A Kingdom in Crisis – What’s All the Fuss About?

This article reviews Andrew MacGregor Marshall’s A Kingdom in Crisis: Thailand’s Struggle for Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, a book on how Thailand’s political challenges relate to the Thai monarchy. The review draws comparisons between the excitement surrounding the publication of the acclaimed book The King Never Smiles in 2006 and the recent reaction to the publication of A Kingdom in Crisis. It argues that the book is an important contribution because it informs a wide audience about the damaging political role of the monarchy, but it repeatedly ignores an already existing corpus of literature that deals critically with Thailand’s monarchy. Moreover, its focus on the succession as the key factor in the ongoing political crisis is unnecessarily narrow and should have been complemented by an analysis of structural forces as drivers of change.     

Introduction: Understanding Thailand’s Politics

ABSTRACT

Thailand’s politics from the mid-2000s has seen considerable conflict and contestation, with seven prime ministers, two military coups, and scores of deaths from political violence. This article, as well as introducing the eight articles in the Special Issue, examines various aspects of this tumultuous period and the authoritarian turn in Thai politics. It does this by examining some of the theoretical and conceptual analysis of Thailand's politics and critiquing the basic assumptions underlying the modernisation and hybrid regimes perspectives that have tended to dominate debates on democratisation. While the concepts of bureaucratic polity and network monarchy shed light on important political actors in Thailand, they have not grappled with the persistence of authoritarianism. In theoretical terms, the article suggests that it is necessary to understand historically specific capitalist development as well as the social underpinnings that establish authoritarian trajectories and reinforce the tenacity of authoritarianism.     

The Resilience of Monarchised Military in Thailand

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that conventional notions of Thailand’s military must be re-examined because they misrepresent the military’s role in politics. Instead of examining its material interests, one must also scrutinise the power and legitimacy of Thailand’s armed forces in terms of its connection to monarchy over time. The relationship between monarchy and military represents a “parallel state”, whereas the ideology, rituals and processes within this relationship result in what can be termed a “monarchised military.” The purpose of this nexus is to sustain a palace-centred order from which the military obtains legitimacy. From 1991 until 2014, the monarchised military mostly operated behind a defective democracy, although it occasionally carried out coups to re-assert the palace’s authority. Its more recent political intrusions have enhanced the military’s power on Thailand’s political stage. Civilian prime ministers have unsuccessfully sought to reign in the military, but to no avail owing to the armed forces’ close association with monarchy.     

Le pouvoir et la guerre dans le discours parlementaire (1914–1918)

SUMMARY

In 1914 the political situation in Portugal was driven by feelings of insecurity, following the revolution of 1910 which had replaced the monarchy by a republic. In this article, Maria Ribeiro illustrates the state of public opinion and its reaction to the European war. The article uses the speeches of the party spokesmen in debates in parliament down to the final decision to enter the war on the side of the Entente powers in February 1916. It argues that public opinion was driven by three perceived sources of insecurity: fear that the great powers had designs for the taking over of Portugal's African colonies; the fear that since the establishment of the republic, the Spanish monarchy might be contemplating intervention in Portuguese internal affairs and sought to compromise her independence; and a general perception that the new republic needed to assert its international status. This last consideration, the desire to establish firm international recognition of the sovereignty of the Portuguese Republic, was probably the principal factor which moved the Portuguese political leaders to intervene in the war.     

Oligarchy and royal power: The Castilian Cortes and the Castilian crisis 1248–1350

Summary

In the early sixteenth century it was usually assumed that the first meeting of the English parliament took place in 1116, under King Henry I. By the later seventeenth century, scholarly research was beginning to reveal that the true origins of parliament lay after 1265. However, between these two periods, the view took hold in Elizabeth's reign that the institution was of extreme antiquity, dating from before the Norman Conquest and possibly even before the Anglo‐Saxon invasions. The most remarkable treatise on the subject was written for the Society of Antiquaries by John Doddridge, one of the leading lawyers of his generation, and achieved wide circulation. However, with the accession of James I, such positions became contentious, since the king in his writings and speeches repeatedly asserted the historic primacy of monarchy over parliaments. In 1614, knowledge of the king's displeasure led the remaining members of the Society to abandon their attempts to refound the Antiquaries. The article outlines the evolution of views on the antiquity of parliament, pointing out the political impact of these beliefs in the early seventeenth century, when the Stuart monarchy seemed far less favourable to the role of parliament than the Tudors had been. It links these unhistorical but powerful treatises to Koenigsberger's argument that ‘a strong and living myth of parliaments’ was necessary wherever effective representative institutions survived in seventeenth‐century Europe.     

Captains of erudition

Abstract

W. A. Nielsen's book The Big Foundations is an informed survey of the American foundation scene. Writing from a vantage point within the citadels of big-time philanthropy, Nielsen takes a chatty and discursive approach to a subject that in fact deserves much more. It seems that the insider's privilege of access can be a handicap as well as an asset, and that a subject of this importance needs critical scrutiny from independent researchers.     

Phenomenological ecology in two occasional poems by Ben Okri

Abstract

This article begins with a brief discussion of the three terms: the poet, ontopoiesis and eco-phenomenology or phenomenological ecology. An explication of its thrust, viz. the significance of sowing/sewing ‘a quilt of harmony’ (Wild 2012: 20), in relation to the broad yet symbiotic theme of cosmic ecology follows. The discussion proceeds by presenting a close critical analysis of Ben Okri's ‘Lines in Potentis’, a poem commissioned by the then Lord Mayor of London in 2002 in commemoration of the bombing of the City of London and which is featured in Okri's most recent anthology of poetry, Wild (2012: 26-27). Both my thrust and my argument are predicated on another occasional poem from Wild, ‘A Wedding Prayer’ (2012: 20-22), which is not analysed in any detail. Axiomatic to the interpretation is the poet's own conception of ‘wild’, cited on the dust cover of the anthology, as ‘an alternative to the familiar, where energy meets freedom, where art meets the elemental, where chaos can be honed’. More precisely, for this London loving Nigerian poet, ‘the wild is our link with the stars…’. This is not aesthetic posturing. As I attempt to show in my reading of the focal poem, it has to do with mystical unrest viewed from an eco-phenomenological ‘enjoyment of literature, of beauty, of the sublime, the elevated, as well as our compassion for the miseries of humankind, [and] generosity towards others.. inspired by the subliminal passions of the human soul’ (Tymieniecka 1996). As the conclusion attempts to show, this projects some of the epistemology of Africans in Africa and the Diaspora. It does this by invoking the contentions of fellow African phenomenologist, Achile Mbembe, in comparison with Tymieniecka's argument that the soul is the ‘soil’ of life's forces and that it is thus the transmitter of life's constructive progress. Such progress is from the primeval logos of life to its annihilation in the anti-logos of man's ‘transnatural telos’ (Tymieniecka 1988: 3).     

Alternatives to the constitution of Cádiz in New Spain: republicanism and the insurgent constitutional decree of Apatzingán (1814)

This article compares the Decreto Constitucional para la libertad de la América Mexicana, published in Apatzingán by the insurgents of New Spain in 1814, with the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz which established a constitutional monarchy in the Spanish Empire. It argues that the Decreto Constitucional cannot be understood as simply a product of Hispanic political thought and a reflection of the Cádiz text. Rather, it contends that the decree published in Apatzingán represents an alternative republican response to the dissolution of the Spanish monarchy. This alternate constitutional settlement drew on the debate of constitutional ideas that had taken place in New Spain since 1808 and was grounded in many of the same ideas as those present in the Pennsylvanian Constitution of 1776 and the first French republican constitutions of 1793 and 1795.     

Studies presented to the international commission for the history of representative and parliamentary institutions 1980 — 1985

SUMMARY

In this article Joseba Agirreazkuenaga continues his account of the development of the Basque political institutions to the period following the settlement of the first Carlist war by the Convention of Bergera in 1839. This laid down a process for incorporating the Basque foral institutions into the framework of the new liberal constitution of the Spanish monarchy. It required negotiations between the Spanish Cortes and Basque representatives, which produced the institution of the Basque Conferencias to speak for the three Basque provinces. Once established these developed into the main institutional voice for the developing Basque national movemebt. By the 1860s the Conferencias had virtually acquired the function of a Basque provincial government.     

Robert Manne's Wilfred Burchett: The Uses and Abuses of Biography

Robert Manne numbers amongst Australia's most influential public intellectuals. Though his politics have moved leftwards, Manne remains critical of the left's so‐called neo‐Stalinist interpretation of Cold War history. Of particular concern is the left's defence of the radical Australian journalist, Wilfred Burchett, who was widely regarded as a communist propagandist and traitor. Manne's 1985 Quadrant essay, “The Fortunes of Wilfred Burchett: A New Assessment”, lent considerable academic weight to this view. Though Manne has since acknowledged some errors, he still maintains that Burchett was a communist “hack” and traitor. But Manne's argument remains selectively based and erroneous. It uncritically accepts security‐based intelligence, while sidestepping the abuse of Burchett's civil liberties by Liberal governments. Manne uses and abuses Burchett's life to push his ideological agenda about Stalinism's evils.     

Sexual Slander and the 1965/66 Mass Killings in Indonesia: Political and Methodological Considerations

Indonesia has been haunted by the “spectre of communism” since the putsch by military officers on 1 October 1965. That event saw the country's top brass murdered and the military attributing this putsch to the Communist Party. The genocide that followed was triggered by a campaign of sexual slander. This led to the real coup and the replacement of President Sukarno by General Suharto. Today, accusations about communism continue to play a major role in public life and state control remains shored up by control over women's bodies. This article introduces the putsch and the socialist women's organisation Gerwani, members of which were, at the time, accused of sexual debauchery. The focus is on the question of how Gerwani was portrayed in the aftermath of the putsch and how this affects the contemporary women's movement. It is found that women's political agency has been restricted, being associated with sexual debauchery and social turmoil. State women's organisations were set up and women's organisations forced to help build a “stable” society, based on women's subordination. The more independent women's groups were afraid to be labelled “new Gerwani ” as that would unleash strong state repression. This article assesses the implications of these events for the post-1998 period of Reformasi and reviews some recent analyses of 1965, state terrorism and violence and reveals blind spots in dealing with gender and sexual politics. It is argued that the slander against Gerwani is downplayed in these analyses. In fact, this slander was the spark without which the bloodbath would not have happened and would not have acquired its gruesome significance.     

Formen politischen Handelns der kleve‐märkischen Landstände 1640–1660

Summary

Affected by the political influences from America and France, Poland's constitution of 1791 revised the electoral ordinance for the gentry, modified the administration of the cities and gave them representation in the Seym, and finally instituted a hereditary monarchy with checks and balances between the branches of government. The opposition of domestic conservatives, aided by armed foreign intervention, secured the repeal of this constitution in 1793. The result was a national insurrection in 1794 the defeat of which led to the final partition of Poland. Napoleon's 1807 Prussian campaign led to the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw, whose constitution was based on French egalitarian ideas and whose civil law was the Code Napoleon. The constitution separated executive and legislative functions and placed constitutional matters in the hands of the executive. In 1815 the Poles secured from tsar Alexander I the establishment of a hereditary constitutional monarchy with an appointed senate, an elected Seym and an extensive Bill of Rights. The system eventually failed when tsar Nicholas I violated the constitution and public dissatisfaction with the conduct of his brother, Constantine, precipitated the revolution of 1830.     

Sheikh Muhammad Abu Zahra (1898–1974) on international relations: the discourse of a contemporary mainstream Islamist

The literature on Political Islam has not devoted ample space to the intellectual contributions of contemporary moderate Islamists. This article attempts to rectify this by examining the international relations discourse of a twentieth-century Egyptian religious scholar: Sheikh Muhammad Abu Zahra. Despite Abu Zahra's prominence in the Islamic world, his writings have received scant attention from academics. The article provides a close reading of his three principal works on international relations: al-?Alaqat al-Duwaliyya fi al-Islam, Nazhariyat al-Harb fi al-Islam and al-Wihda al-Islamiyya; as well as a fourth work with a significant bearing on the subject: al-Mujtama? al-Insani fi Dhil al-Islam. It contends that Abu Zahra's international relations discourse is part of a more than a century-old tradition of theorizing on international relations that dates back to the religious reformers Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdu. Accordingly, Abu Zahra is treated here as an exemplar of what I refer to as the moderate and reformist school in contemporary Islam, in contradistinction to the radical school that is associated with salafi-jihadist figures and movements. A close analysis of Abu Zahra's international relations discourse thus provides penetrating insights on one pivotal, albeit understudied, dimension of this reformist/moderate current in contemporary Islam: its perspectives on international relations.     

Amending the Youth Criminal Justice Act, 2007–2012: dynamics and contingencies of a ‘transforming Canada’ agenda

This paper addresses the Conservative Party of Canada's three-phase effort (2007–2012) to amend the Youth Criminal Justice Act to prioritise public protection, accountability and victims' rights over prevention and rehabilitation. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and criminology and critical policy scholarship, the paper situates this tough-on-crime initiative in relation to a US-led punitive turn that Canada is belatedly catching-up on, positions this catch-up effort in relation to the Conservative's larger transforming Canada agenda, and explores cultural, institutional and political contingencies salient to its impacts on Canadian law and society.     

Poets,culture and orature: A reappraisal of the Malawi political public sphere, 1953–2006

Mapanje and Mphande make a persuasive case for the significant role of literature in challenging Dr Banda's one-party hegemony. The contested terrain, as Mphande notes, was orality, the dominant medium in Malawi where literacy levels are low. It has been assumed, though, that orature did little to challenge Banda's hegemony. I argue that far from being silent, the popular musicians and dramatists (as orature) were much braver than the writers. While written poetry and prose was often presented in coded and dense texts, the musicians’ and dramatists lyrics and texts were usually much more explicit. And while writers used folk tales and appropriations from traditional culture as templates to critique Dr Banda's autocratic regime, oral practitioners went further, critiquing Dr Banda's regime using the same templates but also pointing out the socio-economic suffering of the peasantry.

Since 1994, as writers’ critiques have become muted and spasmodic in the ‘multiparty’, musicians have consistently been loud and forceful voices on behalf of the poor. From 1953 to 2006, orature has been a continuous tool of resistance whereas literature has been an intermittent response, often related to patronage, to political and socio-economic events. Further, while literature tends to be concerned predominantly with human rights and democracy issues, orature is concerned with these as well as socio-economic rights; a distinction reflective of class, the rural/urban divide and education in Malawi. The findings are generalisable to other Bantu-language-speaking countries such as Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Mozambique. I posit that assessments of Malawi's current and future socio-economic and political cultures that exclude oral critiques miss significant and critical factors impacting on developmental changes in these spheres.     

De la Monarchie

SUMMARY

In this article Michel Peronnct discusses the problem of finding a clear, unambiguous terminology, based on contemporary texts, for the comparative discussion of political societies by historians. It takes as its example the classifications of Monarchy. The use of a priori categories, invented by the historians themselves, such as ‘absolutism’ or ‘enlightened despotism’ is argued to be unsatisfactory as such invented terminology cannot yield the necessary clarity. The paper concentrates on the comparison between the French and the English monarchies both of which originated as ‘consultative monarchies’ based on divine right, where the prince is sovereign but by custom takes advice from groups of his subjects, while retaining for himself the ultimate decision making power. This basic monarchical type can continue over long periods of time, as it did in France down to 1789 or it can develop in two directions. Rulers may, over time reduce or even discontinue the consultative processes, leading to autocratic monarchy, of which Joseph II of Austria would be an example. Or as in England the consultative institutions may develop an increasingly representative character and build on this to enforce limitations on the final decision making powers of the prince, producing the third type, representative monarchy. It is shown how this typology can be derived from contemporary texts and argued that it can offer a reliable system of classification for the purpose of comparative analysis.     

PARTNERS IN REALISM: BRITAIN AND BRUNEI AMID RECENT TURBULENCE

Roger Kershaw is a former lecturer, now freelance writer, on South East Asia. He worked in Brunei between 1984 and 1994. His interest in monarchy is reflected in Monarchy in South-East Asia: The Faces of Tradition in Transition (London, Routledge, 2001). He has contributed a number of articles to Asian Affairs on Brunei, Malaysia and Thailand, and many reviews across the years.     

Legacy of the past,promise of the future: Land reform,land grabbing,and land conversion in the Calabarzon

Abstract

Rather than viewing the recent violence in the Thai South largely as a product of long-standing historical and socioeconomic grievances, this article argues that the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has played a crucial role in provoking conflict in the region. Early in his premiership, Thaksin decided that the South was controlled by forces of “network monarchy” loyal to the palace and to former prime minister Prem Tinsulanond. Thaksin sought to reorganize political and security arrangements in the deep South in order to gain personal control of the area, but in the process he upset a carefully negotiated social contract that had ensured relative peace for two decades. As the violence increased, royal displeasure — articulated mainly by members of the Privy Council — forced Thaksin to make certain concessions, notably the creation of a National Reconciliation Commission to propose solutions for the growing crisis. Network monarchy had struck back, albeit from a position of weakness. This analysis seeks to demonstrate that the southern violence is actually inextricable from wider developments in Thailand's national politics.     

Hostility and Hospitality: Muhammad Qazvini's Critique of Louis Massignon

In his magnum opus The Passion of al-Hallaj, the famous French scholar of mysticism, Louis Massignon (1883–1962), studied the life of the tenth-century religious figure and martyr Mansur al-Hallaj. While this earned Massignon high accolades, most famously from Edward Said in Orientalism, his contemporaries disputed the value of his contributions. In particular, this article will closely examine the writings of Muhammad Qazvini (1877–1949), an Iranian philologist who wrote a private letter to a colleague referring to Massignon's ‘Orientalist charlatanism’. Through Qazvini's private reflections we are able to explore the critical undercurrents of French Oriental studies, particularly in Qazvini's assessment of Massignon's concept of hospitality.     

The coup d'état in Spain: from the anti-liberal movements to the democratic revolution, 1814–1874

SUMMARY

In this article Mikel Urquijo seeks to explain the evolution of the coup d'état as a feature of the political history of Spain in the nineteenth century. The repeated interventions based on the armed forces, with a greater or lesser contribution from the civilian politicians, are seen as the method by which some alternation in government between the political factions was made possible. The article traces the development from the purely military coup, or pronunciamiento of the early years, intended to exclude civilian politicians, to the mixed coups of the mid-century. In the absence of a truly democratic political system, or a developed national and civic consciousness, in a system where the ruling party could decide the outcome of elections by executive action, the coup was the accepted method of changing the regime. But the increasing participation of civilian politicians in the process culminated in the coup of 1868, which had some of the characteristics of a democratic revolution, and overthrew for a time the Bourbon monarchy. This represents a true civic-military coup d'état.