Thailand’s internal borders

22 nov 2004

For Thaksin, Tak Bai has been a great political success. Once again he is defender of the nation against external enemies. During his political rise five years ago, he painted himself as the man who could protect Thailand against attacks by the IMF, foreign capital, and globalisation. But as the economy has picked up, that image has lost all its power. The IMF has faded away. Foreign capital is once again good not bad. And globalization is manageable. Just in time, a new foreign threat has appeared. The comments by Islamic leaders, especially Mahathir and Anwar from neighbour Malaysia, “prove” that the southern problem is really a foreign problem. Thaksin has again wrapped himself in the flag. And you can bet that this adjusted form of “new nationalism” will be the undertone in Thai Rak Thai’s election campaign.

All nationalisms tend to play up foreign enemies. There is no easier political message than arousing fears that the nation is under threat from nasty outsiders. But Thailand has a tradition of taking this idea one step further: the nation under threat from problematic insiders linked to nasty outsiders.

Right back to the time the Thai nation was invented a little over a century ago, Thai nationality has had a subtle confusion. Everybody born within the borders is a Thai, but somehow some are less Thai than others.

At first, this gradation depended on language and sophistication. The elite in Bangkok spoke the “right” language and were highly civilised. They were the ideal, perfect Thai. But further away from the capital, and further down the social scale, people spoke different dialects, lived less sophisticated lives, and so were somehow not full members of the nation.

They were told they could escape their disabilities by learning the Central Thai language, and hauling themselves up the socioeconomic scale. Government set up schools and talked a lot about progress. But actually very little was done for over half-a-century, until the coming of the Cold War and the threat of communism. Then the need to educate people and bring “development” became muddled up with ideas of national integration and national security. A whole industry appeared of studying and helping “minorities” which were imagined to be partially outside the national community, and potentially a threat to it. In effect, new internal borders were being drawn, defining certain people as less national than the others.

Three main areas were marked off by these internal borders during the Cold War. They were identified using the old definition – not knowing the “right” language and not being sophisticated – but also by one vital new criterion: being connected somehow to nasty outsiders, especially nasty communist outsiders.

The biggest of these problematic areas was the northeast. Its people were poor, spoke the wrong languages, and lived too close to countries which were falling to communism. The second area was the hills, where hill peoples were even poorer, even more linguistically challenged, and somehow involved in insurgency leaking across the borders. And the third area was the four provinces of the far south with their large Muslim populations, and long history of dissent.

These internal borders are not permanent. Over the last thirty years, as the Cold War has closed, communism has been eclipsed, and the geography and ideology of threat has changed, Thailand’s internal borders have moved quite dramatically.

The border around the northeast has almost completely disappeared. The region may still be poorer than the national average, but no way near as poor as before. Two generations of children have been taught Central Thai. Hundreds of thousands of northeasterners have migrated to Bangkok and become an indispensable part of the city’s economic life. Most important of all, the countries to the east of Thailand have ceased to be a threat. Their communism has metamorphosed into nationalism. They were not interested in retribution for Thailand’s role in the Cold War. Although for a time Vietnam promised to become a serious economic competitor, even that threat has dulled. Thailand’s northeast is no longer an internal problem linked to an external threat.

For the hill peoples, the last twenty years has been more mixed. Many now speak better Central Thai than Cabinet ministers. Lots are quite well off. Many have become useful to the national economy as lures for tourism. But a new external threat has appeared. The hill peoples live close to frontiers which admit some dangerous things – migrants who want Thai nationality, diseases, and drugs. The hill peoples are constantly demonised – rightly or wrongly – for assisting these flows. They are no longer much of a problem in themselves, but they are associated with an external threat. Government policy and public attitudes are similarly ambiguous. For some time, the hill peoples seemed to be getting a better press and more rights. The internal border seemed to be coming down. But in the last few years that trend has reversed.

The fate of the internal border in the south has been more complex. It has shifted. The problem area used to be four provinces but now it is only three. Satun has moved across the internal border. This shift is really a change of definition. The problem area is no longer “Muslim majority”, but “Malay-language-speaking-majority” (Satun’s Muslims speak southern Thai). From a Bangkok perspective, the three provinces have refused to adopt the right language, and have links through Malaysia to new external threats in the Islamic world.

In their initial reaction to the Tak Bai tragedy, government figures explicitly blamed “leaders” from Malaysia. Thailand’s military leaders constantly talk about “separatists” based in Malaysia. The nationalists have whipped up resentment against the “interference” in Thailand’s internal affairs by Mahathir and other outsiders. These are all ways of magnifying the external threat and evading the internal problem. They make it harder to find a political solution that might be lasting. They build the internal border in the south even higher.