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The Lessons of The Thai Coup

The distaste for Thaksin may have colored the tepid U.S. response. “Nobody wants to go to bat for Thaksin. He’s just an odious figure,” said Michael A. McFaul, director of Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. “But there’s the problem — democracy’s not about picking winners and losers, it’s about […]

The distaste for Thaksin may have colored the tepid U.S. response. “Nobody wants to go to bat for Thaksin. He’s just an odious figure,” said Michael A. McFaul, director of Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. “But there’s the problem — democracy’s not about picking winners and losers, it’s about defending institutions.”

Lorne W. Craner, former assistant secretary of state under Bush and now president of the International Republican Institute, agreed that U.S. concerns with Thaksin did not justify a coup. “You can’t sanction a coup just because you don’t like the guy if you’re going to stand up for democracy,” he said. “It’s unconstitutional.” ~The Washington Post

But Thaksin alone isn’t the only problem.  Both major political parties have been at risk of being banned for illegal behaviour, and the election commission that oversaw the one-party elections in April is under investigation.  Thailand has been facing a crisis of many of its basic institutions because all of those responsible for those institutions have failed.  One can make the argument that the intervention of the military, which has been approved, if not originally planned, by the king, is giving Thailand the time to sort out the tremendous legal and political problems of its democratic system.  The juxtaposition in this story of the Thai situation with other despotisms–such as that of Aliyev in Azerbaijian or Musharraf in Pakistan–is simply inappropriate.  Here there is clearly a military intervention to save the country from an overtly corrupt and irresponsible leader, and one that is sanctioned by a unifying national figure; in Pakistan, Musharraf’s takeover was just one more spasm in a fundamentally disordered polity and one that shows no signs of ending or yielding to democratic rule (not that democratic rule in Pakistan would necessarily be desirable for anybody).  In Thailand’s case, there is every reason to think that this coup will ultimately work to the benefit of the country and to the reform of their democratic politics.  As with the administration’s tacit approval of the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002 (I bet they wish they’d made more of an effort to support that one!), the mild rebuke to the coup leaders in Thailand is one of the few signs of foreign policy sanity in this administration.  Thailand is a perfect example of how a formula of “more democracy” or “democracy no matter what” can backfire and actually harm a country.  Thaksin exploited his party’s popularity in all those venal and self-serving ways that demagogues will, and in this he showed the seedy side of democracy, which is always potentially present in every democratic regime.  The Thai coup reminds us that there are things, like good and stable government, that can actually be more important than democracy, and that the one-solution-fits-all strategy of democratisation is inherently misguided and foolish.

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