Democracy
Thailand’s imagined place in the civilized oecumene of the second
quarter of the twentieth century and the Free World of the second
half rested, to a considerable degree, on the adoption of democracy
as the official ideology of the post-absolutist state. As the country’s
second prime minister, Phraya Phahon, put it, ‘there arose the need
to change the form of our government to that of the civilized countries.
. . . This is the rule of democracy where the people are the
master’30 – and this despite the fact that the Phahon government
disallowed the formation of political parties as early as 1934. The
lexical history of ‘democracy’ in the Thai language is an apt illustration
of its vexed career as a political idea. The term that came to signify
‘democracy’ (prachathipatai, literally ‘people’s sovereignty’) was
originally coined by King Wachirawuth as a translation of ‘republic’
– a form of government that was deemed unsuitable for Siam
because of its rejection of monarchical rule. Those who were bent
on changing the political status quo faced too the dilemma of
translation in defining their objectives. Pridi Phanomyong’s reminiscences
of the founding meeting of the People’s Party are revealing:
‘At that time, there were no such new terms as patiwat or aphiwat
to translate the term “revolution” . . . We therefore opted for . . . “to
change the system in which the king is above the law to one in
which the king is under the law”.