‘Withdrawal’ lessons from Prof Anderson
Paragraph per paragraph, no single article analyses Thai politics with as much incision, depth and rigour as that of Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson, the long-time, legendary Cornell University intellectual who taught several generations of students specialising in Southeast Asian studies and inspired many more.
His passing on Dec 12 merits a re-examination of his best work on Thailand, a 1977 essay entitled “Withdrawal Symptoms: Social and Cultural Aspects of the October 6 Coup”. It remains arguably the best analytical frame on what has been transpiring in Thailand over the past 15 years.
Prof Anderson was an unrivalled scholar from a diverse sort of background with a gift for languages and an ability to tie them to power and structures of society and politics. Those interested in finding out more about him can easily search myriad obituaries and tributes that have crisscrossed cyberspace across continents and in the world’s leading newspapers.
In academia, what makes him stand out was his global fame from regional origins. He was known more as a “Southeast Asianist”, with a firm command of several Southeast Asian languages that included Thai and Bahasa Indonesia, who theorised about the world and was received with great international acclaim for it, a rare and now nearly impossible feat for regional area specialists toiling in the social sciences and humanities dominated by quantitative, pseudo-scientific preferences and biases, often driven by America’s academic industry.
Prof Anderson showed that a scholar well grounded in the classics, history, languages and the humanities can walk tall and tower over mainstream social scientists.
His most famous work, a book entitled Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, exposes the paradox and power of nationalism, how as a concept it is unique and common, ancient and new, and vague and powerful at the same time. Everyone feels his/her own nationalism is unique, although others also have their own brands. Nationalism is age-old but can manifest itself tomorrow and into perpetuity. It is as difficult to say what nationalism constitutes as much as it is puzzling why many millions have been willing to die for it.
In this context, nations came into being only after languages multiplied and enabled peoples to communicate across tribes and communities, after the universal belief in divine absolutism waned, and after we found that humankind was not formed with the advent of the world. The drivers of these profound changes, which Prof Anderson substantiates in extensive detail and research in the book, were initially the revolution in information technology — the printing press, at that time — and later capitalism, a socio-economic organising principle and system that allowed individual nations of peoples to be planted and embedded over time.
On Thailand, Prof Anderson’s openly left-leaning preferences and scholarly rigour came together in Withdrawal Symptoms. It is a detailed and comprehensive account of social formation underpinning socio-economic changes that manifested in the student-led overthrow of the military dictatorship on 14 Oct 1973.
Political scientists would have attributed it simply to “modernisation theory,” the notion that rising income and development will lead to new and growing demands for voice and participation — i.e. economic development leads to political liberalisation and democratisation. But Prof Anderson’s take went deeper to include culture and history, almost a psycho-analysis of what went on and what went wrong as to beget the gory reactionary right-wing backlash against the student movement, labour unions, and other social forces in the hours and days culminating on 6 Oct 1976.
Context mattered, and perhaps here Prof Anderson could have emphasised it in more detail. The Cold War setting was decisive in political outcomes of the 1970s. After university students and other social forces (civil society in today’s terminology) brought down a tyrannical military rule, they were unable to nurture and strengthen the ensuing democratic interval. The anti-military and quasidemocratic movement in the mid-1970s was critically conflated with communist expansionism, whose local outpost was the Communist Party of Thailand, at a time when communism was gaining ground all over Indochina and elsewhere.
As democratic institutions then were too weak and communism too strong a threat, the establishment backlash from the entrenched political order revolving around the military, monarchy and bureaucracy struck back and put down the communist challenge on the one hand and political liberalisation and democratisation on the other. Almost four decades on, it is still difficult to come to terms with the heinous killings and maiming that took place in October 1976 in a context whereby Thailand eschewed the threat of regional communist expansionism which enabled Thai economic development in an under-developed neighbourhood rife with poverty and despair.
Prof Anderson’s “withdrawal” analogy is apt for understanding and learning where Thailand needs to go now in order to move on. In the 1970s, the “withdrawal” originated from the established centres of power that rightly saw communism as an existential threat within a Cold War context, supported by the major Western powers.
In the 21st century, the setting is vastly different. There is no more Cold War to rationalise the crushing of communists who no longer exist. Western democracies no longer condone Thai military coups as in the past. Instead, the spread of communications and information technology has profoundly empowered the masses, compounded by wider access to education locally and abroad. Above all, the modernisation imperative of people with more means and more information wanting more voice is now knocking on Thailand’s corridors of power all over again.
They were partly catalysed by the rise of Thaksin Shinawatra and his party machine. Putting down the Thaksin challenge to the established order was necessary to keep abuse, corruption and usurpation at bay but insufficient to bridge the modernisation gap and cater to the new demands and expectations of an emerging new polity to which the previously neglected masses of society now feel connected.
Thailand’s withdrawal in the early 21st century is understandable — the Thai system was set up this way — but it must be accompanied by a game plan that gives popular rule a privilege over dictatorial guises. This is the only longterm way forward that can be sustained by all concerned, a prescription consistent with Prof Anderson’s written outlook on Thailand.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak is associate professor and director of the Institute of Security and International Studies, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University.