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.