iieiiei1eWrkers - Leicester Research Archive - University of Leicester

3.2 Nationalism and Militarism; Constituents of the Modem Thai State
The modern Thai state emerged out of a combination of the administrative
reforms which separated the bureaucracy into military and civilian spheres and
the introduction of the capitalist mode of production during the reigns of King
Mongkut (1851-1868) and Chulalongkorn (1868-1910), Rama IV and V, which
coincided in turn with the major thrust of the European powers of France and
Great Britain into Southeast Asia. Thailand, formerly Siam, was able to
maintain political sovereignty by making trade and territorial concessions, thereby
avoiding the dilemma which King Mongkut saw as either "to swim up-river to
snake friends with the crocodile or to swim out to sea and hang on to the
whale" (Moffat, 1961:124). However, national independence was only salvaged
at the cost of 'indirect colonialism' in the economic sphere and the institution
of a colonial-style centralised administrative system. For the state, the
bureaucratic reforms consolidated control over the outlying regions where state
power was previously weak. By reducing problems of distance modern
technologies of transportation and communication contributed to the entrenchment
of absolutism in this period (Rajakool, 1984).
The territorial concession of Cambodia, Sipsong Chao Thai in North Vietnam
and the left bank of the Mekhong to France in 1867, 1888 and 1893, and of
the four southern Malay states to Great Britain in 1895 (Tambiah, 1976:476)
radically changed Siam's territorial configuration. The old frontiers created by
past interventions and absorptions were transformed into a new geographical
entity bordered by; French Indo-China to the east and northeast, British Burma
to the west and to the south, British Malaya. As Anthony Giddens has
pointed out;
"The nation-slate, which exists in a complex of other nation-states, is a
set of institutional forms of governance maintaining an ad,ninisiraiive
monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule
being sanctioned by law and direct control of the ,neaiis of internal
and external violence.
(Giddens, 1981:190)
Siam, in this period was an emerging nation-state with developing socio-political
structures and ideologies that fundamentally contradicted the traditional Buddhist
polity. Although external violence and colonial threats had not entirely
disappeared they were less critical than the problem of internal unification.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the state was chronically
threatened with peasant revolts, especially in the northeast and the north
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