The Rules of the Game

Related content: The King Never Smiles: Book Excerpt Revival, Renewal and Reinvention: The Complex Life of Thailand’s Monarch Royal Maneuvers For a region blessed with stunning economic growth, stable borders, birth rates largely under control and a virtuous circle of material and consumerist advancement that has enriched the lives of most of its citizens, the tiger democracies of Asia are suddenly astonishingly unruly.

George Bush, take note: Democracy is under almost as much fire in Southeast Asia as it is in the Middle East. All of these countries are putative parliamentary or presidential democracies and have been for decades, most of them with ornate parliamentary or legislative halls and the trappings of civilized governments. They have fully empowered legislatures and extensive court systems and most have free and aggressive press establishments.

But, looking across the span of these economies, it is important to note that democracy depends on more than the paper on which their constitutions are written. It takes generations to inculcate the idea that people need to accept that there are rules to the game and that constitutional practices be followed.

The coup Tuesday night in Thailand, which brought tanks into the streets and banished Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra from power, is a case in point. The constitution that kept him in power through a long period of parliamentary opposition and unrest in the streets was amended to eliminate party-jumping and to restrict the incessant votes of no confidence that made Thai governments a revolving door. That apparently brought a little too much stability to be able to oust a prime minister who was deeply popular with enough citizens to reelect him handsomely, and who looked likely to return his party, if not him, back to power again in elections scheduled for November.

Thailand had undergone 17 successful coups and several attempts over the last 60 years, this one occurring as Thaksin was out of the country, preparing to address the United Nations General Assembly. The deposed prime minister has been under fire since January, when he engineered the sale of Shin Corp, his telecommunications business, to a Singapore company without paying taxes on the proceeds. He dissolved parliament in January, won a disputed election, and has overseen a caretaker government since King Bhumibol Adulyadej voided the election.

But Thailand is not the only Asian democracy that’s having trouble playing by the rules.

—Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has survived two impeachment attempts, several coup plots and thousands of people in the streets over the last 15 months in the wake of allegations she had conspired with a senior elections official to rig the May 2004 Presidential elections. In the wake of the successful coup in Thailand, military leaders found it necessary to release statements affirming their loyalty to the beleagured president. Her term ends in 2010.

—Taiwanese President Chen Sui-bian has faced a continuing series of rallies that have drawn hundreds of thousands of protesters charging him, members of his family and his administration with corruption. In a special session of Parliament n May, opposition members of parliament launched a series of unsuccessful moves to attempt to impeach him. Since that time, Chen has faced mounting anger over a series of scandals including the arrest of his son-in-law on insider trading allegations. On June 1, he was forced to cede some of his powers to the prime minister to attempt to deflect the political crisis. On Sept. 9, political opponents vowed to take to the streets until they drive him from office.

—In Malaysia, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is under unremitting attack from Mahathir Mohamad, the man he succeeded, on a wide variety of charges ranging from corruption to cancelling some of the former prime minister’s cherished projects. On the other side, Anwar Ibrahim, a onetime Mahathir favourite jailed on spurious corruption and sexual abuse charges, has announced his intention to oppose Badawi despite the fact that Badawi had freed him from prison after Mahathir left office.

—On March 12, 2004, President Roh Moo Hyun of Korea was impeached in a tumultuous session of the National Assembly that featured fistfights, candlelight vigils and student rallies, setting off a constitutional crisis that didn’t end until the Constitutional Court struck down the impeachment two months later, which critics said was nothing more than an attempt by opponents to neutralize his attempts at rapprochement with North Korea.

There have been less-publicized but equally problematical episodes of unrest in Nepal, where protesters and increasingly powerful Maoist guerrillas forced King Gyanendra to cede power in April as demonstrations spread from Kathmandu to poorer rural cities. In Bangladesh, the seemingly unending matricidal war between the Bangladesh Nationalist Party headed by Prime Minister Khaleda Zia has gone on for decades with the opposition Awami League headed by former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Even little Hong Kong, a part of the decidedly undemocratic China, has seen mass protests calling for, in fact, the right to elect their government’s leader.

Obviously there is little these countries have in common. There are similarities between the situations in Korea and Taiwan, where opposition parties are concerned about overtures their leaders are making to China and North Korea. There are similarities between the Philippines and Thailand, where powerful militaries combine with weak and corrupt legislatures, and the middle class of the country’s capitals don’t like their elected leader—but the poor in the countrysides very much do. Malaysia is a separate case, where the threat to Badawi is for now a weak one.

But there is one similarity between them all. At some point in their development as nations, democracy as sold by the west presented an attractive alternative to monarchy, dictatorship, oligarchy or anarchy. One hopes that it still does. But to the leaders of China, staring over their borders to the shenanigans to the south, west and east, and even in its own special administrative zone, it probably doesn’t seem like that good an idea right now.