Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, Memory. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xi, 245 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$52.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3891-1.
Two central tropes dominate the official royal-nationalist historiography in Thailand. The first trope celebrates how Thailand has never been colonized by a foreign power. Following the official rendering of the country’s history it is the diplomatic skills of Thai kings and their success with modernizing the Thai state along the lines of a modern nation-state at the turn of the twentieth century that secured Thailand’s independence. The second trope laments the territorial losses inflicted on Thailand by foreign colonial powers. Here the Franco-Siamese crisis of 1893—when France sent gunboats towards Bangkok and subsequently established control over the territories later to become Laos—looms large as the embodiment of foreign colonial aggression. An ever-growing corpus of revisionist scholarship has challenged this official perception of Thailand’s history. While a foreign power never formally colonized Thailand, this revisionist reading of Thailand’s past shows how colonialism nonetheless conditioned Thailand’s path to modernity. Breaking with the binary conception of colony versus non-colony, revisionist readings characterize early twentieth-century Thailand as a crypto- or semi-colony. At the same time, scholars have also taken the idea of the lost territories to task, highlighting how it represents an ahistorical depiction of the modern boundaries of a nation-state back in a distant past.
In his book Strate brings the topic of lost territories on to a new ground as he examines how the Thai state over time has made use of what he calls a national humiliation discourse—or a discourse of victimization—to prop up an anti-Western nationalism. As the title of the book indicates, he links the idea of how Thailand lost territories to European colonial powers at the turn of the twentieth century with this humiliation discourse. Strate traces central elements in the genealogy of this discourse through an analysis of a series of well-chosen cases that organizes the book. First, he explores the roots of the humiliation discourse, outlining the historical events that later became a cornerstone of it: unequal treaties, extraterritoriality, and the Franco-Siamese crisis of 1893. The following four chapters deal with the period from the early 1930s to 1946. In these, Strate traces the emergence and proliferation of this discourse of national humiliation in which 1893 becomes what he calls a “chosen trauma.” Strate shows how border negotiations with the French in 1940 were pivotal in the creation of this discourse and how it underscores the military regime’s commitment to a pan-Asian rhetoric during the Second World War. Strate also turns his attention to an anti-Catholicism campaign of the early 1940s and argues that the state rationalized this extreme nationalism as an attempt to confront the country’s history of victimization. Finally, Strate also deals with the international court case concerning the temple Preah Vihear in the early 1960s. In Thai official discourse this temple is synonymous with the lost territories and an integral part of the national humiliation historiography.
With this analysis, Strate demonstrates how a militant anti-Western nationalism linked with the notion of lost territories existed in contrast and in a complex relationship with the well-known and well-researched royalist-nationalist ideology. While the latter stresses the heroism of past kings in securing Thailand’s independence, the former emphasizes the humiliation Thailand has suffered over time from foreign powers. The idea of the lost territories encapsulates the overall sense of the injustice, dishonour, and humiliation that resulted from Western intervention and thereby communicates the extent of past injuries sustained by the body of the nation. Hereby, the nation emerges as both hero and victim—independent but humiliated by Western powers—and the state has replaced the monarchy as guarantor for independence and the vindication of past injuries. With this analysis, Strate follows in the footsteps of, for example, Matthew Copeland (Contested Nationalism and the 1932 Overthrow of the Absolute Monarchy in Siam, PhD dissertation, Australian National University, 1993), in highlighting the existence of an alternative nationalism in Thailand, which the official historiography seeks to silence. Strate also documents the existence of a significant anti-Western discourse in Thailand and brings forward a more nuanced picture of the West’s role in Thailand’s history than is generally acknowledged. The book is well researched, empirically rich and based on an impressive amount of source material collected in Thailand, France, and the US. It sheds new light on questions that are central to the historiographical debate and contributes to the current revisionist historiography.
Søren Ivarsson
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
pp. 196-198