Global Vs CommuneGlobalizers Vs Communitarians: Post-May 1992 Debates Among Thai Public Intellectuals

1
Globalizers vs Communitarians:
Post-May 1992 Debates among Thai Public Intellectuals
1

Asst. Dr. Kasian Tejapira
Faculty of Political Science
Thammasat University

Abstract: In the aftermath of the May 1992 popular uprising and massacre, even
though dismally little progress has been made with regard to institutional reform of
the Thai state structure, there has been an upsurge of, as well as an intense public
interest in intellectual debates on public issues in the Thai mass media. Serious
public discussion has been taking place on the pages of the popular and business
press among a substantial number of highly-educated, politically vocal, publicly
influential scholars concerning alternative visions and programs of socio-economic
and political reform of the country. With the contours of their ideas beginning
gradually, spontaneously and half-self-consciously to cohere and take shape, these
scholars, once united in opposing the return of military dictatorship during the May
democratic movement, now express clearly different and even opposite opinions on
reform, so much so that it is possible to divide them opinion-wise into two groups i.e.
the globalizers who advocate reform of the Thai state, economy and society along the
globalization trends versus the communitarians who are sceptical and critical of
changes associated with globalization and instead call for a radical reversal of
existing pattern of development so that rural and urban local communities may be
politically empowered to sustain their traditional culture and control their local
natural resources autonomously.

Introduction
In his keynote speech entitled "Watthanatham khong khonchanklang thai" ("The
Cultural Dimensions of the Thai Middle Class") to the Political Economy Centre's
Third Annual Seminar on "The Middle Class and Democracy in Thailand" held at
Chulalongkorn University on November 18, 1992, that is five months after the May
popular uprising which toppled the military-led government of Prime Minister
General Suchinda Kraprayoon, Professor Nidhi Aeusrivongse of the Faculty of
Humanities, Chiang Mai University, stated that in contrast with the European middle
class or the erstwhile Thai royalty and nobility, "the Thai middle class has not

1
This paper was originally prepared for the panel on "Direction and Priorities of
Research on Southeast Asia" at the Annual Meeting of the U.S. Association for Asian Studies in
Honolulu, 11-14 April 1996.

Kasi an Tej api r a 2
produced its own thinkers. Hence the lack of redefinitions (of key cultural ideas and
values) and the absence of a philosophical foundation for enhancing its wealth and
power."
2

Nidhi's judgement accords with the opinions of Dr Anek Laothamatas and Dr Seksan
Prasertkul, two prominent and influential political scientists of the 14 October 1973-
uprising generation.
3
When this issue was further probed in an informal discussion
with the two, it turned out that actually the Thai middle class did have its own
thinkers or intellectuals after all. This was especially evident during the period
leading to and following the 14 October 1973 popular uprising when the middle-class
intelligentsia was politically very active, vociferous and prolific.
4
The trouble was
that the overwhelming majority of them then embraced the extreme leftist doctrine of
"Marxism-Leninism and Mao Tse-tung's Thought" a la CPT as their guiding
ideology.

2
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Watthanatham khong khonchanklang thai" [The Cultural
Dimensions of the Thai Middle Class], in Sungsidh Piriyarangsan and Pasuk Phongpaichit, eds.
Chonchanklang bon krasae prachathipatai thai [The Middle Class and Thai Democracy] (Bangkok:
The Political Economy Centre, Faculty of Economics, Chulalongkorn University & Friedrich Ebert
Stiftung, 1993), p.65.
For a succinct and dependable account of the May 1992 incident in English, see
Amnesty International, Thailand: The Massacre in Bangkok (London: International Secretariat,
Amnesty International, 1992).

3
Seksan, the most prominent and charismatic student leader of the 14 October
1973 uprising, is generally regarded as the living symbol and personification of the rebellious spirit of
the 14 October democratic movement whereas Anek was head of the Chulalongkorn University
student organization few years later. The two left the city along with approximately 3,000 students,
workers and intellectuals to join the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT)-led armed struggle in the
jungle in the aftermath of the right-wing backlash to the radical student movement and the massacre
and military coup of 6 October 1976 that ensued. Both defected from the CPT in the early 1980s, left
the jungle, went to the United States, and later earned a doctoral degree in political
science/government, Seksan at Cornell University and Anek at Columbia. Incidentally, the two are
now members of the Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University. Anek is best known for his
first published book, Business Associations and the New Political Economy of Thailand (Singapore:
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies & Westview Press, 1992), which is based on his doctoral
dissertation. As to Seksan's academic achievement, see Benedict Anderson's generous "Radicalism
after Communism in Thailand and Southeast Asia," New Left Review, 202(November-December
1993), 12-13.

4
Originally a Russian term dating back to the 1860s, the intelligentsia is "almost
exclusively defined by "its alienation from and hostility towards the state." This characterization
seems perfectly to fit the ethos of Thai student and intellectual activists of the 1970s generation. See
Russell J acoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic
Book, Inc., Publishers, 1987), p.107.

For the Thai urban middle class who mostly worked in the modern capitalist
economic sector and enjoyed a Western consumerist lifestyle, this radical ideological
orientation of their intelligentsia gave an ironic twist to J ulien Benda's notion of "la
trahison des clercs". Their revolutionary narodnik populism represented a wholesale
negation and rejection of the middle class' conditions of existence and aspirations,
condemning the latter as having a double political character, potentially revolutionary
on the one hand and yet unreliable and irresolute on the other, unless being subjected
to thorough ideological reeducation and transformation.
5

And of course, the middle-class intelligentsia lived up to their beliefs. Not only did
they turn their back to the middle-class customers of their ideas, they also left the
universities and the cultural establishment behind and joined the struggle of the
workers and peasants in the factories and the countryside, eventually becoming
guerilla fighters in the communist rural insurgency, only to defect from the
communist movement and come out of the jungle en masse about five years later,
completely disillusioned and demoralized.
The foregoing digression provides a necessary historical backdrop to another
significant judgement of Nidhi concerning the political attitude of the Thai middle
class that it was very unlikely that, having gained some additional political power in
consequence of the May 1992 uprising, they would use that power to help alleviate
the plight of their poor and powerless compatriots in the countryside.
6
That negative
and pessimistic prediction is undoubtedly true and fairly accurate. However, one
should put it in historical perspective and not lose sight of the middle-class
intelligentsia's valiant attempt to build up a tripartite alliance of students/intellectuals,
workers and peasants after the 14 October 1973 uprising even though that attempt
was later crushed by the state security apparatus and then broken by the radical
students/intellecutals' conflict with the CPT leadership.
7

5
Hence, it is inaccurate to argue, as Anek did, that after the 14 October 1973
uprising, most political observers failed to spot the "real" middle class. Rather, they were looked
down upon and marginalized ideologically by the leftist intelligentsia. See Anek Laothamatas, "Reu
pen yak thi phoeng teun: chonchanklang kab kanmeuang thai" [Sleeping Giant Awakens ?: The
Middle Class in Thai Politics], Thammasat University J ournal, XIX:1(J anuary-April 1993), 47.

6
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Chatniyom nai khabuankan prachathipatai" [Nationalism in
the Democratic Movement], Sinlapawatthanatham, XIII:11(September 1992), 196.

7
For further details, see Anderson, "Radicalism after Communism," pp.6-9.

In view of the ideological inclination of the middle-class intelligentsia of the 1970s'
generation, the change in the general ideological atmosphere among their present-day
counterparts could not be more drastic. Now, broadly representing the middle-class
interests and concerns, being globalized in their outlook and liberal democratic in
their political views (subject, of course, to their varying emphases and
interpretations), well-educated (in the country or abroad), and multi-lingual (in
foreign and local languages), they consist of 1) the state economic and technical
technocrats, 2) the executives, consultants, researchers, developers, creative designers
of the private business sector, 3) intellectuals working in various kinds of media,
cultural, educational and academic institutions, both public and private and 4)
intellectuals in non-government organizations (NGOs) in both the urban and rural
areas. Armed with such postmodern communication paraphernalia as personal
computers, cellular phones, fax machines, satellite dishes, cable TVs, CD or digital
cassette tape players, VDO or laser disc players, pack-links, E-mail services, etc,
which were used so creatively and effectively in waging a communication guerilla
warfare against the state's misinformation encirclement campaign during the May
1992 uprising, they have since then been busy arguing, advocating and debating
alternative visions and programs of socio-economic and political reform of the
country in their published articles, radio news commentaries, and TV advertisements
and talk shows.
These four groups of middle-class intellectuals were united during the May uprising
by their common opposition to military dictatorship and call for a stronger civil
society and a less centralized bureaucratic state. It has been an ardent wish of
Thirayuth Boonmi, a self-styled "society's thinker" (read "strategic intellectual"),
former student leader in the 1970s and at present a lecturer in the Faculty of
Sociology and Anthropology, Thammasat University, to build on this capitalist liberal
democratic alliance so as to prevent any recurrence of a military coup and push for a
gradual, step-by-step reform of the Thai state and decentralization of power, his
hoping against hope, as it were, that differences of opinion within this loose alliance
about the direction of national economic development would not surface and
degenerate into an open political conflict.
8

8
See, for example, Thirayuth's spirited debate with Professor Saneh Chamarik in a
seminar organized by the Campaign for Popular Democracy (CPD) and reported in the CPD
newsletter:- "sewana-wiwatha: kansewana khong naktosoo 3 run: 20 pi 14 tula kao to pai khong
prachachon" [Dialogue-Dialectic: Dialogue among Three Generations of Fighters: The Twentieth
Anniversary of the 14 October Incident and the Next Step of the People], J odmaikhao Kho.Ro.Po.,
I:4(J anuary 1993), 5-15.
And yet, this was not to be for within a year after the May 1992 uprising, differences
of opinion about both the direction of economic development and the emphasis of
long-term political reform became express and explicit in the published writings and
newspaper columns of leading, influential, university-based, middle-class thinkers
and commentators on public affairs, or shall we say, after Russell J acoby, "public
intellectuals".
9
So much so that they may be divided, for the purpose of clarification
of their ideas and positions (which undeniably involves a certain measure of
simplification) and not their respective political categorization, into two distinct
groups i.e. the globalizers vs the communitarians. The implicit and explicit debates
between them, their various points of agreement and disagreement, will be drawn by
matching the ideas and positions of representative opinion leaders from the two
groups and then the result critically analysed. These will include Suvinai Paranavalai
vs Chatthip Nartsupha on economic reform, Anek Laothamatas vs Saneh Chamarik
on political reform, and Chai-anan Samudavanija vs Nidhi Aeusrivongse on state-
society relationship reform. The paper will then conclude with a very brief criticism
of some theoretical/philosophical attempts at a synthesis of the two groups' ideas.
Before proceeding to the main account of the debates between the globalizers vs the
communitarians, another digression is in order. This has to do with a peculiar
characteristic of the present cultural political situation in Thailand which provides the
setting for these debates, namely a massive part-time migration of university scholars
from the academy to the mass media. If, as Russell J acoby has argued, the current
cultural political scene in the United States is marked by a relative paucity of
(younger, left-wing) public intellectuals, then the one in Thailand is precisely its
opposite, with the preponderance, overexposure and perhaps overexploitation of
university scholars in the print and electronic media. Of the six protagonists in the
debates listed above, four are university lecturers while the other two (Saneh and
Chai-anan) are retired professors now active in NGO research institutes. Three of
them have their own weekly columns in various business or popular newspapers and

Thirayuth's unique status and aura in the eyes of the Thai urban middle-class public
can be gauged from the fact that he alone among the Thai academics is able single-handedly to call a
much-publicized personal press conference eagerly attended by throngs of news reporters to air his
critical analysis and prediction of the political situation. Normally, other Thai public intellectuals have
to resort to writing articles or giving interviews to do the same thing.

9
Keeping in mind his own admonition that: "Too many definitions, too much
caution, kill thought," I follow Russell J acoby in using the term "public intellectuals" here to denote
"writers and thinkers who address a general and educated audience," excluding those "whose works
are too technical or difficult to engage a public." J acoby, The Last Intellectuals, p.5.

magazines and in one case even a radio talk show while another two occasionally
publish prominent articles and interviews in the press. Their appearances on radio
and TV talk shows and news commentary programs are much sought after, fairly
frequent and highly appreciated (see Table on the following page). Moreover, they
are representative of a substantial and growing number of their colleagues who are
moving further and further away from the classroom and ivory tower into the studio
and media circus.
Four factors, I believe, account for this phenomenon i.e. market demand, pay,
publicity, and politics. During the past decade or so, and especially after the May
1992 uprising, Thailand has seen a spectacular growth and diversification of the print
and electronic media, in particular the business ones, in response to the insatiable
demand for more, better and faster information which in turn is occasioned by the
fastest-growing economy in the world (arond 8 % annually according to a recent
World Bank report).
10
Faced with an increasingly globalized and volatile "bubble"
economic environment, the nouveau riche, well-educated and more sophisticated,
reading, listening and viewing Thai middle-class audience need quality information,
particularly informed analyses, learned insights, research-based predictions and
expert advice, to keep themselves abreast of a myriad of factors affecting their
fortune, be it domestic or global, economic or otherwise. These are largely held to be
beyond the capacity of existing media personnel to deliver and require the specialized
knowledge of "nakwichakan" or academics. Taking advantage of the more open and
tolerant cultural political atmosphere and the greater liberalization of the state-
controlled electronic media after the May 1992 uprising, a lot of university scholars
have since then aired their usually liberal and radical views to the

10
"World News," Radio broadcast, BBC, London, December 31, 1995.

Table: Data on Some Post-May 1992 Leading Public Intellectuals
Name

Suvinai Paranavalai

Chatthip Nartsupha

Anek Laothamatas

Saneh Chamarik

Chai-anan Samudavanija

Nidhi Aeusrivongse

Academic Position

Associate Professor,
Faculty of Economics,

Associate Professor,
Faculty of Economics,
Chulalongkorn University

Assistant Professor, Faculty
of Political Science,

Professor, Faculty of
Political Science,
(retired)

Political Science,
Chulalongkorn University
(retired)

Humanities, Chiang Mai
University

Public Venue

Phoojadkan & Krungthep
Thurakij business dailies,a
radio talk-show

Sangsan Publishing House
Co., Ltd., which he co-
founded and has published
many books of his own and
the Chatthip School

Matichon Sudsapda weekly
magazine

Local Development
Institute, giving occasional
talks and interviews in the
print & electronic media

Phoojadkan Raiwan
business daily, Phoojadkan
Raisapda business weekly,
Chiwit Tongsoo weekly
magazine, Institute of
Public Policy Studies

Matichon daily newspaper,
Matichon Sudsapda,
Phoojadkan Raiwan,
Trendy Man monthly
magazine,
Sinlapawatthanatham
monthly magazine

generally more conservative Thai public through various media channels.
And of course the supply is there waiting. The best of Thai universities, so far, are
still state ones and these are notorious for their scandalously low pay but very flexible
working time in contrast with their private counterparts. Thus, whereas a Ph.D.
graduate from abroad earns for a start a mere pittance of around US$ 400.00 per
month by teaching in a state university, the students he/she teaches, after having
graduated with a bachelor's degree, will immediately make as much and most likely
more as an ordinary employee in a commercial bank. So there is every sound
economic reason for an academic to find time to write articles for a business daily
that will fetch US$ 80.00 apiece or to host one or more radio and TV talk shows that
all in all can pay him/her many times the amount of his/her university salary.
11

Another comparison is telling here. To write a 20 to 30 page-long article with
lengthy footnotes, learned quotations, thorough bibliography for a Thai academic
journal will earn one about US$ 40 - 80, take many months or even years to be
published, and have a readership of around a few hundred people who are mostly
obligated and hence unappreciative students. On the contrary, a short article of 3 to 4
page-long typescript published in a newspaper or magazine will earn one US$ 80 -
100, take only days or at most a week or so to come out, and reach a much wider
audience of many thousand voluntary and concerned citizens-readers who have ready
at their disposal far more varied and effective means and ways to react or respond
politically or otherwise to the article's message.
12
In the same vein, one does not
have to be a publicity maniac to appreciate how much more appealing and rewarding
it is to appear before a TV camera and utter sound bites to countless if anonymous
viewers in front of the screens than to lecture to a half-empty auditorium of yawning
and distracted students.
And last but not least, given the fact that the May 1992 uprising was widely regarded
as a traumatic symptom of the deep-seated political malaise and a potential turning-
point in the political development of the country, there have been frenetic searches
for a way out of the vicious circle of [vote-buying] ->[corrupt civilian government] -
>[military coup] ->[military dictatorship] ->[another constitution & fresh general

11
For example, Dr Chirmsak Pinthong, the most popular academic-cum-TV talk
show host in the country, is alleged to have earned as much as US$ 12,000 a month from his hosting
of various radio and TV programs, which is perhaps ten times more than his salary as an associate
professor in the Faculty of Economics at Thammasat University. To be fair, Dr Chirmsak has flatly
denied this.

12
Thus, Dr Seksan Prasertkul, lecturer in political science and one of the finest and
most perceptive newspaper columnists in Thailand today, spoke self-contentedly in a panel discussion
at Thammasat University some time ago that, given the fact that the Phoojadkan Raiwan or Manager
Daily newspaper, which published his popular weekly column, had a circulation of around 80,000,
and supposing that only 5 % of its readers read his column (the actual figure should be much higher),
that would mean he had access to and some influence over the mind of many thousand people on a
regular basis.

elections] ->[vote-buying] ->ad infinitum and high expectations of better political
things to come.
13
For better or worse, the academic community is expected, perhaps
misguidedly, to come up with a clear-cut and ready-made prescription, a universal
remedy, a panacea, so to speak, to cure all Thai political ills. Being good citizens
themselves and with a heightened sense of civic responsibility and self-importance,
many an academic have risen to the occasion. Hence the large-scale publicization of
Thai academic intellectuals.

Suvinai Paranavalai vs Chatthip Nartsupha
If the common ground between the globalizers and the communitarians is their
critical opposition to the overcentralized but underunified and inefficient Thai
bureaucratic state, then the primary and most obvious difference between the two
groups is the content of state reform they respectively propose. While the globalizers
emphasize economic liberalization i.e. reducing state control over and intervention in
the private business sector, deregulating business transactions, making state economic
planning and policy-making transparent and open to public scrutiny especially by
representatives of the private sector and academics, honoring contractual obligations
with each and every private party without any bias or discrimination, etc., the
communitarians stress instead political and economic democratization i.e. reducing
state control over and intervention in local communities, recognizing and respecting
local communities' customary rights to self-government as well as to the
protection/conservation and development/utilization of local natural resources,
empowering local communities to participate in the economic decision-making
process alongside the state and private sector.
14

13
Since the overthrow of the absolute monarchy and the establishment of a
constitutional form of government in J une 1932, Thailand has seen nine successful military coups,
eight aborted ones, 15 constitutions, 35 constitutional amendments, 18 general elections, 21 prime
ministers, 51 cabinets, one protracted but eventually failed rural communist insurgency and two urban
popular uprisings. Of those 64 years, almost half were under overt or covert military rule. The
foregoing data are adapted from Chai-anan Samudavanija et al, Khomul pheunthan keung satawas
kanplianplaeng kanpokkhrong thai [Basic Data on Half a Century of Governmental Change in
Thailand] (Bangkok: Social Science Association of Thailand, 1992).

14
For the general communitarian position, see a representative document,
Community Forestry: Declaration of the Customary Rights of Local Communities: Thai Democracy at
the Grassroots (Bangkok: Local Development Institute, 1992). As to the general globalist position,
probably a crisp reply given to a newspaper reporter by a member of the BMS (Business Management
Services) group of high-profile business executives with political ambition, which surfaced shortly and
In short, both groups want to change the unequal power relationship between state
and society that now obtains in Thailand in favor of the latter but with different
emphasis i.e. the globalizers want to reduce state power over the private sector
whereas the communitarians want to reduce state power over local communities. It is
from this fundamental difference that other disagreements between the two groups
grow, beginning with the desirable direction of economic reform.
In recent years, it is hardly possible to find any two Thai books on economics which
propose such diametrically opposite ways to develop the Thai economy as Suvinai
Paranavalai's Borisat yipun kab kanpennic khong prathetthai [J apanese Firms and the
NIC-ization of Thailand] (1989) and Chatthip Nartsupha's Prawatsat kanpatiwat
utsahakam priabthiab [A Comparative History of Industrial Revolutions] (1993).
Both are their respective authors' academic magna opera so far. In the former case, it
was the most significant and path-breaking part of Suvinai's self-critical, revisionist,
J apanese-language economic research, which finally won him the very demanding
and highly prestigious rombunhakase doctoral degree from Hosai University in J apan
in early 1992. As to the latter book, it represented the crowning achievement of
Chatthip's two-decade long pioneering work in Thai political economic history as
well as his courageous and resolute, diligent and persevering training and grooming
of younger, radical political economists and historians who together constituted the
so-called Political Economy Group and later the Political Economy Centre at the
Faculty of Economics, Chulalongkorn University, and whose collective corpus of
socialist-Marxist historical researches has formed the Chatthip School of Thai
historiography.
15

After comparing the history of three different models of industrial revolution (i.e.
capitalist democracy, fascism and communism) in seven countries (Britain, France,

briefly after the May 1992 uprising, best captured its gist, namely "a free economy and liberal
democratic politics."

15
Bearing testimony to the Chatthip School's substantial academic presence was a
bulky collection of its members' historical studies co-edited by Chatthip himself and Somphop
Manarangsan entitled Prawatsat setthakij thai jon theung pho.so. 2484 [Thai Economic History up to
B.E.2484] (Bangkok: Thammasat University Press & Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks
Project Foundation, 1984). For a critical overview of the Chatthip School in the context of the post-
1973 & 1976 new historiography and political economic studies in Thailand, see Thongchai
Winichakul, "The Changing Landscape of the Past: New Histories in Thailand Since 1973," J ournal of
Southeast Asian Studies, 26:1(March 1995), 99-120; and Hong Lysa, "Warasan setthasat kanmu'ang:
critical scholarship in post-1976 Thailand," in Manas Chitakasem and Andrew Turton, eds., Thai
Constructions of Knowledge (London: University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies,
1991), Pp.99-117.

Germany, Russia, J apan, China and the United States) and one continent (Latin
America), Chatthip concluded his book with a proposal for a desirable model of
industrial development for Asian societies in general and Thailand in particular,
based on the lessons drawn from those earlier case studies, which he called "a
democratic society rooted in community culture". The two fundamental principles of
this model are as follows:-
1) Anti-Imperialism & Economic Nationalism. Thailand should build a nationalist
economy based mainly on domestic demand rather than export markets, promote its
own indigenous science and technology, develop industry which was owned and run
by Thai nationals especially with regard to technological application, and build up a
self-sufficient, self-reliant, ecologically sustainable rural economy.
2) Hegemony of Community Culture and Organization. Peasant community
organizations should play the leading role in Thai industrial development with the
state playing a minimal role or none at all. Peasant community culture should
become the dominant national culture with the urban bourgeoisie embracing it as
their own.
Their authors being political contemporaries and intellectual offsprings of the
October democratic movement (starting with the 14 October 1973 uprising and
ending with the 6 October 1976 massacre), the two books bear similar traces of the
patriotic and populist ethos typical of intellectual activists of that generation. The
difference lies in the disparate ways they respectively dealt with the specific contents
of that ideological legacy. While Chatthip largely embraced it but weeded out the
statist, centralist and dictatorial tendencies and replaced them with peasant
communities and grass-roots cooperativist democracy, Suvinai almost completely
jettisoned it, turned around, and became a born-again non-Marxist.
Burying the theoretical and conceptual remains of his Marxist past, be it the five-
stage unilinear scheme of social development, feudalism, capitalism in one country,
dependency theory, underdevelopment theory, etc., Suvinai rethought and
reconceptualized the whole issue of the controversial relationship between Thai
economic development and foreign, especially J apanese, direct investment in
Thailand, on the basis of the historical experiences of J apan and the Asian NICs
(South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore) in developing their respective
economies. Always favoring the totalizing perspective covering both the macro and
micro aspects, he divided his critical analysis of the problem into seven different
levels from the broadest and biggest one (of world system, world history, waves of
globalization, etc.) to the smallest and narrowest one (of individual desires and
passion, etc.) as follows:-
1) Under the current world economic conditions, the development of a nationalist
industrial economy was very difficult. If Thailand insisted on doing so, it would be
both dangerous and self-destructive. Rather, the proper thing to do was to develop
the Thai economy in an open, externally-oriented and autonomous direction.
2) Massive foreign direct investment from J apan and the Asian NICs, occasioned by
the expansion of horizontal international division of industrial labor from these
countries to the ASEAN nations and spurred on by the increasing revaluation of the
yen, provided Thailand with a historic, golden opportunity to develop its own
technological and industrial capacity. Therefore Thailand should welcome,
participate in and adroitly gear joint investment projects with foreign capital to its
own greatest benefits. Co-operation with the MNCs' business strategy should
proceed along with pursuing Thailand's own self-reliant economic projects. The
ultimate aim was to build a wealthier Thailand with a NIC-type economy, a
democratic polity, a modern information system and an open and diverse culture.
3) The leadership that would take Thailand towards NICdom fell to a younger
generation of Sino-Thai urban middle class consisting of technocrats, capitalists,
business executives, politicians, academics, etc., in short the assimilated Sino-Thai
bourgeoisie.
4) The main economic role of the Thai state was to formulate and implement a wise
and determined industrial policy that would depend for its effectiveness upon the
subjective will and capability of the government, politicians and technocrats.
5) For rural peasant communities, economic NICdom would absorb surplus labor
from the traditional agricultural sector and solve the chronic problem of rural poverty.
Using rural poverty as a rationale to attack Thai capitalist economic dynamism was a
futile exercise. Rather, the point was how to expand that dynamism to reach the
poorest peasants and incorporate them into the industrialization process as much as
possible while keeping the social costs and the personal pain incurred as low as
possible.
6) Subjectively speaking, the key to Thailand's successful exploitation of foreign
direct investment lay in the reform of the business firm's management system
according to the principles of collectivism, cooperation, Buddhism, rationalization
and democracy, so as to allow for the highest possible development of the firm's
human resources.
7) At the individual level, the ultimate aim was to create a new and superior species
of human beings or "homo excellens," befitting the coming informational society.
These would be strong and industrious individuals who kept up with the latest global
information flow and technological change, ceaselessly trained and upgraded
themselves physically and mentally so as to heighten their intellectual potential and
attain eventual spiritual emancipation.
In summary, whereas for Suvinai the axis of Thailand's successful industrialization
started from the world system and stopped at the middle class' ethos, for Chatthip it
began with the Thai nation and ended with community culture.
At first glance, one could not help but notice the glaring homology between the thrust
of the arguments of Chatthip and Suvinai i.e. both aimed at replacing state
domination of their respective imagined constituencies (rural communities in the case
of Chatthip and the Sino-Thai urban middle class in the case of Suvinai) with its own
hegemony over the other. Hence, according to Suvinai, for Thailand to achieve
NICdom, the private business sector had to hold hegemony over rural communities
while, according to Chatthip, for Thailand to attain community-culture-based,
nationalist-democratic industrialization, rural communities had to exercise hegemony
over the private business sector. Essentially built into their arguments was the
assumption that the other side must be subordinate and subservient to as well as
compliant with the leadership and dictates of its own side in a new but still unequal
power relationship. In this sense, both fundamentally denied the freedom of choice
and the power to choose the preferred direction of development and way of life of the
opposite sides.
More specifically, Chatthip's community-culture-based, nationalist-democratic model
of industrialization rested on two basic theses both of which could be questioned as
follows:-
1) Hegemony of Community Culture Thesis. What Chatthip proposed with regard to
the hegemonic role of rural community culture amounted to nothing less than a
thoroughgoing cultural revolution whose aim was to de-Westernize the Thai urban
bourgeoisie and reacculturate them with peasant culture. However, the Thai or for
that matter any other national bourgeoisie in Asia are neither empty-headed nor
empty-hearted. Their intellect and spirit is not just a hollow internal organ whose
contents can then be arbitrarily emptied and refilled with whatever expedient cultural
formula at will. To regard the process of cultural change as if it were a facile and
quick technical operation, not unlike the instant change of headgear or footwear
(from a felt beret to a peasant's palm & bamboo hat or from high-heel shoes to
sandals, perhaps) was deeply mistaken and would most likely lead to an oppressive
and restrictive dictatorial cultural regime as similar attempts in China under
Chairman Mao and in Thailand under Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram had
shown.
This does not mean that a deliberate, planned and organized campaign of any kind to
bring about cultural change should never be attempted but rather that any such
attempt could not but become an open-ended, dialogical and contradictory cultural
political process in which the pre-existing cultural and social psychological character
of the target group must be taken into account. The target group or object of cultural
politics has to be regarded as a thinking, feeling, rational, autonomous subject in
his/her own right. That they choose to accept or keep a certain culture is because it
serves (or is believed, maybe wrongly or short-sightedly, to serve) their own interests.
Effective and long-lasting cultural change could not be introduced wholesale
arbitrarily and compulsorily by fiat but has to go through a continuous and complex
process of persuasion, argumentation, bargaining, negotiation, modification as in a
real cultural game.
Leaving aside the still inconclusive issue of the dubious and contested actual
existence of a traditional peasant community or Gemeinschaft in rapidly
industrializing and permeatively capitalist Thailand from which a pristine and
unadulterated community culture can be derived and disseminated,
16
there is still

16
Chatthip and a committed communitarian research associate named Ms
Phornphilai Lertwicha have together heroically paraded a mass of empirical data painstakingly gleaned
from a score of villages in four main regions of Thailand to prove once and for all the continued
existence of traditional Thai community culture in their recent book, Watthanatham mooban thai [Thai
Village Culture] (Bangkok: Institute of Rural Development, Village Foundation & Sangsan Publishing
House, 1994).
For a contrary assessment of the scope and degree of change in rural village life, see
Samphan Teja-atheuk, ed., Naewnom kanplianplaeng sangkhom thai [The Tendencies of Change in
Thai Society] (Khon Kaen: Research and Development Institute, Khon Kaen University & Akin
Rabibhadana Foundation, 1993), pp.25-44. One should also consult a recent M.A. anthropology
dissertation in Thai which mounts a brilliant, perceptive and devastating deconstructive criticism of
Chatthip and Phornphilai's notion of "community culture" as a discursive construct created with the aid
of visual simulacra some of which bear uncanny resemblance to tourist postcards i.e. Yukti
Mukdawijit, "Kankotua khong krasae "watthanatham chumchon" nai sangkhom thai, pho.so. 2520-
2537," [The Formation of the "Community Culture" Movement in Thai Society, B.E. 2520-2537]
(unpublished M.A. dissertation, Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology, Thammasat University,
1995).

the overlooked problem of the inevitable commodification of community culture in
the process of its circulation in the capitalist cultural market. Given the fact that a
hugh number of rural folks have migrated to the city in search of employment and
many of them have risen via formal and/or informal education to a middle-class
status, coupled with the expansion of an integrated domestic cultural and consumer
market, there exists indeed, among urban middle-class consumers, growing
appreciation of and demand for peasant cultural commodities such as rural
handicrafts, foodstuffs, clothing and folk songs.
17
With capitalist commodification
of reproduced cultural artefacts comes decontextualization, reinterpretation,
resignification, functional transformation and profanation, as Karl Marx, Frederick
Engels, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht well warned.
18
Will community
culture, once commodified, still be able to serve as the hegemonic tool of
acculturation designated by Chatthip ? Or will it instead melt into air and become
profane ? One wonders.
2) Anarchistic Nationalist Industrial Development Thesis. To advocate a nationalist
industrial development immediately raises the question of a proper institutional/
organizational embodiment of the national will (or la volonte generale a la Rousseau)
that is capable of efficiently mobilizing the whole citizenry to carry it out. Chatthip's
answer to that question was "a network system linking many cooperatives together
into a functioning federation" (Prawatsat, p.303) which sounds very much like an
ideal anarchistic society of Michael Bakunin.
But were the nation-state structure to be so loosened and weaken in relation to the
autonomous local cooperatives, then it would be futile to talk about any
implementation of a nationalist industrialization project since the mobilization of
necessary material and human resources at relatively low cost to achieve the national
primitive accumulation of capital which was a primary stage of national industrial
revolution would be well-nigh impossible. If our fellow countrymen were so
empowered as to be able to bargain on an equal footing with the national economic
administrative organ, then how could they be induced to sacrifice their own real

17
Nidhi,"Watthanatham khong khonchanklang thai," p.63.

18
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," in Karl
Marx, The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings Vol. I, David Fernbach, ed., (New York: Vintage
Books, 1974), pp.70-1; Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, Hannah Arendt, ed.,(New York: Schocken Books, 1983), Pp.217-
251; Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," Understanding Brecht, tr. Anna Bostock (London:
Verso, 1984), p.93.

communities' immediate and tangible benefits for the sake of a long-term and
visionary industrial revolution of an imagined community ? In view of the world
historical experience especially since the end of the Second World War that a strong,
centralized state with an urban-biased economic policy dictating or manipulating the
terms of unequal exchange between the industrial sector and local rural economies
was an essential mechanism for nationalist drives for industrialization, Chatthip's
anarchistic and cooperativist community-centered model of nationalist industrial
development could only be a pipe-dream. Moreover, were it to be imposed on
present-day Thailand where the political balance of forces between the bureaucratic
state and civil society in the aftermath of the May 1992 uprising has reached a
stalemate in which "neither a social revolution, nor a state reform" are possible, the
upshot in practice would only be the further strengthening of the state vis-a-vis local
communities and expansion of its economic authority.
However, if Chatthip's communitarian economic reform proposal suffers from his
inclination selectively to read and idealize community culture, Suvinai's globalist
version may likewise be criticized for its tendency to misread and idealize the Sino-
Thai middle class. His misreading has to do with the issues of their race, cultural
assimilation and attitude towards democracy.
Firstly, following uncritically and unquestioningly in the conceptual footsteps of
King Vajiravudh, G. William Skinner and a couple of J apanese researchers (books in
J apanese by Mantetsu (1939) and Chung Hsun Yu (1969) were approvingly cited),
Suvinai regarded the relationship between the Chinese/Sino-Thai middle-class
entrepreneurs and the Thai royal/bureaucratic political elite as a racial issue (Borisat
yipun, pp.18-39, 140-1) whereas in fact it was a statist, clientelistic relationship
between state and capital mediated cultural-politically by the Thai state's hegemonic
racist discourse of Thainess/Chineseness or the official ethno-ideology of
Thainess.
19
The crux of the matter was succinctly put by Chai-anan Samudavanija
as follows:

19
See in this regard:-Asvabahu (King Vajiravudh), Phuak yew haeng booraphathis
lae meuang thai jong teun thoed phrom duai lai phra ratchahat khamplae phasa angklis [The J ews of
the Orient and Wake Up Siam with English Translation in the King's Handwriting] (Bangkok: King
Vajiravudh Memorial Foundation, 1985); G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An
Analytical History (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1957).
For a critical perspective, see Kasian Tejapira, "Pigtail: A Pre-History of
Chineseness in Siam," Sojourn, VII:1(February 1992), 95-122; Kasian Tejapira, "Imagined
Uncommunity: Lookjin Middle Class and Thai Official Nationalism," (La J olla, California:
unpublished paper presented in the seminar on "Entrepreneurial Minorities and Modern Nationalism"
organized by the J oint Committee on Southeast Asia of the Social Science Research Council and the
American Council of Learned Societies, 14-16 J anuary 1994); Nidhi,"Chatniyom".
"It was, therefore, necessary for state power elites to prevent the development
of an independent bourgeoisie and the possible transformation of economic
forces into political influence and power. The easiest way was simply to deny
access of this group to the political process. This was possible by applying
the criterion of citizenship, and it was legitimate to do so. A more serious
problem was how to deal with this potential threat in the long run, since
Chinese born in Thailand would one day become Thai citizens."
20

In this light, secondly, the so-called "cultural assimilation of the Chinese by the
Thais" (Borisat yipun, pp.35-37) can be reinterpreted and decoded as a political
emasculation (read cultural delegitimation, voting and candidacy rights curtailed,
etc.) of the Sino-Thai bourgeoisie by the Thai bureaucratic state on account of their
alleged un-Thai race.
21

Thirdly, having been subjected for decades to such a clientelistic and symbiotic
relationship with the corrupt and authoritarian bureaucratic state with its conservative
ethno-ideology of Thainess, but also pampered and protected by it from radical
popular pressure and protests against their economic exploitation of cheap labor and
natural resources, the Sino-Thai middle class had become the privileged and spoiled
offsprings of successive military governments until their number, wealth and clout
outgrew the strait-jacket of bureaucratic capitalism and polity. Their attitude towards
dictatorship and democracy is thus not as simple and clear-cut as Suvinai implied, but
rather ambiguous, situational, shifty and opportunistic, depending on their perception
of the immediate political situation on anad hoc basis. In general, they hated corrupt,
uneducated and high-handed elected politicians from the provinces no less than
military dictators, sometimes even more. Thus they could and did become in turn
supporters and opponents of both regimes as they applauded the military National
Peace-Keeping Council's take-over of power from the notoriously corrupt elected

20
Chai-anan Samudavanija, "State-Identity Creation, State-Building and Civil
Society," Craig J . Reynolds, ed., National Identity and Its Defenders, Thailand, 1939-1989 (Clayton,
Victoria: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1991), p.68.
Compare the above quotation with the following statement of Chung Hsun Yu
accompanying one of his tables concerning Chinese capital in South East Asia, which was quoted by
Suvinai in Borisat yipun, p.33 :-
"The definition of Chinese capital and Chinese we used here include not only the
people who are Chinese nationals or Chinese immigrants but also the people who are "ethnic
Chinese" and have citizenship in their country of residence." (emphasis added)

21
Richard J . Coughlin, Double Identity: The Chinese in Modern Thailand (Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), pp.177-181; and Kasian, "Imagined Uncommunity,"
p.20n34.

civilian government of Prime Minister General Chatchai Chunhawan in February
1991 only to turn out in mass demonstrations against the military-led government of
the same coup group in May 1992. In short, they have proven themselves to be a
reluctant and unreliable ally of both military dictatorship and parliamentary
democracy. Their political attitude can best be characterized as ranging from
conservative to liberal rather than democratic.
22

To his credit, Suvinai was not so infatuated with the Sino-Thai middle class as to be
entirely blind to the above-mentioned negative side of their cultural political
character and over the years has become increasingly critical and sceptical about their
potential for political leadership and economic reform. Assessing the impact on the
Thai economy of the initial wave of massive foreign direct investment from J apan
and the Asian NICs in the late 1980s, Suvinai concluded that:- 1) the hoped-for
upgrading of Thailand's industrial and technological capacity fell far short of what
could have been achieved and moreover, 2) the harmful and dangerous outgrowth of
"bubble" economy was evident and flourishing for it accorded well with the
traditional ethos of Thai capitalism, namely "the inclinations to short-term
speculation, to 'political business' or the use of political privilege in business
activities, to dependence on foreign demand without one's own solid technological
base, to fleeting fashionable copy-cat type of business ventures without the necessary
long-term vision and industriousness to establish a hard-to-copy business empire,
etc."
23
Further spoiled and demoralized by bubble capitalism, the Sino-Thai
middle class has endemically contracted the harmful and even deadly "bubble ethos"
("jitwinyan fongsaboo") typical of bubble capitalist speculators or gamblers. As
such, they are unlikely to be able to lead Thailand to NICdom, globalization or
anything new but back to bad, old ersatz capitalism Southeast Asian style.
24

Anek Laothamatas vs Saneh Chamarik

22
Anek, "Reu pen yak," p.54, 58-68.

23
Suvinai Paranavalai, Thuuniyom fongsaboo [Bubble Capitalism] (Bangkok:
Duang Kamol Wannakam Co., Ltd., 1994).

24
Yoshihara Kunio, The Rise of Ersatz Capitalism in South-East Asia (Manila:
Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988).

Seven months after the May 1992 uprising and six months after the 60th anniversary
of the establishment of constitutional government in Thailand, an international
symposium on "Democratic Experiences in Southeast Asian Countries" was held at
the J apanese Studies Center, Thammasat University (Rangsit Campus) from 7 to 8
December.
25
Coincidentally, the papers presented by two leading Thai political
scientists on that occasion happened to express diametrically opposite views on the
desirable path of post-May 1992 political reform in Thailand i.e. Saneh Chamarik's
keynote speech entitled "Democracy: Form versus Substance ?" and Anek
Laothamatas' "Sleeping Giant Awaken ?: The Middle Class in Thai Politics".
Indeed, Saneh and Anek were once kindred academic spirits if of different
generations, holding similar views on political trends in Thailand since the early
1980s. Saneh was the first Thai political scientist to point out the end of bureaucratic
polity and the beginning of state power sharing between the bureaucracy and the
capitalist class through the official participation of business associations in the
policy-formulating J oint Public and Private Sector Consultative Committees created
under the eight-year long government of Prime Minister General Prem Tinsulanonda
(1980-1988).
26
Other Thai social scientists widely followed up his penetrative and
prescient cue with further researches and analyses but none with such probing and
systematic thoroughness and conceptual and theoretical rigor as Anek Laothamatas,
whose Business Associations and the New Political Economy of Thailand (1992), a
now famed, standard text on this issue, provided a conclusive proof of Saneh's
original thesis. And yet, on this occasion for the formal and serious rethinking of the
prospective way ahead of Thai political reform after such a tragic and critical
juncture, the two parted company. Furthermore, in reversal of the well-worn cliche
that people usually become less radical with the advance of age, the senior Saneh
Chamarik turned out to be much more radical in his ideas on political reform than the
junoir Anek Laothamatas. As a matter of fact, Saneh may be regarded as the most
radical among present-day Thai political scientists whereas Anek's views can be

25
The symposium was co-hosted by the Core University Program of Thammasat
University, the National Research Council of Thailand, the Center of Southeast Asian Studies of
Kyoto University, and the J apan Society for Promotion of Sciences. See Corrine Phuangkasem, et al,
eds., Proceedings of the 1992 International Symposium: Democratic Experiences in Southeast Asian
Countries (Bangkok: Thammasat University Press, 1993).

26
See Chapter 4 "Soo prachathipatai khreungbai" [Towards Semi-Democracy] in
Saneh Chamarik, Kanmeuang thai kab phatthanakan ratthathammanoon [Thai Politics and
Constitutional Development] (Bangkok: Thai Khadi Research Institute, Thammasat University &
Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks Project Foundation, 1986).

described as moderately progressive. This is evident in Saneh's impassioned
exchange with Thirayuth (referred to in footnote 8) in which he mounted such a
sweeping and uncompromising criticism of the industrial economy and the middle
class' "democracy" from the standpoint of local communities that Thirayuth's call for
a compromise and accommodation between the middle class business sector and the
peasantry in a common united front against military dictatorship was relegated to the
margin.
27

Anek defined the problem of building democracy in Thailand as one of "historical
belatedness", that is Thailand built its democracy many centuries later than the West,
Thai democratic institutions were founded many decades later than the longer-
established and hence more powerful Thai state bureaucracy and armed forces, and
therefore the universal democratic values and ideas that were introduced to Thai
society from the outside world actually reached it and especially the poverty-stricken
countryside much later than the pre-existing, deeper-rooted and stronger patron-client
social relationship and authoritarian and state-centered political culture. It was this
two-hundred-year or so virtual time difference between "Thai democracy" and
globalized democracy that accounted for the chronic instability of democratic
government in Thailand.
28

As to the solution, Anek counselled Thai society to upgrade its political performance
and at the same time downgrade its subjective expectations and demands. This meant
that while all political actors and institutions of Thai parliamentary democracy should
try to perform their expected duties and functions better, Thai society in general and
the urban middle class in particular ought to be more patient and tolerant of the
shortcomings and inadequacies of elected politicians, political institutions and rural
voters as well as adopt a reasonably conciliatory and accommodating attitude towards
the military-bureaucratic forces for these defects were the necessary evils of Thai
democracy which had been historically and sociologically necessitated by the above-
mentioned triple belatedness. To make absolute demands on it in accordance with the
standards of global democracy without taking into account the history and reality of

27
See "sewana-wiwatha." One should note that Saneh ended his verbal
contribution to the debate by chanting a slogan "Long live grassroots democracy !" amid the laughter
of the participants (p.15).

28
Anek Laothamatas, "Khwamlacha thang prawatsat: kamnoed panha lae thang
kaekhai khong prachathipatai, 1 & 2" [Historical Belatedness: The Origin of the Problem of
Democracy and Its Solution], Matichon Sudsapda,XI:566-567 (7, 14 J uly 1991).

Thai society as the middle class had often done in the past would only turn them
willy-nilly into an inverse ally of military dictatorship, providing the praetorian
military unknowingly with another opportunity to disrupt the democratic system and
institutions which actually better served the middle class' interests in the longer-run.
Saneh of course completely disagreed with the foregoing diagnosis of the ills of Thai
democracy. The key to its historical origin and development lay, in his opinion, not
in the issue of belatedness but in its subjective agency and objective context. So, of
the history of Thai democracy, Saneh's typical approach was simply but incisively to
ask:- Who did "democracy" in Thailand ? How did they think about and actually do
it ? How did they transform it from its former version in the West ? Under what kind
of socio-economic and political structures as well as power relationship were those
who did "democracy" ? And how did their own status and interests limit and pressure
them in their shaping of "Thai democracy" ?
29

By considering "democracy" as a kind of soft technology, or more precisely political
technology of self-empowerment, that various socio-economic groups in Thai society
vied with one another to grasp, possess, monopolize and manipulate, he unveiled and
pointed out the wonderful and largely unexplored cultural political dimension of Thai
democracy such as:-
-King Chulalongkorn's use of Western liberal democratic discourse to curtail the
power of the old aristocracy and win absolute power for the monarchy (Kanmeuang
thai,p.75-78);
-the bureaucratic elite's redefinition of "Thai-Thai democracy" under the military rule
of Field Marshals Sarit Thanarat, Thanom Kittikachorn and Praphas Charusathian
(Kanmeuang thai,p.282-301), etc.
As to Anek's warnings and advice for the sake of Thai democracy, the logic of
Saneh's arguments was clear on this point: were they to be kept to the letter, still
Thailand would not achieve full democracy. This is because, for Saneh, democracy
was not simply representative government which was merely a form. Rather, the
substance of democracy was the emancipation of the many from the domination of
the privileged few. And to achieve that, the Thai middle class would have to undergo

29
Saneh, Kanmeuang thai, p.51, 54, 58.

much greater and deeper far-reaching transformation of its values and ideas than
Anek suggested.
Having long been the privileged and spoiled offsprings of military dictatorship
especially since the launching of the state-planned and -promoted unequal and
unsustainable capitalist socio-economic development under Prime Minister Field
Marshal Sarit's military government since 1961,
30
and having already won their own
rights, freedom and a measure of bargaining power by taking part in the popular
democratic movement from 14 October 1973 to May 1992, the middle class was now
changing their social status, shifting their political stance and deserting their former
allies. They were changing sides, so to speak, from being part of the movement for
emancipation of the oppressed and dominated majority to being a new incorporated
member of the authoritarian privileged minority. This was explicitly shown by their
apathy and indifference towards the continuing struggle for rights and freedom of the
organized workers and peasants, and their acquiescence in the face of the aggressive
dispossession of economic resources from urban and rural local communities by the
state and capital. Having largely got and enjoyed what they wanted, they saw no
reason why they should risk fighting the political and economic establishment any
further just for the sake of the lower classes. Therefore, as for the intellectuals who
still adhered to the humanitarian and libertarian ideals, who refused to desert the
lower-class people and hence were in turn being deserted by the middle class, Saneh
strongly and combatively urged them to address their criticism straightforwardly,
aggressively and forcefully to the middle class public. The latter might not listen but
if that was the case, so be it since the point was that one must not allow the voice of
conscience to be silenced.
31

The ideas held by Thai society in general and the middle class in particular that Saneh
believed needed to be changed centered around the notion of industrial culture. It had
had its philosophical and cultural roots in the rationalism of the Enlightenment in
eighteenth century Europe which laid the basis for a conviction in the ability of
human beings to conquer nature with the help of scientific and technological

30
Saneh Chamarik, Ratthathammanoon lae sitthi manussayachon nai prathet thai
lae 60 pi prachathipatai thai [Constitution and Human Rights in Thailand and 60 Years of Thai
Democracy] (Bangkok: Local Development Institute & 60 Years of Democracy Project, 1992), p.36.

31
Saneh Chamarik, Keynote speech in the conference on "Sam thossawas khong
panyachon kab sangkhomthai" [Three Decades of Intellectuals and Thai Society] on the occasion of
the 60th birthday of Sulak Sivaraksa, Thammasat University, Bangkok, 19 March 1993.

progress, limitless material growth and, most important of all, industrial power.
Ideologically, it evolved into unmitigated individualism and social Darwinism.
Economically, it led to mercantilism, capitalism, free market and laissez-faire
competition, colonialism, developmentalism, consumerism, the New International
Economic Order, and, its latest reincarnation, economic glozalization. All these were
but various forms and trademarks of the same bad old economic industrialism-
imperialism. Politically, it now recruited as its agents the national elite of the
developing countries whose seemingly native (or in this case "Thai-Thai")
appearances and names masked their real role as the linkage between global
industrialism-imperialism and their own countries. By imposing such an industrialist
model of development on Thailand, the Thai elite thus brought about unbalanced
economic growth, dividing Thai society into the rich and the poor, the haves and the
have-nots, the powerful and the powerless, depriving the majority population
especially in the countryside of their natural resources, productive potential and right
to autonomous development. In such unequal socio-economic conditions, all the
formal, institutional paraphernalia of democracy, be it political parties, elections,
parliament, etc., could not essentially redress the authoritarian nature of the political
system.
32

Hence, joining the November 1992 celebrated debate in Manila between Singapore's
Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew and Philippine President Fidel Ramos on the
problematic relationship between political democracy and economic development,
33

Saneh criticized both for failing to get to the root of the problem, namely the need
radically to rethink and redefine both democracy and development beyond the
dominant formalist and industrialist paradigms.
34
As he concluded:
"By now, it should be clear for all of us to see that the current pattern and
direction of economic development simply cannot be sustainable, whether
with respect to human or natural and environmental resources. Inherent in the
industrial culture is the built-in hegemonic and oppressive ideology and
mechanism that goes all the way for the sole purpose of unilinear and
unlimited growth. In all this, industrial Capitalism is not much different from
collapsing Communism in its radical and absolute belief in historical necessity

32
Saneh Chamarik, "Democracy: Form versus Substance ?," in Corrine,
Proceedings, pp.5-8.

33
"Discipline vs democracy," Far Eastern Economic Review, 10 December 1992,
p.29.

34
Saneh, "Democracy," pp.4-5.

and inevitability. Both, despite their ideological differences and conflicts,
share basically the same brand of industrialism together with the political
objective of global hegemony. Both, in short, are anathema to human
freedom and democracy. And yet both present themselves as champions of
human freedom and democracy, either in the form of representative
government or democratic centralism. Both end up practically with the same
negative impact, as Pope J ohn Paul, again, succinctly reminds us of the
realities of marginalization and exploitation in the Third World as well as the
reality of human alienation in the more advanced countries."
35

Obviously, the kind of political and economic paradigm shift Saneh called for fell
primarily to the urban middle class who largely shaped and benefited from the
existing unequal economic system. However, Anek, on the contrary, concluded that
the way out for Thai democracy lay elsewhere:-
"If the middle class are true to what they pledge - to establish a democracy
ruled by leaders with integrity and competence - they must earnestly lend
support to a rural development which will turn patronage-ridden villages into
small towns of middle-class farmers or well-paid workers. During the last
two decades several battles have been dramatically fought on the streets of
Bangkok for the cause of democracy, but the one, and the only one, that
delivers a long-lasting victory for democrats will take place in the rural areas
in the form of protracted and perhaps uneventful socio-economic
transformation."
36

Thus, both Anek, representing the globalist political views, and Saneh, representing
the communitarian ones, regarded the way out for Thai democracy to lie precisely
and decisively in opposite areas. For Anek, the long-term survival of Thai
parliamentary democracy depended on the gradual and protracted urbanization of the
countryside while for Saneh, substantive democracy would arise only when a
paradigmatic conversion of the middle class from industrialism to egalitarian and
autonomous, local-communities-centered sustainable development took place in the
city.
However, when one descends from the level of abstract paradigms and principles to
that of immediate, concrete measures to be taken for political reform, another peculiar
reversal happens in their views, that is Anek's moderate theoretical premises led
paradoxically to very extremist practical proposals while Saneh's radical theoretical

35
Ibid., p.8.

36
Anek Laothamatas, ""Sleeping Giant Awaken ?: The Middle Class in Thai
Politics," in Corrine,Proceedings, p.96.

premises led instead to fairly modest practical proposals. In an article entitled
"Nakthurakij kab prachathipatai: khamtob yoo thi hokankha" [Businessmen and
Democracy: The Answer Lies in Chambers of Commerce],
37
Anek simply and
straightforwardly called on middle-class businessmen, for the sake of democracy, to
leave political parties altogether, withdraw from the system of 'political business' as it
was, and devote their resources and energy instead to building up provincial
chambers of commerce into the basic political organizations of the democratic
system. In short, he urged the provincial middle class to give up their short-term
formal political power so as to contribute to the long-term development of
democracy.
That the main agent had to be the provincial middle class was determined by their
occupation of the singular vantagepoint where they could serve as the strategic
linkage between the capital city of Bangkok and the countryside. Economically,
socially and culturally speaking, they were situated close enough to Bangkok to
comprehend the Bangkokians' Western-style or globalist conception of democracy
and at the same time they were also close enough to the countryside to be familiar
with how the Thai-Thai clientelistic relationship affected the behavior of the rural
voters. Being the mediating link between the city and the countryside, they could
employ the chambers of commerce as their front-line positions to make political
inroads into the rural areas and gradually build up a new higher-quality organized
mass base for parliamentary democracy.
Again, that the institutional form had to be the provincial chambers of commerce was
because the institutional logic of the existing political parties in the context of the
present 'political business'-type electoral system propelled them towards corruption
and the abuse of power regardless of their wishes. As aspiring members of these
personalized parties with no distinct party ideology or policy platform, they had no
choice but to act as political patrons, build their network of clients and personal
electoral machine, buy votes, and do whatever necessary to win executive offices so
that they could then abuse their executive power to recoup their prior financial
investment in electoral politics by taking bribes and channelling public resources and
money under their authority to their financial sponsors, canvassers and constituency
in preparation for the next round of general elections. It was this self-reproducing,
self-perpetuating 'political business' or money politics that severely and aggravatingly

37
It was published five months after the May 1992 uprising in Matichon Sudsapda,
9, 16 October 1992.

undermined the credibility, legitimacy and efficiency of Thai parliamentary
democracy to such an extent that a military coup was sometimes perceived as almost
a welcome relief.
38
If, by remaining in the political parties, one could not help
undermining the democratic system, would not it be better to give up power, quit
them and join the chambers of commerce to help build democracy in the countryside
? So reasoned Anek.
His was an incisive analysis which displayed the explanatory power of the
institutionalist or, as I prefer to call, political materialist approach to the study of the
role of political institutions in determining human political behavior. And yet, one
could not but wonder who on earth would selflessly volunteer to give up the pricy
and high-ranking offices and power in the political parties and government in which
they invested heavily so as to become the chambers of commerce's ordinary foot
soldiers in the vanguard of democracy ?
On the contrary, the immediate and practical action Saneh urged the urban middle
class to take was very modest, undemanding and realistic, that is the middle class
organized as well-informed consumer groups should try to link up with the poor petty
producers of safe, insecticide-free and ecologically friendly agricultural produce in a
mutually beneficial relationship in order to create alternative market and commodities
and eventually alternative way of life and model of civilization beyond monopolistic
capitalist industrialism. As he pointedly asserted in a hard-hitting interview that
actually fired the first salvo of radical public criticism at the ideology of
globalization:
"I am rather of the opinion that the real political fulcrum lies in the middle,
namely the consumers."
39

Chai-anan Samudavanija vs Nidhi Aeusrivongse

38
For a concise and succinct analysis in English of the political parties in present-
day Thailand, none surpasses J ames Ockey, "Political Parties, Factions, and Corruption in Thailand,"
Modern Asian Studies, 28:2(1994), 251-277.

39
Saneh Chamarik, "Yonson lokanuwat: khamteuan jak saneh chamarik" [Counter-
Globalization: Saneh Chamarik's Warnings], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 27 September 1993, p.35.

Chai-anan Samudavanija and Nidhi Aeusrivongse could be considered the flagships
of their respective like-minded Thai globalist and communitarian intellectuals. Both
had attained the highest academic achievements in their respective fields,
40

published and edited numerous highly-acclaimed academic and popular books, essays
and articles on a mind-bogglingly wide variety of topics,
41
received prestigious
honors and awards for their works,
42
and now were the two most pre-emiment and
prolific public intellectuals in Thailand whose newspaper columns and occasional
public statements enjoyed wide media coverage, considerable influence and a large
following.
43

Perhaps one may begin to probe the ideas of these two formidable thinkers by briefly
charting their respective intllectual trajectories that brought them to their present
individual stance. In the past decade or so, Chai-anan might be credited as the
outstanding if unorthodox spearhead of the Thai political science establishment. He
alone, among the older, mostly American-educated generation of established Thai
political scientists who began their academic careers in the Indochina War era, was

40
Chai-anan became Professor of Political Science at Chulalongkorn University in
1979 and member of the Royal Institute in 1981 while Nidhi got a professorship of history at Chiang
Mai University in 1985.

41
A recent curriculum vitae of Chai-anan listed 66 publications in Thai, 20 others
in English and another 500 or so articles published in various academic journals, newspapers and
magazines. These included, for instance, Physics kab kanmeuang: soo thrissadi thuapai thang
kanmeuang [Physics and Politics: Towards a Universal Theory of Politics] (Bangkok: The Social
Science Association of Thailand, 1990), which brought some of the latest findings in theoretical
physics to bear on political theory, and another research on fuzzy logic entitled: Majchim thrissadi
[Majima Theory] (Bangkok: The Thailand Research Fund, 1995).
As to Nidhi, an admittedly incomplete list of his works up to 1993, not counting his
articles published in newspapers and news magazines, included 18 books and research publications, 89
articles published in academic and popular periodicals, five translations and three edited books.
Unlisted was an erstwhile extremely popular column of his in Praew monthly magazine in which,
under the pen name of Rangrong, he gave liberal and humane advice on private, mostly romantic
matters in answer to inquiring letters from troubled teenagers and adults. See Rangrong (Nidhi
Aeusrivongse), Laew rao ko preuksa kan [And Then We Confer] (Bangkok: Amarin Printing Group
Co., Ltd., 1988).

42
Chai-anan won the yearly National Distinguished Researcher Award in political
science and public administration from the National Research Council of Thailand in 1986 while Nidhi
was invited by Thammasat University to deliver both the Pridi Banomyong Memorial Lecture in 1991
and the fourth Puey Ungphakorn Special Public Lecture in 1993.

43
For background information of the two, consult Chai-anan, Majchim thrissadi,
pp.55-63; and Kansadaeng pathakatha phises puey ungkhakorn khrang thi 4 doi sastrajan nidhi
aeusrivongse [The Fourth Puey Ungphakorn Special Public Lecture by Professor Nidhi Aeusrivongse]
(Bangkok: Faculty of Economics, Thammasat Universtiy, 1993), pp.12-33.

able to transcend the typical Cold War, mainstream American political science
paradigm, be it the political system theory, the pluralist school's ideological
assumptions, or the teleology of modernization. Of course, he himself had also
studied and made use of them in his own earlier analyses of Thai poltics but, being
neither intellectually fixated nor ideologically mesmerized by them, he was uniquely
open to new thoretical paradigms, in particular the neo-Marxist and new left theories
of the state which came to full blossom in Western Europe and the U.S. in the 1970s
and 1980s.
This was evident in a very popular and best-selling textbook of his entitled Rat [The
State] (1987), which was a broad survey account and critical review of various neo-
Marxist and new left theories of the state, their hitherto application to the analysis of
the Thai state and society by Thai and Western Marxist academics, and his own
innovative theoretical revision, reconstruction and reapplication of them.
44
With his
lively undogmatic, eclectic and "chaotic" (the last one being his favorite self-
description) style of thought, Chai-anan selectively absorbed certain concepts,
insights and analytical tools from these new theoretical resources, evaluated and
utilized them on the basis of his cumulative and substantial extensive knowledge and
intimate experience of Thai politics, and then created a series of new writings and
researches that, though by no means flawless and unblemished, constituted a
significant paradigmatic watershed indicating the liberation of Thai political science
circles from the mainstream American political science paradigm of the Cold War
era.
45
This was indeed a commendable double service on his part, at once
legitimating Marxist theoretical discourse and prodding it out of the isolated
academic margin and secluded intellectual ghetto into the public sphere as well as
helping the mainstream academic dead wood out of its paradigmatic straitjacket and
intellectual sterility.

44
See Chai-anan Samudavanija, Rat [The State] (Bangkok: Chulalongkorn
University Press, 1987), especially his preface to the first printing. Rat had been used by Chai-anan
as the main textbook for his undergraduate course on State and Society at Chulalongkorn University
for several years. As of 1992, it was in its third printing already.

45
For a severe and meticulous critique of Chai-anan's Rat, see Chairat Charoensin-
o-larn, "Kandoenthang khrang mai khong nakratthasat thai: sastrajan do.ro. chai-anan samudavanija
kab kanseuksa rat lae sangkhom thai" [The New J ourney of Thai Political Scientists: Professor Dr
Chai-anan Samudavanija and the Studies of Thai State and Society], Warasan
Setthasatkanmeuang,VI:3-4 (October 1988), 161-197; and Chai-anan's rejoinder on pp.198- 203 of the
same issue of the journal.

By provocatively taking some Thai and Western practitioners of orthodox Marxism
(such as Chatthip Nartsupha, Kraisak Chunhawan, Peter F. Bell, and other members
of the Political Economy Group) to task for not being Marxist enough in their
analyses of the Thai state and society in the final chapter of his Rat, Chai-anan tacitly
showed off his ability to "out-Marxist" them all.
46
Having thus bluffed,
domesticated, and fenced Marxist theoretical discourse in, he then proceeded to
appropriate, incorporate and harness it for his own purpose, namely to construct a
new and presumably original theory of state-society relationship by cross-breeding it
with other non-Marxist species. The resultant theoretical cross-bred brainchild of his,
namely the Trailaksanarat or Three-Dimensional State theory, was first sketchily
proposed in Rat, and later more elaborately expounded in a separate booklet entitled
Thrissadi rabob kanmeuang thai: krob kanwikhroh trailaksanarat [A Theory of Thai
Political System: The Three-Dimensional State Analytical Framework] (1987).
47

Focussing on the relationship between state and society as its central object of
analysis, this theory held that the said relationship consisted of three inter-related,
human drives-derived dimensions i.e. those of security, development and
participation. The historically changing and varying interaction and (im)balance,
conflict and harmony, priority and hierarchy among the three dimensions determined
the pattern and structure of state and society relationship at a given period of time.
48

The independent variables that affected these interactive three dimensions were world
historical processes that came from the outside. In the age of Western colonialism,
the world historical process of Westernization necessitated the priority of the security
dimension while the development dimension was brought up to a certain level but sill
fell short of the then Western standard of development and the participation

46
Chai-anan, Rat, pp.184-198.

47
Ibid., pp.235-277; and Chai-anan Samudavanija, Thrissadi rabob kanmeuang
thai: krob kanwikhroh trailaksanarat [Theory of Thai Political System: The Three-Dimensional State
Analytical Framework] (Bangkok: Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, 1987).

48
In the latest revised version of his theory, Chai-anan added Time to it as the
fourth dimension of state-society relationship in response to a criticism that his theoretical construct
was too static. See Chai-anan Samudavanija, "Old Soldiers Never Die - They Are J ust Bypassed: The
Military and Bureaucracy in the Globalized Three-Dimensional State," (Perth, Western Australia:
unpublished paper presented in the workshop on "Locating Power: Democracy, Opposition &
Participation in Thailand" organized by the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, 6-7 October
1994). The Thai version of it appeared in Chai-anan Samudavanija, Krabuanthas mai nai
kanseuksa rat-sangkhom; siam thamklang krasae lokanuwat; meuangthai nai sib pi na [New
Paradigm in State-Society Studies; Siam in the Current of Globalization; Thailand Ten Years from
Now] (Bangkok: Institute of Public Policy Studies, 1994), pp.3-15.

dimension was mostly neglected and undeveloped. Hence, the state at that time
completely surrounded Thai society. In the Cold War era, the world historical
process of Internationalization (of the conflicting universal models of liberal
democracy vs socialism) enhanced the increasingly important development
dimension alongside the predominant security dimension by virtue of the
internationalized model of liberal democracy while the participation dimension was
further developed but still fell short of the prospective level held out by the
internationalized universal model of socialism. Thai society thus rapidly grew in
developmental terms under the domination of the security-anxious state.
With the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the politico-ideological wall that
had divided the world into two camps and thus obstructed the free flow of globalizing
forces for decades, full-fledged Globalization or Lokanuwat (Chai-anan's own
rendering of the term in Thai) set in, launched and propelled by the continuing
revolution in computerized informational and telecommunications technology since
the mid-1970s.
49
The three-pronged Globalization of liberal democracy, free-
market capitalism and Western consumerist life-style and entertainment culture had
salient anti-state characteristics and effects which structurally and progressively
shifted the security and development dimensions away from the reach and control of
state power and greatly elevated the participation dimension out of all proportion to
the other two dimensions. With various social forces increasingly slipping or
released from effective state domination because of Globalization, the only feasible
and constructive pattern of relationship between state and society had to be a
polyarchic partnership in which 1) governmental power was decentralized to local
self-governing bodies; 2) strategic social groups gained formal access to public
bodies of decision-making over the relevant policy areas of their respective concerns

49
Lokanuwat is the earliest and by far most popular unofficial Thai rendering of
Globalization, having been coined by Chai-anan circa 1992 and initially circulated through various
business-cum-political publications and periodicals of the Manager Media Group, especially the
Phoojadkan Raiwan newspaper.
However, the Royal Institute, which is an independent public agency vested with the
authority to coin new words and compile the official dictionary of the Thai language, publicly
condemned and rejected Lokanuwat as an inaccurate and misleading Thai translation of Globalization
due to its original Buddhist root and literal denotation. In its place, the Royal Institute coined the word
Lokaphiwat for Globalization. As to the cultural politics of the various Thai translations of
Globalization, see Kasian Tejapira, Wiwatha lokanuwat [Debates on Globalization] (Bangkok:
Phoojadkan Press, 1995).

on a regular basis at both the national and local levels and shared power with the state
and other groups therein.
50

There was, however, a more deep-seated and fundamental necessity for the Thai state
to adjust itself to the new conditions of Globalization in the aforesaid manner. Chai-
anan argued, after J ohn Naisbitt, that the actuality of "real time" global
telecommunications of digitized information and finance brought about by the rapid
collapsing of information float, coupled with the much cheaper and speedier
international transportation of people and material goods across nation-state borders
had so shrinked time and space that the state itself was being deconstructed, that is
the standard components that used to define and constitute a modern nation-state
according to classical political science were incrementally unravelling to such an
extent that it was becoming less and less meaningful to think and talk of the nation-
state in the old, established way.
51
With its placeable territory (or space of places)
being overpassed by deterritorialized cyberspace (or space of flows), with its census-
registered citizenly population being overridden by the virtual population of millions
of global tourists and migrant laborers, with its government being confronted with the
diminishing governability of the globalized economy and culture as well as of
resurgent and restive local, ethnic and religious communities, and with its map- &
census-based sovereignty being loosened and deemphasized in view of the massive
emergence and expansion of regional groupings, trade blocs, and international
government and non-government organizations with supranational authority and
jurisdiction over widening economic and social policy areas, the nation-state was
losing its grip not only on simultaneously and dialectically globalized and localized
civil society, but also on itself.
52

Be that as it may, the Thai state in and by itself was incapable of such reform because
of the long-standing and deeply-ingrained authoritarian, centralist, clientelistic and
corrupt tradition of its bureaucracy. Nor could the state be easily surrounded and
pressured by social forces into reform for its security apparatus, having been

50
Chai-anan Samudavanija, "Fa wongjon ubat (ton thi 21, 22)" [Breaking Free of
the Vicious Circle, Part 21, 22], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 8 & 19 February 1993, p.16; 6.

51
J ohn Naisbitt, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives (New
York: Warner Books, Inc., 1984); and J ohn Naisbitt, Global Paradox: The Bigger the World Economy,
The More Powerful Its Smallest Players (London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing Limited, 1994).

52
Chai-anan Samudavanija, "Siam soo satawas thi 21" [Siam Towards the 21st
Century], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 15, 16 J uly 1993, p.31; 31.

overdeveloped during the Cold War to fight the domestic communist insurgency,
deter the neighbouring communist armed forces as well as suppress the people's
protest movement, was still strong enough to withstand and break free from them
with the monopoly of the legitimate means of violence and coercion in its continued
possession. Moreover, Globalization was making Thai society itself so internally
unequal, differentiated and divided in political, economic and cultural terms that it
became consensusless, electorally unrepresentable, dissipative and therefore
incapable in and by itself of mounting any unified, representative, solid and strong
enough pressure to push through state reform.
53
And with the elected political elite
themselves behaving generally as arrogant and unashamed inheritors of the age-old
bureaucratic tradition of power abuse rather than its opponents,
54
the various social
groups mired in such a dire political stalemate had no other option but, in Chai-anan
own words, to "bypass the state" i.e. to move their capital investment, professional
skills or labor power across the borders in search of fresh fields and pastures new in
other nation-states around the globe where the investment and working conditions
were more agreeable and the earnings more profitable. Given the fact that the
capacity and opportunity to benefit from Globalization were far from evenly
distributed to begin with, for that reason the rich and the poor, roughly speaking,
employed different strategies in bypassing the Thai state, namely the rich kham rat or
bypassed it by making a welcome foreign capital investment in Laos, Burma or China
while the poor lod rat or underpassed it by getting a tourist visa to Singapore,
Taiwan, J apan or the U.S. and becoming illegal migrant workers or prostitutes
there.
55
In an almost poetic tone, Chai-anan reflected upon the existential and
experiential rationale behind the decision of those who chose to bypass the state as
follows:-
"When we comprehend the global current, we must also understand that all of
us must inevitably live in that current. To counter the current is typical of
those who wish to preserve freedom and self-autonomy. To bypass the

53
Chai-anan Samudavanija, "Lok anakhot ja pen yangrai" [How the Future World
Will Be], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 27 March 1995, p.9; Chai-anan Samudavanija, "Khwam abjon khong
kanmeuang thai" [The Impasse of Thai Politics], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 19 J une 1995, p.9.

54
Chai-anan Samudavanija, "Watthanatham thang kanchai amnaj" [The Culture of
the Use of Power], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 16 May 1994, p.9.

55
Chai-anan Samudavanija, "Kankhamrat" [Bypassing the State], Phoojadkan
Raiwan, 28 J une 1993, p.4; Chai-anan Samudavanija, "Kankhamrat-kanlodrat" [Bypassing-
Underpassing the State], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 9 August 1993, p.6; Chai-anan Samudavanija, "Rat ja
thook fa kham pai" [The State Will Be Bypassed], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 31 J anuary 1994, p.9.

current is the option and the way out for those who seek the unity of beauty
and truth and have tried again and again to counter the current but were beaten
by the torrential waves of untruth and evil back to the same old position
amidst the strewn bodies of fallen friends."
56

Those who were left behind had to fight it out among themselves as well as with the
hopelessly rigid and unrepentant anti-reform state in a burgeoning (un)civil war over
natural resources and in periodic, spontaneous popular protests and uprisings for
political reform which invariably ended up in senseless, thoughtless and fruitless
violence and bloodshed. The only hope that Thailand might be able to avoid the
coming chaos and anarchy, a certain eventuality for an unreformed state ruling over a
dissipative society in the age of Globalization, lay with the Thai monarchy, the
supremely legitimate symbolic institution that remained above factional politics, was
universally accepted and respected, loved and cherished by Thai people from all
walks of life, and exercised unrivalled cultural power in the land. Only the Thai
monarchy could rally all social forces round it, soften the rigidly anti-reform stance of
the state, initiate a peaceful and orderly breakthrough in the stalemate over political
reform, and help lay new ground rules for the remaking of the unequal, divided and
dissipative society and bureaucratic polity into a sharing and caring, united and potent
politically-reformed people's state-nation ("pen pracharat") which belonged to all
parts or groups of the Thais ("phathai khong thai thuk suan") and was thus capable of
surviving, partaking and prospering in the globalized world.
57

But Nidhi Aeusrivongse thought otherwise. Reviewing the four possible scenarios in
which political reform could take place in Thailand as suggested by Dr Prawes Wasi,
head of the 1994-1995 Commission for the Development of Democracy appointed by

56
Chai-anan Samudavanija, "Khwamjing khwamngam jintanakan lae kanmeuang"
[Truth, Beauth, Imagination and Politics], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 3 Februay 1994, p.9.

57
Chai-anan Samudavanija, "Siam thamklang krasae lokanuwat: kansawaengha
khwamphakdi-khwamchobtham thi thuathuan" [Siam amidst the Globalization Current: The Searh for
All-inclusive Allegiance-Legitimacy], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 22 March 1994, p.9; and Chai-anan
Samudavanija, "Dhika 10 singha" [The August 10th Petition], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 12 August 1992,
p.8.
The two Thai phrases cited above together formed part of the words of the Thai
National Anthem which Chai-anan loved to quote. What was never noticed is the fact that his was a
revisionist reading of it whereas the traditional, semi-official interpretation was: "The home-land of
our people, the whole land is the land of the Thais." For Chai-anan, as against the official version, the
"thuk suan" (i.e. "all parts" which denotes plurality) qualified the Thais, not the land. See Montri
Tramot, "Prawat phleng sansoen phrabarami lae phleng chat" [A History of the Royal Anthem and
the National Anthem], Sinlapakorn, XVI:2 (J uly 1972), 93.

the then Speaker of Parliament,
58
:- 1) a prime minister with insight and leadership
took power; 2) a crisis erupted followed by abrupt political change (i.e. a military
coup); 3) a great number of people gained insight and expressed the will that the
politicians must carry out political reform; 4) His Majesty the King used his charisma
to solve a crisis situation,
59
Nidhi concluded that none looked likely to happen and
instead suggested a fifth scenario or more accurately a more feasible if slow and time-
consuming way to bring about political reform which he called Patiroop kanmeuang
baeb mod tham rang or political reform in the style of nest-building ant. In practical
terms, it meant "gradually to build up people's power, create a channel through which
people can exercise their power continuously and not only during elections, and
institute that channel so that it can function on a regular basis."
60

Nidhi's nest-building-ant-like political reform is a far cry from Chai-anan's advocated
political reform from above under royal patronage and it signifies the populist,
communitarian bent of its author. This is by no means a wide-eyed, wishful thinking
of an ivory-tower academic but rather a considered opinion of someone who has been
proclaimed by Professor Chetana Nagavajara, the most erudite and respected
authority on literary criticism in Thailand, as the unrivalled, sharp-tongued
commentator on Thai politics even among Thai political scientists.
61
Nidhi shone
time and again in his acute and prognostic observation, penetrative and eye-opening
analysis and incisive and pungent criticism of the current political situation, issues
and personalities. For example:-
-Shortly before the May 1992 uprising and massacre, he predicted clairvoyantly that a
government which had a legitimacy deficit and an insecure majority in parliament as

58
Dr Prawes, a hematologist by training and profession at Siriraj Hospital, was
better known as a high-profile, well-liked and widely respected elderly progressive social thinker and
NGO activist. He was also reputed to be among King Bhumibol's inner circle of aides.

59
Prawes Wasi, "Patiroop kanmeuang" [Political Reform], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 18
May 1995, p.9. One should add that Dr Prawes considered a combination of scenarios 1, 3 & 4 to be
most desirable but scenario 2 most likely.

60
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Patiroop kanmeuang baeb mod tham rang" [Political
Reform in the Style of Nest-Building Ant], Matichon Raiwan, 22 May 1995, p.31.

61
Chetana Nagavajara stated so in his keynote speech to the international Thai
Studies conference held in London in mid-1993 and in a panel discussion on "Two Decades of 14
October 1973 Literature" at Thammasat University in October 1993.
Nidhi was also selected as the winner of the 1995 Ayumongkol Sonakul Award for
the best newspaper columnist of the year but he declined the honor.

that of the then Prime Minister General Suchinda Kraprayoon would eventually have
to resort to staging another coup d' etat or suppressing the opposition by unlawful and
undemocratic use of force.
62

-Clearly distinguishing in principle between the defense of a democratic regime and
that of an elected government which failed to fulfill a popular mandate, he brushed
aside the call from the government of Prime Minister Chuan Leekphai for voluntary
self-censorship of anti-government criticisms in the media allegedly "for the
safeguard of democracy" and took it to task for not pushing on with futher
democratization. Though being critical of the elected civilian government, he
insisted on rejecting a military coup as an unviable and unacceptable political option
for Thai society.
63

-And when the occasion arose, as when the elected civilian government of the day
had proven itself to be no more observant of human and civic rights than its military
predecessor in dealing with people's protests,
64
Nidhi was also adept at playing the
Machiavellian fox, publicly and deviously sowing distrust among the ruling coalition
parties by dispensing advice to some coalition partners about how to desert and
topple the government and gain political credit and benefits out of it.
65

-Faced with a political impasse in the parliamentary system dominated by "people
with obsolete political views" from both the ruling and opposition parties, he urged

62
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Kon theung jud thi mai lai klub" [Before the Point of No
Return], Phoojadkan Raiwan, (shortly before 17 May 1992).

63
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Kanaphiprai thi mai hai thang leuak" [An Optionless
Debate], Matichon Raiwan, 22 J une 1993, p.9; Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Tualeuak thang kanmeuang thi
jamkad" [A Limited Political Option], Matichon Raiwan, 28 August 1993, p.31; Nidhi Aeusrivongse,
"Rangab prachathipatai pheua prachathipatai reu ?" [Suspending Democracy for Democracy's Sake
?], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 31 August 1993, p.31.

64
Less than a year after the May 1992 massacre and uprising, during a violent night
clash in early May 1993 between baton-wielding police acting under orders of the Chuan government
to clear the road and peasant protesters armed with sticks, stones and Molotov cocktails who blocked
up the traffic in the province of Kamphaeng Phet, a peasant protester named Sa-ngiam Tomjaiod was
beaten up and arrested by the police. He later died in police custody. An official investigation into his
death clear the police officers involved of all charges. A number of opposition MPs, in response,
erected a peasant monument in memory of Sa-ngiam. Two months earlier, another peasant protest
against the ongoing construction of the Pak Mool Dam in the province of Ubon Ratchathani was also
violently attacked by a pro-government mob incited and paid by the authorities.

65
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Khajad phadejkan chuan" [Eliminate the Chuan
Dictatorship], Matichon Raiwan, 20 March 1993, p.8.

the people to take organized civic action so as to break through it from the outside
especially at a time when the government was weak and holding an insecure majority
in parliament.
66

-Focussing on the issues of resources and the unequal capacity to utilize them among
different classes and groups of the population, he succinctly pointed out the
concealed politics of inequality behind the making of the government budget.
67

-He critically dissected and diagnosed the elitist views of established conservative
figures like M.R. Kukrit Pramoj and Bunchana Atthakorn.
68

That Nidhi was a historian by training and profession surely helped sharpen his
political acumen but not all historians made fine political commentators. That he did
was due to the special kind of historian he proved to be i.e. a revisionist historian
whose characteristic way of thinking was completely undogmatic. This was evident
in the historical research that first brought him to the limelight outside the circles of
historians, namely "Watthanatham kradumphi kab wannakam ton rattanakosin"
("Bourgeois Culture and Early Rattanakosin Literature," 1982). A bold,
pathbreaking and iconoclastic interdisciplinary study of the interplay between
emergent literary trends and socio-economic change in the early Bangkok period of
the late 18th century, it stunned the designated discussants who were old-school
literary scholars into babbling incomprehension in its first public presentation but
received glowing commendation from Professor Chetana Nagavajara, who happened
to be in the audience.
69

Since then, Nidhi had created a series of political, economic and cultural revisionist
histories and analyses that defied conventional Thai history, mainstream social

66
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Phoolalang thang kanmeuang" [People with Obsolete
Political Views], Phoojadkan Raiwan, 31 May 1993, p.33; Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Kanmeuang khong
prachachon phaitai ratthabal thi on-ae" [People's Politics under a Weak Government], Phoojadkan
Raiwan, 28 September 1993, p.31.

67
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Mong kanmeuang jak sapphayakorn" [Looking at Politics
from the Perspective of Resources], Matichon Raiwan, 17 J uly 1993, p.8.

68
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Prawatsat khong kiles" [A History of Craving],
Phoojadkan Raiwan, 23 April 1993, p.4; Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Chatakam khong anurakniyom thai"
[The Plight of Thai Conservatism], Matichon Raiwan, 18 May 1993, p.10.

69
See the verbatim report of the presentation and the discussion that ensued in
Thammasat University J ournal, XI:1 (March 1982), 86-7.

science scholarship and easy categorization, especially Kanmeuang thai samai
phrajao krung thonburi (Thai Politics in the Reign of King Taksin, 1986), "Chaojin:
pajjai samkhan khong khwamplianplaeng" (The Chinese: A Key Factor in Change,
1988), "Songkhram anusawari kab rat thai" (The War of Monuments and the Thai
State, 1990), "Chat thai lae meuang thai nai baebrian prathomseuksa" (The Thai
Nation and Thailand in Textbooks for Elementary School, 1991),
"Ratthathammanoon chabab watthanatham thai" (The Thai Cultural Constitution,
1991), "Chatniyom nai khabuankan prachathipatai" (Nationalism in the Democratic
Movement, 1992), "Watthanatham khong khonchanklang thai" (The Cultural
Dimensions of the Thai Middle Class, 1992), "Wiraburus nai watthanatham thai"
(Heroes in Thai Culture, 1993), "Khwampenthai nai khosana tv" (Thainess in TV
Ads, 1993), "Latthipithi sadejpho ro. 5" (The Cult of King Rama V, 1993), "Song
thossawas 14 tula" (Two Decades after the 14 October Incident, 1993),
"Khwamsoonsia nai khwamtoebto" (The Loss in Growing Mature, 1993), etc.
Together, they constituted not only a formidable academic-cum-intellectual program
but also an ingenious cultural political scheme whose guiding thread, stringing the
keywords of "state", "nation", "the Chinese", "the middle class" and "communities",
may be summed up as follows:-
To criticize and challenge the dominant official nationalist political culture of the
Thai absolutist & bureaucratic state from the standpoint and perspective of the
Chinese other by using the methods of political economic and cultural political
history; then, based on the foregoing, to trace the social formation and cultural
background of the urban middle class which at present constituted the vanguard of
Globalization and the leading force in the reimagination of the Thai nation; the
objective being to influence their ideas, enable them to see the complex connections
between the seemingly separate problems plaguing the city and the countryside, and
urge them to help rural local communities so that the latter could survive the
onslaught of the state and capital for community resources, sustain local economy and
community culture, and have the freedom of choice and the power to choose their
own alternative way of life and development.
The last fifteen years or so thus saw the evolution of this foremost Professor of
History from a middle-class liberal academic to a public intellectual committed to the
cause of rural communities, and from a learned critic of literary and cultural history
to a stinging commentator of day-to-day politics and the follies and abuses of the
holders of state power and capital. Dry academic jargon and the hair-splitting
niceties of the historian's craft gave way to plain, spicy, acid and, at its best,
mischievously funny prose (the best part being ususally in brackets). And yet,
through it all, a warm, kind, humane, moral voice resonated, as the following titles
suggest: "Thang-ok jak khwamrunraeng choeng khrongsang" (The Way out of
Structural Violence, 1 September 1992, p.4), "Khao kab anakhot khong chaona"
(Rice and the Future of the Peasants, 11 February 1993, p.16), "Tourpa kab botbat
khong tho.tho.tho." (Forest Tourism and the Role of the Tourism Authority of
Thailand, 15 March 1993, p.6), "Pason banwadjan: botphisooj ik khrang khong
ratthabal chuan" (The Wadjan Village Pinery: Another Test Case of the Chuan
Government, 10 May 1993, p.4), "Sapha kaset" (The Agricultural Council, 6 J uly
1993, p.36), "Nam kab kanmeuang" (Water and Politics, 30 J uly 1993, p.32), "Poed
pa pluk euca kan mai" (Re-open the Forest to Plant Eucalyptus, 20 September 1993,
p.31), and "Kankhood sapphayakorn" (The Exploitation of Resources, 19 October
1993, p.31), all of which being published in the Phoojadkan Raiwan business daily.
That the continued economic sustenance and cultural survival of peasant communities
came to be Nidhi's chief concern was due, on the one hand, to very rapid, at times
double-digit, growth of the economy in the past decade and, on the other, to the
deafening, incessant official call for conservation of traditional Thai culture or
Thainess amidst socio-economic change at a breakneck speed. What got overlooked
were, firstly, that the peasants' self-sufficient, self-subsistent local economy that used
to sustain traditional community culture had withered away and, secondly, that the
peasants were consequently pushed into confronting capitalist commodity production
and market economy without the requisite, different cultural resources and skills to
handle abrupt fluctuations and crises that were a regular feature of that economic
system. At the starting line of the laissez-faire economic rat race, the peasants were
not only economically disadvantaged or bankrupt, but also culturally exhausted or
empty-handed, so to speak.
70

As such, greater opportunities and favorable conditions had to be created and
provided so that new economic alternatives could be invented, tried and developed by
peasant communities, for instance the Wanakaset or Forestal Agriculture self-

70
See Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Hae nangmaew kab 'wikrit' nai watthanatham
chaona" [The Rain-Making Ceremonial Procession and the Handling of 'Crisis' in Peasant Culture],
"Songgran: withi chiwit thai thi plianplaeng" [Traditional Thai New Year Festival: The Changing
Thai Way of Life], "Phithikam waikhroo samrab mahawitthayalai thai pajjuban" [Waikhroo
Ceremony for Thai Universities Nowadays], "Utsahakam thongthiao kab pholkrathob to
watthanatham" [Tourist Industry and Its Impact on Culture], "Pratoo thaphae lae doi suthep" [Thapae
Gate and Suthep Hill], in Phakhaoma, phasin, kangkengnai lae eun eun: waduai prapheni,
khwamplianplaeng lae reuang sapphasara [Multi-Purpose Cloth for Male, Lower Garment for
Women, Underwear, and etc.: On Tradition, Change and Miscellanious Things], Suphot Chaengrew,
ed.,(Bangkok: Matichon Press, 1995).

sufficient production of Village Head Wibool Khemchaloem or community-managed
eco-tourism in the North. The aim was to reconstruct a viable economic base for the
restoration of traditional community culture so that the peasants might have a
chance/choice to re-enter the capitalist market economy in an assured, careful,
dignified and culturally empowered manner.
As to the government's much-trumpeted conservation of Thainess, Nidhi regarded it
as a futile and ill-advised if well-intentioned attempt. He argued, on the contrary, that
one should take the real, actual, palpable present ways of life of various groups and
classes of people in Thailand as the point of departure, snap out of the conservative
illusion that traditional Thai culture was a fixed, frozen, sacrosanct, perennial,
monolithic entity that must not be allowed to change, fall into disuse or become
extinct come what may, and let go of parts of Thai culture that had lost their old
social functions and let them be. Instead of unthinkingly and overzealously
compelling the living to bear the burden of maintaining dead traditions and culture or,
worse still, refabricating them out of context for the purpose of their simulated
resurrection, commodification and consumption by foreign tourists, one should
irreverently change, revise and adapt old traditions and culture so as to draw fresh
cultural nourishment and force from these resources and make them relevant to
coping with today's ways of life and its problems.
71

It was in the context of the bleak plight and the dim prospects for survival of peasant
community and culture that Nidhi looked at globalization. While accepting it as a
fact of life and even welcoming it as a technologically-enhanced potential
opportunity for individual self-education and cultural liberalization from any
centralized, authoritarian, official cultural regime,
72
he deplored its universal,
borderless and instantaneous homogenizing tendency as detrimental to socio-cultural
diversity and the bargaining power of "small" or unimportant local people and
communities.
73
Moreover, the potentially liberalizing and self-educating
opportunity provided by globalization might not be fully and fairly realized if the pre-
requisite economic, technical and cultural capacity and means to take advantage of it

71
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Sawasdi watthanatham thai" [Good Day Thai Culture],
Matichon Sudsapda, XIV: 716 (13 May 1994), 37.

72
For example, Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Mahawitthayalai cyber" [Cyber-University],
Phoojadkan Raiwan, 28 March 1995, p.8.

73
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Watthanatham yuk lokanuwat" [Culture in the Age of
Globalization], Sinlapawatthanatham, XV:6 (April 1994).

were so unequally distributed. The new informational and communications
technology as well as the resultant information flux might fall into the wrong (read
most powerful and wealthy) hands, thus further aggravating the already unequal
distribution of wealth and power and creating a new divide between the information-
rich and the information-poor on top of the old ones.
74
And last but not least, he
eye-openingly pointed out the ominous use and propagation of Lokaphiwat (the Royal
Institute's official rendering of Globalization in Thai), or Lokanuwat for that matter,
by the political and business elites as new fatalistic ideological blinkers to force-feed
the public into resignedly and submissively swallowing whatever came in its holy
name,
75
which was but their own arbitrarily selective and self-serving reading of the
actual process of globalization, while at the same time denying and rejecting, in
Nidhi's own revisionist coinage, lokanuwok or other troublesome aspects of
globalization such as human rights.
76

Amidst the deluge that was Globalization, Nidhi believed the peasant communities'
only hope of survival as the rearguard of Thainess lay in the solidarity, help and co-
operation that might be extended to them by the urban middle class which constituted
the vanguard of globalization. Largely critical of and realistically doubtful about the
Thai middle class' cultural potential for political democracy, Nidhi nonetheless
optimistically and generously pinned his and Thailand's hopes on their moral
conscience and humanitarian sense of obligation towards their fellow countrymen and
human beings. As he professed during a dialogue on decentralization of power from
the state bureaucracy to local communities:-
"The urban middle class has to help otherwise there is no chance of success.
The urban people have to pay attention to the issue. And when they do, the
media will have to report the news about it. That will create pressure for
change.....
"That I continue to do things these days is due to my belief that the middle
class or which class whatsoever has justice in their hearts. I bet that only a
very small number of people actually benefit from the existing lousy system.
I think that those people in Bangkok who read newspapers are not that

74
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "IT: thi khrai ?" [IT: Whose Turn ?], Phoojadkan Raiwan,
1 February 1993, p.16.

75
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Thod rahas lokaphiwat" [Decoding Globalization],
Matichon Sudsapda, 18 November 1994, 56-7.

76
Nidhi Aeusrivongse, "Lokanuwok" [Reverse Globalization], Phoojadkan Raiwan,
27 J uly 1993, p.32.

heartless or uncaring but the papers themselves do not report on the condition
of the rural folks so that the urban people may be aware of it. I would say that
if we do try to make them become aware of it, they would be willing to
help..."
77

Conclusion
The post-May 1992 debates among Thai public intellectuals managed at least to alter
the discursive currency with which politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen trade
symbolically with the public. Lokaphiwat or Lokanuwat (i.e. Globalization) and
Watthanatham Chumchon (i.e. Community Culture) now made their way into Prime
Minister Banhan Sinlapa-acha's policy statement to Parliament and the basic
principles of the Eighth National Socio-Economic Development Plan (for the year
A.D. 1997-2001). In these discursive maneuvers, as usual, they tried facilely to
reconcile on paper or in sound-bytes the irreconcilable conflict in reality. For,
ultimately, we are talking about the dramatic contradiction between limited resources
vs conflicting demands and unlimited consumption to which there is no easy and
happy ending where everyone will have as much as he/she desires and be fully
satisfied. Someone will have to sacrifice, the question is who, which leads to more
disturbing questions such as: what is the nature of the process of sacrificial selection
of developmental victims in Thai society; how fair is it; who has the power to decide
who should be sacrificed; how legitimate and fair is the decision, etc.
In this light, any theoretical or philosophical attempt at reconciling the two, be it
Thirayuth Boonmi's advocated dual ideology of Prachakhom-Seriniyom
(Communitarian Liberalism)
78
or Chai-anan Samudavanija's proposed Lokanuwat-
Chumchanathipatai (Globalized Communitarianism),
79
could not but be a premature
and ineffectual exercise in verbal acrobatics since it still lacked the very matierial
condition for its realization, namely the actual socio-economic compromise and
political alliance between local rural communities and the urban middle class with
their accompanying institutional/organizational embodiment.

77
J odmaikhao Kho.Ro.Po., I:5(February-March 1993), 13.

78
Thirayuth Boonmi, "Prachakhom-seriniyom" [Communitarian Liberalism], in
Judplian haeng yuksamai [The Turning-Point of the Age] (Bangkok: Winyuchon Publication House,
1993), Pp.65-84.

79
Chai-anan Samudavanija, "Lokanuwat-chumchanathipatai" [Globalized
Communitarianism], Phoojadkan Raisapda, 22-28 August 1994, p.64.

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