Political Transition in Cambodia 1991-99

Power, Elitism and Democracy

David Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781136850547
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book illustrates the limits to the 1990s UNTAC peacekeeping intervention in Cambodia and raises a critical challenge to the assumptions underpinning key tenets of the 'Liberal Project' as a mechanism for resolving complex, severe struggles for elite political power in developing countries.

The book highlights the limitations of externally imposed power-sharing. In the case of Cambodia, the imagined effect was a coalition that would share power democratically. However, this approach was appropriate only for resolving the superpower conflict that had created Cambodia's war. Rather than bringing long-term peace to Cambodia, Roberts argues, it created the temporary illusion of a democratic system that in fact recreated the military conflict and housed it in a superficial coalition.

The book challenges assumptions regarding the inevitability of the globalization of liberalism as a means of ordering non-western societies. It explains the failure of democratic transition in terms of the impropriety and weakness of the plan which preceded it, and in terms of the elite's traditional reliance on absolutism and resistance to the concept of 'Opposition'.

Notes

Preface

1. 1 See A Schlesinger, Jr, Has Democracy a Future? Foreign Affairs, September–October 1997, p. 2; and F Zakaria, The Rise of Illiberal Democracy, Foreign Affairs, November–December 1997, p. 23.
2. 2 MRJ Vatikiotis, Political Change in Southeast Asia: Trimming the Banyan Tree, Routledge, 1996, p. 82.
3. 3 B Schwarz, The Diversity Myth: America’s Leading Export, Atlantic Monthly, May 1995, p. 60.
4. 4 See SP Riley, Africa’s ‘New Wind of Change’, The World Today, vol. 48, no. 7, July 1992.
5. 5 T Young, ‘A Project to be Realised’: Global Liberalism and Contemporary Africa, Millennium_ Journal of International Studies, vol. 24, no. 3, p. 1, 1995.
6. 6 R Burbach, O Nunez and B Kagarlitsky, Globalisation and its Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms, Pluto, 1997, p. 35. Readers unfamiliar with this text should note that the authors are highly critical of this phenomenon, rather than supportive of it.
7. 7 S Lawson, Democracy and the Problem of Cultural Relativism_ Normative Issues for International Politics, Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations, vol. 12, no. 2, May 1998, p. 264. Lawson also cites C Ake, The Unique Case of African Democracy, International Affairs, vol. 69, no. 2, 1993, and M Alagappa, Democratic Transition in Asia: The Role of the International Community, Honolulu, East-West Center Special Reports, no. 3, October 1994.
8. 8 This statement does not imply that policy consensus existed in the capital cities of the USA, the Soviet Union or China. The terms are used for clarity of expression.
9. 9 See amongst others, Fresh Paths to Peace: New Dimensions of UN Peacekeeping Operations, Work in Progress, vol. 14, no. 3, June 1995, p. 1 (United Nations University).
10. 10 This concept finds expression in, for example, F Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Hamish Hamilton, 1992.
11. 11 For a survey and discussion of this phenomenon in Africa, see TD Sisk and A Reynolds (eds.), Elections and Conflict Management in Africa, United States Institute of Peace, 1998.
12. 12 Of course, pressure appeared from below in several cases, such as South Africa; however, the facilitation of change lay in the hands of the international intervenors to a significant degree.
13. 13 Shaw reminds that the conflict spread to Kompong Som, for example, where ‘the CPP military were searching through hotels looking for FUNCINPEC supporters and military … [and] FUNCINPEC governors were told to flee or die … in Stung Treng’. E-mail correspondence from Battambang with Graham Shaw, 11 November, 1998.
14. 14 Zakaria (1997), p. 27.
15. 15 J Chopra, United Nations Authority in Cambodia, Thomas J Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies, Occasional Paper no. 15, 1994, p. 49.
16. 16 JM Sanderson, ‘UNTAC: Successes and Failures’, in H Smith (ed.), International Peacekeeping: Building on the Cambodian Experience, Australian Defence Studies Centre, 1994, p. 31.

I

1. 1 This term is used by some to identify the period after the ‘détente’ of the 1960s and 1970s which followed the climb-down from potential nuclear hostilities over the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It differs temporally from the ‘first’ Cold War which, it is often suggested, began shortly after the end of the Second World War. The second Cold War marks for many an escalation of tensions previously ‘simmering’ during ‘détente’. Not long after the Viêt Namese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978, an anti-western Ayatollah took over from the Shah of Persia in Iran, and the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan. Not long before the Viêt Namese invasion, Hanoi had signed a 25-year Treaty of Friendship with Moscow, reinforcing the Sino-Soviet split and strengthening US-Chinese relations. Many other events signalled increased international hostility and tension.
2. 2 M Vickery, Cambodia 1975–1982, Southend, 1984, p. 247.
3. 3 Chang Pao-min, Beijing Versus Hanoi: The Diplomacy Over Kampuchea, Asian Survey, vol. 23, no. 5, 1988, p. 599.
4. 4 M Haas, Cambodia, Pol Pot and the United States: A Faustian Pact, Praeger, 1989, p. 445; J Pilger, Heroes, Pan 1989, pp. 31–2.
5. 5 WS Turley, The Khmer War: Cambodia after Paris, Survival, vol. 32, no. 5, 1990.
6. 6 WJ Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam, Westview, 1996, p. 368.
7. 7 David Munro and John Pilger, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, ATV-TV (London), 1980.
8. 8 Vickery (1984), p. 247.
9. 9 The KNUFNS changed its name to the Kampuchean National United Front for National Construction, after the ‘Salvation’ had been achieved.
10. 10 It will be noted that Bou Thang’s name appears again later, in an alleged anti-Hun Sen ‘coup’ seventeen years later in 1994. For a detailed discussion of the origins of the Salvation Front, see Vickery (1984), pp. 190–3.
11. 11 SJ Hood, Dragons Entangled: Indochina and the China-Viêt Nam War, ME Sharpe, 1992; Duiker (1996)...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• Tables
• Maps
• Introduction
• I Peace Seeking
• II Assumptions of Peace
• III A Critical Overview of the Operation
• IV Early Challenges to Transition
• V Elite Challenges to Transition – the Khmer Rouge
• VI Elite Challenges to Transition – the CPP
• VII From ‘Coalition’ to Confrontation, 1993 to 1997
• VIII Peripheral Challenges to Transition, 1993 to 1997
• IX Recreating Elite Stability, July 1997 to July 1998
• X Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index