 But now let me turn the floor to Professor John Torcheri from the Ford School who introduced our speakers today. John. Thank you, Ellen. And thank you very much to our dynamic duo of speakers. I'm going to introduce them briefly and you can find more information about their impressive biographies in the flyer. Fasuk Pongfachit is a professor of economics at Chula-Longkorn University in Bangkok, certainly one of Southeast Asia's finest universities, and she's written on a wide range of topics including the theme of prospects for democracy in Thailand, but also involving studies on the sex industry, corruption, illegal business in Thailand. And she has the distinction of perhaps the most alluring title for an academic book that I've heard in a good few years, Guns Girls Gambling Ganja, Thailand's Illegal Economy and Public Policy. She's also written books on corruption and democracy in Thailand. And she's co-authored a number of books with our second guest expert, Chris Baker, who in a former life taught history and politics, Asian history and politics at Cambridge University from where he received his PhD. In this incarnation, he is a writer based in Bangkok and he has edited a number of issues of leading journals on topics related to Thai and Southeast Asian politics and history. And he's also translated a number of works, a few of which included works by King Rama V and by the Communist Party of Thailand, so it's very, very wide-ranging expertise. And what impresses me so much about our two guests today is that while very impressive individually, even more so as a pair, they've written a number of books on different topics in the last decade, including a book on Thaksin Shinnawatra, whom I'm sure you'll hear referenced in today's talk, A History of Thailand, which is a book published in 2005, as well as books about Thai economy and politics related to the financial crisis and other periods in Thai history. I've enjoyed reading a number of your pieces in the Bangkok press, in the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times. And so we very much look forward to hearing your talk today. With that, I'll turn the floor over to you. Welcome. Thank you very much. And all those beautiful titles, I have to thank Chris, he's a very good title. Can we get a little bit of the light away from the screen? We have changed the title, because of course you have to change the title. But this is also because there is an election about to come up. So we have regeared the speech today more to the election and the issues around this election. So it still deals with red and yellow, but red and yellow has got a little bit boring, so we've moved a little bit beyond that. The Thai Prime Minister recently announced he would dissolve the parliament on 3rd of May, meaning a general election will take place in late June, around six months ahead of the deadline. This is much more than just another election because of the recent history. The results of the last three elections have been overturned in different ways. One was voided by the courts. Another was overthrown by a military coup. And a third was negated, where a court judgment dissolved the ruling party. What's more, in 2009 and again in 2010, Thailand was rocked by street demonstrations whose principal demand was to have an election. The government refused that demand and bought in the military to dissolve the protests. And in the last occasion in May 2010, the death toll is now 93, the injury toll is up to around 1,000, and 30-odd buildings were torched. What's even more, this call for an election has been greeted by total dismay from some very powerful figures. Sochi Satyatum, member of the election commission, said outright, I don't want an election, because it would lead to a revolution from below, like in North Africa. Some prominent journalists have voiced the fear that the election might lead to the return of the ousted premier, Taksin Shinoat, and therefore more conflict. And for several months, there have been constant rumors of a coup, an open discussion about forming a, quote, national government, which means an unelected one. Several business figures have spoken longingly about the China model, meaning an authoritarian government that oversees rapid economic growth. In a survey done by the Asia Foundation released two weeks ago, between last year and this year, the number of people in Bangkok who say they strongly support democracy as the model for Thailand dropped from 57% to 27%. Sonti Limthonggul, who was head of the Yellow Shirt People's Alliance for Democracy, which has been so powerful in the last couple of years, went further. He said we need to shut down the government for three to five years so we can clean away the dirt in the political system. The rhetoric of the PAD over time has been coming, taken on more and more of the flavor of fascist rhetoric of several decades ago. It's very strange for a premier to announce the dissolution ahead of time, giving away the advantage of surprise to the opposition. Clearly, there's a special reason he did so. There's a rumor that he also brought in a foreign research company to carry out an opinion poll in order to show to his bosses, which means the military, that he has a chance of winning so that they will let him run this election. So this is much more than just another an election. It's an election about whether Thailand should continue having a semblance of parliamentary democracy or not. And at this point, the result is far from certain. So we want to address today, how did Thailand get to this point and what happens next? And in order to answer the question that Chris posed properly, we need to look at the socioeconomic and political context in which those conflicts have a reason. First, we will look at the inequalities as a background and followed by the challenge which further led to the reaction. Thailand is a very unequal society compared to its neighbor and compared to countries of a similar level of development. Income inequality has worsened steadily over the years and has improved only a little in recent years. Inequality in the ownership of assets is even more staggering. The top 10% on 69% more than the bottom 10%. 69 times more than the bottom 10%. And you can see also that the difference between the second quintile and the first quintile is also still very marked. This is a situation not only in Thailand. You find it in the US. Similar kind of figure will be represented in terms of the top 1% having this huge gap. Economic inequality does not of itself create political division or conflict. But it certainly forms a background against which other forms of inequality, political, social, and cultural also worsen. In particular, power and access to power are very badly distributed. Thailand is ruled by a kind of oligarchy. As its base are three old institutions which have never been reformed. First, there is the bureaucracy which developed from an old feudal nobility and still conceives of itself as a ruling caste. Distinguished from the mass of the people by the uniforms, rituals, grand architecture, and other marker of differences. The second, the military that ruled the country for half a century is still highly politicized and believe it has a special role in the polity, a right of intervention. And third, we have the monarchy who has tended to grow stronger and take a more intrusive role in politics as the length of the rain has steadily enhanced the monarch's personal status. And we must also recognize that in Thailand there has been no mass movement which has challenged these old institutions like in many other countries which has anti-colonial movements that serve the purpose. The new urban middle class that developed over the past century and especially over its latter half has tended is small in number and has tended to allied itself with the old elite rather than challenging it. And that's partly because this middle class is rather small and insecure and this middle class did try to promote elective democracy in the 1970s and early 1990s to end absolutism and to control the military. But it stopped there. In this situation, the ideologies which justify privilege remain in place. The distribution of public goods is very unequal. There is no effort to institute the rule of law as that would undermine that privilege. Next, let us look at the challenge which happened with the challenge to these oligarchy and the concentration of power situation. Over recent years, the situation has come under serious challenge and this challenge is essentially political with underlying economic. The political is a demand for inclusiveness for more equitable access to power and better distribution of public goods. The demand has been largely mounted through the box. The background to this challenge lies in the great economic change of the past decades. You can see in this graph, today the average Thai has an income three times that of his parents. And six times that of his grandparents. All style peasant farming has virtually disappeared and replaced by market oriented agriculture. Many have moved from the village to the city while others rotate between the rural and urban economies. And even in the countryside itself, the lifestyle and the urban facilities has also increased. The inequities in Thai society may not have got significantly worse in recent decades but far more people are in a position to see them, understand them and resent them. With rising incomes, people have more education, more access to information, more access to protect, more assets to protect, different hopes and desire for themselves and especially for their children. And more demands on government obviously, for public goods, for legal process and so on. Yet many people find that they are blocked by some kind of glass ceilings of various kinds. Power is still so concentrated in the capital. Opportunities are monopolized by the old elite and established middle class. School have spread everywhere but the quality of the school are very varied. And you find good school in Bangkok and big cities but not in the provincial area. And you'll be surprised to find that 80% of Thai households still do not have access to tap water. They have access tap water in their households. They can use tap water but they have to go and get it from somewhere into the household. The, moreover the old elite and middle class often continue to treat provincial and lower echelon of people as if they were all still as poor and uneducated as they were two generations ago. Jeung Sak Bintong, a former academic turned media personality, said on television just before all these problems that the most Northeasterner could aspire to become is Petropam Boy, Dek Pamp or a house servant called Lap Chai. This remark was highly resented during the demonstrations in Central Bangkok last May. Newspaper ran cartoons showing the demonstrators as buffaloes and opponents held up signs calling them uneducated people showing how deeply uneducated they themselves are. You can see in the, here. Resentment gathered through the 1990s expressed largely through grassroots organization and protest campaign on rural issues like land rights, access to natural resources, agricultural prices. But in large, these campaigns were not successful. The government either suppressed them or ignore them meaning that resentment festered. In the 80s and 90s, there was no attempt to use the ballot box to pursue change. The parliament was not conceived as an institution through which the mass of the people could affect change. It was a captive of money. Rich candidates invested large sum in direct or indirect vote buying ensuring that wealth was a qualification for admission as an MP. Over three quarters of the seats were occupied by male business entrepreneurs who represented less than 3% of the total population. The parliament operated largely as a business men's club sharing out the budget and networking among themselves and negotiating with the bureaucracy. For the ordinary time, the parliament was remote and unimportant to their lives. That situation changed completely over a decade that began in 1997. The vote became something of value and in this process, taxing Chinawatra, the billionaire businessman who turned politicians play an important role. However, we need to look at the background first. First came the 1997 financial crisis. It caused real pain for those in the middle and lower ranks of society, prompting a massive wave of protests and further politicization. It also undermined the confidence and the legitimacy of the old ruling oligarchy, creating cracks from which new political trends could emerge. Second, in the 1997 constitution, adopted in the teeth of opposition from the old oligarchy during the turmoil crisis, significantly and significantly decentralized power to elective local government bodies. Up to this point, a Thai citizen had voted only once every three to four years for the parliament, which seemed so remote, as I mentioned. But as a result of decentralization and other reforms, the citizens now voted not only for an MP, but also a senator, village head, local counselor, mayor, and provincial council. Through the decentralization of power, though the decentralization of power was still rather limited in the election for local government, citizens voted for candidates they knew and were in a position to evaluate their contribution. In short, there was a rapid education in the value of the franchise, the vote to bring about direct material benefits. And this brought about a revolution in the structure of local politics in the years that follow. Before MPs and prospective MPs had funneled, patternished down to a range of local brokers in the green, in this one. Local officials, prominent businessmen, lottery agents, gangsters who could get out of the world and work as canvassers. Now, local leaders, factions, and activist group emerge. They could bargain among prospective candidates for their support, or bypass them altogether and deal directly with the political parties and central government agencies, and sometimes support all MPs. The transformation was not total, patternage still matters. Circumstances differ from locality to locality, but as a whole, politics became more susceptible to pressure from below. The third factor of change stemming from 1997 was Taksin Chinawat, who served as a channel funneling the rising pressure from below into national politics. Taksin made a multi-billion fortune from a near monopoly concession to run the first mobile phone service. He launched into politics and was elected Prime Minister in 2001. He then vastly increased his family fortune by abuse of power, but also because he became a leader of this force bubbling up from below. We want to highlight the circumstances rather than the man. The situation was ripe for the emergence of a popular leader of some kind. In other words, we think that if there had been no Taksin, there could have been someone else who would take his place. And Taksin did not fully understand this when he launched his bid for power in 1998 and 2001. He presented himself as a successful businessman who would primarily represent the interests of the business and whose main goal was achieving rapid economic growth. But as he gradually lost middle-class support, he gradually transformed himself into a highly attractive popular leader. How he did it? First, he enacted some simple distributive reforms, universal healthcare, micro-credit, agricultural price support, which had a big impact on ordinary people. He showed that national politics could bring about change that affected the lives of the people directly. Second, his health scheme in particular, which offered the same benefit to everybody as a right, encapsulated a new concept of the citizen and hence was popular far beyond the actual usage of the scheme. And here, a study has shown that the universal healthcare scheme has reduced the poverty level by one third because it reduced the cost of healthcare for ordinary people. Third, Taksin increasingly cultivated a close, hot relationship between leader and people through the media, through up-country tours and through rhetoric, which was very different from the cool, aloof model of the old oligarchic position of politics. In worldwide perspective, this style was the standard of mass politicians in a media drenched age, but in Thailand it's something very revolutionary and very new. And Taksin was rewarded with rockstar-like acclaim. People felt his leadership empowered them. Fourth, as he grew to understand and to like his support, Taksin became more radical in his rhetoric. He increasingly not only distinguished himself from the old oligarchy, bureaucrats, old-style politicians and the journalists and a giant co-opted into the old oligarchic culture, but he criticized them and reveled in their criticism of him. By doing so, he tapped reserves of resentment, normally hidden from sight in Thailand, repressed political culture. Now we want to follow the reaction to this that has taken place really since 2005. We want to argue that this turmoil since 2005 has to be read not simply as a reaction against Taksin, but as a reaction against the eruption of new forces into Thai politics. Reaction has come from the old oligarchy and from large sections of the urban middle class. The military has returned to active political involvement through the 2006 coup, through massive interference in elections, particularly in the 2007 election, probably the most corrupt election in Thai history, corrupted by the military using public money, and through propaganda campaigns, through intrigue and through strengthening its own institutional power. Royalists have also been prominence in the reaction. The cry of monarchy and danger was used to rally a disparate coalition against Taksin and no effort was made from above to prevent this. Leaders of the reaction also made explicit appeal to the class interests of the urban middle class. The whole discourse of class was brought into this conflict not by the lower echelons, but by the middle class saying we need to defend ourselves. Arguing that they would lose power and privilege if the political system became more responsive to mass demands. In the political movements that stemmed from the 1970s, the Thai middle class has generally been analysed as a spearhead of the pressure to control the military, stifle dictatorship, and promote elective democracy. In much of the theorising about democracy, the middle class plays a prominent role, the whole democratic transitions literature. But it is clear that in Thailand large parts of the urban middle class have had second thoughts. This is often explained as a revulsion against Taksin and his corruption, but the debate has begun much beyond just removing Taksin to contemplate qualifying or abandoning elective democracy altogether. Over recent years several proposals have been made. One of the first encapsulated in a 2005 book entitled Royal Powers was to increase the powers of the monarchy as a counterweight against quote, corrupt elective politicians. The details of the scheme are fuzzy, but they seem to entail enhancing the monarch's power of veto and appointment. The political scientist Anekh Lautamathat in a 2006 book proposed upwaiting the power of the monarchy and what he called the aristocracy, which mainly meant the military bureaucracy and judiciary. And you can see that many of the reforms implemented by the post 2006 coup government largely followed Anekh's ideas. Reducing the power of parliament in favor of the bureaucracy and judiciary, vastly increasing the power of the military through a new internal security act and so on. In 2007, Sonti and P.A.D. that the yellow shirts floated the idea of abandoning the principle of one person, one vote and constituting the parliament by a mixture of appointment and election by occupational and other groups. P.A.D. has consistently tried to delegitimize the parliament and the electorate by arguing that the mass of voters are uneducated and hence elect corrupt politicians who then misgovern. Several figures have promoted proposals for a national government several in the last few weeks, which ultimately means an appointed government, an installation of the old oligarchy. Over the past year, there's been almost constant rumors of schemes to manufacture a crisis in which this proposal could be brought forward, particularly the fomenting conflict on the border with Cambodia, in which you could actually create a state of war in which you could then go through a new kind of system. The red shirt movement has emerged to counter this conservative reaction. It's a rather complex movement. The original corps, which emerged in 2006, were activist groups, particularly made up of old leftists who were the first to come out in open opposition to the coup of 2006. They were then joined by former supporters of Tuxin from his core areas of support in Bangkok, the upper north and the northeast. But over time, the movement has attracted more and more former democracy activists and ordinary citizens who had in the past been opposed to Tuxin, but are fed up with the return to military influence. The main demand of this movement from the beginning was to restore democracy by holding elections. After an election was held in 2007, that demand dropped, but when that government was then overthrown by a kind of judicial coup in late 2008, it returned. A secondary demand has been to revive the 1997 constitution, which means setting aside the charter written after the 2006 coup. The major strategy of the red shirt movement has been to hold mass rallies and to use the color red to emphasize the sheer size of their support, whether in stadium rallies like this or in street processions. In March to May of last year, the red shirt movement reached a kind of peak when thousands streamed into Bangkok in an atmosphere which can only be described as carnival and drew enthusiastic support from parts of the city population and sympathy from even from some in the army. But over a two month protest, they were tactically outmaneuvered by the army resulting in a violent end to the protest which probably diminished their support somewhat. Despite this repression, the movement has not been cowed and this is really very important. When you've had this kind of repression against popular politics in the past, it's worked and things have tended to dissipate and go away and people hide, but the red shirt movement has totally uncowed by the two incidents of the last two years. Over the past year, the red shirt movement has concentrated on local organization, political schools and developing means of communication through print and through radio. Let us now look at the possible upcoming election and first look at the background of election results over the past decade. The election system which has been in place has two parts. It has territorial constituencies which were 400 of them in 2001, 2005. Average vote in the constituency is about 75,000 and then 100 seats which is known as the party list which is a national vote by party. It's changed a bit in the last election but think of it that way. This was the result in 2001 when Tuxin came to power. In all of these charts, the red part, the red constituencies means the pro-Tuxin party in this case, Tairak Tai and the blue is the Democrats, the head of the current ruling coalition and the, so yes, this bit here is Bangkok. This is greater Bangkok which fits in there but it's expanded because of course it's higher population density. What you can see in this poll is that Tuxin does very well in very large parts of Bangkok, particularly in the upper north and here things are really still very scattered. We are still in the old system where many small localised parties held sway. Tairak Tai won around two-fifths of the vote and just short of an absolute majority. The Democrats dominated the south and the western hills that the northeast was still utterly fragmented. This changed totally by 2005. The end of his four-year term, Tuxin not only did what no other Tai prime minister had done which was to get the last four-year term to go to an election but he won a complete and utter landslide. Most of the little parties which we saw in the previous chart had disappeared, usually absorbed into his party, moving towards a two-party system. Only the green one, Chak Tai, survived. Democrat party held the south but collapsed just about everywhere else. Tairak Tai dominated the north, northeast centre and significantly Bangkok. We're here now in 2005 and Tuxin is still caught very, very sweet, Bangkok or except two seats to the Democrats in the very centre. The poll in 2006 was boycotted by the opposition and eventually scrapped by the courts. So only one party was standing so it's more like a referendum. So all we can do is measure the strength of the vote for Tairak Tai. So the more the redder the shading, the higher the percentage of vote. And you can see it's clearly higher in the northeast now, the two areas of concentration, the northeast clearly higher in the northeast, particularly the central part from the upper north up here. If we compare the 2006 poll to the 2005 poll, we can see the polarization. In the parts that are shaded red, the actual absolute number of votes for Tairak Tai increased between 2005 and 2006. And if it's in blue and the heavier the blue, it reduced. So you can see polarization. In the areas that are supportive of Taksin, his voting is getting even stronger, even now he himself is now under attack and elsewhere else it is declining. In 2007, the Post-Ku Constitution had returned to a multi-member constituency system so you can't map it in the same way you have to map each MP as a dot. So we have to draw it differently. If you put lines on the map, it starts to make more sense. The vote for PPP, which is now the successor to Tairak Tai, was back roughly to the same level as 2001. But what is mostly interesting is that the regional pattern is now very, very clear. Taksin's party wins in the upper north, northeast and around Bangkok, the outskirts of Bangkok here. Whereas the Democrats win in the south and the central part of the capital. The center and lower north are very fragmented, returning to the old pattern of voting for local favourites, irrespective of party. But one very interesting thing to do with this map is to compare it to a map of ethno-linguistic groups. And as you can see, the line that is cutting down here, essentially between this central part and the Taksin book, Taksin is almost, in an uncanny way, follows the line that divides the ethno-linguistic groups in Thailand. What this means is the bit in green in the middle is the speakers of central Thai, if you like, the area of old Siam. And those in the darker red at the north, this is Khmer and the sort of red out here, this is basically Isan Lao. And these are the crossover areas and this is Khmer. But as you can see very clearly, the support for Taksin is at its strongest in these areas, which were parts that were incorporated into Siam by fundamentally by conquest in the 19th century. There are kind of things underneath what is going on now, which are not always very explicit. What then is the situation with the parties? Taksin's party now runs as Pertai. This was the situation in the parliament after the last change in late 2008. Pertai is still the largest party with 189. But the coalition that was set up by the military in December 2008, headed by the Democrats with a slightly lower number, and then a number of smaller parties which were put together in a coalition. What then is the situation of the parties going into this election? Taksin's party is in something of a mess. The leader is still in self-exile. Many of its former MPs are still under a five-year ban from politics. In many localities, there are strains between the parties' MPs and the redshirts. The redshirt agitators are complaining that the MPs did not give them enough support over demonstrations of, particularly of last year. But still, the chances of the party should not be underestimated. Just in the last few days, Taksin has pushed his younger sister, Yingluck, to become party leader for the election campaign. She doesn't have much political experience. Probably her greatest asset is that she smiles all the time. But she will put the Xinhua surname on the ballot. And that, I think, could be magic. It could significantly increase the parties' showing. I think it'll be very interesting what will happen with her in the next few weeks. There'll be sort of a tempest, I think, to kind of undermine her in one way or another. The Democrats have undergone a kind of revolution over the last year. They've completely abandoned their old passive, minimalist, laissez-faire approach to policy and have copied virtually every part of Taksin's populist platform. They have not yet delivered it, however, in the same way. Taksin said, this is yours by right, and people like that. The Democrats say, like the Alburocrats, we give you this as a present patronage style. And the Democrats still don't seem to understand that there is a huge difference to that in today's mass politics. They have made some very interesting changes to the electoral laws, shifting seats, allowing themselves to redraw constituency boundaries that could significantly increase their chances. They have a lot of army backing, and they have mainstream media support. This, if any, is their chance to get somewhere near a majority in the parliament. But that's still probably unlikely. But there's a third very interesting element. The Boomjai Tai or Tai Pride Party is a return of an old formula. Big business money, influence in the bureaucracy, political wheeler dealers, and military backing. The big business backing comes especially from two firms with interests in Bangkok's airport, which has been a honeypot of corruption for a decade now. King Power that runs the duty free and the Sino-Tai construction firm that built the airport link. In the current coalition, this party got control of the interior ministry and has used that position to put supportive officials, governors, and police chiefs in key constituencies important in this election. The effective leader of the party, Nae Win Chit Cho, is expert at using money to lure candidates and votes. So this is going into this election with the Democrats through a sort of policy side and look like the nice guys, they have a leader who has eaten in Oxford and can speak wonderful English. And beside them is this party that can play dirty old fashioned politics of buying up support or coercing support in one way or another. There are then several smaller parties of which probably the most interesting is Perpendin for the motherland, a party that was invented, created by the army in 2007 and still could serve as a way for the military to put exert influence over the election again this time. What then, the result is very hard to foretell. From past experience, polling data is pretty faulty. Lots of people in Thailand lie to posters deliberately and recent by elections are not a good guide. The tumultuous events of the past four years mean the results at the last polls need not be much for guide. So what's the range of possibilities? First, per Thai, the taxing party could win a majority or a large plurality as in 2007, giving them the first chance to form a government. Would they then try to rehabilitate taxing? They've more or less said they would. Would the army allow this result to stand? And if not, what would they do? This is obviously highly problematic. After you've overthrown three governments, can you do it a fourth time and get away with it? Second alternative is, of course, a strong Democrat victory, either a majority or a strong plurality, making it possible to form a single-party or virtual single-party government. The Democrats will campaign on the platform that this result alone holds out prospects for stability. However, if they were to get in this situation, would it put them in a position to be heavier suppression of the red movement and their opponents? Or would it put them in a position where they're confident enough to really move towards some kind of reconciliation? It's very far from clear. Many people think that the result will actually be a return to something like the current Democrat-headed coalition, which a lot of small parties are needed for support, and the military has plenty of scope to play politics in the background. And the fourth opportunity is still an accident. What I mean by that is something that happens that means you don't have to hold a poll. I was saying in 2006, I thought this time we would have a post-modern coup, not an old-fashioned coup, but then, of course, the army ran the tanks in the style of 1958 and had the most old-fashioned coup we have ever seen. But this time I think maybe you could have something more elegant. Suppose that the moment Appesit calls an election, the whole election commission resigns. This has been floated as a possibility. You then create a constitutional crisis that has to be solved, perhaps by the intervention of the monarchy or the military or something. Some of this is still possible. Whatever the result, this election is not an ending of any kind. Since the riots of Songkwan 2009 and even more since May last year, there has been fitful talk of reconciliation. But this reflects the old myth of a unified, harmonious society that can somehow be recovered. In reality, new political forces have challenged the way power, public goods and social respect has been distributed in the past. The main agenda of the red shirts is return to a system abandoned for the last six years where elections determine who governs. But their fuller agenda demands a much more widespread overhaul of the political system. Further decentralization, end to the immunity for officialdom, scrutiny of the judiciary, controls on the military, guarantees for freedom of speech and much more. At present, the main strategy of the red shirts is still to demand the return of Taksin as he was the leader who worked for them in the past so they still see him as the most effective mechanism. This challenge will not be resolved in a short period of time. The challenge to the absolute monarchy in 1932 was not really resolved until 1958 and the challenge issued to military dictatorship in 1973 was not resolved until the Constitution of 1997. This process will take a long time and its course and results are beyond prediction. At present, however, the old oligarchy and the urban middle class has reacted very strongly against this challenge. They have mobilized the symbolic power of the monarchy in order to gear up wide support and in so doing have already done huge damage to the institution. This strategy has virtually outlived its usefulness. In the literature on democratization and democratic transitions, some 15 to 20 years ago, Thailand figured among the country's undergoing transition. Since the rise of Taksin and especially since the 2006 coup, it has often been labeled as a hybrid regime, combining elements of democracy on authoritarianism, yet still assuming that it is on the right path in the long run. But maybe we need to accept that its current position may actually be permanent. Thank you. Thank you. We'll move forward and let you field your own question. I have one to start. You raised the interesting point that the current government has mimicked Taksin's policies but is delivering them in this patronizing manner. And the question is why is it just political ineptitude or is there sort of a deeper paradigm shift problem or fears of changing a discourse from one about beneficence to one about acknowledging rights? Okay, the question is why the democrats while they adopted Taksin's policies have not adopted his style of delivering them? Well, I think that this new government particularly the democrat, the leader, the prime, our prime minister, come from a different background altogether. And he's the agent educated, he's Oxford educated and come from quite well to do a middle class background in Bangkok. He doesn't have the feeling for the people. Maybe he has a feeling but he doesn't really know how to express it. And so that the way he behave is like he come from a bureaucracy or he's someone high up there and giving patronage to the people. In other words, he hasn't yet got into to understand that politics is about passion. Politics is also about how you can bring the people to accept you as their leader, as the leader that they can touch. I think at the moment the people feel they cannot touch them at all. And this is something to do with his upbringing with where he come from and so you get the democrat in this position. And some of the people in the party is a little bit like that too. Even Chuan Dik Pai who come from ordinary person but you know ordinary family but his behavior is very bureaucratic. He's always stand off from the people. But Ducie Tuxin is completely different. He come from a rich family but then he embrace the people and make the people feel that he come from them or he belong to them rather than coming from somewhere and giving things to them. It's a, maybe it's a question of class issue here. I think you are first. I totally agree with you that the next election is not the end of any kind. So can you propose any solution to the chronic time-politic problem? Because if the later, I mean if the democrat party will protest again, I believe. And if the time left time or any new name. So the yellow shirt have a high possibility to protest again. So is there any solution to that problem? The question is can we propose a solution to the current type of political problem? I think I would like to say that I think this is not a very short process at all. I think we're talking about a process of change now which will take 20 to 30 years maybe even to work out. Maybe we'll go a little bit quicker than that. I think a very interesting parallel to take is between the Chartist movement in the UK which was a demand basically for the franchise which sort of came up in the 1830s and dribbled on to the 1880s. Going up and going down and so on. A little explosion now it will go away. We form again, another leader will appear and so on and so forth. I don't think it will take that long. But I think people who are now saying please find a solution for me are still working in this old kind of, the bureaucrats are able to, we can somehow manage this. We can write another constitution. We can fiddle with the moving parts of the system somehow and it all settles down. I don't think it's that way. I think we're in the middle of a major historical change which at this point the forces in power in the society have said no, we're going to block it as far as we can and you have to get over that process somehow. It may happen now, it may happen later. But I don't think anyone at this point can hand down a solution which will send everything back to being nice and calm again. I think this is a fantasy that people should get away from. That you should accept the fact you're in a momentous historical change and go with it. Yeah, may I add a little? I think we have to accept that we are now in a parliamentary system with the constitution and so we should obey the rule. The politics must have a rule and so if the Pertai win, I think the process, that process should allow to work itself out and if there is chaos, then the authority should apply the law. If the demonstrators have reached the law then they should do something about it rather than allowing favor to happen for certain demonstrators and not the others. In other words, stop these multiple standards. Okay, for example in the US, just see in the US, a lot of people don't want Obama to be the president but after he won, they will accept and allow him to rule for the time period if he could and then wait for the next election. Now I think Thailand will have to come to term with the issue of the rule of law. Play within the rule rather than wishing that we don't want Pertai and we would support the military to make a coup or we will support the PAD to come out to have a demonstration and the other way around too. Yes, I... But that's a difficult... I agree with that but the big problem is that the winner can't share the rule and also set the law in Thailand, right? Yes, of course. Of course, that's part of... When you're the winner, you're allowed to do that. Yes. Okay, you may not like that and some people won't like that but that's the rules, okay? That's the way. That will happen. Okay, we'll run out of time. I do have a question but first I want to just follow up on the young man's comment. I didn't want to describe the current prime minister. I assume he's called a prime minister. Yes. You were describing him being from a wealthy family and trying to appeal to the lower classes. I was thinking you must have a Thai word that's similar to one that we have in English which is lip service. Would you say that he's just sort of appealing to them in a form of just giving them lip service to... He doesn't really mean it. He has no intention of seeking... I don't think so. I think he... To be fair to him, I think he means a lot of what he says but he doesn't really understand the psychology of politics that the mass, the mass politics, the psychology of the mass politics and if you stand in front of him, he will move away from you. You know that? There is no... I don't know how to... You can only think of Nehru in India. He also was brought up like this and before he could embrace the people, he had traveled on his own for a year amongst the ordinary people and then work with them too so that he can appreciate them, understand them and know how to embrace them. I don't think our politicians who come from this sort of background have had that experience and certainly Khun Apisit had had some experience talking to people in the urban area of Bangkok but not very much in the countryside. Real question, actually. Oh, sorry. Real question was you've had the courts throw out one election, you've had the military overthrow another. It seems that whoever has the military on their side will really determine the election or is that... Is the military shifted in recent years? So the question is, is it that whoever has the military on their side can determine the election? Well, I mean, you have... What happened in 2007 was this was when the coup government came to an end and they went back to an electoral system. The military tried extremely hard to win that election for the Democrats, fundamentally. To the point of forming political parties, funding political parties, sending soldiers to stand intimidatingly by ballot boxes on polling day, doing a lot of propaganda on military radar and radio television, sort of dirty tricks to try and undermine the opposition, all those things, and they still couldn't win. They still, in fact, did better than they might have thought but were still not in a position to prevent the pro-taxing party having the plurality the largest plurality and therefore the first chance to form a government. Now, the question is now, nobody really knows what will come out of the result right now. So, but if, which is one possibility, we will go to an election, there would again be this similar attempt to try and influence the result before it happens, but there is still also the opportunity that might not work. So there are many unknowns here, many unknowns, but undoubtedly the position of the military is now stronger than at any, stronger and more important for determining the politics than any time that it has been since 1992 and probably since the 1970s. That has come about because of many things because of the way they changed the laws under the coup government, because of new repressive laws they brought in, bringing back ISOC, the old body which used to be there in the past of the times of the oppression of the communist insurgency, they've brought it back now and essentially seeing it as to stop politics, to stop popular politics. So they are now in incredibly institutionally powerful position. So yes, they are, they are the people. There is also a possibility of a wild card in the sense that, you know, as time goes by, if the situation is such that Pui Tai with Ying Lak as the head of the party showing a good prospect of winning a huge majority, there couldn't be some change on the other side, the Democrat, because if the Democrat is really very serious about being part of the next government, they may have to try to do something like changing the leader of the party because politics in Thailand is never, you, it's so difficult, it's a paradox and no one is really, there's a Thai word, no one is the real enemies of each other. Some kind of coalition could always happen and you can imagine a situation where the Democrat completely decided that they want to save democracy and forget about the military and the people behind them and said, okay, let's do something so that we could have a coalition with Pui Tai. That's a Y card, another Y card, that can happen, I think. But we have to wait and see. Oh, sorry, this is out here, is he speaking to you? Yes. Two questions, at one point you showed a map of ethno-linguistic groups and it makes me wonder whether there's something essential about their ethno-linguistic character or is it more a matter of their mode of incorporation into the nation state? And then if we take into account mode of incorporation, this is ethno-linguistic category at all relevant. The second question has to do with the monarchy. So, I mean, to be crass if the king were 20 years younger than he is now, would any of, we would be having any of this kind of conversation. So is there something about a sense of stability with the monarchy that is driving much of the story because the monarchy shows up a little bit and the story that you tell there, but not very much? First question is, how does the distribution of ethno-linguistic groups affect the political affiliations? It is, as you say, the second, as you said, it's because of the nature of their incorporation into the nation state. So, if you go back to the late 19th century, the areas in the North and the Northeast were still referred to by the Bangkok elite as Lao, and that was like being calling them second class citizens, or even if you know it, almost sort of conquered citizens as well. And although, of course, over time that those sort of attitudes have softened somewhat, they're still very much there in the background. And what you see in that picture with the person saying, uneducate people is a reflection of that same idea, people who come from the Northeast, uneducated, their buffaloes, and so on. So it's there. I mean, that's the way that division is now reflected into modern attitudes. Bangkok middle class people feel themselves to be superior. People out in the North and the Northeast hate this, resent this terribly. They've never been able to say this before. It's been part of the repression in the political culture. But now suddenly they can. And this, of course, is very, very shocking. The second question is whether if the monarch was 20 years younger than he happens to be, would this make the tensions any less? Well, you were referring to the issue of succession. Now, people fear Taksin returning, or Pertai party having a majority so much. Maybe it's related to the issue of succession in this way. Some people said they fear that Taksin had good relationship with prospective next monarch. And if him or his derived party became a government, then there is a possibility that he could return to Thailand. Taksin could return under a new rain. Taksin could return to Thailand under a new rain. And he will create havoc in Thai society because the two sides, the yellow who dislike him would come out in the street. And the red would come out in support of him so there would be great chaos. And a lot of people also believe that Taksin will not come as a passive person and he will come and will enter politics again because a pardon would be that he could run election again. So this is one way of expressing the fear of Taksin and how it might be linked to the issue of succession. Some people think this is the major issue behind the current turmoil. No, we think it's an added complication and the issue of mass politics is a much bigger issue. The monarchy is just being mobilized as part of the opposition to this big social change that's going on and the succession is complicating it. Right, in other words, we think that what's happening in Thailand now since Taksin came into power, he has shown that popular politics could work for a majority of people and that idea of parliamentary democracy is kind of getting established in Thailand. But that has challenged the position of the middle class to fear that if that will become the norm in Thailand they themselves will lose the control of the political process because of the politics of numbers. So they will try to prolong or change that development. Professor, where is the question? His first question is more or less my question. But to tack on to that a little bit about the south, does the south just not have the same sort of history as the northeast and the north? Is it the center or is there something else going on? Yes. That's the question. How is the south different from the north and the northeast? Yes, because in a sense the south is also an area that was incorporated quite late, but not so late. The south is really very, very different socio-economically. If you're talking north and northeast, you're talking about a base of peasant agriculture, small scale agriculture. In the peninsula south, that's relatively minor part. It's much more urbanized. You have towns and cities in this area that you can trace back 2000 years, back to Chinese sources and that sort. Its major occupations are plantations, mining, fishing, and so on. They tend to be, they're much larger, they're much sort of larger scale of operations. The, its population is far less Thai. It's got a much more cosmopolitan population, particularly having a very high concentration of Chinese or Chinese who have blended into the population, not just over the last 100 years, but over the last 500 years, coming for a long, long time. So it's both sort of ethnically and economically very, very different from these other areas. But I think the most important part of it is, it's just simply much more urbanized. You have these well-established, most of the people, not most people, a very high proportion of people live in rather well-established towns, which have got a much more developed civil society than you have in the other parts of the country, where still fundamentally peasant agriculture and the towns are really very new. So you mentioned that in the democratization literature, the middle class are simply any forces with a democracy, but in Thailand's case, you mentioned that the alignment is more with the upper classes. Can you tell a little bit more about why that is? I know you mentioned that you feel that their interests would be affected by having a pro-taxing party in power, but I guess I'm not sure what the role that is and how it happens and what that concern is among the middle class. And also when you discuss these cultural stereotypes, so why would they align themselves with the middle class and not with the lower class as well? And is it just because of the geography of the stereotypes that they're actually small numbers? The question is, why has the middle class politics seemed to turn against democracy? What is the background behind it? I think there are many things. I think one is, if you look at the pattern of economic development of Thailand over the last 50 years and the society that it has created, and you compare it to, one of the things in other paper we've done is to compare it, particularly to Japan and Korea at similar stages of development. What you see is that Thailand, by relying so heavily on foreign direct investment and export oriented manufacture has developed a rather unusual society. It has a very small working class, maybe eight or 10%, people actually working in big factories who are actually producing most of the wealth, which is by exports, okay? You then have quite a small professional middle class and professional managerial bureaucratic class which is basically created to service this economy, but it's no more than you can calculate it in different ways, 13, 15, 17%, you can calculate it in different ways. And if you look at Japan and Korea at parallel times, it's at least twice that size, where you had much bigger industrialization, much bigger working class, and also much bigger managerial class. And then what Thailand has got is two thirds of its people still who are either doing two things. They're either doing agriculture, which is now very complicated, but they're still doing agriculture. Or they're in the informal sector. That means a lot of them are migrating back and forth between the country and the city. They're working as vendors, casual labor, small businesses and these sorts of things. They're not in the tax-paying social security covered formal economy. And what I think what has happened, I think the other part about this middle class is that it's small. It's very largely Sino-Thai. So it's very largely from families, most of whom who have arrived in Thailand over the last two or three generations. And we forget now because the Sino-Thai in the last 20 years have become so well-established in Thailand, they've become, they now run everything. They now run the urban economy, whether it's the Ajaan or the military or whatever. It's very heavily Sino-Thai. You go back to the 1980s, you remember, the Sino-Thai was still complaining about being distributed against, still complaining about being second-class citizens and so on. So their sort of habilitation to be so central to the society is very recent. So the cultural memory is obviously still there. And I think this contributes enormously to this insecurity which is driving some of the way they're responding to these politics. And remember that Santi Limtoncun, who became the great leader of the Yellow Shirts in 2006, 2007 deliberately positioned himself as a good Chinese. I mean, he went out of his way to position himself. No, yeah, was it? Look Jean Ratcha. We sons of China love the country and defend the king. I mean, it was absolutely explicit. And he wears this funny hat, which makes himself look like a pao kè, you know? Very, very deliberate use of the symbols as well. Can I add, I'll just give you an example. There's always an economic aspect to all this. The Middle, the Earthen Thai middle class is so used to being able to benefit from 99, 95.9% of the total budget every year until the decentralization institute in the 1997 constitution, which stipulated that from now on, there will have to be a process of relocation of the annual budget to the countryside up to 35% of the total budget by such and such year. And this shows you that the people have got so used to being dominant in every area, including the budget. And then recently, the issue of fiscal reform, tax reform has come into the fall when it now become clear that the government has to take up the populist policies, which now turn into welfare or social security policies, which mean that the government has to find a revenue from somewhere. So there's no talk about fiscal reform. And what is the reaction from some of the economists who work in big banks? They come out to say, you cannot do that because the tax reform would mean there would be an increase in tax on us who pay most of the taxation and who is going to benefit from tax, not us, it's the people out there. And so they said, go slow on this. And this will reduce economic development, will reduce Thailand economic growth. And this kind of talk is now going on and it received a lot of rapport from the urban middle class. So there is an economic issue of the allocation of resources in the process of democratization. I want to speak a little bit more about the allocation of those resources. You know, I mean, you've been talking about the Gini coefficients and the inequality in society, but then also speaking about how much of the benefits of growth are going to the Southeastern to the urban part where there still seems to be a lot of structural inefficiencies that keep people in the poor classes, specifically thinking here about the aristocratic nature of the bureaucracy. There is any talk about reforming these sectors to move away from the often socially destructive redistribution of wealth towards the more traditional? The question is, has there been an attempt to move away from this concentration of wealth to redistributive wealth policies? The middle democrat came to power two years ago. They, one of the policy platform they adopted was fiscal reform, and they wanted to introduce development tax, which mean that people who have, in order to reduce the speculation of land, which mean that people who have land and do nothing on it will pay a little bit higher tax than people who make use of those land. And the differences is not very great in terms of the gradation of the increase in the taxation. And in the beginning, everybody was very excited about that, but only a month ago, they have decided before this election came, they have decided to set aside that. The process has started to process this in the parliament, but they now said they're withdrawing that. We took the institution. On institutional reform, there was a movement that in the early 2000s, sorry, in the 1990s, 1990s, particularly under the democrat government of Chuang to reform the military. And it is at earlier stages of this too. The military is very oversized. There are what, 1600 generals of perhaps which only 200 of them actually have a job to do. And there's all kinds of problems. There's enormous problems over purchasing of weapons and all these kinds of things. But in the end, and there's lots of promises, there were reform plans picked up, the military squashed it all. Absolutely, there's been really no downsizing, no reduction in number of generals. And since they've came back into influence in 2006, they've multiplied the military budget by 50% already and got enormous, they're now trying to buy submarines, for Christ's sake. Second hand submarines. To go with the aircraft carrier which goes nowhere, the airship which goes nowhere and now we have the submarines. So, and then Tuxin came in with his, in many ways his major campaign issue when he came in in 2000 was reform of the bureaucracy. He set himself up to saying, all these other people are still in this bureaucratic culture. I'm a businessman. I'm going to change this whole bureaucratic culture by doing, turning it into a more business oriented. And he had, he used this phrase CEO, we have to turn them into CEO, ambassadors, CEO, governors. He bought the officials all in and got business school people to lecture them and tell them how they were going to change. He set up a whole process for changing the structure of the bureaucracy and all of this. And of course, that part of throwing him out was to stop that. A lot of the opposition to him came from the bureaucracy which did not want to be reformed in this way. So that now is dormant and the bureaucrats are back in spades. I think this is called to my influence a lot of high new generation because it's really important because from my own experience I never become interested in politics before this crisis. So do we have any documentation or suggestion for the new high generation that they can go back and have improve in any issue or to sustainable development? The question is, is there any advice for the tiny new generation who are getting more involved in politics? You have to answer that. You have to answer that. Well, you know, you have to go with the time because you cannot go back globally. You know, although democracy, parliamentary democracy may have its floor and in some countries people become disillusioned with it but it has proven that it is the most efficient system that could help us manage conflicts in a period of this quick change. So that I think we should try to stick to it and improve it along the way rather than using other methods or military intervention which is shunned globally. One of the impressive things about the seven election was how much solidarity it was among the red shirts that despite the 18 being banned they still voted as a block for Puyatai. Now we're on the meeting and ban around the C-Team wondering what your sense of the level of solidarity and the likelihood that that collection of interest will stick together or the likelihood that it will fragment and so what ways would you see that fragmentation occur? So the question is how likely it is that Puyatai will be more fragmented this time than it was in 2007. Yes, there are certainly some considerable problems. For instance, we went to one part of the Northeast a few months ago where there clearly was a lot of tension between the red shirt activists in the town and the Puyatai MPs because of what had happened in May 2010 last year. However, you have to say what you've been reading the Bangkok press carefully in the last couple of months there have been considerable attempts within Puyatai to accommodate the red shirts to negotiate this thing rather than to have it turn out a mess. I think there is a danger that if you read the Bangkok press now they're very anxious to play up this kind of theme because the most extraordinary thing throughout this whole affair is that the Bangkok press thinks that people in Bangkok don't want to read anything except good news and they want to read bad news about people they hate and good news about people they love rather than knowing what's going on. It's quite extraordinary. So we never have this extraordinary organization and everything else going on outside and the Bangkok has got its blinkers on it's not even looking at it. So I think all of these stories that come out all the time about all of this and there's a lot of mess inside the party. Don't listen too much. Let me add, my informant in Mahasaratam I talked to him before I came here said that I asked him on this question and he said that, well, let's talk about the ordinary people on the ground. What are they doing? They are certainly excited about the election but they also know that even though Pueh Tai get the majority they may not be able to form a government. So they are forming groups among themselves. These are ordinary people, the villagers. You know they have groups particularly after the incident in April and May last year they meet regularly to discuss the politics and they're talking among themselves what is the significance of this election? How should we review it? And some of them will say even if we lose, this is very important because it's a chance to show our preference. It's a chance to show our stand where we are. And so there are a lot of these discussions going on. And obviously there are a lot of resentment against local MPs who did not help them after the incident because a lot of these MPs were just sitting on the fence to see where things are going. And so some of them will say they don't want to support those MPs anymore. But some are saying but then they are expecting the party may change some candidate. Certainly there was some shifting to Pueh Tai because it's also very interesting to watch what kind of campaign tactics at Pueh Tai is going to use. And the change of the, what do you call it? The change of the electric system. The electric system which happened before now have been designed in such a way that it will benefit smaller party like Pueh Tai who may not be able to win the whole larger and then they will take up some. And Pueh Tai is also buying up a lot of the MPs to move to them and there will be some in the red who will move with them because people still have the loyalty to some of these local MPs.