Thailand and Turkey have a lot in common. Both countries celebrate their avoidance of formal colonization by adopting Westernizing adjustments overseen by “modernizing” rulers in the 19th century. Both have followed similar state-led economic development trajectories in the 20th century, only to liberalize after the 1980s. Both are known for military interventions in the electoral process. Both are highly nationalistic and devoted to national myths of development centred around revered figures. Both Thailand and Turkey welcomed in the last decade popular elected leaders – Thaksin Shinawatra and Tayyip Erdogan – who succeeded in displacing the dominance of the military and undermining the political myths that have shaped the nation for decades. In both countries, the traditional elite, convinced that its values lie at the core of the nation’s identity, has found itself challenged by a newly enfranchised electorate. After World War I, for roughly eighty years, Turkey lived under various permutations of the Kemalist Republic. This was a western-oriented, nationalist and above all else secular republic. It was also democratic, after a fashion. The military played what might be called a custodial role in the country’s politics – allowing elections and democratic politics as long as things operated within pretty clear red lines. The military pressured and even overthrew civilian governments on multiple occasions. They even hanged a Prime Minister after a coup in 1960. … This status quo left many tensions unresolved, to put it mildly, one of the key ones being the role of Islam. The Turkish elite and military (heavily overlapping) was resolutely secular. But this was not so clearly true of the population at large, or at least not large segments of it. The country had its first elected Islamist Prime Minister in the 90s who was pushed aside in what might be termed a very soft military coup. No death or arrests. Just, he was out. This left even more bare and perhaps unsustainable a basic contradiction that has always been at the heart of post-Ottoman Turkey: It’s secularism was simply not compatible with its full pretensions to democracy or republican rule. Moreover, despite the absence of formal colonization, both the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Siam had experiences with European intrusion that might fairly be called highly traumatic. As a result, in both countries there emerged, first within the monarchy and then within the newly Westernized military-bureaucratic establishment, a reformist outlook that doggedly equated independence with state-led modernization and national cohesion … The important point is that in both cases the lesson drawn from history and applied throughout most of the twentieth century was the same: The modernization and economic development required to protect “the nation” had to be carried out under the careful guidance of an enlightened central power, which in Turkey meant the military and in Thailand meant the military plus the monarchy.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 08:52:52 +0000
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