How did it come to this? Blood in the streets of Bangkok, as a modern, prosperous, thoroughly Westernised country descends into a spiral of violence and chaos. Barricades, razor wire, free-fire zones, all the trappings of massacre and revolution; echoes of Tiananmen Square, the Paris commune, and a hundred other confrontations where political opponents have stopped talking and started killing.
What makes Thailand’s anguish all the more puzzling is that it is ruled by a supposedly liberal government: Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s Democrat Party is a member of Liberal International (alongside, for example, Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats), and came to office in 2008 with the apparent support of the masses in Bangkok. Last year I compared it to the “liberal and revolutionary forces” of 19th century Paris and Vienna. What went wrong?
The fate of Abhisit’s government illustrates the equivocal relationship between liberalism and democracy. Looking at his “red shirt” opponents, the supporters of exiled former leader Thaksin Shinawatra, Abhisit sees a populist rabble: not respectable urbanised liberals like himself, but ignorant peasants following a corrupt, authoritarian demagogue.
This is not an outlandish view. Thaksin is certainly an unlikely poster child for democracy; a friend of mine who met him some years ago likened him immediately to Mussolini. He has also reminded observers of a more recent right-wing Italian leader and media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi.
But a system in which only “the right people” are allowed to get elected is not democracy. It’s basic to democracy that the electorate has to be allowed to make mistakes. Bad governments will win office from time to time, but a robust democratic system will cope with that — better, at least, than it will cope with fraud and repression.
Abhisit, however, has taken the opposite route. A plan for early elections seemed, earlier this month, to be leading to agreement with the protesters, but the government has now backed away from it.
Overnight a proposal from the red shirts for UN mediation was summarily rejected by the government.
The Democrat Party has always been strongly royalist — not necessarily a bad thing, since the Thai monarchy has often been a safeguard against dictatorship. But fear of Thaksin’s peasant populism has driven Abhisit more and more into the arms of the country’s elite establishment, and especially of the military. When you lose faith in the rule of the ballot box, you end up sooner or later in the hands of the men with guns.
Better to remember the wise words of AJP Taylor (writing about the “June days” of 1848 in Paris):
“No doubt the masses threatened all sorts of ‘civilised’ values; the answer to this danger was to bring the masses within the pale of civilisation, not to shoot them down … After all, anarchy is a form of liberty, which is more than can be said for dictatorship or clericalism.
“… Above all, he who loves liberty must have faith in the people.”
The Thai government needs to recover some of that faith. And quickly.
A good article, and a tragic situation. This current government did come in looking promising. But their recent attempts to get their hands of the previous leaders millions, has not helped this situation. The previous leaders supporters may be ignorant and used, of course. And many will (it seems) pay a high price to protest against the current government. But what is the answer?
This article suggests that it is okay when weak democracies vote in bad governments. Democracy to be democracy has to allow that. Of course, that is true in theory. But it did get Hilter elected in a young and weak democracy in Germany in 1930. And look at the trauma he inflicted on the world! (But democracy was allowed to elect a crap government!)
Sadly bad governments might not keep playing the democracy game after they get in. Sometimes, they just don’t leave – even if voted against at a later election. And they definitely pad their own bank accounts and live the life of luxury at the people’s expense. They can be corrupt, cruel, murderers, and cheat with vote rigging at the next election. What is the answer to that?
The current Thai government replaced a terrible leader. The current government is not perfect either of course. But sadly it seems that the followers of the previous government are soon to be canon fodder for a dubious cause. Tragic…
To characterise Abhisit as being in the thrall of the ‘elite’ and that this is driving the current violence is way off the mark. Abhisit and his government have shown remarkable restraint. Would an Australian government have stood by if a similar mob had taken over the streets of Melbourne or Sydney?
Abhisit and his government are not blameless but seeing this as an elites versus the peasants puts it into a western context. This an eastern nation that operates and thinks very differently from the West. Thailand is not ‘thoroughly westernised’ at all.
Look past the glossy shopping centres and you will see that here, people think very differently from you and I.
Mr Richardson you are certainly in vogue with the times, implying that democracy is the highest level of political evolution. At least you acknowledge that liberalism and democracy are not the same thing, which is more than some commentators do, but you still seem to suggest that the moral superiority of democracy over non-democracy is universal and self evident. I don’t agree.
To be sure, it is ironic for a “Democrat Party” to stifle an opposition. But no more so than for a Australian Liberal Party to be in fact a conservative-reactionary party and take some meaningful steps towards a police state. Sometimes names just outlive their usefulness and the more suitable alternative names are taken.
The UDD seeks rule of the mob, in a winner-take-all dictatorship which would see every ignorant populist cause become law, with nothing to oppose it but more effective sloganeering.
As Jim Reiher points out, Hitler’s rise was democratic. So was the rise of Slobodan Milosevic and the Yugoslavian civil war, in which ethnic hatred was generated for the sole purpose of bringing to power men who had no other way to win votes for themselves.
In the right place and time, implementation of democracy is a great way to lock in stability, prosperity, and civil rights, in a society which has already achieved them.
Societies which deify democracy above all other political ideals, and seek in it an answer to chaos, corruption, and poverty, usually find it an ineffective cure to these things, which may even lock in the very backwardness it is supposed to solve.
Liberalisation, not democracy, is the way to develop countries. Democracy is just the final stage in separation of powers, which is just one of the features of a liberal republic.
Hitler was never elected Chancellor. He lost the 1932 Presidential election to Hindenburg. In addition, the Nazi Party never won a majority in the Reichstag, being forced to form a coalition with other Nationalist parties to control a majority in the 1933 federal election. In the last free election in pre-war Germany, 58.7% of Germans voted for non-Nazi parties. Hitler was appointed Chancellor by Hindenburg.
It’s very disingenuous to say Hitler was elected, and then hold up the ‘election’ as evidence of a failure in liberal democracy.
As someone who has followed Thai politics since Chatchai was elected and the current democratic arc began I’m bewildered as to where this situation will lead. Some might romantically allude to the “14 October” student uprisings but Abhisit and his government is far from being a military dictator and those protesters weren’t being bankrolled by a fugitive tycoon. The fact is this situation has no precedent and no winners. A Red Shirt win will see the return of Thaksin (bent on retribution) and a mass exodus of the urban middle-class. A present government win will see the (mostly legitimate) cause of the rural poor set back a generation. Can I also get the ‘rural poor’ characterisation put to bed? The red shirts are lead by the rural elite, who were disenfranchised by the ousting of Thaksin. These people are not poor, the truly rural poor are still out in the fields getting the crop in.