Thailand: A Democratic Failure and Its Lessons for the Middle East

Markets and Democracy Briefs are published by CFR’s Civil Society, Markets, and Democracy initiative. They are designed to offer readers a concise snapshot of current thinking on critical issues surrounding democracy and economic development in the world today.
As nations in the Middle East revolt against longtime autocrats, many reformers in countries like Tunisia or Egypt are celebrating their first tastes of democratic freedom. In Egypt, high turnout marked a recent referendum, the first truly free vote in modern history, to decide on a set of new constitutional amendments.
Yet as the experience of many developing nations in East Asia shows, these initial, exuberant glimpses of democratic reform can prove a mirage, and toppling a dictator hardly guarantees a smooth path to consolidated democracy. In the 1980s and early 1990s, nations from Indonesia to the Philippines to Mongolia embarked on their own democratic transitions, often after large-scale street demonstrations similar to the Middle East’s “Days of Rage.”Among newly democratizing nations, Thailand, where hundreds of thousands of Thais came out into the streets of Bangkok in 1992 to bring down a military government, seemed perhaps the best prospect for stable democracy. Thailand boasted a large, educated middle class, one of the best-performing economies in the world, and a relatively robust civil society. By the late 1990s, Thailand had held several free elections and passed a reformist constitution that enshrined greater protections for civil liberties and created a wealth of new institutions designed to root out graft and ensure civil rights. In its 1999 report on freedom in the world, monitoring organization Freedom House ranked Thailand a “free” nation.
Today, however, Thailand looks less like a success story and more like an example of how democracy can fail. Since a 2006 military coup, Thailand has reverted to a kind of soft authoritarianism: the military plays an enormous role in determining politics; the Thai middle class has become increasingly antidemocratic; and security forces have used threats, online filtering, arrests, and killings to intimidate opponents of a government sanctioned by the armed forces and Thailand’s monarchy. Freedom House recently ranked Thailand as only “partly free,” and the country has sunk near the bottom of all developing nations in rankings of press freedom. Thailand’s failures provide cautionary tales for reformers in the Arab world.

A Markets and Democracy Brief
Author: Joshua Kurlantzick, Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia — กับ Juab Thaidang