‘Thai-style democracy’

The announcements issued by the Revolutionary Council (Khana Patiwat) on the evening of 20 October 1958 declared that the junta had seized power ‘in the name of the Thai people’ (nai nam khong puangchon chao thai) – a message complemented by the admonition that ‘the people’ do as they were told (see Revolutionary Council 1958a: 3). The Revolutionary Council also issued two statements explaining why the coup had been staged, ostensibly with the support of the outgoing government as well as ‘the majority of those who worry about the survival of the country’ (see Revolutionary Council 1958b: 5). In a lengthy pronouncement interspersed with orders of a more practical nature, the junta attributed the coup to the actions of communists, said to have infiltrated Thailand's political, social, and economic institutions in an ‘attempt to assert their influence over the spirit of the Thai people’ (phayayam sang itthiphon nuea chitchai khong prachachon chao thai). While no evidence appears in the statement of any such activities, beyond vague references to communist literature and ‘many clever forms of propaganda and other schemes’ (chai withi kotsana chuan chuea lae phaenkan thi chalat lai yang), the threat was described as serious enough to ‘leave the government with no time and space’ to act (see Revolutionary Council 1958c: 11). Field Marshal Sarit had therefore taken it upon himself to initiate a ‘revolution’.

The statement goes on to demonstrate just what Sarit meant by ‘revolution’. After acknowledging the fact that the Thai people had fought for basic rights and freedoms, the junta explained that ‘some individuals’ had taken advantage of the protections afforded by the constitution to destroy the unity of the nation. Not only was the constitution described as powerless to prevent ‘the ultimate disintegration of the country’ (khwam taek salai khong prathet chat nai thi sut); also, the problem could not be rectified by a mere change in government, or reforms of a more incremental nature. The only available course of action was a ‘revolution’ meant to provide the government with more adequate instruments to confront the nation's enemies (see Revolutionary Council 1958c: 12). On the first anniversary of the coup, Sarit (Reference Thanarat1964 [1959]: 56) expressed satisfaction over the fact that the government now had the right instruments of ‘revolutionary power’ (amnat patiwat) – above all, Article 17 of the 1959 constitution. In the mid 1960s, in its own commemoration of Sarit's life, the Royal Thai Army (1964: 121) told much the same story, arguing that it was only by lifting the legal constraints on the government that the nation could be saved from destruction. Among the rules said to have prevented the government from protecting the nation was the Anti-Communism Act of 1954 – which, as the Royal Thai Army (1964: 120) lamented, forced the authorities to release suspects against whom they could produce no evidence.

Official accounts of the 1958 coup (Revolutionary Council, 1958a, 1958b, 1958c), although exceedingly vague about the nature of the threat, paint Thailand as a nation on the verge of extinction. The reality was an entirely different matter. By 1958, communism had made significant inroads among many of Thailand's neighbours. Labour unrest, although trifling by Western standards, had reached an intensity with which the Thai public may have been unfamiliar (see Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 184). Nonetheless, communists in Thailand were still a negligible force – one that was no match for a state with the means available to the Thai government through American patronage. Even after Sarit's death, communist fighters only numbered in the hundreds (see Handley Reference Handley2006: 182–3). While communists later did manage to build a measure of support among provincial populations, fuelling the insurgency's intensification in the late 1960s and 1970s, they did so largely as a consequence of the regime's own policies.

Indeed, what had prompted Sarit to stage his ‘revolution’ was not the threat of communism, but rather the desire to do away with the limited version of democracy that operated under the 1952 constitution. No longer hampered by rules of due process, Sarit's government arrested hundreds of intellectuals, politicians, and activists. The press was dealt with harshly, because Sarit (Reference Thanarat1964 [1959]: 57) would later explain that many newspapers only served as mouthpieces for communists and ‘evil-thinking people’ (phu khit rai), such that their closure was the only way to safeguard the unity of the nation. Sarit's government also dedicated itself to the enforcement of social order and conformity, using a heavy hand to deal with arsonists, hooligans, drug dealers, prostitutes, rickshaw drivers, and anyone else he found cause to brand an enemy of the nation or a threat to its ‘orderliness’ (khwam riaproi). The repression of non-conformists also extended to the Buddhist clergy, reorganized through measures that centralized its structure, maximized the government's control over appointments and doctrine, and purged monks who resisted the subservience of Buddhism to the political agenda of the authoritarian state (see Tambiah Reference Tambiah1976: 252–61). Under the 1959 constitution, finally, a royally appointed legislature was assigned the task of writing a permanent charter – something that took almost a decade to complete – and, in the meantime, of rubber-stamping the government's policies.

Aside from smashing all oppositions, Sarit paid special attention to boosting the legitimacy of his rule, to be achieved through ideological innovation and energetic government performance in the pursuit of priorities such as national integration and development. The hope was that the people of Thailand would support the revolutionary regime not just out of fear of the imaginary menace against which Sarit offered them protection, but out of a sincere belief in the regime's effectiveness, moral goodness, and cultural appropriateness. In more abstract terms, Sarit sought to entrench the ‘revolutionary’ regime by relying on mechanisms of institutional reproduction harnessing the self-reinforcing properties of power and legitimation (see Mahoney Reference Mahoney2000: 521–5; Thelen Reference Thelen1999: 392–9).

As Thak (Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 92) has put it, the ‘revolution’ Sarit sought to carry out aimed to replace the hybrid system of government inherited from the 1932 coup with something putatively more ‘Thai’. The instability the country had experienced and the grave threats it was said to confront were blamed by Sarit and his associates on the adoption of Western ideas and institutions, which the Revolutionary Council aimed to replace with a ‘Thai’ version of democracy. The so-called ‘Thai-style democracy’ (prachathippatai baeb thai) that took shape thereafter replaced the concern for individual rights and freedoms with a preoccupation for stability and security, requiring in turn the suppression of free speech, political competition, and legislative representation; the elimination of ‘Western’ procedures of selection and accountability; and the establishment of a political system dominated by an unchecked executive wielding absolute powers. Undergirding this new system of government was the revival of hierarchical, organic conceptions of the nation. Indeed, ordinary people were to be denied a political role altogether, because Thailand's prosperity and harmony could only be achieved if everyone knew their place, remained unified behind the government's leadership, and refrained from pressing any demand for political inclusion, economic opportunity, or social change (see Thak (Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 100–5).

As in the time of King Chulalongkorn and King Vajiravudh, the organic, hierarchical conception of society revived under Sarit was anchored in Buddhist ideas of karma and merit. The revival of social hierarchies as central to Thainess and ‘Thai-style democracy’, however, presented something of a challenge. To the extent that Thai Buddhism had historically been ‘positively related to a conception of an ideal political order’, its ‘cornerstone’ had never been a coarse and frequently intoxicated military general, but ‘a righteous monarch who would promote a prosperous society and religion’ (Tambiah Reference Tambiah1976: 431). Even as Sarit went about presenting himself as the ‘father of the nation’, supposedly on the pho khun model of King Ramkhamhaeng of Sukhothai, the restoration of the monarchy as the pinnacle of Thailand's state-sanctioned social hierarchies was therefore central to his ‘revolutionary’ agenda. The expansion of King Bhumibol's ceremonial and ritual role, the accentuation of the King's position as the head of Buddhism and the armed forces, the encouragement of royal tours to the provinces and foreign countries, and the resurrection of practices (such as prostration and rachasap) that elevated the King above humanity (see Handley Reference Handley2006: 143–52; Thak Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 204–8) provided the military regime with more solid symbolic foundations. What is more, Bhumibol's image as a sophisticated, righteous, and benevolent monarch partially masked, at home and abroad, the regime's corruption and brutality.

While it does not appear that King Bhumibol was as directly involved in the 1958 coup as he had been in the previous year's operation, the King is described as not having minded ‘one bit’ the rollback of the 1932 revolution (see Kobkua Reference Suwannathat-Pian2003: 158). Indeed, it is very likely the case, as Kobkua suggests, that Bhumibol shared with Sarit the conviction that ‘the security of the nation’ took precedence over ‘the democratic form of government’ (Kobkua Reference Suwannathat-Pian2003: 158). Nonetheless, the monarchy had both ideological and instrumental reasons to support Sarit's rule, beyond the national security threats overhyped by the Revolutionary Council to earn the public's support for its actions. On the one hand, palace officials like Prince Dhani Nivat (see Dhani Reference Nivat1946), as well as royalist intellectuals like Phraya Anuman Rajathon (see Anuman Reference Rajathon1954), Kukrit Pramoj (see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak and Wongyannawa2006), and many others (see Nattapoll Reference Chaiching2013: Ch. 4), had revived the notion that Thailand never needed a constitution – not as long as it was ruled according to the dharma by kings who were effectively ‘elected’, as had supposedly been the case in Thailand before the influx of Western ideas. On the other hand, the monarchy had much to gain from Sarit's ‘revolution’, which elevated the institution to a position of power it had not enjoyed since 1932.

The 1959 constitution addressed the issue of sovereignty through phrasing consistent with previous documents dating back to the first permanent constitution of 1932, stating: ‘Sovereign power comes from Thai people’ (amnat athippatai ma chak puangchon chao thai).¹ In practice, however, Hewison and Kengkij (Reference Hewison, Montesano, Chachavalpongpun and Chongvilaivan2010: 186) are correct in their assessment that Sarit ‘effectively made the King sovereign, in place of the previous notion that the people were sovereign’. The conception of sovereignty articulated under Sarit had much in common with King Vajiravudh's. Whereas the King and his government were said to embody the popular will and ‘represent the aspirations of the nation’, sovereignty was delegated to them irrevocably by the people, who took no part in the ‘exercise of legislative, executive, and judicial power’ (see Thak Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 103), and were granted no means by which they could withdraw the authority exercised on their behalf. Whereas, moreover, the permanent constitution of 1932 had followed the recognition that ‘sovereign power comes from the Siamese people’ with a statement that ‘the King, as head of state, only exercises said power according to the provisions of this constitution’ (phramahakasat phu pen pramuk song chai amnat nan tae doi bot banyat haeng ratthathammanun ni), the new charter featured no such restriction. The King could once again ‘do no wrong’ and was elevated above the law, as were in practice the generals who administered the country in his name. What were demanded of the people submission and obedience, possibly on penalty of Thailand's newly legalized forms of extra-judicial arrest and execution.

Buddhism and the monarchy served not only as ‘collective identity symbols of the nation’ (Tambiah Reference Tambiah1976: 473), but also as the vehicles through which the regime's nationalism and its ideology of national development were carried into the provinces. Regionalism, particularly in the Northeast, was a persistent problem – as a contemporaneous account described it, the kingdom's ‘most serious divisive force’ (Wilson Reference Wilson1962: 215). The problem, if anything, was compounded by the fact that, since 1932, regional cleavages had found their expression at the national level in a way that reinforced national oppositions over both the form of government and the policies it should pursue, adding a territorial dimension to the struggle for greater democracy and social justice (see Keyes Reference Keyes1967: 36–49). The dismantlement of legislative institutions and the persecution of northeastern members of parliament had complicated matters further. For the reality of continuing neglect, underdevelopment, discrimination, and official abuse, combined with a rising awareness of regional disparities and social inequalities, not only weakened the regime's legitimacy but also compromised the extent to which local populations could be made to feel part of the national community. With the state's increasing physical presence in the periphery, for purposes of both security and development, scarce national integration threatened to turn into active opposition, particularly as the state's activities ‘inadvertently politicized many of the peasants and awakened their awareness of their place in the Thai social order’ (Thak Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 172). The problem was not exclusively a northeastern one, especially given the government's decision to side with large landowners in repealing legal protections for peasants and farmers in other regions.

Quite sensitive to the regionalist challenge (see Keyes Reference Keyes1967: 51), Sarit sought to further national integration through more than just repression. On the one hand, the government propagated its official ideology through the national education system, the teachings of the Buddhist monkhood, and the promotion of the monarchy, much of it funded by the United States Information Service (USIS) (see Handley Reference Handley2006: 149). On the other hand, the regime's emphasis on national development – again, much of it carried out with American funds – sought to cement the loyalties of local populations. Both Sarit and Bhumibol undertook highly publicized tours to the provinces in an attempt to underscore the sincerity of the authorities’ concern for the welfare of provincial subjects. Still, the effort to raise standards of living in the provinces was not inconsistent with the government's determination to preserve the existing social structure: local people were urged to be content with their lot, renounce ambitions to political or economic empowerment, and offer the state their unquestioned loyalty (see Thak Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 153).

Just as the vast majority of the population was asked to embrace their inferior position in Thailand's social order, Sarit and Bhumibol were hard at work to impress upon urban elites that their privilege, too, was permanent as long as the regime enjoyed their support. At least since the late 1930s, wealthy families had shared their largesse with big men in the military and civilian bureaucracy, appointing them to lucrative positions on their companies’ boards of directors and funnelling money to public and privately owned firms controlled by generals. Beginning with the 1947 coup, the practice was extended to all sectors of the economy, as the Coup Group's ‘bureaucratic capitalists’ cashed in on the business community's dependency on access to political patronage (see Akira Reference Akira1996: 137–8, 170–2). Aside from leading to fast-paced economic growth and a vast expansion in both the industrial and financial sectors, Sarit's new development agenda favoured the increased concentration of capital in the hands of a few (Sino-Thai) family-owned conglomerates, which benefited not only from the continuing association with the military but also the dismantlement of labour protections, land controls, and representative institutions, increases in foreign direct investment and government expenditures, and reduced competition from both state enterprises and private firms.

While Sarit's policies gave these families a vested economic interest in the regime's preservation, the monarchy was deployed to solidify the alliance by legitimizing the commoner elite's superior position on the nation's social hierarchy, all the while rendering its status dependent upon the continuing prestige of the royal institution. King Bhumibol personally undertook activities aimed at strengthening the loyalty of the bourgeoisie. On the one hand, the King performed functions and rituals designed to ‘consolidate a complex of alliances between political, royal and business families’ (Thak Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 214). On the other hand, the King developed links with the commoner elite and upper-middle class by granting audiences, officiating at ceremonies, dispensing new titles and decorations, and perhaps above all by accepting donations for the various philanthropic activities in which the royal family was engaged at the time, thereby offering donors a chance to accumulate merit and status through their association with the monarchy (for more detail, see Handley Reference Handley2006: 149–50, 174; Thak Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 214–18).

Already the country's most powerful institution at the time Sarit launched his revolution, the military parlayed its new alliance with royalists and capitalists into a decade of regime stability, effectively triggering mechanisms of institutional reproduction founded on the aforementioned dynamics of power and legitimation. With regard to the former, if the expansiveness of the new coalition had allowed the imposition of rules, such as the 1959 constitution, that granted the regime unchecked, despotic powers, the application of such powers – whether to dispatch organized oppositions, intimidate potential challengers, or promote economic development – further solidified the government's effective hold on power. With regard to the latter, the regime's association with the monarchy gave it a new basis of legitimacy that worked in tandem with repression and patronage to favour its reproduction. If, in particular, the repression removed any real competition or resistance to the government's official ideology, the regime's resulting capacity to secure the voluntary compliance of key segments of the population – persuaded of both the effectiveness and cultural appropriateness of ‘Thai-style democracy’ – allowed it to minimize its recourse to physical coercion, providing the space for Sarit to supplement his despotism with the benevolent ‘paternalism’ that further boosted the regime's legitimacy and moral authority.

Thak's (Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]) seminal work on Sarit's ‘despotic paternalism’ offers a comprehensive treatment of both the ‘paternalistic’ and ‘despotic’ features of the regime. Thak, however, arguably fails to apply the required degree of scepticism to the regime's official line, taking at face value the notion that Sarit's aim was to establish a more traditionally ‘Thai’ system of government. In fact, while Sarit may have benefited from the appropriation of traditional symbols and pseudo-historical claims to legitimacy, ‘Thai-style democracy’ was less the contemporary adaptation of an ‘unwritten constitution’ dating back to the thirteenth-century Kingdom of Sukhothai than it was a synthesis of the official nationalism articulated under the absolute monarchy – based on the nationalist historiography pioneered by the likes of Prince Damrong – with the statism and obsession with social conformity that had characterized the nationalist ideology crafted during Phibun's first tenure as Prime Minister.

It is no coincidence that the man Sarit called upon to plan his ‘revolution’ was none other than Luang Wichit Wathakan (see Thak Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 115–19), who had first spoken of a ‘human revolution’ (manut patiwat) as a means to revert to ‘true’ Thai characteristics in the late 1930s. Not only had Luang Wichit long shown himself ‘adept at using the past, or rather his peculiar conception of the past, to justify or affirm contemporary realities’ (Barmé Reference Barmé1993: 160); two decades earlier, before recycling the idea in support of Sarit, Luang Wichit had also sought to present Phibun as the true inheritor of the Sukhothai tradition. Among other things, it was Luang Wichit who had repurposed King Vajiravudh's official nationalism in the service of Phibun, adding a new twist – namely, the idea that the state should shape the private and public behaviour of the population and, conversely, the notion that the only ‘legitimate, “real” Thai were those members of the populace who acted in full accordance with the behavioural criteria propagated by the state’ (Barmé Reference Barmé1993: 150).

Once again, the version of ‘Thainess’ espoused by Sarit and his supporters did draw upon genuine traditions, particularly through its emphasis on the central role of the monarchy and on Buddhist ideas of dhammic rule, political order, and hierarchies of merit/status (see Tambiah Reference Tambiah1976: 487–9). At the same time, not only was the state's appropriation of such traditions based on a reading of history inseparable from the nationalist ideology that inspired it; also, the rediscovery and propagation of such traditions, and, conversely, the suppression of ideas with an equally good claim to ‘traditional’ status,² in fact served a far less traditional purpose: legitimizing the rule of a venal military regime, of which Thailand had little history, that wielded absolute powers of the kind no ruler in Thailand had enjoyed prior to the late nineteenth century, in the pursuit of goals, such as ‘national development’ and ‘national integration’, no government had even considered prior to the Fifth Reign, through means of propaganda and repression that had only become available in the previous few decades. The Thai state's new-found preoccupation with enforcing ‘unity’ through education and mass media, and its tendency to brand those who failed to conform as ‘un-Thai’, mentally defective, or otherwise lacking in any legitimacy to participate in the political life of the country, had nothing to do with the establishment of a traditionally ‘Thai’ style of government. It had everything to do with a modern agenda of cultural and political hegemony, prosecuted in part by retrofitting an ostensibly ‘timeless’ national culture to match a configuration of power it could then be claimed to have brought into being.

A few ‘good’ men

The volume produced by the Royal Thai Army to commemorate the life of Field Marshal Sarit begins its account of the 1958 coup by arguing that ‘the Thai nation’, in existence ‘for almost a thousand years’, only managed to maintain its sovereignty and independence thanks to the work of ‘good people’ (khon di) who led it each time it was confronted with danger (see Royal Thai Army 1964: 118). The khon di discourse has since supported the contention that a government's legitimacy is rooted, not in its electoral mandate but in the ‘goodness’ of its leaders, the assessment of which is reserved for the King and other royalists who derive from their proximity to the monarchy the authority to speak for ‘the people’.

On the day Sarit died, King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit sent a hand-signed note of condolences to the late Prime Minister's wife Wichitra (see Royal Thai Army 1964: 254), praising the departed as a statesman who discharged his duties ‘without ever thinking of himself at all’ (doi mai nuek thueng ton eng loei). Little could have been farther from the truth. The Field Marshal, it was discovered not long thereafter, had amassed a personal fortune approaching USD 140 million (see Thak Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 224) thanks to the systematic misappropriation of government funds and profits reaped from legal and illegal businesses in which he had been involved for over a decade. King Bhumibol had long known what Sarit had been up to (see Kobkua Reference Suwannathat-Pian2003: 155), but could hardly have been expected to acknowledge it publicly, given their close relationship. Royalists generally rationalize the palace's active support of Sarit as dictated by the King's commitment to the national interest, suitably defined as whatever made the monarchy more popular and powerful (for instance, see Kobkua Reference Suwannathat-Pian2003: 158–9). By that standard, Sarit's ‘revolution’ had been a godsend.

The Field Marshal's death was not followed by immediate changes in the formal structure of government. Still, the 1960s witnessed a gradual shift in the balance of power in favour of the King, who went from being an object of national veneration and pride to asserting himself as the most important player on Thailand's political scene. Now in his late thirties, Bhumibol was in a position to convert the symbolic capital that accrued from his personal popularity, the monarchy's revival, and the anti-communist propaganda overseen by the United States into real political power. The task was facilitated by the fact that Sarit's successors, Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn (as Prime Minister) and Field Marshal Praphat Charusathien (as Interior Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army), although almost equally crooked, had none of Sarit's stature and charisma. While firmly in control of the state's administrative/repressive apparatus, neither could credibly claim to have inherited the roles of ‘father-lord’ (pho khun) and embodiment of the nation's will.

King Bhumibol stepped into that vacuum, repurposing the institution of the monarchy in response to opportunities provided by the increasingly perceptible slippage between the theory and practice of ‘Thai-style government’. The King made use of the central role he had been assigned in the legitimation of the new regime, exploiting the ambiguities of the existing institutional arrangements and the weakened stature of its military leaders. As he did so, Thailand's regime, although formally unchanged, increasingly resembled the local adaptation of a model of Platonic guardianship – a three-tiered hierarchy in which a few ‘good men’ with superior karmic merit and access to the dharma, the King foremost among them, were responsible for assuring harmony in society by conquering, with the aid of their auxiliaries in the armed forces, the base desires of the ignorant many.

The doctrine of ‘Thai-style government’ and the nationalist ideology that legitimized it underwent some adjustments as the King took on a more active political role. Perhaps more than any other thinker, it was Kukrit Pramoj who had set the intellectual foundations for Sarit's adoption of a ‘royal nationalism’ that emphasized the King as the heart of a nation defined by its hierarchical structure (see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 115). On par with Luang Wichit, moreover, Kukrit had played a role in defining the image of the ideal ‘Thai-style leader’ (phu nam baep thai) wielding unchecked, absolute powers for the benefit of the entire nation, as had supposedly been the case at some point in, if not throughout, ‘Thai’ history. Beginning in the early to mid 1950s, Kukrit's writings idealized the absolute monarchy as an ‘excellent golden age’ (samai thong kham an di loet), a time when the country was secure, peaceful, and prosperous thanks to a system of government ‘without politics’, in which enlightened monarchs could rule without concerning themselves with petty political squabbles. Like many other royalists (see Nattapoll Reference Chaiching2013: 170–96), Kukrit not only argued that the government of ‘commoners’ (samanchon) established in 1932 perverted the true essence of ‘Thainess’, but also claimed that the absolute monarchy was more ‘democratic’ – in substantive, if not procedural terms – than the regimes of the constitutional era. The answer to the uncertainty and instability of the intervening period was said to be the return to a version of Thainess that placed the King at its centre and allowed ‘good people’ to run the country without interference (see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 115–30).

Partly in response to leftist critiques of Thai society, Kukrit also offered a spirited defence of the traditional system of feudal hierarchies (sakdina). Not only was the complex stratification of society defended as preferable to the social disorder and moral decline brought about by the diffusion of egalitarian ideals; traditional hierarchies were also praised as a source of morality and harmony, as the reciprocity mandated by Buddhist precepts rendered the system free of exploitation. When the members of all classes ‘knew their place, low and high’ (ru thi tam thi sung), inequalities were accepted without problems. Nor did the sakdina hierarchy impede social mobility. During the absolute monarchy, people were said to have succeeded or failed depending only on their abilities and karma (khon thuk khon cha yu nai thana yangrai ko laeo tae khwam samat rue ‘kam’ khong ton). The idea of karma served a similar purpose as Plato's ‘Noble Lie’, for while it guaranteed that everyone deserved the position they currently occupied, and that only ‘good men’ would rise to the top of the hierarchy, it also made it possible for slaves and phraito live a dignified existence through the benevolence of their superiors (see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 141–50, 239–42, 329). Monarchy and hierarchy, of course, were very much related in Kukrit's thought, because the sanctification of the monarchy was central to the legitimacy of ‘natural’ inequalities of goodness and power (see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 335).

With Luang Wichit, Kukrit popularized the notion that ‘Thai-style government’ required the concentration of all power in the hands of a paternalistic ‘Thai-style leader’, like Sarit, who sacrificed himself to provide the nation with justice and prosperity while guaranteeing that the various parts of the social organism worked in harmony. To such a leader, the people owed ‘political quiescence’ (khwam ngiap thang kan mueang). Sarit's dismantlement of democratic institutions received a full-throated endorsement from Kukrit, as a means to undo the contamination of ‘Thainess’ with the ‘otherness’ (khwam pen uen) blamed for the divisiveness of the post-1932 period (see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 147–53). At any rate, the people were not ready to play an active role in the country's government, because their ignorance made them unaware of their true needs and hence easily misled by evil politicians (see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 258). Ordinary people could only be allowed to participate once they understood that real democracy is about electing ‘good people’. In the meantime, absolute military rule remained the best way to ensure that khon di would remain in charge of the government. By definition, ‘Thai-style government’ guaranteed that there would be no abuse of power. The only check and balance Thailand ever needed was the presence of an inviolate monarch, under whose reign no injustice would ever be allowed to take place.³

The corruption scandal that broke shortly after Sarit's death exposed this notion as a fantasy. In response, Kukrit blamed those who disclosed evidence of the Field Marshal's corruption for destroying the people's confidence in ‘Thai-style government’ and its institutions (see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 367–8). Still, Kukrit's active support of Thanom's regime fizzled as it became evident that Sarit's successor was altogether too weak to rein in the corruption of those around him, take charge of the nation's problems, or command the respect, support, and fear Sarit once did. Aside from becoming increasingly critical of the government, Kukrit provided fresh ideological foundations for the ever more prominent and politically active role of the monarchy, casting King Bhumibol in the role of ‘Thai-style leader’. The King was not just presented as the father of the people and the guarantor of the unity and ‘goodness’ of the nation, but a leader who worked to solve real problems and develop the country, as well as a ‘pure force’ who, without a political agenda, actively ensured that the government did not abuse its powers or shirk its responsibilities (see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 378).

As Saichol (Reference Sattayanurak2005: 441) puts it, Kukrit was the chief purveyor of an ideology that made the King once again synonymous with the nation. If military leaders like Phibun and Sarit had previously been cast as the expression of the nation's will, while the monarchy played a variously significant but largely symbolic role, the notion of Thainess and ‘Thai-style government’ articulated in the mid to late 1960s reserved for King Bhumibol the role of speaking for the nation. Ever since, military generals have had to renounce any claim to being anything more than the King's auxiliaries – their extra-constitutional role justified purely on the basis of protecting the monarchy and the nation with which the monarchy is identified, sometimes against the irrational exuberance of those who disregard their ‘Thai’ obligation to ‘know their place’. It would henceforth be the King – the only person in the realm with access to the true dharma, much as Plato had justified the power of ‘philosopher guardians’ based on their exclusive grasp of ‘the idea of the good’ – who would act as the ultimate arbiter of a government's fitness to serve. On this point, the extant academic hagiographies of King Bhumibol (see Kobkua Reference Suwannathat-Pian2003: 165; Nakharin Reference Mektrairat2006: 90) concur with more critical works on the subject (see Handley Reference Handley2006: 177; Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 68): by the late 1960s and early 1970s, His Majesty was once again the kingdom's most powerful political figure.

While the centrality of each institution to the other's survival and power always required that differences between the military and the monarchy eventually be reconciled or swept under the rug, such differences have nonetheless emerged regularly in the time since Sarit's death. The pressure that King Bhumibol placed on Thanom and Praphat to introduce a new permanent constitution in 1968 and organize multiparty elections in 1969 was the first major incident of this kind – one this study has credited for triggering the first iteration of a cyclical sequence that accounts for the regime instability the country has experienced in the era of ‘Thai-style democracy’. Given the King's well-publicized distaste for ‘Western’ constitutionalism, his short-lived democratic turn in the late 1960s has been subject to varying interpretations. Perhaps most plausible is the notion that, while King Bhumibol's public stance in support of a constitution did not reflect any ‘conversion’ on his part (see Handley Reference Handley2006: 199; Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 69), more pragmatic considerations led him to believe that Thailand needed to soften its authoritarian image at home and abroad (see Handley Reference Handley2006: 194–5). Handley (Reference Handley2006: 195, 205–6) also argues that any benefit the King might have drawn from his advocacy of the system's partial democratization did not reflect a self-conscious attempt to elevate his own power and standing at the expense of the military. This was rather an unintended consequence of his actions, which Bhumibol would attempt to undo upon realizing he had contributed to the regime's destabilization, emboldening its opponents to unleash a wave of criticism against Thanom, Praphat, and their cronies.

Be that as it may, the introduction of the 1968 constitution represented a major victory for the King, whose will had prevailed over the reluctance of Thanom and Praphat. The constitution's content was better still, for its lengthy preamble offered a rewrite of recent history that placed the monarchy at the centre of the country's ‘democracy’, arguing that Thailand had first become a ‘Democracy with the King as Head of State’ (prachathippatai doi mi phramahakasat pen pramuk) when King Prajadhipok promulgated the country's first permanent constitution in December 1932. The qualifier ‘with the King as Head of State’, which had previously featured only in the royalist constitution of 1949 (see Nattapoll Reference Chaiching2013: 46), served as a new way to describe a form of ‘democracy’ with the King as sovereign (see Hewison and Kengkij Reference Hewison, Montesano, Chachavalpongpun and Chongvilaivan2010: 182; see also Chalermkiat Reference Phionuan1990: 137–8). Since 1932, the preamble stated, this particular version of democracy had ‘developed sequentially’ (dai wiwatthanakan ma doi lamdap), in a way that required many changes to the constitution so as to keep it ‘current’ (mo som kae kan samai). The constitution, in other words, presented military coups as instruments of democratic development.

The constitution's provisions did not present much of a threat to the status quo. Unlike the obscenity it replaced, the new charter did guarantee a host of political and civil rights; despite the fact that each such right was described as ‘perfect’ or ‘complete’ (boribun), the language describing acceptable limitations was so broad as to permit the state to draw the line wherever it was most convenient. Indeed, the revised anti-communist legislation introduced the subsequent year made encouraging others to ‘lose faith in religion or the traditions and customs of the Thai race’ into a criminal act of a communistic nature (see Streckfuss Reference Streckfuss2011: 237–8). In addition, while the constitution established an elected lower house, the royally appointed Senate was granted control over the selection of the Prime Minister; given that confidence votes were to take place in joint sittings, any government commanding Senate support only needed some 15 per cent of the elected members of the House to win a confidence vote with an absolute majority of both houses (the Senate was three-fourths the size of the House). The Senate was also empowered to delay the passage of most legislation by as much as 1 year.

Its built-in safeguards notwithstanding, the limited democracy installed by the 1968 constitution was short-lived. The elections of February 1969 had actually yielded positive results for the government. The party formed to support Thanom as Prime Minister – PhakSaha Prachathai (rendered in English as the United Thai People's Party, UTPP) – leveraged its control of the state bureaucracy to win 75 of 219 seats; after the election, Saha Prachathai was joined by 50 of the 72 candidates elected to the House as independents, giving the party a comfortable majority. Perhaps most encouraging to the regime was the extent to which it had made inroads in the Northeast. While most of the candidates affiliated with parties other than the Democrats and Saha Prachathai still came from northeastern constituencies, voters in Isan, as a contemporaneous account put it, ‘rejected the neutralist-socialist parties that had heretofore dominated the region and, instead, chose UTPP and independent candidates supporting the government’ (Neher Reference Neher1970: 253).

Kukrit Pramoj had reasons to be bitter for being passed over for the Prime Minister's job, in the aftermath of which his verbal attacks against the government intensified (see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 369). At the same time, Kukrit did not fail to express his sadness over something far worse than military dictatorship: the involvement of elected politicians in the country's administration. Ignoring the massive corruption in which the country's unelected leaders had engaged since 1958, Kukrit bemoaned the expected return to ‘the unruly corrupt days’ of the Phibun era, lamenting the fact that the country was poised to give up ‘one great freedom’ Sarit had bestowed upon the Thai people: ‘the freedom from politics’ (cited in Neher Reference Neher1970: 257). In reality, the problems were others. On the one hand, there was plenty of politics in the ruling circle, particularly as the designation of Thanom's son (and Praphat's son-in-law) Colonel Narong Kittikachorn as the strongmen's successor generated a great deal of resentment in the military (see Thak Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 229). Meanwhile, the King's public criticism of the government had emboldened others in the press and civil society to do likewise (see Handley Reference Handley2006: 204–5). On the other hand, many among the much-maligned politicians elected to parliament actually took their constitutional responsibilities seriously. In practice, that meant that the House of Representatives, while never coming close to threatening the government's position, was not quite the rubber-stamp to which the ‘Three Tyrants’ (sam thorarat; Thanom, Praphat, and Narong), as they would soon be known, thought themselves entitled.

The self-coup staged by Thanom and Praphat in November 1971 was framed as a repeat of Sarit's autogolpe 13 years earlier – indeed, as Thak (Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 228) put it, a ‘replay of Sarit's 1957 and 1958 coups all at once’. The new junta recycled the name Revolutionary Council (Khana Patiwat) and issued a series of statements reminiscent of its earlier incarnation. As ever, the coup was justified by the presence of grave threats to the monarchy and the nation, said to be impossible to defeat through means other than absolute dictatorial powers. Thanom, moreover, inaugurated a new practice of making conspicuous usage of royal images and symbols as he announced to the Thai people that their rights and freedoms were being terminated for their own protection (see Thak Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 229). Having come to regret or second-guess the public push made for a constitution 3 years earlier, the King refrained from making statements that could be interpreted as condemnation. Meanwhile, three members of the abolished parliament, who petitioned the courts to declare the coup-makers’ actions illegal, were jailed on charges of treason for up to a decade (see Streckfuss Reference Streckfuss2011: 129–34). Such was the price of questioning the authority of ‘good men’ to lead the nation, unencumbered by rules written for the rabble.

Enter the masses

The alliance between the military, the palace, and major capitalists put together by Sarit in the late 1950s had not found it especially difficult to consolidate power and manage conflict. Part of this had to do with the weakness of the opposition, which had been deprived of its leading personalities through exile, arrest, and murder. By then, moreover, most of the country's population was not appreciably more involved in politics than it had been at the time of the 1932 coup. Writing in the midst of Sarit's conservative revolution, Wilson (Reference Wilson1962: 57–8) noted ‘a clear distinction’, based primarily on the level of education, ‘between those who are involved in politics and those who are not’. Those involved – the educated classes in the capital city – were said to pose no threat to the status quo, given their vested interest in the preservation of ‘traditional notions of social hierarchy’. Even university students, whose protests had contributed to Phibun's downfall in 1957, were easily brought in line by Sarit (see Prajak Reference Kongkirati2013 [2005]: 35). For the most part, the students remained apathetic about the Field Marshal's death in 1963 (see Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 137–9); among those who were active on campus, progressives were still far from dominant (see Reynolds Reference Reynolds and Reynolds1987: 30–6).

As for the peasantry, estimated at ‘more than 80 per cent of the population’, Wilson (Reference Wilson1962: 57–8) identified ‘its inarticulate acquiescence to the central government and indifference to national politics’ as fundamental to the stability of the country's social and political structure. More controversially, the peasantry's ‘political inaction’ was attributed to ‘a tolerable economic situation which provides a stable subsistence without encouraging any great hope for quick improvement’. Others have pointed out that the rural population was not quite as free of grievances (Bowie Reference Bowie1997: 61). Even still, while much of the country had experienced significant economic change since the signing of the Bowring Treaty of 1855, the increased economic insecurity produced by the commercialization of the agricultural sector and explosive population growth had not been accompanied by the emergence of a strong political consciousness,⁴ perhaps because economic change had failed to trigger much in the way of actual development or modernization (see Ingram Reference Ingram1971: 216–17). The repression of the Sarit era also effectively silenced the small working-class movement that had emerged after World War II (see Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 186).

As noted, one of the reasons why the end of the absolute monarchy did not settle Thailand's National Revolution is that the process did not intersect, as it did in Western Europe, with the ‘massification’ of politics brought about by the Industrial Revolution. An economic transformation of comparable import did take place in Thailand beginning in the late 1950s. Once again, however, the sequencing of Thailand's National and Industrial Revolutions – that is, the occurrence of the latter at a time when the alliance of the monarchy and the military was deeply entrenched – helps explain the contradictory effects exerted by the subsequent political awakening of new constituencies.

As Anderson (Reference Anderson1977: 15–18) described it, the economic boom of the 1960s, fuelled by the American war in Vietnam, resulted in the dramatic growth of the service economy and vast increases in the secondary and tertiary student populations, multiplying the size of the petty middle class and the urban bourgeoisie several times over. At the same time, increased landlordism in the provinces pushed young men to join the ranks of the working class and the underemployed in Bangkok. These developments not only rearranged Thailand's social structure, giving rise to new classes whose aspirations were not matched by the limited political role reserved for them under military rule, but also generated new rivalries and resentments, both within and across classes. The potential for upheaval increased as the bureaucracy approached saturation, foreclosing traditional routes to social advancement for new graduates, and especially when the economy slowed as a result of American disengagement.

While Sarit's 1958 coup was followed by a decade of rare stability in the formal structure of Thailand's political regime, by the mid to late 1960s, what had once been the sources of the military regime's strength had turned into potential vulnerabilities. On the one hand, the socio-economic transformations engineered by the regime's developmental policies resulted in the increased politicization of some of the social constituencies such policies had been designed to persuade to stay in their place. Workers and peasants remained largely inactive, but their growing political awareness, combined with continuing repression, economic slowdown, inflation, wage stagnation, and inequality, as well as the increased land tenure problems related to rural indebtedness and the scarcity of land, made these groups increasingly available for mass mobilization (see Saneh Reference Chamrik, Kasetsiri and Phetchlert-anan2001: 7–11; Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 186–7, 207–13). In the time since Sarit's death, moreover, the student population had grown more active and politicized (see Prajak Reference Kongkirati2013 [2005]: 38–112). While it had largely refrained from mobilizing in frontal opposition to the regime, the period of relatively open politics between 1968 and 1971 had seen the emergence of the student movement as the ‘most powerful extra-bureaucratic force in the country’ (Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 144). Perhaps most important of all was the role of the expanded middle class, caught between the desire to play a greater political role and the fear of losing its newly acquired social status and improved standards of living.

On the other hand, the regime's identification with the monarchy, followed by the precipitous rise in the King's power and prestige at the expense of the country's military rulers, undermined the cohesiveness of the ruling coalition. Bhumibol may not have acted with the intention to undermine Thanom and Praphat. Still, his push for a semi-democratic constitution in 1968 was evidence of a clear divergence of interests between the monarchy and the military. This divergence was likely aggravated by the government's growing unpopularity with urban constituencies that increasingly looked to the King for leadership and guidance, and to whom Bhumibol likely felt the need to listen, in the spirit of the invented tradition ofratchaprachasamasai – ‘the mutuality of king and people’ (see Connors Reference Connors2008: 148–51) – that would be popularized by Kukrit Pramoj a few years later. By the late 1960s, the very factors that had previously guaranteed the regime's power and legitimacy – its despotic rule, its economic performance, its expanded coalition, and its royal nationalism – had combined to undermine its stability.

The 1968 constitution was an attempt to defuse foreign pressures and domestic dissatisfaction with the regime by enacting what Przeworski (Reference Przeworski1991) has called a ‘controlled opening of the political space’, rendered possible by the fact that the King's will could now prevail over the wishes of hardline elements in the military. Somewhat predictably, however, the 1968 constitution actually led to intensifying criticism of the government and pressures for further reforms. Worried by the increased assertiveness exhibited by elected politicians, the press, and budding civil society organizations – to say nothing of the intensification in the communist insurgency in the provinces – the military and the monarchy temporarily closed ranks in support of the 1971 coup, by which they sought to restore a form of dictatorship as ‘narrow’ as the one imposed by Sarit in 1958. Whether oppositional forces were truly caught by surprise by the 1971 self-coup (see Thak Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 230) or consciously chose to bide their time (see Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 145), their initial reaction was muted. As the generals imposed the repressive measures designed to restore the status quo ante, however, the opposition actually grew more confident in its ability to take on the regime. Crucially, the opposition understood that cracks had opened up in the ruling coalition, both between the monarchy and the military and inside the military itself. The mistaken belief that King Bhumibol supported Thailand's democratization, in particular, was critical to the growing confidence exhibited by the opposition, above all the students, in their ability to challenge the Three Tyrants.

It took about a year for the students to muster the strength, but, when they did, Thailand's first genuine mass movement took shape rapidly, fuelled by the continuing deterioration in the country's economic situation. The first major campaign launched by the National Student Centre of Thailand (NSCT) was a boycott of Japanese goods, complete with a well-attended march staged in November 1972, in defiance of martial law. A little over a month later, after the promulgation of a new interim constitution modelled on Sarit's 1959 charter, the students forced the government to withdraw an order designed to bring the judiciary under tighter regime control. Another major success for the student movement came in June 1973, when a demonstration 50,000 strong earned the reinstatement of nine Ramkhamhaeng University students and the Rector's resignation. The nine had been expelled for publishing in their magazine a satirical statement making light of two recent events: the extension of Thanom's active military post and the scandal sparked a month earlier by the crash of a military helicopter transporting a party of Narong's associates back from an illegal hunting trip at the Thung Yai Wildlife Sanctuary.

On the eve of the massive demonstrations of October 1973, Thailand was something of a tinderbox. A series of social transformations had cumulated over the previous decade, building up pressures on the regime that now approached, partly as a result of the government's own actions, a ‘threshold’ or a critical level (see Pierson Reference Pierson2004: 83–7), such that relatively minor events could trigger an explosive disruption. Aside from the students’ mobilization, 1973 had also seen intensifying labour unrest (see Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 188). The government, increasingly powerless to solve the country's economic problems, had galvanized its opposition by committing a series of missteps and by signalling weakness in repeatedly reversing itself. The mixed signals coming from King Bhumibol, who showed sympathy for the students as he sought to distance himself from the junta, were interpreted as evidence of support, particularly given that associates of the King no less illustrious than Kukrit Pramoj had taken to calling for the government's resignation (see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 423).

It was, however, Field Marshal Praphat Charusathien who detonated the explosion of anti-government sentiment. On Praphat's orders, eleven student leaders were arrested on 6 October 1973 while publicly campaigning for a ‘real’ constitution. Two more activists were arrested on similar charges over the next 48 hours. The government brushed off demands for their release, while Praphat publicly accused the student movement of sedition and communism. By then, the regime expected to be able to repress any protest that might result, but it miscalculated the willingness of members of other social constituencies, including slum dwellers, workers, and the middle class, as well as young people attending secondary and vocational schools, to support the university students. After the leadership of the movement resolved on 9 October to protest day and night until the government agreed to promulgate a new constitution within 2 months, the demonstration on the Thammasat University campus swelled to 50,000 on 11 October and 100,000 on 12 October. Faced with demands for the unconditional release of the thirteen activists, backed up by threats of ‘decisive measures’ (matrakan nai khan det khat) (see Charnvit Reference Kasetsiri, Kasetsiri and Phetchlert-anan2001: 189), the government offered bail but was turned down by the students. By the time their representatives went to inform King Bhumibol of the situation on the evening of 12 October, the crowd of protesters had grown to 200,000.

At the expiry of the ultimatum set for midday on 13 October, a crowd half a million strong streamed from Thammasat University to the Democracy Monument. The potential for a confrontation seemed to be averted that afternoon, when the King brokered a deal between the students and the military regime, which committed to free the thirteen activists and introduce a new constitution within a year. Still, thousands refused to disperse – a determination possibly hardened when the regime announced on radio that the movement harboured terrorists bent on fomenting chaos. At around midnight, the crowd was on the move again, marching to the Chitralada Palace ‘to seek the protection of royal barami’ (phuea nang ao phra barami pen thi phueng) (see Charnvit Reference Kasetsiri, Kasetsiri and Phetchlert-anan2001: 195). What happened after palace representative Vasit Dejkunjorn called on the demonstrators to disperse before dawn on 14 October remains the subject of some controversy (see Somsak Reference Jeamteerasakul2001: 72–83). What is certain is that as the students, surrounded by police, found most of the exit routes blocked, violent clashes broke out. In the hours following the incident, the Army was sent in to crack down on the demonstrators. Security forces shot their automatic weapons into the crowds in street fights all along Ratchadamnoen Avenue. Colonel Narong is said to have personally joined in, firing on protesters from a helicopter. Enraged by the repression, which claimed the lives of at least seventy-seven people, students destroyed property, attacked police stations, and set ablaze symbols of the regime like the buildings housing the Lottery Bureau and the Public Relations Department (see Klima Reference Klima2002: 62–5).

At 7.15 p.m. on 14 October, just over an hour after Thanom resigned his post as Prime Minister, the King appeared on television to decry the violence and announce the formation of a new government, led by Privy Councillor Sanya Thammasak. The effort to remove the Three Tyrants, however, was complicated by the fact that Thanom, like Phibun three decades earlier, remained the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and used the position to urge soldiers to repress those determined to destroy ‘democracy’, as well as the armed ‘communist terrorists’ (phu ko kan rai khommiunit) in their midst (see Charnvit Reference Kasetsiri, Kasetsiri and Phetchlert-anan2001: 201–2). Clashes continued until the evening of 15 October, when the palace and the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Krit Siwara, with the support of both the Navy and the Air Force, finally forced Thanom, Praphat, and Narong to resign all positions and leave the country. It was only then that the situation finally began to return to normal. At great expense of life and property, the students appeared to have won.

The biggest winner, however, was arguably King Bhumibol. The King had not wanted the situation to end as it did, with the ouster of the military regime. He had allowed the country's democratization only once it became clear that resisting change in those volatile circumstances could have done irreparable harm to the prestige of the military as well as the monarchy. It remains an open question whether the pressure that forced the Three Tyrants to leave the country could have been mustered a day or two earlier, as the King and his associates sought to broker deals that offered demonstrators only as little as necessary for them to disperse, or whether the violence of 14–15 October was actually required to aggravate the rifts inside the armed forces that rendered the departure of Thanom, Praphat, and Narong even possible. Whatever the underlying truth of the matter, King Bhumibol's public intervention and well-publicized role behind the scenes were an unqualified triumph for the monarchy. While the King was subsequently given the credit for taking down the increasingly unpopular military dictatorship almost single-handedly, the central role played by the palace in the situation's resolution underscored the institution's real power, elevating further its popularity and prestige.

While the palace's propaganda machine made sure to highlight the King's actions as those of a modern-day Ramkhamhaeng, ready to answer his children's call to resolve a dispute in the interest of justice, many of his subjects had wanted to believe that all along. The student movement had sought Bhumibol's blessing and guidance in their fight against the military regime. For at least some in the leadership, the choice may have been strategic – a way to broaden the movement's appeal, drive a wedge between the monarchy and the Three Tyrants, and inoculate the protesters from the charges of communism and anti-monarchism that would inevitably be levelled against them as an excuse for repression (see Charnvit Reference Kasetsiri, Kasetsiri and Phetchlert-anan2001: 197–8). Throughout the crisis and its aftermath, however, even the leadership of the movement appears to have been subject to a great deal of wishful thinking and confirmation bias – they wanted the King to be on their side and hence discounted words and behaviour suggesting that the ‘royal institution’ never did shift ‘its support away from the military to the people’ (Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 69).

Perhaps not surprisingly, given that even the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) shied away from attacking the monarchy, the leadership of the 1973 student movement was careful to sidestep the issue of the monarchy's power and constitutional status almost entirely. The declaration issued on 6 October 1973 by the student activists arrested by Praphat (reprinted in Thamrongsak Reference Phetchlert-anan2007: 159–60), for instance, did open by saying that ‘Thailand belongs to all the Thai people’ (Prathet Thai pen khong chao thai thuk khon) and described peace, freedom, and justice as natural rights that ‘belong to every member of the Thai citizenry in equal measures’ (pen khong prachachon chao thai thuk khon doi thao thiam kan). The movement, however, did not complement claims for popular sovereignty and equal citizenship with any criticism of the role that the monarchy had played in sanctioning military coups, in propping up corrupt military dictatorships, or in legitimizing hierarchical conceptions of the Thai nation.

The students, in fact, were far from immune to the influence of Thailand's royal nationalism. Their critique of the military government's subservience to foreign interests, for instance, was framed in the same anachronistic historical narrative that had been devised in support of the old absolutist state, which emphasised the Thai nation's centuries-old quest for sovereignty and independence (see Prajak Reference Kongkirati2013 [2005]: 293–307; 412–15). At least some within the movement, moreover, had embraced the myth of a ‘democratic monarchy’ and blamed the country's military dictatorship not on the royalist coups of 1947, 1957, and 1958, but on the actions of the People's Party in the 1930s (see Prajak Reference Kongkirati2013 [2005]: 395–444). Indeed, another declaration issued by activists calling for a constitution on 6 October 1973 (reprinted in Thamrongsak Reference Phetchlert-anan2007: 161–2) highlighted portions of King Prajadhipok's abdication statement that credited the monarchy with the transition to constitutional rule. It was as a result of the students’ appropriation of royalist thought and historiography that, as Handley (Reference Handley2006: 209) has written, the struggle came largely to centre on ‘competing claims of loyalty to nation, religion, king’. What is more, the students’ actions implicitly upheld the established notion that, while the King theoretically exercises sovereignty on behalf of the people, ‘political legitimacy [in Thailand] emanates down from the monarchy’, as opposed to ‘up from the people’ (Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 25). Even in democracy's supposed heyday, official nationalism seemed to have emerged triumphant.

Still, King Bhumibol and his associates could not have failed to notice the potential challenges that the rise of a mass movement for ‘democracy’ presented for the role of the monarchy. While the palace took much of the credit for resolving the situation, the fact remained that the students had thrice disregarded the King's exhortations to disperse. At the end of the day, it had been the students who forced Bhumibol's hand, pushing him to resolve the situation on their terms. For all the conspicuous shows of fealty made by the young demonstrators, moreover, the presence of more radical elements among them was no secret. The threat became all the more manifest as censorship was lifted, ‘overnight’, in the wake of the Three Tyrants’ departure, resulting in the proliferation of literature that previously had been (or would have been) kept out of circulation (see Anderson Reference Anderson1977: 22). While some of this literature did reflect objectives that went beyond ‘an attempt to install an American or Western-style, bourgeois-capitalist constitutional regime’ (Flood Reference Flood1975: 63), the greatest threat to the country's royalist order was not presented by the calls for socialist revolution. Rather more troubling, given its potential to capture the imagination of a far greater cross-section of Thai society, was the popular nationalism that had begun to take root among parts of the student movement in the run-up to 14 October. As Anderson (Reference Anderson1977: 23) pointed out, the popularity of works that challenged ‘the historical centrality and nationalist legitimacy of the monarchy’, exploring the ‘Thai past in categories that implicitly denied or marginalized the traditional royalist-nationalist mythology’, prefigured ‘a Copernican shift of perspective on the core element of conservative Thai ideology’.

‘Right kill left’

The toppling of the Three Tyrants brought the era of indefinite military rule to a close. Henceforth, the military would no longer be able to run the country, for any meaningful period of time, without at least the pretence of acknowledging the public's right to a basic set of political and civil liberties. The ‘real’ democracy ushered in by the massive demonstrations of 1973 proved less durable. As ever, for conservatives in the palace, the military, and civil society, the issue with the liberal-democratic regime was less its inability to solve problems inherited from years of dictatorship than the possibility it might subordinate the royalist establishment to the constitutional order, opening up the system to greater and more inclusive forms of mass participation.

The government appointed by the King to see the country through the transition presided over the introduction of a new constitution in 1974. While the constitution was more liberal than previous charters dating back to 1946, the royally appointed legislature had spent months tinkering with the draft to water down its provisions. Still, the governments in office between 1973 and 1976 struggled to manage the multiplicity of social demands that emerged from the rapid ‘contagion’ of conflict. Despite the movement's fragmentation, students continued to press their demands for greater democracy and social justice in hundreds of demonstrations. Much to the chagrin of the security establishment, the students also worked to expose human rights abuses committed by the armed forces in counter-insurgency operations, including the systematic, gruesome killings of some 3,000 villagers (the ‘Red Drum Massacre’) carried out between 1972 and 1975 in the southern province of Phatthalung (see Haberkorn Reference Haberkorn, Ganesan and Kim2013). Buoyed by the triumph of people power, workers stepped up their struggle for better pay, work conditions, and welfare benefits (see Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 187–96), while peasant groups started demonstrating throughout the country to demand guaranteed paddy rice prices, the enforcement of rent controls, land reallocations, and legal protections from exploitation (see Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 213–25; see also Haberkorn Reference Haberkorn2011: Ch. 2). Prime Minister Sanya Thammasak was proactive in his attempt to address some of the concerns put forth by workers and farmers. But if the volume of requests for government intervention quickly exceeded what any government could do in the short term, the radical content of some of the demands went well beyond what Sanya and his backers were willing to give.

Sanya's successors had to contend with an additional challenge. While the general elections held in January 1975 were among the most competitive in the country's history, the twenty-two parties that won seats in the House of Representatives were little more than electoral vehicles for politicians with a strong local base. Even the largest parties – the Democrat Party, Social Justice, and Chat Thai – were dominated by personalities whose parliamentary cliques piled intra-party factionalism on top of the legislature's extreme levels of inter-party fragmentation. After Seni Pramoj failed to earn the confidence of the House, Social Action Party leader Kukrit Pramoj was tasked to piece together a coalition government. Having realized his dream of becoming Prime Minister, however, Kukrit no longer had the option of becoming the kind of decisive ‘Thai-style leader’ he had once fancied himself. The painstaking process of accommodating such a bewildering array of parties, as well as the factions within them, eventually resulted in the formation of a sixteen-party coalition.

If previous efforts made to democratize the country had faced initial conditions that militated against the emergence of a stable democratic regime, the situation was possibly even more problematic in the mid 1970s. King Bhumibol and the increasingly militant Queen Sirikit, now at the height of their popularity, had clearly stated their preference for military rule, at least under the circumstances (for instance, see Handley Reference Handley2006: 230). The military remained strong despite the ouster of Thanom and Praphat – or perhaps because of it, in that Krit Siwara made sure to remind the public that he had personally forced the Three Tyrants to leave the country, refusing to stand idly by as demonstrators were gunned down in the streets (see Klima Reference Klima2002: 65). As conservatives in the appointed legislature were busy rewriting the draft constitution, delaying its passage, Krit consolidated his power behind the scenes, substituting his own men for Thanom and Praphat's protégés. In an attempt to establish a foothold in parliament, Krit bankrolled the campaigns of dozens of candidates running in the 1975 elections.

Whereas the period since Sarit's death had been marked by a gradual divergence in the interests of the palace and the military, the two institutions found a measure of renewed common purpose, wasting no time limiting the damage that might result from the country's democratization. The fact that, as of the mid 1970s, every country in former French Indochina had fallen to communist insurgencies only added to the growing siege mentality of conservative royalists. By 1973, the CPT's own ranks had grown to several thousand fighters, while communists were known to have infiltrated the student movement's radical wing. In the months and years thereafter, the palace and the military responded to the country's democratization by funding, training, indoctrinating, and promoting groups whose violent actions had the effect of reminding the country of just how badly it still needed the protection of its self-appointed guardians, even at the cost of sacrificing some of its hard-fought freedoms. The target constituency for this campaign was the urban middle class, whose support for the student-led demonstrations of 1973 had caused the crackdown of 14 October to backfire on the Three Tyrants.

The shifting posture of the Thai middle class resulted from a combination of factors. Its insecurities were heightened by the further deterioration in the country's economic situation, particularly as Thailand began to feel the effects of the global oil crisis, and the upheaval generated by the explosion of political participation (see Anderson Reference Anderson1977: 18). The leadership of the student movement, too, bears responsibility for alienating middle-class support, as its radical turn after 1973 placed the movement increasingly outside the mainstream of Thai society (see Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 172–6). At the same time, if these developments made the students into a target for middle-class displeasure or resentment, it was the hysteria whipped up by royalists over imaginary threats to the nation's existence that turned student leaders – as well as the leaders of trade unions, farmer organizations, and moderate leftist political parties – into legitimate targets for murder and mob violence.

The King made arguably the most significant contribution, peppering his speeches with references to ‘dangers from all sides, from within and from without’ (see Bhumibol Reference Bhumibol1979 [4 December 1975]: 36), conspiracies to ‘obliterate our country from the world map’ (see Bhumibol Reference Bhumibol1979 [4 December 1975]: 24), and the potential for political conflicts to spiral into a ‘total free for all’ (see Bhumibol Reference Bhumibol1979 [4 December 1974]: 10). The song ‘We Fight’ (Rao Su) composed by the King at the end of 1975 (see Somsak Reference Jeamteerasakul2001: 115–48) spoke of those who ‘want to destroy’ (yak tham lai) the country and ‘threats of annihilation’ (khu kha lang khot) against which the Thai people should prepare to fight to the death. Meanwhile, prominent monks with close ties to the palace, such as the infamous Kittiwuttho Bhikkhu, provided not just a religious rationale for political assassinations, suggesting that the ‘bestial types’ who would seek to destroy the nation, the religion, or the monarchy ‘are not complete persons’, but spoke openly of the merit and happiness that would accrue to the country if tens of thousands of students and communists were to be murdered, as per the duty of real Thais (see Handley Reference Handley2006: 232). Radio stations controlled by the Army added fuel to the fire, broadcasting hateful right-wing songs and rabid speeches that incited violence against leftists, students, and other ‘scum’. Even the urbane Kukrit Pramoj (cited in Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 546–7), from the height of his position as Prime Minister, proposed that those who threatened the sovereignty of the kingdom be ‘punished violently, without mercy’ (long thot phu phit yang run raeng prat chak khwam prani).

The rest of the work was done by three organizations mobilized by officials in the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC) and the Border Patrol Police (BPP). The Village Scouts (Luk Suea Chao Ban), founded in 1971, expanded into a national mass movement in 1973 and 1974, thanks to ISOC's stewardship and the royal family's patronage. The King made no secret of his involvement and support. Bhumibol wrote the organization's code of conduct, bestowed the kerchief and insignia awarded to initiates, encouraged public donations to the movement, and frequently spoke at Village Scout rallies and oath-swearing ceremonies. But if, in Handley's (Reference Handley2006: 223) words, the Village Scouts became Bhumibol's ‘private army’, the King did not disdain to participate in some of the activities of another group, the Red Gaurs (Krathing Daeng), recruited mostly from mercenaries and thugs who specialized in attacking student demonstrations and breaking strikes. Some of the King's associates, such as the aforementioned Kittiwuttho Bhikkhu and jurist Thanin Kraivichien, were involved in a third group, Nawaphon, described by its leaders as the ‘ideological right’ (see Prajak Reference Kongkirati2006: 17).

The violence unleashed by these groups started in 1974 with the murder of a Ramkhamhaeng University student leader. In the ensuing years, royalist vigilantes embarked on a sustained campaign of bombings and assassinations. The violence claimed the lives of some fifteen students, at least forty-six provincial activists associated with the Farmers’ Federation of Thailand (FFT), and leftist politicians, as well as dozens of their supporters. Another target of the violence was the liberal-democratic regime established in 1973. Aside from openly protesting against some of the progressive reforms spearheaded by Kukrit Pramoj's elected government, as well as the government's insistence on US troops leaving Thailand by March 1976, extreme right-wing groups sought to undermine the administration indirectly, by disrupting the public order it was already struggling to maintain. A constant refrain in Thailand's official ideology had been that freedom equalled anarchy and chaos. Now that the Thai people had won their freedom, royalists made sure that anarchy and chaos would not be far behind.

Previous work on the subject has emphasized the sociological significance of the rise of extreme right-wing groups in the mid 1970s, described as a ‘product of the great boom and its anxious aftermath’ (Anderson Reference Anderson1977: 20; see also Bowie Reference Bowie1997; Prajak Reference Kongkirati2006). For the purposes of this study, most interesting is what these movements reveal in terms of both elite strategy and ideology. Strategically, it has been noted that the attempt to mobilize the masses, through the Village Scouts in particular, marked a drastic departure from the earlier attempt to de-politicize and de-mobilize the population. This may well have been done, as Bowie (Reference Bowie1997: 51–2) suggests, primarily out of a sense of despair induced by the absence of good alternatives. Nonetheless, the attempt to popularize reactionary ideology proved resonant with the disaffected, the insecure middle class, and traditional elites threatened by the mobilization of workers and peasants – by some accounts, some 2 million people were involved in the Village Scouts, the Red Gaurs, and Nawaphon (see Prajak Reference Kongkirati2006: 2).⁵ Their activities, moreover, proved quite effective in isolating the student movement, in undermining the public's confidence in the democratic government, and in providing the monarchy with a fanatical base of support. On the last point, although the idea that it was the duty of ordinary Thai citizens to kill anyone who threatened or defied the monarchy had been part of the country's official nationalism since the 1910s, it was only in the mid 1970s that civilian mobs were indoctrinated and trained to actually do so. No king or military ruler in Thailand had ever ventured as far.

The 5-day initiation ritual of the Village Scouts described in Bowie (Reference Bowie1997: 183–245) provides a clear picture of the state of Thailand's official nationalist ideology in the mid 1970s. Dominating the ritual was the image of a family in which the ‘children’ (dek) owed unquestioned loyalty to their tough-loving parents – the King and Queen. Initiates were encouraged to treat each other like ‘brothers and sisters’, but this was not the ‘brotherhood’ of the French Revolution. The emphasis was in fact placed on respecting and heeding one's elders. Even the practice of reducing everyone's age to 8 or 10 years, billed as a way to induce initiates to de-emphasize their diverse backgrounds, was not designed to get them to permanently identify as equals – as was made clear when the age of each participant was restored at the end of the ritual – but in promoting equality only in their submission to father and mother. While the movement ostensibly repudiated politics, Scout leaders clearly conveyed the expectations made of a good subject. Initiates were taught to obey the commands of officials and trust in their ability to discharge their duties wisely. They should also refrain from making any demands of the government, because it was implied that privileges are best accessed through the benevolence of one's superiors, not by ‘championing universal laws equally applicable to all’ (Bowie Reference Bowie1997: 238). Scouts were advised to keep ‘unity’ under the King and Queen, without arguing, criticizing, or exhibiting excessive non-conformism. The only domain in which people were required to be politically active was in reporting suspicious behaviour to the authorities and in fighting the foreign governments, agents, and ideologies that threatened Thailand, as well as those Thai-born people placed by their political views outside the bounds of true Thainess.

Concession was made to distinctive regional identities and ethnic differences, as well as the putatively rebellious disposition of the Northeast and the Muslim South, in perpetual danger of falling into the hands of foreigners. In keeping with efforts the authorities had made more recently to secure the loyalty of regional, linguistic, and/or ethnic minorities, initiates were encouraged to be proud of their local traditions, respect those of others, and remember that all Thais were brothers and sisters regardless of their background and provenance. Clearly, all Thai nationals were presented as deserving of membership in the family, at least to the extent that they conformed to the ideological requirements set out for membership. Left unsaid was exactly where each fitted in the familial hierarchy. Indeed, the emphasis placed on preserving the status quo implied that no one should challenge social injustice, unequal treatment under the law, or ethnic discrimination – all of which promised to remain endemic, given that conservatives still regarded northeasterners and most working people as ‘stupid, poor, and sick’ (ngo chon chep) and very much expected them to stay in their place (see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 534–7). As the King put it in his 1976 birthday address, ‘what is more important than suffering itself is that you consent to suffering in order to keep unity’ (Bhumibol Reference Bhumibol1979 [4 December 1976]: 50). On the same occasion the next year, he suggested that, instead of seeking redress for their ‘discontentment’, which would lead to chaos and disunity, the Thai people should obtain ‘satisfaction’ simply by ‘get[ting] rid of their dissatisfaction’ (Bhumibol Reference Bhumibol1979 [4 December 1977]: 72).

The situation deteriorated rapidly after Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj announced the dissolution of the House of Representatives in January 1976, in advance of a no confidence vote he had seemed destined to lose. The campaign leading up to elections in April 1976 was marred by unprecedented levels of violence, in which some thirty people were killed as a result of terroristic bombings, grenade attacks on campaign rallies, and assassinations of some of the canvassers, candidates, and leaders of leftist parties. The violence was the work of the Red Gaurs and Nawaphon, but was encouraged by the right-wing politicians associated with Chat Thai as well as the renegade, extreme faction of the Democrat Party led by Samak Sundaravej, a close advisor and confidant to Queen Sirikit. Chat Thai leader and Defence Minister Praman Adireksan launched the party's campaign with the slogan ‘RIGHT KILL LEFT’. Posters appeared in Bangkok screaming that ‘all socialists are communists’, while a smear campaign was conducted nationwide to accuse leftists and moderates of communism and republicanism. Even politicians with unimpeachable royalist credentials, such as the brothers Pramoj and members of the Democrat Party like Chuan Leekpai, came to be accused of being communists (Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 269). In a climate of hysteria, Village Scout initiations skyrocketed (see Bowie Reference Bowie1997: 23).

The April 1976 election produced a less fragmented legislature. While almost as many parties (nineteen) won seats in the House, the three largest (Democrats, Chat Thai, and Social Action) drastically increased their representation at the expense of smaller groups and leftist parties. While more than doubling his party's contingent in the House, Kukrit forfeited his eligibility to serve as Prime Minister after losing his own seat to Samak. The reins of government were taken over by Seni, who led a fractious four-party coalition. Its stability was compromised by conflicts that pitted much of the Democrat Party against its own extreme flank, which was tied to the Village Scout movement (see Bowie Reference Bowie1997: 110), as well as Chat Thai, whose leaders Praman Adireksan and Chatichai Chunhavan were involved in the Village Scouts and the Red Gaurs.

Within weeks of the election, Army Commander-in-Chief Krit Siwara died unexpectedly. His death provided an opening for the remnants of the Thanom-Praphat faction, as well as military men close to the leaders of Chat Thai and the Queen (see Morell and Chai-anan Reference Morell and Samudavanija1981: 267–73). In mid August, Praphat returned to Thailand, ostensibly to receive medical treatment, but was forced to leave days later, after clashes left two students dead and scores injured. On 19 September 1976, Thanom himself returned, sporting the robes of a Buddhist monk, and was ordained at Wat Boworniwet. The King and Queen made a highly publicized visit to the temple, which was guarded around the clock by the Village Scouts and the Red Gaurs. As the controversy unfolded, Seni resigned and attempted to put together a new coalition that excluded Chat Thai, but he had to backtrack after facing the King's opposition. The new cabinet sworn in on 5 October was based on the old coalition, minus two members of the extreme wing of the Democrat Party – Samak, who had travelled to Singapore to convey to Thanom the royal family's approval of his return (see Handley Reference Handley2006: 234), was among those excluded. In response, the Village Scouts took to the streets to demand that the government drop three progressive Democrats from the executive.

If, as some have suggested (see Thongchai Reference Winichakul, Keyes and Tanabe2002: 249), Thanom's return was a deliberate provocation, it produced the intended effects. On 24 September, after days of protests, two workers caught passing out handbills against the former dictator were found beaten to death and hanged in Nakhon Pathom. It was revealed soon thereafter that the murders had been the work of the police. On 4 October, students at Thammasat University staged a symbolic protest to demand justice for the killings with a performance that featured the mock hanging of a student. Extreme right-wing newspaper Dao Sayam seized on the resemblance between the student-actor and Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, accusing the students of having hanged the prince in effigy. The subheading under the front-page title ‘Country Outraged!’ (Phaendin dueat!) was: ‘The NSCT stomps on the heart of the entire Thai nation’ (Sun…yiap hua chai thai thang chat). As students continued their protests at Thammasat, thousands of Nawaphon, Red Gaurs, and Village Scouts converged on the campus to avenge the affront. Some of them were told that the students planned to attack Wat Boworniwet (see Bowie Reference Bowie1997: 26), an idea Queen Sirikit had floated days earlier (see Thongchai Reference Winichakul, Keyes and Tanabe2002: 248), and that the students harboured Vietnamese agents (see Puey Reference Ungphakorn1977: 10), an idea King Bhumibol had hinted at over the previous year (see Somsak Reference Jeamteerasakul2001: 135), adding to the fabricated insult against the monarchy imminent threats to religion and the nation's sovereignty. Egged on via Army radio, royalist vigilantes and police had the campus surrounded after midnight on 6 October. While the police were under orders to disperse the 4,000 or 5,000 students and arrest their leaders, the message conveyed in radio broadcasts to the Village Scouts and the Red Gaurs was simply: ‘Kill them…kill them.’

The siege of Thammasat University followed a similar score as the other massacres of civilians that have taken place in Thailand over the past 40 years. Heavily armed officials from the Royal Thai Police and the Border Patrol Police, in concert with the vigilantes who had answered the call to protect ‘Nation, Religion, King’, attacked the campus with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons. The students defended themselves as best they could, their guards reaching for pistols they had started carrying months earlier after their demonstrations had come under attack. After dawn, some of the NSCT leaders were arrested, having been lured out of the campus by empty promises of a negotiation with the Prime Minister. The students offered to surrender, but found all exits blocked by militants and security forces. At 7.30 a.m., on the pretext that the students were heavily armed, permission was given to the police to ‘free fire’, supposedly in ‘self-defence’.

It is then that the horror for which 6 October 1976 is remembered took place. As the Border Patrol Police called up from Hua Hin's Camp Naresuan stormed the campus, right-wing militants seized a number of unarmed students who were either in police custody or attempting to disperse. Some were shot and hanged from trees, where frenzied mobs cheered the mistreatment of their corpses. Some were tortured to death or burned alive. The police for the most part stood by as the lynchings and mutilations stretched on for hours, in broad daylight (for a detailed timeline, see Puey Reference Ungphakorn1977). Officially, forty-six people died, including two police officers, although it has long been speculated that the casualties may have exceeded one hundred. That evening, it was announced that a new military junta, the National Administrative Reform Council (NARC), had seized power and abrogated the constitution. The coup was justified on the usual grounds, but the junta's statements went so far as to appropriate, almost word-for-word, the Dao Sayam headline from the day before, accusing the students of having ‘stomped on the hearts of the entire Thai nation’ through their act of lèse majesté (see NARC Reference Phetchlert-anan2007 [1976]: 166).

The government formed after the coup was led by a civilian – the former justice of the Supreme Court and palace favourite Thanin Kraivichien. The new strongman was empowered by the new constitution to exercise near-absolute rule, checked only by an appointed legislature packed with military and public administration officials. The new government relentlessly pursued leftists as well as anyone left clamouring for a return to democracy. Thousands of students and intellectuals fled the country or retreated to the jungles – joining the ranks of the communist insurgency. Possibly as many as 8,000 were arrested, and many held without charge because police could now detain people thought to be a ‘danger to society’ (phai sangkhom). Eighteen student leaders were brought before military tribunals to face charges of treason. Under the strict censorship regime imposed by Thanin, secondary schools and universities were forbidden from discussing politics; the police searched libraries, bookstores, and private collections for newly banned literature, some of which went up in flames in ‘great Nazi-style public book-burnings’ (Klima Reference Klima2002: 87). Thanin speculated that it would take another 12 years before the Thai people could be made ready for any form of democracy.

A month after the massacre, speaking at a Village Scout oath-swearing ceremony in Chonburi, King Bhumibol showed no sign that the events of 6 October had given him any cause for self-reflection. The King praised the Scouts for, among other things, ‘recognizing what's good’ (hen khwam di), as well as their essential role in defending the nation. Despite what had happened just weeks earlier, the King reminded initiates of their duty to join other units from nearby areas whenever a situation presenting a danger to the nation required their vigilante activities (see Bhumibol Reference Bhumibol1977 [9 November 1976]: 232). Still far from exhibiting any contrition or regret, moreover, the King explained in his New Year's address that ‘the people had made it clear what needed to be done’ and that, given that clear statement, it was imperative to ‘bring about what needed to be done’, despite the hardships it entailed (Bhumibol Reference Bhumibol1977 [31 December 1976]: 280). Earlier that month, he had told an audience of high-ranking military officers that the country could not afford the luxury of quarrels and dissent in dangerous times. The King added that, if Western newspapers insisted on calling Thai military generals ‘dictators’, it was the military's responsibility to make sure it would be a ‘good dictatorship’, given that ‘the Thai military has never ruled dictatorially in the manner of Western dictators’ (Bhumibol Reference Bhumibol1977 [14 December 1976]: 275).

A legacy of violence

The conservative ‘revolution’ carried out by Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat engineered a profound transformation in what could be called Thailand's ‘material constitution’. Accompanying the reorganization in the workings of the regime, the expansion of the state's capacity and territorial reach, and the adjustments made to the composition and structure of the ruling coalition was the redefinition of the nationalist ideology that provided the system's legitimacy, reflected in a notion of ‘Thainess’ that mixed elements of the official nationalism conceived under the absolute monarchy with the same preoccupation for the state's role in enforcing social conformity that had distinguished the first Phibun government. Also designed to maximize the regime's legitimacy were the developmental economic policies, financed by the infusion of foreign funds, which set in motion a thoroughgoing transformation of Thai society, resulting in the integration of all peripheries in the market economy, as well as rising levels of income, education, industrialization, and urbanization.

Few of the innovations introduced in the wake of the 1958 coup survived, intact, the era of mass politics. Indeed, just as the absolutist regime founded by King Chulalongkorn in the late nineteenth century ultimately succumbed to the social transformations set in motion by the rise of an absolutist state (see Kullada Reference Mead2004), so were the structural foundations of the regime established by Sarit undermined by the effects of measures whose purpose had been to bolster the regime's stability (see also Thak Reference Chaloemtiarana2007 [1979]: 227). The passage of a semi-democratic constitution in 1968 triggered a sequence of events that would repeat itself several times in the ensuing decades. The resulting intensification of demands for greater political inclusion was met with a conservative reaction designed to restore the pre-1968 status quo, followed in turn by the mobilization of popular forces opposed to the restoration. The massive demonstrations and failed government crackdown of 14 October 1973 aggravated pre-existing divisions within the ruling coalition, eventually inducing the monarchy and the military to cut their losses and give in to demands for the country's democratization, albeit in a way that permitted unelected institutions to remain in control of the transition process.

Thailand's democratization, however, almost immediately led to the renewed intensification of challenges from below, followed by a new conservative reaction aiming to restore a form of dictatorship as repressive as the one in place before 1973. Confronted with the threat to its power presented by the liberal-democratic regime that took shape after 1973, as well as the threat to its legitimacy presented by the diffusion of popular nationalist ideas, the country's royalist establishment unleashed a wave of vigilante violence that culminated in the student massacre and military coup of 6 October 1976, followed shortly thereafter by the establishment of a ‘virtual theocracy’ (see Streckfuss Reference Streckfuss2011: 213), centred on the monarchy, that promised to restore the ‘freedom from politics’ said to have characterized the period under Sarit. With the fall of Thanin Kraivichien's dictatorship in October 1977 – rooted, once more, in the combination of intra-elite divisions and popular dissatisfaction with the new regime's extreme repression – the workings of ‘Thai-style democracy’ or ‘Democracy with the King as Head of State’ underwent a new series of adaptations. Designed to ensure the continuity of the royalist order, by means of tempering the system's authoritarianism, the new set of liberal-democratic reforms granted in the late 1970s set the stage for the cycle to repeat itself yet again.

Owing, in part, to the successive rounds of political struggle it experienced since the death of Field Marshal Sarit, Thailand is no doubt a very different country today from the one it was five decades ago. Still, the legacy of Sarit's conservative revolution is unmistakable in the political crisis into which the country descended with the military coup of 19 September 2006. Beyond the King's cult of personality and extra-constitutional status, the most enduring legacy of the period is the persistence, among royalists, of a world view that conceives the national community in hierarchical as opposed to egalitarian terms. What is left of ‘Thai-style democracy’, in turn, still functions as a form of ‘structural violence’ (see Galtung Reference Galtung1969: 171; for a passing reference, see Saichol Reference Sattayanurak2005: 512), because the persistence of (informal) disparities in citizenship status also serves to perpetuate inequalities in income and opportunity far beyond what is strictly unavoidable, given current levels of development and the workings of a market economy (for an overview, see Hewison Reference Hewison2014). Among royalists, moreover, the idea that direct, physical violence against those who challenge ‘Nation, Religion, King’ is a matter of civic duty or religious merit, or should at any rate be exempt from legal prosecution, is alive and well. Indeed, to the extent that its primary function – aside from its crude reduction of ‘Thai’ to ‘royalist’ – is to provide ‘cultural’ justifications for the forms of direct and structural violence that guarantee the power and privilege of a small minority of ‘good people’, the official ideology of Thainess lives on, above all else, as a form of ‘cultural violence’ (see Galtung Reference Galtung1990: 291).