Elements in Politics and Society in Southeast Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 75 pp. (Table.) US$18.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-108-45793-4.
Kheang Un is a Cambodian-American political scientist whose work I have admired for many years. Cambodia, his latest book, is a concise, timely, and persuasive study that draws on years of fieldwork, hundreds of overviews, and on Un’s lightly worn understanding of relevant political theory. Given the constraints of length imposed by the series in which Cambodia appears, I was impressed by the amount of data and interpretation that Un has managed to include without overcrowding the text or obscuring its key arguments.
Before turning to Un’s book I have two small historical comments. Neither of them diminishes the persuasiveness and power of Un’s book.
In the first place, Un might have widened his focus momentarily to note that what he calls patrimonialism, which Cambodians call “string” (ksae), has probably been a feature of Cambodian society for at least as long as we have detailed written records. The addition of a qualifying phrase like “deep-rooted” or “long-held” would have been welcome.
Similarly, given Un’s decision to examine what he calls “electoral authoritarianism” in depth, he might have mentioned that the 1993 elections with which he begins his analysis were the seventh in Cambodian history and the third (rather than the first as many people assumed at the time) to have been pluralistic. Ironically, these earlier elections occurred in the closing years of the French Protectorate.
A similar, but much swifter “return to authoritarianism” that Un might have mentioned occurred in 1955 when national elections unmandated by the Geneva Accords were micro-managed by Prince Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) so as to bring him power and do away with political parties. Hand-picked candidates who belonged to the prince’s national movement (not a political party) won all the seats in the National Assembly that the prince had dissolved in 1952. Members of the movement were not allowed to belong to a political party. Unsurprisingly, political parties more or less disappeared in Cambodia after 1955, as Sihanouk had hoped they would. The single-slate Cambodian elections that followed in 1961 and 1967 were staged to validate Sihanouk’s authority (and his authoritarianism).
The Khmer Rouge held no elections but the one conducted in 1981 by the Peoples’ Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), like those held under Sihanouk, presented voters with a slate of candidates selected in advance by those in power. Given this historical context the pluralistic, open-ended election of 1993 represented a revolutionary alteration of Cambodian political arrangements and a watershed in Cambodian history.
The election was an important element of the 1991 Paris Peace Accords, as was the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, or UNTAC, which arrived in Phnom Penh in 1992. Under UNTAC protection new political parties were allowed to form, and newly enfranchised voters were soon scrambling to take part in the elections, which were scheduled for July 1, 1993.
Given the Cambodian People’s Party’s (CPP) incumbency, the widespread intimidation of potentially hostile voters in the run-up to the election, the spectral menace of the Khmer Rouge, and the vagueness of opposition programs, the CPP expected to win decisively and to return to power. UNTAC officials, by and large, agreed.
In July 1993 almost 100 percent of eligible voters went to the polls in a surprisingly peaceful election. When the votes were counted, a loyalist party known by its French acronym FUNCIPEC had won 46 percent of the vote and 58 seats in the 120-seat National Assembly while the CPP, with 32 percent of the vote, had gained 51 seats. A small opposition party won ten seats.
This humiliating defeat meant that the CPP could not govern Cambodia on its own. Instead, in Un’s deft phrase, the CPP “shouldered its way” back into the government by demanding that a coalition between the CPP and FUNCIPEC be set in place with two prime ministers: Hun Sen (1952- ) , who had served as Cambodia’s prime minster since 1984, and Prince Norodom Ranariddh (1944-), Sihanouk’s eldest son, who had spent most of his adult life in France.
The coalition collapsed in 1997. The CPP has monopolized Cambodian governance ever since, weathering elections in 1998, 2003, 2008, 2013, and 2018. Un provides a useful table of election results on page 48. With the action of 2018, where the CPP faced no organized opposition, a national election reverted to Sihanouk’s single-slate model, replicated by the PRK in 1981 and sought in vain for 26 years by the CPP. Un’s handling of the successive elections held since 1993 is nuanced and absorbing.
Since 2000 Hun Sen and the CPP have pivoted toward China, which is now the kingdom’s major patron and its largest trading partner. The scale of Chinese investment and its runaway exploitation of Cambodian resources have drawn no criticism from Hun Sen or from anyone else in the CPP. The idea that Chinese largesse might have strings attached doesn’t seem worrisome, nor does the notion that the intensity and scope of Chinese involvement threatens Cambodia’s authenticity as an independent nation state. Instead, for the time being and for the foreseeable future, Hun Sen and his associates, in the shadow of their depredatory, neo-colonial patron, are lords of all they survey.
I recommend this indispensable book to anyone interested in Cambodia or the future of Southeast Asian politics.
David Chandler
Monash University, Melbourne