The age of desperation

11 June 2001

Consider the sheer variety of those suggesting Thaksin should be allowed to escape from his Constitutional Court case.

On one side, a playboy politician who decks himself out like an ageing gigolo — flash jacket, pencil mustache, bouffant hair-do, smirk. On the other, a Buddhist moralist who adopts the guise of a Victorian schoolmaster — dark suit, white shirt, horn rims, frown.

On one side, the mega-wealthy head of Thailand’s largest corporate group. On the other, the Assembly of the Poor.

On one side, conservative career bureaucrats. On the other, political activists who spent time in the jungle.

On one side, the Benz dealer who founded the Market for the Formerly Rich so that the wealthy might survive the crisis. On the other, the abbot who inspired thousands of ordinary people to donate their gold bangles for “national survival”.

What is going on?

A moment of polarisation when politics seems so simple, so clear. Black or white. For or against. Thaksin or limbo. No grey areas, no conditional clauses.

The foreign press is struggling to understand this with words like “nationalism” and “populism”. But these obscure more than they illuminate. Thaksin indulges in little obviously nationalist rhetoric (consider, by contrast, George W. Bush, William Hague, John Howard, etc, etc). His supposedly populist election promises have been exposed as more realistically modest. So why is his star still rising?

Listen to a recent convert. Prawase Wasi gave an interview on his admission to the Thaksin fan club. He made four points.

One, Thaksin did nothing wrong; he stole nothing from anybody; it’s all his own money; the problem is only technical; the Counter Corruption Commission got over-zealous. Prawase, it seems, has better information than the CCC and the Constitutional Court. He godfathered the 1997 constitution, but now he wants two of the charter’s flagship institutions to back down. He has made his name as a man of principle. But he is lining up with those who argue for a “political solution” rather than legal principle.

Two (this is the important bit). Prawase believes Thaksin understands the importance of community, the Asian way, and self-reliance. He assures us, “If we can think self-reliance, then we can get out of this crisis”. Three, foreigners don’t like self-reliance because they want countries to be reliant on them. Four, globalisation needs to become more civilised, more humane.

The keyword is self-reliance. The consensus around this idea — and ultimately around Thaksin — emerged gradually. The story started in November-December 1997. The IMF announced its crisis programme against a background chorus in the international press. The crisis proved that Asian capitalism was bad, and Asian government was corrupt. Everything had to be swept away. Opening up markets would allow money, ideas, systems to flow in to overcome the crisis and transform Thailand for the globalised world. Ridicule was delivered through bad jokes on magazine covers.

The reaction built slowly. A month later, the king gave his speech on self-reliance. At first this was interpreted as a strategy for cushioning the villages against the downturn.

In 1998, businessmen tried to raise a nationalist scare about the country being “sold” to foreigners. But this was seen a self-interested tactic by threatened bankrupts. It got no popular support. There was no anti-foreign demo, not one pebble tossed at a foreign bank or fast-food store.

But as the crisis deepened, some in the Thai elite worried that the crisis would create social division and social disorder. By 1999, businessmen and bureaucrats realised that the IMF programme undermined the ideology of national development followed for the previous 40 years: use government power to build a national capitalism, and to distribute the benefits widely enough to maintain social cohesion.

The idea of “self-reliance” was now reinterpreted as something much broader than village defence. Thailand’s problem was that it borrowed everything — technology from Japan, labour from Burma, capital from everywhere. The result: you become vulnerable to crisis, and you get pushed around. The conclusion: to succeed in the age of globalisation, you need to be more self-reliant (the “more” is important; it doesn’t mean independent). Unless Thailand develops its natural resources, human resources and institutions, it will never get the full benefit of globalisation.

Self-reliance was now about a lot more than weaving. Bangkok Bank put a quote from the king’s self-reliance speech on the cover of its annual report. Mom Tao claimed central bank reforms were part of the same idea. This new interpretation was blessed at a TDRI conference chaired by Anand Panyarachun, whose governments had enthusiastically launched Thailand into globalisation in the early 1990s.

By 2000, the future had two routes. One was labelled “to Singapore”. Make the country a paradise for multinational capital. Sacrifice domestic business. Manage the social and cultural consequences. The other was labelled “to Malaysia”. Negotiate with globalisation. Revive government to rescue local business.

The Democrats were drifting along the first route. When Thaksin launched Thai Rak Thai, he seemed in the same camp. But his politics have been moulded by the popular mood. Over the next two years, TRT gradually became the party of the self-reliance agenda. First, he just talked about reviving entrepreneurs. Then came the bank bailout, boosting internal demand, industrial targeting, Keynesian reflation, managed exchange rate.

Populism is a poor description because the programme is much broader. Nationalism is misleading. Something like “self-strengthening to succeed in globalisation” would be more apt. But Thaksin is not hurt by being slated as nationalist and populist . Every time Far Eastern International Review repeats this bleat, his popularity surges. Are they, like everybody else, on the payroll?

This polarisation may be momentary. What Thaksin is offering is something clearly different. It offers rescue to the businessmen, a role for the bureaucrats, social reforms for the activists. But some believe that Thaksin’s chances of bringing this off are the same as finding tons of gold in Lijia cave, or being cured of AIDS by a patent medicine peddled by a trigger-happy policeman. But then, this is the age of desperation.