一个危机中的王国。泰国在二十一世纪争取民主的斗争
一个危机中的王国。泰国在二十一世纪争取民主的斗争 | 作者：安德鲁-麦克格雷格-马歇尔
亚洲争论》。伦敦。Zed Books, 2014. 238页。(地图）24.95美元，纸质。ISBN 978-1-78360-057-1。
安德鲁-麦克格雷格-马歇尔的《危机中的王国》的出版在泰国学者中是一个备受期待的事件。马歇尔是一名苏格兰记者，曾为路透社工作，几年来一直在他的 "#泰国历史 "博客上发布这项研究的大量内容。这本书对这些材料有所补充，但对那些在博客网站上读过他的作品的人来说，不会有很大的惊喜。
马歇尔开始写当代泰国政治的保皇主义层面，背景是该国自2006年以来演变为军事独裁，对维基解密电报进行解读，这些电报暴露了政变策划者的想法和阴谋的不光彩之处，包括保皇党、民主党和黄衫军领导人的想法。由于无法继续在路透社工作，也不愿意在回到泰国后冒着被监禁的危险，马歇尔决定写一本书，通过围绕泰国君主制的长期斗争的视角来构建当代政治斗争。
马歇尔在书中很早就提出了他的观点，分为四个部分（3-4）。
首先，他声称在精英层面，"泰国的冲突本质上是一场关于普密蓬国王去世后谁将成为君主的继承斗争"。
第二，他声称精英们所担心的国王去世后的政治动荡已经开始。
第三，这种动荡的强度 "并不意味着君主作为一个独立的行为体拥有重大的政治权力"，因为泰国的精英们通常会利用君主制为自己谋利。
第四，大多数泰国人与其说是亲皇室，不如说是现任国王的忠实支持者。
然后，他提出了旨在支持这些主张的分析，包括对当前事件的调查和一些历史章节，旨在将当前的统治置于更广泛的视角中。
鉴于有关泰国君主制的可读性和批判性的英文著作相对匮乏，以及这种写作所带来的风险，《危机中的王国》应该被认为是一项重要的成就，泽德书局愿意出版它，应该得到肯定。对于许多继续重复关于泰国王国的过时和东方主义口号的西方人来说，这本书应该被证明是真正的大开眼界--尤其是在讨论导致现任国王登上王位的事件和扩大君主制的社会和政治意义方面（132页）。
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对于许多学者和对泰国政治相当熟悉的人来说，马歇尔的一些分析仍将被证明是相当稀薄的粥。不仅如此，在最近的历史中，有一连串的书籍提出了关于君主制和继承挑战的重要问题--例如，作者引用的本尼迪克特-安德森、保罗-汉德利、索伦-伊瓦尔松和洛特-伊萨格、威廉-史蒂文森、大卫-斯特莱克福斯和通猜-威尼查库的作品，以及他没有引用的凯文-惠森、雷恩-克鲁格和颂萨-詹特拉萨库的作品，而且马歇尔对目前危机的解释也有些片面。
马歇尔肯定是对的，继承问题很重要，他用维基解密电报和其他来源支持这一说法。
但是，如果他自己的断言，即君主制不是独立的强大，而是被精英们利用来达到自己的目的是正确的，正如我所说的那样，那么继承问题就应该被作为一个窗口来看待消耗精英们的更大社会斗争。
这些斗争显然不仅包括他们对普密蓬国王去世后谁控制王室及其各种财产的财富和机构权力的痴迷关注，还包括他们如何在没有围绕现任君主建立的合法形象的情况下继续维持一个精英主导的政治和社会秩序。
在许多方面，正是这种精英阶层对日益高涨的民众需求的斗争，现在被压制的红衫军运动以各种方式凄厉地表达了这种斗争，而这正是目前政治斗争的中心。
遗憾的是，马歇尔的书对这场斗争的这一方面提供了很少的洞察力，包括农村社会的转型使其成为可能，或者它与围绕继承权的精英内部阴谋的相互联系的方式。
此外，对民众斗争的分析失败不仅仅是作品中的一个经验性缺陷，因为它促成了马歇尔的一个相当紧张的预言，他预计在普密蓬去世和一些短暂的动乱之后，泰国可能会朝着更加稳定的方向发展，因为继承问题已经得到解决（214）。
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在我看来，这似乎是一种极不可能的情况，因为民众对精英主义统治形式的斗争非常激烈，而泰国的精英们又不遗余力地试图维持这种统治。
我应该注意到，我读到的马歇尔的书的版本是在2014年政变之前完成的，这个事件毫不含糊地宣布了军方领导层的意愿，即除了支持他们的力量之外，要驱逐所有的民众力量，并在必要时以彻底的独裁或法西斯手段进行统治。
也许可以原谅马歇尔没有把这种深度镇压的行为写进他的分析，或者得出这样的结论：这种行为使得近期的和解似乎没有希望。
然而，对泰国民众斗争的分析--而不仅仅是精英阶层内部的继承斗争--可能已经赞扬了这样的解释，与2014年的政变无关。(奇怪的是，该书没有对2008年黄衫军的机场封锁进行任何分析，这也证明了精英势力的不妥协，并可能对任何短期和解的希望发出警告）。
尽管有这些缺陷，《危机中的王国》是一本有益的读物，尤其是对于那些不熟悉保皇党-军方精英（及其国际盟友）在塑造泰国持续的民主斗争中的作用的人来说。它肯定会在泰国民主活动家的书架上找到它的位置--前提是他们没有住在泰国。
吉姆-格拉斯曼
英属哥伦比亚大学，加拿大温哥华
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A KINGDOM IN CRISIS: Thailand’s Struggle for Democracy in the Twenty-First Century | By Andrew MacGregor Marshall
Asian Arguments. London: Zed Books, 2014. 238 pp. (Map.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-78360-057-1.
The publication of Andrew MacGregor Marshall’s A Kingdom in Crisis has been a much-awaited event among Thai scholars. Marshall, a Scottish journalist who used to work for Reuters, has been releasing large pieces of this study for a number of years now, at his “#thaistory” blog. The book adds something to this material but will not be a huge surprise to those who have read his work at the blog site.
Marshall began writing about the royalist dimensions of contemporary Thai politics in the context of the country’s devolution into military dictatorship since 2006, offering interpretations of Wikileaks cables that exposed unsavoury aspects of the coup plotters’ ideas and machinations—including those of royalist, Democrat Party, and Yellow Shirt leaders. Unable to continue working at Reuters, and unwilling to risk imprisonment under Thailand’s harsh lèse majesté laws should he return to Thailand, Marshall settled in to write a book that frames contemporary political struggles through the lens of long-standing struggles surrounding the Thai monarchy.
The take-home message of Marshall’s book is delivered early on, in four parts (3–4). First, he claims that at the elite level, “Thailand’s conflict is essentially a succession struggle over who will become monarch when King Bhumibol dies.” Second, he claims that the political upheaval elites have feared will result from the King’s passing has already begun. Third, the intensity of this upheaval “does not imply that the monarch has significant political power as an independent actor,” since Thai elites have typically used the monarchy to their own benefit. And fourth, most Thais are not so much pro-royalist as loyal supporters of the current King. He then presents an analysis designed to back these claims, including both a survey of current events and a number of historical chapters meant to place the current reign in broader perspective.
Given the relative paucity of accessible and critical English-language writing about the Thai monarchy, and the risks that such writing entails, A Kingdom in Crisis should be considered a significant accomplishment, and Zed Books should be given credit for being willing to publish it. For the many Westerners who continue to repeat outmoded and Orientalist slogans about the Kingdom, the book should prove to be a real eye-opener—not least in its discussion of the events that led to the current king taking the throne and expanding the social and political significance of the monarchy (132 ff.).
For many scholars and people fairly familiar with Thai politics, some of Marshall’s analysis will nonetheless prove fairly thin gruel. It is not only that there has actually been a string of books in recent history that raise telling issues about the monarchy and challenges of succession—for example, the works by Benedict Anderson, Paul Handley, Soren Ivarsson and Lotte Isager, William Stevenson, David Streckfuss and Thongchai Winichakul, which the author cites, as well as works by Kevin Hewison, Rayne Kruger and Somsak Jeamteerasakul, which he doesn’t cite—but Marshall’s explanation of the current crisis is somewhat one-sided.
Marshall is surely right that succession issues are significant, a claim that he backs with the Wikileaks cables and other sources. But if his own assertion that the monarchy is not independently powerful and is used by elites for their own purposes is correct, as I would say it is, then the succession issue ought to be used as a window onto the larger social struggles that consume the elites. These clearly include not only their obsessive concerns about who controls the wealth and institutional power of the Royal household and its various properties after King Bhumibol dies, but how they can continue to maintain an elite-dominated political and social order without the legitimizing imagery that has been built up around the current monarch. In many ways, it is this elite struggle against rising popular demands, poignantly expressed in various ways by the now suppressed Red Shirt movement, which is at the centre of the present political struggle. Marshall’s book unfortunately provides scant insight into this aspect of the struggle, including the transformations of rural society enabling it, or the ways it is interconnected with the intra-elite machinations around succession. Moreover, this failure to analyze popular struggles is not merely an empirical lacuna in the work since it contributes to one of the rather strained prognostications Marshall forwards when he anticipates that after Bhumibol’s death and some brief upheaval Thailand may evolve toward greater stability, the succession issue having been resolved (214).
This seems to me a highly unlikely scenario, given the intensity of popular struggle against elitist forms of rule, and the intransigence of Thai elites in trying to maintain them. I should note that the version of Marshall’s book I have read was finished before the 2014 coup, an event which announced in no uncertain terms the will of the military leadership to expunge all popular forces except those that support them, and to rule by out-and-out dictatorial or fascist means if necessary. Perhaps Marshall can be excused for not having written such acts of deep repression into his analysis, or for drawing the conclusion that such acts make near-term reconciliation seem hopeless. Yet an analysis of the popular struggle in Thailand—rather than just the intra-elite succession struggle—might have already commended such an interpretation, independently of the 2014 coup. (Strangely, the book lacks any analysis of the 2008 Yellow Shirt airport blockades, which also attest to the intransigence of elite forces and might have warned against any hopes for short-term reconciliation.)
Despite these shortcomings, A Kingdom in Crisis is a useful read, particularly for those unfamiliar with the roles of royalist-military elites (and their international allies) in shaping Thailand’s ongoing struggles for democracy. It will certainly find its place on the bookshelves of Thai democracy activists—provided they do not live in Thailand.
Jim Glassman
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
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