi’s bachelor in International Politics and Government. I have done classical studies at liceo classico Carducci and I'm interested in humanities and politics. I like to study and deepen my knowledge about international dynamics. I'm active in my territory as “consigliera di municipio”.
