Notes on Thammarat and Good Governance in Thailand

Origins and Purpose of Thammarat

• Translation of Governance: In summer 1997, after Thailand’s financial crisis, the IMF’s term “governance” was translated into Thai as “thammarat.”

• Thai Coinage: Created by Professor Chaiwat Satha-anand and promoted by Thirayuth Boonmi, “thammarat” aimed to interpret good governance within Thai cultural politics, independently of IMF meanings.

• Political Actors' Engagement: Various Thai political groups—authoritarian military, liberal corporate elites, and communitarian public intellectuals—used IMF language to debate the state, market, and society, often exceeding IMF intentions.

Role of Thai Language and Translation

• Political Intervention: Thai language politics regard translation as a site for political intervention, where foreign concepts are screened, modified, or retranslated to “civilize or domesticate Western ideas.”

• Rhyming Aesthetics: Thai scripts, sounds, and rhyming traditions necessitate that new coinages “rhyme and fit existing lexical meanings and Thai verse genres” to circulate widely.

  •    Intharayut puts it in more concise terms: ‘‘Thai people are rhymers by habit. The sweet-sounding saying of rhymes is almost a commonplace, but its content is another matter.’’

• Translation-as-Transformation: This process involves official, actor, and unofficial translators who negotiate meanings, re-embedding borrowed words into Thai contexts with new semantic fields and political signifiers.

Official Neologisms and Shaping Political Discourse

• Prince Narathipphongpraphan (Wan): Led the Royal Institute’s coinage work post-1932 absolute monarchy overthrow.

• Wan's Principle: Argued that “Thai language will secure national security by forcing deliberate, culturally grounded coinages rather than direct transliterations that imitate foreign ideas too quickly.”

  • ‘‘It is the Thai language that will guarantee the security of the Thai nation. This is because if we favor the use of Thai transliterations of Western words about ideas, we may walk too fast. That is, we may imitate other people’s ideas directly instead of premodifying them in accord with our ideas. But if we use Thai words and hence must coin new ones, we will have to walk deliberately.’’

• Key Coined Terms: Wan helped coin hundreds of foundational political terms, including:

  • sangkhom (society)

  • setthakij (economy)

  • patiwat (revolution)

  • prachathipatai (democracy)

• Shaping Power/Knowledge Regimes: These official coinages shaped modern Thai political discourse across ideological lines.

  • Revolution: Wan’s “patiwat” (turning/rolling back) implied restoration, while Pridi Banomyong’s “aphiwat” (super-evolution) signaled radical change.

The Voyage of Good Governance to Thammarat

• IMF Definition (1996): Good governance includes “rule of law, efficient and accountable public sector, and anti-corruption.”

• Tom Yam Kung Crisis (1997): Thailand’s financial crisis led to IMF loans with governance conditions.

• Thai Intellectual Response: Chaiwat Satha-anand convened a meeting to articulate a Thai understanding of good governance.

• Meaning of Thammarat: Combines “thamma” (moral righteousness, Dharma, law of nature) and “rat” (state), grounding good governance in Thai moral and religious terms to legitimate potential civil disobedience.

• Faculty's Expectations: The Thammasat faculty articulated three expectations for governance:

  • Government should care for the poor, unemployed, and disadvantaged.

  • Government must reject any unconstitutional power seizure.

  • Public administration should be based on justice, fairness, and righteousness.

• Rhyming Potential: “Thammarat” resonated widely in popular rhymes, with $685$ possible rhymes, significantly more than the $1$ for a direct transliteration of “good governance.”

Five Meanings of Thammarat

• State-Civilizing Thammarat (Chaiwat Satha-anand et al., academic community): Uses thamma to control, regulate, and discipline the state, grounding civil disobedience against illegitimate governance.

• National-Consensus Thammarat (Thirayuth Boonmi): Advocates a tripartite self-reform of state, business, and civil society for efficient and just public administration.

• Authoritarian Thammarat (General Bunsak Kamhaengritthirong): A state-centered, top-down approach emphasizing national unity, Thai-ness, and a potential enemy, often aligning with neoliberal privatization policies.

• Liberal Thammarat (Anand Panyarachun): Focuses on governance as administration, transparency, efficiency, and public service delivery, depoliticizing the concept to prioritize administrative processes over power relations. Singapore is cited as an example where dictatorship can still exhibit good governance.

• Communitarian Thammarat (Dr Prawase Wasi): A networks-based, social capital-driven approach advocating bottom-up reform and building a santi prachatham (peaceful democracy within thamma) through local communities.

Three Variants of Thammarat: Power, Market, and Democracy

1. Power

   • Authoritarian: State-centered power over a monolithic, harmonious nation.

   • Liberal: Checks and balances; allows conflict as part of normal public life.

   • Communitarian: Decentralization to local communities.

2. Market

   • Authoritarian: Complies with free-market forces without a new platform.

   • Liberal: Assumes free-market capitalism as triumphing over socialism/communism.

   • Communitarian: Challenges free-market failures; advocates a space for a “sufficiency economy.”

3. Democracy

   • Authoritarian: Thai-style democracy; separate from thammarat; Singapore cited as an example of thammarat without democracy.

   • Liberal: Distinguishes thammarat and democracy; can separate governance from democracy.

   • Communitarian: Inseparable; democracy must be built through social networks and local empowerment.

Conclusion and Implications

• Challenge to Universal Reason: “Good governance cannot be transplanted intact as a fixed signifier; it must be learned, experimented with, and reinvented within local contexts.”

• Local Definition: Sustainable thammarat emerges when people define and build their own versions, leading to diverse forms globally.

• Tensions Highlighted: The Thai experience highlights tensions between:

  • Norm-based governance (moral-righteousness) and pragmatic administrative efficiency.

  • Top-down state-centric approaches and bottom-up community-driven reform.

  • Privatization and neoliberal reforms versus social protection and sufficiency-based economics.