What Thailand means for Southeast Asia

Once upon a time Thailand was the bulwark of American power in the heart of Southeast Asia. It was a strong, anti-communist state that was easy to govern because of a rich agricultural heartland protected by mountains and the relative absence of ethnic or religious conflict. Great moral authority emanated from the royal palace under King Bhumibol Adulyadej, still on the throne today, whose pillars of power were the Royal Thai Army, noble families and bureaucratic elites and the reverent masses. The military was, in turn, buttressed by force of arms, the king’s aura, American patronage and control of state corporations. Rice farming was the basis of the economy, and the peasant farmers revered the king, who dispensed wisdom, infrastructure funds and development aid. The oldest US ally in the region, Thailand served as a staging post for the American military during the Vietnam War.

Thailand had other advantages, too. It formed an identifiable nation from the 13th century, after the Siamese migrated from southern China and carved a space for themselves over the succeeding centuries through conflicts with the neighboring Khmer and Burmese kingdoms. Thailand has never been colonized, unlike the rest of Indochina. It dealt with rival British and French colonists, and collaborated with the Japanese before switching to the American side in World War II, in order to preserve its independence. Hence the Western world did not humiliate the Thais as much as it did others; the Thais have fewer chips on their shoulders or axes to grind. An intricate and organized bureaucracy has existed here for centuries, yet it has been a flexible one that never condemned itself to the wrong side of history by resisting Western technology. In modern times Siam became Thailand, the word “Thai” loosely associated with the notion of a “free people.” The Thais established a constitutional monarchy after a military intervention in 1932 and have retained it despite numerous subsequent coups.