The politics of authoritarianism: the state and political soldiers in burma, indonesia, and thailand by Chao-Tzang Yawnghwe M. A., University of British Columbia, 1990 B. A., University of Rangoon, 1961

As Gerald Heeger notes, political roles and position are redefined as roles within the bureaucratic hierarchy.¹¹⁴ The net result is the insulation of the state from society by a special, hierarchically-organized collectivity of state officials – the "state stratum".¹¹⁵ In the Third World, the state stratum is in some respects a bureaucracy. It is also, as James Petras suggests, a distinct social entity: a class-conscious, vertically- and horizontally-linked stratum.¹¹⁶ In military-authoritarian states, the class comprises both military and civilian officials, as well as government politicians and legislators, and intellectuals in "think tanks" and state universities. Incidentally, members of the state stratum will comprise a large segment of the "middle class" of Third World societies. This is the "new class" that Milovan Djilas isolated in the communist and socialist context.¹¹⁷ The typical Third World state stratum, like this "new class", achieves greater dominance through its hold over the state, on which it depends for its livelihood and accumulation of wealth.¹¹⁸ In this situation, as Clive Thomas notes, the "classic relation of economic power to political power" is reversed. Economic power is consolidated "after political power and the state is captured".¹¹⁹

Members of this stratum are differentiated from other strata by various privileges and entitlements. They are also imbued with a distinctive esprit de corps, often built around a strong "us-against-them" feeling towards the mass of the population.¹²⁰ The existence of this stratum of state functionaries is crucial to the insulation and the non-malleability of the state, and enhances its independence (or autonomy) from society.


The Personal Ruler in an Authoritarian Order
In addition to the distinct stratum of officials referred to, the most prominent feature of Third World authoritarianism (including its military-authoritarian variant) is the phenomenon of personal rule.¹²¹ It is defined by Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg as a system of rule predominating in a poorly institutionalized political arena. The system is structured not by institutions but by the political players themselves. It is a system where the formal rules of the political game do not effectively govern the con-duct of rulers or other political actors most of the time. Rather, political actions result more from personal power and private whims than are derived from established proc-edures inside institutions.¹²² Personal rulers are not linked with the "public", but to patrons, associates, clients, supporters and rivals, who constitute the "system". As such, political power is not checked by institutions and formal rules. Personal rulers are restrained -- if, and when, they are -- by the limits of their personal authority and power, and that of their patrons, associates, clients, supporters, and rivals.¹²³

The authors note, however, that although countries with a comparatively low level of social and economic modernization are especially susceptible to personal rule, relatively "developed" states -- even modern, developed states -- are not immune to, as they put it, "personal authoritarianism".¹²⁴ Personal rule is, according to the authors, inherently authoritarian. It has given rise to "the narrowing of the public sphere and its monopolization by a single ruling party or a military oligarchy", under the direct con-trol, typically, of a dominant personality.¹²⁵ This has transformed the political process into a private struggle for power and place. It is politics marked by intra-regime fact-ionalism and personal rivalry -- "palace" politics and "court" intrigues -- that revolve around the ruler who exploits, encourages, and manipulates division within a quite narrow circle of key subordinate leaders, so as to maintain both his personal dominan-ce and system equilibrium (or power balance).¹²⁶

In authoritarian orders established by military means, it is ordinarily the coup leader -- the officer who has managed to unite the military factions under his leader-ship, often the chief of the armed forces -- who emerges as the head of state. He is the pivotal player and, as the military regime is consolidated, his role evolves from that of a "military dictator" to the ruler of a more complex (and perhaps legitimate) authoritar-ian order.

Further in this respect, it is worthwhile heeding Heeger’s point that in a military regime, the armed forces as a whole seldom rule.¹²⁷ More often than not, the state is "captured" by a military faction or a small group of plotters (in rare cases involving civilian colleagues).¹²⁸ After the capture of the state, in cases where the military has not yet been unified by a strongman, there will tend to follow a period of often-opaque struggle between military factions and aspirants to personal power. Finally, a winner will tend to emerge; but it is also possible that intense military factionalism may never be effectively resolved, leading to a successor coup or coups, and sometimes to polit-ical disengagement -- a temporary or more enduring return to civilian rule.¹²⁹

The military may also be tamed by the provision of rewards, as noted in the earl-ier chapter. Rewards for the military as a whole may include bigger military budgets, more modern military hardware, the funding of pet projects, the granting of commerc-ial monopolies and other opportunities to accumulate wealth through the selling or "renting" of influence, bribery, corruption, and extortion. Officers may be given positions as government politicians, legislators, bureaucratic "czars," and the like, both to keep them busy and divided amongst themselves. Rewards also tie them more closely to the "great benefactor": the strongman-ruler. The provision of rewards and opportunities will entrench soldiers more deeply in the structure of power, giving them a personal stake in upholding both the authoritarian system and the preeminence of the ruler-and-benefactor.

The strongman-ruler may also attempt to keep the military in check by creating new centres of power headed by civilians who are wholly dependent on his favours. He might even allow the civilian bureaucracy or the governing party a degree of auton-omy from the military, thereby offsetting the military’s role and influence with a net-work of civilian ministers, bureaucratic czars, and governmental party bosses. Often the ruler will create special intelligence agencies which are given wide powers both to sow fear among the populace and to spy on members of the officer corps.

This phenomenon of the shifting relationship between the strongman-ruler and the military is well-documented in the literature on military regimes. It has, however, been insufficiently theorized. The gap in the literature seems to derive from a failure to appreciate the changes that occur in the role and status of the strongman-ruler vis-à-vis the military, as he becomes more of a "national" leader and presides over a more complex and mature authoritarian order.¹³⁰

In other cases, military dominance will be "diluted".¹³¹ For example, the ruler, while reliant on the military, will not only incorporate civilian officials into the new order, but also various technocrats, politicians, notables, and so on. A wider and more inclusive support base is the intended result. In the process, civilian bureaucrats may be made into reliable -- if at times coerced and intimidated -- supporters of the reorganized authoritarian order.¹³² In keeping with, as Linz notes, limited political pluralism that marks authoritarian regimes, as discussed, the ruler will build up a constitutional façade -- consisting of political parties, electoral processes, legislative-representative assemblies, and corporatist-style bodies like official trade unions, business councils, trade associations, and a variety of government-sponsored bodies that "represent" peasants, women, and so on.¹³³ As the regime "matures," the façade may gain legitimacy, and actually come to function as quite a stable institutional framework for the new order.

The strategy selected by the strongman-ruler to consolidate his position and routinize authoritarian rule will, I maintain, shape the contours and trajectory of the authoritarian order. (It must be noted that a mixture of intervening variables -- econ-omic, social, political, external -- is also brought into play; the way the ruler reacts to them will play a large part in this regard.) Military-authoritarian regimes will therefore vary widely in their structures, patterns of state-society interaction, and relative auton-omy relations, and so on.¹³⁴

In some cases, the outcome may be a state that is autocratic, exclusionary, "strong" (in its capacity to repress, at least), and highly autonomous -- but weak in re-solving problems, and unable to win minimal acceptance from the wider society, owing either to poor economic performance, gross injustices, or increasing alienation. In others, the state may prove to be comparatively strong and stable politically and economically, enduring to, or beyond, the final years of the strongman-ruler.

In the longer run, or with the passage of years, however, these states may be faced with potentially serious problems. In cases where states practice some degree of democracy or where constitutional documents enshrine democratic principles, or rulers employ democratic rhetoric to legitimize their hold on power, the regime will be dependent on continuing and uninterrupted "performance legitimacy" to contain pressures for political liberalization. In cases where the state is unable to win minimal acceptance, the cost to the regime of maintaining power through coercion, in the absence of legitimacy, can be expected to keep rising. These potential problems will tend to be deepened by a range of new challenges. For example, there are those arising from regional or global power re-alignments, changes in society as a result of economic failure or success, growing tensions between rivals power factions in the ruling circle, and the physical or political weakening of the ruler himself. Also, the regime and the strongman-ruler may also be challenged by a popular, charismatic leader advocating a democratic alternative, or perhaps preaching a fundamentalist religious message that articulates growing popular resentment against (or alienation from) the regime.

Faced with these challenges, the entire authoritarian edifice may unexpectedly collapse (as may democratic structures for a different set of reasons). Alternatively, the military may violently restore authoritarian rule under a new strongman-ruler. In the absence of a strongman-ruler, there may be a period of coups and counter-coups as factions and aspiring strongmen battle for dominance. Or political stalemate may result, with neither the military nor the opposition winning a decisive victory. This can result in protracted struggle until one side achieves victory, or until a compromise of sorts is reached.¹³⁵

A crucial point is that since the whole military-authoritarian order is kept in balance by the skill of the strongman-ruler, it is highly vulnerable to a succession crisis. This could also lead to a crisis in the transition -- a transition from one state order to another. Since most such orders are not firmly institutionalized and, more importantly, lack established procedures for succession and/or transition, the decline or death of a strongman-ruler can constitute a dangerous political flashpoint. The crises derive in large part from the personalistic nature of rule: the close identification, over time, of the strongman-ruler with the government, the state, the nation, or because his personal preferences largely influence, or subvert, state policies. This illustrates the extent to which the state’s high degree of autonomy relative to society, and its low autonomy vis-à-vis the strongman-ruler, can result in system instability, or at least considerable uncertainty.


The Pattern of Autonomy Relations in Military Authoritarian Regimes
The vulnerability of the regime to succession and transition crises suggests that the issue of the relative autonomy of the state is more complex than is sometimes acknowledged. The complexity suggests that a different category of autonomy relat-ions may obtain in authoritarian orders.

In the literature on state autonomy, debates have mainly centred on the degree of autonomy of the state versus society. They address the relative degree of autonomy of the state, or independence from society granted to state decision-makers, including high-ranking bureaucrats (including military officers where it applies), and technocrats (or techno-bureaucrats) working within the policy-making apparatus of the state (all of whom will, in the proceding passages, sometimes be referred to, for brevity, as "state officials"). It is however assumed that state officials are public servants and that their preferences are bound by the rational-legal, public-oriented norms.¹³⁶ For example, the preferences of presidents, prime ministers, and cabinet ministers are assumed to be policy-related and in the public domain. Their private preferences and agendas are regarded as marginal to the policy preferences they champion and support.

It is, however, the view of this thesis that, just as state and society can be con-ceptualized as two intersecting, interrelated, but potentially independent variables,¹³⁷ so can the state and its component officials be analyzed along similar lines. Although officials are of the state, if their private preferences largely determine the content of state outputs (i.e., corruption), then a situation arises where officials or key power-holders, and their preferences do not belong, conceptually, to the "public" state. In such instances, they can be conceived as being independent vis-à-vis the state.

In Third World military-authoritarian states in particular, along with other authoritarian orders, a situation often arises in which some segment of officials, espec-ially military, are not the servants of the state, but its masters. The state's institutions (the executive and legislative branches, the administrative bureaucracy, regulatory and law-enforcement agencies, the courts, and so on), being subordinated to key power-holders or to the top brass, will often reflect the latter's personal preferences. There-fore, I argue that the relatively autonomous state vis-à-vis society is relatively non-autonomous from the preferences of high officials or the military and its officer class.

Military-authoritarian regimes and states are distinguished by three interrelated characteristics which illuminate autonomy relations between, on the one hand, the state (and its institutions), and on the other, state officials (who make decisions within the state's institutions). The first characteristic arises from the transformation of political actors into bureaucratic ones, as some politicians are replaced as representatives or legislators by soldiers (and bureaucrats), as others are excluded or co-opted, and as political parties are banned, manipulated, or neutralized.¹³⁸ An almost completely "depoliticized hierarchy of governmental organizations" is created as a substitute for a more or less autonomous political arena.¹³⁹ The explanation for this state of affairs lies in the distrust of politics that many military and authoritarian leaders exhibit, along with their strong dislike of social conflicts to which politics is held to contribute.¹⁴⁰ The distrust of political participation extends, as Heeger notes, to regime-sponsored or -sanctioned political parties, and even to its own party.¹⁴¹ The latter is usually insulated from decision-making and not permitted to develop as an autonomous institution. It is used mainly to win votes, manage political participation, and mobilize, theoretically, the "people," -- in fact the regime’s supporters.¹⁴² Its other function is to manage, manipulate, and control the representative-legislative sphere (which serves also to provide regime with a mantle of constitutional legitimacy).

Because the political arena and the institutions that mediate state-society inter-action are neutralized or controlled, the means by which society can influence or press-ure the state are abolished or radically reduced. The first characteristic contributes to making the state highly autonomous, or less "malleable" - in Nordlinger’s formulation - thereby increasing its "insulation" and "resilience."¹⁴³ This malleability, though, is not as simple as Nordlinger presents it. In military-authoritarian states – in authoritarian orders more generally – the state is non-malleable only so far as the public is concern-ed. It may be exceedingly malleable if the private interests of key power-holders are considered: those of the strongman-ruler, the top brass, favored bureaucrats and their patron-cronies, clan members, and so on.

Viewed from this angle, the authoritarian state does not seem to have much autonomy, which leads us to a second characteristic of this type of regime: the erosion of the bureaucracy’s organizational integrity and autonomy. After the military’s seiz-ure of power, as politicians are replaced by bureaucrats, the bureaucracy --military, administrative, and political -- is increasingly brought under the personal control of the strongman-ruler, who holds all meaningful power. As a consequence, impersonal, rational-legal bureaucratic norms are displaced by operational modes and relationships based on patrimonial reciprocity, patronage bonds, personal obligations, and loyalty to immediate superiors -- above all, to the strongman-ruler.

A third characteristic follows from the second. With the whole bureaucracy becoming less rational-legal oriented, more patrimonial, personalistic, and particular-istic,¹⁴⁴ the state’s policy outputs come increasingly to reflect the personal-patrimonial preferences (of state officials), rather than preferences bounded by rational-legal norms and a public-oriented agenda. The state then becomes the "creature" of the strongman-ruler and, to a varying extent, trusted subordinates (together with their respective personal networks and connections). The relative autonomy of the state is eroded to reflect the interests of those who exercise key power within it.

Due to these three characteristics, then, there obtains a pattern of relative auton-omy in which the state is (a) autonomous from society, and (b) more or less "captured" by, and made more malleable to, or non-autonomous from those who hold power or high state and/or military positions. The pattern of state autonomy in military-authoritarian orders is therefore more complex than it seems.

In military-authoritarian states, the pattern of relative autonomy relations are thus shaped by the shifting dynamics between three elements -- the state, state officials (or key power-holders), and society. As a consequence, the pattern of autonomy relations will differ not only from those in democracies, but among, and also within, a particular military-authoritarian order over time. It will vary according to the ways in which the three elements -- the state, officials or power-holders, and society -- relate to one another within the system.

To help in the search for answers to these questions, I have constructed a theoretical framework built around existing concepts on military intervention and the state, state autonomy and relative autonomy; the organization and reorganization of political power in democratic and non-democratic polities; authoritarianism and milit-ary regimes, and authoritarianism and personal rule. I have, on this basis, synthesized a conceptual framework that looks into three interrelated issues (and questions pertin-ent to them): (1) the military and the politics of military intervention as they relate to the reorganization of power in the state; (2) the pivotal role of, and strategies employ-ed by, the military strongman in the reorganization of political power (and long-term outcomes), the relationship between the ruler and his power base in the military; and (3) the nature of military authoritarian orders, their structures (or organizational con-figuration); autonomy relations; the degree of authoritarianism exercised, and the dom-inance (or otherwise) of the military, in the countries examined -- Burma, Indonesia, and Thailand.

Utilizing this framework, I will show that military intervention is a complex, often protracted phenomenon involving the engagement and the use of the armed forces to change the way power is organized. The intention, as noted, is usually to render the state more authoritarian, reinforcing its autonomy vis-à-vis society. The result is what we ordinarily term "military regimes," and the implicit assumption we make is that military regimes are similar enough that they are hardly worthwhile distinguishing.
I maintain, however, that despite the common features of military intervention and backing, these regimes do differ significantly. They vary in terms of the way the state is run, its nature and goals, the extent to which the military participates in governance and dominates the political sphere, and the pattern of relative autonomy relations. They also vary in the degree they are authoritarian: some may be highly authoritarian, some less so, and some may even be quasi-democratic (broadly defined).

The exact form of the reorganization of state structures and institutions in a military-authoritarian order will vary widely. This is because much depends on the goals, political will, and astuteness of different strongman-rulers who oversee the process in their respective countries. The degree of autonomy exhibited by the state will also largely depend on the varied systems of governance and control put in place by the strongman-rulers.

The strongman-ruler who assumes power with military backing indeed has a unique relationship with the military – he is, after all, its chief. But over time, he will tend to be transformed into a "state" ruler, and his bond with the military will almost invariably slacken. Accordingly, he will need to take action to maintain his dominan-ce over the military. At the same time, for the sake of legitimacy, it may be necessary or desirable for the ruler to "separate" himself from the military. It is not uncommon for a military-authoritarian regime to be converted into a "civilian"-led, military-backed regime, headed by the military ruler now clad in mufti. The significance of this change varies according to the goals and capabilities of the strongman-ruler. It may be purely cosmetic, or it may lead to efforts to subordinate the military in its political role, while at the same time seeking to avoid incurring its wrath.

If successful, the ruler’s attempts to subordinate and personally dominate the military will result in the latter becoming a safely co-opted, quiescent elite body. The military and its personnel will often be rewarded with positions in the state or in representative-legislative bodies (including perhaps the government-sponsored political party). If they are abundantly rewarded with budgets, projects, economic opportunit-ies, and the like, the military will likely accept without demur some reduction in its political role and influence. This will obtain provided that the ruler retains his mani-pulative skills and political savvy, and the military does not perceive itself as being "pushed out" in ways that injure its corporate interests and self-image as protector of the nation.

Further, in order to dilute the influence of the military, the strongman-ruler may attempt to co-opt other groups into the ruling circle, or recruit new supporters from among elite segments of society: technocrats, bankers, professionals, businessmen, local notables, and so on. Over time, as the state's structures changes shape, this may reduce the state’s autonomy vis-à-vis societal and economic elite, though this conseq-uence is often unintended and unforeseen. And attempts may even be made by the strongman-ruler and his subordinates (including those in the military) to obstruct and restrict the "opening" of the state sphere to individuals, groups and sectors outside its parameters.

It is possible that in the long run, the autonomy of the state may decline in military-authoritarian regimes and states. To test this and other arguments advanced in these preliminary chapters, I turn now to an examination of three Southeast Asian countries where the military has been politically active and prominent: Burma, Indonesia, and Thailand.