By Warangkana Tempati
Another coup is unlikely in foreseeable future as the Thai military has already found “the perfect niche” for playing its role in national politics—pulling strings from behind the scenes, said a civil-military relations expert at a recent forum.
“This is the perfect niche for the military,” Dr. Paul W. Chambers, a senior research fellow at the Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg, said. “The prime minister and the government get blamed if policies go wrong.”
Dr. Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS), agreed. “The military has become more sophisticated. They choose to be in the second-best place,” said Dr. Thitinan, who moderated this forum. “But they won’t be hesitant to overtake power if circumstances are right.” The public event was organised by ISIS, a partner organisation of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.
Given the current economic conditions and political state of affairs in which the Democrat-led government has an agreeable relationship with the military to the point of taking a blind eye towards the alleged abuses of Rohingya immigrants from Burma by military officials, such circumstances are quite a distance away.
“The military is against democratic rule,” Prof. Dr. Suchit Bunbongkarn, president of the Political Development Council, said his keynote speech at the forum. In his opinion, the military is “over-involved” in politics. He believes, however, that the threat of another coup is low. “Launching a coup is one thing, governing the country after the coup is another. The military realises that governing the country is a complicated matter,” said Dr. Suchit, an expert on civil-military relations. “Secondly, there will be resistance from locals and the international community.”
Civilian Control over the Military?
On one hand, the Thai military is not strong enough to govern the country. On the other hand, civilian control over the military is unlikely if the civilian government is weak. “This is the dilemma in this country,” Dr. Suchit said at the forum “The Military in Thai Politics: What’s Next?” at the Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Political Science in Bangkok on 1 September 2009.
Civilian control over the military is possible if there is a consensus among civilians that the military should be kept out of politics, Dr. Aurel Croissant, director and professor at the Institute of Political Science, Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg, said.
Civilian control is about who has the power to issue policies and get them implemented, especially in the areas of social policies, economy, national security, national politics, and military affairs. Civilian control was lost after the September 2006 coup in which the Thaksin government was overthrown, Dr. Croissant said during his presentation, titled “Civilian Supremacy and Democracy: A Conceptualisation”.
However, if the military is engaged in large businesses, as in the case of Burma, it will be harder to keep them out of politics since they will try to make sure that any decision on economic policies will not affect their sources of income. Civilian control is difficult to achieve also if civilians are not ready to accept responsibilities that accompany the power or if they pull the military into politics to help them succeed in power, he added.
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