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Nike to the Rescue?
Africa needs better jobs, not sweatshops

by John Miller; Dollars and Sense; October 03, 2006

Nicholas Kristof has been beating the pro-sweatshop drum for quite a while. Shortly after the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Kristof, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and now columnist for the New York Times, reported the story of an Indonesian recycler who, picking through the metal scraps of a garbage dump, dreamed that her son would grow up to be a sweatshop worker. Then, in 2000, Kristof and his wife, Times reporter Sheryl WuDunn, published "Two Cheers for Sweatshops" in the Times Magazine. In 2002, Kristof's column advised G-8 leaders to "start an international campaign to promote imports from sweatshops, perhaps with bold labels depicting an unrecognizable flag and the words 'Proudly Made in a Third World Sweatshop.'"

Now Kristof laments that too few poor, young African men have the opportunity to enter the satanic mill of sweatshop employment. [See his article reprinted below.] Like his earlier efforts, Kristof's latest pro-sweatshop ditty synthesizes plenty of half-truths. Let's take a closer look and see why there is still no reason to give it up for sweatshops.

A Better Alternative?

It is hardly surprising that young men on the streets of Namibia's capital might find sweatshop jobs more appealing than irregular work as day laborers on construction sites.

The alternative jobs available to sweatshop workers are often worse and, as Kristof loves to point out, usually involve more sweating than those in world export factories. Most poor people in the developing world eke out their livelihoods from subsistence agriculture or by plying petty trades. Others on the edge of urban centers work as street-hawkers or hold other jobs in the informal sector. As economist Arthur MacEwan wrote a few years back in Dollars & Sense, in a poor country like Indonesia, where women working in manufacturing earn five times as much as those in agriculture, sweatshops have no trouble finding workers.

But let's be clear about a few things. First, export factory jobs, especially in labor-intensive industries, often are just "a ticket to slightly less impoverishment," as even economist and sweatshop defender Jagdish Bhagwati allows.

Beyond that, these jobs seldom go to those without work or to the poorest of the poor. One study by sociologist Kurt Ver Beek showed that 60% of first-time Honduran maquila workers were previously employed. Typically they were not destitute, and they were better educated than most Hondurans.

Sweatshops don't just fail to rescue people from poverty. Setting up export factories where workers have few job alternatives has actually been a recipe for serious worker abuse. In Beyond Sweatshops, a book arguing for the benefits of direct foreign investment in the developing world, Brookings Institution economist Theodore Moran recounts the disastrous decision of the Philippine government to build the Bataan Export Processing Zone in an isolated mountainous area to lure foreign investors with the prospect of cheap labor. With few alternatives, Filipinos took jobs in the garment factories that sprung up in the zone. The manufacturers typically paid less than the minimum wage and forced employees to work overtime in factories filled with dust and fumes. Fed up, the workers eventually mounted a series of crippling strikes. Many factories shut down and occupancy rates in the zone plummeted, as did the value of exports, which declined by more than half between 1980 and 1986.

Kristof's argument is no excuse for sweatshop abuse: that conditions are worse elsewhere does nothing to alleviate the suffering of workers in export factories. They are often denied the right to organize, subjected to unsafe working conditions and to verbal, physical, and sexual abuse, forced to work overtime, coerced into pregnancy tests and even abortions, and paid less than a living wage. It remains useful and important to combat these conditions even if alternative jobs are worse yet.

The fact that young men in Namibia find sweatshop jobs appealing testifies to how harsh conditions are for workers in Africa, not the desirability of export factory employment.

Oddly, Kristof's desire to introduce new sweatshops to sub-Saharan Africa finds no support in the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) that he praises. The Act grants sub-Saharan apparel manufacturers preferential access to U.S. markets. But shortly after its passage, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick assured the press that the AGOA would not create sweatshops in Africa because it requires protective standards for workers consistent with those set by the International Labor Organization.

Antisweatshop Activism and Jobs

Kristof is convinced that the antisweatshop movement hurts the very workers it intends to help. His position has a certain seductive logic to it. As anyone who has suffered through introductory economics will tell you, holding everything else the same, a labor standard that forces multinational corporations and their subcontractors to boost wages should result in their hiring fewer workers.

But in practice does it? The only evidence Kristof produces is an imaginary conversation in which a boss incredulously refuses a Nike vice president's proposal to open a factory in Ethiopia paying wages of 25 cents a hour: "You're crazy! We'd be boycotted on every campus in the country."

While Kristof has an active imagination, there are some things wrong with this conversation.

First off, the antisweatshop movement seldom initiates boycotts. An organizer with United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) responded on Kristof's blog: "We never call for apparel boycotts unless we are explicitly asked to by workers at a particular factory. This is, of course, exceedingly rare, because, as you so persuasively argued, people generally want to be employed." The National Labor Committee, the largest antisweatshop organization in the United States, takes the same position.

Moreover, when economists Ann Harrison and Jason Scorse conducted a systematic study of the effects of the antisweatshop movement on factory employment, they found no negative employment effect. Harrison and Scorse looked at Indonesia, where Nike was one of the targets of an energetic campaign calling for better wages and working conditions among the country's subcontractors. Their statistical analysis found that the antisweatshop campaign was responsible for 20% of the increase in the real wages of unskilled workers in factories exporting textiles, footwear, and apparel from 1991 to 1996. Harrison and Scorse also found that "antisweatshop activism did not have significant adverse effects on employment" in these sectors.

Campaigns for higher wages are unlikely to destroy jobs because, for multinationals and their subcontractors, wages make up a small portion of their overall costs. Even Kristof accepts this point, well documented by economists opposed to sweatshop labor. In Mexico's apparel industry, for instance, economists Robert Pollin, James Heintz, and Justine Burns from the Political Economy Research Institute found that doubling the pay of nonsupervisory workers would add just $1.80 to the production cost of a $100 men's sports jacket. A recent survey by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that U.S. consumers would be willing to pay $115 for the same jacket if they knew that it had not been made under sweatshop conditions.

Globalization in Sub-Saharan Africa

Kristof is right that Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, has lost out in the globalization process. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from slower growth, less direct foreign investment, lower education levels, and higher poverty rates than most every other part of the world. A stunning 37 of the region's 47 countries are classified as "low-income" by the World Bank, each with a gross national income less than $825 per person. Many countries in the region bear the burdens of high external debt and a crippling HIV crisis that Kristof has made heroic efforts to bring to the world's attention.

But have multinational corporations avoided investing in sub-Saharan Africa because labor costs are too high? While labor costs in South Africa and Mauritius are high, those in the other countries of the region are modest by international standards, and quite low in some cases. Take Lesotho, the largest exporter of apparel from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States. In the country's factories that subcontract with Wal-Mart, the predominantly female workforce earns an average of just $54 a month. That's below the United Nations poverty line of $2 per day, and it includes regular forced overtime. In Madagascar, the region's third largest exporter of clothes to the United States, wages in the apparel industry are just 33 cents per hour, lower than those in China and among the lowest in the world. And at Ramatex Textile, the large Malaysian-owned textile factory in Namibia, workers only earn about $100 per month according to the Labour Resource and Research Institute in Windhoek. Most workers share their limited incomes with extended families and children, and they walk long distances to work because they can't afford better transportation.

On the other hand, recent experience shows that sub-Saharan countries with decent labor standards can develop strong manufacturing export sectors. In the late 1990s, Francis Teal of Oxford's Centre for the Study of African Economies compared Mauritius's successful export industries with Ghana's unsuccessful ones. Teal found that workers in Mauritius earned ten times as much as those in Ghana - $384 a month in Mauritius as opposed to $36 in Ghana. Mauritius's textile and garment industry remained competitive because its workforce was better educated and far more productive than Ghana's. Despite paying poverty wages, the Ghanaian factories floundered.

Kristof knows full well the real reason garment factories in the region are shutting down: the expiration of the Multifiber Agreement last January. The agreement, which set national export quotas for clothing and textiles, protected the garment industries in smaller countries around the world from direct competition with China. Now China and, to a lesser degree, India, are increasingly displacing other garment producers. In this new context, lower wages alone are unlikely to sustain the sub-Saharan garment industry. Industry sources report that sub-Saharan Africa suffers from several other drawbacks as an apparel producer, including relatively high utility and transportation costs and long shipping times to the United States. The region also has lower productivity and less skilled labor than Asia, and it has fewer sources of cotton yarn and higher-priced fabrics than China and India.

If Kristof is hell-bent on expanding the sub-Saharan apparel industry, he would do better to call for sub-Saharan economies to gain unrestricted access to the Quad markets - the United States, Canada, Japan, and Europe. Economists Stephen N. Karingi, Romain Perez, and Hakim Ben Hammouda estimate that the welfare gains associated with unrestricted market access could amount to $1.2 billion in sub-Saharan Africa, favoring primarily unskilled workers.

But why insist on apparel production in the first place? Namibia has sources of wealth besides a cheap labor pool for Nike's sewing machines. The Economist reports that Namibia is a world-class producer of two mineral products: diamonds (the country ranks seventh by value) and uranium (it ranks fifth by volume). The mining industry is the heart of Namibia's export economy and accounts for about 20% of the country's GDP. But turning the mining sector into a vehicle for national economic development would mean confronting the foreign corporations that control the diamond industry, such as the South African De Beers Corporation. That is a tougher assignment than scapegoating antisweatshop activists.

More and Better African Jobs

So why have multinational corporations avoided investing in sub-Saharan Africa? The answer, according to international trade economist Dani Rodrik, is "entirely due to the slow growth" of the sub-Saharan economies. Rodrik estimates that the region participates in international trade as much as can be expected given its economies' income levels, country size, and geography.

Rodrik's analysis suggests that the best thing to do for poor workers in Africa would be to lift the debt burdens on their governments and support their efforts to build functional economies. That means investing in human resources and physical infrastructure, and implementing credible macroeconomic policies that put job creation first. But these investments, as Rodrik points out, take time.

In the meantime, international policies establishing a floor for wages and safeguards for workers across the globe would do more for the young men on Windhoek's street corners than subjecting them to sweatshop abuse, because grinding poverty leaves people willing to enter into any number of desperate exchanges. And if Namibia is closing its garment factories because Chinese imports are cheaper, isn't that an argument for trying to improve labor standards in China, not lower them in sub-Saharan Africa? Abusive labor practices are rife in China's export factories, as the National Labor Committee and Business Week have documented. Workers put in 13- to 16-hour days, seven days a week. They enjoy little to no health and safety enforcement, and their take-home pay falls below the minimum wage after the fines and deductions their employers sometimes withhold.

Spreading these abuses in sub-Saharan Africa will not empower workers there. Instead it will take advantage of the fact that they are among the most marginalized workers in the world. Debt relief, international labor standards, and public investments in education and infrastructure are surely better ways to fight African poverty than Kristof's sweatshop proposal.


In Praise of the Maligned Sweatshop

Op-ed by Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, June 6, 2006

WINDHOEK, Namibia - Africa desperately needs Western help in the form of schools, clinics and sweatshops.

On a street here in the capital of Namibia, in the southwestern corner of Africa, I spoke to a group of young men who were trying to get hired as day laborers on construction sites.

"I come here every day," said Naftal Shaanika, a 20-year-old. "I actually find work only about once a week."

Mr. Shaanika and the other young men noted that the construction jobs were dangerous and arduous, and that they would vastly prefer steady jobs in, yes, sweatshops. Sure, sweatshop work is tedious, grueling and sometimes dangerous. But over all, sewing clothes is considerably less dangerous or arduous - or sweaty - than most alternatives in poor countries.

Well-meaning American university students regularly campaign against sweatshops. But instead, anyone who cares about fighting poverty should campaign in favor of sweatshops, demanding that companies set up factories in Africa.

The problem is that it's still costly to manufacture in Africa. The headaches across much of the continent include red tape, corruption, political instability, unreliable electricity and ports, and an inexperienced labor force that leads to low productivity and quality. The anti-sweatshop movement isn't a prime obstacle, but it's one more reason not to manufacture in Africa.

Imagine that a Nike vice president proposed manufacturing cheap T-shirts in Ethiopia. The boss would reply: "You're crazy! We'd be boycotted on every campus in the country."

Some of those who campaign against sweatshops respond to my arguments by noting that they aren't against factories in Africa, but only demand a "living wage" in them. After all, if labor costs amount to only $1 per shirt, then doubling wages would barely make a difference in the final cost.

One problem ... is that it already isn't profitable to pay respectable salaries, and so any pressure to raise them becomes one more reason to avoid Africa altogether.

One of the best U.S. initiatives in Africa has been the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which allows duty-free imports from Africa - and thus has stimulated manufacturing there.


Sources: Arthur MacEwan, "Ask Dr. Dollar," Dollars & Sense, Sept–Oct 1998; John Miller, "Why Economists Are Wrong About Sweatshops and the Antisweatshop Movement," Challenge, Jan–Feb 2003; R. Pollin, J. Burns, and J. Heintz, "Global Apparel Production and Sweatshop Labor: Can Raising Retail Prices Finance Living Wages?" Political Economy Research Institute, Working Paper 19, 2002; N. Kristof, "In Praise of the Maligned Sweatshop,"New York Times, June 6, 2006; N. Kristof, "Let Them Sweat," NYT , June 25, 2002; N. Kristof, "Two Cheers for Sweatshops," NYT , Sept 24, 2000; N. Kristof, "Asia's Crisis Upsets Rising Effort to Confront Blight of Sweatshops," NYT, June 15, 1998; A. Harrison and J. Scorse, "Improving the Conditions of Workers? Minimum Wage Legislation and Anti-Sweatshop Activism," Calif. Management Review, Oct 2005; Herbert Jauch, "Africa's Clothing and Textile Industry: The Case of Ramatex in Namibia," in The Future of the Textile and Clothing Industry in Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. H. Jauch and R. Traub-Merz (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2006); Kurt Alan Ver Beek, "Maquiladoras: Exploitation or Emancipation? An Overview of the Situation of Maquiladora Workers in Honduras," World Development, 29(9), 2001; Theodore Moran, Beyond Sweatshops: Foreign Direct Investment and Globalization in Developing Countries (Brookings Institution Press, 2002); "Comparative Assessment of the Competitiveness of the Textile and Apparel Sector in Selected Countries," in Textiles and Apparel: Assessment of the Competitiveness of Certain Foreign Suppliers to the United States Market, Vol. 1, U.S. International Trade Commission, Jan 2004; S. N. Karingi, R. Perez, and H. Ben Hammouda, "Could Extended Preferences Reward Sub-Saharan Africa's Participation in the Doha Round Negotiations?," World Economy, 2006; Francis Teal, "Why Can Mauritius Export Manufactures and Ghana Can Not?," The World Economy, 22 (7), 1999; Dani Rodrik, "Trade Policy and Economic Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa," Paper prepared for the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Nov 1997.

John Miller teaches economics at Wheaton College and is a member of the Dollars & Sense collective. The syllabus for his course "Sweatshops in the World Economy" is available. This article is from the September/October 2006 issue of Dollars & Sense magazine.

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ZNet | Asia

A Siamese Tragedy

by Walden Bello; Foreign Policy In Focus; October 03, 2006

The military coup in Thailand is the second high-profile collapse of a democracy in the developing world in the last seven years. The first was the coup in Pakistan in October 1999 that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power. There are some disturbing parallels between the two events. Both coups have been popular with the middle class, and in both countries the military promised to soon vacate power. Six years after ousting Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Musharaff and the army are still in power in Pakistan. This precedent does not bode well for Thailand.

The coup is the latest in a series of setbacks for Thailand since a "people power" movement toppled the authoritarian leaders in 1992. Even before Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted on September 19, Thai democracy was in severe crisis because of a succession of elected but do-nothing or exceedingly corrupt regimes of which the Thaksin government was the worst. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which for all intents and purposes ran the country with no accountability from 1997 to 2001, further eroded the legitimacy of Thai democracy by imposing a program that brought great hardship to the majority. Thaksin stoked this disaffection with the IMF and the political system to create a majority coalition that allowed him to violate constitutional constraints and infringe on democratic freedoms, while using the state as a mechanism of private capital accumulation in an unparalleled fashion.

A politically diverse opposition with a middle-class base sought to oust Thaksin by relying not on electoral democracy but on the democracy of the street. In the last few months, the prime minister not only lost moral legitimacy but a great deal of political power. The democracy movement was about to launch the final phase to drive Thaksin out when the military intervened. Though it is now popular among Bangkokians, the coup will eventually prove to be a cure worse than the disease.

Democracy on the Ropes

Although Thaksin Shinawatra undermined the Thailand's democratic regime democracy in the country was in bad shape before he came to power in January 2001. The first Chuan Leekpai government from 1992 to 1995 did not make even the slightest effort at social reform. The government of former provincial businessman Banharn Silipa-Archa, from 1995 to 1996, has been described as "a semi-kleptocratic administration where coalition partners were paid to stay sweet, just like he used to buy public works contracts." The successor government of Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, a former general, was based on an alliance among big business elites, provincial bosses, and local godfathers. Relatively free elections were held, but they served mainly to determine which coalition of elites would have its turn at using government as a mechanism for private capital accumulation. Not surprisingly, the massive corruption, especially under Banharn and Chavalit, repelled the Bangkok middle class, and the urban and rural poor did not see the advent of democracy marking a change in their lives.

Democracy suffered a further blow in 1997-2001 following the Asian financial crisis. This time the local elites were not the culprit. The IMF pressured the Chavalit government, then the second Chuan government to adopt a very severe reform program that consisted of radically cutting expenditures, decreeing many corporations bankrupt, liberalizing foreign investment laws, and privatizing state enterprises. The IMF's $72 billion rescue fund was spent not on saving the local economy but on enabling the government to pay off the country's foreign creditors.

When the Chavalit government hesitated to adopt these measures, the IMF pressed for a change in government. The second Chuan government complied fully with the Fund, and for the next three years Thailand had a government accountable not to the people but to a foreign institution. Not surprisingly, the government lost much of its credibility as the country plunged into recession and one million Thais fell below the poverty line. Meanwhile the U.S. Trade Representative told the U.S. Congress that the Thai government's "commitments to restructure public enterprises and accelerate privatization of certain key sectors - including energy, transportation, utilities, and communications - [are expected] to create new business opportunities for U.S. firms."

The IMF, in short, contributed greatly to sapping the legitimacy of Thailand's fledgling democracy. This was not the only instance where the Fund contributed to eroding the credibility of a government, especially among the poor. If there is today a pattern reversing the so-called "Third Wave" of democratization that took off as a trend in the developing world since the mid-seventies, the IMF - supported by the U.S. government - is part of the reason. Such IMF-inspired democratic reversals could be found in Venezuela in 1989, where a hike in transportation costs provoked an urban uprising against a weak democracy; in the Philippines, where the Fund squandered the legitimacy of the post-Marcos democracy by forcing it to make debt repayment instead of development its economic priority; and in Pakistan, where IMF and World Bank programs did much to undermine the legitimacy of the civilian governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

Monopoly Capitalism cum Populism

After running and winning on an anti-IMF platform, Thaksin inherited a severely compromised democracy when he took office in 2001. In his first year, he inaugurated three heavy spending programs that directly contradicted the IMF: a moratorium on farmers' existing debt along with facilitating new credit for them, medical treatment for all at only 30 baht or less than a dollar per illness, and a one million baht fund for every district to invest as it saw fit. These policies did not bring on the inflationary crisis that the IMF and conservative local economists expected. Instead they buoyed the economy and cemented Thaksin's massive support among the rural and urban poor.

This was the "good" side of Thaksin. However, having secured majority support with these and other practices that analysts Alec and Chanida Bamford call "neofeudal patronage," he began to subvert the freedom of the press and to use government power to add to his wealth. He eased restrictions on his businesses and those of his cronies, and used his position to buy allies and buy off opponents. His war on drugs, which resulted in the loss of over 2,500 lives, bothered human rights activists but was popular with the majority. His hard-line, purely punitive policy toward the Muslim insurgency in three southern provinces simply worsened the situation there.

Just as Thaksin appeared to have created the formula for a long stay in power supported by an electoral majority, he overreached. In January 2006, his family sold their controlling stake in telecoms conglomerate Shin Corporation for $1.87 billion to a Singapore government front called Temasek Holdings. Before the sale, Thaksin had made sure the Revenue Department would interpret or modify the rules to exempt him from paying taxes. This brought the Bangkok middle class to the streets to demand his ouster in a movement that bore a striking resemblance to the "People Power Uprising" that overthrew Joseph Estrada in the Philippines in January 2001.

To resolve the polarization, Thaksin dissolved Parliament and called for elections, knowing that he would win elections handily, as his coalition had in 2001 and in 2005. Indeed, Thaksin's coalition won 57% of the vote in the April elections. But the opposition boycotted, producing an opposition-less parliament. After a not-too-veiled suggestion by the revered King Bhumibol, the Supreme Court found the elections in violation of the Constitution and ordered them held once more. Thaksin resigned as prime minister and said he would be a caretaker until after new elections were held.

Polarization but not Gridlock

The Thai conflict, in broad terms, pitted the urban and rural lower classes - the majority - against the middle classes, mainly the Bangkok middle class. The system of liberal democracy split into its component parts of liberalism and democracy. Invoking the legacy of liberalism, the people in the streets sought to remove Thaksin for his violations of human and civil rights and his arbitrary rule, while Thaksin's supporters sought to keep him in power by appealing to the basic principle of a democracy-that is, the rule of the majority. The anti-Thaksin forces, however, claimed that Thaksin's majority rule fit the phenomenon that John Stuart Mill described as the "tyranny of the majority."

Prior to the coup, Thailand was not in gridlock. And it was far from descending into civil war. Thaksin's resignation as prime minister indicated, more importantly, that the moral tide had turned against him. He had lost control, criticism of him was widespread in a media that was once tame, and the pressure was on for him to resign before the next elections, originally scheduled for October 15 but rescheduled for November. On Thursday, the day after the coup, the People's Alliance for Democracy had planned to stage a mass rally to begin a final push against Thaksin from the streets.

This was democracy in action, with all its rough and tumble and the rambunctious efforts to resolve conflicting principles. Of course, the outcome was not guaranteed, but indeterminacy and prolonged resolution of disputes are part and parcel of the risks that come with democracy. Thais were wrestling to resolve the question of political succession through democratic, civilian methods. And it seemed like the democracy of the streets would successfully determine political succession, creating an important precedent in democratic practice. Direct democracy not only had relevance for the political succession; it was reinvigorating and renewing the democratic practice and democratic spirit.

Cure Worse than Disease

The military coup cut short a vibrant democratic process and was, everybody agrees, unconstitutional, illegal, and undemocratic. Many say, however, that yes, it is all this, but it is popular and it is valid because it ended a crisis. This is questionable. For several reasons, this coup may have temporarily ended the crisis but at the pain of provoking a much deeper one.

· Thaksin's mass base of the poor and underprivileged will view post-coup regimes as possessing little democratic legitimacy.

· The military has reasserted its traditional, self-defined role as the "arbiter" of Thai politics, a function that had been defined as illegitimate for the last 14 years.

· There has emerged a dangerous informal institutional axis that would subvert future democratic arrangements between the military and the Royal Palace's Privy Council, one of the few national political institutions not eliminated by military decree. Retired military strongman, General Prem Tinsulanonda heads up the council, and there is strong suspicion that he had more than just a neutral role in the affair. Several days before the coup, Prem told the military that their loyalty was principally "to the Nation and the King" not the government.

· The one really popularly drawn up constitution, the 1997 Constitution, has been abolished by military fiat. This constitution, approved after consultation with civil society, placed many controls on the exercise of parliamentary and executive power and on the behavior of politicians and bureaucrats. Ironically, the anti-Thaksin coup leaders, for all their rhetoric about "restoring democracy," simply delivered the coup de grace to a very democratic document that Thaksin had systematically subverted.

Coup leader Army Chief General Sondhi Boonyaratkalin may well be sanguine about stepping aside. But personal predilections are no match for institutional interests. More than any other military in Southeast Asia, the Thai military has had a propensity for intervening in the political process, having launched some 18 military coups since 1932. Thai military men have an ingrained, institutional contempt for civilian politicians, regarding them as blundering fools. The generals have often promised to return to civilian rule after a coup, but proceeded to rule directly or indirectly through military-appointed civilians. Gen. Sondhi's post-coup reassurances must be taken with the same seriousness as his claim days before the takeover that military coups "were a thing of the past."

Already, the generals have drafted an interim constitution that makes them "advisers" to an interim civilian government. And they have appointed one of their own, Surayud Chulanont, a retired general and former Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, as interim premier. The April 28, 2003 issue of Time describes him as a military reformer but notes that troops of his elite unit played a role in repressing protestors during the bloody May 1992 uprising in Bangkok. He is definitely an Army insider and conservative in his political views.

This retreat from democracy bodes ill not only for Thailand. The coup is an expression of a larger trend - a deep crisis of legitimacy among elite democracies that came into being in the 1980s and 1990s as part of what Samuel Huntington called the "Third Wave of Democratization." The Thai coup is the second high-profile collapse of an elite democracy in the last seven years. It may not be the last. Is there now a reverse wave leading democracies back to authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes?


FPIF columnist Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the Global South and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines. He is the author of A Siamese Tragedy: Development and Disintegration in Modern Thailand (London: Zed, 1998).

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