A History Of Thailand
Page 19
The second theme of these measures was ‘to make Thai people truly Thai’. Phibun explained: ‘We must remember there are many new Thai. Now we have Thailand, we can mix the true Thai together with the new Thai to work together in friendship for the united nation’.58 This meant applying pressure and providing facilitation for Chinese and other non-Thai to speak and act in ways that confirmed their membership of the national community. An edict prescribed rituals for honouring national symbols, such as the flag and anthem. Everyone was urged to learn and speak the Thai dialect of the central region. To make this ‘easier to read and easier to write’, a government commission modified the language with a simplified alphabet, regular phonetic spelling, unique pronouns that ignored distinction of gender and status, and standard versions for greeting (sawatdi) and other common usages. In 1942, a National Culture Commission was established to define and disseminate Thai culture.
A third theme was unity. People were no longer to be described as ‘northern Thai’, ‘northeastern Thai’, and so on, but henceforth were simply chao Thai. Another committee scanned popular songs and removed mentions of ‘Lao’, ‘Ngiew’ (Shan), and other non-Thai ethnic descriptors.
A fourth theme of the state edicts was progress. Thai were urged to help the economy in various ways, such as being self-reliant and buying Thai goods. Standards of dress, public conduct, and social life were prescribed to remove any justification for outsiders to treat Thailand as uncivilized. Contests were arranged to promote ‘modern’ dress (Figure 12). Thai were urged to conduct themselves with decorum in public places, including queuing in an orderly way and refraining from making graffiti. Some western habits were advised, including using forks and spoons, wearing hats, and kissing one’s wife before leaving the house. One edict prescribed a timetable for people to divide their day between work, eating, leisure, and sleep.
Figure 12: Miss Afternoon Wear. Winner of the contest for afternoon wear and special occasions, probably 1941–42, as part of Phibun’s campaign of modernization.
Since progress was dependent on the number and health of the population, Phibun aimed to increase the population to 40 million and to make people stronger and healthier. A National Nutrition Project had been launched in 1938. The doctor in charge wrote: ‘In revolutionary times, there should also be a revolution in people’s food and eating’.59 People were encouraged to eat more protein. Exercise was included in the school curriculum and more funds were devoted to medicine and hygiene. The edicts prescribed public education on nutrition. A mother’s day was designated to revere and encourage motherhood. A Ministry of Public Health was formed in 1942.
A final theme was national security. The second of the edicts defined treasonous and anti-national activities. The whole programme was publicized on radio in dialogues between Nai Man and Nai Khong, whose two names joined formed mankhong (security). Slogans included ‘Hats lead nation to power’.
The whole project, as Phibun explained, was launched because ‘government is forced to reform and reconstruct the various aspects of society, especially its culture, which here signifies growth and beauty, orderliness, progress and uniformity, and the morality of the nation’.60 In 1944, the government defined a 14-point Code of National Bravery based on the bushido code of Japanese warriors, which Wichit and several others had openly admired for some time. It began by stating that ‘the Thai love their nation more than their own lives’, and went on to define the Thai as martial, Buddhist, industrious, peace-loving, self-reliant, aspiring for progress, and loyal to their leader.
The Second World War
The Phibun group had cultivated strong links with Japan over the 1930s, yet his government’s major aim was to keep Thailand out of a war between the great powers by balancing between the Allied and Axis camps. After Paris fell and Japanese forces invaded Indochina, however, Phibun took the opportunity in January 1941 to send troops across the border to seize parts of French Cambodia. The armed clashes with the French were indecisive, but Phibun’s government declared victory, held parades, and began building a Victory Monument (with more heroic sculptures by Feroci). The Japanese stepped in to broker an agreement that ceded two chunks of territory to Thailand (Map 5). Phibun was now indebted to Japan. When he was informed that the Japanese would land troops in Thailand to attack the British in Malaya and Burma, he urged the Cabinet to comply in order to regain more ‘lost territory’. The Japanese troops landed on 8 December 1941. The government initially agreed to allow safe passage, and then in January formally declared war on Britain and the USA. Phibun told the Cabinet: ‘We should not let them [Japan] build Asia alone…They will appreciate us…Speaking plainly among the Thai, it is about time to declare war with the winner’.61 In May, with Japanese blessing, a Thai army marched north to seize territory in Burma’s Shan States.
Map 5: Thailand in the Second World War.
Phibun imagined Thailand serving as Japan’s partner in ridding Asia of western colonialism. Wichit, elevated to foreign minister, dreamed of ‘raising our country to be the cultural centre of southern Asia’.62 But the reality was that the Japanese treated Thailand as an occupied state, Japanese troops looked down on the Thai as inferior, and the Japanese government ravaged the Thai economy for war supplies. By mid-1943, Thai leaders were aware that the tide of war had turned against Japan, and they began easing away from the relationship. To strengthen the faltering ties, the Japanese prime minister visited Bangkok and formally confirmed Thai control of four Malay and two Shan states. But Phibun pointedly refused to attend the Greater East Asian Conference in Tokyo in November 1943, and sent messengers through China to make contact with the Allies. He told one of his military commanders: ‘which side do you think will lose this war? That side is our enemy.’63 The government began to provide the Allies with intelligence and laid plans for resisting the Japanese.
The war had widened the rift between the military members of the People’s Party who were attracted by the militarized states of the Axis, and many civilian members who had been educated in France or England and sympathized with the Allies. After the Japanese invasion, the civilian leader, Pridi, had been kicked out of the Cabinet and become regent. He began to organize a resistance group that made contact with the Allies through China in mid-1943. In parallel, students and other Thai in the USA and Britain formed resistance groups and offered their services to the Allied armies. The group in the USA was led by ambassador to the USA and minor royal family member Seni Pramoj. By early 1944, these various networks, known collectively as Seri Thai (Free Thai), came together. Men and equipment were parachuted into Thailand to organize resistance. Both Pridi’s undercover group and Phibun’s government secretly lent assistance.
In July 1944, the Pridi group manoeuvred Phibun out of power to improve the chances of negotiating with the Allies and thus avoid being treated as an enemy. Seri Thai wanted to launch a rising against the Japanese to show its bona fides, but the Allies discouraged any such move and only a few sabotage operations had been completed when the war ended. The British wanted to punish and dominate Thailand in the aftermath, particularly in order to secure Thailand’s rice supplies for the devastated colonial territories. The USA, however, was opposed to any return of colonial influence and made it clear Thailand would be treated ‘as an enemy-occupied country’. To strengthen this US support, Pridi invited Seni Pramoj to return from the USA to become prime minister and front the peace negotiations. Eventually, the British were satisfied with an indemnity paid in rice, and the USA insisted that Thailand’s borders be returned to their pre-war positions.
Conclusion
The creators of a new public sphere in the early 20th century founded the second of Siam’s major visions about the uses of the nation-state. Whereas the royalist reformers of the Fifth Reign argued the need for a strong, dictatorial state to enable Siam to survive and be important in the world, the commoner nationalists contended that the main purpose of the nation-state was the well-being of the nation’s people. This meant economic progress
to benefit more members of the nation through agriculture, industry, and an end to exploitation by both the old elite and the colonialists. It also meant more public services, including education, health, and communications. Most of all it meant new institutions, the rule of law, and especially a constitution as tools to limit or block old forms of power and to create new ones.
This vision consciously set itself apart from the masculine imagery of the strong-state version. Journalists skewered polygamy as the epitome of the old order. The novels and stories of the era are full of strong heroines. The 1932 constitution granted the franchise equally to men and women. Even Wichit built several of his plays around heroines and conjured women out of Thai history for immortalization in statuary – though these women were rather martial.
But this second vision proved very vulnerable. The main protagonists of the 1932 revolution were servants of the nation-state with great faith in its capacity to effect social and economic transformation from above. They doubted the existence of any mass base that would rise to defend them in the face of a royalist counter-revolution. With growing influence from contemporary fascist models, Phibun’s military wing projected the ideal of a strong military leadership leading a united orderly society to modernize and expand in order to survive in a world of clashing nationalisms. They created a modified and more powerful version of the strong-state tradition minus only the monarchy.
By 1945, the economy was wrecked by Japan’s wartime demands; Bangkok was subjected to over 4000 Allied bombing raids, resulting in evacuation of 60 per cent of the population; Japan, the exemplar of Asian ‘progress’, had been defeated; and Thailand’s leaders were scrambling to deny the recent past in order to preserve independence at the peace negotiations. Temporarily at least, the ideal of a strong state was discredited. Many of Phibun’s innovations were scrapped – the edicts on dress and social conduct, the language reforms, and the bushido-type code. Even the country’s name was temporarily reversed to Siam in September 1945 (for three years, but only in foreign-language usage).
But many of Phibun and Wichit’s innovations lasted because they commanded wide acceptance in the new urban society. Wichit invented the Thai, not simply as the citizens of a certain state but also as people with a history and ‘national character’. He offered guidance on how new urban Thai could become modern citizens of the world. He helped new bureaucrats imagine themselves as a paternal elite who ‘relieved the sufferings and increased the well-being’ of a backward and passive peasantry.
Phibun and Wichit built their version of the nation on the foundations laid by Chulalongkorn, Damrong, and Vajiravudh, rather than digging those foundations up and building anew. They continued to imagine the Thai as a race with martial characteristics, threatened by bad neighbours and great powers, rescued by unifying around a strong leader, and dedicated to the pursuit of progress. They placed the monarch within a constitution, but never seriously threatened to move towards republicanism. They continued to treat the mass of the people as bystanders at a politics carried out by palace coup and intrigue.
These were still the politics of a national capital city in an overwhelmingly peasant society. The royalists, the military party, and the businessmen and professionals clustered around Pridi were elite groups vying for influence over the new central machinery of the nation-state. But the Second World War made two changes that brought this political era to an end. First, it created a war economy with deeper government involvement and with fluctuations that affected more of the population. The economic crisis after the war brought mass distress and mass political mobilization. Second, the war drew Thailand deeper into complex international politics involving Japan, China, and the western powers, especially the USA. This shift was permanent. The aftermath of the war saw competitive attempts to build transnational empires around rival communist and capitalist visions of the state’s potential to lead economic and political development. The struggles to define the Thai nation and control the Thai state were now skewed to the pattern of this Cold War.
6 The American era and development, 1940s to 1960s
After the Second World War, the USA became a new foreign patron, more intrusive than anything Siam had experienced in the colonial era. While Britain had focused on its colonies and never taken more than peripheral interest in Siam, the USA seized on Thailand as an ally and base for opposing the spread of communism in Asia. To build Thailand’s capability for this role, the USA helped to revive and strengthen the military rule, which had faltered at the close of the Second World War. To consolidate Thailand’s membership of the ‘free world’ camp in the Cold War, the USA promoted ‘development’, meaning primarily economic growth through private capitalism. To achieve ‘national security’, US funding helped to push the mechanisms of the nation-state more deeply into society than before.
Under this regime, a new elite emerged consisting of ruling generals, senior bureaucrats, and the heads of new business conglomerates. Strengthened by the ideology of development and unconstrained by democracy, business was able to exploit both people and natural resources on a new scale. The countryside was transformed again, by driving the agrarian frontier through the upland forests and subjecting the smallholder decisively to the market. Against this backdrop, the old Thai social order faded into history.
From war to civil war
The aftermath of the war was a period of great economic disruption and political tumult. Phibun’s fall in late 1944 propelled Pridi back into the limelight. He returned to his task of founding democracy through constitutional engineering, overseeing passage of a constitution in 1946, which finally created a fully elective legislature. Remnants of the civilian wing of the People’s Party, and more recent recruits to the Seri Thai resistance, formed political parties in his support. He began to purge the army of Phibun’s militarists, and to restrict military involvement in politics by law. He recognized that urban labour had become important as a result of state-led industrialization, and supported legislation for labour rights and labour protection. He also gave support to anti-colonial struggles in neighbouring territories. In Pridi’s vision, Thailand could play a special role as agent and exemplar in the creation of a new post-colonial, democratic Southeast Asia.
But other forces did not share this vision. The power that the military had built over the previous decade was not easily doused. The army that had invaded the Shan States in 1942 returned home full of resentment at the lack of support for its withdrawal and the sacrifice of its territorial gains. The generals looked with distaste and envy at some of the new businessmen and politicians who wanted to profit from the close nexus of power and profit established since 1932.
The royalists also returned to the scene. Ironically, it was Pridi, the anti-royalist ideologue of 1932, who paved the way. Kicked upstairs to be regent from 1942, he enjoyed good relations with some of the royal family, especially Prajadhipok’s widow, Rambhai Bharni. As a key leader of Seri Thai, he moved closely with some royal kin who joined Seri Thai in Britain. From 1944, he brought back the royalists, possibly as a political counterweight to Phibun and the army. He granted amnesty to 61 political prisoners, mainly the royalists jailed by Phibun, and posthumously restored honours Phibun had stripped from Prajadhipok. In September 1945, he invited Seni Pramoj to return from the USA to become prime minister, and in December he encouraged King Ananda Mahidol to return temporarily to celebrate his twentieth birthday. Many other royalist exiles returned around the same time, and others emerged from self-imposed silence. One noted they were still ‘frightened…because they think their property might be confiscated’, and ‘the extremists among them still hope against hope for a restoration of the Absolute Monarchy as a means of restoring their own lost privileges’.1 Seni Pramoj and his businessman-aesthete brother Kukrit formed the Democrat Party, which opposed Pridi in the Assembly. As Seni noted, despite Pridi’s pro-royalist tilt, ‘We could never get over the suspicion that Pridi was a Communist’.2
The elite contest betw
een militarists, royalists, and pro-Pridi liberals over control of the new nation-state was broadened by urban forces stirred up by the war and the economic dislocation. Japan’s forced ‘loans’ from Thailand had undermined the currency and provoked inflation of over 1000 per cent since 1938. Many officials, whose salaries had not kept pace, were tempted to live off corruption, and many other people off crime. With the disruption of trade, everyday goods were in short supply. Political organization among workers, built by both the Seri Thai resistance and the communists during the war, overflowed into a surge of mass politics with street demonstrations and unionization. In 1945, workers went on strike in rice mills, docks, cement works, oil refineries, and timber yards. The Association of United Workers of Thailand was founded in 1947 and had 60 000 members two years later. As a result of the Allied arms drops and the disarming of the occupying Japanese, the country was awash with arms and ‘Buying arms in Thailand was as easy as buying beer’.3
The elite leaderships experimented with manipulating these new mass politics. Pridi’s group supported labour organizations and used government funds to sponsor mass demonstrations. Militarists teamed up with fledgling bankers to hire communist intellectuals to run newspapers, which lambasted their opponents. This confused period climaxed on 6 June 1946, when the young King Ananda Mahidol was found dead in the palace from a gunshot wound. The case has never been properly explained. Royalist politicians, especially Kukrit and Seni Pramoj, tried to pin the blame on Pridi. Three palace aides, one of whom was an associate of Pridi, were arrested and eventually executed. The police chief who conducted the investigation was a brother-in-law of the Pramoj brothers. He was later found to have bribed witnesses to implicate Pridi. Ananda Mahidol’s younger brother was elevated to the throne as King Bhumibol Adulyadej and returned to Switzerland to complete his education.