In a recent edition of The Economist, I was delighted to read about the link between sufficiency economy and sufficiency democracy:
Thailand’s prime minister, an old Etonian, is not the only one to admire that sentiment. King Bhumibol Adulyadej, now in his fumbling twilight, admires what he calls Thailand’s “sufficiency economy”. In essence, the village poor must take their place along with everyone else in a perfect hierarchy topped by the king’s benevolent patronage. The political corollary might be dubbed a “sufficiency democracy”: rule by a self-appointed aristocracy claiming to protect the monarchy while amassing wealth and privilege.
This quote was reproduced a couple of days ago in Schott’s Vocab, a blog in the New York Times stable, which defines sufficiency democracy as follows:
Nickname for the current political system in Thailand, which some say supports a social hierarchy.
Schott’s Vocab traces the term back to one of my 2006 posts on New Mandala where I wrote:
Not only are rural people to be shielded (or excluded) from full and active participation in the national economy but their full and active participation in electoral democracy has been pushed aside in favour of Bangkok’s enlightened national leadership. Sufficiency democracy, like sufficiency economy, amounts to keeping rural aspirations firmly in their place.
I hereby stake a claim to having introduced the term “sufficiency democracy” to political science. But I will gracefully withdraw if someone can provide an earlier citation, either in English or Thai.
I always used to think of what happened here as cargo cult democracy, cf. Richard Feynman’s cargo cult science.
From his commencement address at Caltech:
” In the
South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw
airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same
thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like
runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a
wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head
like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s
the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re
doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the
way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So
I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the
apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but
they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.”
Like the cargo cult, the stage props are all in place, the parliament, the constitutional court, the parties, the campagins, the political columnists discussing those campagins… and yet democracy never lands.
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You are obliged to withdraw claims of coinage. Thailand’s potentate created the concept from whole cloth and duly formulated all related terms. Just as he remains unrivalled as yachtsman, photographer, rainmaker and developer of biofuels, our liege lord possesses rhetorical powers that know no bounds. Some say he invented language itself. Only the nice words though.
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You may claim as the first person who introduce the term “sufficiency democracy” but the difinition MUST be negotiate.
I claim that my King’s speech in 2003 has introduce the “exisiting” of sufficiency in the democracy way of political governing.
He said “เรื่องปกครองทั้งหลาย ด้านวิชาการมันก็มีพอเพียงเหมือนกัน พูดถึงรัฐศาสตร์ เศรษฐศาสตร์ก็มีรัฐศาสตร์พอเพียงเหมือนกัน ไม่งั้นจะทำให้เละเทะไปหมด ที่พูดนี่ตะล่อมให้เข้าใจว่า ให้พอเพียงไม่ใช่เศรษฐกิจ เป็นความคิด ให้สามารถทำอะไรอยู่ได้ ” (paragraph 41)
http://irrigation.rid.go.th/rid15/ppn/Datebook/Datebook2546/King%20Birrhday%202003.htm
Basicly, he said that there are ideas of “sufficiancy” in government, education, politics and so on.
So you know that, during those years Thais tend to put sufficiency into many things hmmmm…. almost everything.
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Let’s not forget he also invented dams and floodgates- “by observing how a monkey fills its mouth with banana before swallowing”, so the story goes.
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I think this is defined more as poking fun at an elderly, unwell man who is not in a position to defend himself, rather than worthy academic debate. Personally I think the King’s concept of sufficiency economy made sense when it was applied in its original sense to farmers who often suffered as a result of using all their land to grow cash crops, which could collapse in price, within leaving any land fallow to regenerate or digging a pond for irrigation. The idea was, admittedly, done to death and made to appear ridiculous by the Sarayud administration by peolple like Sarayud himself, whose knowledge of economics could be conveniently inscribed on the reverse of a standard size postage stamp. However, if you remember, Somkid Jatusripitak who interrupted a career as a professor of marketing to become Thai Rak Thai’s leading economic guru, also jumped on the sufficiency economy bandwagon and was appointed by the Sarayud government as head of a government commitee to teach sufficiency economics.
Thaksin’s early economic ideas also seemed to have borrowed heavily from the sufficiency economy concept. He was a harsh critic of the IMF’s conditions involving opening up the economy more to foreign investment and made it clear that he would rather depend less on foreign investment in order to protect Thailand’s wealthy business owners at the expense of ordinary consumers who were, as a consequence, denied employment and training opportunities and obliged to pay more for inferior quality goods and services. He also made a song and a dance of repaying the IMF early without drawing attention to the fact that Thailand derived no benefit from this since all IMF conditions had already been satisfied by the Chuan government. Interestingly he is now extolling the benefits of foreign investment, to countries as Montenegro, Nicaragua, Uganda and Cambodian.
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now semantics in this case are important! I assume this as another form of thai localism; or a guided democracy- orchestrated or guided of course by the elites in their own interests. The problem is that ordinary folk now know something about what democracy means in practical terms that affect their livelihoods, rights, and opportunities, because they have tasted it first-hand during the Thaksin’s government. Too late to shut the door now!
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Um… My first comment didn’t come up. [We do sleep sometimes Jay. AW]
Anyway, it is too negative for me in the sense that the “term” try to attack the royalist, similar to the royalist and elites attack on Thaksin on Thaksinomics.
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You guys hate the sufficiency economy because “they” love it… and because it is a hateful idea to hard-core neo-liberals like yourselves.
In fact a devolution of nearly everything essential to the local level is exactly what the entire world, not just Thailand, needs economically, politically, socially, spiritually…
The far-right in Thailand surely does have its own “take” on the so-called sufficiency economy.. but you smarmy, self-satisfied neo-liberals make puke…not just want to puke. Excuse me.
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And Australia has a “sufficiency free press.”
I lay claim to that coining that one.
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neo-what? self-sufficiency was promulgated before King Bhumibol’s birthday speech on 4 December 1997. Localism, along with self-sufficiency and self-reliance, is a means then by which trans-national ideas may be contested. At another level, it is also a means by which villagers see themselves connected to national imaginings. Lets step back a bit. In a reprinted book, banned shortly after it first came out in Thailand, the revolutionary, royalist Thai-Lao (Isaan) political thinker named Am Bunthai [2543 (2000), Kridaakaan bonthii raabsuung: aandai rot-thaang-kaanmeuang diinak (‘The Successful Merit on the Plateau: To Read and Savour the Good Way of Politics’), first published 2476 (1933), Bangkok: Amarin Printing and Publishing Company] recalled a basic cultural identity for Thais based on the nostalgia of rurality and face-to-face smallscale community. Am was a scholarship-holding agricultural school teacher from Ubon Ratchanani who sought election to the new House of Representatives in the post-revolutionary government in 1933. However, he was arrested during the social and political upheavals the same year the book was published as he was associated with the failed Boworadet coup in the same year. Am, who died of mistreatment in prison in 1940, was a committed reformer, idealist and visionary concerned with improving civil society based on the virtues of endogenous rural Thai traditions. He emphasized the dynamic relationship between state and society and the importance of a multi-tiered system of participation and local autonomy. At that time he noted the importance of an integrated village-based culture (watthanatham chao-baan), traditional mutual assistance, and an alternative economics embedded in the wider social order. No one can delink from the wider global forces, something even the king acknowledged if you read his past speeches. It was Thaksin alone who was the only political leader able to put this concept into effective practice and show how rural folks can improve their lot through capacity building, empowerment and local-global market linkages-beyond mere rhetoric and pork barrelling of Chuan’s time…This is also why civil society hate Thaksin: they could not achieve a fraction of what he did in his first term towards achieving this end. Jealousies. NGOs & urban intellectuals could only talk the talk, but could not, and did not want to enable the villagers to walk by themselves as many were afraid of losing their patronages to certain amaart powers. Similar confusion within the Ministry of Interior’s then changing CDD administration and responsibilities. The pace of change was too fast for many at the centre but not fast enough for the peasantry at the turn of the century…
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“Do what I say, not what I do” , this is what I think of anything that is sufficient.
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Andrew – I think you can rightly claim to be the first FARANG
who coined this term.
As Thais above have pointed out, it was already common currency in Thailand.
And Bh. V. #8
Re : ‘And Australia has a “sufficiency free press.”’
Never a truer word was said – Australia remains in an appalling state of Asia-ignorance.
Congratulations to NM for greatly improving this.
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I doubt that there were fewer people who knows ‘Sufficient Economy’ comes before HM speech. And the scary part is, fewer will know about that here in 10 yrs time.
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@ Chis Beale
I don’t deny that the Australian (and any other Western public) are almost utterly ignorant about Asian realities and politics.
Having said that, just how many Thais have you met who have any nuanced understanding of Malay or Indonesian politics?
How many Japanese have you bumped into who know ditto?
What do *you* know about social conditions and the history of party politics in Patagonia?
Right. Amazingly, people all over the world tend to be insular and self-regarding and generally give very little thought to much beyond what’s for breakfast, sporting results, and who bribed the mayor for this or that property zoning application.
Not news.
What do Thais know about Burma beyond: (1) Those bastards, They killed Kenny! (2) Monks with superior mojo, (3) Domestic helpers?
Which, by way of a rant brings me (finally) to my point:
What Thai, Burmese, Cambodian, Lao, Malaysian, etc. websites exist which are devoted to furthering mutual understanding between these ASEAN nations? ASEAN is a lovely idea (not much market for overtly cynical ideas… so I won’t die rich), but I have noticed in my travels that its existence does not seem to have done anything to enhance mutual understanding between its constituent peoples.
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Juan Carlos # 12 :
@ Chis Beale
“I don’t deny that the Australian (and any other Western public) are almost utterly ignorant about Asian realities and politics.
Having said that, just how many Thais have you met who have any nuanced understanding of Malay or Indonesian politics?
How many Japanese have you bumped into who know ditto?
What do *you* know about social conditions and the history of party politics in Patagonia?”
Asia – especially East Asia is NOT Patagonia to Australia.
Former Oz PM John Howard’s roll-back of Asian Studies was the worst thing Howard ever did.
And Mandarin-speaking Kevin Rudd has been little improvement.
This is stupid. It’s a disgrace.
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Sufficiency democracy requires sufficiency media and sufficiency information. Freedom against Censorship Thailand (www.facthai.wordpress.com) has now been banned.
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Before I could agree with the term “sufficiency democracy”, which basicly imply negative sense to democracy…. [(ig. political system in Thailand, which some say supports a social hierarchy.)]
Andrew and The Economist and even Schott’s Vocab are likely to agree on the negative meaning of the term,…. its like the limited level or degree of being democracy,… which I am not agree YET.
I would support to imply the “sufficiency democracy” as the “optimal level or degree of democracy” or “minimum require level or degree of democracy”.
In the sense that “Thailand are not being democracy, we needs to improve the level of democracy to be more sufficient”
As you can also have the term say “insufficient democracy”.
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“yachtsman, photographer, rainmaker and developer of biofuels,
Indeed, and none of these ‘accomplishments’ stand the test of close scrutiny any more than the ‘legendary jazz musician’ or indeed ‘sufficiency economy theory’ do.
Useful for the propagandists but almost completely without substance. Like me saying “I was there alongside ‘Lightning’ Bolt at the olympics”. In my mind I was, but nowhere else.
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Jay – 15
I dont think Democracy can be categorized into “more” or “less”, you either got Democracy or you don’t, simple as that. However, there are many “form” of Democracy such as the republic or the parliamentary and so on.
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Tarrin – 17
I think we have different point of view on this “got or don’t ” for democracy.
I believe that we could identify the level of democracy by looking at many key items together, such as freedom of speech, right to vote and etc. So, I believe that the “more or less” democracy could be measure.
There are ideas of pure democracy (direct democracy), representative democracy and deliberative democracy.
The point is “sufficiency democracy” term is becoming negative term toward royalist, elites and the old conservative, so I just try to convince for changes of difinition.
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Anonymous #16 :
Re :
Indeed, and none of these ‘accomplishments’ stand the test of close scrutiny any more than the ‘legendary jazz musician’ or indeed ’sufficiency economy theory’ do.
Oh come off it – I’ve bought a couple of HMK’s jazz albums, and they’re good stuff.
You obviously have no decent taste in jazz !
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Jay – 19
I respect your thought on that one, but a country need to have some certain criteria to be called Democratic. My point is, without either of the right to vote, freedom of speech and expression, total sovereignty, rule of law, and power by the people. Lacking any one of those criteria, then, a country cannot be call democratic. I believed Thailand is still lacking the freedom of speech and expression, total sovereignty, rule of law, and power by the people department. Therefore, I still hold my believe that Thailand is not democracy.
One more point I want to add that, it seems like many Thais has this sense of fault democracy about voting. Voting is not in itself a sufficient condition for the existence of democracy. Elections have often been used by authoritarian regimes or dictatorships to give a false sense of democracy. Historical examples include the USSR under the CPSU before its collapse in 1991, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos. I think Thailand election is just a ritual and not a proper democratic procedure anymore, evidence from the 18 Coup Detat that we had.
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Sufficiency democracy is like being stuck in the state of transitional democracy.
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Perhaps any jazz enthusiast’s day could be improved only if, after the exquisite pleasure of listening to the Great Man’s clarinet virtuosity, the enthusiast steps outside to feel His cooling rain fall upon a fevered brow. Then His palm oil diesel powers a late-model Benz while yon enthusiast heads to an exhibition of oil-on-canvas masterworks likewise bestowed upon a grateful people. When at night there comes peaceful, restful sleep, the Great Man is there too, somehow having made it happen. Just a matter of knocking up the ad copy.
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Dear political scientists
A lack of measurement has occurred in the political science. In order to understanding this argument, it is necessary to answer these questions.
1. Data is goods, isn’t it?
2. How does the mechanism of the data market work?
3. Is there the relationship among the stability, the development and the mechanism of the data market?
4. Does the social phenomenon like the recently Thailand crisis involve the mechanism of the data market?
A lack of measurement is the condition that there are some variables and propositions out of the area of measurement. Re-framing is required.
Sincerely,
Re-framer Siripetia
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