Thailand’s Buddhist Kingship in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Power, Influence and Rites

Marie-Sybille de Vienne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032045559
• eBook ISBN: 9781000567625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Buddhism
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on two decades of fieldwork, including over a hundred interviews with various political and economic actors at different social levels, as well as documentary and media analysis, this volume presents an account of the Buddhist monarchy in Thailand, offering a sociology of elites, an analysis of the economic influence of the Crown and an examination of the magic and ritual dimension of kingship. An exploration of the role and status of the Palace over the last century, whether as a guarantor of democracy, a symbol of stability, a source of power or an object of popular discontent, Thailand's Buddhist Kingship in the 20th and 21st Centuries will appeal to scholars of sociology and anthropology with interests in material religion, politics and Southeast Asian studies.

Part I Notions of “kingship” and “monarchy”

Marie-Sybille de Vienne and Grégory Mikaelian

TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDRA CEALIS

Chapter 1The setbacks and misfortunes of kingship

Grégory Mikaelian

DOI: 10.4324/9781003193760-1

An operative concept for the analysis of power

The contemporary states of Southeast Asia in which there is a king are often referred to by the term “monarchy.” But it is neither the one by which they designate themselves—a vernacular term which generally draws on a vocabulary of Sanskrit origin referring to the Indian notion of rāja¹—nor the term to which they correspond at first approximation, that is “kingship.”

“Monarchy” or “kingship”?

The question is then whether this recourse to an unsuitable term is a simple warping of the tools of analysis provided by observers often trained in an Anglo-Saxon inspired political science²—which largely nurtured the political science curricula in European countries after the Second World War to the point of dominating the field³—or if, beyond this warping, the semantic shift involved a strategy by the elites from the countries concerned to be recognised in the community of nations through a word that “speaks” to the great powers.⁴ Another possible hypothesis, eventually complementary to the first two, would be to consider this shift as the symptom of a real transformation of kingship due to modernisation—in the sense of an adaptation to Western modernity⁵ quintessentialised by liberalism,⁶ and manifested by a strengthening of the State⁷: as such, understanding the adequacy to a western governance characterised by the strengthening of the centralising State associated with the Capital through the form of the nation-state innervated by the ideology of progress rooted in the linear time of Christendom. What is at stake behind this apparent taxonomic detail is the true diagnosis of the contemporary states of South-East Asia in terms of their political traditions: where do they come from, where are they now and where are they going? The question arises all the more because many countries that have abolished kingship and are suffering the horrors of a liberal Jacobinism have more or less strong remnants of a royal system of legitimation, even though they are ruled by governments who claim to break with this tradition (the case of Myanmar, at least until 2010, socialist Vietnam and Laos). For example, Roger Kershaw distinguishes at the scale of South-East Asia and as part of a grid of analysis prosaically assimilating the monarchy to kingship: a “ruling monarchy” (Brunei), three “constitutional monarchies” (Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand), and countries for which the “monarchical” legacy is relevant (Laos, Indonesia).⁸

Elements for the history of a conceptual shift

While most theoretical writings on political systems use indiscriminately monarchy and kingship,⁹ let us, nevertheless, agree with Roland Mousnier¹⁰ that there is an “advantage in distinguishing the monarch from the king,” as did our predecessors. The Greek Aristotle thus differentiates kingship (βασιλεία “basileia”) from monarchy (μοναρχία “monarchia”), the latter embodying the legitimate form of government by one person in that its object is the service of public interest, by opposition to tyranny (τυραννίς “tyrannis”). If kingship for him takes various forms, the one he calls “absolute kingship” (παμβασιλεία “pambasileia”)¹¹ and “which is the one where the King exercises a universal authority, obeying only his own will,” represents the most successful type.¹²

Strictly speaking, the monarchy is merely a system of government in which only one person commands (monos μόνος: unique+ arkhein ἄρχειν: to rule). The monarch can therefore be either a tyrant, a dictator—in the Roman sense as well as in the popular sense—or a republican head of state. Monarchy can be hereditary or not, of religious inspiration or not. It can be established overnight by referendum or a coup d’état. Useful for the morphological description of the powers, the term remains singularly vague. Over the centuries, it has scarcely acquired a positive connotation due to the use of competing terms to designate the bad forms of government by one person—tyranny, despotism, dictatorship.¹³ It thus ends up by designating the good form in the place of kingship, even though it is initially no longer attached to the concept of legitimacy. Only an extrinsic legitimacy is recognised by virtue of precisely the connotation it carries. It is therefore the analysts who underline that the regime referred to is based on a legitimacy by calling it a monarchy rather than, for example, a dictatorship.

Conversely, the King holds by definition “a legitimate power, deemed established by consent and recognised by custom, of organised dynastic succession.”¹⁴ Jacques Népote explained in 1994 that

To prevent the “dynastic” objection to many Southeast Asian kingships, let us add the divergence that is observed in relation to this question between the West and the East. In the West, the notion of kingship is often conceived as a hereditary magistracy in the service of the State by privileged reference to the Temporal. The devolution of this kingship, programmed by some rules of law, is assigned to a family line thus transformed into a royal dynasty, genealogically ordered. This explains why very often no ritual comes to sanction a reduced investiture to a short civil ceremony; this was the case in Portugal, Netherlands, etc. In the East, the choice appears opposite, in the sense that kingship tends to be conceived as an immanent intrusion of the supernatural. It is thus identified and materialised by complex ritual procedures that seize the individual concerned without a direct link to a genealogical place in a royal family. The most complete form of this conception is probably reached in the countries of Lamaic Buddhism, where those who may be considered as rulers of the country (Dalai Lama in Tibet or Bogdogu Eguene in Mongolia) succeed by reincarnation without being able to predict in what body will reincarnation take place. This conception is also represented, although in a more attenuated way, in China for example, where the sovereign holds the imperial power in the name of a Celestial Mandate insofar as his personal virtue attests well that he is ‘Son of Heaven’.¹⁵

Etymologically, at least in the Indo-European tradition of which, nolens volens, sovereigns of Southeast Asia originate in a first semantic approach to the question, the term refers more deeply to the social structure. It is related to the kinship of the dominant group, not only genetically—it is known that king comes from the Anglo-Saxon cyning “man (of the kinship),”¹⁶ and that the word in West Germanic comes from *kuningaz, “he of the lineage”¹⁷—but also metaphorically, notably through paternal rhetoric extended to the entire people. As for his duties, Émile Benveniste recalls that the King (*rēĝ) originally refers to “the one who draws the line that embodies at the same time what is right,”¹⁸ that is, “the law, the rule of rectitude, that of justice, of truth, and of ritual accuracy,” is a more religious than a political role¹⁹ to guarantee the divine order. This first dimension, at once sacral and sacrificial, joins the invariants released by specialists of the royal question for which the King is not so much master as captive of the institution and, basically, a scapegoat, of which it would be possible to trace the institutional origin back to the notion of sacrificial victim. Her ritual killing would have transformed her into a “central figure in all collective ceremonies, the pivot or keystone of the social group.”²⁰ To return to the Indo-European case, the term ended, with the development of a priestly class, by referring to the warlike dimension of the candidate to the throne, to whom the coronation confers the character of the other two functions (priestly and productive), the latter embodying the synthesis of the three functions.²¹ This overarching position then attributes to him the role of guarantor of the social order as well as of the cosmic order with which he is a bridge—and this is what the investiture rituals at the head of the state say—adding a function of political power to the sacredness of the kingship of origins.

The monarchical setbacks of kingship

Far from remaining this technical term inherited from the Greek tradition, the monarchy has been weighed down by centuries of debate over North European political regimes, so that it has ended up losing its universal character, establishing itself in the medieval and modern history of western Eurasian Land’s End. Pierre L. Lamant thus recalls that, apart from its universally accepted meaning as a category of Greek tradition politics, the monarchy is primarily attached to the history of the Christian West:

It is an abstract concept, which appeared little by little, especially in the West, especially thanks to Roman law, which erased with the disappearance of the empire of Rome and despite a few centuries of survival in the Byzantine Empire, but reappears gradually under the influence of the Church and flourishes towards the thirteenth century, precisely at the time of a revival of the knowledge of Roman law, under the action of those who were called in France the lawyers and who were particularly active in the Kingdom of France.²²

From sacred kingship to Christian monarchy

In medieval Christendom, the term monarchy was for a long time reserved for the universal power of the Pope, or that of the Emperor dominating several kingdoms, before qualifying the particularly powerful princes, designated monarchs from the middle of the 11th century, then simple kings when the term is passed in the popular languages in the 13th century.²³ The shift took place under the double effect of the prestige of the catholic Church and the rediscovery of Aristotle’s texts, for whom the monarchy is considered to be the best possible government for men.²⁴ Following a long exercise of institutional definition, in the 13th and 14th centuri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Notions of “kingship” and “monarchy”
• Part II Chakri kingship: in between tradition, nation and constitution
• Part III The crown as stabiliser?
• Part IV Eschatological anguish, institutional unravelling and royal advent
• Appendix A: Lexicon of the main Siamese, Sanskrit and Pali terms
• Appendix B: Thematic bibliography
• Index