Asian Arguments. London: Zed Books, 2014. 238 pp. (Map.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-78360-057-1.
The publication of Andrew MacGregor Marshall’s A Kingdom in Crisis has been a much-awaited event among Thai scholars. Marshall, a Scottish journalist who used to work for Reuters, has been releasing large pieces of this study for a number of years now, at his “#thaistory” blog. The book adds something to this material but will not be a huge surprise to those who have read his work at the blog site.
Marshall began writing about the royalist dimensions of contemporary Thai politics in the context of the country’s devolution into military dictatorship since 2006, offering interpretations of Wikileaks cables that exposed unsavoury aspects of the coup plotters’ ideas and machinations—including those of royalist, Democrat Party, and Yellow Shirt leaders. Unable to continue working at Reuters, and unwilling to risk imprisonment under Thailand’s harsh lèse majesté laws should he return to Thailand, Marshall settled in to write a book that frames contemporary political struggles through the lens of long-standing struggles surrounding the Thai monarchy.
The take-home message of Marshall’s book is delivered early on, in four parts (3–4). First, he claims that at the elite level, “Thailand’s conflict is essentially a succession struggle over who will become monarch when King Bhumibol dies.” Second, he claims that the political upheaval elites have feared will result from the King’s passing has already begun. Third, the intensity of this upheaval “does not imply that the monarch has significant political power as an independent actor,” since Thai elites have typically used the monarchy to their own benefit. And fourth, most Thais are not so much pro-royalist as loyal supporters of the current King. He then presents an analysis designed to back these claims, including both a survey of current events and a number of historical chapters meant to place the current reign in broader perspective.
Given the relative paucity of accessible and critical English-language writing about the Thai monarchy, and the risks that such writing entails, A Kingdom in Crisis should be considered a significant accomplishment, and Zed Books should be given credit for being willing to publish it. For the many Westerners who continue to repeat outmoded and Orientalist slogans about the Kingdom, the book should prove to be a real eye-opener—not least in its discussion of the events that led to the current king taking the throne and expanding the social and political significance of the monarchy (132 ff.).
For many scholars and people fairly familiar with Thai politics, some of Marshall’s analysis will nonetheless prove fairly thin gruel. It is not only that there has actually been a string of books in recent history that raise telling issues about the monarchy and challenges of succession—for example, the works by Benedict Anderson, Paul Handley, Soren Ivarsson and Lotte Isager, William Stevenson, David Streckfuss and Thongchai Winichakul, which the author cites, as well as works by Kevin Hewison, Rayne Kruger and Somsak Jeamteerasakul, which he doesn’t cite—but Marshall’s explanation of the current crisis is somewhat one-sided.
Marshall is surely right that succession issues are significant, a claim that he backs with the Wikileaks cables and other sources. But if his own assertion that the monarchy is not independently powerful and is used by elites for their own purposes is correct, as I would say it is, then the succession issue ought to be used as a window onto the larger social struggles that consume the elites. These clearly include not only their obsessive concerns about who controls the wealth and institutional power of the Royal household and its various properties after King Bhumibol dies, but how they can continue to maintain an elite-dominated political and social order without the legitimizing imagery that has been built up around the current monarch. In many ways, it is this elite struggle against rising popular demands, poignantly expressed in various ways by the now suppressed Red Shirt movement, which is at the centre of the present political struggle. Marshall’s book unfortunately provides scant insight into this aspect of the struggle, including the transformations of rural society enabling it, or the ways it is interconnected with the intra-elite machinations around succession. Moreover, this failure to analyze popular struggles is not merely an empirical lacuna in the work since it contributes to one of the rather strained prognostications Marshall forwards when he anticipates that after Bhumibol’s death and some brief upheaval Thailand may evolve toward greater stability, the succession issue having been resolved (214).
This seems to me a highly unlikely scenario, given the intensity of popular struggle against elitist forms of rule, and the intransigence of Thai elites in trying to maintain them. I should note that the version of Marshall’s book I have read was finished before the 2014 coup, an event which announced in no uncertain terms the will of the military leadership to expunge all popular forces except those that support them, and to rule by out-and-out dictatorial or fascist means if necessary. Perhaps Marshall can be excused for not having written such acts of deep repression into his analysis, or for drawing the conclusion that such acts make near-term reconciliation seem hopeless. Yet an analysis of the popular struggle in Thailand—rather than just the intra-elite succession struggle—might have already commended such an interpretation, independently of the 2014 coup. (Strangely, the book lacks any analysis of the 2008 Yellow Shirt airport blockades, which also attest to the intransigence of elite forces and might have warned against any hopes for short-term reconciliation.)
Despite these shortcomings, A Kingdom in Crisis is a useful read, particularly for those unfamiliar with the roles of royalist-military elites (and their international allies) in shaping Thailand’s ongoing struggles for democracy. It will certainly find its place on the bookshelves of Thai democracy activists—provided they do not live in Thailand.
Jim Glassman
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada