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 Democracy and National Identity in
Thailand

This book seeks to illuminate how Thai elites have used democracy as an
instrument for order and discipline. Drawing on interviews, numerous Thai
language sources, and critical theory, the author reveals a remarkable adaptation
of the idea of democracy in the Thai context. He shows how elites have drawn
on Western political theory to design projects to create modern citizens.
Connors argues that it is possible to see the idea and practice of elite liberal
democracy in Thailand, and elsewhere, as a key ideological resource in the
project of securing hegemony over undisciplined populations. In this perspective
the ideas of civil society, civic virtue, social capital and democracy itself are all
part of the weaponry deployed in an effort to create ‘good citizens’, who act as
guardians of the elite-defined common good.
The book will be fascinating reading for Southeast Asia specialists, and
researchers on democratization, national identity and the politics of Thailand.

Michael Kelly Connors is Lecturer in International Relations at La Trobe

University, Melbourne. He has written articles for journals such as Democratization,
the Journal of Contemporary Asia and Thamyris, an International Journal of Feminist
Inquiry.
 RoutledgeCurzon Research on Southeast Asia
Edited by Duncan McCargo
University of Leeds
Southeast Asia is a dynamic and rapidly changing region which continues to defy
predictions and challenge formulaic understandings. This series will publish
cutting-edge work on the region, providing a venue for books that are readable,
topical, interdisciplinary and critical of conventional views. It aims to
communicate the energy, contestations and ambiguities that make Southeast Asia
both consistently fascinating and sometimes potentially disturbing.
This series comprises two strands:
Rethinking Southeast Asia aims to address the needs of students and teachers, and
the titles will be published in both hardback and paperback.
RoutledgeCurzon Research on Southeast Asia is a forum for innovative new
research intended for a high-level specialist readership, and the titles will be
available in hardback only. Titles include:
1 Politics and the Press in Thailand
Media Machinations
Duncan McCargo
2 Democracy and National Identity in Thailand
Michael Kelly Connors
3 Politics of NGOs in Indonesia
Bob Sugeng Hadiwinata
4 Military and Democracy in Indonesia
Jun Honna
Democracy and National
Identity in Thailand

Michael Kelly Connors

NEW YORK AND LONDON

 First published 2003
by RoutledgeCurzon
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by RoutledgeCurzon
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection
of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 2003 Michael Kelly Connors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been applied for

ISBN 0-203-36163-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-37421-5 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-415-27230-0 (Print Edition)
For my parents, Elizabeth and Michael Connors
 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

1 Introduction: talking democracy 1

2 Making democracy mean something 5
3 Before the doctrine: from constitutional democracy to Thai-style 33
democracy
4 Developmental democracy: villages, insurgency and security 60
5 Delayed liberalism, the general will: the doctrine entrenched 92
6 Citizen King: embodying Thainess 129
7 New times, new constitution 155
8 Liberalism, civil society and new projects of subjection 184
9 Rethinking the nation in times of crisis: democracy, civic 215
engagement and community
10 Final comments 252

Select bibliography 255

Index 263
 Acknowledgements

The debts incurred in the writing of this work go back a long time. Much of the
research for this book was undertaken while I was a recipient of an Australian
Postgraduate Award. I was also the beneficiary of a three-month research
scholarship based at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the
Australian National University, where I was fortunate to discuss my work with
Craig Reynolds and Harold Crouch. Research undertaken in 2001 was supported
by a grant from the British Academy. I hope this book is some repayment for the
taxes that supported this project.
My studies into Thailand began in 1994 under the guidance of Dr Noel Battye
at the University of Melbourne. Writing a fourth-year dissertation on Thai politics,
I hit upon the idea that became the basis for this book— democrasubjection. His
encouragement of my work, and his scholarly knowledge of Thailand, are
remembered fondly. Under the supervision of Phillip Darby and John Dryzek at
the University of Melbourne, I commenced doctoral research into Thai democratic
discourse. As is the norm in these things, I rabbit-hopped from topic to topic
even before my supervisors could bat an eyelid. The broad freedom I was granted
by them provided a wonderful space to explore all the nooks and crannies that my
rather wandering research led me to. When I did finally get to write up the
research, Phillip and John proved to be hardy and critical supervisors, forcing me
to address weaknesses and strengthen my line of argument. When I went to
Thailand to conduct fieldwork in 1996–7, Prudisan Jumbala from Chulalongkorn
University kindly agreed to watch over me (a university requirement). In
between tea and aromatic pipe smoke, Ajan Prudisan politely listened as I
burdened him with questions and polemic. His apparently happy tolerance was
matched by friendly assistance in getting me access to a number of Thai political
notables. Finally, Peter A.Jackson acting as co-supervisor read a draft of the
dissertation and offered many valuable comments. Collectively, I thank all of
these intellectual mentors for their generous spirit and guidance.
What began as a dissertation became a book, and in the process I have
benefited greatly from communication with Bill Callahan and Kevin Hewison.
Both offered invaluable advice on possible improvements. I have taken up many
of their ideas. Finally, a special thanks must go to my colleague at the University
viii

of Leeds, Duncan McCargo. His energy, support and intellectual exuberance

played a considerable part in this book seeing the light of day.
It is also appropriate that the influence of Thai scholars on my understanding of
Thai democracy and politics be recognized. While the interpretations and
judgements of Thai democracy are my own, it would have been a much harder
journey without being able to read the work of Nakharin Mektrairat, Kriangsak
Chetthaphanuanit, Kasian Tejapira, Sombat Chanthonwong and Chalermkiat
Phiu-nuan, and of the highly productive Political Economy Centre at
Chulalongkorn University. One can only hope that much of the excellent work
in the Thai language will one day find a wider audience through translation.
In the course of researching and writing the book, I was privileged to befriend
a great number of people. So many were helpful that I cannot begin to thank
them all. In particular, I would like to thank the members of the Graduate
Seminars in Left and Social Theory at Chulalongkorn University, and the
members of the Kirk University Study Group, in particular Ajaans Ek, Chettha,
Praphat and Bonsung. Librarians at Chulalongkorn University and Thammasat
University helped ease the pain of locating material. Colleagues at Thammasat
University, where I taught in 1998–9, provided a friendly atmosphere for writing
up much of the research. Patamawadee Pochanukul kindly located a number of
difficult sources and answered a number of obscure inquiries. Jean-Michael Sands
kindly assisted with transliteration of Thai names. Michael Nelson provided
several articles cited in this book. He has also been a source of interesting and
friendly differences of opinion. A different version of Chapter 7 originally
appeared as ‘Political Reform and the State in Thailand’, Journal of Contemporary
Asia, 29, 2, 1999. That article was due to the promptings of Ji Ungphakon, and
reflects a number of discussions (debates!) I have had with him.
Friends have been a large part of seeing this project through. Lucy Chessar,
Theresa Wyborn, Asvin Phorugnam and John Jennings provided endless support
and refuge. In particular, Bill Calder and Graham Willett encountered endless
evenings of discussion on my research, and never once looked bored. It is
friendships such as these that make the lonely task of writing bearable. I must
offer special thanks to Kobchai, who more than anyone kept me sane and on
track throughout most of this project. His love and support sustained me. Finally,
I would like to dedicate this book to my parents Elizabeth Connors and Michael
Connors.
Despite the efforts of myself and the support of so many, errors of
interpretation and fact may remain. It is customary to assume responsibility for
these: I do so willingly.
M.K.C.
Leeds, March 2002
 1
Introduction
Talking democracy

Sometime ago the late Kukrit Pramoj, one-time Prime Minister and wit, observed
that ‘The Swiss do not talk about democracy or politics at all, but they have
democracy. The Thais on the other hand talk about democracy and their own
politics non-stop, but they haven’t got democracy just the same.’1 Kukrit’s aside
highlights a fascinating aspect of Thai political discourse: the existence of an endless
inquiry into the meaning and status of Thai democracy against a background of
Brahman divinity in the Chakri Court, acts of seemingly compulsive vote-buying
by politicians, and coups d’état by military cliques, seemingly ‘in accordance’ with
the ‘general will’ of the people.
Kukrit was right: democracy is endlessly talked about. From pontificating
newspaper columnists to scripted radio instruction on being a good democratic
citizen, talk of democracy is ubiquitous. Remarkably, democratic instruction goes
on whether an elected or unelected government is in office. Even in remote
villages, government officials utter Abraham Lincoln’s dictum that democracy is a
system of government for the people, by the people and of the people. However,
Kukrit’s claim that Thailand had ‘no democracy’ was contrary to the belief held
by many intellectuals who worked close to state agencies and envisaged a
significant role for these agencies in advancing political development. These
intellectuals did not view democracy as a final product, but as part of a
developmental project from which the state could draw legitimacy.
Now while ‘democracy’ has been utilized to enhance regime legitimacy in
Thailand, it is often considered as having played second fiddle to ‘development’
and ‘security’. In a fascinating account of the use of political language in
Thailand, Chai-Anan Samudavanija and Kanok Wongtrangan found that
references to ‘democracy’ in coup announcements between 1932 and 1981 were
relatively rare and, when made, were generally negative.2 Work of this kind tends
to downplay the importance of democratic ideology in Thailand. This book shows
how democracy has been integral to the general developmental metaphor that
actors in the Thai state use to construct national ideology and ‘attempted’
hegemony. Let me now anticipate some of the arguments that follow.
In the Thai context, statist ideas on democracy transcend the limited notions of
democracy that dominate Western political science, with its focus on procedures
and form. Instead there is a reprise of traditional themes, with democracy
2 INTRODUCTION

conceptualized as an ideal psychological, almost spiritual, condition of the people

and their capacity to be self-governing. Notably, when authoritarian governments
ruled they extolled a democracy far more idealistic than actually existing
democracies. In part, the ideal served as a delaying mechanism, functioning to
buffer state power against other claimants. As much as the spectre of communism
haunted the Thai state in the 1960s and 1970s, one might say that it was the
mostly unnamed ghost of J.S.Mill and developmental democracy, deployed by
Thai democracy educators, that haunted the people. Indeed, the implementation
of a moral project of rational citizenship has been a common feature of most
regimes, military or civilian. More recently, Thailand’s liberal democratic
transition has been accompanied by new programmes of civic education by non-
state activists, educators and academics. This book is an attempt to make sense of
these projects.
Chapter 2 contains a consideration of how democracy and democratization are
loaded concepts, dependent on an ideological reading of the ‘West’ and how
these readings have been deployed in understanding Thai politics. Taking up the
suggestion of Arturo Escobar to consider ‘development’ as a discursive formation
that aims at the production of ‘objective’ knowledge to aid strategies of
intervention,3 the book focuses specifically on political development and its
relationship to strategies of hegemony and government. This aspect of Thai
politics has been largely neglected because much academic literature on Thailand
is tied to what Paul Cammack has called the doctrine of political development, a
doctrine that neutralizes questions relating to power and domination.4 This
book’s organizing theme is that democracy has been deployed as a disciplining
practice. In making a case for this position, I indicate how Gramscian and
Foucauldian insights on hegemony and governmentality help in the critical
exploration of democracy.
This book centres on illuminating the hegemonic and governmental role that
‘democracy’ has played in Thailand. This is studied first in the deployment of
democracy by authoritarian regimes, and second in the context of Thailand’s
political liberalization. My central focus is neither the sociological generalization of
the forces that have structured Thailand’s democracy through its phases from
statist to liberal moments, nor the institutional modalities of each form of
democracy. Rather, foregrounded is the articulation of ideological moments of
democracy, that is, its place in a discursive struggle over how to signify the
political by forces in the state.
Chapter 3 considers the period from the overthrow of the absolute monarchy
to the mid-1960s. It describes how the broad ideological horizon opened up by
the overthrow of the absolute monarchy shifted modes of legitimation in
Thailand. Chapters 4 and 5 present extended accounts of statist democracy from
the 1960s to the 1990s. I argue that there was a coherent articulation of
democracy within the problem of development. These chapters present a close
reading of the historical contexts that threw up political development notions of
democracy in Thailand. In this period liberal democracy, as a project to be
 INTRODUCTION 3

realized, became a de facto aspect of national ideology, and functioned in hegemonic

practice. Chapter 6 studies the attempt to articulate Thai identity and the
monarchy to democracy, an important if not central component of the
disposition-creating aspect of Thai democratic discourse.
Chapters 7, 8 and 9 are concerned with making sense of contemporary
ideological shifts in Thai politics. Having established the general contours of statist
notions of democracy in the preceding chapters, greater focus is given in the last
chapters to contestations of democracy and citizenship. The shift is warranted by
my desire to highlight the fact that new hegemonic strategies and contestations
have come to occupy the discursive spaces opened up by the process of
democratization in Thailand. Rather than suggest plans for further entrenchment
of the democratic rules of the game—the focus of most writings—I focus on the
emergent disciplinary democratic imaginary in Thailand. In doing this, I draw on
Kasian Tejapira’s contribution to understanding the basic liberal-globalizing/
communitarian split in Thai political discourse.5 In my treatment of these two
broad trends I note, like Kasian, that these strategies are linked to alternative
conceptions of the state, and that they are likely to direct political debate into the
future. However, the very real contestation between them is constrained by a
shared political liberalism and a common commitment to the triadic national
ideology of ‘nation, religion and monarchy’.
More specifically, in Chapter 7 I present an argument for rethinking Thailand’s
so-called ‘People’s Constitution’ as an attempt at embedding liberal imperatives in
the Thai state. I present an extended analysis of the social forces and agendas
behind the new constitution. On the basis of the background material presented
in that chapter, Chapter 8 studies the position of liberalism in the new democratic
imaginary. The principal argument made in that chapter pertains to the
ideological shift that recentres liberalism as a present possibility, rather than a latent
condition. Chapter 9 considers the position of progressive democratic discourses
located in NGOs and in the theorizing of intellectuals, in relation to the
hegemonic project of the new liberalism. It considers the manner in which
progressive notions of democracy, development and community are being
appropriated and inserted into new disciplinary imaginings of the Thai nation.
The thematic unity of this book is comprised of the critical argument that both
liberal and statist moments of democracy in Thailand were projects of what may
be termed ‘democrasubjection’: the subjection of people to imaginary forms of
their own rule. The notion of ‘democrasubjection’ has a broader application to
any time and place where the terms of democratic political discourse are
ideologically directed, and involves making government possible in conditions
where those who are governed are subject to practices of power that are
exploitative and interest-driven. This book is one exploration of the hegemonic
work that democracy does.
4 INTRODUCTION

Notes

1 The Nation, 18/9/78, p. 2.

2 Chai-Anan Samudavanija and Kanok Wongtrangan, Phasa thangkanmeaung (Political
Language), Bangkok: Samakhom sangkhomsat haeng prathet thai, 1983, pp. 36, 58–
63.
3 Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third
World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 5–6.
4 Paul Cammack, Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World, London: Leicester
University Press, 1997.
5 Kasian Tejapira, ‘Globalizers vs Communitarians: Post-May 1992 Debates among
Thai Public Intellectuals’, paper presented to Annual Meeting of the US Association
for Asian Studies, Honolulu, 11–14 April 1996.
 2
Making democracy mean something

In everyday speech and assumption, Thailand and its people are often taken as
natural fact, as if the ‘Thai people’ have always existed. Yet no national people, as
such, exist. There is no conscious collective Thai actor, nor is there a sociological
entity that may be termed the ‘Thai people’. Indeed, it has become commonplace
in academic studies to note that the attempt to form a national people involves
multiple processes of discursive construction that are never quite successful at
encompassing their intended targets. Thailand, in that sense, is not particularly
unique. From the fiction of a Thai and Buddhist people to the very physical
existence of the land, one can uncover a history of construction.
From David Streckfuss we learn how the idea of an all-encompassing ‘Thai
people’ emerged in an encounter with Western anthropological fetishism for race.
Faced with late nineteenth-century French attempts to expand their empire by
seeking to provide ‘protection’ to the Lao peoples then under Siamese control,
the ruling Chakri dynasty counteracted by mobilising racial categories. By
designating Lao people as ‘Thai’, the dynasty laid claim to legitimate guardianship
over them.1 We learn, from Kamala Tiyavanich, of a Bangkok elite frustrated by
the divergent and localized Buddhist practices of the regional clergy and the
subversive threat posed by wandering forest monks. Against this religious chaos,
an image of Buddhist order definable by Bangkok-centric practice and scriptural
interpretation was successfully projected.2 From Tongchai Winichakul we learn
that Siam itself was conjured in a world of power and cartography, replacing
different notions of space and sovereignty with imitations of the territorial nation-
state—or what he terms a ‘geo-body’.3 These are just a few of the critical studies
that alert us to the nonsense that is the ‘national’ essence.
If scholarly critique works to undo the essentialism of the nation myth, then
the very practices of the ‘Thai’ people place the idea of a Thai identity in the
realm of oppositional politics. In language one will find strategies that privilege
locality and dialect over standard Thai. People continue to confound attempts at
state control of religion, a key component of Thai identity. In illegal border
crossings the fixity of the national border is mocked and daily transgressed.
Perhaps most significantly of all, in the many acts of unexamined resistance that
sustain difference and dignity in daily life, the elegant invocation by authorities to
be ‘Thai’ is gently reduced to a rhetorical rubble. For those who embrace the
6 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

sentiment for difference, the phrase ‘discursive construction of national identity’ is

but a euphemism for the untold symbolic and real violence that is done in the
name of sameness. Clearly, the politics to create, appropriate or resist Thai
identity is a contested and ongoing one. If Benedict Anderson’s influential notion
of nations as imagined communities focuses on the technologies that provide the
conditions for this imagining (print media, etc.), it may be said that the fragility
and even subversive nature of imagination portends the inability of the territorial
state to ever quite succeed in the production of national homogeneity.4 Still,
states and their intellectual allies do try.
This book explores the deployment of democratic discourse and Thai identity,
as carriers of sameness, by state and non-state actors. This chapter lays down a
general orientation to this problem by first considering the disciplinary power of
‘the doctrine of political development’ and its paradoxical assumption that a
national people have to be created in order to be represented. Second, a conceptual
tool for understanding this project of sameness is elaborated. The concern is to
explore how democracy and identity are disciplinary technologies utilized for the
purposes of hegemony by forces, in and out of the state, for the construction of a
‘people-body’, an imagined body of people around which the state plans and for
whom it purportedly speaks.

Political development and order

Typically, observers of Thai politics absorb the orientation to order found in
political development studies (1960s–1970s) and its successor, democratic
transition and consolidation literature (1980s–1990s). This literature has
importance because the discourse of political development was not merely an
academic exercise, it furnished actors in the Thai state with a technical and
interpretative tool with which to design policy prescriptions for order, stability
and managed change. Further, it provided them with forms of rationality that
seemingly dispensed with neo-traditional political rationalities centred on sacred
notions of legitimate power.5 In short, political development became a discursive
formation, loosely defined, authorizing state actors to go to work on the material
resources of nation building (the people) and aim for their incorporation into
modernized institutions.6 Today, one will still find many adherents of theories of
political development in the Thai bureaucracy. This adherence is paradoxical;
privately many are despairing of ever developing democracy given the seeming
resilience, even functionality, of what they perceive as Thai-specific practices of
patronage and hierarchy. Yet despite the seeming recalcitrance of Thai politics to
‘modernity’, the bureaucracy continues to use political development ‘theory’ to
design programmes of democratic reform. Why?
Perhaps the answer lies in the utility this body of thought has for governors.
Political development theory has as its object the problem of order over people
when the dawn of modernity breaks over an alleged pre-modern past. In the
name of managing change, varied institutional, cultural-socializational and
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 7

leadership strategies are deployed by state actors. This seeking of order brings into
being an ensemble of concepts discursively unified by the object-focus such
concepts strategically name and seek to transform. Within this discursive
formation a way of speaking emerges that sets the subject, the developer,
authorized by this discourse, into a relationship of leadership, guidance and
surveillance over the mute-rational object of the ‘people’. Yet it is characteristic of
political development discourse that it aims to make the object (the people-body)
speak the language of modernity, to embody the principles of its teleology in the
creation of a speaking subject—the tempered democratic citizen. Within this
discourse lies a coherent strategy of citizen construction, which became a
component of the broader hegemony sought by the state. This book attempts to
show different moments of this order, from the period of statist democratic
discourse to the liberal-communitarian discourse of more recent times.
The development ethos long preceded the sub-discipline of political
development and can, for instance, be traced back to imperial trusteeship and
colonial administration.7 However, one distinctive aspect of political
development literature is that it engaged with Third World elites as partners in
the quest for modernization. It addressed them as policy makers and planners,
holders of the key to order and stability, without which the fragile world of post-
colonial states would break up or be run over by the ‘communist menace’.
More specifically, the import of political development discourse and its
application in developing countries derives from its orientation towards capitalist
modernization. It sought to provide policy makers and planners with a map on
which to strategically mark pathways to development facilitative of a capitalist
economy and, eventually, a democracy. Its distinguishing mark was the role of a
‘hyper-West’, nowhere in existence save as an idealized bundle of aspects, as a
reference point for development. This involved the attribution of ideal constructs
such as progress, individuality, enterprise and rationality to the West, and taking
these as the end point of development. This imagining of the West, or what has
been called ‘Occidentalism’, frames also the assumptions of much of the literature
on political development and democratization.8
This literature was shaped by the geo-politics of the Cold War era. In her
exhaustive study of political development literature, Irene Gendzier notes the
utility of behavioural political science to US foreign policy, especially its role in
counter-insurgency and in justifying the existence of authoritarian states as buffers
against the consequences of mobilization during modernization.9 Concerning
Thailand, Peter Bell suggests a firm relationship between Western conceptions of
Thai society and their utilization in counter-insurgency strategies.10 Bell offers the
example of research by prominent academics Herbert Phillips and David Wilson.
Phillips and Wilson, writing in the 1960s, expressed a fear that the development of
a rationalized bureaucracy in Thailand would pose dangers for regime legitimacy.
From their perspective, Thais did not seek self-determination, preferring to be led
by a government that had the ‘attributes of a strong, wise, but indulgent father’.11
It was expected that a modernized bureaucracy would not be able to fulfil what
8 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

they described as people’s traditional expectations of a paternalistic state. They

recommended, therefore, the revitalization of traditional functions of government
in which the benevolent aspect was emphasized and ritualized for the sake of
internal security.12 This work epitomized much of the entrenchment of the social
sciences in the work of counter-insurgency. This often involved mapping
managed cultural change, while proposing the retention of useful aspects of
tradition for purposes of authority and order.13
Paul Cammack, in his recent study, notes that political development theorists
attempted both theoretical elaboration and to develop a doctrine related to ‘a
transitional program for the installation and consolidation of capitalist regimes in
the third world’.14 This programme, ideologically anti-communist, required a
certain telos to rationalize its recommendations. That telos was order, conceived
as state-capacity to manage its internal and external affairs within the parameters
of a capitalist economy. Political development, then as the synonym of order—
expressed in nation building, as projects of national integration, as institution
building, as projects of normative socialization— became, in effect, the conscious
problematic from which generic themes of nationalism, democracy and identity
could be addressed as matters of social engineering and, as goals, advanced
towards by rational planning. Such planning required a knowledge of the object
to be nationalized, democratized and identified: the people. As a discourse, then,
political development was imperialist in its ambitions, cannibalizing other
discursive formations and turning them into objects of its own rationality: the
nation, identity and democracy all became rationalized by the logics of the
developmental position; they became things to be planned for. Thus the emotive
resources of the state, located in appeals to the ‘nation’ and the ‘people’, had a
parallel existence as objects for developmental experts to form. This getting to know
and manage the people brings into focus what may be termed the ‘people problem’:
that is, what forms of government in the many aspects of modernizing life can be
utilized towards the end of people-order? As it happened, this issue of
management was often directed towards the peasant and brought into being a
literature concerned with personality typologies, achievement strategies and
political socialization. By means of some behavioural alchemy, analysts from the
social sciences hoped to turn the parochial peasant into a self-conscious modern
‘man’, easily capable of change, empathy and rational choice.15
Although many authors within the political development field eschewed
notions of ideal modernity and were cautious regarding the extent to which
developing countries would ever reach such a state, rarefied versions of the West
did aid in mapping trajectories for developing countries. As will be shown in the
course of this book, the doctrine of political development provided the
modernizing elites of the Thai state, from the 1960s onwards, with a powerful
problematic from which to order and act on the ‘people problem’ in a way
productive for hegemonic ends. It would be wrong to conclude, as does Yogesh
Atal, that in Thailand ‘scattered-piecemeal research…[makes] it difficult to assess
the impact of political science in the functioning of governments’.16 Indeed, he
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 9

suggests non-utilization was likely. A study of the rationalities of government in

Thailand provides ample evidence of utilization and constant interaction between
political scientists and state actors. Political scientists were habitually eager to spell
out their role in providing the intellectual means by which to develop and bring
security to Thailand.17 Furthermore, they were among the leagues of social
scientists eager to lecture military personnel and civil servants, as well as sit on
numerous committees. By such means did their influence become dispersed
through the system.18 Although political science faculties were, and to some
extent remain, schools of public administration designed to feed students into the
expanding bureaucracy,19 in the 1960s the growing theoretical pursuit of politics
brought forth the possibility of doctrinally informed governmental practice.20
However, in estimating the relevance or impact of political science, even Thai
academics Sombat Chantornvong and Chulacheeb Chinawanno suggest that the
models taught, among them structural-functionalism, political process and political
culture, were of little relevance to the Thai context.21
The importance of political development studies, as it took root in Thailand, was
not necessarily in developing successful and applicable models. Its importance lay
in naming a particular approach to the problem of development that focused on
the difficulty of entrenching democratic rule, the contingencies of transformation,
and the requisite need for management of change centred on the capacity of the
state. Cammack’s study of Western theorists demonstrates that regardless of the
varying positions on political development, there was common agreement on the
need for certain transitional mechanisms on the path to liberal democracy, a view
shared by political scientists in Thailand and those working on Thailand. This
view was reflected in the influential work of Fred Riggs.
Fred Riggs, writing in the 1960s, refashioned notions of a prevailing
bureaucracy in Thailand into the theory of bureaucratic polity, and provided the
paradigmatic interpretation of modern Thai politics.22 Riggs shared political
development theory’s basic premise of societies being evolutionary organisms.
This organismic metaphor, as David Apter terms it, when applied to developmental
processes, ‘explains equilibrium maintenance, the capacity of systems to survive
under conditions of change by means of internal adaptation and differentiation’.23
Riggs was part of the intellectual currents justifying transitional mechanisms on
the road to modernity. Conceptualizing Thailand through the organismic
metaphor, Riggs sought to define the nature of the Thai polity so as to both
rationalize and prescribe further action in the interests of system maintenance and
adaptation. The basic problem was one of modernization: how to institute
modern governmental forms that best served the functional stability of the body
politic in moments of transition from tradition to modernity, without triggering
instability and radicalism (malintegration).
Riggs posited that the bureaucracy effectively constituted the political field.24
The bureaucratic polity drew its legitimacy not through appeals to electoral
constituencies, as he imagined happened in the West, but through the operation
of rival cliques aiming at parcels of state control.25 The layers of bureaucracy,
10 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

military and civil, were the polity’s constituency: ‘the bureaucratic apparatus,
instead of serving largely as an administrative function, became also the primary
arena of political rivalry’.26 It was, then, a system of closed inputs lacking the
institutional mechanisms of Western democracies. In this absence he located the
prime obstacle to further development:

The great obstacle to further modernization of the Siamese polity lay not in
the construction of the bureaucracy, which could surely, if adequately
directed, give effective and efficient service…. That flaw, rather, lay in the
lack of a guiding force outside the bureaucracy capable of setting its goals
and keeping its agents under effective control.27

This statement reveals the nodal point organizing much of the doctrinal work on
Thai political development: the seeking of extra-bureaucratic players to police the
functioning of an emergent liberal state.
While Riggs disclaimed Thailand as a ‘perfect example’ of the bureaucratic
polity model, others have written as if the bureaucratic polity was a defining
feature of Thai politics.28 Subsequent work within this paradigm sought to
determine whether the bureaucratic polity had been transcended by gauging the
balance of power between bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic forces.29
Characteristically, the central tenets of Riggs’ model were enriched by the
cultural incantations of various exponents. Theorists deployed a number of related
themes to explain the inability of the Thai masses to form a counterweight to the
bureaucracy: Thais were said to pursue interests vertically through patron-client
mechanisms rather than in horizontal interest groups;30 Buddhism depoliticized the
impoverished masses;31 Thais were politically apathetic, they lacked discipline and
had cultural habits of reverence which installed political deference.32 In their
analysis of the open-period of Thai politics (1973–6), David Morell and Chai-
Anan Samudavanija argued that the mass demonstrations, class polarization,
political instability and democratic contestation of that era were premature, born
of uneven economic and ideological development, a dysfunctional moment
restored, albeit brutally, by a military coup.33 In a later piece, Chai-Anan
suggested that Thais were, in the lead-up to the coup, nostalgic for an earlier era
of ‘stability and security’.34 Culture, in this manoeuvre, becomes a handy
rationalizing tool. The appeal to culture is of particular importance in the Thai
adaptation of political development theory. In this regard many of Thailand’s
most prominent political scientists attempted to work out the contours of Thai
political culture and propose means by which its inappropriateness to liberal
democracy could be addressed, as well as how to shape political institutions that
could resonate with this culture. Class struggle in this analysis is effaced and
replaced by the question of the management of political development and the
need to attend to various dysfunctional moments in the body politic.
If political culture was one axis on which political development revolved, the
other was the question of institutionalization. Questions of institutionalization,
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 11

leadership and party formation have thus accompanied developmental enquiries

into the ‘problem’ of the Thai polity.35 This was an underlying theme
accompanying the debate on whether the ‘bureaucratic polity’ was still a viable
model in the 1980s. Noting the failure of the bureaucratic polity model to explain
the high levels of extra-bureaucratic political participation in the 1973–6 period,
Pisan Suriyamongkol and James Guyot ventured that the ‘bureaucratic polity was
at bay’.36 Strengthening their argument was the military’s failure to amend the
constitution in 1983. The authors asserted that the institutionalization of
democratic processes had defined new rules of the political game.37 Chai-Anan
Samudavanija was less hopeful, suggesting that the ‘contested terrain had shifted
from state dominance to the dynamic formation of alliances among strategic
groups of which state power elites are but one element’.38 Unlike Pisan, Chai-
Anan failed to see how this represented a new polity. Characterizing the situation
as ‘semi-democratic’, as ‘Thai-style’ democracy, Chai-Anan argued that the
emerging societal forces had been co-opted into the logic of the bureaucratic
polity.39 This co-option into semi-democratic forms was presented by Chai-Anan
as an appropriate instrument of political stability, one in which the bureaucratic
and non-bureaucratic forces share power and ‘continually engage in bargaining
and adjusting their strategies in order to maximize their power’.40
More innovatively, Anek Laothamatas described the new polity as a system of
liberal corporatism: he claimed that the emergence of business in the 1980s,
politically expressed through representative associations and their work within the
Joint Public-Private Sector Consultative Committee (JPPCC), negated the
bureaucratic polity:

The political regime at work in Thailand, at least in the realm of economic

affairs, is no longer a bureaucratic polity, but not because non-bureaucratic
forces have gained power at the expense of bureaucratic forces. Instead, it is
because both forces are strong and autonomous, and the decision-making
of the regime has ceased to be monopolized by the military-bureaucratic
elite.41

The transformation had delivered Thailand to a higher developmental stage

involving the distribution of power along liberal corporatist lines.42 Clearly,
Anek’s model was simply an alternate method of analysing the rise of non-
bureaucratic forces: it remained firmly within the political development
paradigm. Anek linked his argument of liberal corporatism to a conception of
business groups as progressive forces for democratization. For Anek, business
groups are important actors in society’s struggle to escape state dominance. Unlike
theorists who sought institutional arrangements welding together old and new
social forces, Anek described a new polity. The idea of liberal corporatism forges
a key conceptual link in political development theorizing on Thailand: the liberal
corporatist polity was envisaged as the latest instalment delivered by strategic
struggle under conditions of modernization.
12 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

The most traumatic malintegrative moment since the ‘open period’ of 1973–6
was the crisis of 1991–2, emerging from the coup in February 1991. In those years
a coalition of moderate forces united to demand a democratic constitution and
the resignation of an unelected prime minister. Speaking of these events, Surin
Maisrikrod contended that the bureaucratic polity— composed of the government,
the military and the monarchy—remained resilient, due to the failure of non-
bureaucratic forces to institutionalize democratic processes to their advantage,
particularly in the realm of political party formation.43 However, within and
without the bureaucratic polity, there had been a polarization between
conservatives and reformists whose programmes for Thailand differed sharply.44
Here, Surin argued, lay the basis of the ensuing conflict. On the nature of this
contestation he commented that ‘Thailand may have entered a new era of political
radicalization which pits the old elites against the new’.45 The new elites were said
to favour bureaucratic efficiency and open competition as against the old guard’s
yearning for the status quo.46 Surin convincingly argued that a political shift had
occurred within the Thai bourgeoisie and middle class, representing a global trend
towards diminishing the role of the state and enhancing the capabilities of the
private sector.
Much of the work that appeared in the post-1992 period was concerned with
elaborating the conditions for liberal democracy and the obstacles that needed to
be overcome. Such work was characterized by similar themes: the interaction
between structures and agents, the much lauded growth of the middle class, the
question of political culture and the role of astute leadership in the transition
played by the military.47 What is significant in much of this work is the manner in
which the standard categories of political development, democracy and the
analytical couplet of ‘society and state’ are taken as given units of analysis. This
flows, of course, from its position within the genre of political development
theory. In being part of this general literature, the work also exhibits some
typically Orientalist readings of Thailand. Writers in this frame have all sought to
make sense of the Thai polity as a problem, as a lack. One of the early statements
of this current of thinking was appropriately titled ‘The Problem of Democracy in
Thailand’.48 Much subsequent work on Thai democracy has the simple status of
subtitle to this text.49 Each of the systems proposed to understand Thai politics by
different authors makes sense only in terms of what Thai politics is not: not
democratic; not fully endowed with a civil society; only partially corporatist;
endowed with vertical rather than horizontal cleavages which are expressed in
complexes of patron-client relationships. While marked by the individual styles of
its authors and their applications, the doctrine of political development emerges
forcefully in this literature. The subthemes of order and control, of dealing with
the people problem, are a spoken presence in theorists’ considerations of
institutionalization and political culture. The general categories of modernity,
development and rationality, which inhabit this literature, are discursive cloaks
hiding the fact that it is real people doing real work: ordering people towards
hegemonic ends, under the guidance of the doctrine of political development. In
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 13

more recent times, the focus of order has shifted from the state, so central to
political development theory, towards the significance of a normatively conceived
civil society in producing a stable democracy and rooting a liberal ethic. Civil
society builders are, like their predecessors, order builders. As will be shown in
the later chapters of this book, there is discernible ideological continuity between
them.
The significance of political development as a framing tool emerged in the
contradiction between the theorists’ liberal aspirations to establish procedural
democracy, and the apparently recalcitrant nature of the countries upon which a
liberal regime was to be grafted.50 However this recalcitrance was expressed—as
lack of a political culture supporting democracy, the threat of irrational mass
mobilization, the poor level of institutionalization and process—a position of
opting for less-than-liberal forms of rule was embraced. Thus authors such as
Samuel Huntington argued the need for strengthening state institutions, regardless
of their regime form, such that they have the capacity to manage and lead change;
as he succinctly put it: ‘The primary problem is not liberty but the creation of a
legitimate public order’.51
Strengthening institutions effectively meant removing them from societal
influence.52 It was expected that a series of manoeuvres would be undertaken by
the state to produce stability and order, and slowly incorporate a widening body
of competent citizens into the polity. Daniel Lerner, for example, expected that
while motivational strategies at the individual level could have results in the short
term, the payoff for civic education and socialization would take at least a
generation; he thus effectively endorsed non-democratic means of government in
the meantime to control the high expectations of the masses.53 The view here is
clear: only by painstaking foresight and clever manipulation of the resources
available could state elites hope to succeed in winning order from their
populations and be able to move towards democracy. It is this stance that
Cammack names the doctrine of political development—a doctrine for a
‘transitional programme’ towards liberal democracy and capitalism in developing
countries, with the state as the prime actor.54
Significantly, conscious of the leadership inherent in managed change, Lucien
Pye, a leading formulator of the doctrine, and supporter of authoritarian control of
information during the transitional period, explained that in mass/elite relations,
‘ruling elites of some countries are in a position essentially analogous to that of
persons employing psychological warfare across national boundaries’.55
Let me make some general observations about Pye’s insight. Imbued with this
warlike orientation, modernizing elites developed political rationalities to address
the ‘people problem’. This was an ethos separate from, and not reducible to,
issues of people’s sovereignty and legitimacy (democracy). It thus required its own
conceptual apparatus, for if the people were conceived as a body of objects to
calculate, reform and work on, then the question of the state’s legitimate
sovereignty becomes vested in the state’s knowledge complexes as expressed in
programmes of development, not in the people themselves. Also, the question of
14 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

legitimacy becomes instrumental, residing in state efficacy and delivery;

international legitimacy was bestowed on regimes that could control their
populations. There was, in abstract, no need to always have recourse to the fiction
of a socially contracting people. However, given the prominence of the discourse
of nationalism in developing states, new states necessarily operated at several levels
in terms of political rationality, and the question of a sovereign people was never
absent.56 One might speak of a dual movement here, where the posture of the
state towards the people was not simply one of formation of rationalities for
reform, but also entailed rhetorically appealing to a sovereign people. Thus there
is an irrepressible tension between the rationalities of government in its attempt to
shape the conduct of people, and the universal appeal to represent the sovereign
people. In Western political development theory, enmeshed as it was in the
theories of procedural democracy and the management of order, the quest to root
state sovereignty in a body of citizens was displaced, but not suppressed, by the
examination of the ‘actual’ processes of existing democracies. However, state
actors in ‘developing’ countries, who were motivated in terms of rationalizing
rule to the people, needed to take account of sovereignty as an ideological
resource. This tension created a permanent movement between broad questions of
legitimacy and the lower-level rationalities of specific practices of government.
Actors in the Thai state, influenced by the doctrine of political development, had
to negotiate the latent contradiction that lay at the heart of the doctrine’s
proposed subject/object relations: how could mute-rational objects (the people
prior to modernity) ever be the sovereign basis on which the state could claim to
speak, except post-facto, given that the people as sovereign citizens were not yet
existent? This contradiction sanctioned the many projects of citizen formation in
Thailand. This contradiction is a useful starting point for exam ining the
essentialism that underlies the fiction of democracy. Having defined something of
the positions underlying this work, it is now necessary to outline the operative
concepts structuring this inquiry.

Hegemony
The Gramscian notion of hegemony is open to various readings, but two basic
issues concerned Gramsci’s rendering of the concept. In its earliest usage it related
to the strategic problem of securing proletarian leadership and dominance.57 With
the failure of the Italian proletariat to reach any hegemonic position, Gramsci
undertook a historical study of the Italian elites and their modes of power
assumption. The state in these studies was conceived as a historical process
combining political society and civil society, composing what Gramsci termed the
integral state. His studies noted that the Italian bourgeoisie had failed to
hegemonize (to control and lead by a measure of spontaneous consent from those
led) the social field of civil society and that it had been incorporated into the
ruling strata through a process of passive revolution that did little to bring
revolutionary bourgeois values to bear on the Italian social formation. Whatever
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 15

the specificities of Gramsci’s study of Italy, his theoretical rendering of the Italian
experience spawned a new conceptual apparatus that was highly productive for
thinking about the forms of rule in society, their historical base, and the modes of
subjugation of people to dominant principles and interests of a ruling strata.58
Gramsci was interested in noting how, in societies of relatively advanced
capitalism, a position of hegemony could be attained so that the main integrative
element of the social formation was, apparently, the consent of those who were
exploited and oppressed within it. Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as an answer to
this went beyond simplistic notions of ideology as false consciousness to a
concrete study of the historical emergence of blocs and their articulation of
domination and consent through state and civil society apparatuses, such that they
could maintain some degree of equilibrium in the social formation.59 Ideology was
only one element of this achievement, so too were administrative functions,
mechanisms of soft coercion as structured in the rule of law, the distribution of
economic concessions to strategic groups, and so on. Gramsci’s study of
hegemony correlated to a dual conception of state. First, he saw the state as an
institutional ensemble, or the coercive apparatus for the practice of domination.
Second, he posited the notion of the integral state, which entailed the coupling
and dynamic interaction of the state as institutional apparatus and the organization
of politics and civil society elements.60 Gramsci was, at times, certain that the
institutional ensemble corresponded to moments of force while civil society
corresponded to moments of consent. At other times he recognized that political
society itself played a part in organizing consent.61 Gramsci explored the concrete
forms of the integral state, most productively through a study of Taylorism,
noting the articulations and social controls that emerge from non-state arenas
(conceived in the narrow sense).62 He called for a study of cultural and economic
apparatuses and the manner in which they could be articulated to hegemony
If Gramsci is read as considering modern societies as having shifted from class
rule by force to consent, his own study of the articulation of hegemony was
cognizant of the hybrid character of domination and hegemony, its uneven and
fragile nature and its constant need for reproduction as political practice and
ideology, by intellectuals linked to dominant groups. These intellectuals are
charged with the task of organizing the long-term viability of rule by the strategic
maintenance of hegemony in its various moments and, in particular, in the
articulation of the particular interests of ruling groups as general interest.63
According to Gramsci, for any class (or class fraction) to be hegemonic entailed
having successfully drawn other classes under its leadership through a series of
measures aimed at compromise and ideological identification. However,
domination, as the moment exterior to a comprised hegemony, was a necessary
counterpoint for those strata excluded from the articulation of a hegemonic
apparatus. For Gramsci, then, hegemony was subject to the pressures of political
struggle and the dialectic of resistance inherent in class compromise. Domination
was always a present possibility should consent break down. As will be seen in
this work, the various democracy projects carried out in Thailand are
16 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

hegemonically motivated, which is to say that while they function as attempts to

create order and identification with a political order, their capacity for universal
control is strictly limited, and order is also achieved by many other means.
This book focuses on the ‘democratic aspect’ of a broader hegemonic project.
In doing so, it studies the articulation of democratic hegemony at concrete
conjunctures. It attempts a broadly Marxist political-historical study without
recourse to economic determinism. This frame grants efficacy to the political
moment expressed as ongoing strategies of domination, accumulation and their
reconstitution, through the varied institutional, ideological and economic
matrices that make up an articulated, social formation. In concrete terms, this
means presenting an exposition of the differential articulation of democracy with
national ideology, and an explanation of those articulations in terms of the
political struggles in the evolving Thai capitalist social formation.
In seeking to delimit this study, democracy here is conceived as composing one
component of what Bob Jessop terms a hegemonic project, where hegemony is
(following Gramsci) understood as the

interpellation and organization of different class relevant…forces under the

‘political, intellectual and moral leadership’ of a particular class (or class
fraction) or more precisely its political and intellectual and moral
spokesmen. The key to the exercise of such leadership is the development of
a specific ‘hegemonic project’ which can resolve the abstract problem of
conflicts between particular interests and the general interest.64

Hegemony, Jessop argues, can be secured through the mobilization of

support behind a concrete, national popular program of action which asserts

a general interest in the pursuit of objectives that explicitly or implicitly
advance the long term interest of the hegemonic class (fraction) and which
also promotes particular economic-corporate interests compatible with this
program.65

A hegemonic project, then, involves the strategic use of institutional, social,

ideological and moral resources in the mobilization of a particular view that
facilitates the continuing dominance of interests articulating, or articulated in, that
project.
Democracy, as a metaphor for the capacity of a political community to be self-
governing, is one component in the production of hegemony. It names a political
community as one bound by common interest and fate, as if there were not
always irreparable differences, interests and a constant flow of power in the
maintenance of the myth of common interest. Democracy, then, can be seen as
doing the hegemonic work of universalizing particularistic interests. To the
extent that democracy proceeds in this manner, one may speak of democrasubjection,
or the subjection of people to imaginary forms of their own rule (see below).
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 17

However, while hegemony, as a multiple category of consent-producing practices

(by economic, social, psychological and ideological means), is useful as a
descriptive generalization, it is too expansive to explore and name specific sites in
which the potential for consent is produced. For those interested in one aspect of
the production of consent, the creation of particular subjectivities as a field in
which identity effects are potentially produced, it might be better to recognize the
distinctive localized, bureaucratized or privatized forms that power moves through
in an effort to shape orientations, as potential elements of a broader hegemony (in
articulation). On this aspect, Gramsci noted that in ideal bourgeois societies
where the notion of the free autonomous individual was realized, the brutal hand
of domination was lifted and in its place was the ‘individual [who] can govern
himself without his self-government thereby entering into conflict with political
society’.66 To the extent that one wishes to study how such self-government is
aimed for by particular practices of power, and has potential hegemonic effects in
that it articulates the individual to a social order, then the employment of Michel
Foucault’s notion of government can be productive.

Government
Foucault’s notion of governmentality provides important insights into the
processes of democrasubjection. It is argued below that examining the attempted
construction of the democratic citizen from the dual perspective of hegemony and
governmentality is a productive and critical exercise for understanding the aporia
that attaches to ‘democracy’, or the space between the rhetoric of the sovereign
people and their non-existence from a development perspective. In between this
space one finds projects, both hegemonically and governmentally conceived. In
this respect the approach follows Barry Smart, who sees in Foucault’s notion of
government a deepening complexification of hegemony. For Smart,

it is in the work of Foucault that an analysis of the various complex social

techniques and methods fundamental to the achievement of a relationship of
direction, guidance, leadership or hegemony is to be found.67

Foucault’s work, according to Smart, had ‘revealed the complex multiple

processes from which the strategic constitution of forms of hegemony may
emerge’.68 To see how this might be so requires an accounting of Foucault’s
notion of governmentality and its relation to power.
To be definitional, governmentality involved basically the deployment of
certain modes of power, emergent in situated rationalities capable of shaping
conduct, towards the production of order in any specified field. On Foucault’s
notion of governmental ‘rationalities’, Colin Gordon has suggested that we
understand this as ‘a way or system of thinking about the nature of the practice of
government (who can govern, what governing is, what or who is governed)’.69 If
18 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

these varying governmentalities are to be understood as forms of power, this

would suggest something of an identity between government/power.
This is, indeed, Barry Hindess’ reading of Foucault, and one broadly followed
here. Hindess notes that Foucault attempted to overcome potential misreadings of
his work that conflated domination and power. In order to do this Foucault had
to strike against prevalent notions of power which posited relations of a linear and
asymmetrical type. For Foucault, power was immanent in all social relations as an
effort to shape the conduct of things. This is basically the meaning he attributes to
government. Given the premise of free subjectivities, inherent in the application
of government is the possibility of resistance and an alternative shaping of things
that defy any power’s production of order. For Foucault, the practice of
government is not domination, as Hindess tells it, because it goes to work on a
range of free, or potentially free, subjects, who may wrestle with its effects and
subvert its outcome. Power operates in a space of subjectivities which are given to
choice and reflection, but which are equally bounded by the discursive discipline
that holds in that space.70 The import of this Foucauldian insight is only clear
when the notion of governmentality is set against the general approaches to
power by political theory.
As Foucault puts it, governmentality, in the context of a state’s turn to practices
informed by political economy, is defined as

the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and

reflections, the calculations and acts that allow the exercise of this very
specific, albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population,
as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential
technical means apparatuses of security.71

It will be useful to unpack this quote. As McNay notes, Foucault conceptualized

modern societies as characterized by the ‘tri-angular power complex: sovereignty
—discipline—government’.72 While traditionally political theory was preoccupied
with the art of sovereign power, resident in the ruler, Foucault noted that it had
not been attuned to the actual practice of government. His definition of
governmentality, or rationalities of government, is prefaced by noting the rise of
practices of government over the simple ‘maintenance of one’s principality’ (the
question of sovereignty), and how the emergence of government introduced
principles of economy, as the management of one’s household, into ‘the
management of the state’.73 Political theory, lured by the grand narratives of the
sovereign individual and the social contract, for example, has, by and large, missed
the actual productive practices of government. This Foucauldian displacing of the
themes of political philosophy, as Hindess notes, suggested a whole new field of
inquiry—the specific rationalities of government that lay under and below the
claims of the right to rule and the obvious forms of domination in the practice of
discipline. These rationalities were concerned with questions of management of
the population and social forms of the organization of that management.74
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 19

In Foucault’s sketched outline, the formation of political economy, as a body

of knowledge concerned with the uses of resources for the development of
national wealth, entailed a multiple mapping of things and persons. Thus, with
modern society, new forms of knowledge/power complexes emerged with their
own rationality separate from, but historically always in relation to, questions of
sovereign power and discipline.75 These forms of knowledge, Foucault suggests,
have their means of realization in apparatuses of security, or various techniques by
means of which specific objectives are brought about such that the security of a
field, discursively defined by the objective to which it is to be put to use, is
accomplished. As Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose put it:

If political rationalities render reality into the domain of thought, these

‘technologies of government’ seek to translate thought into the domain of
reality, and to establish ‘in the world of persons and things’ spaces and
devices for acting upon those entities of which they dream and scheme.76

It was by focusing on emergent rationalities in the many fields to be governed

that Foucault could say, pace Nicos Poulantzas, that ‘[m]ay be what is really
important for our modernity…is not so much the etasisation of society as the
“governmentalization” of the state’.77 By suggesting governmentalization of the
state Foucault was not denying the state, but attempting to historicize it as a
contingent outcome of the play of many rationalities and practices of power that
had accumulated inside and outside the institutional apparatuses of the state.
With this account in mind, it is not surprising that while Foucauldian studies of
specific forms of governmentalization develop detailed inventories of technologies
of productive control, they do not, generally, go on to ask the broader questions
of how such forms of control are integrated within the broader capitalist
context.78 However, for some, the notion of governmentality does illuminate
how a strategic unity of distinct regimes and centres can take hold in society.
Miller and Rose, for example, note that Foucault’s understanding of government
is an attempt to understand indirect means for ‘aligning economic and social and
political conduct with socio-political objectives’.79 Nevertheless, while Foucault’s
master-works were discrete studies, his lectures on governmentality pointed to the
possibility of a thematics of unity of the discrete discursive practices of capitalist
modernity. Certainly, this was conceived differently from Gramscian notions of a
hegemonic bloc governing downwards, that is from a steering position. That
Foucault analyses the rationalities of power in discrete instances means that his work
presents a picture of macro-power as emergent from lower levels; and while he
might conceive of some systemic form of governmentality over the social whole,
this is always a contingent construction irreducible to any essence or point of
origin.
20 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

Towards the idea of democrasubjection

In the movement between projects for reform of political subjects/citizen
construction and grandiose claims regarding the sovereignty of the people,
complementary strategies of hegemony and governmentality converge in the
practice of what may be termed democrasubjection—the subjection of people to
imaginary forms of their own rule. By using the term ‘imaginary’ one need not
buy into a Lacanian argument and its implications for ideology. Here ‘imaginary’
is understood as the discursive and ideological effects that are often deployed to
produce a way of seeing that might be otherwise, given different conditions. Such
ways of seeing imprint on social relations a really existing nature (to think and act
like a citizen for example), the experience of which is shaped by the discursive limits
imposed by powers resident in them.
Schematically, the deployment of democracy, as a metaphor of the common
good, proceeds within two parallel moments. First, there is the moment of broad
hegemony conceived as a specific historical formation of cemented leadership by
a historical bloc over a social formation, framed by moments of state-building,
ideological practices, economic development and conjunctural politics. Within
this historical condition democracy may variously be advanced as an ideological
state, an institutional form, a project to build. Underlying these possibilities,
either alone or in combination, is the organization of a centre that aggrandizes for
itself the capacity to speak for the common good. Second, there is the moment of
democracy as a political rationality, or specific project of government, aimed at
creating practices of self-government. This may be framed as the production of
capacity for the practice of citizenship and the promotion of civic virtue through
which the particular is transcended, such that individuals act in a manner
commensurate with the common good (the particular of the elite universalized).
To the extent that a moment of democratic hegemony becomes effective in
dispositional terms, by orientating people to particular ways of seeing and acting
as citizens of a political community, then we are studying the effects of
government situated within the problem space called democracy. To give
specificity to this discrete area of governmentality and hegemony, it may be
named democrasubjection. As theoretical constructions, both hegemony and
governmentality are not exhaustive of the forms of power operative in society, nor
do they work in an enduring balance; rather, as organizing concepts for enquiry,
they point to a critical reading of democracy as democrasubjection.
Democrasubjection, or ‘people in democratic subjection’, refers to the
potentially oppressive dimension of democracy, the never-succeeding project of
subjecting people to new institutional and ideological forms of power in the
construction of democratic subjects. This is more than a play on words: it is an
attempt to suggest some productive insights that flow from a recognition of the
constructedness of subjecthood. It also draws on Althusser’s noting of the
ambiguity of the term ‘subject’:
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 21

In the ordinary use of the term, subject in fact means: (1) a free subjectivity,
a centre of initiations, author of and responsible for its own actions; (2) a
subjected being who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped
of all freedom…the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he
shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, ie, in order that he shall
(freely) accept his subjection…There are no subjects except by and for their
subjection.80

This derivation of ‘democrasubjection’ does not signify agreement on Althusser’s

structuralist reading of the subject, which extinguishes meaning (1).
Democrasubjection is understood more as a strategy, within a more general
hegemonic project, than an actual state. It may succeed in having some
dispositional consequences, in terms of producing ‘consent’ (as an inculcated
propensity to see or do things in particular ways by selfvolition).81 Likewise, the
Althusserian model of ‘total’ ideology is eschewed here, in favour of a more
limited sense which points to the production of closure, a placing of limits on
ways of seeing, in a discursive formation, and this closure’s instrumentality for
hegemonic blocs.
Ideologically speaking, then, a citizen, in moments of practice and
identification, might be seen as a subjective place of closure inhabited by myths of
nationhood and animated by the equivalence of nation and self, produced by such
identifying closure. Certainly, across the globe, and no less in Thailand, much
effort is expended on producing a political subject able to recognize itself as a
modern political citizen, who is held to be an autonomous agent, and capable of
consent. Althusser’s notion of interpellation is useful for making some general
remarks on this. He maintained that a necessary precondition for the maintenance
and reproduction of capitalist society was the extent to which its ideological
systems were perpetuated.82 To examine this, Althusser grappled with how the
subject internalized ideology, and he famously concluded that ideology was
constitutive of the subject: ‘Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects’.83 By this
Althusser meant that ideology, as a representation of the imagined relations of
individuals, is a process through which the subject ‘negotiates’ its relationship to
societal forces (material ideological apparatus). The ‘negotiation’ takes place at the
level of subject (mis)recognition of itself when it is interpellated, or hailed, by
outside subjects or institutions.84 When a subject (mis)recognizes that a discourse
is addressed to herself/himself, and responds as the addressee, then the subject is
thoroughly implicated in ideology. Thus Althusser claims that actually the
negotiation described above (interpellation/(mis)recognition) does not take place
because ‘(t)he existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals
as subjects are one and the same thing’.85 The subject only ever was an
ideological production.86
We have in Althusser the strongest statement on the fictive nature of
subjecthood, such that lines of resistance are not intelligible. Here the questions
of subject autonomy, of consent and resistance, make no theoretical sense. While
22 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

the idea of interpellation remains a suggestive way for theorizing the discursive
making of subjects, for it points to a permanent process of interpellation, by
making this process formal rather than real (since ideology and the subject are the
same thing), Althusser denies the agential nature of interpellation and the
possibility of subversive and resistant readings of subject status. Inasmuch as one
might recognize the limits of ‘interpellation’ as an account of subject constitution,
it can nevertheless function to name a particular elite orientation which seeks to
construct particular ways of being by addressing people as citizens.
Furthermore, an underlying assumption of the chapters that follow is that the
democratic aspect of both the statist and liberal hegemonic project entails the
discursive citation of what Poulantzas calls the ‘isolation effect’, an effect in which
subjects recognize themselves as citizens or individuals rather than class subjects,
and which produces forms of politics relevant to this being a ‘person’ in a nation,
separate from class politics and identity.87 As Poulantzas argued, the isolation
effect can not be read simply as an automatic process derived from the structural
isolation of individuals through commodity production and their de-classed
relation to the political region as individuals, mediated by ‘juridical-political
ideology’ and legal institutions.88 Rather, this effect must be organized and
constantly articulated as the commonsense operative subjectivity, as a form of
subjectivity involving a particular imagining of the political community and one’s
location in it.
Projects of dominatively defined citizenship function as constant interpellative
appeals to the desired subjectivity. This is not to say they are effective or not
subvertible, but it is to say that they form a crucial component of the ideological
struggle to combat the ‘people problem’, or the problem of organizing the people
productively. Part of the democratic aspect of hegemonic projects in Thailand, both
statist and liberal, is precisely the attempt to make manifest and operative the
structural potential of the isolation effect, to make it politically operative and
organize the population around concepts of citizenship. That is to say that the
isolation effect is consciously organized for as a political project. The more
organized ideological strata in the state do seek the organization of a national
imaginary and a citizen conducive to self-rule. It is for this reason that there exists
a durable tradition of practices of government in the Thai state concerned with
developing within the people particular subjective orientations that are held to be
the civilized condition of modernity, among which is the production of a
democratic temper. It is also why it is possible to meaningfully speak of projects
of democrasubjection.
Admittedly, the notion of democrasubjection circumscribes a relatively narrow
area of study that focuses on analysing an aspect of the relationship between
hegemony and governmentality around representations and practices of
democracy. This work seeks to illuminate how democratic discourse and the
propagation of forms of citizenship-practice is channelled towards a contribution
in the practice of hegemony—by constituting a national political imaginary, a
political community, at the level of ideology.89 This does not exhaust the
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 23

hegemonic apparatus in Thailand. Indeed, rather than attempt the over-ambitious

project of determining the total nature of the state in Thailand and its hegemonic
apparatus (as a complex unity of historical blocs, national and international,
condensed as the integral state) this work will present a discrete analysis of several
moments of democracy (statist/liberal/communitarian) as part of a contribution to
an understanding of the complex of ideological forces that play a part in
articulating the Thai social formation. Such a study is neither exhaustive of an
understanding of the political and ideological realms of Thai society, nor is it
necessarily the central aspect of the constitution of hegemony of the Thai state.
Other studies could legitimately focus on, for example, the coercive nature of
much of social life beyond the constitution of the political imaginary, the market
and its impact on subject constitution, or even neo-patrimonialism. The mix of
powers, repression and localities in Thailand is as complex as anywhere. However,
it is beyond the bounds of this work to present an articulation of the complex
unity of hegemony and domination in Thailand that draws on the many
ideological forms that fabricate life, and the many concrete social relationships
structured into strategic dominance, and which is capable of directing societal
projects around the problem spaces of the economy (as a project of development
and national commitment) and security (as a project of national identity and
sovereignty). The study of the moment of realized hegemony in Thailand
certainly is not the aim of this work. Indeed, if one takes Gramsci’s notion of
attained hegemony as involving the successful presentation and indeed historical
necessity of a group’s corporate interests being universalized, and in which a
dominant ‘party’ brings about

not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and
moral unity, posing all questions around which the struggle rages not on a
corporate but universal plane, and thus creating the hegemony of a
fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups90

then maybe it has never been realized.

Another limit of this study is that it does not approach the study of Thai
democracy in terms that emphasize resistance and conscious counter-hegemonic
strategies that rework the national-popular imaginary. It is taken as given that
resistance is a permanent possibility and is an inherent part of the discursive
workings of power in identity formation. Regarding Thailand, one can find in
Peter Vandergeest’s work an attempt to highlight counter-hegemonic strategies in
the appropriation of state propagated rights discourse by Thai peasants and
farmers.91 This project of recovery is to be supported. Certainly, in focusing on
hegemony and state ideology this work misses much of the dissonance that
pervades even official ideology and its reception by the population.92 Yet the
attempt to study the dominative work that democratic discourse does, necessarily
means focusing on projects that emanate from those pursuing hegemonic strategies.
This is not to say there is no escape. Indeed, in the worker and peasant
24 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

movements of Thailand one sees acts of resistance and rebellion with the potential
to fundamentally transform the existing social formation. But this work focuses on
the ‘other side’: the hegemonic productions of the elites and their project of
subjecting people to imaginary forms of their own rule. This approach means also
taking to task the liberal and communitarian refashioning of democracy, which
have recently emerged, as part of a new project of people-subjection.
Something also needs to be said about the conceptualization of citizenship used
here. This is not a sociological study of the emergence of institutionalized relations
between states and subjects. Democrasubjection, in its productive aspect of citizen
construction, is distinguished from positivist and critical readings of citizenship
because, as a conceptual category, it seeks a transcendence of the ambivalent
tension between seeing citizenship positively, as in the Marshallian tradition of a
bagfull of enabling rights and obligations, and critically, as a strategy of rulers to
stave off class conflict.93 Democrasubjection, being a discursive account of
citizenship, sees citizenship as the possibility of a productive enactment of a
mythical political community by subject-citizens within the limits set by
hegemonic blocs.
If democrasubjection might be a theoretical category—organizing our
understanding of the construction of democratic subjection through
the discourses of citizenship—it may also be the name properly given to a
particular practice of power. I am developing here the idea that it is better to see
democrasubjection as a political project, rather than an actual state. This requires a
constant engagement with the objects of that project and consequently a continual
reformation of the project in response to real-life resistance and obstacles. In
making this point I hope to move beyond an ideology-critique of citizenship as
serving bourgeois capitalist values, towards an elaboration of the social and
political forces that go into its making. Here, then, democrasubjection might best
be defined as any articulated project formed at the intersection of the ideological
interpellation of individuals into citizen-subject status within the frame of the
nation, and the governmental practices that take up the raw material of people for
productive reform. Clearly, as the politics of cosmopolitan citizenship take shape,
the sphere of this practice of power is extended. What is significant, is that the
term directs our attention to the dominative side of citizenship. To this end
citizenship is now read as an enabling discursive resource for social control and
active internalization of the given normative frame.94
In the chapters that follow I will attempt to present a situated reading of
projects of democrasubjection. My approach is expository as well as critical. I take
an expository stance since what I am saying regarding democracy in Thailand is
unorthodox and there is a need to present textual evidence. I interpolate this
expository approach, however, with critical comments pertaining to
democrasubjection. By using both hegemony and governmentality, a dual critique
may be formed. Let me now briefly summarize the argument as it will emerge in
the chapters that follow.
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 25

In studying the hegemonic aspect of democracy, we are looking at the

interpellation of subject-cum-citizen into the nation, as an identified member of a
political community. The extent to which identification occurs is the extent to
which it is possible to speak of hegemonic effects. The democratic aspect of
hegemony operates at the level of appeals to legitimate sovereignty and the
production of relevant metaphors substantiating this claim. Practices of
government are linked to the production of dispositional orientations and the
very being of the subject-citizen. These practices are orientated to subject-citizen
realization and take the form of technological rationalities of management and
reform of the subject, although there are attempts to articulate these with
questions of sovereignty. By taking on this dual perspective it becomes possible to
explore the contradiction surrounding the claiming of legitimacy, on the basis of
popular sovereignty, when state and social actors seek the very creation of citizens
on whose behalf democracy is supposed to function. This is another way of
reintroducing one of the latent contradictions of the political development
doctrine: how can a political philosophy of popular sovereignty hold, when there
are no citizens to speak of, just objects of reform? Thinking about democracy in
this way entails a demystification of popular sovereignty by pointing to its fragile
constructedness
Also, a focus on the governmental level, on the political rationalities that lie
behind hegemonic discourses on democracy, helps explore the question of
‘consent’ raised by Gramsci. These rationalities aim at the construction of consent
by proposing means towards the formation of pliable citizens with particular
subjective orientations and identifications towards the political. This is why
thinking between hegemony and governmentality might also be productive in
any enquiry into the workings of a democracy. It is also why the term
democrasubjection was coined. This term captures both the global level of
projecting a sovereign power as the focus of unity to which people are to be
subjected, as well as the making of that subjection through the very practices of
becoming a citizen.
Democrasubjection, as a project, is always unfinished. Progressive battles are
fought in the name of popular sovereignty and citizenship, which is to say people
are not simply the mute objects of power. In that sense, it is best to think of
democrasubjection as a project, rather than as an actual state. While there is a
never-ending quest to subjugate, order and exploit in the name of an elite-defined
common good, there is also resistance, and subversive reversals that accompany
any play of power. Finally, a qualifier—hegemony and government are
theoretical categories that attempt to do some exploratory work on ‘democracy’.
They necessarily narrow the field of investigation, as well as claim too much; alas,
this is always the hazard of isolating out from complex social fields several issues
for investigation.
26 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

Notes

1 David Streckfuss, ‘The Mixed Colonial Legacy in Siam: Origins of Thai Racialist
Thought, 1890–1910’, in Laurie Sears (ed.) Autonomous Histories: Particular Truths,
Essays in Honour of John Smail, Madison: Center for Southeast Asian Studies,
University of Wisconsin, 1993, pp. 123–53.
2 Kamala Tiyavanich, Forest Recollections: Wandering Monks in Twentieth-century
Thailand, Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1997.
3 Tongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation, Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1994.
4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983.
5 On traditional rationalities of power see Stanley Tambiah, World Conqueror and
World Renouncer: A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand Against a Historical
Background, London: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
6 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M.Sheridan Smith,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.
7 See Phillip Darby, Three Faces of Imperialism: British and American Approaches to Asia
and Africa, 1870–1910, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
8 James Carrier, ‘Introduction’, in J. Carrier (ed.) Occidentalism: Images of the West,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, pp. 1–32. Carrier suggests a brief definition of
Occidentalism as ‘stylized images of the West’, p. 1.
9 Irene Gendzier, Managing Political Change: Social Scientists and the Third World,
Boulder: Westview Press, 1985.
10 Peter Bell, ‘Western Conceptions of Thai Society: The Politics of American
Scholarship’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 12, 1, 1982, pp. 61–74.
11 Herbert Phillips and David Wilson, ‘Certain Effects of Culture and Social
Organization in Internal Security in Thailand’, Memorandum Rm. 3786-ARPA
(abridged), The Rand Corporation, 1964, ibid., p. 8.
12 Ibid., pp. 7–8.
13 See Eric Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War. Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in
Thailand, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, Center for Southeast Asian Studies,
Monograph no. 7, 1992.
14 Paul Cammack, Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World, London: Leicester
University Press, 1997, p. 1.
15 See, for example, David McClelland, ‘The Impulse to Modernisation’, in M.
Weiner (ed.) Modernisation: The Dynamics of Growth, New York: Basic Books, 1966;
A. Inkles and D. Smith, Becoming Modern: Individual Change in Six Developing
Countries, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
16 Yogesh Atal, ‘Arrivals and Departures: The Case of Political Science in Asia’, in
D.Easton, D.J.Gunnell and M.Stein (eds) Regime and Discipline: Democracy and the
Development of Political Science, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, pp.
249–68, p. 264.
17 See, for example, Khana ratthasat mahawithayalai ramkhamhaeng, Sarup phonkan
kanprachum thangwichakan ratthasat kap kanphathana prathet 8 thanwakhom 2525
(Conclusions From An Academic Meeting, Political Science and Development of the
Country), Bangkok: Khana ratthasat mahawithayalai ramkhamhaeng, 1984.
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 27

18 Precha Hongrailert, interview with the author, Bangkok, 24 March 1997.

19 See Sombat Chantornvong, ‘Political Science in Thailand: A Brief History of the
Discipline’ (in English), in Phonsak Phongpaeo (ed.) Thitthang khong ratthasat thai
(Directions in Thai Political Science), Bangkok: Samakhom nisit kao jula-longkon
mahawithayalai, 1985, pp. 189–201, pp. 190–4.
20 Sombat Chantornvong, ‘Major Trends in Teaching’, in ibid., pp. 201–17, p. 210.
21 Sombat Chantornvong and Chulacheeb Chinawanno, ‘Problems of the Profession’,
in ibid., pp. 226–8, p. 227.
22 Fred Riggs, Thailand: The Modernization of a Bureaucratic Polity, Honolulu: East-West
Centre Press, 1966. For a Marxist critique of modernization theory in general and
Riggs in particular, see Kevin Hewison, Thailand Politics and Power, Manila: Journal
of Contemporary Asia Publishers, 1989, pp. 3–13.
23 David Apter, Rethinking Development: Modernization, Dependency and Postmodern
Politics, Newbury Park CA: Sage, 1987, p. 20.
24 Fred Riggs, Thailand: The Modernization of a Bureaucratic Polity, Honolulu: East-West
Centre Press, 1966, p. 96.
25 Ibid., p. 364.
26 Ibid., p. 148.
27 Ibid., p. 131.
28 Ibid., p. 396.
29 Neher and Bidya note the prevalence of the bureaucratic polity model among Thai
political scientists. See Clark Neher and Bidya Bowornwathana, ‘Thai and Western
Studies of Politics in Thailand’, Asian Thought and Society, 11, 31, 1986, pp. 16–27,
p. 16.
30 For an example of this type of analysis see Clark Neher, Politics and Culture in
Thailand, Ann Arbor: Center for Political Studies Institute for Social Research,
University of Michigan, 1987. Also see Norman Jacobs, Modernization without
Development: Thailand as an Asian Case Study, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971.
Jacobs uses the Weberian notion of patrimonial authority to explore Thai political
culture.
31 Somboon Suksamran, Buddhism and Political Legitimacy, Bangkok: Chulalongkorn
University Research Report Series, no. 2, 1993.
32 Thinapan Nakata, ‘Political Culture: Problems of Development of Democracy’, in
Somsakdi Xuto (ed.) Government and Politics of Thailand, London: Oxford University
Press, 1987, pp. 168–95.
33 David Morell and Chai-Anan Samudavanija, Political Conflict in Thailand, Reform,
Reaction, Revolution, Cambridge: Oelgeschlager, Gunn and Hain, 1981, p. 311.
34 Chai-Anan Samudavanija, ‘Thailand, A Stable Semi-democracy’, in L. Diamond,
J.Linz and S.M.Lipset (eds) Democracy in Developing Countries, London: Lynne Rienner
Publishers, 1990, pp. 271–312, p. 281.
35 See William Siffin, The Thai Bureaucracy: Institutional Change and Development,
Westport: Greenwood Press, 1966; Suchit Bunbongkarn, ‘Political Institutions and
Processes’, in Somsakdi Xuto (ed.) Government and Politics of Thailand, London:
Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 41–74; Kramol Thongthammachart, Toward a
Political Party Theory in Thai Perspective, Singapore: Southeast Asian Studies Centre
Occasional Paper, 1982, no. 68.
28 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

36 Pisan Suriyamongkol and James Guyot, Bureaucratic Polity at Bay, Bangkok:

Graduate School of Public Administration, National Institute of Development
Administration, 1985, p. 37.
37 Ibid., p. 60.
38 Chai-Anan Samudavanija, ‘State Identity Creation, State Building and Civil Society
1939–1989’, in C. Reynolds (ed.) National Identity and its Defenders, Thailand: 1939–
1989, Clayton: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1991, p.
75.
39 Chai-Anan Samudavanija, Thailand, A Stable Semi-democracy’, in L. Diamond,
J.Linz and S.M.Lipset (eds) Democracy in Developing Countries, London: Lynne Rienner
Publishers, 1990, pp. 297–302.
40 Ibid., p. 310.
41 Anek Laothamatas, Business Associations and the New Political Economy of Thailand:
From Bureaucratic Polity to Liberal Corporatism, Singapore: West View Press, 1992, p.
161.
42 Ibid., pp. 168–9. See especially p. 171: ‘the participation of business in the policy
making process and its exertion of influence over the bureaucracy may be
considered as a progressive stage in the political development of a society with a
strong tradition of operating in a bureaucratic polity’. See pp. 154–5.
43 Surin Maisrikrod, Thailand’s Two General Elections in 1992: Democracy Sustained,
Singapore: Research and Discussion Notes Paper no. 75, Institute of Southeast
Asian Studies, 1992, pp. 4–5.
44 Surin Maisrikrod, ‘Emerging Patterns of Leadership in Thailand’, Contemporary
Southeast Asia, 15, 1, 1993, pp. 80–96. See especially pp. 89–93.
45 Ibid., p. 84.
46 Ibid., p. 86.
47 For examples, Surachart Bamrungsuk, ‘New Strengths—Old Weaknesses:
Thailand’s Civil-Military Relations into the 2000s’, paper presented to
Interdepartmental conference, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn
University and Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of
Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 17–18 May 1996. On pacted transition see for example
Park Eunhong, ‘A Study on Democratization: Comparative Analysis of the Periods
between from [sic] 1973–1976 and from 1992 to the Present’, paper presented at ‘Asia
in the Next Century Forum’, Centre of Asian Studies, Chiang Mai University and
Korea Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Program, 5 February 1996.
48 Thinapan Nakata, ‘The Problem of Democracy in Thailand: A Study of Political
Culture and Socialization of College Students’, Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt
University, 1972. Also see Thinapan Nakata, ‘Political Culture: Problems of
Development of Democracy’, in Somsakdi Xuto (ed.) Government and Politics of
Thailand, London: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 168–95.
49 See for example Kamol Somvichian, ‘The Thai Political Culture and Political
Development in Modern Thai Politics’, in Clark Neher (ed.) Modern Thai Politics:
From Village to Nation, Cambridge MA: Schenkman, 1979, pp. 153–69; Kramol
Thongthammachat, Kanmeuang lae prachathipatai khong thai (Thai Politics and
Democracy), Bangkok: Ho.jo.kho. bankit trading, 1976. This text introduces the
notion of democracy as a way of life and thus as a matter of cultural norms (pp. 258–
9). It speaks of the function of political parties in political socialization (pp. 295–6).
This book covers material in a manner very similar to the democracy manuals
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 29

discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 of this volume. See also Amon Raksasat, Anakhot chart
thai (The Future of Thailand), Bangkok: Rongphim kromyuthasuksa thahanpok, 1976.
This book suggests building democracy with regard for Thai culture and argues for
expanding the role of the monarchy. The most sophisticated approach is found in
Chai-Anan Samudavanija, Panha kanphathana thang kanmeuang (Problems of Political
Development), Bangkok: Samnakphim julalongkon mahawithayalai, 1993.
50 Paul Cammack, Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World, London: Leicester
University Press, 1997, p. 123.
51 Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1968, p. 7.
52 Ibid., pp. 20–4.
53 Daniel Lerner, ‘Toward a Communication Theory of Modernization’, in L.Pye
(ed.) Communications and Political Development, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1963, pp. 327–50.
54 Paul Cammack, Capitalism and Democracy in the Third World, London: Leicester
University Press, 1997, p. 123.
55 See Lucien Pye, ‘Communication Policies in Development Programs’, in L.Pye
(ed.) Communications and Political Development, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1963, pp. 229–33, p. 232.
56 As Preston suggests, post-colonial elites in ‘developing’ countries were strongly
influenced by the doctrine of nationalism as a resource for modernization. See
P.W.Preston, Discourses of Development: State, Markets and Polity in the Analysis of
Complex Change, Aldershot: Avebury, 1994, pp. 4–7.
57 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1980, pp. 47, 111–36.
58 It would be quite useful to draw many parallels between modern Thailand and
Gramsci’s Italy, given the nature of the bourgeoisie in Thailand. Indeed, John
Girling has produced a very suggestive piece in this direction, drawing on the
notion of passive revolution and hegemony. See John Girling, ‘Thailand in
Gramscian Perspective’, Pacific Affairs, 57, 3, 1984, pp. 385–403.
59 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1980, p. 38.
60 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1971, pp. 262–3.
61 For the myriad meanings that might be read into hegemony see Perry Anderson,
‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review, 100, 1976/7, pp. 5–78.
62 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1971, pp. 279–80, 301–10. Gramsci’s comments on rationality and Taylorism hint
at some kind of ‘apparatus’, but it is ideologically conceived as an effect of capitalism
and the factory, not as in Foucault as ‘rationally’ driven by the power/knowledge
paradigm. See pp. 270–8.
63 Ibid., pp. 5–25.
64 Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in Their Place, London: Polity Press,
1990, pp. 207–8.
65 Ibid., p. 208.
66 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1971, p. 268.
30 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

67 Barry Smart, ‘The Politics of Truth and the Problem of Hegemony’, in D.Hoy (ed.)
Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, pp. 157–73, p. 160; see also
Barry Smart, Foucault, Marxism and Critique, Melbourne: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1983.
68 Barry Smart, ‘The Politics of Truth and the Problem of Hegemony’, in D.Hoy (ed.)
Foucault: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, p. 160.
69 Colin Gordon, ‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction’, in G.Burchell, C.
Gordon and P.Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 1–52, p. 3.
70 See Barry Hindess, Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault, Oxford: Blackwell,
1996, pp. 97–113.
71 Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in G.Burchell, C.Gordon and P.Miller (eds)
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991, pp. 87–104, p. 101.
72 Lois McNay, Foucault: a Critical Introduction, London: Polity Press, 1994, p. 117.
73 Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in G.Burchell, C.Gordon and P.Miller (eds)
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991, p. 92.
74 Barry Hindess, ‘Politics and Governmentality’, Economy and Society, 26, 2, 1997, pp.
257–72, p. 259.
75 Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in G.Burchell, C.Gordon and P.Miller (eds)
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991, p. 101.
76 Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing Economic Life’, in M.Gane and T.
Johnson (eds) Foucault’s New Domains, London: Routledge, 1993, pp. 75–138, p.
82.
77 Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in G.Burchell, C.Gordon and P.Miller (eds)
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991, p. 103.
78 For a critique of this nature see Boris Frankel, ‘Confronting Neo-Liberal Regimes:
The Post-Marxist Embrace of Populism and Realpolitik’, New Left Review, 226,
1997, pp. 57–92.
79 Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing Economic Life’, in M.Gane and T.
Johnson (eds) Foucault’s New Domains, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 76.
80 As should be clear from this, my notion of ‘democrasubjection’ derives from Louis
Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, 2nd edn, London: New Left Books,
1977, p. 182. Foucault also points to this duality in the notion of subject. See Michel
Foucault, ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power’, in H. Dreyfuss and P.Rabinow,
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 208–26, p. 212.
81 For an extended discussion on the subject/subjected dichotomy see Etienne Balibar,
‘Citizen Subject’, in E.Cadava, P.Connor and J.Nancy (eds) Who Comes After the
Subject?, London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 33–57.
82 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, 2nd edn, London: New Left
Books, 1977, pp. 127–8.
83 Ibid., p. 160.
 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING 31

84 By misrecognition Althusser meant to point out how the subject sees itself as the
source of meaning when in fact it is simply an effect of meanings around which it is
brought into being by interpellation.
85 Ibid., p. 163.
86 Whatever the fate of the Althusserian project, this aspect of Althusser’s attempt to
bridge the ideological and the material remains a potent one around
which contemporary theorists move. See Stuart Hall, ‘Introduction: Who Needs
Identity?’, in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity, London:
Sage, 1996, pp. 1–17.
87 Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, London: New Left Books, 1973,
pp. 130–4.
88 Ibid., p. 133.
89 See Barry Hindess, ‘Citizenship in the Modern West’, in B.Turner (ed.) Citizenship
and Social Theory, London: Sage, 1993, pp. 18–35. I am following, here, certain
ideas in the post-Marxist camp. As Barry Hindess notes, against the idea that
citizenship is a real category, which determines the functioning of democracies, the
notion of citizenship relates to the idea of a political community as having a
common civilizational ethos to which a citizen should aspire. But it is not all closure:
against what he calls the realization work (citizenship as an assumed realized state of
rights and obligations) and the critique of citizenship as an ideological mystification,
Hindess suggests that citizenship can be a way of thinking about the political which
can result in unforeseen consequences (pp. 31–2). In essence, Hindess hints at a
discursive conception of citizenship. See also Chantal Mouffe, ‘Preface: Democratic
Theory Today’, in C.Mouffe (ed.) Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism,
Citizenship and Community, London: Verso, 1992. Mouffe also hints at a de-
essentializing of the idea of an existing political community (as if it really exists in a
commonality of interests) and proposes that modern political communities be seen
as a ‘discursive surface of inscription’ on which competing interpretations construct
and act upon (p. 14).
90 See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1971, pp. 181–2. For Gramsci, hegemony is never conceived as having
been secured but, as Boggs puts it, ‘Hegemony is part of a dynamic, always-shifting
complex of relations, not the legitimating core of a static and all encompassing
totalitarian rule’. See Carl Boggs, The Two Revolutions: Antonio Gramsci and the
Dilemmas of Western Marxism, Boston MA: Southend Press, 1994, p. 163.
91 See Peter Vandergeest, ‘Siam Into Thailand: Constituting Progress, Resistance and
Citizenship’, Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1990; also Peter Vandergeest,
‘Constructing Thailand: Regulation, Everyday Resistance and Citizenship’, Journal
for the Comparative Study of Society and History, 35, 1, 1993, pp. 133–58.
92 I have in mind here the notion that my focus could reproduce the dominant
ideology thesis which has been persuasively critiqued by N.Abercrombie, S.Hill and
B.Turner, The Dominant Ideology Thesis, London: Allen and Unwin, 1980.
Regarding the question of the diversity of democratic attitudes, such that it would be
mistaken to imagine passive reception of ideology, see John Dryzek, Democracy in
Capitalist Times: Ideals, Limits and Struggles, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
93 For the former position see T.Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. For a suggestive outline of the latter
position see Michael Mann, ‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship’, in M. Blumer
32 MAKING DEMOCRACY MEAN SOMETHING

and A.Rees, Citizenship Today: The Contemporary Relevance of T.H. Marshall,

London: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 125–44.
94 Indeed, Bryan Turner has hinted at this, but in a positive fashion, seeing citizenship
as a kind of secular solidarity in modern societies. See Bryan Turner, ‘Contemporary
Problems in the Theory of Citizenship’, in B.Turner (ed.) Citizenship and Social
Theory, London: Sage, 1993, pp. 1–18.
 3
Before the doctrine
From constitutional democracy to Thai-style democracy

Our realm is vast and the population is great. The eyes and ears of
our king, and the eyes and ears of the government officials cannot
reach out to all the people…. Thus there arose the need to change
the form of our government to that of the civilized countries. The
way to do this is to make the joys and sorrows of the people known
to the eyes and ears of the administrators…. Those who rule must
fulfil the needs of the people…. This is the rule of democracy where
the people are the master. For this reason the people have their
representatives who are their spokesmen.1
(Phahon Phonphayuhasena, Prime Minister of Siam, 1933–8)

Pridi Phanomyong, one of the leaders of the 1932 revolution which overthrew
the absolute monarchy in Thailand, was moved several decades later to consider
the failure of the People’s Party to establish democracy in Thailand. He offered a
sketchy explanation focusing on the role of egoism, the degeneration into
divisiveness (characteristic of even the French revolution, he noted), and the
continued survival of old-regime elements in the post-1932 order, particularly in
the bureaucracy. Pridi also repeated a story that is often told at seminars on
democracy even to this day, that when officials talked about the new constitution
(ratthathammanun) villagers thought it was the child of an important person.2 The
story may be read in several ways. Clearly, it highlights the different world-views
of the new rulers and the population. It also points to the fact that while the state
may have been characterized by administrative integrity of sorts, and possessed
internationally recognized sovereignty, its proclaimed citizens remained distant
and undisciplined in terms of the new democratic ideology that the government,
and future governments, propagated. Despite the administrative reforms of King
Chulalongkorn that brought about a centralized state apparatus, the state was far
from able to reach down to the lowest levels and shape their conduct. Distant
villages, constant movement, and a hardy rejection of the encroaching state made
it difficult for the state to turn its rhetoric even into a semblance of reality.
Meeting occasionally for ceremonial, financial and legal purposes, state officials
and villagers may be envisaged as having a long and uneasy stand-off, right into the
34 BEFORE THE DOCTRINE

present. Penetration of the ‘vast land’ and ‘great people’ has been a central aim.
Part of this penetration involved the elaboration of democratic ideology as a way
of bringing subjects into relations with the state. A stated ambition of the
modernizers from the 1930s to the late 1950s was to break down the population’s
perceived reverence and fear of authority so that it might become self-governing.
In a number of attempts at subject reform and citizen construction, projects of
democrasubjection were unevenly put into practice, well before the arrival of the
doctrine of political development in the 1960s. This chapter is an account of the
context in which these new projects emerged and the conditions under which
they were transformed.

Capitalism, the nation and the possibility of citizenship

In the mid-to-late nineteenth century the monarchy emerged as the organizing
centre for the rise of a modern state system in Thailand. By a process of
adaptation and control over other social forces, it was able to inaugurate a
hegemonic project of state modernization. In doing this, new ways of seeing
emerged. Although Thailand escaped formal colonization, the military, industrial
and social progress of the West greatly influenced the elite.3 Their actual
engagement with the West and their selective application of Western-derived
ideology (nationalism, constitutionalism) and technology (state apparatuses,
armies) ensured that elite were caught in the discursive frame of Orientalism.
They saw the society over which they ruled as somehow delinquent and inferior,
and in need of form and rationality, seen as attributes of the West.4 As Carol
Breckenridge and Peter Van Der Veer note, Orientalism was not merely a way of
thinking, but ‘a way of conceptualizing the landscape of the colonial world that
makes it susceptible to certain kinds of management’.5 In bringing under heel the
disparate populations that made up the kingdom, elites increasingly embraced a
civilizing posture towards their subjects. A form of internalized Orientalism may
be said to have informed the practice of ‘developing’ states and their intelligentsia.6
Additionally, Occidentialism, or an imagined West of rational order and
progress, animated this Orientalism, providing it with goals and indices of
progress and new political rationalities. These basic points have some application
in the Thai context, particularly because Siamese elites experienced an epistemic
rupture such that the tasks of modernity could only be referenced to Western
conditions. As active participants in this Orientalist frame, and providing it with
its necessarily hybrid disposition vis-à-vis the peculiarities of Siam, the elite
emerged as a historical class of state modernizers.
With the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932, ‘democracy’ emerged as
a troubled component of national ideology. The broader social and economic
basis for a discourse of citizenship and democracy had been developing for
generations. King Chulalongkorn (1868–1910) had built the administrative
structure of the nation-state in the late nineteenth century in response to the
threat of imperialism, and as a measure to entrench monarchical rule against noble
 BEFORE THE DOCTRINE 35

feudalistic tendencies.7 John Girling describes the form this state building took as
a ‘colonial-style, centralized, functionally differentiated bureaucratic state’.8
Additionally, all the outlying regions that form modern-day Thailand were
brought under control.9
This bureaucratic centralization and modernization of the state was
accompanied by the gradual abolition of the sakdina system. Seksan Prasertkul has
described this system as being composed of the phrai (indentured peasant) system
of corvee labour and a ranking system of the population.10 In effect, the sakdina
system was a specifically unique form of pre-capitalist mode of production,
sharing some similarities with European feudalism.11 Structurally, the sakdina
system was under threat from the commercialization of agricultural production,
and the newly ‘liberalized’ trade regime resulting from the British-imposed
Bowring Treaty of 1855. Integrating itself into this economic regime as regulator
and private beneficiary, the monarchy pursued the dual task of forming a
centralized, territorially fixed administrative structure and of providing the
conditions for a capitalist economy. These developments necessarily impacted on
the nature of class structure and gave rise to new national imaginings.
First, the Chakri state succeeded in replacing the subjugation of phrai (serfs) to
local masters with a new juridical status as subjects of the state. The gradual
abolition of phrai status (1905) and slavery (early 1900s), which created a universal
class of nominally free subjects, reflected the shift to free labour for
commercialized agriculture and a shift from corvee to monetary tax as the basis
for state revenue. This ushered in a new period of governor/subject relations. As
Peter Vandergeest notes, the new nation builders ‘attempted to individuate
people so that they could be regulated by the institution of citizenship’.12 Also, by
moving against localized political units of sultanates, regional monarchies and
tributary states, and winning the subjection of the regions to Bangkok, the
monarchy was able to implement financial, judicial and military functions of a
modern state.13
For Thongchai Winichakul, a significant ideological accompaniment to these
developments was a shift in the cosmological representation of space in Siam,
which was modelled on the Buddhist ‘three worlds’ account of various levels of
existence from celestial to bestial. He argues that the ‘modern’ understanding of
‘borders’ was absent, until the Siamese elite found themselves confronted with
Western cartography and demands to clearly delineate the boundaries of rule.14
Emerging out of this encounter with imperialism and the grave imperative to
respond, was the ‘geo-body’ of Siam, a new spatial imagination of territorial and
bordered sovereignty, providing a central condition for nurturing national
identity.15 Thongchai’s insight builds on the critical account of nations as
‘imagined communities’ developed by Benedict Anderson.16 For Thongchai,
national space was constructed by the mediation of maps and visual representations,
such that it could be discursively deployed to provide ‘a component of the life of
a nation’.17 The ‘geo-body’, then, is not simply to be understood as a physically
bounded space, but a space in which to discursively act. The emergence of the
36 BEFORE THE DOCTRINE

nation-state in Siam was also the birth of its geo-body as a representational space
around which other discourses could coagulate, particularly those related to
sustaining notions of an organic community.18 Although Thongchai is prone to
flights of determinism, granting agency to discourse, and viewing human actors as
mere instruments of discourse, his notion of the ‘geo-body’ is a profoundly critical
one, aware of the constructed nature of nationhood, even its seeming
physicality.19
As new administrative structures spread across the newly bordered Siam,
integration was sought even at the most local of levels. On the workings of the
new administrative regime, Siffin notes that a figure close to the powerful Prince
Damrong Rajanupab, younger half-brother of Chulalongkorn, visited British-
controlled Burma and returned with various ideas relating to administrative
measures for the integration of local areas into national administration. In the
1890s the Interior Ministry, under Damrong’s leadership, expanded. Censuses
were carried out to map the population.20 Of particular significance were the
Local Government Acts designed to integrate local ‘village leaders’ into state
administration as conveyers of policy and, increasingly, as registrars of the local
population, performing various licensing and policing needs.21 Speaking in 1892
on the rationale of local-level administrative reforms which would empower
village-level leaders, Prince Damrong Rachanuphap, Minister of the Interior from
1892 to 1915, explained it thus:

I want to make them all equal citizens. If we can have such a base for our
administration we will naturally be able to mobilize the people, to
investigate crimes, and in general to direct the people more easily than in
the past.22

Finding expression in this short statement are emergent forms of governmental

rationality relating to guidance and surveillance through citizenship. Such
rationalities would be the basis for attempts to cast the newly created subjects into
various productive moulds.
The advance of territorial sovereignty, administrative integrity and penetration
into the local areas, required a remaking of processes of state legitimization. While
Chulalongkorn’s achievement was the transformation of the dynasty into a
territorially bounded monarchy and the development of a modern state apparatus,
the significant contribution of King Vajiravudh’s regime (1910–25) was in
providing the ideological weaponry (the triadic Nation, Religion, Monarchy)
required to gather the various network of peoples, that Chulalongkorn had caged,
into a sense of nationhood.23 In propagating this triadic ideology, Vajiravudh
shrewdly drew on existing Thai and Western formulations of identity, adding
‘nation’ to the identity markers of religion and monarchy. The triad came to be
the three pillars of the ‘civic religion’, a related set of symbols and patterns which
fill up the meaning of life, connecting it to some sacred entity and destiny.24 As
Benedict Anderson notes, Vajiravudh’s administration began to systematically
 BEFORE THE DOCTRINE 37

utilize school education, propaganda and the writing of history for the purpose of
producing ‘endless affirmations of the identity of the dynasty and the nation’.25
The potential of this ideology, in modified form, was most fully utilized in the
decades following the revolution of 1932, as the state embarked on a project of
creating a national identity, using drama, music, literature and textbooks.26
Nationalism, as a universal language incorporating chosen subjects in a given
territory, provided the discursive basis for the development of ideological
citizenship; it provided a model of the individual delinked from the hierarchical
structure of the nai (lord) and phrai relationship, and made possible the
constitution of a juridical subject of law. This challenged the dual traditional
rationalities of the monarchy premised on Brahmanical conceptions of divine
kingship and Buddhist conceptions of sovereign power legitimated by the
monarch’s protection and embodiment of the Thai version of the Thammasat, the
Buddhist legal and cosmological code.27
Ideologically, these developments were well under way during
Chulalongkorn’s reign. In textbooks from the mid-nineteenth century efforts
were made to inculcate among elites a notion of citizen duty to the secular state.28
Likewise, as the revenue base of the state moved towards taxing the population,
taxpayers were increasingly seen as part of a newly emergent secularized state.29
Notions of bourgeois individualism were also propagated which stressed reason,
individual capacity and choice beyond fatalistic conceptions of karma.30 Most
importantly, the idea of developing a citizen’s morality and knowledge was
related to the development of the nation itself.31 During the next two reigns, the
idea of the Thai nation was further developed around a mythic history of the
Thai race.
David Streckfuss has pointed to the importance of the colonial encounter for
understanding the discourse of ‘Thainess’—the essence of ‘who we are’.32
Streckfuss notes that in struggling to define who would be Thai’, when faced with
French protectionist claims over Lao people, ‘the Thai ruling elite creatively
adapted the logic of race in delegitimizing French claims and in formulating a
sense of “Thainess”’.33 While Siam had erstwhile been a multiethnic entity,
imperialist pressures and the Thai attempt to maintain sovereignty generated new
designated identities over the peoples contained in its emerging borders. Speaking
to a royal commissioner, Chulalongkorn suggested caution in the designation of
identity:

you must remember that if you are speaking with a westerner on the one
hand and Lao on the other, you must maintain that the westerner is ‘them’
and the Lao is Thai. If, however, you are speaking with a Lao on the one
hand and a Thai on the other, you must maintain that the Lao is ‘them’ and
the Thai is ‘us’.34

Racial categorization brought into being, following Thongchai’s ‘geo’ neologism,

the ‘people-body’, the Thai. The ‘us’ and ‘them’ would be a constant internal
38 BEFORE THE DOCTRINE

tension of Thai identity, for this was nothing other than the imposition of a
centralized identity over a disparate population. The ‘Thai’ was a call to unity,
while a recognition that people were not sufficiently Thai and had to be made so,
was a call for disciplinary work on the people-body.
Two significant things may be said of the myth of origins relating to the Thai
nation and its people. First, in standard history and classroom teachings of it, the
ethno-base of the nation is uniformly presented as based on a southern migration
from China by the many Thai-speaking people. Yet these diverse peoples become
subsumed under a central Thai identity constructed in Bangkok. This historical
origin became the discursive basis on which central Thai chauvinism worked to
marginalize other ethnic groups.35 The year 1939 marked the pinnacle of this
project when Phibun Songkram changed the name of Siam, as part of his strategy
to reclaim parts of Laos. E. Bruce Reynolds explains the relevance of this move:

Ostensibly Thailand represented a more accurate translation of the Thai

term ‘Muang Thai’, but it was well understood that the change reflected an
aspiration to bring all neighboring peoples ethnically related to the Thai
under Bangkok’s rule. In the expansive view of Phibun’s chief ideologue,
Luang Wichitwatakan, these included not only the Lao, the Shans, and the
T’ai peoples in southwestern China, but the Cambodians as well.36

Second, in 1927 Prince Damrong, drawing on ideas that had been developing
within aristocratic circles, presented what would become the definitive statement
of the characteristics of the Thai people.37 Damrong explained Thai dominance in
Siam, going back 700 years, on the basis of their possession of certain
characteristics that he defined as ‘Love of National Independence, Toleration, and
Power of Assimilation’.38 As Damrong presented it, through love of national
independence the Thais had successfully fended off threats to the nation; because
of toleration for different beliefs and customs other races did not hate the Thais;
and through clever assimilation of different cultures the Thai people gained the
benefit of other civilizations.39 These ‘miraculous’ characteristics of the imagined
Thais, expressive of their ‘Thainess’, would often be repeated right into the
contemporary period, being articulated with the theme of statist democratic
development.
One of the consequences of the rise of national discourse within the bowels of
the monarchical state, and its continuance under the emergent post-1932
authoritarian state, was the disciplinary use of nationalism to stave off any
challenges to power that might come from the growing non-royalist fractions of
the capitalist class, as well as potential political dissidence. This class had been in
formation over the previous century and largely had Chinese origins.40 In 1911,
in response to the growing republicanism within China and among Chinese
immigrants in Siam, Vajiravudh passed the Nationality Act, which simultaneously
acted to exclude and include different sections of the Chinese population.41 This
inclusion and exclusion, and the use of various measures to stamp out the
 BEFORE THE DOCTRINE 39

speaking of foreign languages, set the scene for a long history of state efforts to
marginalize the Chinese, both workers and capitalists. Seksan has suggested the
underlying logic behind these moves:

by dividing the Chinese into natives and aliens, the Thai state was able to
weaken the capitalist class politically and re-establish its political dominance
in the relationship with the local bourgeoisie, it was a situation in which
capitalism was allowed to grow but not the political influence of the
capitalist class.42

This was the basis on which the Thai variant of bureaucratic state capitalism was
able to develop, forcing the predominantly Sino-Thai capitalist class into relations
of dependence with actors in the state.

Constitutions, politics and the new state

A pervasive interpretation of the revolution that overthrew the absolute
monarchy in 1932 is made by Riggs, who noted that ‘The revolution confirmed
but did not create a more basic transformation in the structure of the Thai
government, which had already taken place.’43 Given that significant changes in
the state had already occurred in the 1890s, Riggs considered the events of 1932
as merely the ‘substitution of one oligarchic elite by another’.44 Certainly the
governments that immediately followed the revolution of 1932 were marked by
compromise and struggle between competing fractions of the elite centred in the
military, bureaucracy and the palace. These struggles have led to an interpretation
of post-1932 politics as a politics of ‘faction constitutionalism’, which David
Wilson famously described as ‘the drafting of a new constitution to match and
protect each major shift in factional dominance’.45 At one level this is a fair
description, given the frequency of coups d’état and constitutional revision in
Thailand. However, recognizing the instrumental uses to which constitutions
were put does not mean that ‘democracy’ was irrelevant to the post-revolutionary
order. The idea of constitutionalism also downplays the significant changes
ushered in by the revolution.
On overthrowing the absolute monarchy in June 1932, the revolutionary
People’s Party built on earlier discourses of national citizenship to formulate a new
conception of an individual’s relationship to the state. The revolution’s intellectual
leader Pridi Phanomyong, a French-educated lawyer, was well versed in Western
constitutional and utopian radical thought, and this is reflected in a crucial text,
the Announcement of the People’s Party, issued during the revolution. The
Announcement criticized the monarchical state as dishonest, corrupt and indifferent
to the people’s sufferings. Furthermore: ‘The king’s government held people as
slaves…animals, and did not consider them as human beings. Thus, instead of
helping them, it continued to plant rice on the back of the people.’46 The
Announcement further attacked the arbitrary and nepotistic rot of the monarchical
40 BEFORE THE DOCTRINE

state.47 It also marked a forceful reconceptualization of the relations between the

state and the people:

People! Let it be known that our country belongs to the people and not to
the king as was deceived. Our forefathers had rescued the freedom of the
country from the hands of the enemy. The royalty only took advantage and
gathered millions for themselves.48

In this same declaration the six principles of the People’s Party were outlined, the
main features of which were to maintain sovereignty of the nation, to provide
employment, to formulate a national economic plan and for all to have equal
rights, freedom and liberty and a promise of full education.49
While abstractly embracing the people as the sovereign basis of government,
Pridi also exhibited the ‘civilizing’ tendencies of the elite. In his 1933 economic
reform plan that promised ‘equality of opportunity’ and government employment
for all, Pridi revealed the modernizing disposition that the revolutionaries held in
their assumed role of guardians of the people.50 This role entailed a modification
of the principle of liberty. Speaking of the economic wellbeing of the people as a
prior principle to complete liberty, Pridi notes: ‘Complete personal liberty is not
possible under any social system, such liberty is always limited by the good of
society.’51 In Pridi’s view the people needed to be led in their economic
development up a higher civilizational scale.52 As Pridi put it:

We may compare our Siamese people to children. The government will

have to urge them forward by means of authority applied directly or
indirectly to get them to co-operate in any kind of economic endeavour.53

It was around these interrelated ideas of the nation, economic development and
modernization that state democratic discourse emerged. Democracy was seen as
just one more component in the package of modernity towards which the new
elite aspired, and would in turn involve the formulation of projects for its
realization.
Another significant change involved the more effective use of the state
apparatuses, separated from monarchical caprice and extravagance, which put in
place the long-term conditions for effective practices of specific governmentalities
around located problems. Importantly too, administrative power was spread more
evenly and away from the dictates of ‘born rulers’. ‘Commoners’ assumed
positions of power next to aristocratic hangovers. In line with this trend, the
‘permanent’ constitution, promulgated in December 1932, proclaimed that titles
of birth no longer inhered privilege and laid down the basic rights of people
(Article 12).54 In the post-revolutionary period, the formal political arena
expanded to embrace a form of ‘parliament without parties’, with those pushing
for the establishment of political parties seen as harbouring malign counter-
revolutionary intent. However, the revolutionary grouping known as the
 BEFORE THE DOCTRINE 41

People’s Party continued to function. The revolutionaries also put in place a ten-
year plan towards full representative democracy. For ten years parliament would
be composed of two categories of MPs: first, those elected from local-level
elections who would then go on to elect members for a national parliament; and
second, those selected by the revolutionary regime. After ten years the second
category of MPs would be abolished. This plan stalled with the rise of the military
faction within the People’s Party; in 1940 the constitution was amended to
extend the role of appointed MPs for a further twenty years, thus ensuring the
stability of the government.
Another indication of significant change after 1932 was the shift towards
economic intervention in order to mobilize national capitalism.55 Regarding the
former, it is possible, Kevin Hewison argues, to look beyond the intriguing
struggles in the decades following the revolution and discern the emergence of
‘haphazard, state-led industrialization’ and, more generally, the role of the state as
‘policy maker, financier and model investor’ of capitalism.56 This was a decisive
break with the almost laissez-faire attitude of the absolute monarchy and its use of
state for private gain. Within the general parameters of this new state, different
elite fractions struggled. Once secured, power networks of allied capitalists,
military elites and bureaucrats were in a position to benefit economically, and
through such patterns of alliance, state actors became rentiers.57
The fact that the revolution had stopped far short of purging the palace
element meant that a latent royalist threat remained. This threat manifested itself
in the rebellion led by Prince Boworadet in October 1933, which indicated the
sheer reticence of aristocratic elements to submit to the revolution, thus forcing
strategies of mild ‘terror’ on the regime; political parties were not allowed, and
with the passing of the Protection of the Constitution Act (1933) free speech was
curtailed.58 By the late 1930s the struggle for control of the state had led to various
measures that sat uncomfortably with the democratic rhetoric of the regime. The
rise of the military faction in the People’s Party, led by Phibun Songkhram, was
indicative of this. The emergence of the military in the state was rooted in post-
revolutionary circumstances, in the concrete political struggles of the day and the
emerging structural power of military leadership vis-à-vis other elite groups. This
trend was attenuated after the onset of World War II.
However, it would be wrong to see the post-revolutionary bureaucratic and
military state as simply the inheritor of the centralized apparatus of the
modernizing absolute monarchy; rather, it sought to bend this apparatus towards
wider degrees of elite involvement, and to further develop modern rationality for
governance in nationalistic and democratic terms.
In the late 1930s the intial democratic intent of the regime was overshadowed
by xenophobic nationalism. This was expressed in a number of anti-Chinese
measures, and was coupled with the promotion of civilized Thainess through the
issuing of what were called state preferences (ratthaniyom). These state preferences
were the first extensive project, apart from developments in education, of subject
reform aimed at producing a modern citizen. They prescribed standards of
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"Five kilometers and a little better," he soliloquized in English, "and a
doubtful prospect of a meal…. Contrast that with what the gods offer
here—a cosy fire, coffee, eggs and chips, I warrant, and the
daintiest of little maids—to say nothing of a musical uncle with an
amiable propensity for throwing visitors into the stream. By Jove, it
is chilly…. Over in dear old England they'll be roasting nuts and
telling ghost-stories to-night."

The fast-thickening shadows deepened into the blackness of an

October night; the wind grew quieter, but there was a bite in the air
that made him draw his fur collar about his ears.

"What excellent French the little lady uses," he went on. "I wonder
who her parents were, and why the deuce she has to live with this
ogre. And what eyes! Enough to make one invent new songs of
Araby just to see them sparkle and soften…. One moment sad,
another tender—and always lovely. Steady, the Air Force—you're
becoming sentimental."

He looked at the battered machine and shook his head; a solitary

raindrop lit on his face and slid down its surface like a tear.

A belated gust of wind smote his face and left it moist. He rose in a
determined manner and adjusted his helmet.

"Adieu, my Camel!" He took a last survey of the machine. "The

kitchen is calling to my appetite; a storm is brewing in the heavens;
a pair of dark eyes is urging all the romance within me; so—mill-
stream or no mill-stream—mon oncle, I come."

He squared his shoulders and, with the rather absurd long stride and
the odd raising of the knee, made for the cottage door, from
underneath which a faint glow of light was timidly emerging.

III
In response to his knock there was a roar from within, and the door
opened enough to show the young lady in the doorway.

"Good evening," he said gravely. "I saw the light in here and decided
to accept its kindly invitation."

She glanced over her shoulder; but the airman, gently putting her to
one side, entered and looked serenely about the room, which
appeared to be kitchen, dining-room, and parlor in one. Beside the
stove he noticed the stooped figure of a man, whose huge black
beard straggled over a suit of overalls that had once been dark blue,
but had become a dirty white from constant association with flour.

"Good evening, monsieur." The airman handed his helmet to the girl
and proceeded to unbutton his coat. The miller's blotched eyes rose
sulkily to the visitor's face.

"What do you want here?" His voice was nasal and slovenly, and
there was a hoarse growl in the words, as though his throat was
parched and rusted.

"I am doing myself the honor of taking supper with you, monsieur."
The airman's face was full of melancholy dignity as he divested
himself of his coat.

The miller's mouth opened, and a rasping, deep snarl resonated

disagreeably. "There is the village, five kilometers that way."

"Ah—but that is five kilometers too far."

"You cannot stay here"—the miller's voice rose angrily—"there is but

food for two."

The Englishman tapped his pipe against his heel, and blew through
it to ensure its being empty. "Then, monsieur," he said, "you must go
hungry."
The Frenchman rose to his feet and brandished both arms above his
head. "Go!" he bellowed, and swore an oath that comprised a
reference to the sacred name of one dog and the sudden demise of
the afore-mentioned ten thousand devils who, it appeared, rested
heavily on his conscience.

"Mademoiselle"—the young man turned politely to the girl—"I

apologize for this gentleman. Shall I throw him into the stream, or
would a cleansing spoil his particular style of mottled beauty?"

The miller became eloquent. His language was threatening,

blasphemous, and deafening. His whole ungainly body vibrated with
a fury which, at certain moments, grew to such a pitch that he
would raise his chin upwards until all that could be seen was a forest
of beard, the while he emitted an unearthly roar that could have
been clearly heard on the village road. The girl, who had been
making preparations for supper, glanced timidly at him, but
continued her work. The cat, slumbering by the stove, opened his
eyes dreamily as if some sweet strain had come to his ears then
settled to slumber once more.

And the whole room resounded and quivered to the hurricane of

sound.

With an air of complete imperturbability, the intruding guest slowly

backed towards the table and became engrossed in the task of
refilling his pipe, though beneath the glow-worm eyebrows his eyes
(which were very clear and blue, as though his excursions into the
last free element of nature had blown all the dust and grime away)
held the orator in a steady look.

"Fill your pipe?" he said cryptically, choosing a moment when his

host was swelling up with a breath that promised to burst his ribs.

The response was startling.

Exhausting the air from his lungs with the noise of steam escaping
from an overcharged boiler, the miller rushed blindly forward,
crouching so low that his beard against his discolored clothes
suggested an ugly bush against a background of slushy snow.

With the precision of a guardsman forming fours, the airman took

one pace to the rear with his left foot and one to the right with his
right foot. This maneuver, successfully completed, placed the table
between himself and his assailant, and, tilting it dexterously, he
swiftly thrust that article of furniture forward, where it came into
violent contact with the irate miller's knees and shins. With an
indescribable howl the worthy man fell back in a paroxysm of agony,
grasping his knees with both hands, and rocking to and fro like a
demented dervish.

The airman bowed gravely to the girl. "I learned that," he said,
"from a gentleman by name of Charlie Chaplin. If you can oblige me
with a custard pie I shall hurl it at your uncle and thus complete the
Chaplinesque method of discounting violence."

The young woman's brows puckered. The spectacle of her uncle's

discomfiture had not disturbed her so much as this new kind of a
person who could bow so courteously, whose eyes twinkled
humorously, and whose words were full of gravity on the subject of
custard pies. She came of a race that coordinated gestures and the
play of features with speech; but this stranger of the air—Sapristi!

The moaning of the uncle grew less and his figure stopped its
rocking; but his red, blotchy eyes looked furtively at the young man,
biding their owner's time for a renewal of hostilities.

With an air of deep dejection the airman gazed at the unlovely

spectacle, then, very slowly, unfastened his holster and drew a
revolver.
"Monsieur," he said, "I offer peace. The alternative is—that I fill you
full of holes—which would interfere with your singing. I intend to
have supper here, because I saw hens outside. If they have given no
eggs, we shall eat the hens themselves as a punishment. We are
allies, you and I; let us be friends as well. Monsieur"—he struck a
Napoleonic attitude—"Vive l'Entente!"

The swarthy face of the miller, who had retained his posture on the
floor throughout, wrinkled hideously into a grin, which developed
into a roaring laugh that set a solitary vase jingling.

With a doubtful air of appreciation, the airman surveyed him, his

head inclining dubiously to one side. "Come, monsieur," he said,
after the miller's unpleasant mirth had subsided, "you sit there—at
the far end of the table; mademoiselle—when you have given us the
supper things—here; and I, at this end. Just to show how completely
I trust you, my host, I will keep my revolver beside my plate; and
should it be necessary for me to blow your brains out during the
meal, it will be with the very keenest regret that I lose a friend for
whom I have acquired such an instantaneous and profound
affection."

Thus the young lady with the guileless eyes, the youth who had
descended from the clouds, and the stentorian miller with the painful
knees, sat down together for their evening repast.

And the mill-stream, chuckling as it sportively tumbled over the

chute, made a pleasant serenade.

IV

The airman glanced at his wrist-watch; it was half-past nine. The

miller slept by the side of the stove, his chin crushing his beard
against his chest. Louis also slept, having curled himself into a black,
furry ball, apparently possessed of neither head nor tail. A clock
brazenly stating the time to be five-thirty, ticked lazily as though
finding itself four hours behind the correct hour, there was no
chance of its ever catching up, and it only kept going because it was
the sporting thing to do. Just over the clock a picture of Marshal
Joffre gazed paternally on the quiet scene.

Seated at the table, which was covered by a geranium-colored cloth,

the girl and the airman sat silent, while a shaded lamp lent a
crimson glow through which her deep eyes gleamed, like the first
stars of a summer evening.

To her romance had come.

She was no longer the miller's niece, but the girl who had seen the
Fairy Prince. All the sighs, all the questionings, all the longings of her
girlhood had culminated in this amazing adventure of a fair-haired
knight who, descending from the clouds, had proceeded to terrorize
her uncle who was feared for miles around. It was wonderful. And
he was so droll, this young man; and his voice had a little soothing
drop in it, at times, that left a fluttering echo in her heart.

She had left the convent when ten years of age, on the death of her
mother. Her father—but then gossip was never kind. He was an
officer who had deserted his pretty little wife for another woman—or
so rumor had it; and her mother had died, a flower stricken by a
frost. The daughter had been taken by a relative, the owner of a
lonely mill, and for six years had lived in solitude, her horizon of life
limited to the adjacent village, her knowledge of women gained from
the memory of a sad, yearning face, paler than the pillow on which
it rested, and an occasional visit to the curé's sister. Of men she
knew only her uncle and the few villagers that had not gone to fight
for La Belle France.

From unquestioning childhood she had passed to that stage in a

girl's life when the emotions leap past the brain, fretful of the latter's
plodding pace. Her mind untutored, unsharpened by contact with
other minds, left her the language and the reasonings of a child; but
her imagination, feeding on the strange longings and dreams which
permeated her life, pictured its own world where romance held sway
over all the creatures that inhabited its realm.

It is the instinct of a little child to picture unreal things—the

unconscious protest of immaturity against the commonplaceness of
life. But with the education of to-day and the labyrinth of artificiality
which characterizes modern living, the imaginativeness of childhood
disappears, except in a few great minds who, retaining it, are hailed
by the world as possessors of genius.

Unhampered (or unhelped, as the case may be) by association with

the patchwork pattern of society, the miller's niece had retained her
gift of imagination, without which the solitude and the monotony of
her days would have been unendurable; until, blending it with the
budding flower of womanhood, she found mystery in the moaning of
the wind. While the sun danced upon the grass her spirit mingled
with the sunlight; and when the moon exercised her suzerainty of
the heavens the poetry in her soul thrilled to sweet dreams of lover's
wooings (though her unreasoned rapture often ended in unreasoned
tears upon the pillow)…. She found melancholy in the coloring of an
autumn leaf, and laughter in the music of the mill-stream…. There
were smugglers' tales in a northeast gale, and fairy stories in a
summer's shower.

The doctrine of pleasure so feverishly followed by her sisters to-day

was unknown to her—as was its insidious reaction which comes to
so many women, with the dulling of the perceptions, the blinding of
eyes to the colors of life, the deadening of ears to the music of
nature, until they cannot hear the subtle melody of happiness itself,
so closely allied to the somber beauty of sorrow.

"Little one"—the aviator's voice was very soft, so that the ticking of
the clock sounded clearly above it—"in a few minutes I must go. It is
a dark night, and of necessity I must get to the village to-night, and
be on my way before dawn."

Her eyes were hidden by her drooping eyelashes. "You will return—
yes?" she asked, without looking up.

He smiled rather wistfully. "'When the red-breasted robins are

nesting,'" he quoted slowly, "'I shall come.'"

The clock ticked wearily on…. A few drops of rain fell upon the roof.

"Monsieur"—the crimson in her cheeks deepened—"you must not

smile; but it is in my book, here."

She took from the table The Fairy Prince, and handed it to him. He
gazed at it with a seriousness he might have shown towards a book
of Scottish theology.

"You know, monsieur"—she appeared deeply concerned in the

design of the geranium table-cover—"I never leave the mill-house
unless to attend mass, and sometimes—perhaps you would think so,
too—it is very lonesome; no brother, no sister, just Louis and my
uncle."

He nodded, and, with an air of abstraction, his brow wrinkled

sympathetically, and his fingers strummed five-finger exercises on
the table.

"It must be very dull," he said.

"But no, monsieur"—her eyes looked up in protest—"not dull—just

lonesome."

He sustained an imaginary note with his little finger, frowned

thoughtfully until his eyebrows almost obscured his eyes, then came
down the scale with slow and measured pace.
"Well, little lady who is never dull, and what has all this to do with
The Fairy Prince?"

"It is because I have no sisters, no friends, that—that I pretend. But

you do not understand."

He played some chord with both hands.

"Very young people and very old ones pretend," he said, with
dreamy sententiousness; "pretending is what makes them happy.
But the Prince——?"

She smiled deprecatingly. "When I read, monsieur, I think that the

girl—there is always a girl, is there not?" He nodded gravely. "I do
not think it is she," she went on, "but myself; and when the book is
finished, and she marries her lover, then I am happy … and
dream…."

"'We are such stuff as dreams are made of,'" he murmured, and
trilled with his first and second fingers.

"So, monsieur," she continued, glancing shyly at him, "in that book
——"

"There is a girl."

"Yes. And a Fairy Prince who was very handsome."

"Like me?"

"It does not say, monsieur."

"Ah!"

"But I think so," she said earnestly, "for he was the handsomest man
in all France."

"It said nothing of England?"

"No, monsieur, only France."

He nodded with great dignity, and motioned her to proceed. She

leaned forward with her elbows on the table, and rested her chin on
her interlocked fingers.

"To-day I was reading it to Louis," she said, "when, just at the

moment that they met—vous voilà!—you came. Monsieur," she said
naïvely, "are you a fairy prince?"

He considered, with head characteristically on one side.

"N-no," he said, "I cannot claim that, but——"

"Ah, yes?" Her face lit up with delighted anticipation.

"I am a prince of the air." He struck an attitude and held it.

"Oh!" Her lips parted in ecstasy and her cheeks, which had been
crimson, became scarlet. "You—are really a prince?"

"Of the air, mademoiselle." He folded his arms and tilted his chair
back. His face was still grave, but his voice had a sense of distance
in it, and his light eyes widened as though they saw the world his
words were picturing. "My kingdom is greater than all the kingdoms
of the earth, and when I ride, my steed with wings takes me
towards the stars. For sport I play with clouds and race the wind; at
night the moon gives me light; and when I travel there are no
mountains to climb, no lakes to cross. I go faster than the swiftest
horse, and ride from villages to cities, out into the country, and over
the sea with a steed that never tires."

"But, monsieur," she cried, "this is wonderful!"

He looked frankly into her eyes. "It is wonderful," he said.

For a few minutes neither spoke, and the soft symphony of raindrops
played through the quietness of the night.
"Your Majesty," she said timorously, "are you very brave? You
understand," she hurried on as a slight blush darkened the tan of his
cheeks, "in fairy books the prince always fights a dragon or a wicked
giant."

"Don't uncles count?"

She made a pretty moue.

"As a matter of fact," he said slowly, "there was a wicked Emperor—

a blustering popinjay with a madman's vanity—who decreed that all
the world should be his slaves, and sent his armies into France and
Belgium to enforce his will. My brothers heard of this, and came
from countries and dominions thousands of miles away. Across great
continents of water they sailed, and, with their brothers from the
little Islands of the North Sea, came to France…."

"Your voice is very sad," she said tenderly. Her nature, that knew
every mood of a summer breeze, had caught the inflection of his
words, understanding by their tone what the vagueness of his words
hid from her mind.

"So many have died," he said, looking away from her. "Almost every
day some one rides out into the sunlight to his death, young, brave,
and smiling…. Mademoiselle, it is wonderful how they smile."

Tick—tick—tick.

For more than a minute neither spoke, then, with a smile that was
strangely boyish, he squared his shoulders and ran his fingers
through his rumpled hair.

"Ha!" he laughed; "what fancies get into a scatter-brain like mine

when the rain's a-pattering on the roof. If you will allow me, little
Pippa, I shall smoke."

"Little Peepa?" she laughed delightedly.

"Pippa," he assented, puffing smoke as he lighted the pipe. "I think I
shall call you that. You see, according to her biographer, Mr.
Browning, she worked in the silk-mills all the year, but one day she
had to herself, from dawn to midnight, and so as to enjoy it to the
full she—well, she pretended, like you."

"But that is droll," she said eagerly, "for every Easter after Sunday,
my uncle, who is fatigued from so much chanting in the church,
always goes to Boulogne and becomes drunk for one whole day. On
Wednesday he returns. These six years he has done it always the
same; and on the Tuesday it is wonderful. I am alone with Louis,
and we ask all the people in our books to visit us."

A sudden gleam of excitement lit his eyes.

"The Tuesday after Easter?"

"Always it is so."

"Pippa," he said—but checked the remainder of his words. He placed

the pipe in his mouth and ran five-finger exercises at a terrific speed.

"Pippa," he said again, then, ceasing his display of virtuosity, leaned

back and gazed at her from beneath his eyebrows. "Next spring, on
the Tuesday after Easter, I will come for you."

She caught her breath deliriously.

"Beyond the village road," he went on, speaking slowly and

distinctly, "I saw a big pasture-field at the top of the hill. Be there as
the sun is just above the horizon, and I will come in an aeroplane."

"And, your Majesty, you will take me to your kingdom?"

"For one day, Pippa, to the great city of London—the city that is
open to all who possess a golden key. We shall return by the stars at
night."
"Then"—her voice shook, and the brilliancy of her eyes was softened
by sudden tears, as the rays of an August sun are sometimes
tempered by a shower, "then—at last—I am to see the world—boys
and girls and palaces and——"

"To say nothing of prunes and potentates."

"Oh, but, your Majesty, it is too wonderful. I am certain it will not

come true."

He rose and quietly placed his chair against the wall. "Pippa," he
said, "there are only two things that could prevent it. One, if there is
a storm and—the other——" he shook his head impatiently.

The girl took down a work-basket, and after searching its contents
extracted a tiny trinket.

"You mean," she said, stepping lightly over to him, "that you might
go to join your brothers—those who smiled so bravely?"

"We never know, Pippa," he answered.

She reached for the lapel of his coat and pinned the little keepsake
on it. "'Tis a black cat," she said. "I saw it in the village store, so
small and funny, like Louis. It is a gift from little Pippa, who will pray
to the Virgin every night that her Prince may not be killed—unless
——"

He looked at the little mascot, which dangled above a couple of

ribbons.

"Unless?" he said.

For a moment there was a flash in her eyes and a sudden crimson
flush in her cheeks that startled him. For the first time in her life she
felt the instinct of a tigress; that strange fusion of passion and
timidity that comes to women of her kind when it seems they may
lose the object of their love.

"Unless he—forgets." The words were spoken between lips that

hardly moved.

"By the sacred bones of my ancestors," he said, with a sort of

sincere grandiloquence, "I promise to come. So that I shall always
think of you, my Pippa, I will paint a black cat upon the machine,
and woe to the Hun who dares to singe its whiskers!"

A few minutes later, the heavily coated figure of an aviator was

plowing its way through a drizzling rain, along a dark and solitary
road. His pace was extraordinarily long for his height, and he
appeared to be stepping over a perpetual array of obstacles at least
one foot high.

By a casement window a girl, with hair like the dusk, stood gazing
towards the road that was hidden in darkness. Silently and
motionless she watched the melancholy drops of rain as they fell
upon the glass, until, unconsciously, her lips parted and she sang,
very softly, the little song taught to the maiden in the story by the
lonely shepherd:

"Maman, dites moi ce qu'on sent quand on aime.

Est-ce plaisir, est-ce tourment?"

She paused in the improvised melody, and repeated the words

slowly.

"Est-ce plaisir, est-ce tourment?"

And then the little mistress of the mill laid herself upon her bed and
wept profusely; but whether it was because she was happy or
because she was sorrowful, let those explain who understand the
psychology of a woman's tears.

Downstairs, Louis and the miller slept profoundly.

It was several months later that an airman emerged from his hut
into the chilly air of an April night that was lingering grudgingly over
its last hour of darkness. There was a sullen rumble of guns borne
on a restless breeze that stirred the long grass of the fields and set
the leaves in the trees whispering and quivering. The drone could be
heard of a lonely aeroplane returning from its night-ride over the
enemy lines…. Above the distant roll of the artillery, one gun stood
out like a pizzicato note on a giant bass violin.

The airman passed the silent aerodrome, and, with difficulty

accustoming himself to the darkness, made out the shadow of a
machine in the adjoining field. He heard the sigh of cylinders sucking
in the petrol as the mechanics warmed the machine, and walked
over to it. For a moment he spoke to the men before climbing into
the pilot's seat. There followed the incisive monotone of the flier's
incantation between himself and the non-commissioned officer.

"Petrol on: switch off."

"Petrol on: switch off."

"Contact."

"Contact."

The propellers were swung into action, hesitated for a moment, then
wheezily subsided.
The incantation was repeated; the propeller blades coughed, and
leaped into a deafening roar. The mechanics sprang aside, and the
machine, stumbling forward for a few yards, turned into the wind.
There was a sudden acceleration of the propeller, a crescendo from
the engines, and the machine made swiftly across the field, rising as
it attained flying speed, and disappearing into the night.

A few moments later its light was mixing with the dulling stars, and
the drone of its engine could be heard only at the whim of the
breeze.

"I wonder what the Black Cat's up to now," said mechanic No. 1,
rubbing his hands together for warmth. "Rum beggar, isn't he?"

His companion slapped his breast with his arms and blew on his
fingers. "Mad as a March hare," he growled; "takes a two-seater out
at this time of night."

"And did you notice the extra outfit?"

"He's mad," repeated the before-dawn psychologist, "mad as a

rabbit."

"But he's a mighty stout boy," interposed the N.C.O., who was torn
between his duty of keeping discipline and his love of character
study; "and he sure puts the wind up Fritz when he takes off with
his Black Cat Bristol fighter."

The blackness of night was beginning to give way to a dull and

sullen gray as the solitary pilot made a detour over the lines. In the
gloom beneath he could see a long crescent of orange-colored
flashes where the British guns were maintaining their endless
pounding of the enemy. Farther east was a large patch of winking,
yellow lights, giving to his eye the same effect as flakes of
gunpowder dropped upon a heated stove: it was the bursting of the
British shells. Beyond that field of death he could see other and
larger flashes, and knew the Hun was replying in kind.

Everywhere the darkness was being penetrated by long, rocket-like

lights with a white, starry burst at the end, and, as though to give
variety to the scene, a few red and green bursts mingled garishly
with them.

To the airman, from his refuge of height, it all combined in an

uncanny pageant of fireworks—a weird spectacle of death, as
though hell had opened and the passions of men were feeding the
flames to make a devils' holiday.

A searchlight woke him from his reverie. A couple of anti-aircraft

guns barked at him. With a smile he noticed the rapid approach of
morning's light, and, turning to the west, he set his course by the
compass and made for the lonely mill-house of Picardy.

VI

From a meadow at the top of a hill, a girl watched the horizon of the
east as the first glow of daylight heralded the arrival of Aurora's
chariot. The hurried walk from the mill-house and the climbing of the
hill had set her pulses throbbing with vitality, and as she watched
the dull gray give way with the promise of dawn, a wild, unthinking
spirit of exaltation seized her. Like the Pippa of Browning's song, she
felt her spirit rise with the triumph of nature.

Day!
Faster and more fast,
O'er night's brim, day boils at last:
Boils, pure gold, o'er the cloud-cup's brim
Where spurting and suppressed it lay,
For not a froth-flake touched the rim
 Of yonder gap in the solid gray
Of the eastern cloud, an hour away;
But forth one wavelet, then another, curled,
Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed,
Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the
world.

But he had not come—her Prince with the solemn face and the
laughing eyes. Day after day, through the long winter, she had lived
for this hour, thrilling over it, picturing it, dreaming of it—both awake
and asleep…. And he had not come.

Suppose—supposing——

Her heart leaped painfully. She had heard a sound like the humming
of an insect—faint—then more clear. The hum became a drone, and
in sheer intoxication she reached her hands towards the east as the
sun, well above the horizon, illumed the sky with gold-red flames.
Blinded by its brilliancy, she turned away; but her ear heard the
cessation of the engine as the pilot brought his machine towards the
earth. She knew that he must be approaching her; yet she kept her
face averted, on some caprice of sixteen years, until she heard his
voice calling, a few yards off.

He bowed very low as, with lowered eyes, she gave him her hand;
then, indicating a coat on his arm, he leant towards her, with some
effort making his voice heard above the impatient throbbing of the
aeroplane's engine.

"Take off your hat," he cried, noticing with quick approval the pretty
costume she wore (for however poor she may be, no French girl is
without one becoming frock), "and slip your curls into this helmet.
It's the largest I could find."

She did as she was bidden, laughing delightedly.

"Now, youngster, climb into this."

He wrapped her in a fur-lined leather coat, and after buttoning it

securely, lingered for a moment over the amusing and dainty picture
she presented. Then, picking her up in his arms, he carried her over
to the machine and deposited her in the observer's seat, fastening
the belt. He was just about to climb into his place in front, when,
changing his mind, he leaned over to her and placed both hands on
her shoulders.

"Frightened?" he smiled, speaking so close to her ear that a truant

curl brushed against his cheek.

She shook her head decisively—for a considerable period she had

been beyond the power of speech.

He looked into her eyes, which seemed to have borrowed something

of the sunlight, and patted her reassuringly on the shoulder…. And
Mademoiselle Pippa, niece of the absent miller, would have gone
straight to the moon with him had it been his wish and in his power.

She watched him wonderingly as he lifted a heavy sand-bag used as

ballast, and dropped it on the ground. The next moment he was in
the pilot's seat, there was a crescendo of the engine, a waddling
sensation as the aeroplane went forward, the sudden development
of the crescendo, the burst of speed, and….

The earth was receding!

She caught her breath, and hid her face in her hands to stifle a cry
and keep the sight from her eyes. She had been afraid that she
would faint with dizziness, and for a full minute sat, terror-stricken,
until, gaining courage, she tremblingly parted two fingers and cast a
timorous glance below. A cry escaped from her—but it was not one
of fear.
Beneath her, though she was not conscious of height, the
countryside spread, a great masterpiece of color, the light brown of
plowed fields standing out vividly against the green of meadows
where sheep (she laughed out at the thought) were huddled in little
groups like peanuts; roads had become paths, and cottages were
dwarfed to miniature dwellings for the tiniest dolls.

But—she felt no height.

Only, the landscape, refreshed after its long winter repose, kept
closing in—closing in, displaying new beauties every minute, as
though she were in real truth a Fairy Princess summoning villages
and rivers and farms into one vast tapestry of nature.

And this was France! As far as the eye could see, it was France, the
mother of greatness. For the first time she pictured the wide,
charred plains where the Hun had been, and scalding tears hid
everything from her sight.

Several times her cavalier of the clouds had turned around to see
that she was not frightened, and, as often as he did so, she nodded
excitedly, and waved both hands after the manner of an orchestral
conductor calling for a fortissimo. Once he shut off the engines, and
they seemed to lie in the wind, a becalmed ship of the air.

"All right?" he queried inelegantly.

She tried to think of some word to summarize her emotions, but,

failing utterly, raised her goggles and thanked him with her eyes. A
woman's methods are not affected by altitude.

It seemed to her that they had flown for an hour, when, in her
tapestry of landscape, she found the gradual inclusion of the
steeples and the roof-tops of a city, the streets of which gave the
impression of having been drawn with a brown crayon with the aid
of a ruler. The aeroplane appeared to be turning with the wind, and
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