It is traditional thought to immediately consider a military coup bad because they usually are. Take the many horrors of Africa and Latin America, for example. There have certainly been ambiguous exceptions, such as Pinochet’s coup in Chile which still inspires much debate. But nowadays things are a bit different. Military coups are occurring for the explicit purpose of creating national harmony and moving forward with democracy. Look at Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania, where coups have led directly to increases in civil and political liberties with a progression toward elections.

The most recent coup that inspired international condemnation was in Thailand, where prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted during his visit to the United Nations. Yet despite a temporary clampdown on the capital, the Thai people have gladly welcomed the coup and it appears that elections will be held within a year. Troops have been ordered to smile and allow people to take pictures with them — even hold their M16s! An interim civilian government is now in place to manage the day-to-day activities of government while the military supervises, and corruption investigations and the promise of an end to the Muslim insurgency in the south shows a willingness to fix some of democracy’s populist glitches.

The nature of such coups is different than those of the past. Many of the ones in Latin America, Africa, and even southern Europe were the result of foreign intervention on the part of the United States or the Soviet Union. The coup in Thailand is an internal development cultivated mostly by domestic issues. Also, it seems that the coup is widely supported in the whole country — those in Bangkok because they despise Thaksin, and most in the rural areas because, even though they supported Thaksin, they value the unity and harmony of Thai society much more than his divisive reign.

So far I doubt that the coup leaders will make the same mistakes that King Gyanendra of Nepal made when he completely suspended civil liberties and turned Kathmandu into a police state — and then subsequently lost all of his political influence. They will also not make the same mistakes of previous military governments. Bangkok has shown that it’s people are willing to stand up against military dictators if they go too far and Gen. Sondhi realizes this. If in fact he took power to prevent future bloodshed as he has said, then he will not do so himself.

This begs me to ask a question, something that almost feels taboo: Are military coups applicable in certain situations to cure political problems and put the country on the fast-track to an even better democracy than it had before? Both Thailand and Mauritania have set a one-year deadline for elections, and while it is too early to tell, the results so far are promising. It may seem strange to us in the West, but could a military coup be exactly what Thailand needed in order to save its democracy?

(This is definitely an open discussion, by the way. I think there are some good traditional arguments for no, but exploring the ways that such a thing could be feasible is interesting to me.)