What democracy means to Thailand.
The West seems to understand the World of today only through the narrow opposition between democratic/non-democratic countries. With this approach, it is easy to fall into some sort of Manichaeism perspective, especially when the information relayed through Medias is organized with a pure Western point of view or simply false. Information broadcasted through Western Medias is often something intellectually constructed on Western concepts, values. It is the same for the word democracy.
Democracy comes from the Greek demos, the people, and kratos, power. The origins of the word can be retraced to the Fifth century before the birth of Christ, and thus existed in Europe for more than 2500 years. Even though the implementation of this idea as the standard form of government in Europe is quite recent and took various forms, –from liberal democracy to the Marxist-Leninist People’s democracy-democracy is now the cornerstone of Western thought and culture. But the same word doesn’t mean the same thing from one continent to another. The word democracy in Thai, Prachatipatai, is a pure neologism created in 1932, when Western educated Thai Officers staged a Coup against King Rama VII and ended the absolute monarchy. Unlike in the West, the word is constructed with real Thai words and is based on the same construction as the Greek word, except only that the meaning is simply a cut and paste from the Greek word directly. So Pracha means people and Tipatai, power or rule. In a sense, Thai people should know better than the West what democracy truly means, since the word is constructed directly with Thai words. But that would be forgetting that democracy is something new in Thai culture and is an imported idea from the West into a country that has been ruled by absolute monarchy and feudalism for more than seven hundred years. While deeply rooted in the Europe, Thai democracy has made a long way through Dictatorship eras and has been trampled by 19 Coup d’état since 1932. After six decades of military rule, Democracy was truly settled in Thai Society with the end of General Suchinda’s regime in 1992. With the end of the Cold War Era, dictatorship once backed up by the United States in the fight against communism in South-East Asia (Thailand was then surrounded by communist countries like Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar) was replaced by a civil and democratic form of government. Since then democracy started to really penetrate into the civil society. But another structural problem was to emerge. Democracy in Thailand wasn’t followed by serious education policies, which is a prerequisite because under this regime because it needs modern and politically educated citizen. This structural flaw in Thai society was clearly used by some populist politicians to get elected simply by corruption and rural vote buying. Mr. Thaksin Shinawatra, a media tycoon and famous businessman, and his majority got elected in 2001 by simply buying the votes of more than 15 million Thai citizens. People simply voted for those who gave money. Presently, the so-called red shirt demonstrators pretending to defend democracy in Thailand is nothing more than a mob that has been paid (about 30 Euros per person which represents two weeks of wages) to demonstrate. Given that Mr. Thaksin’s wealth is estimated about 6 billion dollars, paying off a hundred thousand protesters is something the ex-prime minister can easily afford. This is not democracy since the demonstrators should be in the streets by their own will, not for some lucrative purposes. The demonstrations of these past few weeks were often seen and commented as an expression of Thailand’s democracy by Western journalists, referring to the big demonstrations that can take place in their country. That is a big mistake because behind this democratic Masquerade, a pure power struggle is paralyzing the advancement of Thai democracy towards more equality, in front of justice for instance and more efficiency of the law in order to fight against the severe corruption that plagues the country.
Democracy in Thailand will become reality only when education would be truly enhanced and only then we would get a little closer to this myth.
Bibliography.
Dovert, Stéphane, La Thailande contemporaine, L’Harmattan, 2003, 428 p.
