Cambodia's Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy by Astrid Norén-Nilsson (review)

DOI: 10.1355/sj32-3j

Through the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement, the international community imposed multi-party democracy on Cambodia. Since then, Cambodia's democracy has evolved into a hybrid form, with a liberal framework but illiberal substance. Most studies on Cambodia's democratization stress the social, cultural and political-economy factors that have hindered liberal democracy from taking root there. Cambodia's Second Kingdom: Nation, Imagination, and Democracy by Astrid Norén-Nilsson — a Swedish scholar on the faculty of Lund University — departs from this common pattern of analysis of Cambodia's democratization. The book offers a novel argument, centred on the Cambodian elite's conceptualizations of political legitimacy, national identity, and representation and on the impact of these conceptualizations on both elite perceptions of democracy and democratic outcomes. In other words, the book offers an analysis of democracy from the perspective of the Cambodian elites. Starting with the idea that modern nations rest on "invented tradition and symbols of tradition" (p. 1), Cambodia's Second Kingdom enters the unsettling terrain both of elite perceptions of Cambodian politics — more specifically, elite perceptions of the country's characteristics and boundaries — and of the question of who has the legitimacy to represent "the true Cambodian nation" (p. 4).

Utilizing process tracing based on a multidisciplinary approach and rich field research including elite interviews, the book examines the ways in which the country's main political parties — the Cambodian People's Party (CPP), the Royalist FUNCINPEC party, and the democratic parties that coalesced into the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) — construct their respective, conflicting discourses with reference to imaginings about the meanings of "embodiment, genealogy, and elected leadership" (p. 27).

The book's most original contribution to Cambodian studies is its analysis of Prime Minister Hun Sen's systematic attempt to "imagine" himself through the Sdach Kan narrative, his own royal connections and his democratic discourse. The discussion demonstrates that Hun Sen's "imagined" project aims not only at the construction of his domestic legitimacy but also at countering the liberal democratic discourse imposed on his regime by the international community. Drawing on an alternative narrative of the mythical King Sdach Kan, previously seen as a villain who usurped the throne, Hun Sen imagines this past monarch as a revolutionary and visionary king who charted new and in many instances progressive paths for Cambodia. Norén-Nilsson argues that, by invoking the name of Sdach Kan, Hun Sen imagines his own journey as one that parallels to that of Sdach Kan — an imagined journey that embodies a nation with distinctively Cambodian national roots. Like the career of Sdach Kan, Hun Sen's rise to the pinnacle of Cambodian politics from a humble background discursively projects a path of social mobility through merit. Like Sdach Kan, Hun Sen single-handedly ended Cambodia's civil war after the United Nations' misadventure of the early 1990s. This achievement clearly demonstrates his prowess and therefore predetermines blessings for his lifelong rule of Cambodia. Allegedly like Sdach Kan, Hun Sen invokes the concept of "people's democracy", a distinctive form of democracy that values economic development over other values embedded in Western liberal democracy.

Norén-Nilsson further contents that, in post-Paris Peace Agreement Cambodia, political royalism revolved around former King Norodom Sihanouk, whom royalists imagined as the embodiment of the Khmer nation. Other members of the royal family were by extension seen as similarly destined to embody the Khmer nation. As a son of Norodom Sihanouk, Prince Norodom Ranariddh imagines himself, therefore, as possessing the legitimacy to lead by following the footprints of Sihanouk's Sangkum Reastr Niyum movement and ideology. Among the crucial elements of this idealized 1955–70 period were direct democracy through a national congress and fulfilment of the people's needs. However, discord among members of the royal family, along with Ranariddh's impotence and lack of resources, enabled Hun Sen to outmanoeuvre the royalists...