Cambodia after Hun Sen: A hereditary autocracy?

1 December 2020

Liberation, Hannah Arendt wrote, does not provide ‘the actual content of freedom, whose essence is admission to the public realm and participation in public affairs’. Indeed, freedom claims the future not through liberatory revolution alone, but by the writing of laws that guarantee citizens’ ability to participate in public affairs.

Cambodians know this lesson all too well. The Khmer Rouge offered them vague liberation from the corrupt and ineffective Lon Nol regime, a promise particularly attractive to the young and disenfranchised, but upon assuming power in 1975 the communists offered almost four years of conscripted misery — perhaps the most obvious antithesis of freedom.

Cambodia is once again, however, facing the not-too-distant prospect of revolution. Hun Sen has ruled the country for over 35 years and will likely remain in power until his death (thanks to his political skills and patronage network), but the strongman’s proposed patrimonial succession is certainly not guaranteed. Upon Hun Sen’s death or incapacitation, public anger — the result of his closeness with China and failure to address corruption, skyrocketing household debt, a lack of jobs, and lagging development — could converge with extant elite discontent to topple Hun Manet, the strongman’s eldest son and likely successor.

The question, therefore, is: what comes next, and can it ensure Cambodian freedom?

An inherited autocracy?

Patrimonial successions, like that of Hun Sen to Hun Manet, are among the greatest threats to modern personalist authoritarian regimes, as systems governed around an individual ‘have no institutional structure for preparing the next generation of autocrats’.

Cambodians are indeed disinclined to support a Hun Manet-led autocracy, but they are not necessarily more inclined to back the amorphous concept of “democracy”. Rather, they yearn for a more popularly legitimate regime that can deliver tangible day-to-day improvements.

Since the end of World War II, 27 countries have at some point been ruled by hereditary autocracies; today, as Oriana Skylar Mastro notes, only 12 remain in power. In that period, hereditary autocracies have collapsed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (previously Zaire), Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Nepal, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and Romania.

Those dictators who remain in power past age sixty — Hun Sen is 68 and in 2019 vowed to stay in power “until those who want to overthrow the government are all dead” — face “the biggest hurdles to orchestrated leadership transitions, including hereditary handovers”, according to Jason Brownlee. Without elite support for the successor, these handovers are dead in the water.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Hun Sen’s ‘sheer political genius’ is thus a burden for Hun Manet, who will struggle to match his father’s ability to control both elites and the public. Hun Sen seems aware of this, and has, accordingly, taken to increasingly vouching for his eldest son.

“As his father, I have to support my son and train him so that he is capable [to take over the leadership]”, he said recently. “Even if he cannot be like his father, at least his capacity should match that of his father by 80 or 90 per cent”.

But there is no indication that Hun Manet’s ‘capacity’ approaches this 80 per cent estimation. While he has military and other credentials—he is a four-star general in the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, the commander of the Royal Cambodian Army, and the president of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party’s youth wing — he has also been described as ‘stiff’ and remains unlikely to successfully manage the CPP’s endemic rivalries and factionalism.

Confidence in the Hun clan has, in fact, been dwindling for some time: Some elites even became citizens of Cyprus (citizenship which was later revoked) as an ‘escape plan’ following Hun Sen’s poor 2013 electoral performance. Blindness to both elite and public discontent, however, plagues many personalised autocratic regimes, which surround themselves with ‘yes men’ attuned only to flattering narratives. Hun Sen’s regime is no exception on this front.

But Cambodian anger is bubbling, nonetheless. Hun Sen’s government recently arrested the Khmer Nation newspaper’s publisher simply for social media posts critical of the strongman’s succession plans. But crackdowns like this are unlikely to stem the anti-Hun clan sentiment swelling among a Cambodian populace tired of Hun Sen’s closeness to China, corruption, and failure to improve their quality of life (‘Hun Sen will lose everything if he still wants to nominate his son as Prime Minister!’, one post said).

As I’ve written elsewhere, such widespread public anger could combine with elite discontent in a revolution of sorts to topple a nascent Hun Manet regime.

Cambodia after Hun Sen (and Hun Manet)

Upon accepting the premise of a possible post-Hun clan Cambodia, one cannot help but be alarmed by the uncertainty and lacking articulation of what comes next. But revolution without an intentional articulation and legal guarantee of freedom will only usher in another form of tyranny, as Arendt warned and as Cambodians found out in 1975.

In a post-Hun context, such ‘tyranny’ would likely come in the form of a military government, with Cambodia’s top generals, potentially backed by China, which has funnelled over a $100 million into the country’s armed forces, seizing upon the moment’s chaos to seize power for themselves. As Mastro notes: “democracy rarely follows the end of a hereditary autocracy”.

China, for its Palmerstonian part, has no loyalty to its partners but only its interests — evinced by its support for competing groups and leaders in Zimbabwe, South Sudan, and Venezuela — and will not hesitate to abandon the Hun clan and back a Cambodian military regime promising to protect Chinese investments in the country.

To avoid this continuation of Cambodian illiberalism, outside actors like the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Australia would be wise to deepen their engagement not with the Hun Sen regime, but with civil society groups offering clear democratic plans for the future.

The independent Phnom Penh-based Future Forum think tank is one example of this. With German support, it recently published the first volume of its tripartite Cambodia 2040 book series, which argues that Cambodia must ‘continue building a culture of democracy, underpinned by the necessary institutions and governance mechanism’.

Future Forum’s recommendations, while perhaps boilerplate for Western observers, are a far cry from both Cambodia’s current reality and any domestic governance before it. Western-imposed ‘democracy’ has failed Cambodia before (see: the 1993 UNTAC-facilitated elections), which, in part, explains why the majority of Cambodians have ‘a paternalistic view of the role of government’, while ‘general societal trust’ is ‘almost non-existent in Cambodia’.

Cambodians are indeed disinclined to support a Hun Manet-led autocracy, but they are not necessarily more inclined to back the amorphous concept of ‘democracy’. Rather, they yearn for a more popularly legitimate regime that can deliver tangible day-to-day improvements. For many, the perceived benevolence and functionality of Singaporean or Vietnamese authoritarianism is, frankly, more attractive than the contemporary dysfunction of American or European democracy.

Foreign nations concerned with Cambodian freedom, in particular the United States, must, therefore, empower Cambodian civil society groups dedicated to democracy education and the improvement of societal trust. Such support must not be seen as favouring a single political party — such as the Cambodian National Rescue Party, whose leader Sam Rainsy has found purchase in Washington for decades — but instead as providing even-handed support for all groups focused on freedom. Crucially, these foreign resources must facilitate grassroots efforts beyond Phnom Penh to better democratic values and societal trust in rural communities, whose members comprise nearly 80 per cent of the country’s population.

Only with these building blocks can ‘freedom’, as Arendt wrote, ‘unfold its charms and become a visible, tangible reality’ in a post-revolution, post-Hun Cambodia. Without them, however, chaos will send any Cambodian revolution to its doom, or deform it so decisively that it lapses ‘into tyranny and despotism’.

‘Revolutions’, she wrote, ‘are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning’. Accordingly, Cambodian democrats, with or without outside assistance, must now begin preparing for what comes next — for what comes after a potential post-revolution genesis.

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.

Author biography

Charles Dunst is an associate at LSE IDEAS, the London School of Economics’ foreign policy think tank, and a journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He was previously based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Image credit: World Economic Forum/Flickr.

Editor's Picks, Pacific9DLDecember 1, 2020China, Southeast Asia, Cambodia