Infiltrating Society opens up new and valuable perspectives on three concerns central to serious understanding of modern Thailand. The first of these concerns is the means by which the military in fact involves itself in the country's politics and governance. The second concern is the specific challenge posed to Thai democracy by the military's employment of those poorly understood means. The last concern is Bangkok's relationship with the Thai provinces—and by extension the country's and society's historically fraught quest for and contest over what, with apologies to modernization theorists of yore, it is appropriate to call national integration.

The closing years of the reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej and the opening years of that of his successor King Vajiralongkorn have aroused renewed interest in relations between Thailand's military and its monarchy. Attention has focused above all on the inactivity to which King Bhumibol's infirmity condemned him during the last years of his life and its consequences for the partnership of palace and Army, on the loyalty to the royal institution of the high command of that latter force, on the apparent strength or weakness of various senior officers’ ties to King Vajiralongkorn, and on the new king's decision to assume direct control of certain units of the country's military.

Puangthong Pawakapan denies the importance of none of these foci. But she argues in Infiltrating Society that an effort to understand the bonds between military and monarchy demands that we look well beyond coup plots hatched among senior officers in Bangkok and those same officers’ extravagant poses of loyalty to a notionally timeless and essential Thai monarchy. For the bonds between soldier and sovereign in recent history have in fact owed much to the era of counterinsurgent operations—focused on the perceived security threat of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) and undertaken above all in rural and even remote reaches of the Thai provinces—from the 1960s into the 1980s. At levels both institutional and personal, rural counterinsurgency brought monarchy and military into close and sustained collaboration.

While violence and coercion most marked Thai counterinsurgency, it was not in the main their use that gave rise to this collaboration.

In 1959, Aguedo F. Agbayani of Pangasinan introduced to the Philippine Congress a bill “designed to prevent the growth of the power and influence of the military in this country, in order to spare our country from the tragic experiences of our Asian neighbors, recently in Burma and Thailand, where military dictatorship has marred their beautiful history” (Republic of the Philippines, House Bill 2220 [1959], quoted in Berlin 2008, p. 97).

Congressman Agbayani evidently had the keen sense of connections between the Philippines and the rest of Asia not uncommon among his countrymen in the post-war period. His reference to Burma, today's Myanmar, concerned the military's non-violent assumption of power in the country in October of the preceding year and to Chief of the General Staff Ne Win's consequent service as premier at the head of a “caretaker government” (Nakanishi 2013, pp. 84–88). In Thailand, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat had staged coups d’état in September 1957 and again in October 1958 (Thak 2007, pp. 78–80). Of course, Agbayani could not know that, following elections in early 1960, Ne Win would return power to a civilian government in Rangoon, only to mount a coup of his own in March 1962 and thus to initiate long-term military control of Burma, or that military rule in Bangkok was destined to last another fourteen years, until October 1973. These developments and their legacies account for the publication of the present volume, treating the same two states whose examples troubled Aguedo Agbayani sixty years ago.

The late Donald Berlin called attention to the congressman's 1959 bill in his landmark study of civil-military relations in the Philippines during the decades preceding President Ferdinand E. Marcos's declaration of martial law in September 1972 (Berlin 2008). It was the contention of that study that—contrary to received wisdom, despite the absence of direct military control of the government in Manila, but very much as in other Southeast Asian states and societies—“military influence in Philippine state and society historically ha[d] been substantial” (Berlin 2008, p. 140). At the same time, the specific forms of that influence during the 1946–72 period proved varied.

The coup d’état staged by Thailand's military under the leadership of army commander General Prayut Chanocha on 22 May 2014 inaugurated the country's longest period of naked dictatorship in half a century.

Even before the duration of this spell of authoritarian rule in Bangkok became clear, other factors had already distinguished the 22 May putsch and its aftermath. For one, the campaign of political repression and ideological transformation launched by the self-proclaimed National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO, Khana raksa khwamsangop haeng chat) junta that seized power in the coup represented a notable break with what had followed Thai coups of the recent past. Above all, that campaign made this coup very different from the coup of 19 September 2006, which had ousted Thaksin Shinawatra from the premiership, and it left many observers of Thai affairs concerned that the junta was determined to entrench long-term military domination of the country and its politics.

A second factor shaped observers’ understandings of the NCPO, of its project and of the prospects for the success of that project from early on. Even at the time of the junta's seizure of power, it was evident that the end of the long life and long reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej was near. In the event, the king passed away, at the age of eighty-eight, on 13 October 2016, after seventy years as Thailand's sovereign. His son Vajiralongkorn succeeded him, fully four and a half decades after being designated crown prince (Handley 2006, p. 249).

In social, political, cultural, economic, institutional, demographic and other terms, the Thailand that the new king inherited was a different country from that of 1946, from that of the decades of counter-insurgency in which his father had redefined the role of the Thai monarchy, from that of the heyday of Bhumibol's reign in the 1980s and 1990s, and even from that which had first elected Thaksin to the premiership in January 2001. The events of the decade and half since that election had left the NCPO, a segment of the Thai military, more broadly and a number of civilian interests that backed the junta and its seizure of power determined to pursue a certain vision of Thailand's political and social orders.

Introduction: Wat Thepsirin, 12 November 2006

On the clear, sunny afternoon of 12 November 2006, a sliver of Bangkok's great, good, and merely loyal gathered at Wat Thepsirintharawat Ratchaworawihan to participate in the royally sponsored cremation rites for General Kriangsak Chomanan. Thailand's prime minister during 1977–80, Kriangsak had passed away in late 2003. Three years on, his cremation offered a rare, even reassuring moment of calm and order during a year of disorientating and discouraging developments for Thailand.

Thais present at Wat Thepsirin included a number of those who had shaped recent history. Former Foreign Minister Air Chief Marshal (Retired) Siddhi Savetsila attended the cremation. So did former Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai and several of the leading technocrats of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dhanin Chearavanont of the Charoen Pokphand (CP) Group was also present — perhaps in recognition of Kriangsak's engagement with the People's Republic of China, where CP was an important early foreign investor, during his tenure as premier.

For all their reminders of yesteryear, the rites had a particularly timely aspect, too. Not least, they came less than two months after a military coup in Bangkok, executed on 19 September 2006. In his time, Kriangsak had been no stranger to coups. He was a leading participant in the October 1976 coup that ended Thailand's three-year experiment with open democratic politics. A year later, the extreme rightist orientation of judge Thanin Kraivixien's government led Kriangsak to lead a further coup, this time without prior royal approval, and to assume the premiership himself. During his years in office, Kriangsak moved to limit the political influence of the rightwing, pro-monarchist mass movement, the Village Scouts. Determined to place the Thai monarchy truly above politics and convinced of the need for a systematic approach to the challenges facing the country, he consulted with the King only minimally. This determination is said to have earned him the lasting dislike of the palace.

With no member of the royal family present, and in the King's stead, Privy Council president General (Retired) Prem Tinsulanonda presided over the 12 November cremation rites. His role was not without irony.

The military coup d’état of 22 May 2014 brought enforced quiescence to Thailand. This quiescence contrasted with the turmoil of the preceding decade. That turmoil included protests against the Thai Rak Thai Party government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra starting in late 2005, his ouster in a coup in September 2006, the return of a pro-Thaksin party to power in elections held in December 2007, and the removal by means of judicial processes of two premiers from that party in the closing months of 2008. It also brought about Thaksin's August 2008 flight into exile to escape corruption charges, his “Red Shirt” supporters’ disruption of the ASEAN Plus Three and East Asian Summits hosted by Democrat Party Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva in April 2009, and protests against the Abhisit government whose quelling brought the greatest loss of life in civil conflict in Thailand for many decades during April and May 2010. While the triumph of the Phuea Thai Party in the elections of July 2011 propelled Thaksin's sister Yingluck into the premiership and ushered in relative calm, the end of 2013 and the first half of 2014 witnessed a campaign of demonstrations against her government and led, finally, to the 22 May coup.

The years since 2005 have also seen Thailand, long viewed as one of the great successes of Cold War-era “nation-building” not only in Southeast Asia but also in the post-colonial world more generally, emerge as a bitterly divided society. It seemed to become, suddenly, a country debilitated by disagreements over fundamental questions concerning its social order, standards of political legitimacy and basic institutions. These disagreements often took the form of feelings — blind hatred on one side, unwavering loyalty on the other — toward the unquestionably transformational figure of Thaksin. But their origins predated Thaksin's 2001–6 premiership by decades. Their bases lay in developments broader than the policies and conduct that defined that premiership. For the same developments that long accounted for Thailand's image of harmony, prosperity and success also explain its crisis of the last decade. These developments date to a period of just a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. • Amendment of the Thai constitution of 2007, a charter drafted under the supervision of the putschists who seized state power in Thailand in September 2006, numbered among the promises made by Yinglak Shinawatra and her Phuea Thai party in their campaign for the July 2011 general elections.

2. • To date, however, the Yinglak government has proved unable to fulfil that promise.

3. • In 2012, Thailand's Constitutional Court thwarted its initial effort to amend the charter. This year, the government has launched a second effort, once more under the close scrutiny of that court. The ongoing struggle over constitutional amendment in Thailand reflects the paradoxes of Thai constitutionalism.

4. • Those paradoxes suggest that the framing of a durable constitution for Thailand must await the resolution of fundamental questions about the country's political order.

INTRODUCTION

In January 2001, telecommunications tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra led his Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party to a decisive victory over the Democrat Party in polls for the lower house of the Thai parliament. At least two distinguishing features marked these polls. First, they were the inaugural general elections held under Thailand's putatively reformist constitution of 1997. In an attempt to introduce and give institutional integrity to a new order for Thai parliamentary democracy, that constitution had created a series of independent bodies. These bodies included Thailand's first Constitutional Court.

The 1997 constitution also introduced for the first time elections for the upper house of Thailand's parliament, the senate. A second feature also distinguished Thailand's 2001 elections: TRT campaigned on the basis of a series of specific policy proposals, including several relating to local development funds and lowcost access to health care. A third significant departure duly followed TRT's electoral victory: in power, the party actually moved to act on its campaign promises. Fulfilment of such promises became what would prove a lasting hallmark of Thaksinite government in Thailand.

This 1997 constitution was abrogated following the September 2006 coup d’état which ousted Thaksin from his premiership. In 2007 the military appointed the National Legislative Assembly to draft a new constitution which was subsequently approved through a referendum in 2007.