Racial tensions face perilous tipping point
The influential Belgium-based International Crisis Group’s most recent report recommends highlevel dialogue both within Thailand and with the country’s development partners to overcome a polarisation of society. This diagnosis confirms similar investigations by organisations like the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and notes that dialogue, at present, seems impossible. Nonetheless, negotiations on restoring democracy are essential to avoid a downward spiral of worsening ethnocentrism and xenophobia.
A purely pragmatic reason for an urgent solution to prevent Thailand’s descent into the abyss is to save the economy. As pointed out in the 2015 Global Creativity Index, where Thailand ranked 82nd out of 139 countries, creativity relies on a cosmopolitanism in which foreign workers and ethnic minorities all play a role in effecting economic and social progress. Yet, on the GCI’s sub-indicator for ethnic and religious tolerance, Thailand ranked 127th in the world, above only Jordan, Tunisia and Egypt.
Analysis of the 2015 World Values Survey database confirms this picture of increasing intolerance. Using 2013 data, Thailand ranks in the lowest quintile on three questions focusing on neighbours you would not want, namely those of a different race, immigrants or foreign workers, and people speaking a different language, together with one question about people you do not trust, namely those of a different nationality. Moreover, in a composite index of these four questions, Thailand ranks in the lowest decile. Sorrier still, compared to 2007 data, Thailand has become significantly more xenophobic on every metric.
The reasons behind increasing chauvinism lie both in current events and in Thailand’s history. Thais taking such surveys may be responding to the polarised political situation and adopting stereotypically negative views of other Thais or foreigners. For example, a Thai may be thinking of “northern secessionists” or “Thai Lao red shirts”, and of Cambodian “political agitators”, Malay “bandits”, and hill tribe “drug dealers”, or of “interfering” Americans and Europeans or “meddling’” supranational organisations and NGOs.
At least some of these fears are rooted in history, thus the worldview of xenophobic individuals must be engaged with. For example, Thailand has a neo-colonial economy which borrows from European colonial models, primarily the British and French. Thailand employs two million poorly-paid Myanmar, Cambodians and Lao who work in dirty, dangerous and difficult conditions. Rather than improve those conditions and make the jobs attractive to Thais, Thailand’s labour force has been subcontracted in order to compete globally. Thus, the neo-colonialism pervading the economy negatively affects how those outside the heart of the system are perceived.
Moreover, in following a system of provincial governorships and a heavily centralised bureaucracy, Thailand is governing in a manner introduced in the late 19th century. This quasi-imperial system in its most extreme form exists in the deep South, where children cannot learn their own language in state-run schools. The decentralisation process has now stalled, meaning Bangkok remains the most primate city on earth, with regional centres and conurbations struggling to develop independently, a problem which affects the social standing of their ethnic minorities.
Moreover, in the same period and from the same countries which introduced colonialism and imperialism to Thailand, the country developed its own racialist doctrine. Thai race concepts evolved as a direct reaction to the expansion of French Indochina, as in one traumatising move in 1893 a French flotilla defeated Siam’s defences and laid siege to the Royal Palace, a move which led to France obtaining Laos and western Cambodia from Thailand. In order to prevent French sovereignty extending over Lao and Cambodian citizens in Siam, a greater “Thai” identity was claimed for all, based on race and citizenship.
To this notion a more concentrated fear of the internal and external “Other” was added in the 1910s and 1920s, mainly focusing on the Chinese in polemics in the press. These were, nonetheless, merely drawing on the Western concept of the “Yellow Peril” in an attempt to build a nation state in the face of genuine threats from Chinese strikes and rising Chinese nationalism, then communism.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Thai racial ideology found its greatest expression under Field Marshall Pibulsonggram and his 12 Cultural Mandates. Based on Japanese imperialism and Western fascism, the Mandates introduced a form of weak totalitarianism which governed how Thais should think and behave, especially regarding the Chinese and the regional minorities, whose identities were to be erased in favour of a pan-Thai empire, and as regards foreigners — who were not to be trusted.
While the post-war period saw some of Pibul’s reforms reversed, Thailand was never ‘’de-Nazified’’. Instead, it was to return Laos and Cambodia, recaptured in 1941, to the French, and to feed the British and American armies. It was then taken under the wing of the United States, soon becoming a bulwark against communism. And as the Cold War turned hot, Thailand witnessed increasing xenophobia as Saigon, Vientiane and Phnom Penh fell.
These social pathologies which sustain the present prejudices have to be addressed, and urgently, to avoid the march towards totalitarianism. Paternalistic authoritarianism and praetorianism now pervade the Thai state in ways not experienced since the 1970s.
It is precisely those countries which most influenced the formative stages of the Thai nation state that need to establish a dialogue with the country on how best to resuscitate democracy’s fallen body before it adopts a rictus grin.
Thailand has formed international partnerships with many western countries, including the UK, Germany and the US and the country still needs to be empowered to reject its racialist past by itself, and in a post-modern world, this requires significant economic aid, like additional assistance in restructuring the fishing industry and subsidies for alternative energy, in order to steer the economy away from neo-colonialism.
Continuing symbolic expressions of friendship, not necessarily with the military but with the Thai people, such as the recent agreement with the EU on aviation safety, would also defuse the xenophobia and risk of race-based repression.