The Making of Thailand’s Extra-Constitutional Monarchy

Few countries epitomize the adversities non-Western nations have met with in their quest to build stable liberal democracies as compellingly as the Kingdom of Thailand. For its many similarities with the rest of the developing world, however, Thailand’s reiterated failure to build a consolidated democracy cannot be understood without reference to something decidedly more peculiar to the nation’s political development—namely, the role that the monarchy and the reigning dynasty have played in its repeated oscillations between alternative regime types, whose most visible manifestation is the succession of twenty constitutions promulgated since 1932. Only a few decades removed from having presided over the Kingdom of Siam’s transformation into a bounded, centralized nation-state around the turn of the last century, Thailand’s monarchy was seemingly consigned to irrelevance upon succumbing to the unintended consequences of its own state-building reforms. Having been stripped of most of its powers and property in the years following the inauguration of the country’s first constitutional regime in 1932, the monarchy went on to stage a most improbable comeback during the seventy-year reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej (r., 1946-2016), over the course of which the palace and its allies exploited the “bureaucratic polity’s” deficit of legitimacy and the United States’ search of a local bulwark against the onslaught of communism in the region to restore the King to a position outside—indeed, decidedly above—the country’s ever-changing constitutional order, presiding over a hierarchy of karmic merit and purity the state-sanctioned ideology of “royal nationalism” had substituted in the meantime for more egalitarian conceptions of the Thai nation. On the day of his passing, on 13 October 2016, Bhumibol had been the world’s richest and longest-serving monarch for some time, and by some distance. And yet, it had long become clear that Bhumibol’s succession with a less capable, less disciplined heir apparent—the erstwhile Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn—would, in time, come to present an existential threat for the institution, even before the new King’s grotesque behavior had become tabloid-fodder in Europe and elsewhere. This chapter traces the historical construction of the Thai monarchy’s extra-constitutional role over the past century and a half, focusing on the events and processes that have contributed to the formation, the development, and ultimately the decay of Thailand’s own “peculiar institution,” to borrow an expression from a different time and place. After contrasting Thailand’s “extra-constitutional monarchy” with absolute and constitutional varieties of monarchical regimes, the chapter dedicates separate sections to its historical and intellectual origins, its apogee and decline, and its future prospects. The latter are shown to hinge on the willingness of the palace and its allies to cease to stand in the way of the country’s democratization, as well as their capacity to undertake the reforms required to inaugurate a genuine constitutional monarchy.