Conflict, Legitimacy and Government Reform: Equitable Allocation of ...

76 KPI Congress XI
suggest that the experiment in governance being conducted by
Thailand’s political leadership is not achieving all that its authors would
hope. The “Rationale” cites, among other disturbing signs in recent
Thai political history, clashes between groups with opposing political
views, unrest, loss of life, polarization, and battles between different
levels of government. The “Rationale” further states that these visible
conflicts cover an even deeper set of systemic problems including
corruption, misconduct of public officials, unfair allocation of resources,
unequal access to educational opportunities, elections influenced by
patronage, and military intervention.
If, as is often said about addictions, the first step toward recovery is
recognizing that one has a problem, the long list of problems contained
in this “Rationale” suggests that Thailand is ready to undertake the
difficult “Treatment” required to become a full and vibrant democracy.
As the recent global financial crisis has reaffirmed, we in the United
States should be very careful about pretending to have lessons to teach
others, whether in economics or politics. Our own failures to address
systemic weaknesses in our financial structures have brought untold
suffering to millions of unemployed Americans struggling and, in many
cases, loosing their battle to keep their homes and families safe. Our
failures because of the global influence of the U.S. economy have
inflicted life threatening hardship on countless others around the world.
Fortunately, we had a democratic system capable of responding
quickly to these failures through the alternation in power of an
opposition political party. However, despite the hope that President
Obama has brought to the United States and, if the Nobel prize
committee is to be believed, to the rest of the world, the jury is still out
on whether we can address the political failures that led to the financial
failures: the corrosive influence of money on our political system, the
dominance of political decision-making by well-organized lobbies and
influence peddlers, and the undermining of the government’s
competence and capacity to regulate in the public interest the
functioning of the private market economy.