The Odd Intellectual Bedfellows: a Cultural Nationalist, Popular-Anarchist, Radical Conservative, Leftist Intelligentsia in Thailand

Thongchai Winichakul

Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

In a recent book on history of Laos, a Thai leading economic historian wrote a preface to the book that he hopes the history would one day help nurture a “federation of the Tai people in the Golden Peninsula”. The rhetoric is from the late 1930s-40s by a fascist regime in Thailand whose ideologue advocated the creation of a Pan-Thai polity in the mainland Southeast Asia. The historian in case is, however, a well known progressive, leftist academic since the late 1970s.

Is this another story of a Left turned Right? Not really. At least the historian and his followers never consider themselves converting to the Right. On the contrary, their current ideas are the further outgrowth of their Leftist ideas that, in their view, remain essential to their ideology. From the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist stance, many former leftists intelligentsia in Thailand have become popular nationalists in certain ways and advocates of the peasants at the same time. The historian in case becomes an advocate of peasant anarchism. Since the late 1980s, furthermore, the historian and his intellectual followers have been the promoters of studies of the ethnic Tai people across the belt from northwestern Vietnam to Assam, in search of the genuine Tai/Thai essence, with the believe that the true essence of Thainess that has been lost in the modernized/ Westernized Thailand remains among the ethnic Tai peasants. This true essence is important in the struggle against the dominance of the West and capitalism.

This intellectual idiosyncrasy can be understood in the larger context of the history of nationalism in Thailand. Since the early 1980s in particular, Buddhist radicalism against the mainstream capitalist development has been strong among the intelligentsia across the ideological spectrum. But both the leftist and Buddhist radicals are the products of the same bourgeois revolution in the early 1970s. Tracing history further back to the period of fascist nationalism in the 30s-40s, and to the royal nationalism in the early 20th c. and late 19th c., we will find more of the seemingly odd ideological alliances among various strands of nationalism. Influences and cross-fertilization among these ideas are very intriguing.

Our conceptual frames of cultural and developmental nationalism are very useful. So are other concepts such as the Left, Right, radicals, conservatives, populist and so on. But their utility is maximized only when they are limited in particular contexts.