The Lost Territories: Thailand's history of national humiliation

Abstract

During the last decades of the absolute monarchy the authorities banned discussion of the l893 loss of Lao territories, since the image of King Chulalongkorn submitting to French demands to cede Siamese territory damaged the prestige of the Thai monarchy (42). [...]insult was added to injury in 1962 when in a controversial decision the International Court of Justice in The Hague awarded sovereignty over the Preah Vihear temple to Cambodia.

Reviewed by

Patrick Jory

The Lost Territories: Thailand's history of national humiliation By Shane Strate. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2015.

During a recent overland visit to Cambodia I was completing an immigration form at a border checkpoint near Anlong Veng in the northeast of the country, just across the Thai-Cambodia border, when a stern-looking immigration official asked me where I had entered from. I told him the name of the checkpoint on the Thai side of the border, "Chong Sangam." The official immediately corrected me, giving the Khmer pronunciation, adding in a harsh tone, "You are not in Thailand now. You are in Cambodia!" Not wanting to jeopardize my visa application I repeated the name to him, this time according to the Khmer pronunciation. I got my visa.

This incident brought home to me the strength of the feelings that the drawing of borders in mainland Southeast Asia during the colonial period over a century ago still provokes. In this case feelings on both sides of the border were particularly raw, because of the escalation of the conflict between the Thai and Cambodian governments over the sovereignty of the region adjacent to the spectacular twelfth-century Preah Vihear temple, situated on a clifftop bordering the two countries. The bitterness on the Thai side is well over a century old, dating from its loss of sovereignty over this region to the French in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Memory of "The Lost Territories"-including the Lao territories on the "leftbank" of the Mekong river (present day Laos), as well as much of Cambodia-is deeply etched into the Thai nationalist imagination.

In The Lost Territories: Thailand's history of national humiliation we now have a book that traces how this painful episode in Thai history has become a central motif in Thai nationalism. Shane Strate refers to this as "National Humiliation" discourse. It bears a strong resemblance to a similar phenomenon in another semicolonized Asian county, China, which also seeks to end a "century of humiliation" at the hands of the European colonial powers. The phrase "Never Forget National Humiliation" has become a staple of contemporary Chinese nationalism (192). Although more subdued in the Thai case, beneath the surface of Thai nationalism there is also deep resentment at its humiliation at the hands of the European powers in the colonial period. Strate shows how this resentment has been a constant in Thai nationalism over the last century, regularly bubbling to the surface.

The notion that "Thailand was never colonized"-by contrast to the remaining countries of Southeast Asia and most of Asia-is central to Thai nationalist historiography. Strate refers to it as Thailand's "chosen myth" (192). It is so central that few tourists to the country are unaware of this proud boast, since it features prominently in the tourism literature. Yet the fact that the Thai kingdom lost substantial portions of its territory to the French and British colonial empires, that the kingdom's economy during the colonial period was largely in the hands of the British, and that extraterritoriality further limited the Siamese government's sovereignty, present a problem to the coherence of this central myth. For this reason there is a counter-narrative of Thai history: that Thailand was in reality a "semi-colony." In times of tension with the west this counter-narrative often comes to the fore.

Also problematic is the fact that Siam's kings, who are otherwise portrayed as the heroes of Thailand's independence in "royalist-nationalist" historiography, presided over the losses of these territories and the compromising of Siam's sovereignty. During the last decades of the absolute monarchy the authorities banned discussion of the l893 loss of Lao territories, since the image of King Chulalongkorn submitting to French demands to cede Siamese territory damaged the prestige of the Thai monarchy (42).

Strate traces the process by which the "Lost Territories" have been a theme of political rhetoric and nationalist history writing from the early twentieth century through to the 1960s. The rhetoric grew stronger following the 1932 "revolution" and the establishment of a nationalist regime that soon fell under the control of the military. The nationalist ideologue Wichit Wathakan played a key role during this period in politicizing the issue of the "Lost Territories." The Japanese invasion in 1941 and the agreement with the Thai government opened up the opportunity to reclaim these territories. During the war, with Thailand allied to Japan and the Vichy French government, Thailand succeed in reclaiming most of the "Lost Territories" in what was acclaimed at the time as an historic triumph for the Thai nation. Anti-French sentiment was so strong at the time that it led to the Thai government's persecution of the Catholic Church, which had become a symbol of French imperialism. But this triumph was short-lived. Following Japan's defeat in the war the French successfully pressured the Thai government to return the recently recovered territories to France in 1946. This was a second blow to Thai nationalist pride, almost as severe as the traumatic 1893 incident, when the French annexed from the Siamese kingdom the "leftbank" of the Mekong river, which would late become Laos.

Further insult was added to injury in 1962 when in a controversial decision the International Court of Justice in The Hague awarded sovereignty over the Preah Vihear temple to Cambodia. The decision was met with "disbelief and defiance" in Thailand (179). Huge protest rallies were held around the country-some of the largest in Thailand's history. As one Thai protestor at the time put it, "How can Preah Vihear possibly belong to Cambodia when all Battambang [the former Thai-controlled province where Preah Vihear was located] was ours?" (175). Later, Thailand's Prime Minister Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat gave a speech in which he predicted that "sooner or later Phra Viharn [the Thai pronunciation of Preah Vihear] shall revert once more to Thailand" (186).

This rigorously researched and readable book will therefore do much to help explain the strength of feelings evident in the recent recurrence of this old dispute between Thailand and Cambodia over Preah Vihear. But it also helps expose and elucidate an imperialist element in Thai nationalism itself that can be sparked when the moment is right. Among conservative sections of the Thai elite it has not been forgotten that the territories that are now Laos and Cambodia, and to a lesser extent Siam's former Malay vassal states to the south that now form part of Malaysia, were once part of a much larger Thai empire that was dismantled by French and British imperialism. Today, ASEAN economic integration and the size and dynamism of the Thai economy by comparison with its mainland Southeast Asian neighbours may just provide the opportunity for these "Lost Territories" to be brought back once again into the orbit of the Thai state.