Thailand, democracy, and the culture question

One of the reasons neither politics nor democratic evolution is black and white has to do with culture.

Frederic Schaffer concludes his 1998 study on democracy in Senegal by reminding us of the need to take culture and cultural differences seriously. We cannot assume, he argues, that our particular ideals of democracy are universal. Yes, democratic ideas are now globally accessible, but each local community is likely to understand them differently, and shape them to fit its own environment.

If that’s the case, it is surely way off the mark to portray liberal democracy as something that can be packaged up homogeneously, plonked down in widely different cultural, economic, and historical destinations, and then expected to produce the same, predictable results.

Thailand has dramatically illustrated various aspects of the culture/democracy linkage over the years.

A Thai student I talked to in 2006, when the protests against Thaksin were beginning to gain steam, used a striking metaphor to describe the difficulty of combining internal and external ideas in a culturally and democratically authentic way:

“We’re wearing another person’s jacket, something like that? We’ve borrowed the idea or the practice of democracy from the West. We’re not using our own jacket… So the clothes don’t fit totally well. But it’s better than being naked… So a borrowed jacket doesn’t mean all bad, all negative things. It’s valuable for us. It’s something positive for us… But we’re struggling hard to find how we can make that jacket fit us better, how we can tailor that jacket for ourselves. We’re working on it, but it takes time.”

This picture highlights the enormous difficulty of tailor-making a democracy. How can you alter a borrowed garment when you are already wearing it, when you have maybe already adapted to some of its imperfections? At the same time, it emphasizes the need to tackle this tailoring task. After all, who wants to live life in clothes that don’t quite fit?

The next few posts will take a closer look at this connection.

Trusting your fellow-voter: “better education” and the Thai election

One of the crucial factors that will determine whether last weekend’s Thai election will “hold” – that is, whether the newly elected government will be given a fair crack at governing – is the acceptance by voters that their compatriots have made a valid choice.

Part of the story of why democracy in Thailand has been so hard to consolidate is a tendency on the part of middle-class or elite voters to despise the electoral choices of their poorer counterparts. (The same applies in reverse, of course, but the elites – up till recently anyway – had more means at their disposal to ensure the ultimate outcome suited them.) Thitinan Pongsudhirak sums up “the curse of Thailand’s distorted democratic deadlock” like this: “The election winners can’t rule and the rulers can’t win elections.”

In the course of my research on Southeast Asia, I have talked to lots of people who insist that “better education” is the key to making democracies work. And on one level, of course, they are right. A higher level of general education contributes to a better ability to access information and assess arguments, and probably a different way of seeing the world. And a higher level of political education would be useful in every single country I’ve ever lived in.

But on another level, I’m bothered by this emphasis. The problem is that what we understand by “better education” often translates into “education so they think more like me”.

The laudable desire for education often masks a potentially dangerous us/them split, whereby obstacles to “proper” democracy are attributed primarily to poorer, less educated, more limited “others”, as opposed to abler, better educated, more cosmopolitan “us”.

It’s one thing to understand education as a means to ensure greater access to political debate, and to play a role in informing that debate and persuading those who participate in it.

But it’s another to see it as a prerequisite for valid participation.

If democracy is to mean anything, then surely the voices of those who are poorer than we are – or less schooled, or more religious, or more prejudiced, or whatever is our particular bugbear – must be honoured now.

If we find electoral outcomes embarrassing (and I’ve often been embarrassed by the electoral choices of my own co-constituents), then we probably need to consider the concrete interests and problems that are driving their choices, and consider whether we can change the playing-field so those interests and problems are better attended to.

Ultimately, politics is about sorting out these conflicts of interests. They can’t all be educated away.

What ASEAN’s expecting of Thailand

Prime Minister Yingluck will have plenty on her plate in the coming weeks. But she needs to reserve some energy for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Thailand has been more of a liability than an asset for ASEAN in recent years. Its internal ructions have disrupted high-level meetings. It lost a lot of the democratic credibility that once made it a liberal fore-runner in the organization. And its dispute with Cambodia over disputed temples and territories has been little short of catastrophic for the region. ASEAN always suffers from a surfeit of (often very unfair) criticism. But even its harshest critics generally concede that membership seems to stop states resorting to war. Hostilities, deaths, and civilian displacement were therefore a very, very bad look, fanning the flames of scepticism, shaking investor confidence in the region, and embarrassing current ASEAN chair, Indonesia.

ASEAN, and its Thai secretary-general, will be fervently hoping Thailand can turn things round.

Nothing black-and-white about the Thai election -- or Southeast Asian politics

Mainstream news out of Southeast Asia at the moment is dominated by the election of Yingluck Shinawatra in Thailand.

The cautious tone of the commentary makes a welcome change in a region where political events are all too often portrayed as black or white.

Commentators see the vote as a rejection of the 2006 coup that ousted Thaksin Shinawatra, and of the various machinations that have since removed his supporters from government. But they rightly fear that this is not the end of the story. There will be many who will find this result hard to accept, and if Thaksin returns, the visceral hatred he inspires in certain quarters could trigger renewed conflict. The jury is still out on whether Yingluck will ultimately be good for democracy in Thailand or not.

Cautiousness is definitely in order, since Thailand’s recent political turmoil clearly warns of the dangers of rushing to conclusions about who to cheer and who to boo.

Liberals both in Thailand and abroad understandably criticized Thaksin’s drift to prime-ministerial authoritarianism in the early 2000s. But because he was so very easy to oversimplify and demonize, the yellow-shirted People’s Alliance for Democracy, which rallied to oust him, initially gained unreasonable levels of liberal support. No few experts at the time hailed their appearance as a laudable manifestation of civil society intervention in the monitoring of governance.

This approbatory mindset surely set the scene for the 2006 coup, and photos of Thais placing flowers on the gun barrels of tanks hit news outlets around the world. “This is a good coup,” my Thai students assured me.

Such sympathy paved the way for a decidedly muted inter-state reaction, sharply contrasting with the reaction to the coup in Fiji the same year.

But then the Yellow Shirts revealed distinctly undemocratic tendencies, flirting with elitist ideas about appointed parliamentary representatives, and backing a breed of popular protest that world opinion began to find questionable.

The lines were beginning to blur about who were the goodies and who the baddies in Thai politics. But by then, the damage had been done.

Politics, Thai or otherwise, rarely divides neatly into black and white. When the Thai election is again off the front pages, this is a message that should continue to resonate in our broader analyses of the Southeast Asia region.