Contradictions in Thai Fascism
A Case Study on the Issue of post-Enlightenment Nationalism
In the lull from the end of the Great War until the Japanese declaration of war against the British Empire and Dutch Kingdom, the Kingdom of Siam was in a decent place. The series of territorial concessions to the French Republic and British Empire had finally ceased, diplomatic relations normalized, and Siam had begun to poke its head out onto the world stage with an Expeditionary Force in Europe. But the Siamese still remembered where the old borders were and who their old vassals used to be. Even during the Great War, when tensions flared between French and Siamese troops on the frontlines, some Siamese considered taking back the territories in Laos and Kampuchea from French Indochina while the Métropole was occupied with the German Empire, something which the French knew was a possibility and desperately tried to avoid by calming tensions between its army and the Siamese Expeditionaries.
In 1932, a liberal revolution took place, with the Khana Ratsadon clique among the civil service and military staging a coup d’état and forcing His Majesty King Rama VII to sign a constitution, ending the traditional form of government which had stood since the successful revolt of Sukhothai against Angkor many centuries prior. The new constitutional government was a rocky one, with purges and scandals being the norm. The first Prime Minister was deposed in 1933 in another coup, and his successor, a military man, established a dictatorship which itself lasted until a series of scandals forced him to resign in humiliation in 1938. The following election opened the door for Field Marshall Plaek Phibunsongkram, the new leader of the Khana Ratsadon’s increasingly-fascist military faction, which stood in opposition to its liberal-democratic civil service faction.
The new Prime Minister openly admired Benito Mussolini, importing the Italian regime’s ideas, styles, salutes, and films. Like Mussolini’s, Phibun’s regime was characterized by futurism and a cult of personality revolving around Phibun as the personification of the nation and the state. His decrees aimed to create a new modernized culture, almost always at the expense of traditional Siamese culture. His cult of personality worked to erase the legacy of the monarchy and Siam’s past as a collection of semi-independent kingdoms united in vassalship to Thonburi. He suppressed regional dialects and customs, trying to create a single Siamese identity which was to stretch from Pattani to Chiang Mai. This culminated in Phibun’s greatest surviving legacy: changing the name from “Siam” to “Thailand.” With that one act, he intended to severe Siam from its past and create an entirely new entity which was not a Kingdom ruled by a Raja belonging to an ancient dynasty of divine and priestly origin, but a nation-state built around “Thainess.”
The question naturally arises of “What is Thai?” This is where the contradictions arise. Siam as a kingdom is composed of various Thai-speaking groups. In the Central Valley, in and around Bangkok and Ayutthaya, are the actual Siamese. To the far north are the peoples of what once was Lanna, and in the northeast are the Isan people who are arguably more kindred to the Laotians. In the south are the Southern Tai, inhabiting an area which used to be host to successive Malay regnal realms. Further, there are the questions regarding the Thai-speaking Chinese, the northern Malays, the Cambodians, and the myriad of hill tribes. At its height under the Rattanakosin Kingdom, Siamese territories and vassals extended into modern Malaysia, over all of Laos and Cambodia, into both Burma-proper and the Shan State, and even into the southern tip of Chinese Yunnan and the western third of northern Vietnamese Tonkin.
What is “Siam”? Siam is the states and territories which answer to His Majesty in the Great City, Bangkok. What Phibun wanted to create was impossible with the realities of what Southeast Asia is and always has been. His definition of “Thai” was fuzzy and often stretched to suite his goals. Thai-speakers of Southeast Asian origin? Definitely Thai. Same with Laotians and Shan. The Thai-speaking Chinese? They were Thai if they adopted Thai customs (and pledged loyalty to the Thai state). The Cambodians, especially the ones living the areas which used to be under direct Siamese rule? They don’t necessarily speak Thai, but Siam and Kampuchea (as Angkor) have had a long and intertwined history and shared culture, and Cambodia as a whole was once a Siamese vassal, so sure, they can be Thai. The Malays in the south? Well, they can be sort of Thai, since several Malay states were under Siamese suzerainty (or outright annexed into Siam) and the Siamese have thus left a cultural, ethnic, and linguistic imprint. What about the hill tribes who speak pretty much no Thai, practice their old animism, and never really fell into the Indo-Aryan cultural sphere like the rest of Southeast Asia? Oh f*ck it, they’re Thai because they’re within our borders.
The idea of “Thai” as the Field Marshall tried to craft was a constantly changing hybrid of linguistic, cultural, ethnic and at times geographical identities that never stuck to a single set of criteria, thus resulting in a fragile and unstable identity which has to be held together by the state. Pure nationalism seeks a rebirth of the nation under a state with a new foundation of the people, but what that foundation really should be is not always clear. Phibun hoped that his decrees aimed at creating a new culture would smooth over the problem by forcibly assimilating everyone into the Central Valley Siamese culture, but this never really materialized, especially among the rural regions and the less central cities. Centralized government power alone cannot craft the necessary basis for nationhood intended to form the foundation for a highly unitary and mechanistic state, especially not a nation meant to be totally uniform across an area that had never been culturally unified nor politically centralized in history.
Furthermore, Phibun failed to emulate the most important aspect of Mussolini’s regime: cooperation with the monarchy in an organic relationship. Italian fascism actually did approach the Roman ideal of the Rex and the Dux, wherein a King, the regal figure representing the unity of political and spiritual authority, ruled alongside a Dux, a non-royal granted the duty of wielding the state’s temporal power on the merit of his skill and loyalty. Thai fascism never had anything remotely analogous. The King was a minor living in Switzerland, and the Regent had very little practical ability to influence events. Phibun in many ways usurped the roles of the King for himself. By failing to subordinate himself to a higher figure, he ensured that Thai fascism remained a purely modernist phenomenon, not rooted in any ancient tradition and not capable of bearing any legitimacy beyond Enlightenment notions of popular will.
Phibunsongkram’s reign came to an end in 1944 when the National Assembly voted him out of power following his plan to relocate the capital, which would have completely eradicated the historical connection of his new Thai State to Siam of old. Phibun then revealed himself to be a complete grifter after his visit to the United States. When he returned, he styled himself as very democratic (as a facade for the more typical, non-fascist anocracy), abandoning ultranationalism and Thai futurism. This outcome, of course, should be unsurprising. After all, Siam’s traditional statehood was built on a rich religious and cultural tradition which dated back to 68 AD with the early mandala of Nokor Phnom and endured until 1932, while the pseudo-futurist and modernist state built on artificial centralization imploded after only six years. His pseudo-democratic second tenure, during which he legalized homosexuality, ended in him once again being overthrown, this time in a military coup led by royalist officers who were loyal to the monarchy and the old aristocracy. The result was a swift transition to a more traditionally paternalistic government under General Sarit Thanarat, who managed to largely undo the damage of the 1932 revolution and return to the eternal foundations of Siamese statehood: a Buddhist king, descendent of Mera and Kambu Swayambhuva, crowned by heaven and made divine by rite, who rules over the Great City and all the cities subordinate to it.