Understanding Thai Nationalism and Ethnic Identity

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Understanding Thai Nationalism and Ethnic Identity

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Understanding Thai Nationalism and Ethnic Identity

Stithorn ThananithichotKing Prajadhipok’s Institute, Thailand

AbstractThis article examines three approaches to the study of nations, nationalism, and ethnic identity: primordialism, instrumentalism, and constructivism. The discussion relies primarily on qualitative methods consisting of documentary and explanatory research to consider the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. More importantly, an attempt is made to understand Thai nationalism and ethnic identity. Applying each theoretical framework to explain the Thai nation, nationalism, and ethnic identity, this article finds that each approach has both pros and cons. This article thus proposes the mechanism of the political entrepreneur to discuss how Thai political leaders define and utilize Thai (or ‘Thai-ness’) as well as Thai nationalism.

KeywordsEthnic identity, nationalism, Thailand – nation, nationalism, and ethnic identity construction

Introduction

Nationalism and ethnic identity are critical issues in current Thai politics. This is not only because Thailand is currently facing separatist violence in its southern ethnic Malay-Muslim provinces, but also because nationalism issues have increased political conflicts in recent years. Nationalism is one of the factors that has brought hundreds of thousands of people (who later become the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD)) to the streets to protest against Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2006. The Prime Minister’s family sold so-called ‘national properties’, which in this case were telecommunication shares, to Temasek, a Singaporean investor, for about 70,000 million baht ($2 billion) without paying taxes. Nationalism in terms of the ‘national interest’ was also the major reason used by the military (i.e. the Council of National Security (CNS)) in the coup of 19 September 2006. More recently, nationalism in the sense of a nation’s pride has become a critical issue, particularly when it is overused and brought into the conflict between the governments of Thailand and Cambodia. The encouragement of nationalism by each government has the potential to worsen Thai–Cambodian relations by expanding the scope of the conflict from a disagreement

Corresponding author:Stithorn Thananithichot, King Prajadhipok’s Institute, 120 Moo 3 Chaengwattana Road, Thung Song Hong, Laksi District, Bangkok, Thailand 10210. Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

399735 JASXXX10.1177/0021909611399735ThananithichotJournal of Asian and African Studies

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between governments to intense hostility between these countries’ citizens. Thus, the understanding of nationalism and ethnic identity in Thailand is important to the study of Thai politics.

How can nationalism and ethnic identity in Thai politics be understood? Adequate knowledge about the construction of Thai identity is necessary. This article discusses three approaches to the study of nationalism and ethnic identity: primordialist, instrumentalist, and constructivist. The major goals of this article are threefold: first, to briefly explain each approach; second, to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each approach; and, most importantly, to determine the most use-ful approach for understanding one of the most crucial issues in contemporary Thai politics: nationalism and ethnic conflict. This article examines primordial and instrumental thought as two of the most recognizable strategies of constructivism and proposes the mechanism of the political entrepreneur to discuss how Thai political leaders define Thai nationalism. This article concludes that the construction of Thai nationalism and identity is a process constructed by continually focusing on the importance of people’s emotions and memories – a process in which the elites, especially the king, the royal family, and political leaders, have played critical roles.

Approaches to the Study of Nationalism and Ethnic Identity

Drawing broadly upon comparative and historical materials, academic explanations of nationalism and ethnic identity generally fall into one of three schools of thought: primordialist, instrumental-ist, or constructivist (Joireman, 2003; Rudolph, 2006; Yavuz, 2003). Interactions between these three approaches have been diverse and not necessarily conflicting.

PrimordialistApproach

The primordialist approach argues for the priority of the timeless nation over nationalism – if nationalism is construed as a modernist, that is 20th-century, approach toward consolidating politi-cal units – and seldom disputes the centrality of modern states (Conversi, 2007; Guibernau and Hutchinson, 2004). It approaches identity as a primordial attachment by holding that ethnic groups and nations are formed on the basis of attachments to the ‘cultural givens’ of social existence (Smith, 2003: 52–53). According to scholars using this approach, any identity (e.g. family, reli-gion, ethnicity, language, race, or nation) exists prior to interactions. Identity is thus given rather than chosen, immutable rather than malleable, and it inevitably produces conflict. When discussing nations and ethnicities, primordialism assumes that people cannot deny or escape from their nation or ethnic identity (Horowitz, 2002: 72–82). Proponents of primordialism, such as Pierre van den Berghe (2005: 118), acknowledge that ‘any understanding of ethnicity must go back to stateless societies’, while ‘[n]othing focuses one’s ethnic consciousness faster or better than political con-flict with or within states dominated by people who are ethnically different from oneself’.

Even though primordialism maintains the core characteristics described above, it can vary. According to literature on identity, there are at least three subgroups of the primordial school: nationalist, biological, and cultural/symbolic. First, the nationalism approach sees identity as based on an external characteristics. People have the same identity (or nation) because they have the same appearance. A nation has a ‘national frontier’, where people with the same identity live together. This understanding of nationalism sees the people seeking to protect this frontier, although this protection usually turns violent when they interact with people of a different identity. The second is the socio-biological approach, which holds that nations, ethnic groups, and races can be traced to the underlying genetic reproductive drives of individuals and their use of strategies of nepotism and kinship to maximize their gene pool (Smith, 2003; van den Berghe, 2005). The



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socio-biological approach assumes that people cooperate with some emotional attachments; that is, they require security and are linked by kinship. In this view, the cultural groups are treated as a wider kin network, and cultural symbols (e.g. language, religion, color, etc.) are used as markers of biological affinity. The cultural/symbolic approach, the third version of primordialism, holds that ethnic groups and nations are formed based on attachments to the ‘cultural givens’ of social exis-tence (Smith, 2003). Scholars such as Clifford Geertz (1963) expanded the application of the con-cept beyond kinship to larger-scale groups, such as those based on common territory, religion, language, and other customs. As individuals and members of collectivities, Geertz argues that we feel and believe in the primordiality of our ethnies (ethnic communities, with their myths and sym-bols) and nations (their naturalness, longevity, and power). If we ignore these beliefs and feelings, we overlook one of the central factors in the explanation of ethnicity and nationalism.

Overall, primordialism has many benefits for explaining nationalism and ethnic identity. Primordialists show us that identity is deeper than we thought. It contains both emotions and memories; it relates to different groups (and distinguishes who we are and who they are); and it provides a better sense of why we need identity and how it shapes our lives. Primordialists see identity as a role model and a cognitive map to identify national characteristics. Primordialism suggests that if we understand a national identity, we can know or predict something (e.g. behav-iors) about a group. However, primordialism also has some weaknesses. While it can explain the persistence of ethnic identity over time, it cannot address the issue of why such an identity can, and indeed often does, change or fluctuate in its intensity and be differentially distributed at a given time throughout a single group. Primordialists believe that this deficiency is remedied by their focus on social circumstances surrounding this identity or, rather, on changing or differential social circumstances. Primordialists also ignore the context in which identity is constructed (Jaffrelot, 2005: 40), as well as the way in which ethnic identities arise out of interactions. Although primor-dialism may predict people’s behaviors by understanding their identity, it cannot explain why these people attain this identity.

InstrumentalistApproach

Unlike primordialists, instrumentalists render ethnicity (and nationalism) as a political identity that can be constructed for contemporary political mobilization. Ethnicity is a product of a political phenomenon (Cohen, 1969) and the means to some specific political end, such as nationalization – creating shared values within a state (Haas, 1997). Instead of focusing on the origins of ethnic groups or nations, instrumentalists pay more attention to goals that vary depending on their use as political tools. In this sense, ethnicity (and nationalism) is a kind of external identity that is pro-moted within particular groups by elites with political or personal agendas of their own. In addi-tion, ethnicity, for instrumentalists, is changeable rather than an innate characteristic that is consistent over time. It may be important at some times (or in some circumstances) and completely absent in others (Joireman, 2003: 35). From this viewpoint, ethnic identity is sometimes important because of circumstances or the role of elites in manipulating identity, while at other times it disap-pears because it no longer serves a specific purpose.

According to instrumentalists, nations and nationalism are modern phenomena. Defining nation-ality as a shared fundamental identity (or culture), Ernest Gellner (1983) claimed that nationalism, the process of creating ‘one culture, one state’, is essential for modern states and industrial societies that need the support of their citizens in order to rule. As Gellner noted, industrialization brings several changes to societies, including a change in the mode of production, by adapting advanced technologies and organizational innovations requiring a new type of educational system. Unlike



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agrarian societies, where education or training can be left to families or guilds and is connected to the rituals and social contexts of agrarian life, mass education in industrial societies is taken over by the state, using one language, a single identity, a unified sense of history, and nationalism. Thus, the instrumental use of nationalism by the (modern) state is critical to ensuring its strength. More spe-cifically, strong states are those that are able to manipulate nationalist feelings through a variety of methods, such as the use of symbols, songs, rituals, and traditions, in order to tie the sentiments of their citizenry to the interests and goals of the state. In contrast, those states that fail at manipulating nationalism are necessarily weaker and often lacking in support or legitimacy.

In summary, instrumentalism sees identity as a vehicle that modern states use to create and maintain a nationality. The politics of identity, for instrumentalists, can be rationally explained in terms of cost–benefit analysis (Hechter, 1987), which makes identity easy to mobilize. Although nationalism for the ethnic identity with the most power, according to the instrumentalist view, engages political actors in empowerment that could take participants toward an idealized nation-state, instrumentalists also suggest an internal diversity within identity groups that affects how groups mobilize and how they function. For this reason, instrumentalism is more effective than primordialism in explaining why people feel a national identity and become nationalists (Jaffrelot, 2005). However, arguments that ignore the role of ethnicity are insufficient to explain recent phe-nomena in which a number of nations have been created from ethnicities (e.g. Armenia and India). Moreover, while instrumentalists believe in the impact of modern societies (industrialization and technology) on the centrality of nation-states, there are also nations that emerge without industrial-ization (e.g. Thailand).

Another critique of instrumentalism is its exclusion of the importance of emotion and passion as well as the roles of history and memory. Instrumentalism makes it hard to understand why nationalism can stir the passions it does, and it encourages analysts to either ignore ethnic and other identities that do not coincide with states, or to treat them as somehow naturally given. The instru-mentalist approach also cannot explain why nationalism is more benign in some nations and states and more virulent in others, or why it creates some nations and destroys others. In addition, based on their focus on the role of leaders/elites and their reduction of identity to interest, and culture to economic goods, instrumentalists have little or no connection with what most people mean by the term ‘nationalism’: the ideologies and movements under which banners people have sought unity, identity, and autonomy for their nation. The instrumentalists’ emphasis on the temporal nature of nationalism, for this reason, ‘has been replaced more recently by an emphasis on the deeper histori-cal roots and therefore the cultural resonance of nationalism’ (Pryke, 2009: 16).

ConstructivistApproach

Constructivism assumes that any society is a human construction and subject to multiple interpre-tations and influences. Influenced by Benedict Anderson’s (2006) Imagined Communities, this approach suggests that national mythologies create imagined communities, such as nations, ethnic groups, and communal religions, and use myth and historical narrative to present them. For Anderson, a nation is ‘an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’ (2006: 6). Unlike an actual community, the nation is imagined because it is not a face-to-face community but a community that its members hold in their minds as an image of their communion. The nation is imagined as limited because ‘no nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind’ (2006: 7). For Anderson, ‘The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet’ (2006: 7). It is also imagined as




sovereign because ‘the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm’ (2006: 7). Moreover, it is not just imagined as sovereign but also imagined as a community because ‘the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (2006: 7). As he explains, ‘Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imagining’ (2006: 7).

The process that created nations and nationalism, according to Anderson, thus includes the ter-ritorialization of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capital-ism and print, the development of secular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time and space. Anderson argues that nations use language and create symbols such as censuses, maps, and museums to shape as well as reinforce those imaginations. An official language is a tool for nations to educate people by shaping their imaginations. People with more education thus have more nationalism because they know about themselves and their identity through education, which is provided by the nation as a nation-building process. Things such as novels and traveling shape people’s imaginations as well. When people read novels they can imagine themselves and their community, and traveling can help people learn who they are in relation to those they encounter. People become aware that there are people like them around the world, which makes them imagine more about themselves and their community. Therefore, nationalism, for constructivists, is a pro-cess that uses language and symbols to create, shape, and reinforce imagination.

The constructivist approach views societal, political, economic and historical processes and circumstances as determinants in ‘constructing’ nations and ethnic groups. These processes and circumstances fashion, influence, and determine the nature and importance of ethnicity. Therefore, the constructivist approach to nationalism and ethnic identity has several advantages over those previously outlined. First, it can explain the construction of identity. Constructivists explain how nationalists create history and recognize individual agency in the construction of identity. Second, it can explain the spread of nationalism. Constructivists illustrate how intellectual ideas become mass ideas. For example, they examine the role of modern literature in shaping identity by using old stories to evoke new emotions. Third, because it suggests that identity is not fixed but is con-stantly evolving, constructivism explains how people create different kinds of identity. Imagination, for constructivists, is never completed; it is always constructed and re-constructed. However, con-structivism presents some arguments that could be questionable, especially its core ideas about identity being constructed and invented. If identity is easy to create or invent, why do some nation-building projects fail?

The Trinity of Nationalist Discourses and the Thai Case

There are some advantages to applying the primordialist approach to explain Thai nationalism and ethnic identity. For example, primordialists clearly suggest why people (Thais, in this case) need a group identity to indicate cooperation and solidarity. Furthermore, using the primordial approach to understand Thai national identity, we can know or predict something about Thais (e.g. their behavior). However, because the primordialist view ignores the context in which identity is con-structed and disputes the centrality of modern states, it cannot fully explain Thai nationalism and ethnic identity. First, people living in the Thailand of today did not attach either Siamese (or Thai) national identity or Siamese (or Thai) ethnic identity until the 1850s. The unofficial name ‘Siam’ (instead of Bangkok Kingdom) became official in 1856 with its use in a treaty with Great Britain (Smith et al., 2005: 7). Thais conventionally employ the term of their geographic area, such as ban (village) or muang (city), to identify who they are.



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Moreover, the origins of the Thais are unclear and are still debated among historians. Three decades ago, it could be said with presumed certainty that the contemporary ‘Thais’ (or Tai, in the more general sense) originated in Northwestern Sichuan in China about 4500 years ago and later migrated to their present homeland (Dodd, [1923] 1996; Manich Jumsai, 1972; Wichit Matra, 1967). Based on this theory, the official state narrative of Thailand focused on race and the glori-fication of militaristic leaders whose love for ‘freedom’ – an interpretation of the word ‘Tai’ – forced them to lead a somewhat passive peasantry southwards to an empty golden land, or Suvarnabhumi (see Chaloemtiarana, 2001: 65). However, this theory has been altered by the dis-covery of remarkable prehistoric artifacts in the village of Ban Chiang, in the Nong Han District of Udon Thani Province in the Northeast. These include evidence of bronze metallurgy going back 3500 years, as well as other indications of a far more sophisticated culture than previously suspected by archaeologists. It now appears that the ‘Thais’ might have originated in Thailand and later scattered to various parts of Asia, including some parts of China (see e.g. Saraya, 2002; Wongtes, 1984, 2005). Furthermore, the fact that many Tai are still living in Southern China sug-gests that the Chinese had no hand in driving them out of China (Zhu, 1992). The Thais in Thailand, according to this alternative theory, are not just the Tai (as the prior theory argued) but a new people formed out of various ethnic groups and races such as the local Chinese, the Mon, the Khmer, the Lao, and many others (Wongtes, 1984, 2005). Thai people’s understanding of their ethnie as a ‘free’ and ‘independent’ people is a modern view that surfaced in the 20th-century, after the country’s name was changed from Siam to Thailand in 1939. Prior to this, most Thais were referentially ‘Tai’ because their own understanding of their ethnogenesis is tied to Southern China as their primordial origin. Whether Thais came from any part of China or originated in present-day Thailand, ‘Siamese’ or ‘Thai’ was chosen by the elites (the king and political leaders), if not by the people themselves, to present the nation (Siam or Thailand) as well as the people’s ethnicity (Siamese or Thai). People of many races became Siamese or Thai by showing loyalty to the king and adopting the Thai language.

Finally, while primordialists rarely dispute the centrality of the modern state, the Thai nation and nationalism are modern phenomena. The constructions of the Thai nation, nationalism, and ethnic identity were a result of the country avoiding colonization. Since the process of nation-state building was started in the 1850s, the Thai identity was used as a vehicle to create and maintain the Thai nationality. This evidence may also be used to support an instrumentalist approach rather than a primordialist one.

Instrumentalism is a useful approach to the study of the Thai nation and nationalism, particu-larly when considering the period of nation-state building in the 1850s. An example of how Thai or ‘Thai-ness’ can be a simple political instrument can be seen in its use in politics by recent Thai political entrepreneurs. The word ‘Thai’ is one of the most frequently used words in the names of Thai political parties (McCargo and Pathmanand, 2005). For example, the ex-prime minister Banharn Silapa-archa’s ‘Chart Thai’ (Thai nation) party, the current ‘Chart Thai Pattana’ (Thai nation development) party, the ex-prime minister Thaksin’s ‘Thai Rak Thai’ (Thais love Thai) party, or the current ‘Puea Thai’ (for Thai) party, and so forth. A Thai nation under the instrumental-ist view is thus a political consciousness in which the Thai ethnie becomes an instrument for acquiring power: it varies depending on who uses it as a political tool.

The Thai case, nevertheless, challenges the instrumentalist approach for at least two reasons. First, while the instrumentalists believe that industrialization is essential to the development of nation-states, the process of Thai nation-state building emerged without industrialization. Even though King Rama V (1869–1910) modernized the country by constructing an infrastructure including electricity, a postal system, and railroads, the development of industry in Thailand only




began in the 1960s (Baker and Pasuk, 2005). In addition, although the Thai royal families utilized various modern innovations such as bureaucracy, the national military and mass education as instruments to create and maintain the Thai nationality, they did not ignore the importance of emo-tion and passion and the role of history and memory (especially the history and memory of the roles of the king and royal family). They created symbols to represent the Thai nation such as a map, a flag, and a national color. Songs, dramas, and novels were also created and used to awaken Thai nationalism. Architecture, such as monuments and museums, were constructed to shape and reshape people’s memory about the nation. More recently, Thai politicians and parties increasingly engage in a much more strident conservative nationalist language and rhetoric, playing on ideas of Thai nation and nationalism and using symbols such as national flag and color in a far cruder fash-ion than before in order to obtain political power and popularity.

In establishing his party in March 2004, Thaksin drew on the emotional nationalism of the post-crisis (i.e. the 1997 economic crisis) reaction (Pasuk and Baker, 2004: 139). The party’s name, ‘Thai Rak Thai’, means Thais love Thai, and the party’s slogan, ‘Think new, act new, for every Thai’, combines a promise of change with an inclusive nationalism (Pasuk and Baker, 2004: 78). As a supposedly nationalistic politician, Thaksin attempted to reform Thailand in almost every aspect by connecting socio-economic programs of Thai nationalism with government policies. By comparing the nation to a company, he called himself CEO of Thailand and toasted himself as a champion of the Thai nation. Of his many government schemes, the One Tambon One Product program represented a strong sense of economic nationalism. In order to build up a strong domestic economy, this program was designed to exhort Thais to support indigenous products by buying and selling Thai. In 2003, Thaksin declared war on drugs, which were described as a national threat. As a result, more than 2000 suspects were executed. To outsiders this was a case of human-rights violation. However, to many in the domestic grassroots Thaksin was a national hero who fought against what was believed to be extrinsic to Thai characteristics (Chachavalpongpun, 2006). In order to understand the Thai nation, nationalism, and ethnicity, we thus need an approach that views those identities as constantly evolving modern phenomena and indicates the importance of emotion and memory. That approach is perhaps constructivism.

The constructivist approach to Thai national identity has an advantage over primordialist and instrumentalist approaches. It has been theoretically convincing to many scholars because the the-ory tells us why particular ethnic groups develop and why some groups disappear. In the Thai case, Winichakul (1994) explores the ways in which the Thai nation pegs nationalist formation on glori-ous renditions by archaic maps of Thailand’s hegemonic past. In this perspective, the creation of nationhood is a process of constructing the domain of a national entity and demarcating its clear boundaries, thereby creating the body of a nation. He argues that the Thai sense of nationalism could not have been created without these physical borders and the ‘geo-body’. He conceptualizes the geo-body as the territoriality of a nation and the collective self-concept of its people, and he suggests that this concept was vital in organizing the Siamese sense of community and nationhood, the Thai-self. In addition, constructivism’s view of societal, political, economic and historical pro-cesses and circumstances as determinants in ‘constructing’ nations and ethnic groups offers insight into the process of the construction of the Thai nation, nationalism, and ethnicity. In his recent article ‘Sacred Nationalism,’ Jack Fong (2009) discusses how royalist networks of Thailand’s pres-ent king (King Rama IX) used primordial themes to reinforce the staying power of his rule and the institution of constitutional monarchy after the end of absolute monarchy in 1932. Fong argues that primordial simulacra derived from the Siamese empire, Buddhism and rekindled royal ceremonies functioned to ‘sacralize’ the nation and legitimize the king as a ‘sacred nationalist’, a type of nation-alist that harmonizes the tangible and intangible to construct the ‘Thai’ nation. During this process,



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the country’s traditional authority system was extolled in order to respond to the undesirable con-sequences of 20th-century modernization.

However, because constructivism is less focused on how the role of individuals manipulate and construct ethnic identities or national agendas, applying only the constructivist approach may not be sufficient to understand the case of Thailand. Thai monarchs and political leaders (e.g. military leaders and politicians) have played critical roles in the construction process of Thai nationality and political identity. Moreover, due to constructivism’s recognition of nation and ethnic identity as a combination of inborn traits and social input, most scholars of nationalism would argue that primordialism and instrumentalism are variations on the social constructivist model. Indeed, all dimensions and articulations of primordialism and instrumentalism are social constructions. However, what have rarely been identified are the political entrepreneurs that have ‘pegged’ their notion of nation on one or the other. Learning from Thongchai and Fong also makes us realize that all forms of socially constructed nationalism (whether through primordialist or instrumentalist approaches) have material consequences (i.e. Fong’s royal rituals and Thongchai’s maps). Considering primordial and instrumental thought as two of the most recognizable strategies of constructivism, this article thus suggests a fourth approach: the mechanism of the political entrepreneur.

This discussion will add to the aforementioned scholars’ rich analyses by indicating where Thai nationalism has been placed in the various epochs discussed in the article. That is, in the nation (which may or may not include the present boundaries of Thailand or Siam), in the state (a politi-cally recognized boundary that may include many nations), and in the nation-state (the perfect synchronicity of where a nation is and how this nation coincides with its political boundaries). Chronologically, the discussion begins in the period of Siam’s nation-state building (1850s–1940s), moves to the rise of the military’s roles after the bloodless revolution in 1932, and examines the monarchy resurgence (1960s–present) in which the Thai national identity was constructed by the public roles of the present king (King Rama IX) and the royal family.

‘Thai’ or ‘Thainess’ as the Mechanism of the Political Entrepreneur

Due to confrontations between colonizing powers at the end of the 19th-century, Siam attempted to resurrect itself as a nation-state to preserve its independence. The nation constructed by this process was novel, under the supervision of the king and his royal family. The process was initiated by King Rama IV’s (1851–1868) vision of reformation, including nation-state building and mod-ernization. King Rama IV began the process of modernizing Siam’s government by centralizing tax revenues. He encouraged citizens to make judicial appeals to the king and imagined himself as a phramahakasat, a great king, ruling over an ekkarat, a unified and independent kingdom. King Rama IV understood the importance of history in this era and was fascinated by the idea of prog-ress. He traveled to historical sites, collected historical sources, and compiled a tentative Short History of Siam. In addition, the unofficial name Siam was used instead of Bangkok Kingdom to represent the whole territory and to signal its unity and independence to westerners. His great ref-ormations and preparations replaced the old political order with a model of the nation-state under King Rama V, his son.

King Rama V introduced an administrative reform of the government in 1892 by creating 12 ministries, functionally defined, in which each head was directly responsible to the king. He also replaced traditional semi-autonomous tributary statelets by a modern administration with chang-wat (province) and amphoe (district),1 as it still is today. In addition, a national army was created




for which there was male conscription. Moreover, he promoted education and opened a Siamese school in the Royal Palace. The Department of Education was set up, and a government school for ordinary people was established in Bangkok, and gradually expanded throughout the country. To modernize his new nation-state and facilitate citizens’ communication with one another and with the state, modern infrastructures such as electricity, telegraph, and railroads were constructed. Although King Rama V may be said to have constructed the modern Kingdom of Siam, the pro-cesses that made it into a nation were developed in the period of his son who followed him on the throne.

King Rama VI (1910–1925) inherited his father’s nation-building mission, particularly the ideas that King Rama V had put forward in 19072 about the importance of history for establishing the country. He visited Sukhothai carrying the text of an inscription found by King Rama IV and matched monuments mentioned in the text with ruins found on the ground. He published his account of the visit to make the Thai more aware that the Thai race is deeply rooted and is not a race of jungle-folk – or, as the English say, uncivilized. He enjoyed literary pursuits and wrote plays and essays, and his works were used to popularize his ideas about patriotism, the virtue of hard work, and the willingness to die for king and country. In addition to using historical narratives and literature to promote Siamese nationalism, a national flag was created to represent the nation and to awaken nationalism based on the king’s ideas about the Thai nation, chat Thai (a phrase that he was the first to popularize). His Thai nation was founded on the basic triad of chat-satsana-phramahakasat (nation-religion-monarchy), a trinitarian mystery in which all three elements were inextricably bound together. He then introduced the tri-colored flag, called the ‘trirong,’ which has red, white and blue to symbolize his Thai-nation motto, ‘nation-religion-monarchy’ (Peleggi, 2007: 119). Thai nationalism, for King Rama VI, was therefore part of his definition of the Thai nation: a corporate body of people living within the Siam boundary, imbued with a common identity, striv-ing for common goals, and placing public interests ahead of private ones (Wyatt, 2003: 216). If the goal of the construction of Thai national identity was to preserve Siam’s independence due to the confrontations of colonizing powers, the absolutist conceptions of the Siam nation and nation-state completed this mission during the reign of King Rama VI.

However, created by colonial commerce and by the nation-state itself, the new generation of early 20th-century Siam took up the ideas of nation, state, and progress, and recast them (Baker and Pasuk, 2005: 105). This challenge to the definition of the nation as those loyal to the king eventu-ally led to a bloodless revolution in 1932, replacing an absolute monarchy with a constitutional monarchy. Unfortunately, several changes that followed, particularly the abdication of King Rama VII in 1935, while the new king, King Rama VIII, was too young (10 years old) and stayed in Europe (Switzerland), and the conflict among the new administrative leaders (new civil and mili-tary elites, and old and conservative ones), brought a rise of the roles of the military in politics as well as in the construction and reconstruction of Thai nationality and nationalism.

After the abdication of King Rama VII, the military, under Field Marshal Pibunsongkhram’s (Pibun) leadership, became the most powerful elite group in Siam. While the new government could not maintain its peaceful regime-change, the military claimed to be one of the four basic political institutions of Siam – monarchy, parliament, bureaucracy, and military – and the only institution that was abiding and permanent. During 1940s to 1960s, the military government did at least two critical things for the construction of Thai national identity. First, they changed the coun-try’s name from Siam to Thailand in 1939. In doing this, the government made three main argu-ments to support why the new name, Thailand, was better than the old one, Siam. First, Siam is the word used by Chinese and Cambodian to call people living in the Chao Phraya River Plain, so it excludes people in other parts of the country. Second, Thailand makes a better sound; it means the



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land of Thais consisting of not only Siamese-Thai, but also Mon-Thai, Cambodian-Thai, Malay-Thai, and so forth, living together in this area. Lastly, the word Thai means independence; so it creates a sense of nationalism by giving pride to Thais as a people who have never been subservient to any power (Thailand was historically the only Southeast Asian country never to have been taken over by a European power).

Secondly, attempting to extend the idea of making the Thai people truly ‘Thai,’ after changing the country’s name, Pibun’s government established a National Culture Commission in 1942 to define and disseminate Thai culture. The main reason for this was to apply pressure on, and facili-tation for, Chinese and other non-Thai to speak and act in ways that confirmed their membership of the national community. In addition, everyone was encouraged to learn and speak the Thai dia-lect of the central region (it would be better to say, the dialect of people living in Bangkok). In order to make Thai easier to read and write, the government modified the Thai language with a simplified alphabet, regular phonetic spelling, unique pronouns which ignored distinction of gender and sta-tus, and standard versions for greeting (i.e. Sawasdee) and other common usages.

Overall, although the military government of Pibun placed the monarch within a constitution, the government never threatened to move towards republicanism. Indeed, Pibun built their version of the nation on the foundations laid by King Rama V and King Rama VI instead of digging those foundations up and building anew. They continued to imagine the Thai as a race with martial char-acteristics, threatened by bad neighbors and great powers, rescued by unification around a strong leader (the monarchy), and dedicated to the pursuit of progress. Hence, royalists continued to sus-tain the ideological legitimacy of kingship by extending the constitutional role of the monarchy throughout the 1940s (Connors, 2003). By preserving the monarchy as one of the most important pillars of the Thai nation, the construction (and reconstruction) of Thai national identity after the end of the Pibun era and the new challenge of the Cold War benefitted from the roles of the king (King Rama IX) and the royal family in maintaining the nation’s unity and harmony.

The period after the end of World War II, especially since the 1960s, was the period that Thailand received economic and military assistance from the United States and favors from international organizations (Wyatt, 2003: 250). However, Thai national identity was challenged by the external opposition ideology, communism, due to the worldwide division caused by the Cold War, as well as by internal borders problems (hill people in the north and the Malay-Muslim separatists in the south) caused by an inequality of the country’s economic development. To combat these new threats, the construction of Thai nationality was continued by reviving the roles of the monarchy. In his day, Field Marshal Sarit Dhanarajata (Sarit) created a ‘paternalistic’ style of leadership, mod-eled mainly on the ancient Siamese concept of administration, a father looking after his children style of government, made famous by the King Ramkhamhaeng of the Sukhothai period (Chaloemtiarana, 2007: 111–112). He also promulgated King Bhumibol’s (Rama IX) 5 December birthday as a national holiday and made it Father’s Day. With the strong support of his government (from 1957) and the continuous efforts of every government that followed, the role of King Rama IX (whose reign began in 1946) has been then a source of the economic and political goals of the regime, the ‘Development King’ as well as a symbol of national loyalties.3

Even though King Rama IX had no real power and was little more than a figurehead under the military-dominated government (Pibun era) in the early years of his reign, he used his personal funds to initiate social and economic development projects. With the great support of Sarit, his royally initiated projects were then implemented with the financial and political support of the government (Fong, 2009). These included projects in rural areas, particularly in the areas of the hill people in the north region, the Malay-Muslims in the deep southern provinces, and the communi-ties under the influence of the Communist Party of Thailand. The king’s efforts were intended to




benefit members of the Malay-Muslim Thai and hill tribes and other ethnic groups and to make them feel that they were part of the kingdom and important to the well-being of Thailand, and these efforts have had significant results. Moreover, his visits to those projects were heavily promoted by the government and were broadcast, encouraging people throughout the country to recognize him and imagine him as a source of development and a unifying leader.

In addition to the king’s role in social and economic development projects, the king as a symbol of national loyalty was revived to harmonize national identity. In the late 1970s, the old national-istic motto ‘nation-religion-monarchy’ was modified to the new touchstone, ‘nation, religion, mon-archy, and democracy with the King as head of state’ (Connors, 2003: 144). According to this new national ideology, the monarchy assumed a much more prominent role as the focus of national loyalties in comparison to the other two components of the old trinity, and it became a fount of democracy. Moreover, with the support of the civilian governments since the General Prem Tinsulanonda era (beginning in 1981) and the National Identity Office, the king’s public role was more ceremonial than ever before. For example, the bicentennial of Bangkok was celebrated in 1982 and followed by several public celebrations for the king’s birthday and special events of his reign. These celebrations included the king’s fifth cycle (60th birthday) in 1987, the longest reign of any Thai monarch in 1988 and of any living monarch in the world in 1992, the reign’s jubilee (1996), the king’s sixth cycle (72nd birthday) in 1999, the reign’s diamond jubilee and the 60th Anniversary Celebrations of His Majesty the King’s Accession to the Throne in 2006, and the king’s 80th birthday in 2007. With his devotion to the peasantry, promotion as the centerpiece of national identity, and constant ceremonial presence, the king’s barami (charisma, innate authority) steadily increased and finally became a source of national pride, a symbol of national unity, and a central pillar of the nation.

Conclusion

Is the nation a recent or ancient phenomenon? This question is still debated among scholars. Primordialists provide an account of the thick nature of ethnic affiliations, based as they are on community (and even communion) at a level that can only be justified by myths of common ances-try and analogies between ethnicity and the family. Instrumentalists claim, in contrast, that the nation and nationalism are sociologically necessary phenomena of the modern, industrial epoch, emerging in the transition to modernization. Constructivists accept the instrumentalists’ argument that the nation and nationalism are wholly modern, but they address different forms of modernism. They view the nation and ethnicity as manufactured rather than innate, but with no necessary eco-nomic or political goal for it to form. Deciding on the best approach that can respond to every issue of nations and nationalism may be impossible. Nevertheless, learning from the strengths and limi-tations of each approach allows scholars to analyze nationalism and ethnic identity by considering a variety of factors.

This article suggests the mechanism of the political entrepreneur as the most appropriate approach to explain and understand nationalism and ethnic conflicts in Thai politics. Even though the main reason for the construction of the Thai nation, nationalism, and ethnic identity was ini-tially (in the 1850s) to preserve Thailand’s (or Siam’s, at that time) independence due to confronta-tions by colonizing powers, the process is continuously constructed by paying attention to the importance of emotion and memory. For this reason, it must be emphasized that Thai national identity was not a natural growth rooted in some primordial sense of separateness but rather was consciously constructed. Moreover, Thai national identity was constructed and reconstructed differently from other Southeast Asian Countries, where nationalism was anti-colonial or



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anti-imperialist (Reid, 2010) in nature. It may be considered similar to the nationalism of Europe, where states forged unitary identities by harnessing linguistic, religious, and historical commonali-ties, or inventing them when necessary. However, the construction of Thai identity is unique because of the significant role of the king and the royal family. Learning from the Thai case also makes us realize that all forms of nation-construction processes (whether through primordialist or instrumentalist) have material consequences. The Thai monarchs and political leaders, as political entrepreneurs, have established their legacy as, for example, the ‘sacred nationalist’ of the current king (see Fong, 2009), the ‘paternal despot’ of Sarit (see Chaloemtiarana, 2007), and the ‘new nationalist’ of Thaksin who placed himself as the ‘savior of the nation’ (see Pasuk and Baker, 2004). Interactions between these ideas of Thai nation and nationalism have been diverse, some-times harmonious and unpredictably conflicting.

Thailand has just gone through a near-death experience in May 2010. Additionally, since the strength of Thai national identity lies in its strong attachment to the monarchy (in particular, the role of the present king), there is increasing concern about the country’s future without its monarch (Fong, 2009; Ockey, 2005). On what will Thai nationalism be based in the future process of Thai’s nation construction? Without the current king, will the royalists be able to maintain his legacy as ‘sacred nationalists’? Will Sarit’s legacy as a ‘paternal despot’ continue in the process of Thai nation construction? Do the next-generation Thais still require a ‘national hero’ like Thaksin to save their country? The answers for these and similar questions are varied, depending on whom the privilege of defining the Thai national identity will belong to.

Acknowledgments

The author presented an earlier version of this paper at the International Studies Association – Northeast Annual Conference, 3–4 October 2008, Baltimore, MD USA, and received very useful comments from Kiran Pervez. I also appreciate the criticisms and suggestions received from Mathew Burbank and Douglas Byrd.

Notes

1. For some scholars, such as Thongchai Winichakul (1994: 146), this replacement is not just a reform but a ‘glorious revolution’. That is, ‘the system of provincial administration had indeed helped to preserve the Thai kingdom as the only independent nation of Southeast Asia in the age of European imperialism’ (Bunnag, 1977: 261). Moreover, this also indicates why geo-body (along with history) has become a powerful technology of Thai nationhood (Winichakul, 1994).

2. In his speech for the 1907 celebration of Siam history, given in the ruins of the old capital of Ayutthaya after returning from his second tour of Europe’s historic capitals, King Rama V noted that well-estab-lished countries maintain that the history of one’s nation and country is an important matter that should be known clearly and accurately through study and teaching (Baker and Pasuk, 2005: 72).

3. In this regard, the king is honored as the father of the nation: being Thai is to show loyalty to the king, our father.

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Stithorn Thananithichot is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. He is a researcher (on study leave) at the King Prajadhipok’s Institute, Thailand. His research interests include democratization, electoral behavior, and Thai politics. He has published three books and three edited books, as well as many articles and book chapters, most recently ‘Imagined Thai: The politics of constructed national identity in Thailand,’ in Global Politics in the Dawn of the 21st Century (Athens, Greece: Athens Institute for Education and Research).



Understanding Thai Nationalism and Ethnic Identity

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