Thailand’s Monarchy and Constitutional History

Abstract

Thailand’s recent political history is unsettling to observers of a vibrant developing Asian state on a path to democracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Thailand’s democracy spiralled into political chaos. Political interventions by king and military leading to two twenty-first-century military coups, political street violence, and repression of pro-democracy movements seemed, to many Thai and Western scholars, evidence of another failure by a developing state to establish rule-of-law constitutionalism. Eugenie Mérieau’s carefully researched and persuasively argued Constitutional Bricolage: Thailand’s Sacred Monarchy vs The Rule of Law shows that this conclusion requires careful reassessment. Mérieau rejects the view that prerogatives exercised by Thailand’s politically active kings and state institutions acting in the king’s name have undermined constitutionalism. On the contrary, she maintains that preservation of the monarchy’s prerogative powers has been central to Thai constitutional jurisprudence and in play during drafting of every Constitution from the first in 1932 to the latest adopted in 2017. Constitutional Bricolage develops the author’s thesis through detailed accounts of debates over constitutional language, examination of the intentions of actors who influenced constitutional thought through reinterpretation of constitutionalism’s most important norms. Mérieau constructs, era by era, a “constitutional ethnography,” a “layered narrative” of the collective, dialectical, and often chaotic process of purposeful misreading, and “reassignment” of ideas to serve new functions by “active and often strategic participants” who legitimize power, not only the constitution-drafters, but also scholars, judges, and other political actors. Constitutional norms that emerge from this process comprise an eclectic mix of reinterpreted elements from Thailand’s remembered past and European constitutional practice. The resulting constitutional bricolage, or patchwork of repurposed borrowings, arose from successive political compromises between monarchical traditions and foreign ideals, each with legitimating force. In the debates over these ideas, the monarchy’s prerogative powers were never far from the centre of debates. In an earlier article, Mérieau put forward her thesis that Thailand’s constitutional destiny has been determined by the origins and content of its first Constitution, adopted in 1932. The small revolutionary party that overthrew the absolute monarchy was quickly outmanoeuvred by a king with his own vision of constitutionalism and parliamentary government. He drew on support among conservative bureaucratic and political elites to draft a text that guaranteed his essential prerogatives and control of Parliament. Even after the king was forced into exile in 1935, the Constitution he left behind was Thailand’s longest-lasting and, according to Mérieau, became a baseline for political forces aligned with the power of the monarchy. The king’s Constitution had not only elite political support but roots in the Buddhism of ordinary Thai. As Mérieau explains, words for law have a cultural history. The Thai word dhama, referring to Buddhism’s ordering of the universe, gave rise to a multiplicity of modern terms for law with different implications, some explicitly rejecting association